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This is a CBC podcast. We want to let you know before you listen that this episode contains references to depression and to suicide. Please take care. The orange nose of the ship cuts through the thick fog entering the narrows at St. John's Harbor. Five stories high, it slows to a crawl and turns to pull alongside the dock, next to towering cranes in the shadow of small office towers and wooden houses on the hills. Thick ropes are tossed from the vessel and held to the shore. Workers, about 30, gather on the rail as the Silver Gangway is lowered. They're looking worn after a three-week shift aboard the Hibernia oil platform in the North Atlantic. It usually takes 90 minutes in a helicopter to get home, but with the chopper sucked in by the weather, this is the backup plan. They've been at sea for 16 hours in the white bank of fog. Inching closer at this moment are two men, unknown to each other. The gangway is lower to the asphalt, and workers in orange safety suits begin to file back down to Earth, to their homes and families. As the next group of 30 stands by, chatting and making last-minute phone calls, these two men catch sight of each other.

They walk slower, heads pivoting ever so slightly to keep the other in view. One of these men is Clifford Avery, and the other is Clarence Hines. The strange encounter must have haunted Clifford in some way because he told his brother Wayne and his sister-in-law Pam about it afterwards.

Two of them met, coming off the boat and going on the boat.

One was coming off and we were going on. I said, I see this, but he looked just like me. He said, Look at me.

He looked back at me and said, We just stare each other.They never really spoke or met. No, they just looked each other. They just seen each other. He said, He's looking at himself.

He said it was like looking in the mirror.

For a second, they locked eyes. Just two ships passing. They would never meet again. I'm Luke Quintin, and from CBC, this is Come By Chance. Episode 3, The Brick Layers Dance. Clifford Avery was a few years older than his brother, Craig, but they were close. He worked as a Mason and lived down the road in Hillview, just like most of the Averys do, with his wife, Maryline, and their three kids. I drove out from my home in St. John's, Newfoundland, a few hours from the little town of Hillview, to meet two of Clifford's daughters.Hi.How are you? Good, how are you? Of course, it was absolutely beautiful out there. Every time you leave St. John's, it seems like the weather improves. Town is miserable.

I'm Melissa Avery, Clifford's daughter.

I'm Stephanie King. I'm also Clifford's daughter.

When Clifford Avery first told his daughters that his brother Craig was working with a guy who looked eerily like Clifford himself, and that actually there were some serious questions around Craig's relation to the Avery family, at first, they thought it was a joke.

I just remember him saying that he might not be our uncle, and of course, we called bullshit. No, no. He said, That's true. He said, That's facts. Ask your mother. That's how we knew he was telling the truth, is when he would say to us, That's facts. Ask your mother. Because his mom didn't lie.

Not that dad did lie. He just joked so much.

He had a reputation, yeah. Stephanie and Melissa have a lot of stories about their dad's jokes. They tell me Clifford once convinced a group of people from another town that that he knew how to play the Banjo when, in fact, he never played a note in his life. His practical jokes could really be something else because Clifford liked to play a very long game. Like the time, he set up a little vegetable plot at the family cabin in a remote corner of the island called Round Harbor.

He had a little potato garden down there.

Everybody told him that he wasn't going to be able to grow any potatoes in Round Harbor.

Newfound land soil is notoriously rocky and barren, especially so in Round Harbor. Digging a garden here is not for the faint of heart, but that didn't stop Clifford Avery. One fall day, Clifford is showing a neighbor around his plot, and he points out his veggies garden and ask her to try picking up his potatoes. She cannot get over what she sees.

Oh, she danced. She sang. She did it all. She was so happy. Couldn't believe the size of potato that Clifford grew in Round Harbor.

The word travels around Round Harbor, and neighbors are telling other neighbors about this potato. Another guy named Sean is even more excited.

We actually took the potato, brought it to his house, and had it on display on his bur telling everybody about this gigantic potato that dad grew in Round Harbor.

It was months and months later when he actually told people the truth.

The truth being that Clifford bought the potato in the store for the sole purpose of planting it for his friends to later dig up.

I think it was right around Christmas when he finally... Sean was telling the story to someone. He's like, Yeah, not everyone true.

Anything to get a joke, right? And have a laugh.

Some of the people Clifford joked around with probably still don't know.

