“Right now, it’s eleven o’clock, we’re stuck on the 101, and we’re going nowhere,” she said.
“I have Rob’s keys,” I said. “And I have a map.” I slipped the map out of the envelope and unfolded it over my lap. A picture on ancient browned newsprint slipped from between the folds. It showed a line of smiling officials decked out in sashes, cutting a long ribbon with an outsize pair of scissors. Over their heads hung a banner:
SERVING AMERICA THE VERY BEST: THURINGIA
NUTS FRUITS PASTRIES
The caption read, “California’s newest tourist town welcomes visitors.”
On the map, two circles had been marked in red pen, one around a small dot with no name east of Livermore, the other around San Jose.
“Do you know anything about a place called Thuringia?”
“No,” she said. “Sounds like a sausage.”
“How much do you want to get involved?” I asked her.
She gripped the wheel tighter.
“Lissa?” I leaned forward to catch her eye and force her to answer.
“I want to feel at peace sometime in this life,” she murmured. “If you’re going to do what Rob did . . .” She glanced at me, and I knew instinctively that she was seeing Rob. My brother and I had diverged little in appearance in almost three decades. Rob had been dextro, I am levo—right-handed and left. Adroit and gauche. His hair had curled deasil, my hair curls widdershins. He put on his shoes first right, then left—me, the reverse. His left eye had been tilted a little, my right eye is tilted a little. Different fingerprints, retinal patterns, of course; embryos have some autonomy when they develop.
But the very same genes. The very same.
We had speculated, during our first and last run at cooperative dating, that disastrous eighteenth summer, that it wasn’t technically unfaithful for one twin to sleep with the girlfriend of another. No difference in the old evolutionary game. We had learned otherwise.
Now I was the only one.
“There’s something in Thuringia, and there’s an address in San Jose,” I said. “Shall we go open some doors?”
“Why?” Lissa asked.
“I think my brother’s having one last joke on me. He gave me just enough evidence to tweak my interest, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps and solve a mystery. I’m thinking if I succeed, I’ll know why he was killed, and maybe I’ll be able to recover my life.”
That didn’t sound convincing even to me, but how could I explain a masculine game of chicken between a dead twin and a live one?
“Maybe he’s warning you, stay away from these places.”
“By sending a map and a set of keys?”
She gripped the wheel even tighter. “Hungry?” she asked.
“Famished.”
“Tell me where we should eat, and what,” she said with just a hint of tartness. “You’re the expert.”
I picked out a Denny’s. We would be powerless against any organization that could control all the fast-food restaurants in California.
Lissa had a bowl of clam chowder. I had a cheese omelet with sausage. Everything was thoroughly cooked.
25
THURINGIA, CALIFORNIA
We missed the turnoff twice. I looked at Rob’s map and determined that Thuringia—if that was the unnamed dot in the red circle—lay between two little towns, Gillette Hot Springs and Cinnabar, about five miles off an old stretch of highway now used as frontage road and for backcountry access. But all we found east of Gillette Hot Springs were rolling brown hills and an abandoned restaurant complex with a decrepit green-and-white Dutch windmill.
We stopped for directions in Cinnabar, not much more than a gas station and a trailer park. The attendant at the station, a sixteen-year-old boy with long black hair and a torn LA RAMS T-shirt, had never heard of Thuringia.
“This is the most boring place on Earth,” he confided as he pumped gas into the Toyota. “Nothing but old-timers. Even the dogs are old.”
Lissa was clearly unhappy but kept her mouth shut as I swore and fumbled with the map.
Finally I decided we should backtrack and stop at the old restaurant. We pulled into the weedy parking lot. I got out and peered through filthy and broken windows into a ruined interior, counters ripped up, trash on the floor. Around in back, in an angle of shade, I found a large, warped plywood sign leaning against two battered trash cans. I flipped it with my foot and it fell over. In faded green mock-Deutsche letters, outlined in powdery pink, the sign proclaimed:
PEA SOUP THURINGIA
I shaded my eyes against the sun and walked across the cracked asphalt. A barricade, splintered and bleached by the sun, blocked a side road that ran straight off into the hills.
“Bingo!” I called out to Lissa in the car.
She did not share my excitement.
The road to the hills had been turned into a washboard by years of sun and rain and neglect. Lissa pushed the Toyota along at about thirty miles per hour, our teeth rattling. “What do you hope to find?” she asked.
“I don’t hope to find anything,” I said. “Except maybe that it’s all a dream.” Utility poles lined the road. Power lines still served Thuringia, but it was no longer named on the map.
Lissa slowed to drive around a particularly deep pothole. “You think there’s something bad here?”
