A Tale of Two Dead Ringers - Chapter 19
The story moves on to its climax! The ego trips are over. The truth is out there and the characters must deal with that., and work on solving the central mystery!
In this chapter... Ned helps Jaye deal with Eric. And Jaye believes she finally figures out who she has to save from whom...
Title: Chapter 19 - Saving Him From Her
Word count: 2,630 Chapter count: 26
Previous chapters: S, P, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
Observations: A Pushing Daisies/Wonderfalls crossover - a tale of mystery with a slight surreal touch.
Previously on “A Tale of Two Dead Ringers”
It's Halloween. Aaron and Ned have switched places to solve a mystery, which involves voodoo dolls representing Ned and Chuck, anonymous notes threatening Emerson and his friends, an old lady with muffins poisoned with “the zombie drug,” and a sinister coroner who moonlights as travel agent between two magical lands.
The story so far...
The experience of "crossing to the other side of the mirror" has some unexpected effects on Ned and Aaron, as both momentarily feel they had out-of-body experiences and revisited their loved ones in their respective hometowns.
But events keep happening for everyone else anyway. Jaye Tyler becomes intrigued by the behavior of that Ned/Aaron mixture in front of her. The man she believes to be her brother Aaron suddenly shows signs of feeling very disturbed, and when she gets closer to him, the muses start telling her to kiss him on the lips. At the same time, that man starts rambling incoherently about spoons, in a way that is totally uncharacteristic for Aaron Tyler.
Jaye, still believing that's Aaron, feels disgusted with the idea of kissing on the lips. But the muses, led by the Tasmanian Devil, insist. Jaye finally gives in, just to figure out that man is not her brother at all, and she ends enjoying the kiss much more than she cares to admit.
However, in the life of Jaye Tyler, even the briefest of happiness moments do come with a steep price tag. Maybe she forgot the muses always have ulterior motives, but they haven't. Seeming to have synchronized the events of the Universe, Eric, her boyfriend, shows up at her trailer's door at the exact moment she is kissing Ned, as Eric has just arrived from his trip to meet his ex-wife Heidi.
Jaye gets desperate and fears she'll lose what she loves most. Being perfectly aware of that, the muses start a cacophony of impish giggles. Angrily, she slaps Ned's cheek, and that finally shocks him out of his trance.
XIX
Saving Him From Her
(October 31st, Halloween, early evening - Niagara Falls - Jaye's trailer)
“I said snap out of it! You owe me that!” shouted Jaye Tyler, visibly frustrated and angry.
Ned's cheek hurt bad enough. That cute brunette was right there, in front of him and did she look angry!
A terrible thunder caused the trailer to shake, and the Plastic Tasmanian Devil to drop on the floor. For some reason that was something important.
“Come on! That's not fair... My boyfriend Eric saw us...” Jaye moved her hands forward and back, indicating the word 'us', but wouldn't dare put in words what they had just done together.
“I can't lose him now...” She beat Ned's chest with her close fists, but this time she wasn't trying to hurt him; instead, it was just an expression of her frustration.
“Not this way... But how can I face him now?” Her voice sounded hesitant, showing she was finally being overwhelmed by all that negativity and misfortune. She then collapsed on Ned's chest and made a low sobbing sound. Ned embraced her and gently patted her head.
Then she quickly raised her head, and looked around with a furious look.
“SHUT UP YOU ALL!!! Shut up, or I'll shut you up myself, you devilish creatures! There's nothing funny about it!”
She looked genuinely disturbed, and it would be perfectly understandable for anybody who saw her in such a pitiful condition to consider her stark raving mad.
But Ned knew better, and he knew her predicament was genuine. And at that precise moment, everything was clear in Ned's mind. It all made sense to him now and he knew exactly what to do next.
“Where did he go?” he asked.
Jaye probably had a million questions to ask him, but she just pointed in which direction her boyfriend had stumbled away to.
“Do you think you can catch him?”
