On Borrowed Time by David Rosenfelt

me about it.”
    I looked up suddenly, surprising her. “What is it?” she asked.
    “What you just said … ‘tell me about it.’ Jen said that all the time.”
    Allie took a deep breath. “Julie and I have been saying that since we were kids. It was a running joke in our family because it drove my mother crazy. She would say something to us, and we would say, ‘Tell me about it,’ and my mother would say, ‘I just did!’ ”
    “So here we have another coincidence,” I said.
    She smiled. “Tell me about it.”
    “We have to figure out what to do with this,” I said.
    “Yes, we do.”
    “How long are you going to be in town?”
    “As long as it takes.”
    “You’re so much like Jen,” I said. “Not just how you look, but how you talk. Your mannerisms.”
    “I’m also just like my sister.”

 
    I walked Allie back to her hotel.
    Even saying good-bye to her was awkward; she looked so much like Jen that it would have seemed natural to kiss her. I knew I needed to get that under control. She was not Jen, and in all likelihood her sister wasn’t either. In all likelihood there was no Jen.
    Allie said that she was going to stay in New York for a while, that she had her computer and could do her work from anywhere. We agreed we would talk the next day and try to plan out our actions. I feared it was going to be a short talk, since I couldn’t think of any more actions to take. I had already tried everything I could think of, and had gotten nowhere. If Allie’s arrival on the scene presented me with new avenues to pursue, I couldn’t quite see them yet.
    I also needed to get back to work. I had some money put away, some of it from an inheritance when my father died last year, but if nothing was coming in, it would disappear fast. It was just so hard to focus; all I had thought about for weeks was Jen.
    I got the mail before going upstairs, and when I entered my apartment I added it to the mail I hadn’t opened the day before. I made myself a frozen pizza, even though I wasn’t hungry, basically because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
    I tried to plan my next step, some concerted effort that Allie and I could take to find the person missing from our lives, though we didn’t really know if her sister and my Jen were the same person. That lasted about a half hour, during which time I came up with absolutely nothing.
    I wasn’t too disappointed; coming up with nothing was something I was getting used to.
    I finally decided that if I couldn’t concentrate, I might as well not concentrate while going through the mail, so I sat down to do so. There were at least sixty pieces, maybe forty of which were more responses from readers to my piece about Jen.
    I had become proficient at judging the quality of a letter just by looking at the handwriting on the address. The percentage of nutcases was about twenty, down from a high of maybe forty when the piece was first published. The others were well-intentioned letters of sympathy or understanding, or tips to Jenny’s whereabouts. I read at least part of all of them, on the theory that you never know.
    The remainder were bills, junk mail, and the like. I’m pretty good about paying my bills, always have been, so I was surprised to see one from my cell phone company. You can always tell the notices that are notifying you of an overdue bill, they’re ominously thin. It’s as if they don’t want to waste a lot of paper on a deadbeat.
    This notice said that I owed a hundred and forty-nine dollars, and that my account was fifteen days overdue. I checked my records, which were not in the best shape since Jenny’s disappearance, and I had no record of having made a payment. But I also didn’t remember seeing a bill.
    I called the company and, after at least ten computer prompts, got through to a human being. I explained that I had received the notice but had not gotten a bill.
    “Can I put you on hold?” she asked.
    It didn’t seem like I had a