Identity Theft
Celeste Blackwell was late finishing her afternoon rounds. The often-belligerent, eighty-seven-year-old Mr. Theodore Brewer in Room 314 had been in another one of his difficult moods, complaining about the food and refusing to take his medication. Celeste found it necessary to call a male orderly to assist her in persuading the reluctant patient to swallow his pills. When she went to the nurses' locker room to get her jacket and handbag, she glanced at the wall clock. It was 2:30.
"I'd better hurry," she observed, "if I want to be home by 3:00."
There was a line of people at the elevator, so she took the stairs down to the lobby. From there, she ran to her car, which was parked in the employees' lot. Celeste unlocked the door, got behind the wheel and started the engine. Wasting no time by letting the vehicle's engine warm up, she immediately shifted into reverse, pulled out of the parking spot and quickly drove away.
It was 2:40; that meant she had twenty minutes to get home for the start of Hearts and Heroes. Celeste was a devoted fan of the popular, Emmy-winning daytime drama. She had been watching it since the seventh grade when the show first premiered, and she rarely missed an episode in the twenty-five years that followed.
"Twenty minutes," she told herself. "I ought to have plenty of time."
Suddenly, the driver in front of her hit his brakes. There was a traffic jam ahead.
The nurse's eyes went to the clock on her dashboard. It was now 2:45.
"Damn it!" she cried. "Why is there traffic today of all days?"
After two months (only four days in soap opera time) of false starts and interruptions, Jennifer was going to tell her married lover, Brad, that she was pregnant.
"I have to get home by 3:00. I can't miss a minute of the show today!"
Celeste was so worried about missing her soap that she didn't notice the eighteen-wheeler behind her until she heard the squeal of its tires. The last thing she remembered was seeing the truck's grill in her rearview mirror.
* * *
When Celeste eventually opened her eyes again, she was momentarily disoriented. Having been a nurse for more than fifteen years, however, it did not take her long to realize she was in a hospital. She turned her head slightly and saw the intravenous drip in her arm. More disturbing, there were several monitors around her bed, keeping track of her vital signs.
A moment later, a pretty young nurse walked into her hospital room, and Celeste caught her breath. It was Valentine Jones, one of the lead characters on Hearts and Heroes.
"I see you're finally awake," Nurse Jones noted cheerfully. "Are you feeling any better?"
"What are you doing here?" Celeste cried in surprise.
"I work here."
Celeste stared with disbelief at the attractive young woman in the tight nurse's uniform with the scandalously low-cut neckline and well-above-the-knee hemline.
"But you're not a real person. You're a character from a soap opera."
The nurse laughed.
"What nonsense! Your high fever must be making you delirious."
"What fever? I don't have any fever," Celeste argued.
"Of course, you do. There's an epidemic of a rare tropical disease in Lincolnville. Everyone in the hospital except Dr. Orbach and yours truly is suffering from the symptoms."
"There is no Lincolnville. It's a fictitious city created by the writers of the show."
"I'm afraid you're very sick. You don't know what you're saying. I'd better get Dr. Orbach."
But before she could call the doctor, Nurse Jones put her hand to her head.
"I'm not feeling very well all of a sudden," she moaned. "I hope I'm not getting ...."
Celeste found herself instantaneously transported to another set: the Lincolnville police station. Detective Nash McNally, one of the show's most beloved characters and a heartthrob adored by millions of housewives, stared at Celeste angrily from across his desk.
"I know you killed your husband," he shouted. "We don't have any evidence to tie you to the crime yet, but we'll find it."
"I don't even have a husband," the startled woman protested. "What's going on? Why am I suddenly living inside a soap opera? And where are the cameras, the director and the crew?"
The actor who played Nash McNally never broke character. It was as though he actually believed he was a Lincolnville detective.
"Why don't you save us both a lot of time and trouble and confess? Maybe the D.A. will give you a break if you do."
"Don't count on it."
The voice was familiar. It belonged to an actor who had left the soap opera a year earlier to star in a Broadway musical.
"Wait! This isn't right!" Celeste exclaimed. "You're no longer on the show. You were killed off when the mob boss you were prosecuting put a bomb in your car."
"That wasn't me who died in the explosion," District Attorney Archibald VanDorn explained. "It was actually the hitman the mob boss hired to plant the bomb."
"Then why were you gone from Lincolnville for so long?"
"I got amnesia when I hit my head after I was thrown against a wall when my car blew up. You see, I had gone down to the parking garage just as the bomb went off."
"Yeah," Detective McNally added, "the D.A. had amnesia and was living on a farm in New Jersey where he fell in love with Daisy Dugan, a woman who was dying of AIDs."
