Dead Girl Running (Cape Charade Book 1)

by Christina Dodd

  On the other side of the bed, she saw a shiny chrome IV stand that fed her fluids…and God knew what else.

  Drugs. Someone was keeping her drugged. Gregory…

  She froze. No. She remembered Kellen, Gregory, the murder, the explosion. She remembered Kellen’s apartment. She remembered fleeing New York… But she remembered nothing else. She didn’t know how she got into this room. Now she was trapped here, tied to an IV tube.

  In an adrenaline-fueled fury, she tore away the tape that held the needle and pulled it out of her arm. Blood ran. Pain made her gasp. She used the corner of the sheet like a cotton pad, wrapping it over her wound. She closed her elbow to put pressure on the wound.

  Her elbow moved rustily. Her neck was stiff. She felt weak. Every muscle ached, as if she hadn’t moved in days.

  God. What had they been doing to her?

  And who were they?

  Two monitors were attached to her chest with adhesive. She peeled them off with fingernails that were long and—too weird—manicured and painted with a clear lacquer.

  Taking a breath, she worked her elbows under her and lifted herself off the pillows. The sheet slid down; she wore a pretty pajama top. She raised herself into a sitting position and pushed the sheet away. On the bottom, she wore matching soft cotton pajama pants.

  Nothing made sense. This didn’t make sense.

  She was drugged. Yet she was cared for.

  Why did she feel as if she’d been sick and in bed a long time? Why couldn’t she remember? The burden of fear and panic was only increasing. She didn’t know why, but she knew she didn’t have much time.

  She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Pins and needles of pain rolled from her toes to her knees, and her head buzzed as if she was going to faint.

  She was going to faint.

  No! She needed to get out of here. Fast. Now.

  She slid off the mattress, put her bare feet on the cool linoleum. The temperature woke her up, erased some of the cobwebs. She put more weight on her legs, pushed off and stood, slid back and rested. Stood again. Rested again. Stood sideways to the mattress and took one step, then another. Rested. Within one minute, she could walk the length of the bed, but as soon as she let go, her knees buckled.

  She sat down in the bedside chair and ate the applesauce.

  It tasted marvelous, and the half cup filled her up. How long since she had eaten real food?

  She stood again, felt steadier and set her sights on the metal cabinet. It looked like a locker or a closet, and she needed clothes.

  The IV stand had wheels. Perfect.

  Taking it in both hands, she leaned and pushed, leaned and pushed, until she reached the cabinet. Standing there, she stared at the combination lock and wondered—could it be? ECKC. Earle, Cora, Kellen, Cecilia—3, 2, 5, 2. She took her time, rolled through the numbers.

  The locker opened.

  She stared at the partially open door and realized—she must have set the code. Who else would know about the code?

  From somewhere down the corridor, she heard a raucous burst of laughter, hastily muffled.

  Hurry. Hurry.

  She flung open the door and examined the contents. Clothes: underwear, bra, jeans, a soft button-up shirt, belt, socks, shoes. On the shelf: the same travel wallet Cecilia had worn when she fled Greenleaf. A quick check showed nothing had changed. She had Kellen’s driver’s license, diplomas, passport. She stared at them in her hands, memory stirring. She had taken them from Kellen’s apartment because she was afraid and wanted to get away to…to where?

  She didn’t know. Was this a mental institution? Was she committed? Was she crazy?

  Get me out.

  She had money. A couple of hundreds, a handful of twenties, miscellaneous small bills. If she got away, she could survive. She had survived on less…before…although she didn’t remember when…

  She gathered the clothes in one arm. Held the IV pole with one tight hand and pushed it into the bathroom. Locked the door, sat on the toilet and changed.

  Her legs and arms were without muscle. The shirt was loose; the jeans required that the belt be fastened, not in the well-worn hole, but one notch tighter. But the shoes fit perfectly.

  That made sense of a sort. Her clothes and shoes were hers, kept in a locker that opened with her combination.

