Fear of Frying

maybe Sam One wasn’t either. Suppose their marriage had been really awful, much worse than it looked to outsiders. She discovers that Sam One has a twin—or maybe Sam Two did the discovering. Anyway, it could be to her advantage and his to bump off Sam One. Marge gets out of a terrible marriage. Sam Two gets to step into his twin’s extremely well heeled shoes. And they’re bound to each other by the crime. Neither can rat on the other without revealing their own part in the plot.“
    “And they go off happily into the sunset,“ Jane said. “Holding hands and making a couple of neigh-hors look like fools for imagining they found a corpse.“
    “From what we saw of them today, it’s a very satisfactory bond,“ Shelley said, pouring them each a cup of coffee. “They couldn’t keep their hands off each other this morning.”
    She thought for a moment. “But, Jane, there could be another explanation for that. Suppose there aren’t two Sams. Just the same one. He had some sort of physical and mental crisis and it brought them together. You know, pouring out of true hearts and all that like Eileen suggested. A renewal of the love they must have had when they married. A second honeymoon, so to speak.“
    “But how do you account for the dead body we saw—and we both know it was dead—and the fact that Sam suddenly became left-handed?”
    Shelley nodded. “I’m not crazy about the idea of Marge conspiring to murder her husband, though.’ She really seems to be such a basically nice, if downtrodden, woman. That scenario—physical and emotional crisis and so forth—couldn’t Marge have been taken in by it, too?“ She eyed the doughnuts for a moment, broke off a dainty piece of one and tasted it, then made a face.
    “Marge is the one person who would know they aren’t the same person,“ Jane said. “It would be hard to have a heart-to-heart talk about your marriage if the other person hadn’t been part of it.“
    “Which is the reason for the amnesia,“ Shelley said. “If this guy is Sam Two, he could be telling her that he’s the same old Sam, can’t remember specifics, but has the vague sense that he’s treated her badly all these years, has seen the light, and they’re going to get a fresh start. Maybe even emphasize that he doesn’t want to remember. That he wants to court her all over again, be young lovers.“
    “Would you buy that?“ Jane asked. She broke off another bit of the doughnut and nibbled.
    “Not on your life. But then, I’m not timid, shy, obedient Marge.“
    “I’ll say! Yipes! This doughnut tastes as ghastly as it looks.“ She got up and threw the rest of it in the wastebasket. “Still, I don’t believe Marge could be unaware that this is a different man. He looks the same to the rest of us, but without being too graphic—“
    “Go ahead, be graphic,“ Shelley urged.
    “I don’t even need to. Different things happen to identical twins. Broken bones, scars, moles in different places. I’d imagine they develop different tastes—“
    “Is this the graphic part?“
    “Shelley, I’m serious. We all have things we like or dislike intensely for irrational reasons. Nature versus nurture and all that. Like me hating lima beans because I ate too many of them once and threw up at a school play. I wasn’t born hating them.”
    Shelley was staring off into space. “I saw a television show about this.“
    “About lima beans or throwing up?”
    Shelley rolled her eyes. “No, about twins. Wait, let me think for a minute. I think it was on one of those science and documentary stations. Some scientists or social workers had located a bunch of identical twins who had been raised apart from each other, without even knowing they had a twin. When they really dug into their very separate lives, they discovered that all of them were remarkably similar. They had the same sort of jobs—“
    “I remember that, too! There was lots of stuff they had in common. They liked the same kind of music and colors and had even given their kids the same names.“
    “I wonder if Sam Two sings,“ Shelley said.
    “I wouldn’t be surprised,“ Jane said. “But, Shelley, if we’re right about this, how in the world would we prove it? How could we ever get anyone else, particularly a backwoods sheriff, to believe it?“
    “Marge would have to confirm it.“
    “If she’s in on it, a coconspirator, there’s no way she’d confirm it,“ Jane said. “And if, like you prefer to