“Lottie?”
The way he said my name sounded strange, as if he wasn’t sure it was me. David always radiated confidence, even during his most difficult times, but right now I saw only hesitation and doubt.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asked.
“Of course, I’m okay.” In fact, I was better than okay. For the first time in days, I felt normal and healthy again, and like the flu had become a long forgotten memory. I was relieved to finally feel better. And hungry.
He looked up at Alicia. “Call 9-1-1. Now.”
Alicia hesitated, watching me. Mrs. Reynolds, whom I recognized from a photo Logan once showed me, stood beside her. I wondered when they’d come into the office, and then I wondered where Logan was.
“Logan’s alive,” I blurted. “Where is he? Have you seen him?”
David fixed Alicia with a hard stare. “Call 9-1-1,” he demanded again.
“No, stop. I’m fine, see?” I grabbed his hand and pressed it to my forehead. The fever and nausea were gone and I was raring to go.
I tried standing but David stopped me. “Do you know where you are?” he asked.
“I’m in my office,” I said. “And I want to know where Logan is. What did you do with him?”
David drew in a breath and held it.
And I wasn’t going to wait anymore. I tugged out of his grip and went to the open window, fingering the tear in the screen and scanning the parking lot for signs that Logan might still be around. I swung around and looked at Mrs. Reynolds.
“Your son is alive,” I told her. “He was here, in my office, and we had a conversation about the note he left in his bedroom.”
David walked to the window and inspected the damage.
“That screen’s been ripped for days,” Alicia said. “Since just after you went out on sick leave.”
She and David exchanged a look and I didn’t like what I saw beneath it.
“My son is dead,” Mrs. Reynolds insisted, and she turned to David. “Is something wrong with her?”
“David,” I said, “I’d like to speak with Mrs. Reynolds. Can you please wait in the reception area with Alicia until we’re done?”
Mrs. Reynolds clutched her Louis Vuitton handbag to her chest. “Why are you telling these lies?”
The room swayed again and I heard a distant voice. A woman’s voice. I couldn’t make out the words but her tone sounded harsh and accusatory. As if I had wronged her.
But no one else in the room was talking.
David was staring at me as if he knew something was wrong and was ready to do something about it.
I didn’t give him the chance. “I’d like to explain what I believe is happening,” I told Mrs. Reynolds. “I’m not lying and I want to know if you’ve seen Logan dead or how you can be so certain that he committed suicide.”
Mrs. Reynolds took two steps in retreat, her eyes trained on David. “She needs help. I don’t know why she’s making up such stories — ”
“I’m not lying.”
Mrs. Reynolds tapped a pointy black Ferragamo on the carpet. “I intend to report your erratic behavior to your director. I will not be patronized. I’m dealing with tremendous loss right now and here you are, telling me I’m wrong.”
“Mrs. Reynolds, I assure you — ”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ve already seen too much.”
She marched out of my office as tightly wound as the blonde hair pinned to her head.
I leaned against the wall and stared at the open office door. “I don’t understand. This makes no sense. Logan was here,” I said, pointing to the sofa he’d just been sitting in, “and we talked. You’d think his mother would be happy to hear the news that he’s alive and okay.”
David settled onto the edge of my desk, drawing my attention back to him. “Lottie, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“Paul.”
“I thought you said you remembered Logan.”
“No, I mean I want to talk to Paul.”
I started for my desk phone but David stopped me. “Okay, assuming what you said is true, when did you see and talk to Logan?” He held up his own phone and showed me the time. It read ten minutes after eleven.
“That can’t be right.”
“Should I still get help?” Alicia asked.
I peered past David’s shoulder and answered for him. “No.”
David let out a long sigh and turned to her. “Alicia, can you leave us alone, please?”
Alicia paused, looking caught between needing to listen to me because she worked with me, and wanting to obey David because he looked more intimidating. After a few moments, she nodded and shut the door after her. David refocused on me and I didn’t like what stared back.
“I tried writing off this morning’s episode as an anomaly,” he said. “Something that was the result of the flu and maybe a bad night’s sleep. But what am I supposed to think when it happens a second time, Lottie? And worse, when you can’t even remember your own name? Or me?”
“It’s not uncommon for people to have these types of reactions when they’ve been very sick, David. You’ve been through similar situations — ”
“I’ve lost memory because of a concussion, and that was something entirely different. But this?” He motioned between us. “This isn’t normal. And you scared the shit out of me.”
I could see that I had and that made my heart ache. David was the solid one. The one who always stood firm and always had answers. He was the one who had enough strength for both of us during those times I had none.
Restless, I moved around the office, hoping something along the way would jog things back to life in my head. But the only things that kept coming back were questions about Mrs. Reynolds.
A fragment of a conversation eased into my head. You are angry with me. Why?
It was me, speaking to someone else. I knew it as surely as I was standing in my office, but I wasn’t talking to David. I was talking to the woman whose voice I heard minutes before. My tone was insistent, even a little sharp, as if I was trying to make her understand something she refused to accept.
