“I don’t really consider myself an artist,” I said. “I suppose you could say that I used to be a news photographer, but nowadays I’m just a common, ordinary, everyday commercial photographer. I take pictures of whatever people are willing to pay me to take pictures of. Their kids, their dogs, their airplanes or construction sites, their chairpersons of the board.” Not to mention half-naked lady loggers and almost totally naked escort service providers and their girls. As I’d told Bobbi’s father, someone had to do it.
“Do you miss being a news photographer?” Mrs. Waverley asked.
“The pay was better,” I replied. “But only marginally. More regular, though.”
Mrs. Waverley held out the bottle. I held out my glass, although it was only half empty. She topped it up, then poured more wine into her glass. The bottle was nearly empty.
“Are you married, Mr. McCall?”
“I was,” I answered, then added quickly, “Mrs. Waverley, the woman who hired us to photograph that boat, do you have any idea who she might be?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t. How would I? It wasn’t even our boat. Not that that’s relevant, is it? I’m sorry, I’m rambling, aren’t I? I’ve had too much wine on an empty stomach, perhaps. I should eat something.”
I stood up, prepared to take my leave, albeit regretfully, mission unaccomplished.
“No, please,” she said. “You don’t have to go. Unless you have another appointment, of course, if there’s some other place you need to be.”
“No, there’s no place I need to be. But I don’t want to be an imposition.”
“You’re not imposing. Not at all. I enjoy your company. But perhaps we could talk in the kitchen while I make something to eat.”
“As long as I’m not imposing,” I said.
“You’re not,” she said and started to pick up the tray.
“Let me,” I said, and bent quickly to pick up the tray. A little too quickly. We thumped heads, hard.
She sat down on the sofa, eyes momentarily glazed. Way to go, McCall.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, ears ringing. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said, rubbing her forehead at the hairline. She stood. “Let’s try that again, shall we?” She gestured toward the tray. “If you would …”
I picked up the tray and followed her into the kitchen without further incident.
chapter ten
“Do you believe in parallel universes, Mr. McCall?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I said.
She’d made a salad of leafy lettuce, spinach, blue cheese, and pine nuts, but ate very little of it, opening the other bottle of wine instead. We sat at a small, round, glass-topped table in her big, immaculate kitchen. I watched her as she spoke. She sat with her heels on the edge of her chair and her arms folded around her knees. She unwrapped only long enough to reach for her glass of wine, or to nibble on a leaf of lettuce, a crumb of cheese, or a pine nut.
“I read a very strange novel a few years ago,” she said, “about a man who created parallel universes every time he made a choice between two or more courses of action. Every time he chose, say, between having the apple pie or the blueberry crumble for dessert, or whether to drive to work or take the bus, the universe split into two separate universes. Alternate timelines, the author called them. In one timeline, the protagonist drove to work, had a car accident, and became a paraplegic, but in the other, he took the bus on which he met the woman he would eventually marry. He was able to move between the different timelines at will, and discovered others who could do the same.”
“Handy,” I said. “Like being able to take back chess moves.”
“It’s the only science-fiction novel I’ve ever read. I don’t remember the author’s name, or even if it was very good. For some reason, I didn’t finish it, so I don’t know how it turned out, but I often feel as though I exist in two different universes at the same time, this me in this universe, getting blotto with a perfect stranger, and another me in another universe in which perhaps I’m also getting blotto, but all by myself because I didn’t let you into my house. I think I prefer this timeline,” she added, and almost smiled.
“Schrödinger’s cat,” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“Schrödinger’s cat. It was a ‘thought experiment’ in quantum mechanics by a physicist named Erwin Schrödinger. I read about it in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Physics. It had something to do with the probability that an atom of uranium or some other radioactive substance would decay within an hour, trigger a Geiger counter, and release a gas that would kill a cat in a sealed container. In one quantum reality, the atom decays and the cat dies. In the other, the atom doesn’t decay, and the cat lives. According to quantum theory, the cat’s two possible states — alive and dead — are mixed or entangled together until we look into the box to see what happened, at which point the cat’s realities separate and it will be either dead or alive.”
“How awful.”
“Tough on Dr. Schrödinger’s cat, anyway,” I said. “Fortunately for Felix, it was only a thought experiment. No real cat involved.”
“Do you believe it’s possible that with each choice we make,” she said, “we create a separate parallel universe for each alternative?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” I said.
“But unlikely?”
“The probability is not good,” I said, and she almost smiled again, but once again hid behind her wineglass.
She refilled her glass from the bottle on the table between us. There was an almost visible aura of sadness about Anna Waverley, an emotional entanglement field in which I was trapped along with her. It was distorting my reality — she was distorting my reality — and while my reality was far from perfect, I liked it the way it was. Besides, like it or not, it was the only one I had, and I was stuck with it. I wondered what was so terrible about Mrs. Waverley’s reality that she wished for another. Or was I misreading her? Maybe she was just plain nuts.
“How long were you married, Mr. McCall?” she asked.
She changed topics like a stone skipping across the water. “Six years,” I said. “It ended ten years ago.”
“Do you have any children?”
“A daughter. She’ll be fifteen in August.”
“My husband never wanted children,” Anna Waverley said. “I did, but Sam had had a vasectomy even before I married him. We’ve been married almost twenty-five years. If we’d had children, they’d be grown now. I could even be a grandmother.”
In an effort to get the conversation back on track, I said, “Is it possible that Bobbi’s attack, or the woman who hired us, is somehow connected to your husband or his business?”
“What? No, the idea is ludicrous. If you knew my husband, you’d know just how ludicrous. My husband is an extremely boring man. He was boring when I married him twenty-five years ago and he’s even more boring now. And his business is equally dull. Do you like this kitchen, Mr. McCall?”
I