Coincidence by David Ambrose Read Free Book Online Page A

advice, repeating a small and precise movement with his hand.
    I didn’t know that cars were still able to backfire. I thought that the well-timed backfire went out as a dramatic device
     with old black-and-white thrillers on late-night television. But then I asked myself, what did it matter if it wasn’t a backfire?
     What if it had nothing to do with that car at all? It was a noise, a loud noise, a detonation. It came from somewhere, and
     it happened just then, at the very moment I was thinking about one.
    As I walked on, I replayed the incident in my head, recreating it as exactly as I could from the still-fresh memory. I realized
     there was something I’d overlooked in my anxiety, however unconscious, to find another coincidence. There had been other noises
     in the air—all kinds of noises, a rich tapestry of noises all happening at the same time. It just so happened that the one
     I’d heard was the nearest and loudest. Had it not occurred, I was quite sure when I thought back on it that I could have picked
     out any one of a number of other noises going on around me and chosen to synchronize it with the story I was telling in my
     imagination. The whole incident was, on reflection, a clear example of how careful you have to be before claiming some perfectly
     normal phenomenon as a paranormal one. I went on my way, reassured in my skepticism.
    It couldn’t have been Sara I had seen that afternoon, I told myself. It was out of the question. A near double, that’s all.
     Like Lou and his friend in California. A coincidence. Without significance.
    I had a couple of drinks at the bar as planned, then a couple more. As I was leaving I ran into some friends who insisted
     I join them for dinner. It was still early and I had nothing else to do, so I abandoned my pledge not to eat and had scrambled
     eggs and smoked salmon while they had steaks and roast potatoes. I was in bed by eleven and dozing fitfully as I watched the
     late-night talk shows. Before finally switching off the TV and going to sleep, I made a last desultory flip through the cable
     channels and came across an image that at once had me sitting bolt upright, not sure at first whether I was awake or dreaming.
     An instant later I was out of bed and flying across the room to shove a tape into the VCR and hit the record button.
    What I was looking at was a somewhat labored comedy scene—all dialogue and lots of theatrical arm-waving—featuring the two
     people whose photographs I had found in my father’s trunk and with whom I myself had been photographed as a child sitting
     on an unknown terrace wall at some equally unknown time or place.
    Then something else hit me. I realized that the clothes they were wearing were the same as in that photograph. Of course,
     his white tie and tails were pretty much anonymous, but it was her dress, the cut of the neckline and the orchid at the shoulder,
     that convinced me.
    On top of that, I then saw something else that took my breath away. Exasperated by their argument, she flounced up a short
     flight of steps. He followed her, protesting, and they continued their quarrel on a terrace overlooking an ornamental but
     obviously studio-bound garden. It was then that I recognized the stone balustrade on which the three of us had been photographed
     together. What clinched it was the large ornamental urn visible behind me in the picture, and which, as I watched, they flounced
     past several times.
    I didn’t need to check it out later, though I did all the same when the credits rolled. I had been watching Jeffrey Hart and
     Lauren Paige in
There’s a Spy in My Soup.

Chapter 8
    B y three in the morning I had watched the video several times, fast-forwarding between the scenes involving either Jeffrey
     Hart or Lauren Paige or both. In particular I scrutinized the scene that featured the wall on which I had apparently at one
     time sat with them. Now, with the photograph in my hand and comparing it with stop-frame