The Bad Twin Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  “Just a minute…I know it’s in here…” Abby Levesque twisted her body to reach deep inside of her threadbare fringed hobo bag and searched for change. “I’m sure I had it before I left the house.”

  On the other side of a yellowing linoleum counter, a utilities clerk responded with a look that was equal parts exasperation and boredom.

  “I’m really sorry about this. My sister promised me that she was going to pay the water bill last week. She must have forgotten, and I didn’t realize it until this morning when I tried to take a shower. I also didn’t realize that there was going to be a processing fee in addition to the reconnection fee…” Abby was babbling to cover her embarrassment. Her “quick trip” to get the water turned back on was rapidly devolving into a fiasco. Her problems started with a payments line that snaked all the way out of the office door. Now, she was faced with an extra eight-dollar charge that she hadn’t counted on. For most people, eight dollars wouldn’t be a big deal.

  Abby was not most people.

  “Ma’am, the New York Department of Environmental Protection will not re-establish a waterline connection until all outstanding fees and costs have been paid,” the woman spoke the words in a robotic tone that signaled they were often repeated. “If you are unable to pay in person, you may settle the charges by phone, or by logging on to our website at www.nyc1…”

  “C’mon already!” The man behind Abby snapped in frustration. “Some of us have places to be.”

  “Go back to the end of the line!” another voice called, while a third person coughed loudly.

  “Just a second!” Abby squeaked, pressing her eyelids shut to hold back tears. She knew that she had at least ten more dollars. Abby kept eagle eyes on her budget. She wouldn’t just lose that amount. Relief surged through her body when her fingers brushed against a small paper cylinder at the bottom of her purse. A roll of quarters. She remembered now that she had picked them up to use at the laundromat. “Here!” she exclaimed in triumph and handed them across the counter.

  The clerk sighed and ripped open the wrapper. Silver coins showered onto the counter. The customers in the line made a collective moan, but the worker was unperturbed. She ignored the sounds of protest and began counting the quarters one by one.

  Abby glanced at the clock and winced.

  “Could you go a little faster?” she asked, “I’m on my lunch break.”

  “Are you even serious right now?” the woman snapped. Then, perhaps out of spite, she started counting again from the beginning.

  Abby held her tongue until the coins and the handful of crumpled bills that she had surrendered earlier were totaled up and the clerk offered her a receipt. She snatched it out of the clerk’s fingers and bolted toward the door. She ran all the way back to her office, but it wasn’t any use. She had still overshot her lunch hour by nearly forty-five minutes.

  She sneaked into the offices of RSL industries with as little fanfare as possible. She was grateful, for a change, that she worked in such a boring field. RSL was a medical billing company. Their business was translating scribbled doctor’s notes into procedure codes that were submitted to health insurance companies for payment. It was mind-numbing work that required squinting at pages full of illegible writing and inputting numbers on a computer screen. They were paid by the page. Most days, it was soul-crushing. Now, however, Abby was grateful that the other employees were too busy staring into their glowing screens to pay her any mind. She slipped back into her cubicle and clicked her computer on without drawing any attention- almost.

  “Did you get it taken care of?” A whisper floated through the flimsy cubicle wall. Through a narrow slit where the partitions came together, Abby could make out a sliver of her favorite co-worker’s eye. Abby wouldn’t call the woman her friend, exactly, but they had started the same day and covered for each other from time to time.

  “Yeah. It took longer than I thought.”

  “Always does.”

  Abby wasn’t sure if that remark was directed at her, or at the efficiency of government services. Either way, she flashed a sheepish grin.

  “Did anyone notice that I was gone?”

  “No. The boss is in the front office.”

  “Still?”

  “Hasn’t come out all morning.”

  “You don’t think they changed their mind, do you?” Abby bit her lip, worried. For the past two months, rumors had swirled that RSL was going to close. According to the chatter, the company lost its contract with one of the city’s largest hospitals and they didn’t have enough money to continue operations. Abby didn’t love her job, but at least it paid the bills. She was panicked by the thought of the business closing.

  Luckily, RSL had caught a break. Just a few days earlier, Human Resources circulated an e-mail announcing that the company had been purchased by an investor and would be merged into one of its competitors. Operations were expected to continue. Abby was still skittish though.

  Abby’s grand-mère, Bette Levesque, always said that a person should never borrow trouble. “When the time comes, there will always be more than enough to go around,” she liked to say. Sometimes the old woman preferred to scold in her native French: “Qui vivra verra.” The future will tell. Abby soothed herself with the proverb and forced herself back to work. She picked up a folder from the fifteen-inch stack on the corner of her desk and tried to focus on how much Empire Dermatology Associates could bill for a mole removal.

  She had just started to relax when footsteps behind her chair caused her to jump

  “Ms. Levesque, may I have a word?”

  Abby cringed when she recognized her supervisor’s voice. She thought that she had gotten away with her midday absence scot-free. Had someone ratted her out?