  If only she remembered.

  When she finished dressing, she ran her shaking hands over her face. It was at that moment she found the scar on her forehead. With increasing alarm, she circled it with her fingers, exploring. It didn’t hurt. There was bone under the skin. But when she pressed on it, it felt…weak on the inside. This time she stood easily, without thinking of the effort. She leaned over the sink and looked. Beneath her carefully trimmed bangs, a hard, one-inch round scar shone pink and shiny.

  She pulled back and looked at her whole self. She was too gaunt and pale. Her eyes were frightened, sad. At some point, someone had cut her hair into short stylish wisps that framed her face and hid that scar from view.

  She had been sick for a long time. Someone had carefully cared for her. The only scenario she could imagine was that Gregory’s sister had somehow tracked her down and…and what? Been nice? Nothing about this made sense.

  Except that she needed to escape.

  She pulled the travel wallet over her head and tucked it under her shirt. Making as little noise as possible, she left the bathroom and went to the door that led to the corridor. She poked her head out. One glance told her all she needed to know.

  The laughter came from the nurses’ station at one end of the corridor. A dozen people in scrubs: the staff in this wing of a medical center. A man in dark blue scrubs knelt on one knee before a woman in pink patterned scrubs, and as Cecilia watched, the woman wiped a tear off her cheek, smiled and nodded.

  More laughter, swiftly muffled.

  A tired-looking man in a distinguished business suit walked toward the group, frowning.

  Cecilia turned the other way, taking one careful step after another toward the exit sign. She passed two patients, one making the rounds on her walker, one seated in a wheelchair. They looked curiously at her, her IV stand and the dangling tubes, but made no comment.

  She pushed on the exit door, stepped onto the landing.

  A flight of stairs went up and down.

  She looked at the number on the wall. She was on the second floor.

  She could do this.

  She pushed the IV pole into the corner, grasped the handrail and, taking her time, descended to street level. The exit door warned, “Security alarm will sound if door is opened.”

  She stopped, took several long breaths, gave the door a push and sprinted outside—onto a sidewalk beside a busy city street. Thank God. Thank God. She could quickly vanish. Straightening her shoulders, she joined the stream of people and disappeared into the city.

  She would never be Cecilia again.

  * * *

  In her cottage kitchen, Kellen assembled her salad on her plate and sat down at the eating bar. She picked up her fork, put it down and rubbed the scar on her forehead.

  Ceecee. Ceecee. Where are you? Come back to me…

  Max Di Luca reminded her of the man in the corridor. The suit. The size. He didn’t look tired anymore. And she wasn’t sure, anyway. She’d been intent on escape. She’d only glanced.

  But if that was the truth, she had known him before.

  In Philadelphia.

  31

  That day, Kellen didn’t return to the resort. If they had needed her, she would have gone, of course. But with a skeleton crew and few guests, she was able to handle the couple of crises from her phone. She wasn’t avoiding Max; she was taking some much needed downtime.

  Besides, a new memory was nudging itself up from the depths of her brain…

  A park
, trees bare of leaves, openmouthed pedestrians running. A man with a thin, familiar face who spoke with an Italian accent. He held a Beretta Pico to her forehead…

  In the background, a man raced toward them and…

  And nothing. Whatever happened then…was gone.

  But that explained her scar, and why she woke up in the hospital that was maybe a mental ward and maybe not, and why when she woke, she was afraid someone was trying to hurt her. Maybe she wasn’t crazy. Maybe if she knew all the facts, she would at least understand what had happened.

  Maybe Max could tell her.

  She should ask him.

  Instead, Kellen pulled up her laptop and went to work, approving menus, viewing the employee roster with an eye to who might be the biggest baddest importer/murderer in the world, studying the resort’s blueprints and wondering where Priscilla could have stashed the tomb art. The architect had designed the resort for visual impact, not working efficiency. Storage closets hid in absurdly inconvenient locations, narrow maids’ stairways twisted and turned behind the walls, old-fashioned dumbwaiters that had once lifted and lowered linens and plates from level to level… Even if Priscilla Carter had hidden the tomb art somewhere in the resort, one of the housekeepers could have found that gross figure of a man with his massive penis, shrieked in horror and tossed it all in the garbage.

