by Kay Hooper
Dumb. This was so dumb.
The building loomed ahead, virtually impossible to identify, and she felt a moment’s qualm as she asked herself if this was even the right place. The directions had been maddeningly vague, and she might easily have been mistaken in the conclusions she’d drawn from what little information she could trust. She was probably not even in the right section of the city—
What was that? A sound … from over there. A whimper?
Dinah crept forward, her heart thudding in excitement, trying very hard to keep her breathing soft and even, not to betray her presence. Straining to listen. No other sound now, if there had been one.
Her overwrought imagination, probably.
God knew she had reason to imagine monsters.
Dinah stopped moving, standing still to better see and hear whatever lay around her. She had good senses usually, and there was also that little bit of something extra Bishop called a “spider sense”; it was a sharpened awareness of her surroundings, as though her five senses were somehow magnified by danger or the possibility of it.
Her eyes having adjusted quickly to the darkness, she was now able to make out more details of the building. Windows were high and dark, offering no clue as to what lay behind them. There didn’t seem to be a door of any kind. Somewhere was a loose shutter or piece of tin on the roof; she heard it rattling faintly in the breeze. And she smelled wood, lumber.
Something else as well.
Dinah stood utterly still, her chin raised, sniffing the night air that was teasing her with an odor she knew she should recognize but which lurked just beyond reach.
Primal. Animal.
The hair on the nape of her neck was stirring.
She needed to leave.
She needed to leave right now.
When it came at her there was no warning. No sound. Just a dark shape hurtling from its darker surroundings, and then the blow that knocked her off her feet.
And then the hot, tearing pain …
FOUR
Faith jerked awake to find herself sitting up in bed, her arms raised as if to protect her throat and face. Her heart was pounding, her breathing ragged, and her skin clammy, as though she had just raced in from the damp, chilly night.
It took several minutes for her to reassure herself that she was not out in the dark, lying on the cold ground with an animal tearing brutally at her flesh. That she was inside, and safe.
That she was not Dinah.
She was in Kane’s bedroom, which was still filled with afternoon light, as it had been when she had retreated there after lunch, when the sudden need to sleep had overwhelmed her. The clock on the night-stand told her a little more than an hour had passed, but when she slid from the bed, she felt slow and clumsy and stiff, as though she had slept heavily for hours. She was also unnerved.
She could still feel those teeth tearing at her.
Shaking off the nightmare memory as best she could, Faith decided she didn’t want to be alone a minute longer. When she reached the living room, she paused in the doorway, unnoticed by the two men. Kane was on the couch, Bishop in the chair on the other side of the coffee table, and both were leaning forward as they studied the papers spread out before them.
“No sign another car was involved,” Bishop said. “In fact, there were several witnesses, and all confirmed she was driving erratically before losing control and plowing into that embankment.”
They were reading the police reports of her accident, Faith realized.
“No mention of a prescription bottle,” Kane said, frowning. “And no mention that anyone checked afterward to confirm that a doctor prescribed muscle relaxants. Just the notation that EMS reported alcohol on her breath, then the emergency room doctor’s report and the test results.” He paused. “Christ, her blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit.”
“How could that be?” Faith came into the room and sat on the couch, staring at the report. “I had just left work. There hadn’t been time to—to drink so much.”
“We don’t think it happened that way,” Kane told her, and picked up a legal pad covered with notes. “I talked to your supervisor. Listen to this. At five thirty-five that day, she reports that you handed in some paperwork you’d stayed a bit over to complete. The two of you talked for, she says, about five minutes, then you got your purse and left. That building has underground parking for employees, with a gate that requires a keycard. The gate receipt for your car was time-stamped at five-fifty.” He paused again. “At six-thirty, you plowed your car into an embankment—six miles from your office building.”
Faith thought about that for a moment, frowning. “Maybe it’s not so unusual to take forty minutes to drive six miles in rush-hour traffic, but—”
“But it would take a good chunk of that time to drink enough to screw up your reflexes and boost your blood alcohol level to three times the legal limit. And you would have had to be throwing back hundred-proof scotch straight out of the bottle while you were driving.”
“Then, if it wasn’t possible …”
Bishop said, “Possible, maybe. Likely? No. First of all, there was no bar along the route you must have taken, and we can assume you didn’t drink in your car because there wasn’t a bottle found in it.”
“I could have thrown it out along the way,” Faith offered, playing devil’s advocate.
“You could have, but since you were on your way to meet Dinah for drinks, why on earth would you have drunk so much before?”
Kane said, “And then there’s the famous prescription for muscle relaxants, which from all evidence doesn’t seem to exist. There was no bottle in your apartment or your desk at work, and none was found in your purse or anywhere in the car. We used the entries in the checkbook you brought from your apartment and called the pharmacy you normally go to. The only prescription they filled for you during the six weeks preceding the accident was the regular one for birth control pills.”
Birth control pills. Was there a man in my life after all? Or was I merely prepared for the possibility?