  She turned around slowly and swallowed hard.

  “Yes, sir.” She avoided looking into his eyes.

  Abby followed the man into his “office”. It was actually a cubicle the same size as the one that she inhabited, but with dividers that went almost all the way up to the ceiling and a fourth wall with an opening where a door would be, offering a slight illusion of privacy.

  “Is it about the report on the Pediatric Associates account?” she asked, twisting her fingers anxiously as she was directed to take a seat. “I double-checked all of the billing codes before we turned them in. Oceanic Insurance has made some recent changes and…”

  “I’m sure that your numbers are accurate, Ms. Levesque.” He lifted his hand to cut her off. “That’s not what I need to talk about. I would like to discuss your future with RSL.”

  “Sir?”

  Abby’s heart skipped a beat. The e-mail about RSL’s merger mentioned personnel changes. Abby was the newest member on her team, but also the most productive. Were they considering her for a promotion? She wasn’t wild about the idea of extra stress, but her mind was immediately spinning with ideas about how to spend the money. The house that she shared with her sister was cozy but falling apart. The second-
floor banister was getting wobbly, and the plaster in the dining room was cracked. They could use a new refrigerator too. The one they had made an ominous noise if they kept the freezer door open too long.

  “How long have you been with us, Ms. Levesque?”

  “A little over a year.”

  “That’s right, you came to us from a bookkeeping office, isn’t that right?”

  Abby nodded her head. “Yes. Before that, I worked at a florist. Before that…” Stop talking, she told herself harshly and let her voice trail off.

  “Yes, yes. You were very qualified, and you’ve done excellent work. I’m going to give you my highest reference.”

  “Thank you, sir!” Abby said, as calmly as she could manage. “You don’t know what this opportunity means to me. I’m not going to let you down.”

  “Let me down?” A look of confusion crossed the older man’s features, followed by a flash of horror. “Er…I don’t think you understand. RSL’s sale means that some of our functions will be made redundant. Our buyer is merging the coding teams into one of their existing divisions. I’m afraid that some of our less lucrative accounts are going to be sold off to smaller companies to manage. I’m sure that any of them will be excited to take you on.”

  “Take me on?” Abby blinked. “You’re firing me?”

  “It sounds bad when you put it like that. We’re not firing you. We’re…releasing you.”

  “Releasing me to do what, exactly?”

  She never got an answer. Abby was still pondering that question a half-hour later as she trudged down West 24th street with a banker’s box full of her personal effects.

  Daylight was waning by the time she arrived on her front porch. The overhead light buzzed and flickered as she dug for her keys. She wondered if the switch was going out. Just great. Something else that she couldn’t afford to fix.

  Despite its flaws, Abby was glad to be home. Abby sighed in relief when she stepped across the threshold of the yellow clapboard cottage in Brooklyn where she and her sister had been raised by Grand-mère Bette. They didn’t live in the most fashionable or expensive part of the borough. Their street was blocks away from any famous restaurants or trendy clubs but walking through the front door of the quaint old house was like stepping into a warm hug. Abby instantly felt more at ease. The house was warm and cozy and smelled like lemon furniture polish and old books. In the mornings, sunlight flooded through the large windows at the back of the house. The furnishings in the home verged on shabby. The couches were lumpy, and the china was chipped, but every piece had been lived-in to the point of maximum comfort. The cushions on the living room sofa were indented in the perfect shape to cradle Abby’s head as she dozed, and the end tables were arranged just so that they created an ideal space to balance a teacup without getting in the way. She loved every inch of the house, but the gallery was her favorite.

  It wasn’t really a gallery, of course. Grand-mère Bette bestowed that grandiose name upon the front hall and staircase in one of her typical flights of fancy, but Abby had never referred to the space as anything else. The stairs were creaky, and the paint on the walls was peeling, but as far as Abby was concerned, the room was a real museum. Watercolors painted by Bette, along with sketches and oil paintings from her friends were hung from eye level all the way to the top of the plaster ceilings. Grand-mère Bette was a talented painter. In her younger days, she spent time at an artist colony in Upstate New York. Through the years, she remained in contact with the men and women she had met there, sometimes allowing them to crash in the attic bedroom when they were in town to open a show. The artists repaid her in prints and canvases. Their works filled the entire house, but the gallery was a place of honor. Abby had every picture committed to heart. She loved the frameless canvas on the landing composed of bold brushstrokes of blue, black, purple, and gray. Up close it looked like a mass of disorganized squiggles. Standing at a distance, you could see a crowd of painted figures contemplating yet another piece of abstract art. Further up the stairs, the less objectively “artsy” pieces hung: crayon self-portraits that Abby and her identical twin sister Gabrielle brought home from kindergarten, sketches of Grand-mère in the buff that one of her many male admirers had made, and the impressionistic paintings that Bette herself had created during her girlhood years in Paris.

