20

THEY SAT IN THE TUBULAR CHAIRS IN COLTRANE’S LIVING ROOM, two cans of diet Pepsi open, glasses filled, neither of them drinking.

“After you told me to get lost,” Jennifer said.

“I hope I wasn’t that blunt.”

“Everything’s a matter of perspective. From my perspective…” She took a long breath. “Anyway, let’s just say I felt hurt. I felt used. I…”

Coltrane looked down at his hands.

“I’m not trying to throw this back at you,” Jennifer said. “The only reason I’m going into this is to make you understand why I did what came next.”

“After what I’ve been through the past couple of days, believe me, I understand what you felt. Throw it back at me. I deserve it.”

“I felt angry. And confused. And deeply deeply troubled. Not just about our breakup, but about Tash Adler. Maybe you thought it was normal to fall in love with her on the spot. But given your usual reluctance to make an emotional commitment, I thought your sudden commitment to her was disturbing as hell.”

Coltrane felt stung.

“Those photographs of Rebecca Chance,” Jennifer said. “Tash Adler’s uncanny resemblance to her. The whole business didn’t only baffle me; it struck me as being unnatural. So I decided to try to make sense of it. Not because I thought I might find some dirt that would help get us back together. I had no hope of that. I still don’t. It’s not why I’m here. For all I know, you’re going to tell me I’m making all this up so I can cause trouble between you and Tash. But I have to try. Because if something happened to you, I’d never forgive myself for not having warned you.”

“Don’t worry. You can’t cause any more trouble between Tash and me than there already is,” Coltrane said. Coming into the house, Jennifer had asked about the gashes on his mouth. He had told her what happened in Mexico and Big Bear.

“If I’m right, there could be a lot more trouble,” Jennifer said. “I think you’re in real danger.”

“Keep talking.”

“I wanted to find out just who this woman is that she could set your mind spinning the way she did.”

“And? You said her real name isn’t-”

“She was born Melinda Chance.”

“How do you know?”

“I hired the same private detective you did when you wanted to find out where Natasha Adler lived. He didn’t have much to go on, just what you’d told me about the stores she owns and her connection with Rebecca Chance. But that was enough. The stores aren’t owned in her name. They’re controlled by a corporation she runs, called Opportunity Inc. The private detective followed the trail of that corporation and worked backward, but I’m going to explain from the beginning and work forward.” Jennifer opened a briefcase that she had brought with her. “Here’s a copy of a birth certificate. Melinda Chance. Born April twenty-ninth, 1972, Fresno, California. Father unknown. Mother – Stephanie Chance.”

“All that proves is that some woman had the same last name.”

“Here’s a copy of a page from a Fresno high school yearbook.”

His stomach fluttering, Coltrane peered down at the copy she set before him. It was a good-quality photographic reproduction. He scanned the rows of students’ faces and fixed almost at once on the features of a young woman gazing back at him. Her dark hair was a little shorter, and her features were more girlish than womanly, but she had the same smoldering coals in her eyes. Tash. Except that the name under the photograph was Melinda Chance.

“When was this yearbook issued?”

“When she was seventeen. Just before she left Fresno.”

“What’s this caption under her name? ‘Destined to launch a thousand ships’?”

“A compliment about her looks. At first, it puzzled me, too, but it reminded me of a quotation from something, so I asked a reference librarian to track it down for me. ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships…?’ It’s from a Renaissance play by Christopher Marlowe. The face that’s referred to is Helen of Troy’s. I thought the allusion was a little fancy for a high school yearbook, but then I noticed that below the caption it says ‘Favorite activity: the Drama Club.’ Here’s a photocopy of another page from the yearbook. These are the members of the Drama Club. Melinda Chance is easily the eye-catcher. As the caption indicates, among other things, the club practiced by reading scenes from classic plays. Must have been a tough teacher. Portions from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. That’s the play with the ‘thousand ships’ quote. You can see the title on the cover of the book she’s holding in this photograph. It’s about a man who sells his soul to the Devil.”

Coltrane felt a chill. “What are you getting at?”

“She never finished high school in Fresno. She and her mother left town. The reason they left is that Melinda Chance also enjoyed being on the football team’s cheerleading squad. She gave two of the players quite a bit of extra encouragement. The quarterback killed a fullback because of her.”

Coltrane’s chill worsened.

“Stabbed him in a parking lot after the spring prom.”

“My God.”

“The killer was eighteen, old enough to be tried as an adult,” Jennifer said. “His family didn’t have any social position. But the boy who got stabbed was sixteen, and his father was a bank president. The jury found the older boy guilty. The sentence was ten years.”

“And Melinda Chance moved on.”

“To Sacramento. She finished high school there and went to college. But by then, her name was Vivian Breuer. B-r-e-u-e-r. It’s a distinctive spelling. I’ll get to why that’s important. In college, she majored in drama, but the drama she was involved in didn’t happen only on a stage. A young man she was dating fell from the ten-story-high balcony of her apartment. The police questioned another boyfriend of hers who was in her apartment at the time of the fall. That second young man was eventually arrested for harassing her. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Drama Department, a forty-six-year-old man with a wife and two children, shot himself to death after the final performance of the Drama Club’s spring production. The play was Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. You’ll never guess who played Maggie, the character Elizabeth Taylor played in the movie, and you’ll also never guess who was suspected of having had an affair with the professor.”

“You can prove all this?”

“Here are photocopies of articles from the Sacramento newspaper. I’ve underlined Vivian Breuer’s name. By now, she was smart enough not to allow herself to be photographed for the yearbook, but the private detective I hired tracked down cast members from that production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and they identified Vivian Breuer from Melinda Chance’s photos in the Fresno high school yearbook. They’re also the ones who suspected she was having an affair with the professor who killed himself. These are the private detective’s notes of the conversations he had with the cast members, and these are the tape recordings of the same conversations.”

Coltrane looked with horror at the accumulating materials.

“She transferred to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, still majoring in drama, but now she changed her name to Linda Erikson. That last name’s important, too. I’ll explain why in a little while. In Arcata, the lead actor in William Inge’s Picnic beat his male costar to death in an argument after the production’s dress rehearsal. Do you remember the movie of that play?”

“William Holden was the star.”

“Right, and Cliff Robertson was the male costar, and the plot had to do with how Holden, playing a drifter, showed up in a small town in Kansas and stole Robertson’s girlfriend. Kim Novak played the girl.”

“And Tash had the Kim Novak role? You’re suggesting that what happened in the play also happened in life?”