by Ann Major
“Get security on this immediately,” Pete ordered. “This young woman is in no condition to be out of bed. Check the entrances. The parking lots. In her condition she couldn’t have gone far.”
Fire and ice.
Chilled to the bone, burning up at the same time, the barefoot girl shivered convulsively in the parking lot. Her thoughts kept slipping and losing direction like a sailboat in rough waves.
She didn’t know who she was.
Or where she was.
Or who wanted to kill her.
When that freckled nurse had asked her her name, terrible images had rolled through her tired brain.
A name? Something as specific as a name?
“Oh, dear God,” had been all she could whisper brokenly.
She could remember the van rolling, catching fire. She kept seeing a gray face, its hideous vacant eyes peering at her through plastic.
Pain and terror shuddered through the injured girl.
They knew who she was, and they were coming after her.
Her head throbbed. When she tried to walk, her gait was wide. Her feet felt like they didn’t quite touch the ground, and she had the sensation she was about to topple backward.
Crouching low outside the entrance, the girl had tracked blood down the concrete steps because slivers of glass were still embedded in her heels. Her torn, blood-encrusted jeans and hospital gown clung to her perspiring body like a wet shroud.
Vaguely she remembered someone cutting her red T-shirt and her bra off. Patches of yellow hair were glued to her skull. Dark shadows ringed her blue eyes. She kept swallowing against a dry metallic taste in her mouth. She kept pushing at the loose bandage that hid the row of stitches that were yellow with antiseptic. What was left of a heparin lock oozed blood down her arm.
She had to get out of here.
But how? When ambulances and cops were everywhere?
When those two curious boys in the black Lincoln kept jumping up and down and staring restlessly out of the car.
Feeling muddled, she shut her eyes. Her entire life consisted of a few hours and less than half a dozen foggy memories that made no sense. It was as if she was a child again, and there were monsters in the dark.
Only the monsters were real.
She remembered huge headlights blinding her as she’d thrown herself in front of them. She remembered the frightened trucker, lifting her and demanding angrily, “Girlie, what were you trying to do?” Next she remembered the hospital.
The two boys in the Lincoln must’ve grown bored with leaning out the windows because all of a sudden they slithered into the front seat like a pair of eels. They leaned over the dashboard, fighting for control of the radio, holding the seek button down through several stations until they came to rap music. Gleefully they slapped their right hands together, turned the volume up and settled back to listen.
“Boys! That’s way too loud!”
A stout security officer edged between the girl and the Lincoln. The boy with the slicked-back ponytail and the shark-tooth necklace quirked his head out the window again. When his huge mirrored glasses glinted her way, she was afraid he’d spot her.
“Sure, Officer,” he said, clumsily faking a respectful attitude as he thumped the dash with his hand in time to the beat.
The officer lingered a minute or two till the volume was low enough. Only then did he stride away. When he had gone the boy leaned out of the car again, hand still thumping the side of the car as he stared fiercely in the direction of her shadowy hiding place. Twelve, thirteen maybe, he had the surly good looks of a wannabe bad-boy.
The fingers stopped thumping. He yanked off his mirrored glasses and wiggled so far out of the car, he nearly fell.
She heard more sirens in the distance as his gray eyes zeroed in on her.
Dear God.
His sulkily smirking lips mouthed, “Hi.” He started to wave.
She put a finger to her lips in warning as two more squad cars, sirens blaring, rushed into the lot. A dozen officers with hand-held radios jumped out.
She shrank more deeply into the shadows, her pleading eyes clutching the smiling boy’s as a fat cop shuffled over to the Lincoln.
“You been here awhile, kid?”
The sassy smile faded. He gave the cop a sullen nod.
“You seen anything suspicious?”
Sulky silence. Then slowly the black ponytail bobbed. “Yeah.” He pointed toward the alley at the opposite end of the parking lot. “I saw…a girl with a—a bandage on her head. Way over there.”
The cops shouted to the others and they took off in a dead gallop. When they had disappeared, the boys slapped their right hands together.
Then, ever so cautiously, they eased a door open and scuttled toward her. Hovering over her, their dark narrow faces seemed to waver in and out of focus.
They were so alike they could have passed for twins. Not that they were trying to pass. The taller and skinnier of the two had shorter hair, wire-rimmed glasses and pressed jeans. The huskier kid with the ponytail and the gold earring wore rumpled black clothes. A vicious shark tooth dangled from his necklace.
When they leaned down, their hands, shaking, a whirring sound beat inside her ears and made her feel so dizzy and sick, she almost passed out.
She barely felt their hands as they gently circled her. Or heard their frightened whispers.
“We have to help her.”
“But she’s hurt. Look at all those bruises, and her eyes—”
“And her feet! We should take her into the hospital so Uncle Pete—”
“No!” She grabbed their arms, her broken nails digging into their skin, her huge eyes pleading.
“Can’t you see how scared she is?” a young voice croaked hoarsely. “Somebody bad might be after her. We gotta save her.”
“What’ll Dad do?”
