The Key to Midnight

consider such outrageous concepts.
        
        Lisa
        1) She looks like me.
        2) She is five foot six.
        3) She weighed 115 pounds.
        4) She studied music.
        5) She had a fine voice.
        6) Her mother died when she was born.
        7) Wherever she is, she's separated from her father.
        8) She had appendicitis surgery when she was nine.
        9) She had a brown birthmark as big as a dime on her right hip.
        
        ME
        1) Therefore, I look like her.
        2) Same height.
        3) So do I, give or take.
        4) Likewise.
        5) So do I.
        6) My mother is dead too.
        7) My father is dead.
        8) I have an appendix scar.
        9) So do I.
        
        As Joanna was reading the list yet again, Alex pulled another report from the file, glanced at it, and said, 'Here's something damned curious. I'd forgotten all about it.'
        'What?'
        'It's an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Morimoto.'
        'Who're they?'
        'Lovely people,' Alex said. 'Domestic servants. They've been employed by Tom Chelgrin since Lisa… since you were five years old.'
        'The senator brought a couple from Japan to work in his home?'
        'No, no. They're both second-generation Japanese Americans. From San Francisco, I think.'
        'Still, like you said, it's curious. Now there's a Japanese link between me and Lisa.'
        'You haven't heard the half of it.'
        Frowning, she said, 'You think the Morimotos had something to do with my… with Lisa's disappearance?'
        'Not at all. They're good people. Not a drop of larceny in them. Besides, they weren't in Jamaica when Lisa disappeared. They were at the senator's house in Virginia, near Washington.'
        'So what is it exactly that you find so curious about them?'
        Paging through the transcript of the Morimoto interview, he said, 'Well… the Morimotos were around the house all day, every day when Lisa was growing up. Fumi was the cook. She did a little light housekeeping too. Her husband, Koji, was a combination house manager and butler. They both were Lisa's baby-sitters when she was growing up, and she adored them. She picked up a lot of Japanese from them. The senator was all in favor of that. He thought it was a good idea to teach languages to children when they were very young and had fewer mental blocks against learning. He sent Lisa to an elementary school where she was taught French beginning in the first grade-'
        'I speak French.'
        '-and where she was taught German starting in the third grade.'
        'I speak German too,' Joanna said.
        She added those items to her list of similarities. The pen trembled slightly in her fingers.
        'So what I'm leading up to,' Alex said, 'is that Tom Chelgrin used the Morimotos to tutor Lisa in Japanese. She spoke it fluently. Better than she spoke either French or German.'
        Joanna looked up from the list that she was making. She felt dizzy. 'My God.'
        'Yeah. Too incredible to be coincidence.'
        'But I learned Japanese in England,' she insisted.
        'Did you?'
        'At the university - and from my boyfriend.'
        'Did you?'
        They stared at each other.
        For Joanna, the impossible now seemed probable.

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    28
        
        Joanna found the letters in her bedroom closet, at the bottom of a box of snapshots and other mementos. They were in one thin bundle, tied together with faded yellow ribbon. She brought them back to the living room and gave them to Alex. 'I don't really know why I've held on to them all these years.'
        'You probably kept them because you were told to keep them.'
        'Told - by whom?'
        'By the people who kidnapped Lisa. By the people who tinkered with your mind. Letters like these are superficial proof of your Joanna Rand identity.'
        'Only superficial?'
        'We'll see.'
        The packet contained five letters, three of which were from J. Compton Woolrich, a London solicitor and the executor of the Robert and Elizabeth Rand estate. The final letter from Woolrich mentioned the enclosure of an after-tax, estate-settlement check in excess of three hundred thousand dollars.
        As far as Joanna could see, that money from Woolrich blasted an enormous hole in Alex's conspiracy theory.
        'You actually received that check?' he