by Ted Dekker
The lake threw off a breeze that caught the back of Shauna’s neck. She shivered and felt her knees give way, and then it seemed the ground opened. She started to drop and instinctively closed her eyes, but when she continued to fall, she found the will to open them.
She fell through a vertical black tunnel lined with images, three-dimensional, nearly holographic. Random images, hundreds of images, of schools, sports, clubs, office spaces, people. She tried to focus on one or two and found the rate of her descent decrease. She reached out to touch one of the pictures and got an electric shock.
Foreign locations—a desert, a forest—were in some of the pictures. She saw her family. She saw herself. She saw a hospital. Water.
She saw her car and reached out for the image as if she could grab it and stop her fall completely. Her hands burned when she plunged them into the grainy image. She kept falling, and then the bottom of the tunnel opened like the platform of a dunk tank and dropped her into a well of freezing water. Her breath caught in her throat and her body went numb.
The cold rose to her waist.
She opened her eyes and saw herself coughing in the water of a black river, slapping the surface as if it might hold her up. Was this her own memory? She had come close enough to dying then, perhaps.
No, it was the memory of someone watching her.
Wayne. He had pulled her out.
She saw herself call his name between gasps of frozen breath, and he reached for her. Gripped her shoulder with his left hand.
Shoved her under the water.
Held her down.
Held her. Under.
Shauna could not be sure if the fear that penetrated her then was cast off of the memory or resident in the moment, in the truth of what she saw. Wayne Spade had tried to drown her.
He had, in fact, tried to knife her. On his right hand, she saw his blue class ring; and in his right palm, a short knife with a pearl handle.
He dropped the knife into the water behind him as if it were a scoop on a water wheel, and brought it up against the drag until it hit flesh. Her flesh.
He withdrew the blade and drove it in again.
In some other world, Shauna felt a pointed ache in her ribs.
The third time, he lifted the weapon out of the water, and the moonlight bounced off a broken tip.
Sirens sounded, bouncing off the bank of the river.
He swore, crammed the knife into his pocket, and bent over her, scooping her up under her armpits. She appeared to be unconscious. The water fell off her skin as he dragged her in, her heels scraping over rocks and grit onto a shore covered in dry winter scrub.
He rolled her onto her back and began to administer CPR.
When he covered her mouth with his, she lifted her palms to his chest and pushed him off.
Opened her eyes onto the blues and greens of Town Lake.
Wayne released her waist immediately and she realized they were both shaking. They were two steps away from the picnic table, and the breeze had become a whipping wind. She wrapped her arms around herself. Wayne’s hands quivered and he tried to find something to do with them. He covered his mouth with his right hand, and the blue ring caught the light. His eyes were as cold as the water had been.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
He dropped his hand. “No. It’s my fault. That was . . .”
When he groped for the word she said, “Pretty intense.”
He laughed. It was forced. “I hope I didn’t come on too strong.”
“No! No. Not at all. I wasn’t expecting . . .”
He didn’t try to fill in her blank, though he studied Shauna for several long seconds. What had he sensed of that encounter, above and beyond the immediate reality? She had never thought to ask whether her gift opened information highways that ran in both directions. How much had they shared, if anything?
She rubbed her own arms to hide the shaking. Though no longer cold, she was filled with fresh terror.
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Oh, how she understood now.
She attempted to lay a hand on his arm in a gesture that she hoped would ease the awkwardness. Protect her from his probing gaze. He turned out of her reach quickly, pretending, she thought, not to have seen her move. He shoved both hands into his pockets and looked at the food sack.
“You hungry?”
21
For the rest of that day and into the next, Wayne seemed intent on both avoiding Shauna’s touch and not leaving her side, breaking this code only once, when he gave her an overstated peck on the back of her hand before they parted ways for the night in the living room of the guesthouse.
She awoke in the night to sounds of him moving about in the living room. Keeping watch to make sure she didn’t run off again? Planning to come in, smother her while she slept?
Shauna did not go back to sleep.
How could she get out from under his murderous eye?
He had not wanted her to remember that he had tried to kill her. He had insinuated himself into her life as her lover in order to hold the memory at bay.
If she hadn’t developed this bizarre ability of hers, Shauna had no doubt it would have worked. She would be planning now to leave this miserable home behind and make a new one in Houston with her worst enemy.
Would he kill her there? Stage another tragedy? Another accident?
Had her accident been staged? If it had, she wasn’t responsible for Rudy’s condition. Someone else was. Wayne Spade. If she could prove it, she could have peace of mind and Rudy could have justice, if not his old life.
Assuming Wayne hadn’t simply made an opportunity out of an unfortunate event.
Why had Wayne wanted her dead in the first place?
Maybe Corbin had known the answer to that question.
If that was the case, why didn’t Corbin tell her that day at the Statesman? Why bring her, and his death, to his home? What was more dangerous about telling her then and there?
Okay. So maybe Corbin didn’t know, but his witness did.
