Chapter 14: Identity Crisis
Bella was sitting in front of the television flicking through channels, when Jasper walked in. He approached her slowly, trying to catch her eye, which she ignored. He stepped between her and the flatscreen. In his hands, he had a large business envelope.
"Your giant head is blocking my view."
"I brought you a welcome home present."
She eyed him suspiciously as he held out the envelope. She set the remote down and reached for the gift. It was heavy in her hands, but she was pretty sure it was all paperwork. She opened it and slid out the documents.
"You have a driver's license, passport, birth certificate, and social security card. Those are the best forgeries money can buy, they'll fool almost any government worker, but please try not to get picked up by the Department of Homeland Security."
Bella looked at him and couldn't tell if he was joking. His face didn't look humorous.
"What's the rest of it?"
"School transcripts, family history, and a permission slip to enroll you in an Exchange Student Program, signed by your parents. Medical history documenting valid health concerns which is why you are homeschooling with Esme instead of matriculating with us. You also have a very nice fashion blog, detailing the many ways to style hoodies."
"I have a what?"
"Real humans leave footprints, Bella."
"I am a real human."
"Now you have documentation to prove it."
"Bella Marie Masen?"
"Edward wanted you to keep your real name to make it easier to remember-"
"Aw, is baby getting her first fake ID?" crooned Rosalie as she and Emmet arrived home.
"-And you never gave us a last name, so we used his."
"His, who?"
"Mine." Edward answered. "And do you have mine?"
"Yours are going to take a few more days, so stay off the grid."
"Never even told her his last name," Rosalie whispered to Emmett.
Edward hissed at Rosalie, who smiled a cruel toothy smile.
"Stop!" Jasper shouted.
He kneeled down so he was at eye level with Bella.
"I need you to understand how important those documents are. I need you to read over them, make sure there are no inconsistencies, and I need you to do that in the next twenty-four hours. I need you to try and memorize the information on those documents, within the next… let's say forty-eight hours. If there is anything in that packet that troubles you, bring it up in that time period and we'll sort it out. Otherwise, that's the identity you'll be using here in Forks. Any questions?"
"Who's idea was the fucking sweatshirt blog?"
"Mine." Rosalie answered rather proudly. "Kids today leave a digital footprint everywhere. We can't exactly let you have a Facebook. Alice suggested a fashion blog, but you and couture were hardly believable. Every time you post about your love of the versatile hoodie, dress it up, dress it down, it automatically posts to Twitter and Pinterest. Hundreds of little wrist-cutters will know your name."
"Wrist-cutters, that's a… You're a terrible fucking person!" Bella yelled.
She laughed. "Hey, the way I see it, I went from trying to kill you to helping give birth to you. Let's call it square."
Rosalie disappeared up the stairs. Emmett had enough human decency to look upset by the exchange. He silently mouthed, "I'm sorry," across the room at Bella.
"Why are mine late?" Edward asked.
"They're not late-late, we just rushed hers. She an actual human person, Edward, with actual human relatives who might come looking for her-"
"They won't."
Jasper's eyes flicked to Bella as he continued, "She's been in public already, and since she's so good at making friends and trouble, she'll likely stay there. We needed her set up. You, on the other hand, are a ghost. We need to make you a real human, but you have to be able to disappear again. It isn't as easy as it used to be. Security systems are much more advanced than they were in the 1920s."
"Why does he need to be able to disappear again?"
Edward shifted uncomfortably.
"You'll age. He won't."
"Oh."
Bella thought about it. Edward and his family had an eternity to create fake identities, and they were going to need each and every identity scrubbed from history, each and every time they moved. But she didn't fully understand why they thought her identity was less important.
"Things will happen in your lifetime, that won't happen in mine." Edward offered the information. "You will grow and change. You have the option of deciding to stay in one place. You might find you prefer to live alone. Maybe you'll want college. Or maybe you'll marry… You won't necessarily have to become someone new every time you move."
She could have kids, Rosalie added from upstairs. She could leave her DNA somewhere the cops can catalog it. Maybe she already has? She could get sick and die. She'd be better off, you know. If she figures out any option is better than this. We're all ghosts.
"You should take that for a drive, now that you're legal." Edward said, pointing at the license.
"See if it's really good enough to fool a cop?"
Edward flinched. "Please don't."
"Can we consider just having her do as she's told?" Jasper snapped.