The whirring inside her head got louder. Halfcarrying, half-dragging her, they crawled with her to the car and made a bed of lumpy pillows and blankets for her on the floorboard of the back seat. The boys unfolded a blanket and covered her, whispering that if she was quiet they could smuggle her home and hide her in their room until she got well.
The girl lay there, trembling uncontrollably, terrified of the claustrophobic feeling she had because the blanket was over her face.
Only vaguely was she aware of footsteps hurrying, of car doors slamming, of men’s voices talking low in the front seat, of a little girl’s excited shouting. “See there! Got ’em off!”
“Oh-big deal.”
But the girl in the back seat instantly registered a man’s beautiful, gravelly drawl. “Peppin, the officer told me you helped them.”
There was something so familiar about the sound of his voice. Something so warm. It seemed to resonate in her soul.
She knew him. She had loved him. Somewhere. Some time.
“Yeah, Dad. Peppin really helped ’em,” the older boy said.
“Shut up, Monty!” Peppin slugged his brother.
“Hey!”
“Who are all the cops looking for anyway, Dad?”
“Some young girl got high on drugs and had a wreck. It’s a very serious situation. She could die without proper medical attention.”
The girl felt hot all over. Tears pooled in her eyes.
“Die?” Peppin croaked as a key turned in the ignition. His young face bleached a sickly white, he stared at his tearful hideaway.
She shook her head at him, tears escaping under her eyelids.
Peppin sucked in a long, nervous breath. “So— Uncle Pete, what sort of treatment would she need?”
“Hmm?”
“Your patient?”
Peppin bombarded his uncle with questions, demanding specific details.
Once again Peppin’s father praised his son in that deep melodious drawl of his—this time for his intellectual curiosity.
The man’s low voice was husky and somehow devastatingly familiar, and yet at the same time it lulled her. She want
ed to go on listening to it, for nothing seemed left in the whole world but that voice wrapping around her.
Who was he? Why did she feel she knew him?
She was too tired for thought, and her eyelids grew heavy again, fluttering down and then rising as she fought to stay awake.
She slept soundly for the first time since the van had rolled and the driver had chased her into those blinding headlights.
She slept, knowing she was safe, because the man with the beautiful voice was near.
Two
Bluish flashes ricocheted in the boys’ bedroom.
It had rained like this the night the blue van had rolled and burned.
What van? Where? Why?
The girl lay rigidly awake, longing for Lucas as she listened to the surf and to the sharp cracking sounds of thunder. Torrents of rain beat a savage tattoo against the bedroom window.
He was two doors down from her. Peacefully asleep in his huge bed, no doubt. Unafraid of the storm and blissfully unaware of the strange woman sleeping in his sons’ bedroom closet.
He might as well have been on the moon.
She stretched restlessly, almost wishing she was as happily unconscious of him as he was of her. But she needed him because he made her feel safe.
Why did her demons always come alive when she closed her eyes in the dark?
She hated feeling shut in and alone, and she felt she was—even though the closet door was louvered and her darling boys were just outside, snugly tucked beneath quilts in their bunk beds, oblivious to the storm and her fears. She lay stiffly on her hidden pallet in their huge closet and stared at the ceiling, watching the lightning that flashed through the louvers and caused irregular patterns of blue light to dance across the walls and hanging clothes.
Her strength had returned rapidly, but, so far, not her memory. Vague illusive images from her past seemed to flicker at the edges of her mind like the lightning, their brief flares so brilliant they blinded her before they vanished into pitch blackness.
Her entire world had become Lucas Broderick’s coldly modern mansion perched on its bluff above Corpus Christi Bay. But more than the mansion’s high white walls and polished marble floors; more than its winding corridors and spiral staircases intrigued her. With every day that passed, she had become more fascinated by Lucas Broderick himself.
From almost that first moment when she had awakened in his sons’ closet to their rush of adolescent chatter, they had made her aware of him.
“What if Dad finds her?”
An audible gasp and then terrified silence as if that prospect was too awful to contemplate.
“You’d better not let him—stupid.”
She had opened her eyes and found their fearful, curious faces peering eagerly at her. She’d had no memory of who they were or how she’d gotten here.
But she’d quickly learned that they were Lucas’s adorable sons, and that they looked endearingly like him.
“She’s awake.”
“Told you she’d live.”
“We’ve got to feed her something or she’ll starve like your gerbil.”
“What’s your name?”
Her name? Blue lights flickered, and she shook her head and made a low moan.
“Pete said she had amnesia, dummy.”
Pete? Who was Pete?
“You hungry?”
“Maybe…some broth,” she whispered.
Their heads swiveled and they stared at each other in round-eyed consternation as if they’d never heard the word. “Broth?”
“Then water,” she managed weakly.
That started a quarrel over who got to fetch it, each of them wanting to.
For ten long days and longer nights those two wonderful boys had fought many battles over the privilege of nursing her. They had checked medical books out of the library. They had cleaned her wounds and doctored them with medicine from Lucas’s huge marble bathroom. They had painstakingly picked the slivers of glass from the soles of her feet with tweezers, plunking the jagged bits into a metal bowl. They had soaked her feet in pails of hot water, and she could almost walk without limping.
