I knew he was talking to both of us.

“Listen, I have a strange question for you,” Roscoe said. “It came up with a patient today, and I thought you might remember. There was an old woman who used to work behind the counter at Lutz’s bakery for a while. I think they found out her husband was some kind of Nazi. We used to make fun of her name while we were eating our pastries. Do you remember what it was?”

On the phone, Dylan answered immediately in a singsong chant.

So did I, mouthing the same words silently to Roscoe from the other side of the desk.

“Friedegunde, Friedegunde, face like die Hunde.”

Roscoe closed his eyes in disbelief. We’d both passed the test, and neither one of us could have faked it. A long time passed before he said softly, “Yes, that was it. Now I remember.”

“We weren’t very nice back then, were we?” Dylan said with a laugh.

“Well, we were nine,” Roscoe replied, opening his eyes and considering me like an alien come to earth. Which, in some ways, I was.

“So why did you want to know about old Friedegunde?” the other Dylan asked.

I put my finger over my lips and shook my head.

“I’ll tell you later, buddy,” Roscoe said into the speakerphone. “Gotta go for now.”

“Okay, catch ya later,” Dylan replied.

Roscoe stabbed the button on his phone to end the call.

“All right,” he said to me, his voice a block of ice. “Who the hell are you?”

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 29

I’d barely begun telling Roscoe the story when he shut me down. At the first mention of the Many Worlds, he put up his hands, unwilling to hear more. He had patients to see, and they came first. What it really meant was that he needed time to process the idea in his head. Roscoe never leaped to judgment about anything. He thought about things. He evaluated all the factors and made plans. He was cautious. In other words, he was everything I wasn’t.

He told me to meet him at six o’clock at a bar just off the Kennedy on Montrose. The location he picked felt like another test. This was the bar where I’d gotten drunk and wound up in a street fight with a man who was abusing his girlfriend. Roscoe had come to collect me from the police station, and he’d never made it home alive.

The fact that Roscoe was alive meant that evening had gone differently in this world. And yet the fact that he chose the bar as our meeting place told me that the location still had some kind of special significance for Dylan Moran.