A Woman with a Mystery

by B. J Daniels

  “I’m not sure,” he said as he climbed behind the wheel. He didn’t have a clue how to find her. She wouldn’t have gone for medical help even if she’d needed it. Too many questions would have been asked.

  “You know, something’s been bothering me,” he said. “If these…monsters who delivered your baby, if they were doctors, why didn’t they do an episiotomy? Why were you suffering from hypothermia when you arrived at the hospital?”

  “Maybe they wanted it to look as if I’d given birth alone, without any help,” she suggested as he started the truck.

  “Maybe.” He thought about her memory of the three ghouls appearing frantic, the feeling that something was wrong. “That seems a little too cruel, even for monsters. Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing because they lacked the medical expertise. Maybe they weren’t doctors at all.” He didn’t like that theory because it opened up too many possibilities. “Have you remembered anything more about the room? It wasn’t just a bedroom in some house?”

  She shook her head as she squinted out at the gloomy day. “The bed made me think it was a hospital because of the rails.”

  Hospital-type beds could be rented. Or purchased.

  “I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t be positive it wasn’t just a bedroom but— Wait a minute. The ceiling.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

  He looked over at her.

  Her eyes were closed. “The ceiling seemed too high for a regular house. And…there was something on it.”

  He waited, afraid to speak for fear of making the memory—if that’s what it was—slip away.

  “A mark.” She opened her eyes and frowned.

  “You mean like the roof leaked?” he asked when she didn’t continue. “Or the plaster cracked?”

  She nodded. “It was in the shape of something large and scaly.”

  He stared at her for a moment, then looked back to his driving. “Like a dragon?”

  “Or some kind of monster,” she said with a sigh. “Obviously, I saw monsters everywhere I looked,” she added, her tone dismissing the ceiling design and the memory as useless.

  He wanted to assure her that every possible memory was important. But three monsters at the end of the bed and another on the ceiling?

  He shifted down at the edge of town, the pills he’d taken from her rattling softly in his coat pocket. Who knew what those pills could have made her see? he thought as he pulled into the drugstore parking lot, anxious to find out.

  “Do you mind if I wait here?” she asked.

  He would much rather have had her with him, but the pharmacy was near the front of the store and he knew he would be able to keep her in sight. “I’ll get you something for your headache.”

  “How did you know I had a headache?” she asked in obvious surprise.

  He shrugged. “You get this little ridge between your brows when your head hurts,” he said, feeling strangely shy about revealing the things he knew about her.

  She studied him openly for a moment. “You do know me, don’t you?”

  He nodded, his gaze brushing hers, sparking like flint on granite. He opened his door, breaking the connection, telling himself to let her take the time she needed, hoping she had the time to take.

  Last night, unable to sleep, he’d stayed up going through old photo albums from when he and Shelley were kids. This morning he’d put in a call to her, just wanting to hear her voice. But she hadn’t been in her room. He’d left a message asking her about the twin-angel Christmas ornament, asking her to call him. The moment he hung up, he wished he hadn’t said anything about the ornament. He hadn’t meant to.

  He felt disconnected, dreading what he might find out, knowing somewhere deep inside himself that the news on neither case would be good, and wondering how he would be able to tell Holly. And Shelley.

  “Slade Rawlins?” Jerry Dunn said when he saw him. “I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”

  Jerry and Slade had gone to school together. They were two of a handful of classmates who still lived in Dry Creek. The difference was, Jerry had left long enough to become a pharmacist. Slade felt anchored here by the past.

  He reached across the counter to shake Jerry’s out-stretched hand. For a pharmacist, Jerry had a hell of a grip. He’d played fullback on the football team and looked as if he still worked out. Jerry had married his high-school sweetheart and started a family. Slade knew why Jerry had stayed in Dry Creek. Jerry had inherited his father’s drugstore and pharmacy when his father’d retired.

  “So how’s business?” Slade asked, although the drugstore was empty except for a young clerk at the front.