We were a close family, more so than probably some. I always remember Mom and Dad, they did everything together.

Another thing they tell me about their father is his love for dancing.

He loved all the music, all the dance songs and old stuff.

Him and Mom were the first ones on the dance floor, last ones to leave. Anything that they could do like the old-fashioned waltz, too. Him and mom were very smooth on the dance floor.

Clifford made sure that when they built their cabin at Round Harbor, it had a wide open floor for dancing.

A few years later, he built on an outdoor patio so we could have an outdoor dance floor.

A born dancer. Yeah.

He had his own dance. He had the brick layers dance. What's that?

Oh, my.

I could show you. No one's going to see it, of course. Sure, sure. No.

We'll take a minister.

All right. So you have to take a couple of steps, and then you kick your foot back. So it's like, one, two. And that was his brick layers The reason I'm laughing is that there is something about picturing a grown man with a bushy mustache doing this dance.

If you've ever seen a Mason lay bricks, the rhythm of it is perfectly captured by the brick layers dance. It's a one step, two step, pull the front leg back behind the other. Tap with your toe. Tap, tap.

You all had to know the brick layers dance. It was very important.

It can be hard to know your dad sometimes. They can be stoic, short on words and explanations. But dancing was maybe the best way that Stephanie and Melissa knew their dad. Stephanie remembers one night in particular. It was at their cabin in Round Harbor.

I'm not sure if it was his birthday or there was something, and me and dad were the last ones up, and it was probably like, I don't know, 3:00 in the morning or something, and a few drinks and having a good time. And he randomly just grabs a broom and starts dancing with it and literally dips it. I just could not stop. I was nuts laughing that hard. No one else got to see it but me. I was like, Thanks for that.

There was also a tragedy deep at the heart of this close-knit family.

We had an older brother, Mitchell. He passed away from leukemia when he was eight. I was six.

I can't imagine what they went through with all that. I mean, now I got kids on my own. I can't even... The thought of it just terrifies me, right?

I think dad was a little more overprotective of us growing up.

When it came time for holidays and stuff, we still had wonderful Christmases and birthdays and all that. But the holidays had to be more difficult after last year, first born child, your only son. You could see it at times, sometimes, that it wasn't the same for him after.

This event, the loss of Clifford's first child, and the fact that he felt so protective over his family may go a long way to explaining why he took Craig and Tracey's suspicions about Clarence Hines so seriously. He had to help, if he could, to find the truth. When Clifford discovered that the guy born on the same day as his younger brother, Craig, in Come by Chance, was called Clarence or Klar Heinz, he realized he'd heard the name before. Clifford Avery had been mistaken for Clarence a couple of times. Like the in the 1990s when he was working at the Bullarm Fabrication Site.

Somebody came up behind him, gave him a little tap on the shoulder, and I was like, What are you at, Claire? And when dad turned around, I looked at him and was like, You're not Claire, but you look an awful lot like him. Everybody says everyone has a twin out there. And we knew that dad had a twin out there somewhere. Didn't know how much of a twin.

Eventually, it became obvious why these cases of mistaken identity kept happening. Stephanie remembers first seeing a picture of Clarence on Facebook.

Well, even the little blurry zoomed in, it was still hard to believe the resemblance.

The next picture they show me of Clarence and Clifford side by side, that's the picture that made me a believer. Okay, what are we looking at here?

So there's a picture of my dad and Claire, and no trouble to tell their resemblance.

It's like two pictures. They're not actually standing.

No.

In one In the pictures, Clifford Avery is standing next to his daughter, Carol, and he has a big grin on his face. He's wearing a Guinness beer hat and a plaid sweatshirt. He's got his graying, bushy mustache and gray fluffy hair over his ears. Then you look at the man in the next photo, Clarence Hines. He's smiling with what looks like the same eyes and same graying mustache. The images are so uncannily alike, you would have to be related to one of them to tell who was who or that they're not the same person.

Even the little head tilt. Mustache. The nose.

Avery nose. It's a thing.

Can you describe the Avery nose?

A little bit on the larger side at times. Try to be nice about it. It's a great nose. The smile, just the build.

Even the hair is like... The way he's standing with his hand in his pocket there is like everything. Yeah, it's wild.

