Free The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel by Peter Swanson

off Donnie? Call off Donnie from who? You?”
    “No. From Jane. He’s been threatening her.”
    MacLean lowered his brow in confusion. “Who are you talking about? Are you talking about Donnie Jenks? DJ?”
    George suddenly felt confused. “The guy you hired to get the money from Jane. I met him yesterday.”
    “Well, you also met him today. He just patted you down. Donald Jenks. DJ. He’s an investigator in my employ. I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about.”

Chapter 7
    A fter a moment, George said, “There’s someone else pretending to be Donnie Jenks. I met him yesterday.”
    “What did he look like?”
    George described him.
    “He doesn’t sound like anyone I know. He’s probably just some friend of Jane’s, trying to scare you into doing her a favor.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense. It’s because of him that she decided to return the money.”
    MacLean pressed his lips together and squeezed the bridge of his nose again. “Is that what she told you?”
    George told him what he knew, about the man’s threats to Liana, the way he’d been following her since she’d left Atlanta. “Clearly he knows enough about you to know you hired a man named Donnie Jenks to recover the money, and he’s using that name.”
    MacLean flicked his fingers in a gesture of dismissal. “Either way, it’s not my problem. If some gun-for-hire wants to chase down Jane, I’m not going to lose any sleep. Something makes me think Jane’s behind it anyhow. I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”
    “You got your money back,” George said and shifted in his seat. He was ready to go. It had suddenly occurred to him that the miniature assassin going by the name of Donnie Jenks was most likely an employee of MacLean’s, an employee MacLean had no intention of owning up to. Someone paid under the table. MacLean was the worst kind of dirty, someone who pretended he wasn’t.
    MacLean, as though reading George’s mind, held up a hand and said, “Look, let me do you a little favor for no good reason. Let me tell you my story about Jane. It probably won’t change your mind about her, but I’ll feel better.” He looked at his watch, a chunky piece of metal that hung loosely on his thin wrist.
    George shrugged.
    MacLean slid a little farther back into the couch. “As you probably know, I have some money to my name. Not Walmart money, but I’ve done okay for myself. I’ve had two wives. The first one died from eclampsia giving birth to my only daughter. That was thirty-seven years ago. My first wife’s name was Rebecca, and she had black hair and blue eyes. Raven black hair and eyes that were the palest kind of blue you can imagine. She was like a poem, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I met her on a golf course on a Saturday afternoon in Georgia. She was quite the golfer. Today she would have gone pro and been one of the best lady golfers in the country, but back then she was happy enough to be my wife.
    “After she died, I didn’t think I would recover, but I did. I met Teresa fifteen years ago at a charity event up here in Boston. Like my first wife, she has very dark hair and very blue eyes. And like my first wife, she will die before me. She’s dying right now in this very house. It’s entirely possible that she will die in a matter of days, not weeks. What do you think the probability is that I would have two wives who looked so very much alike and who both met such cruel fates? Don’t answer. That’s a rhetorical question.
    “The answer is that both of them dying young is just another piece of shitty luck, but any psychologist worth his hourly fee would tell you that they looked alike because I am attracted to women with black hair and blue eyes.”
    He paused, staring at George, challenging him to interrupt his tale. George said nothing.
    “Which brings us to Jane Byrne,” he continued, then coughed twice after saying her name. “The lady that you’re interested in.