I know you think I'm a jerk, Edward, but for her to be part of this family, she needs to learn her part.
"What's Common Variable Immunodeficiency?" She asked quietly.
"I can tell you about it on the way to work." Carlisle announced.
"I have a job?"
He laughed. "No, but I do. Edward said you're driving."
He tossed her his keys.
He lowered his voice below what her ears could hear. "You boys, and Rosalie, need to stop taking shots at each other. She's actually seventeen and you're all old enough to know better."
"Come on, Bella, we'll take my car."
Bella blinked at him, before deciding he was serious. She looked at Edward and Jasper who were both sullen and decided a drive would be nice.
"Okay," she said, pocketing the ID, and sliding the rest back into the envelope and leaving it on the coffee table.
Carlisle opened the driver's side door for her. He heard Esme exit the house, determined to supervise the journey. He closed the door for Bella and clicked the garage door opener before climbing in the passenger seat.
"Safety first," he said, pulling a seatbelt across himself.
Bella pulled her own across, before realizing Carlisle didn't actually need one.
She turned the key in the ignition and the Mercedes hummed to life. She set the car to reverse and tapped the gas. The car leapt backwards out of the garage like a wild animal. Panicking, she slammed her foot into the break.
She felt her face turn bright red. "I apologize. It's more sensitive than mine."
"I probably should have mentioned that…" He clicked the garage door remote to close it. "Try again. Just softly."
She put a little pressure on the gas and the car slid backwards. She rolled the steering wheel and the car responded, turning until it was pointed the opposite direction. The car was more quiet than hers, but she could tell by the way it moved it was more powerful. She wondered why the people of Forks never questioned why a small town doctor had a car like this.
She guided it down the driveway and out onto the street.
"I thought you'd probably had enough of my children bickering for one day." Carlisle spoke quietly from beside her.
"They do like to argue," Bella acknowledged, not taking her eyes off the road.
"I helped put together your medical file. Common Variable Immunodeficiency makes you immunocompromised. You're susceptible to bacteria, funguses, and viruses, because your body isn't making B-Cells. Antibodies. It is going to keep you out of crowded places like public schools. But with treatment and monitoring, you should be able to live a fairly normal life, despite a shortened life expectancy."
"That's why my parents felt comfortable letting me stay with a doctor and his family in Washington?"
"Edward seemed quite sure you weren't going to change your mind on enrolling in public school, and we felt it might be safer if we could explain away any sudden disappearances on your part."
"You mean if I decide to run away?" Bella asked, thinking about Edward insisting they could go back to running anytime she wanted. Carlisle remained silent and she thought of Rosalie's cruel toothy smile. "Or do you mean if somebody eats me?"
Carlisle made a sound in his throat. She couldn't tell if it was a laugh or a growl.
"I'd like to think that's not going to happen," he said quietly. "You are exceptionally important to Edward."
He changed the subject. "How are you adjusting?"
Bella thought about the question and then quietly admitted, "I don't know."
Carlisle looked at the young girl next to him. She was underweight for her age, her dark hair and the overcast lighting made her look sickly. Selling an autoimmune disorder to the locals wouldn't be hard. She possessed a ferocious personality that rivaled Rosalie's, but there was compassion and self-assuredness that his own daughter would never know. It was the first time he'd heard the little human speak in a way that made her sound as fragile as she looked.
"If you need anything, please tell us. We want you to feel at home."
"I think that's the problem," Bella admitted. "I don't know what that's supposed to feel like. I've never had a home."
"Edward's determined that we shouldn't ask you any personal questions. I'm not sure that that's correct."
"He just wants to protect me," she offered. "But you're right."
"My family was abusive. They unloaded me as soon as they could. I wound up in a government run institution, and when I escaped, I never looked back. I stayed briefly at a safe house in New Jersey… But I ran from there, too."
"You have an ability."
"Yes."
"You know what we are and you are not afraid… Do you think we would be afraid if we knew what you could do?"
Bella thought about it. It probably wasn't every day that vampires met someone with pyrokinesis, but no they probably wouldn't be afraid. Edward was just being overprotective, she was sure. She could tell Carlisle, but she held herself back. There in her chest lurked a painful desire that she liked to avoid thinking about directly.
"Don't you ever just want to be normal?" She asked.