"After poor Daisy's funeral, I was devastated with grief," VanDorn continued, "I tried to hang myself from one of the high rafters in her barn. When the rope broke, I fell and hit my head again. That was when my memory returned."
In the real world, such an explanation would be ludicrous, but this was Lincolnville, in the world of daytime television drama, and people having amnesia, miraculously regaining their memories and seemingly returning from the dead was as common as fleas on stray dogs.
"Enough talk about me," VanDorn declared angrily. "I'm going to personally see to it that you go away for a long, long time. You murdered my best friend, and I don't want you to see the light of day again."
"Please just listen to me and try to understand," Celeste pleaded. "I'm not a character on this soap opera."
A memory suddenly came back to her. She had been in her car driving home from work, and there had been a stopped vehicle up ahead and an eighteen-wheel truck behind her.
"I was in an automobile accident," she concluded. "I must be unconscious. That's it! None of this is real."
Relief flooded over her.
"All I have to do is wait it out, and eventually I'll wake up."
The old rotary telephone on Detective McNally's desk rang.
"Hello," he answered. "... Yeah, we've got her right here .... Are you sure?"
After Nash hung up the receiver, there was a look of bitter disappointment on his gorgeous Hollywood idol face.
"That was your landlady," he informed Celeste. "My partner finally tracked her down. She identified the woman who ran out of your apartment the night your husband was murdered."
"Who was it?" VanDorn asked anxiously.
From somewhere outside the Lincolnville police station came the sound of music. It was the Hearts and Heroes theme song, and it signaled the end of the episode.
Again, Celeste was summarily taken away. This time she found herself inside the Endicott mansion. The Endicotts were the richest family in Lincolnville. Genevieve Endicott, the matriarch of the clan, had been on the show since its pilot aired. From the time of that first episode, she had been married fourteen times, widowed six times and divorced eight. She had given birth to six children and had two miscarriages and one abortion. There had also been quite a few extramarital affairs. In fact, Genevieve had been romantically involved with just about every adult male lead character on the show at one time or another. The only one to escape her clutches was Kerwin Odell, a character who was later revealed to be gay. But now the actress was nearing her sixtieth birthday—and looked it. The producers of Hearts and Heroes, hoping to attract a young afterschool audience, thought she was too old to play the blushing Juliet to the young Romeos on the show.
Celeste walked to the fireplace and was staring up at the large portrait of Genevieve Endicott above the mantel when into the room walked the aging doyenne herself.
"Well, well," Lincolnville's wealthy socialite said, looking down her aristocratic nose at Celeste Blackwell. "So, you're the woman who snared my son?"
"No. I'm not really here. I was in a car accident, and this is some dream I'm having."
Genevieve menacingly advanced toward the younger woman, reached out her well-manicured hand and slapped Celeste across the face.
"How dare you try to make a fool out of me?"
The nurse's hand went to her cheek. Dream or not, the slap had hurt.
"You bewitched my son and got him to leave his family. If it weren't for you, he would still be alive and running my father's newspaper."
"I wasn't married to your son," Celeste insisted. "And I certainly didn't kill him."
"I know he would never lower himself to actually marry such a common woman, but you were the reason he left our home. And I intend to make you pay for that."
"I don't even know who your son is."
"His name is ...."
The phone rang. It was a common ploy in soap operas, a much-used method of creating suspense.
Abruptly, Celeste found herself back in the hospital bed. Nurse Jones was still on the verge of fainting, but Dr. Orbach came into the room and caught her just as she was about to fall.
"Valentine, are you all right?" the extraordinarily handsome doctor asked. "My darling, can you hear me? Speak to me."
"Dr. Orbach," a laboratory technician called as he entered the room. "We have the results of the paternity test you asked us to run."
Dr. Orbach and Nurse Jones, who seemed to have made a swift recovery, both reached for the report. Dr. Orbach got his hands on the paper first and quickly read the results of the DNA test.
"It says here I'm not your baby's father," he announced, his dreamy blue eyes glaring at Nurse Jones with unspoken accusations.
"There must be some mistake," Valentine cried defensively. "Someone must have tampered with the test."
Celeste smiled. Switching DNA samples or altering the results was quite the fashion on soap operas these days.
"No one could have tampered with the test," Dr. Orbach insisted. "I took the samples up to the lab myself."
"But if you're not the father, then who is?" Nurse Jones asked.
Just as Dr. Orbach was about to reveal the father's identity, the familiar strains of the Hearts and Heroes theme song indicated another episode had come to an end.
Celeste then found herself back in the police station.