“What made you come to my office anyway?” I asked, turning to David, the other conversation fading away.
“Mrs. Reynolds came in while I was waiting for you in reception.” David walked over and pretended to show the same interest in my diploma. “Alicia phoned you and when you didn’t answer we got worried because you’d been so sick. So we came to your office. We found you alone.” He stared at the diploma but I could see he wasn’t really looking at it. “You weren’t yourself.”
I spied the slit in the window screen. The hole, I realized, looked big enough for someone to get into. Or out of.
“He was here,” I said again. “Logan’s alive and his mother knows it, David. She’s playing me but I don’t know why.”
“Lottie — ”
“Please, David, don’t. I’m not losing my mind.”
His features and body language began to soften. I’d managed to get through, if only a little. “I’m helpless here,” he said. “In all the years I’ve known you — and that’s been a lot of years — you’ve never, ever behaved the way I saw you behave this morning.”
I pressed my hand to his chest and felt the comforting, rhythmic beat of his heart. He was worried and only trying to help, and that made me want to find a solution that would make us both happy.
“If I have one of these episodes again, I’ll see someone. Okay?”
“I want you to see someone now. You’re losing moments of your life. You need help.”
“David — ”
“I don’t understand, Lottie. Why are you so afraid?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Then why wait?”
“You don’t understand.”
He took a step back. “I don’t understand? I don’t understand?”
“Why are we arguing?”
“I’m not arguing — ”
David sto
pped when he realized we were.
“I’ll talk to Paul,” I told him. “If anyone can help, it’s him.”
The look in David’s eyes said everything I needed to know. The last person he wanted me to spend time with was Paul, but Paul was my friend who was also a psychiatrist. A friend who, when things were at their worst between David and me three years ago, had been something more.
David muttered a curse but didn’t push the issue. He took my hands in his and steadied me with a probing gaze, peeling away every layer of defenses to get to the heart of me. The part only he understood and knew.
“You’re going to make me insane,” he said over a heavy sigh. He brushed a hand over my cheek and cupped it, and the heat in his touch seeped into my skin.
I wrapped my hand over his. “Then take comfort in the knowledge that you’re shacked up with a therapist who can help you when that time comes.”
“It’s why I wake up every morning,” he said. “Pity I won’t be competent enough to know it when it happens.”
Chapter Five
The ride home felt strange. David and I sat in awkward silence, and for very different reasons. I knew he was thinking about the two episodes I’d had that morning, and I was thinking about Logan and his mother. I’d called Mrs. Reynolds twice after leaving Amrose but with no luck. I ended up leaving a message but didn’t think she’d call back.
As David navigated our SUV up the driveway, I considered how I’d handle my next weekly appointment with Logan, if there were one. I had the feeling he was going to be true to his word and leave for good. And if he did, then what? Would his mother continue to believe he was dead? Would she come after me for telling her what she believed were lies? Or would this all go away with my questions unanswered?
We got out of the SUV and I was aware of David behind me, watching. He let us inside and dropped the keys on the small table in the foyer along with the mail he’d picked up on the way, and went for the kitchen at the back of the house. He didn’t say anything but I didn’t read his silence as anger. He was troubled, and I let it go. He’d talk to me when he felt ready, and by then I’d probably feel ready, too.
I went to the den that adjoined the kitchen and settled into the leather sofa by the fireplace. I heard the faucet turn on, cabinet doors open and shut, then water filling a teapot. I looked at David and he looked at me.
“I assume you want a mug,” he said, holding up my favorite. It was bright yellow with a smiley face. My feel-good mug.
I nodded.
While David worked his way around the kitchen, I turned my attention to the mail. In the pile, I found two solicitations for credits cards with limits large enough to buy a car, along with several trade magazines. I leafed through those and dog-eared articles that I intended to read over the weekend. In the last magazine, I found a manila envelope addressed to me in handwritten block print tucked in between the middle pages. I flipped it over. No return address.
I opened the envelope and thought it was empty at first, but after shaking it upside down, strands of long black hair fell onto my lap. Long black hair that looked like mine.
David set the mug on the dark wood coffee table, sat beside me and looked at the strands on my lap. “What’s that?”
“I think it’s my hair.”
I held them up and in one short breath, my chest wrenched into a tight knot until I couldn’t breathe. I dropped the envelope and the hair on the table and folded my arms over my chest, wanting as much distance from them as possible.
David picked up the hair and studied it without a word. He followed with the envelope, flipping it over and then peering inside.
“No return address,” he said, giving it a thorough once-over. “No postmark or postage either. No anything.”
“Except my name.”
He pressed his lips together, and when his eyes met mine my heart kicked into high gear. We might not have known who dropped off the envelope but we knew how they did it. They had hand delivered it right to our home.
