A Tap on the Window Read Free Page A

thought I left my sunglasses at the Home Depot.” I fumbled with my right hand in the small storage area at the head of the console. “Oh yeah, there they are.”
    And I turned the light back off. It was on long enough for me to be sure.
    Her left hand. It was uninjured.
    There was no cut.

TWO
    I’d seen that wound on Claire’s hand, the ragged bits of skin, the tiny bubbles of blood just below the surface, waiting to come out. She’d suffered that injury—small as it was—only a few minutes before she’d gotten into my car at Patchett’s.
    Unless Claire was one of the X-Men team, and had super healing powers, the girl sitting next to me now was not the same girl who had been sitting next to me when we pulled into Iggy’s.
    I had a surreal feeling as we continued along Danbury, like I’d stumbled into a
Twilight Zone
episode. But this was real, and there had to be some kind of rational explanation.
    I tried to think it through.
    This girl was dressed pretty much identically to Claire. Blue jeans and a short dark blue jacket. The same long blond hair. But, glancing over, I noticed that this girl’s hair, like her jeans, was not nearly as wet as Claire’s had been. And there was something slightly off about it, like her entire head was askew. I was pretty sure I was looking at a wig.
    I broke the silence. “Do I make a turn soon or anything?”
    The girl nodded, pointed. “Two lights up. Go left.”
    “Okay.” I paused. “You feeling better now?”
    A nod.
    “When you were gone so long, I wondered if you were even sicker than you’d first thought.”
    “I’m okay now,” she said quietly.
    There was a sudden glare coming from my rearview mirror, even with the night setting. Raised headlights again.
    “You were telling me before,” I said, “about how you met my son.”
    “Hmm?” the girl said.
    “I was just wondering where it was that thing happened, where he spilled an ice cream cone on you.”
    “Oh,” she said, not staring out her window, but still down and to the right, so that the side of her face was still shrouded by the wig. “Yeah, that was pretty funny. It was at the Galleria Mall. I ran into him at the food court. Like, literally. He was eating this cone and the ice cream fell off the top and landed on my top.”
    “Really,” I said. We were sitting at the light where I was supposed to turn left. The truck that had been behind us was to our right, waiting to go straight. It was an SUV, not a pickup, like the vehicle I’d seen at Iggy’s.
    Before the light turned green, I said calmly, “How long do you want to do this?”
    “Huh?” She almost turned her head to look at me, but resisted.
    “This act. How long do you want to go on like I don’t know you’re not Claire?”
    Now she looked at me, and her fear was instantly palpable. She didn’t say anything.
    “It was a nice try,” I said. “The hair, the clothes, it’s all pretty convincing. But Claire had a cut on her left hand. She’d just got it, at Patchett’s.”
    “The cut doesn’t matter,” the girl said quietly. “It just has to work from a distance. It wasn’t meant to work close up.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    She bit her lower lip. “Just make like you think I’m Claire, okay? Don’t do anything weird.”
    “Why? You think someone’s watching us?” I raised one hand, a gesture to the world around us. “Someone tracking us on satellite?”
    “There was that truck a while ago. Maybe him. I don’t know. Could be a different guy.”
    I could see why they thought they could pull it off. Judging from the oversized purse she had down by her feet, she’d come out to the car with a similar red bag. It might have been the same one.
    This girl’s skin tone was about the same as Claire’s, almost porcelain. Her facial features were only slightly different. Maybe slightly more oval, but Claire’s nose was a little shorter, I thought, even though I’d never gotten a really good look at her. But