“Faith?”
She looked at Kane and forced her mind to focus on more important matters. “I can check with my regular doctor at that clinic tomorrow just to make sure, but it does sound like those muscle relaxants weren’t mine. So how could I have gotten them into my system?”
“The obvious answer,” Kane said, “is that someone slipped them to you without your awareness.”
“While they were getting me drunk in about half an hour?” Faith shook her head. “That’s the part I just don’t get. To drink so much at all doesn’t feel right to me. To drink that much in so short a time …”
“Unless someone’s lying and you had nothing at all to drink,” Kane suggested. “Maybe it was a setup from the get-go. I’m willing to bet there are drugs that mimic a combination of alcohol and some kind of prescription med, resulting in death—or coma. Maybe someone drugged you, gave it a few minutes to take effect, then splashed a little alcohol in your mouth and on your clothes and put you behind the wheel, knowing damned well you couldn’t drive a block without wrecking the car. In downtown Atlanta traffic, chances were good you’d be killed or seriously injured. And when you survived the crash, how hard could it have been in a busy emergency room for someone to get at the paperwork and make sure it tells the right story?”
“Are we talking about one person here, one enemy?” Faith asked. “Somebody who influenced everything from the wreck and my hospital records to Dinah’s disappearance? Maybe even what happened in Seattle?”
Bishop said, “There may be one person behind everything—always assuming it’s all connected—but there’d have to be more than one person involved.”
“Aren’t you the man who told me once that true conspiracies are almost as rare as hen’s teeth?” Kane asked.
“Yeah. But note that I said almost. They do happen. And if Dinah was telling you the truth when she said she was working on a story involving business, politics, an
d something criminal, then I’d say that’s probably what we have here.”
“How could a story like that have any connection to me?” Faith asked.
“That,” Kane said, looking at her broodingly, “is the question. And we have to find the answer.”
Bishop checked his watch and got to his feet. “There’s a flight out just after six. I’ll head for home tonight, and if they don’t put me on another plane before I can unpack, I’ll see what I can find out about that restricted file tomorrow.”
Faith was a little surprised. “Didn’t I hear you say you weren’t leaving until tomorrow?”
“That was the plan. But something came up.” He didn’t explain further.
Faith suddenly heard the whisper of a not-quite-alien voice in her mind. He wouldn’t leave if he thought I was still alive.
She went absolutely still, conscious of a deep chill as she tried desperately to listen to whatever else that quiet voice might tell her. But there was nothing else. Just silence.
“Faith?” Kane’s voice now.
She blinked and focused on Bishop. He was staring at her, his sentry eyes narrowed and an arrested expression on his face. As if he knew, as if he’d heard it too.
Faith drew a breath to steady herself and give herself a moment to think. Could she reach Dinah consciously, gain some information that might point them to her or her captors? Until she knew for sure, there was no reason to tell Kane about the voice in her head, no reason to baffle or unnerve anyone else, to try to explain the unexplainable.
“Is anything wrong?” Kane asked her.
“It was nothing,” she said, so calm that she nearly convinced herself. “I thought I remembered something, but it slipped away.”
Bishop didn’t contradict her, but she wondered if he could have.
Faith debated telling Kane about her latest “dream” but decided not to, simply because she could see nothing helpful in it either to his search for Dinah or her own search for knowledge of her past. The dream had revealed virtually no detailed information; the area had been too dark and unfamiliar for her to recognize, so she couldn’t even provide a location from which Dinah might possibly have disappeared.
Always assuming it had been more than a dream.
That was what worried her most about the dreams and flashes of knowledge—that they might well be no more than her imagination coupled with a few lucky guesses. It seemed so incredible that there could be some kind of psychic connection between her and another woman, one so strong that she was actually reliving the other woman’s experiences and memories, feeling emotions not her own.
Hearing a voice in her head that belonged to someone else.
How could she believe such a thing?
And yet she did. Despite her worry and nagging uncertainty, she believed that a connection between her and Dinah did exist. She didn’t know how or why that bond had formed, but she believed it was very real. If she could only figure out a way to use it to find Dinah …
But she seemed as unable to control that as she was to find memories of her own in the blankness of her mind. The helplessness was maddening. And sitting around doing nothing wasn’t helping.
She could use her brain, though, couldn’t she?
When Kane returned from seeing Bishop off in a cab to the airport, Faith was sitting on the couch with a legal pad and the small address book she had brought from her apartment.
Before Kane could ask what she was doing, she picked up the phone and placed a call to the women’s clinic. It took several minutes of talking her way patiently past a couple of staff members and then her personal doctor’s answering service, but she finally reached her doctor. She made an office appointment for the following day.
Kane said when she hung up, “So she’ll see you tomorrow?”
Faith nodded. “And have all my records ready so she can fill me in on my life—the medical part of it, at least. She wasn’t surprised about the accident, although she didn’t say how she’d heard about it.”