“Faster than a speeding bullet!” Ned replied, and ran to the door.
Amazingly, he felt great for the first time since he had arrived in Niagara Falls. He stepped outside and quickly scanned his surroundings. It wasn't hard to find who he was looking for.
Ned ran, until he got a few feet from that young man with a short beard who had just been at the door of Jaye's trailer. Somehow, Ned remembered seeing him there.
“Eric!” Ned shouted. But all he could do was watch Eric get in his car and speed away. It started to rain.
Ned started walking back towards Jaye.
“You let him go!” Jaye complained. “It's all my fault!”
“I'd think the same if I were you... But he'll be back,” Ned pondered.
“How can you be so sure?”
“He'll be back. I would!”
* * *
Eric drove away from the trailer park as fast as he could. Unfortunately, he couldn't drive away from the memory of what he had just seen.
“Jaye and her brother... kissing?” he kept mumbling to himself as he drove.
He went to the Barrel, and it was raining when he got there. The Barrel was the perfect place for Eric to drown his sorrows, especially that evening, when the place was closed for the public as it was remodeling.
He was already in his third beer bottle, and getting ready for the fourth, when a giddy Mahandra was coming out of the back room, carrying a few bottles of assorted alcoholic beverages. Like Eric, she had also come to the Barrel looking for drinks, but quite unlike him, she was after the drinks for very happy reasons, more specifically for a special Halloween night celebration between herself and her boyfriend Aaron. At least that was what he had promised her that afternoon, and she thought he'd better be a man of his word.
“Oops, I didn't see you here. Did you get here long?” asked Mahandra. Eric just shrugged, and started drinking again.
“Hey, what's got into you? Well, never mind if you don't wanna talk. Not my problem. I was just on my way out, for my celebration with Aaron!”
Eric choked on the beer, then gave a nervous laugh.
“Perhaps you two should invite Jaye...” he suggested.
“OK, now. Jaye knows about our thing and she's OK with it. What's that supposed to mean?”
Eric shrugged again, but Mahandra insisted. He ended telling her everything he had seen that day. Mahandra stood there, her mouth opened like she was a fool and she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
But then she started connecting the dots. Aaron's strange behavior that morning, the breakfast he had prepared for the Tylers, and God, that delicious pie! But he forgot her name, and wouldn't let him kiss her no matter how hard she tried.
There are some things a woman knows about her boyfriend, and one of the first of them is, precisely, when a man is not her boyfriend! Yes, there was just one explanation possible and it was that this man she had met, the one kissing Jaye, was NOT Aaron Tyler. She couldn't explain it, just feel it. And she'd known all along, and just had refused seeing it so far.
“Come on, Eric. Let's go back to Jaye's trailer. I wanna confront this man, whoever he is. And you're coming with me!” commanded Mahandra.
Meanwhile, inside Jaye's trailer, thanks for Jaye's mother who had recently had delivered to her trailer a whole box full of towels, and an assortment of linen articles, Jaye and Ned were practically dry. Fortunately for him, she had some of her brother's spare clothes. If rainy days are good for anything, it is for honest and revealing conversations, and backgammon games. Since she had no board games on the trailer, a moment of honest connection was established. So, he explained to her who he really was, and told her the whole story that had brought him there.
“So, Jaye, I'm really, really, really sorry. You deserved much better. But your brother and I...”
“You two geniuses concocted this half-baked scheme and one would pass as the other? I'm so surprised, because my brother actually IS a genius. And I think this is exactly why he sometimes has this kind of ridiculous idea.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Thinking back, I honestly don't know how we thought we could pull this off...” Ned confessed. “But we didn't want whoever is behind this to know Aaron had been incapacitated, and I was the one here asking questions. The least everybody knew, the better.”
“And you're sure my brother is all right, and that he has completely recovered from the poisoning?”
“I know here, deep inside my sweet spot that he's all right. He's a hundred per cent all right. He's with my friends, and he couldn't be with better people. He's been confused and lost, but he's extremely resourceful, and I truly beleive he'll take care of the situation when nobody else will be able to.”
