What She Saw

by Sheila Lowe

  She rang off from the call, unsatisfied. Her gut told her that Kevin Nguyen knew something.

  You’re being paranoid.

  Oh yeah, it’s just a coincidence that they do a search on my first day back at work when I wanted to smuggle contraband.

  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

  After lunch, Simon phoned. His tone was cool and it didn’t take a psychic to sense him nursing his resentment. He was down in the lab and asked Jenna to bring the security clearance paperwork for the new consultants.

  She took the elevator down to the basement and used her card key to open a door marked Laboratory. A young female technician hunched over a microscope glanced up as she entered. “Hi Jen. Wow, Keisha was right, that haircut is awesome on you. Where’d you get it done?”

  Jenna returned the smile and came up with the first lie that popped into her head. “A friend in Solana Beach did it for me.”

  “She did an awesome job. Hey, if you’re looking for Dr. Lawrie, they’re in the library.”

  Following the jerk of the tech’s head, at the far end of the lab Jenna came to a door that led onto a corridor lined on both sides with more doors.

  Each was marked Lab 1, Data Center, Lab 2, Microscopy, Lab 3, Machinery, and so on. Long horizontal windows allowed someone in the corridor to see technicians at work benches inside the rooms.

  The library was a sizable, attractive room trimmed in ash veneer and lined on each side with bookcases that contained numerous scientific magazines. There were relatively few books, which seemed odd until it occurred to Jenna that due to the speed with which scientific advances were made, many books would be obsolete before they hit the shelves, while periodicals could be rapidly updated.

  Through the glass wall of a reading room at the back, she could see Simon seated at a round table with Dr. Raisa Polzin, the woman she had encountered in the ladies room the previous evening, and a distinguished-looking bald man in a tailored sport coat, his white dress shirt open at the neck. He wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses and sported a greying goatee.

  “Oh, there you are,” said Simon, rising when Jenna arrived at the open door. He beckoned her into the room and turned to the other man. “Dr. Kapur, I don’t believe you’ve met my assistant. This is Jenna.”

  Dr. Kapur rose and acknowledged her with a slight bow. “A pleasure indeed. We have spoken on the telephone so many times.”

  “It’s good to meet you,” Jenna said, as if she knew what they had spoken about. She turned with a small start of surprise to the other woman seated at the table. A woman she recognized from the photos in Simon’s office. Yesterday, Simon had expressed fear that his wife had caused Jenna bodily harm.

  What is she doing here?

  “Hi there, Jenna,” Christine Palmer said. Her mouth smiled, but her eyes glittered with animosity. Jenna gave her a nod and an uncertain smile.

  What do I call her? Mrs. Lawrie? Ms. Palmer? Christine?

  Simon answered the unspoken question. “Christine brought Dr. Kapur out from DC with her to tour the lab before his people take over next week. You have the paperwork ready, Jen?”

  He looked perfectly at ease, bringing his wife and his lover together in the same room, which made Jenna dislike him. How had she dealt with such meetings before her amnesia? She could not imagine ever feeling comfortable about it.

  Setting the file folder containing the security clearance applications on the table in front of Dr. Kapur, she said, “Welcome to BioNeutronics, Doctor. If you would complete and return these to me today, I’ll take them to our security chief so they can be processed right away.”

  Dr. Kapur thanked her and murmured that he would handle it. His speculative gaze flicked from Simon to her, lingering for a moment that stretched, but his interest barely registered. For Jenna, Christine Palmer had sucked all of the air from the room and it was all she could manage to keep her breathing steady. She was afraid her cheeks were flushed bright red with embarrassment.

  You should feel guilty. Homewrecker.

  I’m not a homewrecker. The marriage was already over.

  Whatever gets you through the day.

  Raisa Polzin remained silent in the background while the men began to discuss the security forms. Was it because she didn’t like having Dr. Kapur’s employees foisted upon her that she looked as sour as if she’d been sucking on a lemon?

  Or maybe she had been in charge of Project 42 and it was being removed from her control.

  “Dr. Kapur’s people will be working in the new lab,” Simon said to Jenna. “I’ll let Kevin Nguyen know about the additional clearance level they’ll need.” He turned back to the scientist. “Card key entry will be limited to those personnel and me. Information strictly on a need to know basis until the clinical trials are complete. The reader will be installed on the door before Monday.” Glancing over at Jenna, he seemed surprised to see her still there. “Er, thanks, Jen, that’s it for now.”

  And with that, she was dismissed, which ticked her off because she had hoped to learn more about Project 42 and the high level of security surrounding it.

  She left the reading room and had started back across the library when Christine Palmer’s voice called her name. “Oh, Jenna, could I have a moment?”

  Palmer hurried over and slipped an arm through hers, so that from a distance it looked as though they were friends. No one could see the way she gouged her fingernails into the flesh of Jenna’s arm. Or the way she dug in mercilessly when Jenna tried to pull away.