Kane nodded and gathered up all the notes and the police report they had been going over earlier. He saw her turn another few pages of the address book and frown down at an entry. “Find something?”
She shook her head half-consciously. “I’m not sure. In the ‘in case of emergency’ section, there’s an address and a phone number, but nothing to identify who or what it is.”
“Local number?”
“There’s no area code.” She met his gaze, then picked up the phone. “One way to find out.”
It rang three times before a brisk, female voice on the other end announced, “Haven House.”
The name meant nothing to her, but given where she’d found the number, Faith thought surely someone there would recognize her name. So, tentatively, she said, “This is Faith Parker.”
There was a moment of silence, then the woman exclaimed in surprise, “Faith? The last we heard, you were still in a coma.”
Faith didn’t state the obvious. Instead, she said, “I just came home this past week.”
“And you’re okay? I mean—”
Faith barely hesitated. “I’m fine physically, but I seem to be having some memory problems. Forgive me, but I don’t remember who you are.”
“This is Karen.” The answer came readily enough, but wariness had crept into that brisk tone.
Faith jotted the name down on her legal pad. “So we knew—know—each other?”
“Of course. You probably spent more time here than in your own apartment up until the last few months. We always kept a bed ready for you, in case you wanted to stay.”
Puzzled, Faith said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Just what is Haven House?” She was thinking that perhaps it was a bed-and-breakfast, something like that. The truth came as a definite surprise.
“It’s a shelter,” Karen replied, even more wary now. “A shelter for abused women.”
Faith added that information to her notes automatically, and it was only as she watched her pen moving across the page that she realized she was writing with her right hand. She transferred the pen to her left hand, confused both by her actions and by what she was hearing.
“A shelter. Did I—did I work there? As a volunteer?”
“You helped out when and how you could, same as the rest of us.” Karen’s voice hardened slightly. “Look, if you really are Faith and what you’ve told me is the truth, I’m sorry—but I can’t tell you anything else over the phone. We have to be careful here. Too many of us are in hiding.”
“I understand.” Faith wished that she did. “May I—is it all right if I come over there? I have the address.” She recited it, just to make sure what was in her book was correct.
“Our doors are always open to women,” Karen said. “But in case you’ve forgotten the rules—no men. No exceptions.”
“I’ll remember. Thank you, Karen.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Faith cradled the receiver slowly.
“What kind of shelter?” Kane asked immediately.
“For abused women. And—they know me there.” Faith felt peculiar just saying the words.
“But she wouldn’t tell you anything else over the phone?”
“No. Understandable, I suppose. I need to go over there and talk to them. Now, today. I don’t know if there’s a connection to Dinah, but—”
“She did a story on a women’s shelter,” Kane remembered suddenly. “And Conrad, her financial manager, said she donated money.” He paused. “If she donated her time as well, or went there at all, she never mentioned it.”
“I don’t think she would have. Judging by what Karen said to me, being secretive about the shelter was encouraged.” She looked down at the entry in her address book. “I didn’t even name it in my book.”
Kane nodded, accepting that, then looked at his watch. “Let’s go, then. They might not let me in, but I can make sure you get there and back safely.”
Faith didn’t argue. But when they reach
ed the shelter—which turned out to be a large, pleasant old house in a quiet suburban neighborhood—she realized her visit might take some time and doubted Kane’s patience to sit and wait for her.
“You said you wanted to talk to Richardson about that police report,” she reminded him. “Why don’t you go do that while I see the people here? If we divide the work, we’re more likely to find out something useful quickly.” She thought she hardly needed to tell him that, but did anyway because she knew he was reluctant to leave her there.
Kane jotted down the number of his cell phone and gave it to her. “If I’m not waiting out here when you get ready to leave, call me.”
Faith nodded. She got out of the car and went to the front door of the house, conscious, as she rang the bell, of the closed-circuit security camera positioned near the entrance.
The door was opened by a tall, very thin woman of about thirty-five, with dark hair already going gray. When she spoke after a long, steady look, it was with the brisk voice she had used on the phone.
“So it is you. Good to see you, Faith.”
Faith went in, wondering, now that she was there, just what she was going to ask this woman or anyone else there—besides a wistful “Who am I? Do you know?”
The house was fairly quiet, even for a Sunday afternoon. She heard, somewhere upstairs, the faint sounds of children laughing and talking, and someone softly—and inexpertly—playing a piano nearby.
“Let’s talk in my office before you see any of the others,” Karen suggested, obviously still feeling protective of the shelter and its inhabitants.
Faith was agreeable, and moments later found herself sitting in a small, cluttered, windowless office that had probably once been little more than a closet. The gracious old home showed plenty of signs of recent renovation, but it was clear the money had been spent where it would do the most good, the comfort of the director obviously far down on the list.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Faith said as Karen went around the desk and sat behind it, “and if you need someone to verify what I claim about the memory loss, I’m sure my doctor will explain everything.”
