Haviland pushed a button on a remote control, and a picture of my beloved Elena appeared on a large screen. “Is this the woman?”
I felt a lump in my throat, just seeing her picture. It had been so long since I’d seen her. It seemed like another life. I felt like I was choking, like I was going to cry right there in the courtroom. They had been there, right there at the NJSC. They had split when the varcolac came to the house, and here was the proof.
I realized everyone was looking at me, and Terry was frantically tugging at my sleeve. Judge Roswell glared at me. “Mr. Kelley, sit down.”
I sat. “I’m sorry, Your Honor.”
Haviland gave me a predatory smile and turned back to the witness. “Ms. Singer, let’s be clear. Mr. Kelley claims that he saw his wife and children dead in his house in Pennsylvania more than an hour before you claim to have seen them in New Jersey. Were they dead when you saw them?”
“No, sir.”
“Ms. Singer, how long have you been working at the NJSC?”
She blinked at the sudden change of direction. “A little more than a year.”
“And in that time, how many visitors have you seen?”
“Oh, hundreds. Gosh, I don’t know, maybe thousands.”
“And the woman who was looking for Mr. Kelley, had you ever seen her before December third?”
“No, just that once.”
“Can you be absolutely sure she was Jacob Kelley’s wife?”
Her mouth pouted prettily. “I’m very sure.”
“I remind you that you are under oath, Ms. Singer.”
“She didn’t tell me who she was, but she looked just like the picture,” Singer said. “If it wasn’t her, then she had a twin sister.”
With shaking hands, I snatched one of Terry’s legal pads and scribbled a note on it.
Terry read it, looked at me, and wrote, “Why?”
I wrote, “Please, just ask.”
He shook his head, but he tucked the legal pad under his arm.
“And what did you tell Mrs. Kelley?” Haviland asked.
“Well, I felt sorry for her, you know?” Singer said. “She said he might be with Mr. Vanderhall, so I looked up the building and told her.” She put a hand to her cheek. “I had no idea that her husband had killed the man. The poor woman.”
“Objection,” Terry said, but the judge was already nodding.
“Ms. Singer,” she said. “Whether or not Mr. Kelley killed Mr. Vanderhall has not yet been established. Please limit your answers to the questions being asked.”
“Of course. I’m sorry,” Singer said.
“Your witness,” Haviland said, and sat down.
Terry stood and took the lectern. He flipped through his legal pad for a moment as if marshalling his thoughts. He obviously hadn’t planned to interview this woman, which meant he wasn’t prepared. The old adage that you shouldn’t ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer meant that he should just sit down again. He frowned and stared at his pad. I knew he was deciding whether to ask my questions or not.
“Mr. Sheppard?” the judge said.
He seemed to shake himself. “Just a few questions, Your Honor. Ms. Singer, did you happen to notice if the woman you saw was wearing a wedding ring?”
Singer brightened again. “Yes, she was. I always notice that sort of thing. It was a sweet ring, small, you know, but sometimes that means more than some enormous diamond. Maybe the guy doesn’t have a lot of money, but then it’s really for love, you know what I mean?”
“Did you happen to notice…” Terry paused. “Did you happen to notice which hand the ring was on?”
“Well, of course,” Singer said. “It was on her left hand. I told you it was a wedding ring; where else would it be?”
I knew the jury wouldn’t understand why I was smiling, but I couldn’t help it. At least an hour after I had seen them dead, my family had been alive. Singer had seen my Elena, not the backward version of her I had found in the house. It meant my theory about them splitting had been correct after all. It meant my family was really alive out there, or had been two months ago. But if that was the case, what had happened to them? Why had no one seen them since?
“Mr. Kelley,” Judge Roswell said in her stern voice. Her face was too pleasant to pull it off effectively, and she looked more like a scolding grandmother than a fierce authority figure, but I knew her affable appearance wouldn’t stop her from holding me in contempt of court, so I sat down quickly.
“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” I said.
“Mr. Sheppard, is there a point to this line of questioning?”
Terry glared at me. “I apologize, Your Honor. I have no further questions.”
CHAPTER 17
I needed help. Colin had given us a place to stay, at least for the time being, but I needed to figure out what was happening. I needed to find out if it was possible that a different version of my family was still alive, and if so, where they might be. Marek was self-employed, so he had some flexibility, but he still had to fulfill his contracts, not just stay with me all the time. Besides, Ava—his wife and Elena’s sister—hadn’t been pleased that he had been gone all night without calling, and she didn’t like his explanation that he had been with me. She had seen the headlines, too. I only heard one side of the conversation, but she sounded furious and upset.
I left Alessandra in Colin’s safe house and borrowed Colin’s car. Jean Massey lived in a two-story condominium in Princeton, not far from the college. She understood the physics involved, and she worked at the NJSC. I couldn’t just stroll around the facility asking people if they’d seen my wife and kids. The police would still be crawling everywhere, and I was a murder suspect. Jean could ask around though, if she was willing.
She answered the door, and when she saw me, her eyes flew open wide. “Jacob? Is that really you?”
She had a smartpaper in her hand, and I could see the headline on the newsfeed. She knew I had been arrested. “I can explain,” I said. “May I come in?”
“Of course.” She held the door open, briefly looking out past me to see if anyone else was there. “What’s going on, Jacob? The police were all over the facility yesterday, looking for you, and the paper this morning said you had been arrested and your family was missing.”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
She pointed me to a seat in her living room and offered me coffee. The room was sparsely decorated, with a few inexpensive prints and personal knick-knacks. A baby swing sat in a corner, and there was a tiny pacifier on the coffee table next to a stack of diapers and scattered physics journals.
“I left you in Brian’s office, and then I never heard from you again,” Jean said. “Then the police came and said Brian was dead and asked all sorts of questions about you, and then this…” She held up the news article. “Why aren’t you in prison? Are you out on bail?”
I explained everything as best I could. I told her about finding Brian in the bunker, about the varcolac, and about seeing the second Brian, and what he had told me. I told her about racing home and finding my family dead, escaping the varcolac again, and evading the police.
She asked a lot of questions, but she didn’t once question my sanity or the truth of what I was saying. She seemed to have no trouble at all accepting the idea that there were two of me. I figured she’d spent so much time thinking about quantum physics that it seemed more natural to her than the normal world.
“I’m so sorry about your family,” she said. “Really, I can’t imagine.”
I didn’t want to dwell on that. I had a quantum puzzle to figure out and the very real possibility that my family was not dead. I had to keep pushing forward or I would go mad. “The varcolac is a probabilistic entity, like a particle,” I said. “I think that contact with him can cause splits, where more than one possible path exists for a time.”