Pinch Me [Suncoast Society] (Siren Publishing Sensations)

by Tymber Dalton

  “Rob’s got a set, too, and there’s a spare set somewhere at your place. I don’t know where you keep them, though.”

  He tried several padlock keys until he found the right ones. There were three units altogether, right next to each other, and she matched up her keys to the ones on his ring.

  He opened all three doors for her. The units were jammed full with hundreds of boxes wedged in with walls of furniture. No wonder Rob hadn’t wanted her coming here before.

  Laura’s breath left her. “Oh. My. Fucking. God. How am I supposed to sort through all of this?”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart, you knew all this stuff when you put it in here. You numbered all the boxes and made a list with the contents so you could find stuff. If you’ll look, you’ll see they’re stacked in numerical order.”

  They were. “I did?”

  “Yep.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. Where’s the list?”

  “I don’t know. Probably in your office at home.”

  She felt her spirits sink again. There would be no quick search with a successful outcome. She wondered if she was impatient in her former life.

  “No idea for sure, huh?”

  “You were pretty methodical with things like this. You have a file somewhere with all your stuff in it like your will, business and insurance paperwork, things like that.”

  As Laura thought about it, a light switched on in her brain. “You’re right, I do. I remember seeing it. It’s a red folder, the only red one. I didn’t go through it because it was in the front of the ‘morgue’ drawer. I guess I considered all my clippings important, too.”

  “Every hurricane threat, that’s one of the first things you packed. It makes sense you’d put that folder in with them. To you, those clippings were important.”

  Were. It almost sounded like she was dead and had just forgot to stop breathing. She’d even noticed more people taking about her in the past tense from before.

  She mentally shook that thought off. “Okay, I’ll have to find it and come back and look later.”

  “No problem.” He locked the doors and she followed him out to Placida Road before going their separate ways. Doogie had been very patient while they were at the warehouse, sitting quietly in the passenger seat.

  She looked over at him. “Feel like coming back here tonight and helping me search?”

  Just the tip of his tail wagged. Anything his mistress wanted, he wanted. Labs were willing to follow.

  She dug her phone out, which was still on silent from lunch. She’d missed several calls from Rob throughout the day and he’d left her two voice mails.

  In one way it comforted her. On the other hand it annoyed her for some reason. She wasn’t sure why.

  Then she felt guilty. And that definitely annoyed her.

  Was Rob controlling? Did he used to keep tabs on her every move?

  Then again, he had good reason to be worried about her without Bill to keep an eye on her. Except she had the comforting weight of the 9mm in the holster against her back.

  She couldn’t spend her life waiting for people to babysit her.

  And if that’s what she needed to use to rebuild her life from the ground up, carrying a concealed weapon so she didn’t spend every spare moment focused on what might happen, she’d do it.

  But first, she wanted to find that list before she did anything else. Back at the condo, she found it in the red folder in her desk. Also her will, business papers, insurance policies, and other important documents. She changed into jeans and an old T-shirt and called Rob.

  “Hi. I was afraid you’d forgot me.”

  She felt another twinge of guilt over lunch with Don Kern, and then anger and resentment for feeling guilty, and right on top of that guilt for feeling angry and resentful.

  She suppressed a nervous laugh. “No, just had a busy day, that’s all.”

  He sounded hesitant. “Did you want to have dinner or something tonight? Maybe go see a movie?”

  “I’m sorry, but not tonight. I’ve got some boxes of stuff I want to sort through from the warehouse. I want to find the old journals.”

  “Do you want any help?”

  She gripped the phone tightly. He sounded hopeful, but she wanted to be alone. She didn’t know what she’d find in the journals, and if it wasn’t something good, she didn’t want Rob around.

  “I’m not trying to blow you off, but I really want to do it by myself. I need to do it by myself.”

  “Are you sure it’s okay to go over there alone?”

  “I’m taking Doogie. And the gun. Steve already ran me over there earlier. It’s fine.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I understand.” He sounded like he didn’t understand, but was doing his best to give her the space she asked for.

