“Are we going?” Con said, opening her door.
“Wait,” the other Constance D’Arcy said, studying the unmoving rDogs.
“For what? They did what you wanted, didn’t they? It’s fine.” Con had come this far. What were four killer robot dogs in the grand scheme of things?
“Just wait. Let me think,” the other Constance D’Arcy said, pointing her gun at Con.
Con got out of the car anyway. “What did I tell you about that? Give me a break.”
The other Constance D’Arcy cursed and had no choice but to follow. Giving the rDogs a wide berth, they circled the car to the front of the cottage. As they passed the pond, Con saw the flash of orange-and-red koi. It reminded her of the pond in the lobby of Palingenesis where she’d sat only a handful of days ago, although, in reality, it had been eighteen months going on a lifetime.
When they reached the bottom of the porch stairs, the front door opened and a white woman in her midfifties stepped out into the sunshine.
“Welcome home,” Abigail Stickling said, looking remarkably fit for someone who had leapt to her death on Christmas night eighteen months ago.
All ideas required assumptions, and Con had been making the wrong ones from the very beginning—that her aunt was dead and it was her former partners fighting to control her legacy. Turned out, Abigail Stickling still had something to say about it. Con found some small comfort in the fact that she’d been right in a way. It had taken a founder of Palingenesis to pull all this off. She’d just guessed the wrong one.
“Oh, is this what welcome looks like?” the other Constance D’Arcy said, the hurt in her voice barely disguised.
“Now calm down. Don’t overreact,” Abigail said.
“You had no right to keep me out. None. This is as much mine as it is yours.”
In the morning sunshine, Con could finally get a good look at her twin. She’d never much liked seeing recordings of herself, and watching a real live Constance D’Arcy was a lot to absorb. Everything about her was familiar yet unpleasantly foreign. How could two people who were so much alike be so different?
Abigail seemed genuinely offended by the accusation. “I merely took steps during the crisis to protect this place. That was always paramount.”
“Don’t be obtuse. The only reason you opened the gate is because I got to her first.”
“You killed Pruitt and his entire team,” Abigail scolded. “Four men. Without consulting with me. It’s as if you’ve lost sight of everything that’s important.”
So Pockmark’s name was Pruitt. In the midst of this peculiar argument, Con had a name to put to that grim face. She wondered if even he’d known who he was working for.
“We’ve been over and over this,” the other Constance D’Arcy said. “They were seen by Vernon’s drone at the farm. How long before he tracked them down? What then? There wasn’t time for a symposium. I had to act.”
“We do not kill people,” Abigail said.
“Well, that’s simply not true.”
“We don’t intentionally kill people,” Abigail amended with a frown that suggested that this was an irrelevant point that had been settled long ago. “That was a regrettable mistake. You know as well as I that Cynthia wasn’t supposed to be aboard that plane.”
Cynthia. Con’s ears perked up at the name. Her aunt had just claimed responsibility for Vernon Gaddis’s plane going down in the North Atlantic. That was nearly five years ago and had sent dominoes toppling that would cost Vernon Gaddis his children and force him out as CEO of Palingenesis. It had set him against Brooke Fenton and Fenton against him. How long had her aunt been planning for today?
“You can stand there carping about the ends and the means until you’re blue in the face, but I got the job done,” the other Constance D’Arcy argued. “And in the process cauterized our Brooke Fenton problem and gave us leverage over Franklin Butler.”
“You’re delusional if you think it is that simple.”
“See? That’s the problem,” the other Constance D’Arcy said. “You sit here in the mountains where everything is theoretical and abstract. I’ve been out there. Doing the dirty work. Our dirty work.”
“Theoretical and abstract?” Abigail said, voice rising above practiced detachment for the first time. “How dare you? You think being trapped here is theoretical? Alone, year after year?”
“Yes, I’m well aware of your many sacrifices,” the other Constance D’Arcy said, voice painted with sarcasm.