When he stood close, the hairs on my scalp tingled, and I had the brief but distinct feeling of an ice cube slithering down the back of my neck.
“I want to go home,” was all I said.
Mom and Detective Basso shared a look.
“Dr. Howlett needs to run a few tests,” Mom said.
“What kind of tests?”
“Oh, things related to your amnesia. It’ll be over in no time. And then we’ll go home.” She waved a hand dismissively, which only made me more suspicious.
I faced Detective Basso, since he seemed to have all the answers. “What aren’t you telling me?” His expression was as unfaltering as steel. I supposed years as a cop had perfected that look.
“We need to run a few tests. Make sure everything is fine.” Fine?
What part of any of this seemed fine to him?
CHAPTER 3
MY MOM AND I LIVE IN A FARMHOUSE NESTLED between Coldwater’s city limits and the remote outback regions of Maine. Stand at any window, and it’s like a glimpse back in time. Vast unadulterated wilderness on one side, flaxen fields framed by evergreen trees on the other. We live at the end of Hawthorne Lane and are divided from our nearest neighbors by a mile. At night, with the fireflies lighting up the trees in gold, and the fragrance of warm, musky pine overwhelming the air, it’s not hard to trick my mind into believing I’ve transported myself into a completely different century. If I slant my vision just so, I can even picture a red barn and grazing sheep.
Our house has white paint, blue shutters, and a wraparound porch with a slope grade visible to the nak*d eye. The windows are long and narrow, and protest with an obnoxiously loud groan when pushed open. My dad used to say there was no need to instal an alarm in my bedroom window, a secret joke between us, since we both knew I was hardly the kind of daughter to sneak out.
My parents moved into the farmhouse-slash-money-pit shortly before I was born on the philosophy that you can’t argue with love at first sight. Their dream was straightforward: to slowly restore the house to its charming 1771 condition, and one day hammer a bed-and-breakfast sign in the front yard and serve the best lobster bisque up and down Maine’s coast. The dream dissolved when my dad was murdered one night in downtown Portland.
This morning I’d been released from the hospital, and now I was alone in my room. Hugging a pillow to my chest, I eased back on my bed, my eyes nostalgically tracing the coll age of pictures tacked to a corkboard on the wall. There were snapshots of my parents posing at the top of Raspberry Hill, Vee modeling a span-dex Catwoman disaster she sewed for Hall oween a few years back, my sophomore yearbook picture. Looking at our smiling faces, I tried to fool myself into believing I was safe now that I was back in my world. The truth was, I’d never feel safe and I’d never have my life back until I could remember what I’d gone through during the last five months, particularly the last two and a half. Five months seemed insignificant held up against seventeen years (I’d missed my seventeenth birthday during those eleven unaccountable weeks), but the missing gap was all I could see. A huge hole standing in my path, blocking me from seeing beyond it. I had no past, no future. Only a huge void that haunted me.
The tests Dr. Howlett had ordered had come back fine, just fine. As far as anyone could tell, except for a few healing cuts and bruises, my physical health was as stel ar as it had been on the day I’d gone missing.
But the deeper things, the invisible things, those parts of me that lay under the surface out of reach of any test—with those things I found my resilience wavering. Who was I now? What had I undergone during those missing months? Had the trauma shaped me in ways I would never understand? Or worse, never recover from?
Mom had imposed a strict no-visitors policy while I was in the hospital, and Dr. Howlett had backed her up. I could understand their concern, but now that I was home and slowly settling back into the familiarity of my world, I wasn’t going to let Mom seal me up with the well-meant but misguided intention of protecting me. Maybe I was changed, but I was still me. And the only thing I wanted right now was to talk everything out with Vee.
Downstairs, I swiped Mom’s BlackBerry off the counter and took it back to my room. When I’d woken up in the cemetery, I hadn’t had my cell phone with me, and until I picked up a replacement, her phone would have to do.
IT’S NORA. CAN U TALK? I texted Vee. It was late, and Vee’s mom enforced lights-out at ten. If I called, and her mom heard the ring, it could mean a lot of trouble for Vee. Knowing Mrs. Sky, I didn’t think she’d be lenient, even with the special nature of the circumstances.
A moment later the BlackBerry chimed. BABE?!?!!!!!! AM FREAKING OUT. AM A TOTAL WRECK. WHERE R U?
CALL ME AT THIS NUMBER.
I set the BlackBerry in my lap, chewing the tip of my nail. I couldn’t believe how nervous I felt. This was Vee. But best friends or not, we hadn’t talked in months. It didn’t feel that long in my mind, but there it was. Thinking of the two sayings, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” versus “Out of sight, out of mind,” I was definitely hoping for the former.
Even though I was expecting Vee’s call, I still jumped when the BlackBerry rang.
“hello? hello?” Vee said.
Hearing her voice caused my throat to thicken with emotion. “It’s me!” I choked.