That didn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t Wayne kill the witness? Because he didn’t know who the witness was? Did he kill Corbin to warn the witness? To draw the witness out?
A headache took root in the back of Shauna’s head and snaked around over her ears.
Maybe there was no witness. Just a straw man Corbin created to protect himself, though that had done little good. If, however, he knew of a witness who might divulge what he—she?—had seen, why withhold this information until Shauna snapped out of her coma? Why not go right to the police on day one? What would be the point of telling her and not the law?
Simply to keep her out of Wayne’s reach?
That didn’t make sense either. Corbin could have said so without all the dramatic mumbo jumbo.
If Miguel Lopez were the witness who wanted to keep her alive, he would have said, “Wayne Spade wants to kill you.” Not, “Wayne Spade is not your friend.”
Not your friend. Understatement of the eon.
At this point Shauna believed she understood more about this situation than Miguel and Corbin ever did. When the first beam of light rose off the floor of her room, she had more questions and only a few certainties:
She was not safe with Wayne.
She was probably not safe anywhere until she knew why Wayne had wanted her dead. Maybe still wanted her dead, though this was not clear. She couldn’t exactly ask.
A nice conundrum. She could pretend to “forget,” go with the flow, go to Houston, and perhaps end up dead anyway. Or she could keep along her present path, find all her answers, and probably die in the process.
What decided her course was the possibility that she could redeem her reputation and her relationship with her father. If he believed she did not harm her brother, he might forgive her. He might allow her back into that very small family circle that she had been expected to leave. H
e might. She needed to escape Wayne, and until she figured out how, she would do all the pretending she was capable of.
Something had happened to Wayne during that kiss, and as he drove her to her therapy appointment that morning with Dr. Harding, she spent the mostly silent commute speculating about what it was, what he thought it was, and whether he believed she had engineered the event.
“I appreciate your driving me,” she attempted at one point.
He smiled at her, the same kind smile he had offered her several times every day since she had first seen him at the hospital. But today he smiled to disguise something. Or perhaps he always had.
“No problem.”
“I thought I’d ask her what she thinks of our Houston idea.”
Wayne nodded and kept his eyes on the road.
“Well, if she thinks it’s a bad one, we’ll go to Houston and find you a second opinion.” He chuckled at his own joke. She laughed along.
They had become the proverbial cat and mouse.
Maybe they always were, and she had been the mouse. Now she would make herself the cat.
He reached across the gear shift and squeezed her knee, then released it. A test. She smiled at him, confident that nothing would put his memories at risk with his guard up so high. Maybe he would eventually find false security in that. For now, she needed to find other ways to test the measure of her ability.
She needed to know if she could duplicate yesterday’s success.
She needed a person who would open up to her, a person whose memories she had not already snagged.
And she needed to know if she was truly snagging them, not merely sharing them.
She needed a guinea pig. She needed Dr. Millie Harding.
Wayne had promised to wait in the car while Shauna had her appointment.
“An hour’s a long time to wait,” she protested.
“I’ve got the laptop with me.” He retrieved his phone from the console. “And I can make a couple calls to the office.”
“You’re supposed to be on vacation.”
“If it’s more vacation than work, it’s still vacation.”
She had considered calling Uncle Trent, maybe talk him into luring Wayne back from vacation prematurely. She would have to head off Trent’s worries about her safety without telling him that the real danger was practically holding her hand. If she jeopardized her only “uncle,” she would tie one more stone around her neck before casting herself into the Colorado River. She’d have to come up with a plan to reassure Trent that she was perfectly fine and would be even better if Wayne were gone. Getting Wayne to do what his boss wanted would be more tricky. No, getting Wayne to leave her would be virtually impossible, once she thought it through. Maybe she would have to wait out this season and hope Wayne didn’t knife her before it was over.
An unfathomably stupid idea.
Now, forty-five minutes into the conversation, Shauna still pondered how she could steal a memory from Dr. Harding and then verify that it was stolen. This was an opportunity she could not waste, but in fifteen minutes there would be nothing left of it to retrieve.
While she considered this, her mind barely engaged in the session, she convinced Dr. Harding that visions they’d previously discussed had become a nonissue, that she didn’t know any more about the six months of her vacant memory than she had at their last meeting, and that her relationship with Wayne, while pleasant, had not done anything to illuminate Shauna’s history.
“So Wayne has been supportive,” Dr. Harding observed.
Shauna did her best to gush. “More than that: attentive. I could not have survived this without him.”
“He does have a sensitive side, doesn’t he?”
The observation begged Shauna to take note of it. The words themselves were benign enough, but something maternal in the tone caused Shauna to say, “You know him? Personally, I mean?”
The psychiatrist’s cheeks twitched. “I was only basing my remark on what you’ve told me.”
Shauna nodded, smiled to restore the ease in the room. Was Wayne a patient of hers? A colleague?
A boss?