  Kellen sighed.

  The phone rang.

  It was Annie. Her warm voice asked, “How are things going?”

  My friends are mad at me.

  I’m being haunted by a ghost or tormented by someone who knows my past, and I’m not sure which is worse.

  Nils Brooks wants to kiss me.

  Your stupid nephew thinks I’m a delicate flower. Or a quitter. I don’t know which is more insulting.

  “As well as can be expected. Employees are jumping ship at an alarming rate. I hope you’re all right with this, but I’m approving every unexpected request for vacation and leave, and offering a bonus when they return.”

  Annie’s voice grew somber. “You’re doing exactly the right thing. They’re nervous about the murders?”

  “Add to that the weather.” Kellen glanced at the radar. “We’ve got another big storm coming in. It’s four in the afternoon and like midnight out there. You know. The darkness is difficult even without finding a corpse or two.”

  “When I get back, I’ll send you on vacation whether you want it or not!”

  “I wasn’t hinting!” Kellen remembered Birdie, and no matter what Kellen felt right now, Birdie needed time off. “But Birdie and I would like to go somewhere sunny.”

  “I’m glad to hear you’ve relented at last. Do we have enough employees to keep the resort running?”

  “Yes, but only because we have so few guests.”

  “I never thought I would say that’s a good thing.” Pause. “Did Max make it?”

  “Yes.” Kellen inserted a pause of her own. “He’s gone to acquaint himself with his security team, for what they’re worth.”

  “What did you think of him?” Annie sounded anxious and nervous.

  “I barely met him.” Already she’d spent too much time with him. “He seems fine. He knows the sheriff, and that’s good.” I knew him before, didn’t I?

  “Max is a Renaissance man. He knows about security and resort management, and wineries and… Well, he’s very accomplished.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “Am I overselling him?”

  “A little.” And that makes me wonder why.

  “I simply want you to feel as if you can trust him to do his job.”

  That was a good reason why. “Thank you, Annie. I’m glad to turn security over to him.” In the background, Kellen heard a burst of noise, children’s voices shrieking in wild delight as they ran through. “You need to go and enjoy your vacation. I’ll talk to you later!” She hung up before Annie could say goodbye, sat and looked at the telephone. She should be asking probing questions, asking for honesty.

  Maybe later, when the murders were solved, the Librarian arrested, winter had ended, world peace had been declared…

  She wanted to know, but she didn’t. Ignorance was comfortable, safe, without challenge. She was, in fact, tired of standing tall and facing all confrontations with her chin up. She wanted to slump for a while.

  Although she and Max did sort of click. Until he thought she’d be glad to run away from her responsibilities. Damn him. Until that moment, he was doing so well.

  That evening, she sat with all the lights in her cottage dimmed and watched out her bedroom loft window, watched to the west and the way leading up from the dock.

  She saw nothing.

  That meant nothing.

  The smugglers could be out there with special lights and drones that allowed them to see in the dark, with guns and bombs and traps, and all to bring a few bloodstained relics to a greedy smuggler and his wealthy, grasping collector of illegal goods. Kellen thought about Afghanistan, the battles she had fought, the deaths and destruction she’d seen, and fury held her in its grasp. She hadn’t carried a rifle through the treacherous mountains so Americans at home could break the law and fund the very terrorists she’d fought.

  Fate led Cecilia in a straight line from the hospital to stand in front of an Army Recruiting Station. She looked in the window at the two people in uniform seated at desks inside. She looked back in the direction of the hospital, looked around at the busy streets, the indifferent people. Danger stalked her here. She didn’t know what danger, but she knew something terrible had happened and she needed to get out of this town. What better way to disappear than into the massive organization called the US military?

