Читать книгу Granville Island Mysteries 2-Book Bundle - Michael Blair - Страница 13

“Do you believe in parallel universes, Mr. McCall?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I said.

She’d made a salad of leafy lettuce, spinach, blue cheese, and pine nuts, but ate very little of it, opening the other bottle of wine instead. We sat at a small, round, glass-topped table in her big, immaculate kitchen. I watched her as she spoke. She sat with her heels on the edge of her chair and her arms folded around her knees. She unwrapped only long enough to reach for her glass of wine, or to nibble on a leaf of lettuce, a crumb of cheese, or a pine nut.

“I read a very strange novel a few years ago,” she said, “about a man who created parallel universes every time he made a choice between two or more courses of action. Every time he chose, say, between having the apple pie or the blueberry crumble for dessert, or whether to drive to work or take the bus, the universe split into two separate universes. Alternate timelines, the author called them. In one timeline, the protagonist drove to work, had a car accident, and became a paraplegic, but in the other, he took the bus on which he met the woman he would eventually marry. He was able to move between the different timelines at will, and discovered others who could do the same.”

“Handy,” I said. “Like being able to take back chess moves.”

“It’s the only science-fiction novel I’ve ever read. I don’t remember the author’s name, or even if it was very good. For some reason, I didn’t finish it, so I don’t know how it turned out, but I often feel as though I exist in two different universes at the same time, this me in this universe, getting blotto with a perfect stranger, and another me in another universe in which perhaps I’m also getting blotto, but all by myself because I didn’t let you into my house. I think I prefer this timeline,” she added, and almost smiled.

“Schrödinger’s cat,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“Schrödinger’s cat. It was a ‘thought experiment’ in quantum mechanics by a physicist named Erwin Schrödinger. I read about it in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Physics. It had something to do with the probability that an atom of uranium or some other radioactive substance would decay within an hour, trigger a Geiger counter, and release a gas that would kill a cat in a sealed container. In one quantum reality, the atom decays and the cat dies. In the other, the atom doesn’t decay, and the cat lives. According to quantum theory, the cat’s two possible states — alive and dead — are mixed or entangled together until we look into the box to see what happened, at which point the cat’s realities separate and it will be either dead or alive.”

“How awful.”

“Tough on Dr. Schrödinger’s cat, anyway,” I said. “Fortunately for Felix, it was only a thought experiment. No real cat involved.”

“Do you believe it’s possible that with each choice we make,” she said, “we create a separate parallel universe for each alternative?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said.

“But unlikely?”

“The probability is not good,” I said, and she almost smiled again, but once again hid behind her wineglass.

She refilled her glass from the bottle on the table between us. There was an almost visible aura of sadness about Anna Waverley, an emotional entanglement field in which I was trapped along with her. It was distorting my reality — she was distorting my reality — and while my reality was far from perfect, I liked it the way it was. Besides, like it or not, it was the only one I had, and I was stuck with it. I wondered what was so terrible about Mrs. Waverley’s reality that she wished for another. Or was I misreading her? Maybe she was just plain nuts.

“How long were you married, Mr. McCall?” she asked.

She changed topics like a stone skipping across the water. “Six years,” I said. “It ended ten years ago.”

“Do you have any children?”

“A daughter. She’ll be fifteen in August.”

“My husband never wanted children,” Anna Waverley said. “I did, but Sam had had a vasectomy even before I married him. We’ve been married almost twenty-five years. If we’d had children, they’d be grown now. I could even be a grandmother.”

In an effort to get the conversation back on track, I said, “Is it possible that Bobbi’s attack, or the woman who hired us, is somehow connected to your husband or his business?”

“What? No, the idea is ludicrous. If you knew my husband, you’d know just how ludicrous. My husband is an extremely boring man. He was boring when I married him twenty-five years ago and he’s even more boring now. And his business is equally dull. Do you like this kitchen, Mr. McCall?”