Carlisle thought about it. He had tried to live in a manner that produced few regrets. His early years had been lonely and filled with self-loathing. When he decided to make his family, he'd never taken someone who wasn't already dying. He refused to strip humanity from someone who had the option of enjoying it. He loved his family, but he knew he'd left voids in Edward's and Rosalie's lives that would never be filled and he wondered on his worst days, if he'd been wrong to save them from death. He'd become a doctor to make sure he never lost sight of humanity, but it didn't make him human. He'd never see his child cradled in Esme's arms.
"Every day," he admitted.
His cellphone rang and he answered.
"Hello?"
"Dr. Cullen? This is Chief Swan."
"Good evening, Chief."
"I'm sorry to have to ask, but I need a favor. We found a body this morning and we're trying to make a determination on the cause of death. Dr. Emerson is having a little trouble, we thought it might be best to have a second opinion."
"I'm on my way to start my shift at the hospital, Chief-"
"I know. I wouldn't have asked, except the deceased is a friend of mine, and the ME is getting on in years… His testimony needs to be able to stand."
Carlisle was quiet. The trespassers were indeed going to be a problem. They'd killed a friend of the local police chief and left the body where it could be found and easily identified.
"Look, he isn't going to get up and walk out of the freezer. Do you think you'd have time after your shift?"
Carlisle weighed his options and decided sooner was better.
"You know what, I'll tell the hospital I'm going to be late. If it was someone I knew, I wouldn't want to wait either."
Charlie Swan sighed heavily on the other side of the phone.
"Thank you."
Carlisle ended the call and looked at Bella. "We need to make a stop at the Police Department."
Bella blanched at the information.
"Why?"
"There is something in their basement, I need to see."
Charlie Swan looked exhausted. His face was set into a scowl, his five o'clock shadow blurring the edges of his mustache. His head was bowed over paperwork as two men in white lab coats argued. Dr. Emerson was pushing eighty and he looked as pale as the corpse he'd been examining. His assistant, a dark skinned man in his late twenties, looked frustrated and, as he turned to see Dr. Cullen enter, his frustration turned to shock.
"You called him?"
"He's the best doctor on the West Coast and you need to work together and figure it out. Waylon's wife wants to know why her husband died. Quit busting my chops because you don't like white people."
"You think that's what this is-"
"I think it's prejudice and I will not have it in my department!" He yelled. "A man is dead. Tell me why."
He stood up from his desk and walked forward to greet Carlisle.
"Thank you, Carlisle, you got here fast." His eyes flicked to Bella, but he was too tired to be surprised. "Do you need anything?"
He shook his head. "Just to see-" he stopped. He didn't want to say 'the body' in front of a friend. "Just to see him."
"Dr. Emerson and Dr. Uley will show you and get you anything you need."
"I don't understand, Chief. If you've already got two people…"
"Homicide," said Dr. Emerson.
"Animal attack," said Dr. Uley.
"I see," said Dr. Cullen.
"What should I-"
"Stay here," Carlisle instructed. "It won't take long."
He followed the two men away from Charlie Swan, past the desks of deputies who were sneaking sidelong glances. They took a stairwell down to the basement. Dr. Emerson seemed oblivious to the tension radiating off the Quileute in his employ. Carlisle could smell, under the scent of aftershave and woodsmoke, the faint but familiar odor of sour, wet dog.
Carlisle was handed a lab coat and a face shield by Emerson, who wobbled off to the freezer. The lab was low tech, but sterile. He wouldn't be able to claim contamination of results. Dr. Emerson rolled out a gurney, while Dr. Uley offered Carlisle a box of gloves.
"Who found him?" He asked, pulling on the gloves.
"The wife," Dr. Uley answered.
"When you're ready." Dr. Emerson offered, parking the body.
Carlisle could smell the blood and decay coming from the corpse. He could smell Waylon's rancid fear and the sickly sweet perfume of three hungry vampires. He tamped down the anger and disgust, as he thought of that poor woman finding her husband.
He peeled back the sheet.
Waylon's neck had been ripped out, so deep it was amazing his spine was still intact. He had hand prints on his chest, bite marks on his left arm, more on his right leg. There was an expertly cut and restitch Y incision on his chest, that Carlisle presumed was dictated by standard operating procedure, when the surgeon could clearly see cause of death.
"Cause of death appears to be injury to the neck," he spoke clinically. "How long for lab results?"