  “Crazy before Christmas. Fortunately it’s slowed down, but hey, flu season is coming.” Jerry grinned. “It will pick up.”

  Slade pulled the container of pills from his pocket. “I need to know what these are.”

  “Sure.” The former fullback took the bottle, checked the prescription, then shook a couple of the pills out into a small plastic tray. “Looks like a generic of Xanax. A common anxiety medication,” he added when he saw that the name rang no bells for Slade.

  “Strong?”

  “Not really.”

  Slade glanced toward the truck and Holly. She’d leaned back against the seat, her eyes closed. He’d hoped Jerry was going to tell him that the pills were something strong enough to cause memory loss. But Slade knew it had been a long shot. What pill was strong enough to cause a woman to forget months out of her life?

  “Is there any way to test these pills?” he asked. “A lab, somewhere I can take them?”

  “What about the Butte hospital’s computer?” the young clerk asked. “Can’t they run the number on the pill?”

  Slade hadn’t heard her approach. She was young, college-age, blond and with a look of intelligence. Her name tag said she was Penny.

  “I was just getting ready to suggest that,” Jerry said, obviously not happy about the interruption. “Want me to call for you?” he said to Slade.

  “I can do it,” Penny said. “I’ve been going to pharmaceutical school and I need the practice,” she told Slade. “Isn’t that what you always tell me when it comes to your grunt work, Jerry?” She grinned as she picked up the phone, reaching over to take the tray and pills from Jerry.

  “See this,” she said to Slade as she waited for the hospital to answer. She pointed to a small indentation that appeared to be a letter and a number. “The hospital computer data base can tell you what generic it is.”

  “How long does it take?” he asked.

  “Not long.”

  “Anything else you need?” Jerry asked, sounding a little testy.

  “Yeah, something for a headache.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jerry said, coming out from behind the counter to help him. While they moved through the drugstore, Slade kept an eye on Holly. Jerry asked about Shelley and made polite conversation. He and Jerry never had had much in common, Slade realized.

  Armed with a bottle of painkillers for Holly’s headache and a pop out of the cooler, he and Jerry returned to the pharmacy counter. The clerk was just getting off the phone.

  “Wow,” she said, eyeing one of the pills as she hung up the phone. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these. They’re the same color, size and shape as Xanax, but they’re Halcion.”

  “Are you sure?” Jerry said in surprise.

  “What’s Halcion?” Slade asked.

  Jerry let out a low whistle. “Halcion is an oldie, been around literally for years. It’s a sedative hypnotic,” he said, obviously stealing the young clerk’s thunder.

  Slade felt his breath rush from his lungs. “A hypnotic?”

  “There was this big case in Utah,” the clerk said enthusiastically. “A woman was taking Halcion and killed her mother. Got off too.”

  “Side effects?” Slade managed to ask.

  “Oh yeah,” she said before Jerry could. “Disorientation, light-headedness, mental confusion,
loss of memory, paranoia.”

  He felt a little light-headed himself. “Addictive?”

  “Highly,” Penny said. “This stuff is dangerous. I can’t imagine a pharmacist making a mistake like this.” She eyed the prescription. “The bottle’s so old it’s hard to read where the prescription was first filled. Halcion isn’t easy to come by. It’s so dangerous that you can only get ten pills at a time.”

  Unless you knew someone who could get you the stuff without raising suspicion. The question was, who had put the Halcion in the Xanax bottle? Inez was the obvious choice.

  Jerry picked up the bottle, frowning at the prescription. “Dr. Allan Wellington?”

  “It’s an old prescription.”

  “I guess. He’s been a dead a while, hasn’t he?”

  Not long enough, it seemed.

  “Holly Barrows?” Jerry said, still reading the prescription.

  “A client of mine. Don’t worry, I won’t let her take any more of them.”

  “Good thinking. You want me to throw out the pills for you?”

  “No,” Slade said quickly. “I’d like to hang on to them for a while.”

