Obsession Falls

by Christina Dodd

  She was very aware of the crime she had committed, and also very aware that if the residents of this house returned, she would quickly have to make herself scarce. She did not want to be shot as a trespasser.

  Going back inside, she shut the door behind her and felt the heat soak into her chilled skin. To be warm was a luxury she would never again take for granted.

  Starting with the upper level, she took a tour of the house.

  The upstairs held three bedrooms and a bath. The main floor was the living room, the kitchen, the half bath, the master suite. There, on the wide wooden desk in the bedroom, was a computer. Walking over, she turned it on. While she waited for it to boot, she checked the modem. It was unplugged. She plugged it in. The modem lights came on.

  She had power. She had a way to communicate with the outside world.

  She put her hand on her heart. It fluttered like a trapped bird beneath her palm.

  God. In just a moment, she would be free. She would send an e-mail to the authorities, and the police would take her away and protect her until the monster who had killed—or tried to kill—that child was taken into custody.

  Anticipation hummed like fine wine through her veins.

  Seating herself on the upholstered Queen Anne armchair, she waited for the computer to load. The browser came up. The home page was set to USA Today. The headline flashed on the screen. She was connected. WHO WAS TAYLOR SUMMERS?

  She shook her head. That was the headline? What the hell did that mean?

  She leaned forward. Read it again.

  WHO WAS TAYLOR SUMMERS?

  Her name. Why was her name in a national newspaper? In the headlines?

  And why … why were they talking about her in the past tense?

  She scrolled down.

  Her picture was inserted into the text … and a photo of her rental vehicle, charred and broken.

  She read the words.

  She read them again.

  The article dissected everything about her: her appearance, her parents’ divorce, her education, her career as a successful interior decorator. In cold, cool prose, everything about her life was laid out for the world to see. And the story continually asked—why would a woman with so much going for her kidnap the nephew of the wealthy and powerful Kennedy McManus? And do so with no more motivation than to kill the child and bring misery to those who loved him?

  “I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that!” She was talking to USA Today.

  The article continued, When the child escaped and she had failed, how could she have been so naive as to die in an explosion set by her killer lover?

  She shouted at the monitor, “My killer lover? Who was my killer lover?”

  The picture showed the skinny guy who had dragged the boy out of the trunk, Ramon Hernandez, a guy with a criminal record stretching back to grade school. But he was dead, too, killed by the strike force that had saved the boy.

  Taylor sat back and tried to absorb what she had learned.

  The boy was still alive. At least her actions had helped him.

  But how had the truth become so twisted? The article said the boy was unhurt. He had to know she had nothing to do with holding him.

  Didn’t he tell the authorities what really happened?

  Or rather—why didn’t he tell the authorities what really happened? He had been whisked away by his uncle and not seen since. Was he hurt? Had he had a mental breakdown? Was he in a coma or something?

  Taylor read the article again. Yes. There it was. Kennedy McManus stated his nephew had fallen while escaping, had brain damage, and although he was recovering from the ordeal, he was not expected to regain his memory.

  There was no one to bear witness to her innocence.

  Worse, the article contained no mention of Dash. None.

  How could they have missed Dash?

  The article claimed she had been identified by papers with her name on them. Yes, that was what Taylor had been afraid of. But those papers—“They were drawings. Not sinister plotting. How could you print stuff that’s not true?”

  How could the reporter have researched Taylor’s obscure background and nailed the facts so precisely, but not have gotten one damned thing right about the crime? How could the cops be so stupid?

  Taylor followed another link and found shocked quotes from her coworkers, friends and her first fiancé … and tearful quotes from her mother wondering why Taylor had returned to her childhood home to commit her crime, and if Pete Summers’s suicide had warped her daughter’s youthful psyche.

  “How can you say that?” Taylor asked the computer screen. “He did not commit suicide!” Just like her mother to transfer all the blame for Taylor’s messed-up childhood away from herself and onto Pete Summers, with no care about maligning a good man’s memory … Taylor wiped a tear off her cheek.

  It wasn’t simply that the whole story was wrong, reporting her as one of the kidnappers, saying she was in the car when it exploded and her body had been unrecoverable—it completely missed the fact that someone else was behind the kidnapping, some guy named Jimmy, someone who was willing to commit a heinous crime to make Kennedy McManus miserable.

  Taylor had to do something.

  But what?

  This story made her a fugitive.

  No, worse than that.

  She was dead.

  She didn’t exist.

  She had nowhere to go.

  She searched and found the story repeated in every major newspaper in the country. For some reason—slow news week—this story had caught the country’s imagination. Predictably, the Idaho Mountain Express, Sun Valley’s weekly newspaper, had featured her as a local girl gone wrong, complete with her fourth-grade school photo, big teeth and crooked bangs, and a picture of the Summers’s home before demolition.

  She rubbed her sunburned forehead. Rubbed her cracked, blistered lips. Rubbed her bloodshot eyes. She felt as if she needed to wipe herself clean from this terrible injustice. She got up and paced away, came back and sat down, and read more articles that restated those same wrong “facts” as if they were gospel, searching for some version of the facts. The truth. But it wasn’t there.