“And you know all that because you two switched souls or minds, or katra, in your Vulcan mind-meld, or whatever, and it was not you here this afternoon, it was actually my brother Aaron walking around? A little farfetched, isn't it?”
Ned shrugged.
“Well, if you put things this way, it does sound a little absurd. Actually, a few days ago and I would've agreed with you, but now... Tell me something. Is it any less farfetched than hearing messages from plastic figurines and cartoon animals? Yeah! I know what Aaron knows.”
Or bringing the dead back to life for one minute, Ned added in his thoughts, then a chill went up his spine. What if Aaron knew HIS secret. What if he told Olive, for example and she went around spewing buckshots of truth to some 11 o'clock news team?
Jaye looked away in shame and embarrassment. She didn't seem to be able to look at Ned in his eyes anymore.
“There could be a simple explanation. I could be losing my mind...”
“Hey, hey!” he held her shoulders, and lowered his head in order to make eye contact easier, because, like all important women in his life, she was tiny. “There's nothing wrong with you, Jaye. You just have a gift.”
“The only gifts I know are sold at the gift shop of Wonderfalls Emporium for the price of 6.99. I'm just a slacking retail clerk... As my family has already figured out, nothing to be proud of.”
“And I just bake pies, just happen to be damn good at it, except I have no blood family not to be proud of me. You'll find your calling sooner than you expect. You're a very special, wonderful person.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. I have total confidence in you.”
“But you barely know me.”
“That's where you are wrong. Don't ask me how, but I know you much better than you think.”
“And that makes me special?”
“To me, you're almost as special as my dear Chuck. But don't worry. Nobody measures up to her. Not even close...”
“In that case I'm more than happy to come in a solid second. But what makes you say that?”
Ned stopped to think for a moment. The answer was crystal clear in his mind.
“Because you were both made in the same fun factory of life, that's why.”
Jaye's seemed puzzled at first, but then she relaxed and laughed.
“All right... I'm going to pretend what you just said made any sense at all. Because it was just too beautiful to ignore. Thank you! Thank you, Ned... And by the way... You're a terrific kisser!”
He timidly averted her gaze, wishing she hadn't brought that up.
“You're not such a bad kisser yourself. But you and I know...”
“...that this shouldn't happen...” she added.
“...ever again,” he completed with an embarrassed look.
Ned let go of her of her shoulders, and put his hands in his pockets, retreating to his inner, safe place he went to whenever he became embarrassed. They both exchanged wry smiles. He tried to whistle a tune, but gave up in the middle.
“Let's talk about the case?” she suggested.
“Great idea!” he agreed. Then she looked at the Brass Monkey and became restless.
“Oh, please! Not again!”
“What?”
“It's the Brass Monkey. He's saying 'Save him from her' again. It's starting all over again! I can't stand that anymore!”
“But you said he wanted you to save me from Mahandra. That situation has been properly dealt with.”
“I know! Unless... Unless he's talking about somebody else.”
“Why did you say it's starting all over again? Has the monkey told you that before?” asked Ned.
“No, first it was the cocktail bunny... Last year... Yeah, then the Monkey and the Lion said it too. Long story short, that's how I got final custody of our little metal friend here. At that occasion I saved the life of... Oh no!”
Jaye was restless again and this time she was looking at the Tasmanian Devil on the floor. She picked it up and put it on the table where it was before falling.
“What did it say, Jaye?”
“It's saying, 'The mother is the key'! You see, last year I saved Dr. Ron's life and he gave me the Monkey as a memento. The Brass Monkey is extremely connected with the doctor and he was here earlier to take care of you, or your body at least.”
“What does the mother being the key have to do with that?”
“Doctor Ron told me that he's taking care of his mother. Her behavior is becoming unpredictable, because of some mental or emotional instability. He tried to warn me about how the human mind can create different personalities, blah, blah, and all that. I thought he was referring to you...”