  Pushing open the door, she walked in. Her mind immediately assembled a catalog of data on the officers:

  ARMY RECRUITERS:

  ONE MALE, ONE FEMALE, PLEASANT AND BRISK, SKEPTICAL WHEN LOOKING ME OVER, DISCOURAGING ABOUT MY CONDITION AND ABILITY TO PASS THE STRINGENT PHYSICAL. PRODUCE STERN WARNINGS ABOUT DRUG USE. IMPRESSED BY KELLEN’S DEGREES, SATISFIED BY PHOTO ID.

  The male recruiter, Sergeant Barnes, said, “With these credentials, we’ll send you to Officer Candidate School.”

  “If you pass the physical,” Sergeant Rehberger snapped. She was more realistic, less hopeful of Cecilia’s chances.

  Cecilia nodded at her. “I’m good with numbers, data structure, patterns.” As she spoke, her mind was collecting more information about the recruiters, this station, how to turn the details of this situation to her advantage. She could give answers that they wanted to hear, because by their body language and by logic, she could anticipate their needs.

  She had never had this gift before, but she knew how to use it now.

  They put the paperwork in front of her. She filled it all in without hesitation, using Kellen’s New York address, Kellen’s birthday, Kellen’s degrees. She was, she realized, being Kellen Rae Adams in every way. She got ready to sign and date the forms. “What day is this?” she asked.

  Sergeant Barnes said, “May twelfth.”

  Then she scrawled Kellen’s signature and passed over the paperwork.

  The recruiter ran through it all, asked a few questions, got to the end and laughed, scratched out the date and passed it back. “I know—I still get the year wrong, too. Initial the change, then we’re on to the next stage.”

  That was when she discovered she’d lost more than a year of her life.

  Lost it, apparently, forever.

  Someone knocked on her front door.

  She clutched the arms of her chair. She knew who was there.

  Another knock. The bell rang.

  “Bastard.” She stood and clattered down the spiral stairs. She looked through the peephole, then flung open the door. “What a surprise,” she said in a voice heavily laden with irony.

  Nils Brooks
stood on the porch. “May I come in?” Like a vampire who had to be invited to cross the threshold.

  “If you must.” She backed away.

  He dusted a few flakes of snow off his shoulders. There, in the porch light, his disguise was stripped away. He looked like a dangerous man, strong, wiry, with a determined jaw and a fake pair of eyeglasses in his pocket. He came in, flung off his Burberry coat and hung it on the rack. “The weathercasters got it wrong again. The main thrust of the storm went south to Oregon.”

  She didn’t answer, and she didn’t turn up her lights.

  His conversational tone changed. “What do you know?” He demanded information as if he was in charge.

  “Lloyd Magnuson is dead.”

  He dismissed the information with a wave of the hand. “We already had that figured out. What else do you know?”

  “You don’t give a damn, do you?” She looked at him in the dim light and saw a man driven by ambition. “Someone trapped Lloyd Magnuson by using his own weakness and now he’s dead.”

  He seated himself in the easy chair beside her front door. “Gossip at the resort says he used heroin.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then why was he trapped? He was simply weak.” Nils couldn’t have sounded more indifferent.

  “I don’t like you.” She had never meant anything so much. “Do you have no weaknesses?”

  “Yes.” He came to his feet, caught her shoulders and kissed her.

  She didn’t punch him in the ribs or use the serrated edge of her flashlight on his face. She let him kiss her, mouth to mouth, breath to breath, and as the moment stretched out, she relaxed, accepted the sensation, lived in the moment…and when he lifted his mouth from hers, she said, “I’d give it a B plus.”

  “Are you frigid?”

  She laughed in his face. “Because I don’t want to sleep with you? I suspect if you looked around this world, you could find a great many people, both women and men, who don’t want to sleep with you.”

  “I’m only interested in the one.”

  Most of the time, she didn’t like him. Then he was charming and self-deprecating, and she did. “You can leave now.”