  She did find that the few remains of Taylor Summers the FBI had been able to recover were now buried in a cemetery in Maryland.

  Her mother knew perfectly well Taylor wanted to be buried in Idaho.

  Or maybe her mother didn’t. They’d never discussed Taylor’s desires when it came to her death. Why would they? Taylor was twenty-nine, in excellent health, both physical and mental, although to read these articles, it was clear her mental health was now in doubt. In fact, when she made the mistake of reading the comments, it became clear she was a woman despised and reviled throughout the world. She was a pariah—or would be, if she was alive.

  The comments finally drove her from her morbid fascination with her own demise and into the bathroom. She turned on the water. She peeled off her clothes and stuffed them into the trash under the sink. She pulled the plastic bag out of the can and put it by the door. She stepped into the glass shower enclosure and into the steamy warmth, and scrubbed herself hard, peeling off a week’s worth of grime, scrubbing under her nails, trying to avoid the memory of the erroneous articles and the harsh comments. How dare those people, total strangers, read about her life and presume to make judgment?

  She found herself talking out loud, arguing with unseen opponents, defending herself for a crime she hadn’t committed.

  “I was trying to help that kid. I put my life on the line for a child I didn’t even know. I didn’t do it blindly. I knew I was putting myself at risk. Maybe it wasn’t the best plan. I mean, it was a stupid plan. But it worked! It’s not like I expected any thanks. I didn’t. But I didn’t expect to freeze and starve and live in constant fear from every beast in the forest. I didn’t expect to have my car booby-trapped and exploded, and in the process, almost get blown up. I didn’t expect to descend into such desperation that I broke into my own hous
e…” Her voice broke. She gave a hard, dry sob.

  She washed her hair, using copious amounts of shampoo and conditioner, trying to remove pine sap and needles and dirt and tangles …

  “I’m a criminal. I’m afraid to go back to civilization. I’m afraid they’ll put me in prison. I’m afraid Dash, who is evidently as free as a bird and not a suspect at all, will find and kill me. How did this happen? No good deed goes unpunished, and all that? Winter’s coming. How can I survive? I’m going to die up here.”

  She heard her voice echoing off the tile. She was ranting. She sounded like a crazy woman. Maybe she was a crazy woman.

  She used the squeegee to clean the shower—this place had saved her life, and she wanted to leave it the same way she’d found it. She got out, wrapped one towel around her head and one around her body. She stood indecisively, then started toward the closet. She had to have something else to wear. She hoped to hell the lady of the house was approximately her size.

  As she turned, she caught sight of someone in the mirror. She jumped violently, and swung to look behind her.

  She was alone.

  Incredulous, she turned back and stared. She took a step forward. She touched her cheek.

  Who was that woman in the mirror?

  Her face had been pleasantly rounded, a placid face with brown eyes and lips that smiled often.

  She dropped the towel.

  Her body had been curvy, with soft hips, a well-defined waist, and generous boobs.

  That face was gone. That body was gone. They had vanished as if they had never been. In their place were features refined by terror, by hunger, by pain. Her chin was squared-off and determined, her cheeks gaunt, and the gash on her left cheek had barely begun to heal. Her artfully highlighted hair was growing out, showing her brunette roots. Sunburn had blistered her pale skin, time and again, until it was raw on her cheeks, forehead, and arms. Her eyes were too big, like a starving African child’s.

  But those eyes contained none of the innocence of childhood; they had stared into the heart of darkness and seen her own death. The veneer of civilization had been stripped away. She was a beast like any of the other beasts in the forest; she would take whatever action necessary to survive.

  Coldly, deliberately, she would survive.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For the first time, Taylor understood who she was and what she was made of, what she would do and say and be to continue on this earth … and, someday, to get her revenge on the men who had destroyed her life, and find justice for herself.

  The doubts she had experienced at breaking into the home of strangers, at eating their food and claiming their clothing, faded. Someday she would make it up to them, but if this was what she had to do, she would do it.

  She rummaged through the drawers in the bathroom until she found the supply of Band-Aids. And, glory hallelujah, there was an Ace elastic bandage. She wrapped her wrist—it felt better—and went back into the bedroom.

  A glance at the photos on the desk proved to Taylor that she was never going to wear the mother’s clothes. A wedding photo taken about twenty years earlier featured a very tall, very pregnant woman in a gorgeous white gown and a man who topped her by at least two inches. Both were beaming.

  These were the owners of Taylor’s property.

  The picture almost made her like them.

  A more recent photo showed the entire family on the ski slope—father, mother, tall teenage son, and one glaring, resentful, eyebrow-pierced teenage daughter who was about five inches shorter than the mother.

  The mother was the kind of person who had pewter picture frames etched with names: the father was Brandon, she was Susan, the son was Jules, the daughter was—improbably—Cissie. They were the Renners, so all-American they made Taylor’s teeth hurt. Holding the photo, she sank to her knees and stared.