“But maybe he was relating to his personal experience with his crazy mother?” Ned wondered.
“Something like that,” Jaye confirmed. “Didn't you say an old lady poisoned Aaron, and that this lady is not Marie Marianne Beattle?”
“It's not the Muffin Lady. That much I'm sure of. So, you're saying that Dr. Ron's mother is going to kill her son? Tonight?”
Jaye stopped for a moment, and looked at the two figurines again. Then looked at Ned with a resolute expression.
“That's exactly what I'm saying!”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” admitted Ned. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
“We have to reach Dr. Ron immediately.”
“But do you know where he lives?”
“I don't. But I know where he's office is.”
“Which is certainly empty at this hour,” reasoned Ned. “What good will that do?”
“We can find his address or phone number among his records. But don't worry. I know how to break in. I've done that before!” she said with a mischievous grin.
“Somehow that doesn't make me feel much better...”
Jaye shrugged. Next, she was holding a backpack, where she was placing the Tasmanian Devil, the Brass Monkey, a few other of his friends and additional burglary items. Then she picked a raincoat for her and produced another one for Ned. Unfortunately, that one belonged to Eric, not Aaron, so it was quite a bit small for the Pie Maker. He felt like Frankenstein's Creature, with his very short suit jacket, a familiar and undesirable Halloween memory. But it was better than nothing.
Jaye opened the door, and they both ventured into the rainy night in order to save a life.
A little after Ned and Jaye left, Mahandra and Eric reached the trailer park. So, then they stood at Jaye's trailer front door. They knocked, and knocked again. She obviously wasn't home.
“Hurry up, it's raining!” said Mahandra.
“Looks like she isn't in,” said Eric. “Where could she have gone?”
“Let's try her parents' place then. But I will get to the bottom of this tonight!”
They both turned to walk back to Eric's car when they were stopped by a figure right in front of them.
“You two are not going anywhere!” said the man. The sudden surprise kept Eric and Mahandra from reacting. Where was Jaye? And what could the man possibly want?
In this chapter... Ned helps Jaye deal with Eric. And Jaye believes she finally figures out who she has to save from whom...
Title: Chapter 19 - Saving Him From Her
Word count: 2,630 Chapter count: 26
Previous chapters: S, P, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
Observations: A Pushing Daisies/Wonderfalls crossover - a tale of mystery with a slight surreal touch.
Previously on “A Tale of Two Dead Ringers”
It's Halloween. Aaron and Ned have switched places to solve a mystery, which involves voodoo dolls representing Ned and Chuck, anonymous notes threatening Emerson and his friends, an old lady with muffins poisoned with “the zombie drug,” and a sinister coroner who moonlights as travel agent between two magical lands.
The story so far...
The experience of "crossing to the other side of the mirror" has some unexpected effects on Ned and Aaron, as both momentarily feel they had out-of-body experiences and revisited their loved ones in their respective hometowns.
But events keep happening for everyone else anyway. Jaye Tyler becomes intrigued by the behavior of that Ned/Aaron mixture in front of her. The man she believes to be her brother Aaron suddenly shows signs of feeling very disturbed, and when she gets closer to him, the muses start telling her to kiss him on the lips. At the same time, that man starts rambling incoherently about spoons, in a way that is totally uncharacteristic for Aaron Tyler.
Jaye, still believing that's Aaron, feels disgusted with the idea of kissing on the lips. But the muses, led by the Tasmanian Devil, insist. Jaye finally gives in, just to figure out that man is not her brother at all, and she ends enjoying the kiss much more than she cares to admit.
However, in the life of Jaye Tyler, even the briefest of happiness moments do come with a steep price tag. Maybe she forgot the muses always have ulterior motives, but they haven't. Seeming to have synchronized the events of the Universe, Eric, her boyfriend, shows up at her trailer's door at the exact moment she is kissing Ned, as Eric has just arrived from his trip to meet his ex-wife Heidi.
