Twelve

1

It's a hoax!

Carol sat at the kitchen table, drenched in sweat, gaping at the last page of the letter. She flipped back through the journal's curling pages.

It has to be a hoax!

But in the deepest recesses of her heart and mind she knew that Hanley himself had written the letter—she knew his handwriting well enough by now—and that what he said was true. The detailed experimental records, the cache of photos, the yearbooks, the scrapbooks, all the contents of the safe supported his fantastic claims. But more than anything else, it was Hanley's reputation that weighed so heavily on the side of truth—if any man could have accomplished what was described in this letter, it was the Nobel prizewinning Dr. Roderick Hanley.

Jim was a clone! A clone! Roderick Hanley's clone!

God, this is a nightmare!

For Jim, not for her. The shock of it was numbing, frightening, but Carol forced herself to step back from it. And when she did, she saw that it really didn't matter to her, for it didn't change how she felt about Jim.

So he was a clone. So what?

He was still the man she had married, the man she loved. So what if he had Hanley's genes? She hadn't married a bunch of chromosomes; she had married a man. Jim was still that man. The letter changed nothing for her.

But oh, how it had changed things for Jim.

Poor Jim. So eager and full of hope as he had searched for his roots, only to find that he didn't have any. He had always been insecure about where he had come from—no wonder he had been acting so strange the past twenty-four hours.

It's not fair!

Carol was suddenly angry. How had this come to be? Jim never should have learned about this! Hanley had been right in his intent to keep Jim's origin a secret from him. What had gone wrong? The letter said—

Then she remembered: Hanley and Derr had been killed together in that plane crash.

What a strange twist of fate. He'd said they never traveled together. Yet they had been together that night. Which left no one alive to put the Project Genesis files into the hands of the lawyer he had mentioned. So they had been left behind for Jim to find.

Fate could be cruel.

But Carol's anger was not solely for fate. She was furious with Hanley and Derr. She looked down at the last page of the letter in the journal, still in her hands. One line caught her eye.

"I beg you not to destroy these records."

Why not? They should have been destroyed the day Hanley and Derr gave up Jim for adoption. If they had really cared about the child they had created, they never would have risked these records falling into the wrong hands. But no, they had kept all the damning evidence squirreled away.

"Derr and I deserve our recognition someday…"

That was the key. Vanity. Ego. Glory-seeking bastards…

Carol pressed her palms over her eyes. Maybe she was being too hard on them. They were pioneers. They had done something unique. Was it so bad to want the history books to chronicle that?

She realized suddenly that she couldn't hate them. Without them, there would be no Jim.

But poor Jim. What was she going to do about Jim? How was she going to get him back on his emotional feet again?

And suddenly she knew. She'd do what Hanley and Derr should have done in 1942—destroy this junk.

Jim would be furious, she knew, and justifiably so. After all, these records were a part of his legacy from Hanley. They belonged to him and she had no right to dispose of them.

But I have a right to protect my husband—even from himself.

And right now this letter and these journals were tearing him apart. They would destroy Jim if she didn't destroy them first. The longer they were around, the worse it would get. They'd be like a cancer, eating away at him day by day, hour by hour, until there was nothing left of him. Look at how he had been acting since last night! If this went on much longer, he'd be a wreck.

She looked around her. But how? If only the house had a fireplace. She'd set a match to the papers and watch them go up in smoke. That was the only safe way to go—incinerate the evidence.

Incinerate. Tomorrow was garbage day, the can out at the curb waiting for the pickup. First thing tomorrow the truck would come by, dump the can, and haul the load out to the county incinerator. That was it. Throw this stuff in the garbage where it belonged!

She got a brown grocery bag from the kitchen, dumped the journals and the letter inside, then tied it with string. Wrapping her coat around her, she hurried outside to the curb. But as she lifted the lid of the garbage can, Carol hesitated.

What if the wrapper got torn and one of the sanit men just happened to see the journals and read them? As remote as it was, the possibility chilled her.

And beyond that, this just didn't feel right. There were Jim's. As much as they were damaging him, he had a right to them.

What if she simply told him that she had thrown them away? Wouldn't that be just as good?

But she'd have to have a damn good hiding place to make that plan work. Where… ?

The crawl space! It was perfect! Nothing down there but pipes, footings, cinder blocks, and dirt. No one had been in there since the plumber they'd hired two years ago to fix a pipe. And Jim would never search there because he wouldn't be searching—he'd believe they'd gone up in smoke at the county incinerator.

Carol was excited now as she hurried around to the side of the house to the access door. Thank God that Monroe had such a high water table that crawl spaces were the rule rather than cellars. She squatted and reached between a pair of rhododendrons, searching for the handle on the hinged wooden board over the crawl space opening. The opening was small, about a yard wide and only half that in height. She grabbed the handle, lifted the board, quickly dropped the bundle inside, then eased the door back into place.

There, she thought, straightening and brushing off her hands. No one will read those now except the bugs.

The beauty part of this plan was that after Jim had blown his top and fumed over the loss of the records, he could get on with the task of accepting his origin and putting it behind him where it belonged. The journals would no longer be staring him in the face every day, gnawing at him, focusing his anxieties and insecurities. And when he had finally stabilized again—and Carol knew he would with her support—and put it all in proper perspective, maybe then, in a couple of years, she would return the journals to him. By that time they would be old news, and he would be better able to deal with them.

She hurried back to the front door to get out of the cold. Tomorrow was going to be rough after she told him her lie, but once the storm was over, it would be a new beginning.

Everything was going to be all right now.