  She didn’t want to leave him sounding hurt. “Listen, tomorrow night, here, I cook dinner for you. It’s time to see if I can make something edible. Okay?”

  His voice lightened. “That sounds good. What time?”

  They agreed on a time and she hung up. Locating a flashlight, she leashed Doogie and grabbed her list.

  The storage yard was open twenty-four hours and the manager lived in an apartment on the second floor of the office. Laura used another key to open the lock on the gate, and she locked it behind her, feeling a little more secure knowing a random stranger couldn’t get in.

  Her ribs didn’t protest too much when she opened the door to the third storage unit, where her list indicated the boxes were located. She found a light switch and two sets of fluorescent four-bangers flickered to life. It wasn’t as bright as she would’ve liked, but it was light enough to see. The list indicated boxes seventy-six through seventy-eight were her journals.

  She searched through the stacks and realized the boxes she needed were buried in a back corner. It took her nearly an hour to unbury them, and she ripped them open.

  Even the journals were numbered. Starting in her junior high years and going all the way until the computer journals started. From the number and the short date range each one contained, she wondered where the newer ones were. Based on everything she’d seen, she journaled nearly every day, even if it was only a couple of sentences about the weather or what she ate. It had been an ingrained habit for years.

  It didn’t make sense she would stop.

  But where did I put the damn things? She didn’t have time to think about it. It was almost dark and she wanted to get home. The three large boxes fit in the backseat of the truck. She locked the unit and loaded Doogie. A quick shower to rinse off the sweat and grime, then she spread out on the living room floor in an oversized T-shirt with a cup of hot tea and Doogie by her side.

  Surreal did not begin to describe it. Laura decided the best way was to start at the beginning since she was missing the last few years anyway. The early journals were filled with handwriting that looked vaguely familiar, a narrow script that eventually morphed into the penmanship she now used.

  Well, used before. Even her handwriting was different now when compared to notes and signatures on paperwork at the shop from the days before the attack.

  She had normal teenage experiences, hated math, loved English. A crush on a boy a year older than herself. Then a month later, he was the anti-Christ. Two months after that, she accepted his invitation to a fall dance.

  I don’t understand why boys are soooo childish. They just drive me absolutely nuts. They are immature and absolutely not worth wasting time on. Why are they so cute?

  Laura couldn’t help but smile at the words. They brought back ghostly images—memories or fantasies, she wasn’t sure. There was an easy feel, a flow to the rhythm of the narrative that entranced her and gripped her. Steve was right—she was a good writer. Even in junior high.

  There was no school today, teacher work day (hurray!). I took the flats boat out by myself. I didn’t go far, just out to Bull Bay. Didn’t even take a fishing pole with me. I had my notebook and a pen. I wanted
to write, work on my poetry and get a few ideas for my stories. I was the only one there, no one looking for snook, no one trolling for tarpon.

  The air was heavy, sweet with the fecund smell of the mangrove roots and mud and salt. I watched a school of baitfish come in, followed soon after by a school of snook. Wished for a pole then! I watched them dancing on the surface, turning and spinning and ripping across the water. The only sounds the lapping of the water on the fiberglass hull, the fish splashing, the cry of a gull hitting the leftovers on the surface. Far away, the drone of an outboard had no more effect than a mosquito near my ear.

  Wait, that was a mosquito near my ear. Remember the deet next time…

  Laura made it all the way to her freshman year at Lemon Bay High when she yawned and looked at the clock. It was nearly two in the morning, and she realized she was about to fall asleep where she sat. It didn’t make any sense to force herself through them all in one night.

  She went to bed with Doogie on her heels.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  There wasn’t a girls’ day that week because Leah, Tilly, and Loren had a meeting for a charity project they were involved with. When Laura awoke shortly before dawn, she returned to the journals.

