Chapter 17

The Next Morning Shortly Before Noon

Kyle entered the offices of Lewis & Associates. In the manila envelope he carried in his hand were printouts of the newspaper articles about the murders. He went up the front desk and patiently waited for the receptionist who was on the phone to speak to him. She hung up the phone after a few seconds and turned to face him.

“Hello, what can I do for you?” She asked.

“Torian White’s office please?” Kyle answered.

“Is she expecting you?”

“Uh…not exactly. This is kind of last minute.” He responded.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Kyle Matthews.”

The receptionist picked up a phone, pressed a button, and waited for an answer. “Ms. White? Hi, it’s Tina. You have a visitor in the lobby. He said his name is Kyle Matthews. He said you weren’t expecting him but he’d like to talk with you.” Tina paused and glanced at Kyle as she waited for an answer. “I’ll send him right up.” She finally said then she placed the phone back on the receiver. “She’ll see you now. Take the elevator to the fourth floor, take a right out of the elevator and look for office 1210.”

“Thank you.” Kyle responded as he walked toward the elevator. On the way up he thought of what he would say to Torian White. He didn’t doubt what her reaction to seeing him would be. Most likely the same one he had last night. He didn’t care though. He had questions and he felt that she was his only link to answers. When the elevator stopped on the fourth floor and the doors opened, Kyle walked down the hallway looking for Torian’s office. When he found it, he knocked.

“Come in.” A voice called out. Kyle took a deep breath and then opened the door, quickly shutting it behind him in case she screamed. She had been looking at some papers in front of her but looked up he entered.

Shock rendered Tori speechless for a moment. She dropped her head in her hands and closed her eyes. Thoughts bombarded her mind. No, she thought. Chris said he would not interfere with her daily life! Her eyes had to be playing tricks on her for her to see him standing in front of her.

“Chris?” She finally managed to croak out.

“No, I’m Kyle.” The guy near the door responded. “But I was hoping you could tell me about Chris.”

“Kyle?” Tori looked at him confused. Kyle was confused as well. This was not the reaction he expected from her. While shocked, she was still far too calm. She should have been climbing walls right now. He took a few steps toward her desk. She visibly tensed up which made him wary that she would scream any minute and security would barge in and throw him out. He held up the envelope for her to see. “I was doing some research and came across these articles about the Orville Wright shooting five years ago. I saw a photo of that guy Chris and it freaked me out. I felt like I was looking at myself. The articles listed you as the only survivor so I sought you out to get some answers.” He came closer and placed the envelope on her desk. She stared at it. “Open it.”

It took Tori a minute to even do that. All she saw when she looked at this Kyle person was Chris. He even had Chris’s voice. That rattled her nerves so badly. Without taking her eyes off him she picked up the envelope an opened it. Inside were some news articles he’d printed about. She didn’t need to read them to know what they said. A few colored photographs were also inside. She took them out and looked at them. She saw Chris as a baby or was it Kyle? She guessed it was Kyle because the woman holding him certainly wasn’t Chris’s mother. The guy behind the woman wasn’t Chris’s father either.

“Those pictures are of my adoptive parents and me at various stages of my life.” Kyle spoke while watching Torian flip through the photos.

“You were adopted?” She looked up at him.

“Yes, I was adopted. I’ve studied various pictures in those articles and pictures of me. The similarities in Chris and my looks are startling. We look like…twins. And we share the same birthday.” Kyle said quietly.

“But Chris wasn’t adopted.” Tori stated.

“How do you know? How can you be sure?”

“Because he looked just like his mom and dad and his older sister Chey.” Tori stood up and turned her back to him to stare out of her office window at traffic. “You do too.”

“So you know my birth parents?“ Kyle asked. Tori didn’t answer and he looked down and noticed the pictures on her desk. He picked up the picture frame that featured Chris and Tori in it. They appeared to be slow dancing together. One glance at their faces told him that they had been in love with each other. He could only imagine how the tragedy affected her. He placed the picture back in it’s place.

“Yeah, I know them real well. Since I was five. They were like aunt and uncle to me and I called them such.” She turned around and glanced at the clock on her desk. “It’s lunch time. I normally go to a deli a few blocks from here. If you come I can answer any questions you might have. You can follow behind me in your car.”

“Yeah, I’ll come.” Kyle answered.

Tori nodded and grabbed her purse and keys from inside her desk drawer and walked out. Kyle followed behind her. He got into his car and followed her to the deli she had mentioned earlier. Seated outside the deli, they talked. Or rather Kyle did. Tori listened while he told her about his childhood and how he was a good kid up until his father had died, and about his five year stint in prison. Tori studied him closely to see how much of a resemblance he had to Chris. There were a few differences here and there. While Chris had a baby face with no facial hair save for a barely there goatee, Kyle had a full goatee and sideburns. Chris wore designs in his hair, Kyle wore waves. Chris had no tattoos, but Kyle had at least one on the side of his neck. It looked like bird wings with some writing underneath. She wasn’t close enough to see what it said. Other than that, Kyle and Chris were practically identical. Kyle watched Torian watch him. He was curious about her too. Whenever she turned her head to right he could see a few, small zigzag lines near her jaw line. He correctly figured they were the result of the bullet she took to the head. They did nothing to take away from her attractiveness though. He wondered what his brother saw when he looked at her. Were they lovers? For how long? And why did he feel drawn to her, a woman he had never met until today? He wondered if it had anything to do with the twin connection stuff he had spent all night researching. Maybe he felt drawn to her through the strength of his twin’s connection to her.