  Jerry put the pills back in the container. “I’d throw them out if I were you.”

  Not likely. They were evidence.

  Jerry glanced toward Slade’s pickup and the woman sitting inside it, openly curious.

  Slade wasn’t interested in satisfying his curiosity. He thanked Jerry and his assistant for their help and paid for the headache pills and the soda. Behind Jerry on the wall was a family photograph of Jerry and his wife Patty and a couple of towheaded little boys about six and four.

  Slade felt a tug at the sight of the kids and the happy family. He tried to imagine a photo of him and Holly and their little girl—and couldn’t.

  “You should see the latest photos of the kids,” the clerk said, noting what he’d been staring at. “They are the cutest things.”

  He thanked Jerry and Penny again and left, the Halcion safe in his pocket.

  GRATEFULLY, Holly took the bottle of tablets and the drink Slade handed her as he climbed into the pickup.

  “Thanks.”

  He was right. She had a blinding headache. After she tried unsuccessfully to unscrew the cap on the pill bottle, he took it from her, opened it and shook two tablets into her outstretched palm.

  She fumbled to pop the top on the soda can, downing both pills in a swallow of throat-tingling cold liquid. She closed her eyes for a moment, knowing why he’d gone into the pharmacy, afraid of what he’d found out.

  “The pills?” she said after a moment.

  “They’re probably responsible not only for your headache, but also your memory loss,” he said as he started the truck and pulled back out onto the highway.

  “What are they?” she asked, shocked.

  “They aren’t what they say on the prescription.”

  That shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her since Slade had already suspected as much. She listened while he told her about the hypnotic drug and its side effects.

  She was too stunned to speak. “Then it was just the drug. Someone must have mixed up the prescription—”

  “Not likely,” Slade said. “I think there is more to this than just the drug. Did anyone besides Inez have access to the prescription?”

  All she could do was stare at him. Inez. “You think she was the one who—?”

  “It could depend on where she got the prescription filled.”

  Holly looked out the window at the passing town, remembering how Inez had asked last night if she’d taken her pill. How Inez had insisted she go back to Evergreen. How Inez had planned to fire Slade.

  “The other day when I was at your sister-in-law’s, someone buzzed at the gate,” Slade said, not looking at her as he drove. “It was obvious Inez didn’t want me to know who it was. But eventually, she answered the intercom. It was a Dr. O’Brien from Evergreen.”

  Holly felt sick to her stomach. She had to fight back tears of anger—and pain. For the last year, Inez had been her only family. As difficult as Inez had been, Holly had trusted her.

  “I feel like a fool.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Slade said. “The pills are identical to Xanax. You had no reason to believe they were anything but what they said they were on the bottle.”

  “Still…”

  “I think your memory started coming back when you came to Dry Creek and forgot the pills in Pinedale,” he said. “Maybe you did that on purpose.”

  Was it possible that on some subconscious level she’d suspected the pills weren’t really helping her?

  “I talked to a friend of mine last night,” Slade was saying. “He said these kinds of drugs are used in conjunction with hypnosis.”

  Hypnosis?

  “You said you felt as if someone was manipulating you,” he reminded her. “Drugs and hypnosis have been used in mind-control experiments.”

  Hypnosis. She tried to grasp it, her thoughts scattering like bits of paper in the wind. She’d seen a hypnotist once in a bar in Butte. He’d made grown men hop around and cluck and flap their arms like chickens. No, not like chickens. The men had appeared to believe they were chickens.

  “Did Dr. Parris use hypnotism on you at Evergreen?” Slade asked.

  “I don’t remember ever being hypnotized.” She did remember, however, that a hypnotist, through hypnotic suggestion, could wipe out all recollection of a person ever being hypnotized. Case in point: the chicken/men at the bar. They’d gone back to their stools, confused by the laughter and applause, believing the hypnotist had failed to put big, strong men like them “under.”