Jaye gets desperate and fears she'll lose what she loves most. Being perfectly aware of that, the muses start a cacophony of impish giggles. Angrily, she slaps Ned's cheek, and that finally shocks him out of his trance.
XIX
Saving Him From Her
(October 31st, Halloween, early evening - Niagara Falls - Jaye's trailer)
“I said snap out of it! You owe me that!” shouted Jaye Tyler, visibly frustrated and angry.
Ned's cheek hurt bad enough. That cute brunette was right there, in front of him and did she look angry!
A terrible thunder caused the trailer to shake, and the Plastic Tasmanian Devil to drop on the floor. For some reason that was something important.
“Come on! That's not fair... My boyfriend Eric saw us...” Jaye moved her hands forward and back, indicating the word 'us', but wouldn't dare put in words what they had just done together.
“I can't lose him now...” She beat Ned's chest with her close fists, but this time she wasn't trying to hurt him; instead, it was just an expression of her frustration.
“Not this way... But how can I face him now?” Her voice sounded hesitant, showing she was finally being overwhelmed by all that negativity and misfortune. She then collapsed on Ned's chest and made a low sobbing sound. Ned embraced her and gently patted her head.
Then she quickly raised her head, and looked around with a furious look.
“SHUT UP YOU ALL!!! Shut up, or I'll shut you up myself, you devilish creatures! There's nothing funny about it!”
She looked genuinely disturbed, and it would be perfectly understandable for anybody who saw her in such a pitiful condition to consider her stark raving mad.
But Ned knew better, and he knew her predicament was genuine. And at that precise moment, everything was clear in Ned's mind. It all made sense to him now and he knew exactly what to do next.
“Where did he go?” he asked.
Jaye probably had a million questions to ask him, but she just pointed in which direction her boyfriend had stumbled away to.
“Do you think you can catch him?”
“Faster than a speeding bullet!” Ned replied, and ran to the door.
Amazingly, he felt great for the first time since he had arrived in Niagara Falls. He stepped outside and quickly scanned his surroundings. It wasn't hard to find who he was looking for.
Ned ran, until he got a few feet from that young man with a short beard who had just been at the door of Jaye's trailer. Somehow, Ned remembered seeing him there.
“Eric!” Ned shouted. But all he could do was watch Eric get in his car and speed away. It started to rain.
Ned started walking back towards Jaye.
“You let him go!” Jaye complained. “It's all my fault!”
“I'd think the same if I were you... But he'll be back,” Ned pondered.
“How can you be so sure?”
“He'll be back. I would!”
* * *
Eric drove away from the trailer park as fast as he could. Unfortunately, he couldn't drive away from the memory of what he had just seen.
“Jaye and her brother... kissing?” he kept mumbling to himself as he drove.
He went to the Barrel, and it was raining when he got there. The Barrel was the perfect place for Eric to drown his sorrows, especially that evening, when the place was closed for the public as it was remodeling.
He was already in his third beer bottle, and getting ready for the fourth, when a giddy Mahandra was coming out of the back room, carrying a few bottles of assorted alcoholic beverages. Like Eric, she had also come to the Barrel looking for drinks, but quite unlike him, she was after the drinks for very happy reasons, more specifically for a special Halloween night celebration between herself and her boyfriend Aaron. At least that was what he had promised her that afternoon, and she thought he'd better be a man of his word.
“Oops, I didn't see you here. Did you get here long?” asked Mahandra. Eric just shrugged, and started drinking again.
“Hey, what's got into you? Well, never mind if you don't wanna talk. Not my problem. I was just on my way out, for my celebration with Aaron!”
Eric choked on the beer, then gave a nervous laugh.
“Perhaps you two should invite Jaye...” he suggested.
“OK, now. Jaye knows about our thing and she's OK with it. What's that supposed to mean?”