"I guess you're free to go," Detective McNally declared with a sigh of disappointment.
But this time the man behind the desk was not Terry O'Shea, the popular soap star adored by millions of housewives. Now, a new actor was playing the role. Terry O'Shea must not have renewed his contract, Celeste surmised. Perhaps he was bound for feature films, to follow in the footsteps of Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Pitt, Tom Berenger, Kevin Bacon and other former soap stars who made the switch to the big screen.
VanDorn, the D.A. who had recently returned from the dead, suggested Celeste not leave town. Apparently, he still believed she was involved in her husband's murder.
Before Celeste could reply, she was back in the Endicott mansion.
"This nightmare has got to stop soon," she cried. "My head is spinning from all this popping in and out of scenes."
Once again, Celeste walked to the fireplace and was staring up at the large portrait of Genevieve Endicott above the mantel when into the room walked the aging doyenne herself.
"Well, well," Lincolnville's wealthy socialite said, looking down her aristocratic nose at Celeste Blackwell. "So, you're the woman who snared my son?"
"This isn't a case of déjà vu," Celeste told herself. "It must be Monday. The soaps often replay a cliffhanger scene from the previous Friday during the Monday episode."
"You haven't broken any laws, at least none you can be charged with," Genevieve said once Friday's scene had finished replaying. "Yet we Endicotts have always been above the law. Our money has accorded us certain privileges."
"That's for sure," Celeste replied sarcastically. "I've watched this show since I was a kid in the seventh grade. I've seen you get away with murder on more than one occasion, but I recall that you were convicted once, too—that was back in 1998, I believe. You shot and killed the neighbor's handyman who raped your younger sister. You went to jail that time. That was where you learned Philo Endicott was not your real father."
"Shut up!"—her illegitimacy had always been a sore spot for Genevieve—"That's a lie. Philo Endicott was my father."
"No, he wasn't. Your mother may have been married to Philo, but she had a brief affair with his half-brother before the young medical student went into the priesthood and was sent to the jungles of Africa."
"No! You lie! My poor mother would never have been unfaithful to my father. She loved him very much."
"No? Surely you remember the time she fell in love with your piano teacher, the same one who seduced you when you were only sixteen? Afterwards, your mother went to Europe where she had a child that she gave up for adoption. That child was Lelani, your half-sister, who came to Lincolnville and stole your second husband from you. Later they were both killed in a skiing accident in Switzerland when the actor who played your husband wanted to go over to All My Children."
Genevieve screamed hysterically like a maniacal harpy.
"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
Once again the scene changed. Celeste didn't recognize the set, however.
"Where am I?"
"You're in an alcove deep in the cellar of the Endicott mansion," a calm, calculating Genevieve informed her.
Celeste tried to move her hands but couldn't. They were chained to a wall behind her.
"What are you doing?"
"I told you. I'm going to make you sorry you took my son from me."
Genevieve disappeared momentarily, but she soon returned with a wheelbarrow full of bricks.
"Have you ever read Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado?" the older woman asked in a deadly, chilling voice.
"That's the one where Montresor seals Fortunado up in a wine cellar and buries him alive, isn't it?"
"That's the one!"
Genevieve giggled insanely as she placed a brick on the floor at Celeste's feet. She followed it with another and then another.
"You're crazy!" the young woman said, feeling no fear since she still believed it was all a dream.
"Of course, I am. Since you seem to know so much about me, you must remember that I was institutionalized when I tried to commit suicide after my sixth husband's death—or was it my seventh husband? Admittedly, I sometimes lose track of them all."
Genevieve had finished one row of bricks and began adding a second.
"It doesn't matter," Celeste rationalized. "You can't kill me. I'm lying in a bed in a hospital somewhere."
"Now who's the crazy one?" Genevieve asked as she began the third row of bricks.
Celeste waited patiently. Even if she didn't wake up soon, she would be in no danger. She was well acquainted with the ways of soap operas. Genevieve's descent into madness would last months. It would be drawn out—much to the annoyance of the fans—until the writers milked it for all it was worth. Yet long before the matriarch finished bricking the nurse in, Celeste would return to the police station or to City Hospital.
"By the way, which of your sons am I supposed to have lured away from you?" Celeste asked as Genevieve continued laying bricks atop each other.
"Why, Wynford, of course!"
"Wynford? I thought he was in an irreversible coma after he was hit over the head by the embezzling secretary with the split personality?"
"Don't pretend you don't know he came out of the coma and met you when you were masquerading as an heiress from London."
"A British heiress, huh? That doesn't sound familiar. I must have missed that episode."