When Clifford's family found out that their uncle, Craig, was born at the same hospital on the same day as their father's mysterious doppelganger, Clarence Hines, a slow drip of speculation started to flow into a river.

Even before their birthday, Tracy had said before how much Clara looked like dead. Even before that. And then, of course, when the birthday thing happened, and we were like, Okay, so there is something to this.

And I was like, Uncle Craig is very different from the rest of the Averys. He stood out a little more than the rest of them.

Craig, the unruly seventh son with his blonde hair and freckles.

So then as you started thinking about it, it's like all the pieces started to come together, and then things started to make sense.

The pieces start to add up, even though it's surreal. And you'd think, No, that can never happen. But the more you think about it, the more likely it is that it did.

Everyone snowballed from there.

And with these puzzle pieces seeming to fall into place, Clifford and Craig Avery took some decisive action.

Dad said that they were going to do a DNA test. He wanted to know the truth and get the answer once and for all.

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With their parents, Donald and Mildred, no longer around and able to explain what happened. The Avery siblings needed other ways to find answers. Craig made a decision. The only The only way to find out for certain whether the unthinkable was true, that he was not related to his family by blood, was to get a DNA test. That's when his brother Clifford put up his hand.

He said, I'll get it done with you. So I sent away and got I got a kit to come, and me and Clifford done the kits, and I sent them away.

With the DNA test sent off, all the Averys could do now was wait. Craig waits for weeks, checking his inbox over and over again.

I was waiting for the email, and never come, never come, never come for the results.

It was a while, and I said to him one day, Check your junk mail.

So I checked the junk mail, and there was the email.

And I said to him, I said, When you open these results, it could change your life forever. He said, I know. And I asked him, I said, So are you prepared for it? He said, I got to know.

And I said, I can't open it. So I got Tracy to open it. I couldn't. And it was all a bunch of numbers. It was 20 numbers for Clifford and 20 numbers for me. And it was three matches out of 20. So I didn't know what it meant.

He called up the place that he got the DNA test done, and they explained to him how it worked. There was 20 different things that were tested. It was a Y chromosome test is what it was. And Craig and Clifford matched on three out of 20. So there was no way possible that they're even related.

That blew my mind right out of the water. That's when it really hit home.

With the DNA results in, Craig started to reach out to the rest of the Avery siblings to tell them.

Oh, Craig contacted everybody pretty well right away. What were those conversations? Disbelief. Then wanting to know, How could this happen?

As soon as Craig found out the result, he approached Clarence Hines with the news at work.

He told me that him and Clifford wasn't brothers.

Craig felt that the only way to understand what had really happened was for Clarence to also get a DNA test.

So he asked me to do mine and match it with Clifford, but he I just wanted to know then. He didn't want to wait. And I always said, No, I'll see it later. I see it later. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know part of it. I don't want to deal with it now.

How did Clifford react when he got the DNA back? Did that affect him as well, do you think?

Oh, definitely. Definitely, it affected Clifford. That hit him big time. It him really hurt.

They'd come so close to meeting years before. Now, Clifford wanted to find out more about his Doppelganger, Clarence.

He made several attempts to contact Clare to get to see him. He really wanted to see him. He just wanted to meet him because I think when the DNA come back, he knew it in, too, right? And he really wanted to get to know Clare.

Clarence was more guarded, and he didn't want to know, even. So what do you think? What was it about Clifford that was in his nature that he wanted to reach out?

He figured then that Clare was his biological brother, and he wanted to get to know him. He wanted to get to know. He wanted a big part of his life.

For Clifford Avery, finding out that his younger brother, Craig, was not his biological brother hit him hard, too.

It was shock, of course, disbelief. I mean, had something like that happen.

Suddenly, the very idea of family that he knew wasn't out. Clifford's daughter, Melissa, also saw her dad try and connect with Clarence.

Day in and day out, trying to reach out to Claire.

And Clifford did get through once or twice on the phone He didn't understand or he couldn't understand why Clara wouldn't meet him.

And I said to him, I said, Dad, it's not your typical situation. We have no idea how Clara is feeling right now. We don't know what he's going through. Maybe he just needs a little bit of time. I just remember seeing the hurt in dad's face day in and day out. That's the image that I have stuck in my head.

What does that look like or what was he doing?