Eric shrugged again, but Mahandra insisted. He ended telling her everything he had seen that day. Mahandra stood there, her mouth opened like she was a fool and she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
But then she started connecting the dots. Aaron's strange behavior that morning, the breakfast he had prepared for the Tylers, and God, that delicious pie! But he forgot her name, and wouldn't let him kiss her no matter how hard she tried.
There are some things a woman knows about her boyfriend, and one of the first of them is, precisely, when a man is not her boyfriend! Yes, there was just one explanation possible and it was that this man she had met, the one kissing Jaye, was NOT Aaron Tyler. She couldn't explain it, just feel it. And she'd known all along, and just had refused seeing it so far.
“Come on, Eric. Let's go back to Jaye's trailer. I wanna confront this man, whoever he is. And you're coming with me!” commanded Mahandra.
Meanwhile, inside Jaye's trailer, thanks for Jaye's mother who had recently had delivered to her trailer a whole box full of towels, and an assortment of linen articles, Jaye and Ned were practically dry. Fortunately for him, she had some of her brother's spare clothes. If rainy days are good for anything, it is for honest and revealing conversations, and backgammon games. Since she had no board games on the trailer, a moment of honest connection was established. So, he explained to her who he really was, and told her the whole story that had brought him there.
“So, Jaye, I'm really, really, really sorry. You deserved much better. But your brother and I...”
“You two geniuses concocted this half-baked scheme and one would pass as the other? I'm so surprised, because my brother actually IS a genius. And I think this is exactly why he sometimes has this kind of ridiculous idea.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Thinking back, I honestly don't know how we thought we could pull this off...” Ned confessed. “But we didn't want whoever is behind this to know Aaron had been incapacitated, and I was the one here asking questions. The least everybody knew, the better.”
“And you're sure my brother is all right, and that he has completely recovered from the poisoning?”
“I know here, deep inside my sweet spot that he's all right. He's a hundred per cent all right. He's with my friends, and he couldn't be with better people. He's been confused and lost, but he's extremely resourceful, and I truly beleive he'll take care of the situation when nobody else will be able to.”
“And you know all that because you two switched souls or minds, or katra, in your Vulcan mind-meld, or whatever, and it was not you here this afternoon, it was actually my brother Aaron walking around? A little farfetched, isn't it?”
Ned shrugged.
“Well, if you put things this way, it does sound a little absurd. Actually, a few days ago and I would've agreed with you, but now... Tell me something. Is it any less farfetched than hearing messages from plastic figurines and cartoon animals? Yeah! I know what Aaron knows.”
Or bringing the dead back to life for one minute, Ned added in his thoughts, then a chill went up his spine. What if Aaron knew HIS secret. What if he told Olive, for example and she went around spewing buckshots of truth to some 11 o'clock news team?
Jaye looked away in shame and embarrassment. She didn't seem to be able to look at Ned in his eyes anymore.
“There could be a simple explanation. I could be losing my mind...”
“Hey, hey!” he held her shoulders, and lowered his head in order to make eye contact easier, because, like all important women in his life, she was tiny. “There's nothing wrong with you, Jaye. You just have a gift.”
“The only gifts I know are sold at the gift shop of Wonderfalls Emporium for the price of 6.99. I'm just a slacking retail clerk... As my family has already figured out, nothing to be proud of.”
“And I just bake pies, just happen to be damn good at it, except I have no blood family not to be proud of me. You'll find your calling sooner than you expect. You're a very special, wonderful person.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so. I have total confidence in you.”
“But you barely know me.”
“That's where you are wrong. Don't ask me how, but I know you much better than you think.”
“And that makes me special?”
“To me, you're almost as special as my dear Chuck. But don't worry. Nobody measures up to her. Not even close...”
“In that case I'm more than happy to come in a solid second. But what makes you say that?”
Ned stopped to think for a moment. The answer was crystal clear in his mind.
“Because you were both made in the same fun factory of life, that's why.”
Jaye's seemed puzzled at first, but then she relaxed and laughed.