  Palmer moved in closer, as if she were about to share a secret. “We know what you’re up to, you little scammer,” she hissed so that no one but Jenna could hear. “Just don’t think you’re going to get away with it.”

  s i x t e e n

  Simon did not appear for the rest of the day and the afternoon was dominated by memories of Christine Palmer’s implied threat. Was it possible that she knew about the files she had downloaded onto the flash drive? Had someone found it and turned it in? If that were so, Palmer must already have been confronted with the evidence. Or had the senator been referring to her affair with Simon? And who was the “we” she had referred to?

  There was no security check that afternoon. If she had left the damn flash drive buried in her office overnight, Jenna could have walked it straight through the exit.

  Dumbass.

  Yep.

  After a dinner comprised of a salad and a carton of yogurt, Jenna checked for new email. Along with the usual glut of spam, there was one from Zach, inviting her to a party on Saturday. Mingling in a group of people unknown to her was out of the question. She was not up to attempting to bluff more than one person at a time.

  Did she have no other friends? What about Belle, the one name in her phone’s contact list? She considered calling the number, but decided against it, for fear that Belle was just a service provider or something equally impersonal.

  For a few minutes, Jenna gave in to her own personal little pity party. Here she was, twenty-seven years old, it was Friday night, and she was home alone with her computer and one good email. She could at least have had a cat. But that would be no good if she kept forgetting who she was and where she lived. The poor creature would never know when he would next be fed.

  As she emailed Zach back, letting him know she would be out of town on Saturday—Dr. Gold’s office in Venice was sort of out of town—but thanks for thinking of her, it occurred to her that the entire day had passed without a headache or a blackout, or any buzzing. That felt like some kind of progress.

  Before powering down the computer, Jenna decided to Google Christine Palmer and discovered that the man with whom she had been having an affair was married to a United States Senator.

  Holy shit.

  Scouring the web for information, Jenna learned that Palmer was a hardcore political animal whose presidential aspirations were well documented in articles that were rife with speculation about her ambitions. More than one reporter noted that not since Sarah Palin’s
resignation as governor of Alaska in 2009 had there been so much conjecture about a possible bid for the presidency.

  Jenna sat back and thought about it. What if Christine Palmer had just learned of her husband’s affair? What steps might she take to keep it away from the likes of CNN, or the Huffington Post, or FOX News? Simon was right. If the media got a whiff of scandal they would be on it like ravening dogs. How far would Palmer go to keep something like this quiet? Not far enough to cause her husband’s paramour physical harm—or worse. Would she?

  Simon had thought she would go that far.

  That afternoon in the library, the other woman had been palpably threatening. The faint crescent marks of her nails biting into Jenna’s flesh were visible proof. She would have drawn blood if she had thought she could get away with it.

  But if Palmer had indeed engineered some kind of attack last weekend, how had Jenna survived it? And how had she ended up on a train to Ventura with no memory?

  Then there was the question of the car accident. Simon had not been the driver of the car in her hypnotic trance. Those dark, demented eyes that haunted her were not his baby blues.

  She typed Simon’s name into the Google search engine, eager to read what Wikipedia had to say about him.

  There were far less entries for Simon Willard Lawrie, Ph.D than his wife, but under “Early life” Jenna learned that Simon was eighteen years her senior, born and raised in a small Texas town, the only child of Willard Lawrie, Jr., a hardware store owner, and Janice Sweet Lawrie, a homemaker. Simon won a full scholarship to UCLA, where he studied biochemistry and met Christine Morelli Palmer, a Poli Sci major.

  After graduation, he had earned his chops at a major pharmaceuticals company in Buffalo, then Christine gave birth to two sons and got herself elected to the city council. The family moved back to California in the early 1990s and, partnering with a group of well-funded businessmen, Simon founded BioNeutronics Laboratories, which subsequently flourished. The article mentioned his pride in maintaining a private laboratory that was independent of government funding and therefore, government interference.

  Independent of his wife’s influential contacts?

  The other articles detailed Bioneutronics’ various research projects and accomplishments. No mention was made of Project 42, but given the level of secrecy Simon had impressed upon her, she had not expected to find any.

  Jenna switched off the computer, snippets and remnants of scenes and conversations over the past three days spiraling through her brain as if trying to find the right place to dock. There must be some way to make sense of what she had come to learn about herself.

  Bent on writing it all down, she went looking for a pen and paper. She might not be the super-organized Jenna that she had been B.A.—Before Amnesia—but she was organized enough to know that making a list could be a good start.

  The meticulously arranged junk drawer yielded a pen and lined steno pad. Propping herself against a pile of pillows on the bed with the pad against her knees, Jenna began to summarize her life as she had come to know it:

  Fact: Unconscious—how long? More than a day?

  Fact: Train from Solana Beach to Ventura

  Fact: Three addresses: Marina del Rey, Ventura, Escondido

  Fact: Blackouts, headaches, buzzing in head

  Fact: Asked Dr. Gold about betrayal

  Fact: Told Dr. Gold someone is going to kill me

  Question: Hypnosis. Car accident?

  Fact: Employed at BioNeutronics Laboratories

  Fact: Affair with boss

  Question: How long?

  Fact: Boss’ wife a senator

  Fact: Buried flash drive–Project 42 info?

  Question: Why was Project 42 erased?