  At the time, it had seemed silly. Now it was disturbing. “This drug I’ve been taking, would it make it easier for me to be hypnotized?”

  Slade nodded, his gaze seeming to access how hard she was taking this. “I have a feeling you were also programmed to take the pills.”

  The words she’d heard in her head this morning echoed now. It’s time for me to take my pill. Dear God. “So it is possible someone has been controlling me?”

  “I’d say it’s a whole hell of a lot more than possible.”

  Still, Holly hadn’t really accepted the ramifications. Inez had given her the pills. Inez thrived on control. But Allan had written the original prescription. And when she’d met Allan, that’s when it had all begun.

  “But why? It has to be more than just the baby,” she said, watching the dense snowcapped pines blur by as the pickup snaked up the narrow old two-lane road toward the summit of the pass—and Evergreen Institute. She hadn’t seen another car for miles and had forgotten how isolated it was out here. “My memory lapses go back a whole year,” she pointed out.

  “I wish I knew,” Slade said. “Unless they’d had something planned for you that far back.”

  “You mean—” She glanced over at him. “You don’t think they purposely got you and me together?”

  “No. For what purpose?”

  “The baby?” she said. “Like you said, that’s all they appear to have gained.”

  He drove in silence for a moment. “How could they know we would have a baby together?”

  She stared at him. “Because they know everything about us. Once they were in control of my mind…they could control you as well.”

  He smiled over at her. “They couldn’t make me fall in love with you.”

  “Maybe they hadn’t planned on that.” Hadn’t planned on her going back to him this Christmas Eve for help. Hadn’t planned on the bond that had drawn her to him. She wanted desperately to believe that. To believe she and Slade had the upper hand. It gave her hope that they could find their baby and get her back. “Just as they hadn’t planned on my memory coming back and me coming to you for help,” she said, hoping he’d agree.

  He looked over at her and smiled. “I’d like to think we’re one step ahead of them.”

  His smile warmed her to her toes. “Thanks,” she said, feeling almost shy. She
was changing, wasn’t she? She felt stronger. Just knowing that she wasn’t losing her mind helped. That it had been the pills making her feel that way and that someone had been unconsciously forcing her to keep taking the pills. All of it made her angry—and more intent on foiling their plans.

  A thought struck her. “No one knows I’ve quit taking the pills or how much of my memory is coming back.” The thought pleased her immensely. “How long do you think we have before they know?”

  Slade slowed the pickup, turned into a paved, pine-lined driveway, bringing the pickup to a stop before an ornate locked steel gate.

  “That all depends on whether Dr. Parris is in on it,” he said as he rolled down his window and reached out to buzz the intercom of the Evergreen Institute.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dr. Parris seemed genuinely pleased to see Holly. He came from one of the long hallways, his footsteps echoing through the massive stone foyer as he moved toward the reception desk, a tall man with graying hair and long arms and legs that appeared almost disjointed. He reminded Slade of a marionette.

  “Holly,” Parris said, greeting her with a smile. “How are you?”

  “That’s what I hope to talk to you about,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call for an appointment.”

  Parris waved that off, then looked to Slade, his smile still firmly in place. On closer inspection, Slade could see that the doctor seemed disheveled. His pale-blue smock was stained from the leaky pen stuck in the breast pocket and his name tag was askew. He didn’t look like a man who could control anything—certainly not Holly’s mind.

  “This is a…friend of mine,” Holly said. “Slade Rawlins.”

  The doctor offered his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. “Rawlins? Why does that name sound so familiar?” he commented more to himself than to Slade. “Come on down to my office.”

  Slade and Holly followed him down a long, wide marble hallway. The place looked like a palace. Outside, Slade had glimpsed a horse barn, a covered pool and indoor tennis courts. He had seen no patients and hardly any staff. He figured it had something to do with that wonderful scent of food he kept picking up. Not school-cafeteria-type food. A gourmet lunch from the smell of it, served somewhere deep in all this luxury.