Dr. Harding cleared her smoky throat. “You seem far more relaxed today than you did on our first meeting.” She picked her cup of tea off the small tray that balanced on the vinyl stool.
“I suppose I’ve had time to grow accustomed to the idea of having a gap in my life.”
“Has it caused you any unexpected hardship?”
Woefully unexpected hardship.
“Surprisingly, no.” Shauna tried on a light laugh and let her eyes flit around the room. They landed on that glistening file cabinet at the same moment that her opportunity presented itself. If the wild-haired psychiatrist knew Wayne Spade, perhaps Shauna could find evidence to that effect in the file. A memo, an e-mail, a whole file.
That, and the cabinet was locked by a digital combination. Could Shauna fetch this information from the doctor’s mind?
She would try. At the very least, Shauna believed she could find a detailed set of notes and evaluations about herself. That was worth something.
“It’s little things,” Shauna said. “I have outfits in my closet I don’t remember buying. Pictures from a party I don’t remember attending. I can’t remember why I quit my job or where I put my latest résumé—it didn’t help that the family moved all my stuff around! Sometimes I mix up phone numbers. Yesterday I forgot the PIN number for my ATM card.”
Shauna did not feel the smallest pinch of guilt over any of these fibs. Her life was surrounded by lies and liars, it had turned out, and if she had to tell a few herself to see her way through them, so be it.
Dr. Harding nodded and set down her pen. “Well if it’s any comfort, I forget numbers like that all the time.”
Shauna sipped from her own cup, moved in. “There’s so many to remember!”
“True. Today the average person’s memory is taxed by so much information, it’s a wonder we can function at all.”
“How do you do it?”
“Do what? Function?”
“No, remember all the details. Online passwords, your bank account numbers”—she noted a wedding band on Dr. Harding’s left hand—“your husband’s social security number?”
“Oh goodness. I don’t remember all of it. Memory is accidental sometimes. We remember something only because we use it over and over again. I tend to remember that sort of thing.”
Of course. Repetition. Shauna’s eyes went to the high-tech file cabinet for a fleeting second. Think. Think. Think.
Shauna leaned forward and picked up the teapot to warm the psychologist’s cup. “More?”
“Thank you.” Shauna allowed herself a heavy sigh as she focused on pouring the tea.
“I would like to remember what that feels like,” she said. “Everything seems so . . . jumbled.”
“Give yourself time, Shauna. It will happen.” Dr. Harding removed her narrow reading glasses and folded them on her notepad. Shauna moved the teapot over her own cup. “I have a son your age.”
Shauna held her breath and set down the pot.
“You remind me of him somewhat. He’s impatient too.” Dr. Harding smiled as Shauna lifted a cup and passed it to her. Now was the time to try. She grasped the handle so that she nearly covered it with her fingers, and wrapped the other side of the cup snuggly in her other hand. She appeared to be a wind-chilled adventurer looking for warmth, and maybe she was.
The grip forced Dr. Harding to touch her to take the cup.
Shauna closed her eyes and held the image of that file cabinet front and center in her mental screen. She held it there, willing it not to be knocked over by an explosion of other memories.
There was no explosion, but Shauna was hit with an unexpected rush of data like heat from an oven. First a list of names, random and senseless but short: Jacobsen, Brown, Paulito, Vu, Allejandra. Then equally random labels: Active, Committed, Closed, Pending. Then Harding 4273464.
Dr. Harding le
t out a shout of surprise, and Shauna snapped her eyes open. She had sloshed the tea in the psychologist’s lap.
“Oh no. Oh no. I can’t believe I—”
“Are you okay?” Dr. Harding said. She was rubbing her left temple with two fingers.
“I am such a klutz.”
“Not at all.” The doctor’s detached persona resurrected itself, politeness not quite covering up her thoughts.
“Are you okay?” Shauna stammered, disbelieving how little control she’d had over what had happened. “Are you burned?”
“Just wet. That had cooled off a bit.”
“What can I do?”
“Stay put a minute while I go dab up. I’ll bring back some towels.”
She moved off past the desk to a bathroom and kitchenette at the back of the office. Shauna grabbed her purse to find tissues.
4273464.
She looked at the file cabinet, then, prompted into action by a ticking clock that she could sense but not hear, she strode across the office in four long steps and punched the number into the digital panel.
Enter.
The top file drawer popped open.
She hadn’t expected it to.
Shauna was so surprised that she took several seconds to register the manila folders lined up in front of her in the drawer, an unremarkable row of both thin and bulky files labeled with surnames and initials. Nothing worthy at first glance of being in a high-security drawer.
Shauna heard water running in the bathroom. She moved quickly. She looked for Wayne’s name.
The drawer ended in the Ks.
She opened the one beneath it, reaching for the back. Spade, W. Not there.
No! She needed something. She rushed in search of her own file. Then she would try the other drawers.
McAllister, S.
There she was. She snatched the folder, a skinny little thing, out of the drawer. Should she take it with her? She looked at her chair, her tote bag. There was room in there.