  Taylor used to be like them. She used to be the kind of woman no one noticed when she walked down the street. She wore semi-fashionable clothes, changed her hair color on a regular basis, used deodorant, brushed and flossed. Now she was … not normal. Not likely to remain clean, deodorized, or flossed. Not all-American.

  Now she wore nothing but a towel. She had nothing that was hers except for a few drawing pencils kept in a hip pack. She was even worse than poor. She was dead, an outcast, a foreigner in her own country.

  She stood, placed the photo back on the desk, and donned Susan’s robe. The hem probably hit Susan about mid-thigh; it hit Taylor right at the knee. She went back to the desk and contemplated the browser.

  She needed to communicate with someone, to explain that she was alive and not guilty, and that she had information to provide. But to whom?

  Simply to contact a random police officer or a random official of any kind seemed at best suicidal. She needed a name, someone she knew.

  Kennedy McManus was the logical choice.

  She went looking for a way to contact him.

  She found no direct way. Not surprising—she had worked with many wealthy, powerful people and they weren’t readily accessible.

  She’d worked on Maryland senator Bert Hansen’s home. But she was under no illusions; he was a politician first, and if he had the chance to bring a notorious criminal to justice, he would do so with all the fanfare of a magician revealing his greatest sleight of hand. While in Eastern Europe, she had run into a CIA agent. Yes, she knew the CIA only worked outside of the States, but surely any kind of official government contact was better than none. On the other hand, she and Elsa Medcalf had not hit it off. In retrospect, Taylor should have sucked up to Elsa.

  Taylor could get in touch with her mother, who was married to an executive of a company contracted for government work. But the thought of going to her mother for help, after her mother’s betrayal of her and her father … Taylor could not. She could not.

  She put her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands. This wasn’t as easy as it should be. She should be able to go to the police. She should believe they were honest and trustworthy. She did not.

  Which brought her back to Kennedy McManus. She needed to research him, see if she could figure out any way to …

  She lifted her head from her hands. Outside, she heard the spit of gravel beneath wheels. She turned her head and listened harder.

  A car. A car had just driven up to the front door.

  Her heart started pounding, strong, rapid.

  She turned off the computer. She glanced at the French doors that led onto the porch. Should she run out? But what if someone came around that direction? What if … what if this was Dash? She would be caught. She would be killed.

  The front door opened.

  She crawled under the desk.

  Men’s voices in the living room. Not angry, not threatening—not Dash—just chatting back and forth.

  Not Dash, but still dangerous to her. Did they live here?

  The voices got farther away, then closer.

  She huddled against the wall, then forced herself behind the desk drawers. She was not invisible, but unless these men bent down and looked, they wouldn’t see her. She hoped.

  They came into the master bedroom. One guy said, “No sign of an intruder in here, either.”

  “Something tripped the sensor.”

  The sensors. Of course. There were motion sensors in this house. She should have known.

  “The branch broke the window. The debris set off the sensors.”

  The other guy was stubborn. “Last night the branch broke the window! The monitors recorded the break then and the motion then. That shouldn’t have tripped the sensors today.”

  These were the guys from the local home-security office. And it had taken them over twelve hours to arrive from town to check out the problem? The Renners should be informed. Not that Taylor was going to do it.

  “There’s nothing out of place here,” the first guy said.

  Thank God she had wiped up after herself.

  He continued, “If we don�
��t find anything, we’ll send a technician. I’ll tell you what he’ll find—he’ll find a mouse chewed on wiring and we’ve got a short.”

  Legs walked past the desk.

  Heart pounding, Taylor pressed herself into a compact ball. When Dash had chased her, she had given everything to her physical reactions. She had gasped, feared, run, sought refuge. She had been an animal in flight.

  Now she was an animal in hiding, frozen in place, trembling, afraid to make a sound, to allow a single panicked breath to escape her. She wanted to stand, to shout she was innocent, to tell them she had entered the house only in the most dire of circumstances, to ask what they would have done in her place.

  But she knew, without having ever faced this situation before, that she did not want to deal with smug, homegrown guys who couldn’t wait to bring in their first trespasser.

  The second guy said, “I’m going to check upstairs again.”

  “Sure. You do that.” The first guy walked into the bathroom, didn’t shut the door, took a pee that echoed along the tile floor and back to the place where Taylor trembled.

  Would he notice the evidence of her recent shower?

  He flushed, walked out into the bedroom, and stood there.

  Was he looking for her?

  He sighed, and the bed creaked.

  She couldn’t believe it. He was sitting on the bed?

  The mattress creaked again.

  Was he getting up? Leaving?

  No. No footsteps.

  That guy was lying on the Renners’ bed! What a creep. He was in someone else’s house, and he made himself at home in the owners’ bedroom!

  She hated this guy.

  He sighed. A moment of silence, then, “Hey, Brian. It’s Logan. I’m out at the Renners’ place. No sign of a break-in, but for sure a broken window and probably some wire damage by rodents … Yeah, happens when you live in the middle of a prairie. Listen, when do you think you can send someone out?… Sounds good. I’ll let Gary know. He’s searching the attic.” Chuckling. “Yeah, he’s still got that rookie enthusiasm.” Logan clicked off.