It was the eyes. It was just this... It was this sadness in his eyes. And he said, even if they weren't brothers, just for the fact that they looked so much alike was enough for dad to want to meet his so-called twin. And they just never got the chance.

Clifford's daughter, Melissa Avery, was actually living with her parents that spring of 2016. She was getting ready to move back to the city.

I came home from work. I was packing up last few of my things. Dad was home, which was strange because normally he was working. So I was surprised to see him. I was like, Oh, you're home. And he said that he had just given up work. He's done. There's no more work. And I was like, What? No, you never. Again, We're dead. You joke around so much. And he said, No, no. He said, It's it. He said, I'm done. No more work. I was like, Hey, what's going on? And then that's when he told me that he was after being up to the doctor, and she diagnosed him with depression. I told him how proud I was of him for being able to recognize that there was something not right and for reaching out. It was probably one of the most heartfelt conversations that myself and dad have ever had. I didn't even want to leave. I did not even want to leave and go back to St. John's. I was like, No, I'm going to stay. Something in my stomach was telling me not to go. And he convinced me. He was like, No, no.

He said, I'm going to be okay. Don't you worry about me. He said, You go on. So I left, and We talked a couple of times over the weekend on the phone. And then Wednesday morning, he was gone.

We want to give you a heads up that for the next few minutes, we're going to talk to Clifford's family about Clifford's death by suicide.

I was in the tow crib and my sister-in-law called me. Took the wind right out of my sail, so I couldn't believe it. That was unbelievable.

What did she say?

She said, Clifford is gone. I said, What? It don't seem real. It don't seem that Clifford would do that. It don't seem I don't know. It didn't seem like something that Clifford would do. And the hardest part is we'll never know. Clifford was... I couldn't believe that. I still... I guess when we got DNA back and he found out that... You know, I guess he didn't know 100%, but like I said, we knew. That bothered him a lot.

Was he bothered for you, do you think, too?

I'd say it was for both of us. He had a brother that he thought was his brother and a brother that was his brother that he never knew.

I don't feel that this was the reason reason that dad took his own life. Not at all, but I don't think it helped. And dad had a lot of stuff going on for a lot of years that we knew nothing about. And I don't know if this was just the icing on the cake that just set everything in motion. And that's the hard part with suicide. You have all these unanswered questions. That's the difference with grieving suicide and grieving another type of death. You have to be able to get to the point that you're never going to have the answers to these questions.

We can't know, and we will never know. One thing we do know is that within the members of the Avery family, there was a strong disposition, a tendency towards serious depression. We know that Clifford had struggles and darkness that haunted him well before any DNA test. We know that there was so much more to the playfulness and the warmth that Clifford showed to the outside world. The loss of his son, Mitchell, and the ongoing grief it caused weighed heavily on Clifford. It's painful to think of Clifford Avery, the prankster, the man with his own signature dance move, who seemed to seek out the fun in life everywhere he went. That he was gone, and that the Averys were left reeling from this unimaginable loss.

We saw hundreds of people. He knew everybody. There was a lineup outside the funeral home, down the hall, and to come in and see dad during visits. They had the downstairs full and they had the video set up. So the upstairs was full, downstairs was full, and there was people outside that just could not get in. He knew everybody and their dog.

But there was one person missing. The DNA test had shown that Clifford and Craig were not related. But it was an answer that spawned a thousand more questions. And it was Clarence Hines, and only Clarence Hines, who could confirm, once overall, what the Averys believed they already knew.

You've been listening to Come by Chance, produced by Novel for CBC. The series is written and produced by me, Luke Quintin, and produced and edited by Joe Wheeler. Our Assistant Producer is Madelyne Parr, our field producer producer is Rebecca Nolan. Sound Design and Scoring by Daniel Kemson. Roshnie Nier is our digital coordinating producer. Original Music by Adam Forren. Music Supervision by Joe Wheeler and Nicolas Alexander. Our senior producers are Veronica Simmons, Willow Smith, and Damon Fairlist. Our production managers are Charlotte Wolf, Cherie Houston, and Sara Tobin. The series was developed by Madelyne Parr. Creative Director of Development and Novel is Willard Foxton. The fact checker is Valeria Rocca. Our executive producers are Max O'Brien, Cecil Fernandez, and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is our Senior Manager, and Arif Narani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc. Ca/podcasts. Com.