"A week," said Emerson. "My initial findings, severe liver damage from alcohol abuse, lung damage from smoking, but otherwise fairly healthy. I would concur, that the injury to the neck was fatal. No blood was found at the crime scene, though. I'm ruling this a homicide."
"No person ripped out this man's throat and stole the blood, Doc, I'm telling you, I can't put homicide in my notes."
"This is why I've never had an intern before. I'm telling you, you upstart, I've been doing this job for fifty years and those are not animal bites on his skin. They're more like human teeth." He looked at Carlisle. "You see this sometimes, in the city… It's why I left the city. Serial killers get hopped up on methamphetamines and do all sorts of bizarre things. Waylon may have been killed elsewhere-"
"I've considered the bites and bruises are unconnected to the fatal injury. Have you considered, Waylon and his wife may have been rough with each other? The handprints are female in size."
"Are you suggesting spousal abuse or S&M?" Emerson sounded scandalized.
"Either. I'm suggesting the Chief might need to ask Mrs. Forge some hard questions."
Carlisle tried to imagine Charlie asking a bereaved widow about her sex life and cringed. They needed the murder to look like anything other than vampires, but he also wanted to mitigate the amount of pain people were going to endure.
"What kind of animal rips out the throat?" Carlisle wondered out loud.
"Cat."
"A hungry cat, eats."
"Not if he's sick, if he's got something wrong with teeth. It would just drink."
"Sam, that's a whole lot of ifs!"
He let the men argue as he thought about what to do.
Bella sat across from Charlie in awkward silence, while he worked on the computer. He glanced at her intermittently, but she kept her eyes trained on the floor. She glanced at the clock and wondered what was going on down below her feet.
"Are you enjoying your stay?" Charlie asked out of the blue.
Her head snapped to attention.
"Yes, we like it here. We're going to stay with the Cullens for a while."
"We?"
Bella realized she hadn't mentioned Edward.
"I've been traveling with their son, Edward."
"I wasn't aware that they'd had another son."
Awkward.
"Where are you from originally?"
"Oh-" Bella found herself panicking under the gaze of the Police Chief. His eyes were undeniably kind, but she didn't like his scrutiny. She never had to answer these questions before and she realized why Jasper had wanted her to study.
She'd been quiet too long, and it caused the wrinkles on Charlie's forehead to deepen.
"Tulsa," she answered. She was pretty sure her birth certificate had stated Tulsa.
"And your parents didn't mind you interrupting the school year to run away with some boy?"
"Esme is a great teacher."
"How did you meet, Edward, if you homeschool?"
"Oh, um,-"
"Edward attended a private school in Oklahoma," Carlisle interrupted. "He volunteered at the hospital where Bella was undergoing treatment for CVID."
"Bella, can Charlie and I have a minute?"
"I'll go wait by the car." She got up and hustled out of the police station.
"What's the verdict?"
"I'm inclined to say, the wound on his neck can't have been made by anything other than a sick animal… The other injuries, I can't say… Did he have a history of alcohol abuse?"
"Dr. Cullen, I can't remember a fishing trip we had, where he wasn't drunk."
"I don't know him and I don't know his wife… But people with substance abuse tend to have other problems. Could he have gotten those injuries anywhere else? A bar fight?"
"He wasn't violent…" Charlie mused. "But I suppose he could have met someone who was…"
Carlisle nodded.
"Could the injury to his neck have been sustained after he died?"
Carlisle hid his surprise at the line of inquiry. Charlie was an intelligent man and that was dangerous. The town of Forks was lucky to have him. He took his job very seriously.
"I can't make that determination. I can say the injuries would have all happened relatively close together because they didn't have time to heal."
Charlie nodded his head.
"I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful."
"Thank you for your time, Doctor. I know we dragged you out of your way."
Charlie no sooner dismissed him than his deputies swarmed his desk. He ignored them, while he thought through the next steps. Homicide cases were unusual for the area, animal attacks were not. They had a week before lab results came back in.
"Chief?"
"We'll coordinate with the local Game Warden, tell them we might be looking for a sick mountain lion. If the cat's that ill, it won't stay away from town. Tell them they'll need dogs and a gun. Someone, go to the pub and see if Waylon had a negative interaction with anyone. I want to know who was the last person to see him alive. I'm going to go and talk to Mrs. Forge."