“’Bout time,” she huffed, but her voice sounded thick and emotional too. “I was at the hospital all day yesterday, but they wouldn’t let me see you. I bolted past security, but they called a code ninetynine and chased me down. They escorted me out in handcuffs, and by escorted I mean there was a lot of kicking and bad language being slung in both directions. The way I see it, the only criminal here is your mom. No visitors? I’m your best friend, or did she not get the memo every year for the past eleven? Next time I’m over, I am going to lay into that woman.” In the darkness, I felt my trembling lips crack into a smile. I clutched the phone to my chest, torn between laughing and crying. I should have known Vee wouldn’t let me down. The memory of everything that had gone horribly wrong since I’d woken up in the cemetery three nights ago was quickly eclipsed by the mere fact that I had the best friend in the world. Maybe everything else had changed, but my relationship with Vee was rock solid. We were unbreakable. Nothing could change that.
“Vee,” I breathed, a sigh of relief. I wanted to bask in the normalcy of this moment. It was late, we were supposed to be sleeping, and here we were, chatting with the lights off. Last year Vee’s mom had trashed Vee’s phone after catching her talking to me after lights-out. The next morning, in front of the whole neighborhood, Vee went Dumpster diving for it. To this day, she uses that phone. We call it Oscar, as in Oscar the Grouch.
“Are they giving you quality drugs?” Vee asked. “Apparently Anthony Amowitz’s dad is a pharmacist, and I could probably score you some good stuff.” My eyebrows lifted in surprise. “What’s this? You and Anthony?”
“Heck, no. Not like that. I’ve sworn off guys. If I need romance, that’s what Netflix is for.” I’ll believe it when I see it, I thought with a smirk. “Where is my best friend and what have you done with her?”
“I’m doing boy detox. Like a diet, only for my emotional health. Never mind that, I’m coming over,” Vee continued. “I haven’t seen my best friend in three months, and this phone reunion is crap. Girl, I’m gonna show you the bear in hug.”
“Good luck getting past my mom,” I said. “She’s the new spokeswoman for helicopter parenting.”
“That woman!” Vee hissed. “I’m making the sign of the cross right now.” We could debate my mom’s status as a witch another day. Right now, we had more important things to discuss. “I want a rundown of the days leading up to my kidnapping, Vee,” I said, taking our conversation to a far more serious level. “I can’t shake the feeling that my kidnapping wasn’t random. There had to have been warning signs, but I can’t remember any of them. My doctor said the memory loss is temporary, but in the meantime I need you to tell me where I went, what I did, and who I was with that last week. Walk me through it.”
Vee was slow to answer. “You sure this is a good idea? It’s kind of soon to stress about that stuff.
Your mom told me about the amnesia—”
“Seriously?” I interjected. “You’re going to side with my mom?”
“Stuff it,” Vee muttered, relenting.
For the next twenty minutes, she recounted every event during that final week. The more she talked, however, the more my heart sank. No bizarre phone calls. No strangers skulking unexpectedly into my life. No unusual cars following us around town.
“What about the night I disappeared?” I asked, interrupting her midsentence.
“We went to Delphic Amusement Park. I remember taking off to buy hot dogs … and then all hell broke loose. I heard gunfire and people started stampeding out of the park. I circled back to find you, but you were gone. I figured you’d done the smart thing and bolted. Only I didn’t find you in the parking lot. I would have gone back inside the park, but the police came and kicked everybody out. I tried to tell them that you might still be in the park, but they weren’t in the mood. They forced everyone home. I called you a zill ion times, but you didn’t answer.” It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. Gunfire? Delphic had a reputation, but still.
Gunfire? It was so bizarre—so completely outrageous—that had anyone other than Vee been telling me, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Vee said, “I never saw you again. I found out later about the whole hostage situation.”
“Hostage situation?”
“Apparently the same psychopath who shot up the park held you hostage in the mechanical room under the fun house. Nobody knows why. He eventually let you go and bolted.” I opened my mouth, shut it. At last I managed a shocked, “What?”
“The police found you, got your statement, and took you home around two in the morning. That was the last anybody saw you. As for the guy who took you hostage … nobody knows what happened to him.”
Right then, all the threads converged into one. “I must have been taken from my house,” I concluded, working it out as I went. “After two a.m., I was probably sleeping. The guy who held me hostage must have followed me home. Whatever he hoped to accomplish at Delphic was interrupted, and he came back for me. He must have broken in.”
“That’s the thing. There was no sign of a struggle. Doors and windows were all locked.” I kneaded the heel of my hand into my forehead. “Did the police have any leads? This guy—
whoever he was—couldn’t have been a complete ghost.”
“They said he was most likely using a phony name. But for what it’s worth, you told them his name was Rixon.”
“I don’t know anyone named Rixon.”
Vee sighed. “That’s the problem. Nobody does.” She was quiet a moment. “Here’s another thing.