  Paris. As a child, Abby could never hear enough stories about her grand-mère’s birthplace in France. Abby used to sit on the sofa next to the older woman, flipping through photo albums, looking at pictures of the bateaux mouches floating serenely down the River Seine, and the cobbled streets winding past charming cafes, wondering how Bette had ever torn herself away.

  “Love,” was Grand-mère’s wistful answer. She rarely spoke of the man she ran away with when she was only nineteen years old. Abby only knew that things hadn’t worked out, and that her mother was the result of the affair.

  Grand-mère promised the twins that they would visit the French capital one day. She would show them the grand cathedral of Notre Dame, the majestic opera house and, most important of all, the museums. As soon as Abby was old enough to hold a job, she saved up the money to obtain a passport. She kept it on standby for the day she would need it, but as lovely as Grand-mère’s promises were, the long-awaited trip never materialized.

  Gabrielle went to Europe. She hitchhiked across the continent with a string of suitors and later returned on the arm of a rich but ultimately disposable boyfriend. Abby never made it though. Time and money never came together at the same time. Then, one day, Grand-mère got sick.

  I will not think about that today, Abby told herself firmly and dragged her mind back to the present. She stripped off her jacket, deposited her carton of belongings on the floor, and walked into the kitchen.

  “Gabrielle?” she called out to her sister, wondering if the other woman would dare to show her face. The younger twin wasn’t home when Abby stepped into the shower that morning and discovered that their water had been shut off- again. Abby had been waiting all day to give her little sister a piece of her mind.

  There wasn’t any answer, and some of Abby’s annoyance turned into concern.

  “Gabrielle?”

  She knew there was no reason to be worried. Either the younger twin was already out for the evening or she had yet to return from the night before. With Gabrielle, it was hard to tell. Sometimes Abby was disgusted by her sister’s ability to party her way through life without a care in the world, and sometimes she was jealous. Gabrielle was probably snuggled up with an underwear model right now or eating caviar at a fabulous rooftop gala, while Abby would eventually sit down to eat a microwave dinner alone.

  Abby poured some tea and settled into an armchair to go over the mail.

  Bill. Bill. Junk mail. Bill.

  Headlights flashed through the windows onto the far wall, momentarily distracting her from the unpleasant task. Abby noticed that a car had pulled up outside. She couldn’t make out the details in the darkness, but it was dark and sleek. The engine barely made a sound as the car idled.

  Abby moved the blinds apart to get a closer look. It was a limousine, a rare sight for her part of Brooklyn. She was more surprised, however, when the door swung open and a leggy blonde clad in a tiny black skirt and bright blue stilettos spilled out onto the pavement.

  Gabrielle.

  Abby’s mouth fell open in shock as she watched her sister spin backward to reach for her python-patterned handbag. Gabrielle bent forward, allowing her sister a brief glimpse inside the car.

  A man was sitting at the far end of the leather bench. His features were barely visible in the dim light, but Abby could make out lean lines and a strong jaw. A cellphone was glued to his ear, and he scarcely seemed to notice when Gabrielle stepped away and closed the door.

  Abby noted that her sister was coming inside but kept her gaze fixed on the limo. It remained motionless until Gabrielle was on the porch. Then, when the green front door swung open, it finally pulled away.

 
Gabrielle surged through the front hallway in her typical fashion, heedless of the artwork and timeworn antiques. She shed articles of clothing as she bustled to the back of the house, kicking off her heels in the front room, dumping her handbag on the floor, and carelessly flinging a jacket onto the hallway table.

  “What’s for dinner,” she asked without preamble as soon as she reached the kitchen. “I’m starved.”

  “Cereal…or we might have some crackers left.”

  “You didn’t go to the store?”

  “I couldn’t go to the store. I had to go downtown during lunch to get our water turned back on. You promised me you were going to pay.”

  “Oh, you were serious about that?” Gabrielle said without the slightest hint of contrition.

  “Yes. I was serious about that,” Abby snarled back. “When do I ever make jokes about bills? Why are you eating at home, anyhow? You let Mr. Moneybags drop you off without dinner?”

  “Mr. Moneybags?” Gabrielle arched a brow, her wide blue eyes a picture of innocent confusion. Abby had never figured out how her sister managed that look.

  To outside observers, the girls were perfect clones of one another. They were both tall, slim blondes with crystal blue eyes and delicate features. Even Grand-mère Bette, who had raised them since they were five years old, could barely tell them apart in pictures. In personality, however, they were nearly opposites.

  Abagail- usually referred to as Abby, older than her sister by sixteen minutes, was calm, reserved, and deliberate. She was never unpopular but wasn’t the life of the party either. She lived her most vivid life inside her imagination, losing herself in artworks the way some people got caught up in books or movies, fantasizing about the painted world outside the frame. She could spend hours with a pen and sketchbook, happily transposing her daydreams onto the page. She wouldn’t call herself an artist. That was a title she reserved for Grand-mère Bette and the old lady’s friends, but making art was as necessary to Abby as breathing.