I looked around. The kitchen of Sam and Anna Waverley’s house was as big, if not bigger, than my living room. It was equipped as well as the kitchens in many small hotels. And it was spotlessly clean, like a model kitchen in an Ikea showroom.

“It’s very nice,” I said. “Very clean.”

“It should be. It’s rarely used. My husband doesn’t like home-cooked meals. We eat in restaurants most of the time. Or order in. That’s when we eat together at all, which isn’t often. Sam lives for his work.” She drank more wine, then topped up her glass.

“Mrs. Waverley, when you were at the marina the other night, did you notice anything unusual?”

“No, I did not.”

“No strangers hanging around, especially near the Wonderlust?”

She shook her head. “No.” She picked up the wine bottle and gestured toward my glass. There was still a bit of white left in it.

I shook my head. “I should be going,” I said.

“How did you meet your wife?” she asked, as though she hadn’t heard me. Perhaps I only imagined I’d spoken aloud.

“I met her in a club,” I said. “I was doing photography for a lifestyles piece on working students and she was working her way through university as a bartender.”

“She’s younger than you are, then?”

“Just by a couple of years,” I replied.

“My husband is quite a few years older than I,” she said. I found her grammatical precision slightly pretentious, until I realized that she was more than a little drunk. “I was twenty-one when I married him. Sam was forty-two. I had graduated with a degree in art history and got a job in his gallery. There was another woman working for him then. Andrea. She was about thirty, plain, and it seemed to me that she hated me on sight. A month later she was gone, and less that a month after that Sam and I began having an affair. I was so damned utterly naive it embarrasses me to think about it even now. Andrea resented me because she’d been having an affair with him, too, and I was the usurper. She wasn’t the first of his assistants with whom he’d had an affair, of course, nor was I the last. His current assistant is Doris. A lovely woman, really. A little plain, perhaps, as have been most of Sam’s assistants, but very sweet. I don’t know what she sees in him.”

Once upon a summer afternoon a few years before, I’d happened across a couple in Stanley Park. They’d been sitting in each others’ laps under a tree, mouths greedily fastened, her legs wrapped around his waist and her wide peasant skirt spread across their hips, as they’d rocked and writhed with ever-increasing urgency. I felt as I had then, a reluctant voyeur. I wanted to stop listening to Anna Waverley, as I’d wanted to stop watching the lovers in the park, but I couldn’t. Although it was painful hearing her bare her soul to someone she had known for less than an hour, I felt a strange sense of duty to keep listening, to be there for her, to be her sounding board. Her passive therapist. Or her confessor.

“When you were married, Mr. McCall, were you ever unfaithful to your wife?”

“I was tempted once or twice,” I admitted. “But I was never actually physically unfaithful.” In this timeline, I added to myself.

“In the Bible the thought is often as sinful as the deed,” Mrs. Waverley said.

“Then, biblically speaking,” I said, “I’m doomed to burn in hell.”

“Are you a believer?”

“Fortunately not.”

“Nor I,” she said. “Thoughts are easier to keep secret than deeds. My husband never tried to hide his affairs, perhaps because he does not consider himself to be unfaithful to me. In his mind, adultery is not a sin, any more than having red hair is a sin. As the scorpion said to the fox, it’s simply in his nature. To give him credit, he was faithful for the first three years of our marriage, but it is unrealistic, is it not, to expect a scorpion to change its nature just because you wish it? And to be fair, he gave me a choice. He would grant me a divorce, if I wished, as long as the settlement was fair and reasonable, or I could take lovers myself, as long as I promised to be discreet. And careful, of course. Not about disease, although we were just beginning to hear about AIDS then, but about pregnancy. If he did not want children of his own, he certainly didn’t want some other man’s bastard around.”

