The Mirror Man, стр. 13

“Parker?” he called. “Is that you?”

“Dad? What are you doing home?”

The clone walked down the stairs to meet the boy in the kitchen, cameras following so that Brent and Jeremiah could track his progress without interruption. Jeremiah braced himself. Would his son react the same way that Louie had? Would he know the clone wasn’t really him? This entire thing, he thought, could be all over before it even began. He might be home for dinner, after all.

“I had a little car accident this morning. I’m fine,” the clone told Parker. “But the doctors at the hospital told me to take the day off, so I did. I’ll be back to work tomorrow, though.”

“Whoa! You were in the hospital?”

“Just as a precaution, it’s nothing serious. They checked me out. I’m okay.”

“Did you total the car, Dad?”

“Not sure yet, but I think so. Probably. Shouldn’t your mother be home by now?”

“Nah,” Parker said, opening the refrigerator and turning his attention to the pressing matter of what he would eat. “She’s working late.”

That was news to Jeremiah.

“I thought you had something at school tonight,” the clone said, echoing Jeremiah’s own thoughts right down to the word.

“It got canceled. I texted her and she said she might as well stay late tonight.”

“Did she say when she’d be home?”

Parker shrugged and poured himself a glass of milk to wash down the eight or nine cookies he had snagged from a cabinet. “I don’t know,” he said. “Hey, if we get a new car can we get a convertible?”

There wasn’t a hint of suspicion in Parker’s face. In fact, Jeremiah was stunned at how readily Parker had taken the clone for him. His every reaction and expression, every gesture, was exactly what Jeremiah would have expected. His son interacted with it in exactly the same way he would have done with Jeremiah. As impressive as it was, it hurt. Dr. Young’s words echoed in his mind: “You are literally being replaced, Jeremiah.” That thought hit home watching the clone talking to Parker.

“We’ll see,” the clone said. “Where have you been? Did you miss the bus or something?”

“Nah. I stayed after school with some friends.”

“What friends?”

“You don’t know them. Kids from school.”

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing much, just hanging out.”

Parker turned to head upstairs, eager, no doubt, to begin his usual hour of gaming before dinner. But the clone stopped him.

“Hey, do me a favor and take Louie out for a walk. He’s acting strange. I hope he’s not sick or something.”

At that moment, the cameras stopped and the monitor on the wall blinked off just as abruptly as it had switched on four hours before.

Brent stood up from his place on the couch with a slow stretch. Jeremiah was still staring at the blank wall in front of him.

“That was,” he began, shaking his head to find the right word, “absolutely bizarre.”

“I bet,” Brent said. “It certainly looks like an exact copy. So, down to my questions and then we can kick back for a while, have some dinner.” He didn’t seem genuinely fazed by what they’d just seen.

“Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

Brent sat back down and pulled his laptop closer. When he spoke, his voice had assumed a more solemn, businesslike manner.

“During the viewing did you note any actions of the clone to be unexpected, atypical or otherwise out of the ordinary?”

“The whole thing was a bit out of the ordinary from where I’m standing,” he said. “But no. I suppose he acted just the way I would have under the same circumstances.”

Brent typed and then looked up at Jeremiah.

“At any point during the viewing did you note an instance where you would have acted in a manner different from the clone?”

Jeremiah honestly tried to settle on something he might have done differently. But the clone had done everything exactly as he would have done—from the things he’d said to Parker to the way he’d fluffed the pillows behind himself, stacking them at an angle to support his shoulders and upper back. It was almost spooky.

“No,” he said at last.

“Finally, did the people interacting with the clone display any indication that they recognized the clone as an imposter?”

“No,” he said. The question had referred to people, after all, so technically, Jeremiah reasoned, he wasn’t lying when he failed to mention Louie’s reaction. He felt justified in his answer. And in terms of Parker’s interaction with the clone, it was definitely the truth.

He’d been struck, in fact, by the way Parker hardly seemed to look at the clone when he talked to him. Parker acknowledged his father only as much as he needed to and nothing more. It hadn’t always been like that.

Jeremiah’s mind turned to a camping trip they’d taken together when Parker was about ten years old. Jeremiah had never been camping in his life and never had any desire to try, but at the first mention of the idea from his son, he’d rushed out and spent a small fortune on anything he thought they might need: a top-of-the-line tent, subzero sleeping bags, a book of campfire stories, several cans of bug spray and a portable stove. They ended up at a campground in central Maine, slightly off-season, with a persistent light rain that stayed with them the entire weekend. He wasn’t surprised they’d had the place almost exclusively to themselves.

The trip wasn’t the idyllic adventure Jeremiah had imagined it would be. It took him three tries to get the tent up and even then it ended up lopsided when one of the poles wouldn’t stay put. They couldn’t get a fire started until the owner of the place felt sorry for them and finally helped to put up tarps in the trees above their campsite. But Jeremiah had never felt closer to Parker than he did during those damp, chilly two days in the middle of the woods.

“It’s a good thing it’s just me and you, Dad,” Parker had said while they listened to the rhythm of