Though the windows and slider to the back patio were closed and locked, I felt vulnerable and exposed. For a brief, insane moment, my eyes tracked to the bushes and trees that lined the backyard and the in-ground pool, and I wondered if someone was hiding outside and watching me.
“Do you recognize the handwriting?” David asked.
I kept staring out the slider. “No.”
“Any idea why someone would send this to you?”
My eyes flicked to David. “Send me my own hair? No.”
“Anyone giving you a hard time at the office?”
I hesitated. “No.”
David picked up on my hesitation. “Does it have something to do with Logan?”
There was only so much I could tell him without breaching confidentiality, and I took the time to choose my words carefully. “He knows things, David. Things he shouldn’t know. About us.”
David said nothing and I knew exactly what his silence meant. He still didn’t believe that I’d seen Logan and that he was alive. But he didn’t confront me about it and I took that as a good sign. That meant he was still open to possibilities.
David put the envelope and the hair on the coffee table and faced me. “If this hair really came from you, how would someone have been able to get it? And this much of it?”
My hand instinctively went to my head, searching for something that felt out of place. Or missing. I didn’t know how someone had managed to get it but, “That’s definitely mine,” I said. “And you know it, too. Not too many people have hair as long and as straight and as black.”
“They’re all perfect strands, too,” David said. “They look like they’ve been cut off.”
I shuddered over the thought that someone had gotten that close to me without my even knowing it.
“Can you think of any time that you may have fallen asleep with someone else around?” David asked. “Or a time when you blacked out — ?”
He stopped talking and I stopped breathing, the both of us thinking the same thing.
“Logan was the only person around when I had that episode at the office today,” I said. “But I don’t think he did this.” Logan was many things but this behavior didn’t fit his profile.
David let out a small sigh. “If Logan really is alive, we can’t dismiss the possibility. Along with the possibility that we could be overlooking someone else, too.”
I looked at the backyard again and the thick wall of bushes around the fence that offered us privacy. “If someone’s watching me, what do I do now? Call the police?”
David clasped his hands together and sat in deep, silent thought. “I don’t think the cops can or will do anything, Lottie. Unless you know who’s after you. And even then, what can we prove?”
I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. Then David wrapped an arm around me.
“There are a lot of ifs to consider,” I said.
“Yes, there are.”
His cell phone vibrated. He unclipped it from his jeans, checked caller ID, and answered. The call lasted barely a minute and, when it was over, I felt the muscles in his body contract with tension.
“That was Neil,” he said. “He couldn’t find anything on the phone call you got this morning. He also couldn’t find any reason why the call would route back to our land line.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means that someone’s got access to our accounts. Or that they know how to manipulate the phone system. Maybe both.” His gaze went back to the envelope on the coffee table and I understood the connection he was making.
“You think the envelope and phone call are linked?”
“Possibly.” He punched in a call on his cell and waited for the other end to pick up. “That’s why I’m calling Nat. He might be able to find something that Neil overlooked.”
This didn’t surprise me. Nat was one of David’s best friends from childhood and a genius with technology. He was also a contract soldier at PROs.
“Isn’t what you’re doing considered a misappropriation of PROs’ resources?” I asked.
“Not if they’re friends who’ll cover for me.” David’s expression soured. It seemed Nat wasn’t answering. “Look, I know this won’t be easy for you but you don’t have a choice.”
“Choice with what?”
He left a quick message and hung up. “I’m thinking of having Nat arrange some kind of surveillance on you, so you’re covered for the times I can’t be with you. Maybe install a tracking device on your Jeep or set up audio in your handbag or some other kind of surveillance for when you’re mobile. OnStar maybe. I haven’t decided yet.”
I pushed away from David. “You can’t be serious.”
“I know you don’t like this, Lottie, but it’s for your own good.”
“How can a leash be good?”
“This isn’t a leash. This is protection. Your protection.”
I was about to argue but he spoke right over me. “This isn’t up for debate. Like it or not, you need to be tailed. My biggest concern is having you watched when I can’t be with you, and I trust my men to do that job.”
I launched to my feet. “I can take care of myself, David.”
David launched up to meet me. “Someone cut off your hair, Lottie. Someone dropped off an envelope in person, right here at our house. Someone called this morning claiming to know what you dreamt about. You’ve also blanked out twice. And, in case you haven’t noticed, all of this happened in the space of five hours.”
I’d noticed, all right, but in my denial I was hoping it was just a coincidence. Foolish, I knew, but I couldn’t help the reaction. I just wasn’t ready to mentally deal with all of it yet.
“I still think you’re overreacting,” I said. “I’m a grown woman and I can handle myself.” I’d done it at the office several times before, and I was prepared to do it again.
“What if someone attacks you in a parking lot?”
“I have my mace.”
“What if someone gets into our home and is waiting for you upstairs?”
“I’ll run out of the house. Call 9-1-1. Go to a neighbor’s.”
“What if you have another episode or blank out and someone comes after you then?”
In This Life Page 3
