All Shots

The major difference between our mothers is, however, the difference between life and death: whereas the other Holly’s mother is alive, mine died a long time ago. If it had been my mother’s ghost and me who walked along Quincy Street and crossed Mass. Ave., it’s likely that we’d have been heading to Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. I inherited my healthy appetite from both parents, but my metabolism is Marissa’s. When she used to take me to Harvard Square, we sometimes ate at Bartley’s, where she gave as little thought to calories as I do. In contrast to the other Holly Winter’s mother, mine was energetic. As she used to say, “You can’t work as hard as I do if you don’t eat.”
    The other Holly Winter and her mother are walking, albeit slowly, toward a Thai restaurant that my mother would have hated. Steve loves the place, mainly because its menu items show little icons of peppers to indicate the spiciness or blandness of dishes. He is thus able to order and devour concoctions so blisteringly hot that they’d send me to the hospital. My mother hated hot peppers. In fact, Yankee that she was, she mistrusted even ordinary black pepper and used it sparingly, mainly as one of her rare concessions to the wants of other people. Or, I might add, the wants of dogs. Marissa met people’s needs, and she more than met the needs of our golden retrievers, but needs are not wants, are they? Well, maybe sometimes they are.
    “I need you to take my arm,” says the mother. “It’s so confusing. I don’t know how you manage to find your way around.”
    “It’s perfectly simple,” says Holly impatiently. “And we don’t have far to go.”
    “This one must be good,” says the mother as Holly leads her around the line on the sidewalk in front of Bartley’s. “We could go here. What is it we’re having? Siamese food?”
    “Thai.” She is about to say more when she catches sight of a couple emerging from the Harvard Square landmark that she wrongfully dismisses as a greasy spoon. As a statistician, she fully understands that statistical correlation does not imply causation. There is, however, nothing statistical about the association she is now observing. Rather, what she sees is a social association, the coming together of a Cambridge police lieutenant and a woman named Holly Winter, another Holly Winter, a Holly Winter who differs from herself in radical and suspect ways.
     

CHAPTER 22
     
    As I maneuvered Steve’s van out of a Harvard Square parking garage built for compacts and as I drove home, I couldn’t help wondering what the other Holly Winter had made of seeing me with Kevin, or maybe what she had made of seeing Kevin with me. She knew who we were, at least in a superficial sense. Kevin had questioned her, and she’d paid a visit to my house. She’d obviously recognized us. No one ever misses Kevin. He’s a great big man with red hair, and although I don’t exactly believe in auras or energy fields, Kevin exudes such a strong sense of presence that it would be a gross understatement to say that he stands out in a crowd. The line outside Bartley’s had consisted mainly of late-adolescent students and of Harvardian adults with more brains than brawn. In that particular crowd, Kevin had looked like a woolly mammoth in a flock of sheep. I, perhaps, stood out as the sheepdog. In any case, there’d been no question about whether we were together. Kevin may be a mammoth, but he’s a gentlemanly one: he’d taken my arm as he’d made a path for us through the line. Catching sight of us, Holly Winter had visibly startled. In reality, Kevin and I were friends and next-door neighbors, but she must have seen only a Cambridge cop investigating the death of the woman who’d been stealing her identity and the woman who shared her name, the name that had been stolen, the same woman who had found the body of the would-be identity thief. It occurred to me that if the other Holly Winter searched the Web for information about Kevin and about me, she’d find nothing about our friendship. Furthermore, although Kevin lives next door to me, his mother is the one who owns the house, and the phone there is in her name; and whereas I’m listed as living on Concord Avenue, the Dennehys’ address is on Appleton Street. If the other Holly searched only for the Cambridge address of Kevin Dennehy, she might well fail to discover that we lived next door to each other. For all I knew, Cambridge had multiple