If thoughts were sins, it was fortunate for me that I didn’t believe in hellfire and damnation, because I was doing some very serious sinning at that moment. Not only was Anna Waverley an exceptionally attractive woman, she was also fragile and vulnerable and so very lonely, which tended to bring out the ride-to-the-rescue romantic in me. Unfortunately, the romantic in me also wanted to take Anna Waverley to bed. Badly. I didn’t for a moment believe there was a chance in hell of that ever happening, but it was, I thought reluctantly, finally time to take my leave, before I dug myself in any deeper.

“… long while before I took a lover,” she was saying. “Take isn’t the right word, though. I wasn’t looking for a lover. I wasn’t sure I even wanted one. It just seemed to happen. I’ve had five lovers since then, Mr. McCall, and, with few exceptions, each was less satisfying than the last. Would you believe me if I told you that I still love my husband? No, of course you wouldn’t. Why would you? But I do. And, in his way, I suppose, he loves me as much as he’s ever loved anyone. I’ve had five lovers, when all I’ve ever really wanted was a real marriage. To Sam. Instead, I’m trapped in this sham of a marriage and having affairs I don’t really want with lovers I don’t really like.” Tears glittered in her eyes. She gestured toward the almost-empty wine bottle on the table in front of her. “And drink myself into a stupor every night so I can sleep.”

Run away with me, I wanted to say. I’ll sell my business and my house. You can dump your lover and divorce your husband. We’ll take his sailboat, fill it with good wine, and sail the South Pacific until we find a small, deserted island where we’ll build a little tree house, lie naked on the beach, drink fermented coconut milk when we run out of wine, and live happily ever after without a care in the world.

That was sure to make her smile. So what the hell, I thought, and said it. And it worked. After a fashion. It was a very sad smile, though, but a smile nonetheless. It near to broke my heart.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a very long time,” she said. “Would that it were possible.”

“In some parallel universe we’ll do it,” I said.

“God,” she said, gusting alcohol fumes. “You must think I’m a crazy woman. Maybe I am. You come here to talk about your dear friend’s attack and find yourself trapped with a madwoman who gets blotto and blathers on endlessly about her pathetic excuse for a life as though you were her shrink or her priest. You poor man. If I weren’t so goddamned drunk that I’d probably fall asleep the moment I became horizontal, I’d drag you into the bedroom and make it up to you.”

“Maybe next time,” I said.

And she laughed.

Her laughter was still ringing in my head an hour later as I got into my car and drove toward home. She’d made tea and she’d talked for a while longer, although I remembered very little of what she’d said, except in the most abstract of ways. When I’d left, I’d thanked her for seeing me, she’d apologized again for subjecting me to her foolishness, and we’d shaken hands. I’d wanted to tell her that I’d like to see her again, but she’d have likely smiled sadly and said, “Perhaps in another timeline,” so I’d just let go of her hand and left. I knew, though, that I’d be calling on her again, probably within a matter of days, with whatever lame excuse was necessary to justify it, to ask if she’d have dinner with me, or go deep-sea fishing, or let me weed her garden. I didn’t know if my feelings were based on infatuation, lust, compassion, empathy, or simple curiosity, but one thing I knew for certain was that in a very short span of time Anna Waverley had entangled me in her reality. She mattered to me, or her happiness did, and I would do whatever I could short of a felony to help her be happy again. Reeny would understand, I told myself.

It was after eleven when I got home. I brushed and flossed and fell into bed, and for the second night in a row slept like a baby until my bedroom filled with pearly light. I lay in bed for a while, watching dawn brighten in the bedroom window, then slipped comfortably asleep again, waking next a few minutes past seven, whereupon I got out of bed, showered, and went downstairs. I felt wonderful, even better than I had the day before, after my night out with Jeanie Stone. It was a today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life kind of wonderful. An anything-is-possible, world-is-my-oyster kind of wonderful. In fact, it felt so good to be alive that I knew, deep down inside, where thoughts dwell before you become conscious of them, that something bad was bound to happen.

It was simple thermodynamics.