“I had dreams.” Kyle said after a brief moment of silence between them. “They started sometime after I went to prison. I thought they were foreshadowing my demise.”

“What kind of dreams?” Tori asked as if she were talking to a patient.

“Crazy ones. I’d hear gunshots and voices. I’d feel a gun pointed at my head. I’d hear a woman’s scream. After reading about what happened to you and the others, I recognize now that it was not myself being tormented. It was Chris. It was your scream. It’s like I was seeing everything through his eyes, feeling everything through his skin. It was just creepy.”

“When did you go to prison?”

“I was arrested the night of August 4th, 2007 and was sent to prison not long after.”

“That was the same night my friends died.” Tori said quietly.

“Very strange isn’t it?” Kyle asked, having already figured out the coincidences in the date last night. “I don’t think you need any more proof that Chris is my twin brother. We were both born on the same day and both had something tragic happen to us on the same night. s*** is crazy but it’s true. Now I want to know about you, my siblings, and family. What can you tell me?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. How’d you meet? How long have you known each other? Whatever you can tell me.”

“There’s not much to tell. I met Chey, well Chalea, but we called her Chey, when we started grade school. Her and I have been inseparable since then. Same with Chris. Shad joined us in the 9th grade and became very close to all of us. He and Chris became best friends. He became my brother, and Chey’s boyfriend. We all graduated from the same high school and enrolled in the same college. That about sums it up.” Tori said.

“You and Chris didn’t date?” Kyle asked very interested in knowing her answer. “I saw the picture on your desk.”

“No.” was the simple answer he received but he wasn’t convinced. He had a gut feeling, a twin feeling that his brother had something going on with the woman sitting in front of him. He’d seen the look in Torian’s eyes when he asked the question. But he could dig it though. She wasn’t going to tell him everything that she probably kept locked inside. Plus, he was still a stranger to her, he knew.

“Chris was an ordained minister since the age of thirteen. Always had a love of the Lord. You could tell when he preached his sermons at church. He was always smiling, always laughing, and loved to help people. He had a good heart. As his mom would say, ‘God could’ve used that boy’.” Tori smiled a sad smile that was gone as quickly as it came. Kyle was willing to bet it was painful for her to do that, to smile.

“Do you still go to church? I ask because I used to, before my dad died then I stopped going. If it’s too personal you don’t have to answer.”

“I don’t. It’s been five years since I’ve been to one.”

“We have something in common then. Had something terrible happen to us that made us lose faith.”

“That’s not a very good thing to have in common.” Tori stated quietly.

“Yeah, but that’s just the hand we’ve been dealt. And honestly, to learn of Chris and Chey and what happened to them is another blow to me too. All my life I wanted siblings, a brother, a sister. Wished I had them, only to discover now that I had a sister and a brother, a twin brother at that, that I’ll never get to meet. There’s definitely a void; one I’ve felt for five years and all my life really.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Kyle sat up in his seat. “A big half of me is missing-”

Tori cut him off. “You think I don’t understand? Chris has always been a part of me. My other half. That half is gone. You think I don’t know how you feel? No, you don’t know how I feel. And it hurts to even look at you right now. You look so much like him…” Tori’s voice trailed off as her eyes welled up with tears and she looked away as she wiped them. Kyle just sat there watching her helpless. For the first time it really dawned on him that this woman had really been in love with his brother and seeing him standing in front of her as if Chris had never died was messing her up.

“I’ll leave if you want me to.” Kyle rose from his seat.

“No, sit.” She turned to face him. “You came to me for help and I’m going to help you but I don’t have all the answers you are looking for. You came here to Los Angeles looking for your parents so it’s only right that I take you to them. Now I’ve got to get back to work but when I get off we can go talk to them. Do you have a number where I can reach you?”

“Yeah, my cell.” Kyle said as he sat down in his seat again..

“Give me your number and I’ll call you after work and have you meet me somewhere, then we’ll go from there.” Tori said. Kyle obliged. She saved his number in her phone and gave her number to him. She stood up once they were finished.

“See you later.” Tori said hurriedly.

“Torian, wait.” Kyle touched her arm as she started to walk off. This first skin to skin contact destabilized them both. The two of them stared at each other and something passed between them silently. Kyle quickly removed his hand and the silent connection between them broke. “Thank you for your help.” Kyle said quickly. Tori nodded and walked away so fast that it seemed as if she would have ran if she could.

What the hell just happened? Kyle asked himself after she was gone. The minute he touched her something like an electrical charge shot through him. It was quick and it was, dare he say it, erotic. Kyle sat there nearly paralyzed. Something erotic was brewing between him and his dead twin’s girlfriend?

Hell no.

TBC…