  Fact: 3 days after amnesia, no additional memory loss

  Question: Crying—

  Not going there.

  She had started to write “crying child,” but a wave of nausea left her queasy and clammy all over. So much for making progress. She scribbled over the letters until they were obliterated, as if that could erase the child’s face from her consciousness.

  When she reviewed the list, it said a lot and it said nothing.

  Her handwriting was small, the printed letters squashed close together. Jenna wondered what the handwriting analyst would make of it.

  Probably think I’m a psycho.

  She’d probably be right.

  The day had left her utterly depleted. Her eyelids were drooping, her breathing slowed. Already half-asleep, she turned onto her side, forgetting the pen and steno pad. They clattered to the tile floor.

  Clumsy as well as psycho.

  Leave me the hell alone.

  Leaning over the side to pick up the notebook, she found that the pen had rolled under the bed. She knelt on the cool tile floor and reached under the bed skirt for the pen.

  Her fingertips came in contact with something else.

  s e v e n t e e n

  A cell phone.

  My phone is in my purse on the dining table.

  Then whose phone is this, and why is it under my bed?

  This was a newer model than the plain old flip phone she had found in her backpack. A much fancier “there’s an app for that” kind of phone.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out how to turn it on. The LCD display lit up and she slid an experimental fingertip across the icons, accessing the various menus. A string of text messages from Simon Lawrie clogged the Inbox. So he had not lied about trying to reach her after all.

  What the hell is going on?

  Two names. Two driver’s licenses. Two phones.

  Simon had sent twenty-three texts over a span of three days, the first received last Friday at seven p.m. The final one had arrived on Monday at eleven-forty-eight p.m, the tone increasing in urgency as the days passed. They started with a terse request for Jenna to call him; went on to order her to call; finally begged her to call. The last one implied more than a hint of desperation: G-d it, J, WTF are you??? Can’t stand this!

  Was this phone for Simon’s calls alone?

  According to the voice mail indicator there were messages waiting, but without the password, access was beyond her reach. In the contacts folder the first name on the list caught her by surprise: Ariel. The Little Mermaid again.

  She tapped on the name and lifted the phone to her ear.

  A few seconds after the first ring, muffled music from the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack sounded in the living room. Jenna barreled into the living room, reaching the dining room table just as the voicemail announcement began in her ear: “It’s Jessica, leave a message.”

  Jessica.

  Her voice. It sounded flat, half-dead, as if it were an insurmountable task to rally the strength to say the five words. She grappled the purse open and read with no surprise the name on the phone’s LCD screen: Belle.

  Clicking off before the beep, she set the phone she had found under the bed on the dining table and navigated to the contacts folder of the other phone. She selected the name “Belle” and pressed send.

  The second phone began to play a ring tone from Part of Your World, a song from the Little Mermaid soundtrack. After the fourth ring, the announcement began and her own cheerful voice said, “It’s Jenna, leave a message.”

  ***

  “I want to make sure she feels safe,” Zebediah Gold said into his cordless phone. “She’s in a very vulnerable place. We have to take it easy, give her time to deal with what’s happened to her.”

  On the other end of the line, Claudia Rose, the handwriting analyst, readily concurred. “Understood. So, how do you want to play it?”

  “It might be best if you were to meet her first, then have Joel join us once she’s comfortable with you.

  That would be less threatening than having to face two new people together, knowing they’ve got you under the microscope.”

  “You’re the shrink, dear doc. I’m just the humble handwriting analyst, grovelling at the feet of
the master.”

  Gold gave a low huff of laughter. “Oh, darling, if that were but true.”

  “I’m prostrating myself as we speak,” Claudia cracked, then got serious. “Do you think there’s any possibility of Dissociative Identity Disorder?”

  “It’s too soon to make that kind of diagnosis. Right now, I’m more concerned with helping her be able to verbalize what she’s experiencing.”

  “Am I correct in assuming you want me to collect a new handwriting sample for analysis?”

  “But of course, my sweet. When have your insights not helped in a case we’ve worked together? Anyway, you’ve met her before. I’d like to get your impressions of her now.”

  “It’s an interesting case.”

  “It is that. The amnesia appears to be complete for her personal past. But her cognitive functioning seems unimpaired. Which leads me to think the amnesia is the result of a trauma, rather than some sort of organic brain disease. She refused medical testing, so at this point that’s guesswork from my own observations.”

  “You mentioned a hypnosis session?”

  “Yes. It was obvious she experienced something under hypnosis that she refused to talk about. Whatever it was shook her in a profound way.” He checked the wall clock. “I need to go, she should be here any minute.”

  “Okay, I’m on my way. I’ll ask Joel to give us a fifteen minute head start.”

  Gold rang off and set the phone back in its base, then began to prepare for his appointment with Jenna. Or Jessica. He wondered which one would show up. Claudia’s question about Dissociative Identity Disorder or multiple personality as a possibility was an intriguing one that could not be adequately answered in just one or two sessions.

  ***

  Jenna settled into the chair she had taken before. “Was that statue there last time?” she asked, noticing a small bronze figurine on the table. “I don’t remember it.”