“All right... I'm going to pretend what you just said made any sense at all. Because it was just too beautiful to ignore. Thank you! Thank you, Ned... And by the way... You're a terrific kisser!”
He timidly averted her gaze, wishing she hadn't brought that up.
“You're not such a bad kisser yourself. But you and I know...”
“...that this shouldn't happen...” she added.
“...ever again,” he completed with an embarrassed look.
Ned let go of her of her shoulders, and put his hands in his pockets, retreating to his inner, safe place he went to whenever he became embarrassed. They both exchanged wry smiles. He tried to whistle a tune, but gave up in the middle.
“Let's talk about the case?” she suggested.
“Great idea!” he agreed. Then she looked at the Brass Monkey and became restless.
“Oh, please! Not again!”
“What?”
“It's the Brass Monkey. He's saying 'Save him from her' again. It's starting all over again! I can't stand that anymore!”
“But you said he wanted you to save me from Mahandra. That situation has been properly dealt with.”
“I know! Unless... Unless he's talking about somebody else.”
“Why did you say it's starting all over again? Has the monkey told you that before?” asked Ned.
“No, first it was the cocktail bunny... Last year... Yeah, then the Monkey and the Lion said it too. Long story short, that's how I got final custody of our little metal friend here. At that occasion I saved the life of... Oh no!”
Jaye was restless again and this time she was looking at the Tasmanian Devil on the floor. She picked it up and put it on the table where it was before falling.
“What did it say, Jaye?”
“It's saying, 'The mother is the key'! You see, last year I saved Dr. Ron's life and he gave me the Monkey as a memento. The Brass Monkey is extremely connected with the doctor and he was here earlier to take care of you, or your body at least.”
“What does the mother being the key have to do with that?”
“Doctor Ron told me that he's taking care of his mother. Her behavior is becoming unpredictable, because of some mental or emotional instability. He tried to warn me about how the human mind can create different personalities, blah, blah, and all that. I thought he was referring to you...”
“But maybe he was relating to his personal experience with his crazy mother?” Ned wondered.
“Something like that,” Jaye confirmed. “Didn't you say an old lady poisoned Aaron, and that this lady is not Marie Marianne Beattle?”
“It's not the Muffin Lady. That much I'm sure of. So, you're saying that Dr. Ron's mother is going to kill her son? Tonight?”
Jaye stopped for a moment, and looked at the two figurines again. Then looked at Ned with a resolute expression.
“That's exactly what I'm saying!”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” admitted Ned. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
“We have to reach Dr. Ron immediately.”
“But do you know where he lives?”
“I don't. But I know where he's office is.”
“Which is certainly empty at this hour,” reasoned Ned. “What good will that do?”
“We can find his address or phone number among his records. But don't worry. I know how to break in. I've done that before!” she said with a mischievous grin.
“Somehow that doesn't make me feel much better...”
Jaye shrugged. Next, she was holding a backpack, where she was placing the Tasmanian Devil, the Brass Monkey, a few other of his friends and additional burglary items. Then she picked a raincoat for her and produced another one for Ned. Unfortunately, that one belonged to Eric, not Aaron, so it was quite a bit small for the Pie Maker. He felt like Frankenstein's Creature, with his very short suit jacket, a familiar and undesirable Halloween memory. But it was better than nothing.
Jaye opened the door, and they both ventured into the rainy night in order to save a life.
A little after Ned and Jaye left, Mahandra and Eric reached the trailer park. So, then they stood at Jaye's trailer front door. They knocked, and knocked again. She obviously wasn't home.
“Hurry up, it's raining!” said Mahandra.
“Looks like she isn't in,” said Eric. “Where could she have gone?”
“Let's try her parents' place then. But I will get to the bottom of this tonight!”
They both turned to walk back to Eric's car when they were stopped by a figure right in front of them.
“You two are not going anywhere!” said the man. The sudden surprise kept Eric and Mahandra from reacting. Where was Jaye? And what could the man possibly want?