"But you didn't fool me. I had a private detective look into your past."
Genevieve stopped working, having run out of bricks. Celeste was certain she would suddenly find herself in another scene with another character, but such was not the case. Genevieve disappeared and returned moments later with another wheelbarrow full of bricks.
"I knew you were no heiress," the murderous matriarch continued. "You were a common little gold digger who came to Lincolnville to break up Ted and Pepper's marriage."
Ted and Pepper Samson, Celeste knew, were one of the super couples of daytime drama. They were Hearts and Heroes' answer to General Hospital's Luke and Laura.
"Then when you couldn't get your claws into Ted, you set your eye on my son."
Genevieve continued to work on her wall of bricks, and she soon had to fill the wheelbarrow a third time. An hour later, she placed the last brick, and Celeste was enclosed in a small area, roughly four feet long and two feet wide.
"Don't bother to scream or call out for help," Genevieve tauntingly advised. "I gave all the servants a week off. By the time they return, you'll be dead, Miss Blackwell."
Celeste did not cry out. Instead, she held firmly to the belief that it was all a dream.
* * *
Celeste's head began to ache. The pain in her arms became unbearable, and the muscle cramps in her back made her twitch from side to side. Her stomach growled from lack of food, and there was an uncomfortable pressure in her bladder. Finally, she could stand it no longer.
"Help me!" she screamed.
There was no response. Genevieve had told her the servants were gone. But what about the matriarch herself? Was she upstairs waiting for Celeste to suffocate? Had she gone to bed, or was she sitting in a chair watching television or reading a book?
"Genevieve," Celeste yelled as loudly as she could. "Please let me out."
From somewhere above, Celeste heard the sound of laughter.
Hours passed, and Celeste drifted in and out of consciousness. She would faint, only to have the agony in her arms revive her. Maybe she wasn't in a hospital room after all, she thought, losing all hope. Perhaps she had been killed in that car accident and was now in hell. But what had she done to be damned for all eternity? She had always endeavored to lead a good life. She had been kind, charitable and honest. Apparently, that wasn't enough to warrant entry into heaven.
Perhaps this isn't hell, she thought with a renewed sense of hope. Maybe it's only purgatory. If so, I might still have a chance at redemption for whatever wrongs I did.
She closed her eyes and began to pray.
"Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell."
Celeste couldn't remember the rest. It had been many years since she had gone to church or recited a prayer.
That might be the reason why ....
There was a noise on the other side of the brick wall. Her body tensed.
"Who's there?" she managed to utter.
"So, you're still alive?" Genevieve asked.
"Yes. Let me out. I beg you."
"I can't, and I wouldn't if I could."
"You'll never get away with this. You'll be sent back to either prison or the institution."
"Wrong on both counts, Miss Blackwell. You see, the contract is up for the actress who plays me, and the producers don't want to renew it. They claim she makes too much money and that the younger audience wants younger actors. After twenty-five years on this damned show, Genevieve Endicott is to be killed off. Fools! They can't get rid of me that easily!"
Through the brick wall, Celeste heard the muffled sound of receding footsteps. By dawn the following morning, the entombed nurse was dead.
* * *
Genevieve opened her eyes. She was behind the wheel of Celeste Blackwell's car. Up ahead, the traffic was stopped. Behind her, she heard the squeal of tires. She looked into the rearview mirror and saw the grill of an eighteen-wheel truck closing in on the rear of her car. She braced herself for the crash, but miraculously the truck driver was able to stop his vehicle and avoid a collision.
When the traffic finally cleared, the young woman in the nurse's uniform drove home. She walked into her apartment at 3:20 p.m. It would be another forty minutes before Hearts and Heroes came to an end, but Genevieve didn't turn on the television set. She'd had twenty-five years of drama in Lincolnville. That was enough! She'd been a two-dimensional character for far too long. Now, living in Celeste Blackwell's body, she would see what life was like on the other side of the television screen.
For a brief moment she thought of the real Celeste, her dead body bricked up behind a wall in the cellar of the Endicott mansion. Millions of Hearts and Heroes viewers would believe she was murdered by an insane Genevieve Endicott, but no one would know that Celeste had merely been a victim of identity theft—in the truest sense of the word.
The new Celeste Blackwell, the former Genevieve Endicott, smiled. Perhaps Celeste would return from the dead as so many soap opera characters did. Maybe she would return to nursing, getting a position in Lincolnville's City Hospital where she might even fall in love with hunky Dr. Orbach.
Who knows? In the world of daytime drama, anything is possible!
Salem, you don't honestly expect anyone to believe that Johnny Depp stole your identity?