They took turns pretending to be sick themselves so that one of them could stay home from school with her. They had given her the antibiotics they tricked their uncle into prescribing for them. For the first few nights they’d coaxed their father into buying and cooking the few foods she could keep down—chicken broth, Jell-O and boiled vegetables, which they’d smuggled up to her.
At first she’d been too weak and ill to worry about the way her presence in their home had forced them to deceive their father. But as she’d grown stronger and more attached to her lively, affectionate nurses, she blamed herself for their burgeoning talent at duplicity. Nursing her wasn’t the worst of it. They were hard at work on a covert project they called Operation Nanny.
The boys didn’t want Lucas to hire a new nanny. “Because,” as Peppin explained, “we couldn’t fool one of those nosy old bags so easy as Dad. A nanny’d be up here all the time—she’d probably find you the first day.”
Thus, every time Lucas informed the boys of a home interview for a prospective nanny, Peppin, who could mimic Lucas’s voice to a T, phoned the woman and told her the job had been filled.
At first the girl had been too ill and too grateful and too terrified of being thrown out of the house to care, but now she felt stricken that she had become a corrupting influence on their characters.
Although Peppin and Montague bickered incessantly, they could be an incredible team. During the day, when Lucas was at work, the boys gave her the run of his huge house, with its soaring ceilings and skylights and views of Corpus Christi Bay. One wall of his bedroom was made entirely of glass. Sometimes she would step out onto his balcony and let the tangy sea air ruffle her hair.
Sometimes she showered in his pink marble bathroom that had both an immense enclosed shower and a bathtub as big as a small swimming pool. Sometimes she spent a languid hour buried beneath mountains of foamy bubbles in his tub. Sometimes she would pick out old clothes from his abundant closets to wear. Always she would linger in his room, studying his things, running his slim black comb through her hair and brushing her teeth with his yellow toothbrush. She would open his drawers and run her fingertips over his undershirts and cuff links, marveling that one man could have so much of everything. But what she loved best was lying in his bed and hugging his pillow to her stomach and imagining him there beside her, holding her. She gathered flowers from his gardens and arranged them in crystal vases everywhere, taking special pains with those that she left on the white table beside his bed. It pleased her when he picked a pale yellow rose from that vase and pinned it to the black lapel of his three-piece suit one morning before he rushed to his office.
She tried to think of ways to repay him for all that his boys had done for her. The endless stark hallways of his beautiful house had been strewn with everything from rumpled clothes, baseball bats, soccer gear and Rollerblades to newspapers when she’d arrived. Dirty dishes had overflowed from the white-tiled kitchen counters onto the ebony dining room table.
When she’d gotten better, she’d convinced the boys that maybe their father wouldn’t be so anxious to hire a nanny or a housekeeper if he didn’t feel the need for one so strongly. She had made a game of cleaning the house.
While they picked up, she would lie on a couch or a chair, perusing the tattered album that contained black-and-white pictures of Lucas’s childhood in India, wondering why he’d looked so unhappy as a boy. Wondering why the pictures of India especially fascinated her even as she prodded the boys to pick up.
Every time Peppin or Monty touched something, the rule was that they had to put it where it belonged. She began talking them through the preparation of simple meals, using the cans in the pantry and the frozen dinners in the refrigerator, so that Lucas always came home to a hot meal. At first they complained bitterly, but she just laughed and tried to motivate them by telling them they we
re learning basic survival skills.
Mostly they went along with her projects because she lavished attention on them. She walked with them on the beach, threw horseshoes with them and played games. The only thing she refused to do was to let them lead her into the tunnel that wound from the garage under the house down to the beach. When they had unlocked the doors to that weird, underground passage, and she had smelled the mustiness of the place, she had felt as if the black gloom was pressing in on her and she was being suffocated.
Ghastly minutes had crawled by before the feeling of claustrophobia subsided.
“I can’t go in,” she had whispered, clutching her throat, not understanding her terror as she wrenched her hand free of theirs.
“Why?” they asked excitedly, the beams of their flashlights dancing along the wall.
Suddenly she had some memory of being trapped in a box and knowing she was being buried alive. She remembered coughing as dirt sifted through the cracks of her coffin. She remembered kicking and clawing and screaming when the narrow box was black and silent.
“What’s wrong?” the boys demanded.
Blue lights flickered, and the memory was gone.
“I—I don’t know.” She edged away from them toward the open garage doors and brilliant sunlight. “Let’s go inside the house…and watch a video or something.”
How she ached for them when once more they were safely inside and they showed her their home videos and photograph albums with photos that had been taken of their family before the divorce. There were very few pictures of them. The boys told her that their parents had never had time for them, even when they’d been married. It was worse now, though, since their mother had run off and their father kept threatening to send them to military school.
She began to understand that maybe the reason they doted on her was that she was the first adult who ever enjoyed them and made them feel needed.