  At seven she called Steve and told him she wouldn’t make it in and why. By eight o’clock, she’d worked her way to her junior year of college and had progressed from simple daily events to interspersing poetry and snippets of fiction. The writing improved as well.

  Sunlight on the water,

  gulls over the beach,

  magical, a moment forever suspended in time

  by the sheer power of its renewal

  We should be so lucky

  that nature could bring us back

  to such beauty on a daily basis…

  It was different from the magazine articles she’d already read. This was real and held a raw, magic quality that couldn’t have been evident to her as a teenager, or even as an adult fresh into college. Maybe not ever. Why else would these have been sitting buried in the warehouse?

  Perhaps before she didn’t realize how good her writing was.

  She?

  Laura wondered if this was how people with multiple personalities felt. Even with most of her childhood intact, as well as other memory fragments returning, she still saw herself before as a different person whose mind she couldn’t decipher other than what she read on the paper in front of her.

  She also read, yes, about the guy she’d dated back then. A professor older than her by fifteen years. So at least that part of Don Kern’s story matched up.

  When Laura took a break at ten to stretch her back, she realized while she was trying to get her memories back by going through her old writings, she’d yet to look up any of Shayla’s.

  After a quick search on her laptop, she found the website for the magazine Shayla worked for. She started with the most recent entries. One was about a marine research facility in Sarasota, Mote Marine.

  A few memories trickled back as she read, something about a charity dinner.

  She closed her eyes. Rob was there, dressed in a nice suit, as were their friends. Tony and Shayla, Seth and Leah, and the others.

  But nothing more than a few stray memories from that night.

  Still, she’d take the win.

  She kept reading the articles, regardless of the subject matter, hopefully desperate for another recent memory including Rob to slide home and lock into place.

  It felt like all she did lately was search for elusive clues to who she used to be. Like trying to find a missing person standing right in front of her.

  Maybe that’s another reason Shayla and I are such good friends, because we’re both writers.

  That made sense. Even better, it felt right.

  She spent two hours working through the magazine’s online archives, sometimes getting sidetracked from Shayla’s articles by another article that caught her eye.

  Unfortunately, nothing she read was enough to trigger a lot of memories, but stray fragments gathered like dust to static electricity. That gave her hope.

  Then she accidentally closed the search result page and had to run a new one on the site. She typed in Shayla’s first name and hit enter before thinking about it.

  Several new articles appeared, with a different last name of Pierce, but showing earlier dates than the first batch of articles.

  Oh, stupid. That’s her maiden name.

  She immediately giggled as she realized what she’d thought, adding one more hash mark in the win column for the tiny victory.

  I remembered her maiden name!

  Pleased with herself, she continued reading, latest articles first and working backward through time.

  When she reached the last several articles, apparently some of the first ones Shayla wrote for the publication, Laura realized they were part of a series.

  She froze as she jumped back farther in time to open the first in the series.

  Part of her wanted to close the browser window, forget she ever saw it.

  And yet, something kept her reading. Refused to let her stop.

  As her heart pounded, thudding hard and heavy in her chest like a gorilla trying to break free, she took a deep breath and started over from the beginning.

  Last weekend, a group of friends gathered around a table at a local restaurant and discussed their week, their jobs, their lives, graciously inviting this writer into their inner circle. Nothing distinguished them from anyone else in the restaurant.

  Except that an hour later, after dinner ended, they all met up at a local private BDSM dungeon club to continue their evening…

  She wasn’t an idiot. As she read, despite the way Shayla had disguised the identities of the people she met and talked with along the way, she easily recognized them.

  Mental pictures flashed through her mind, of her friends, dressed in a wide variety of sexy clothes.

  Or maybe I’m remembering?

  Now she wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.

  Her mind pulled her back to finding the corsets in her closet.

  A numbing chill settled over her.

  And the description of the man Shayla had paired up with—mentor and teacher at first, progressing into Dominant—left no doubt in Laura’s mind it was Tony.

  Several times during reading, she caught herself feeling at her throat for the necklace no longer there.

  A necklace much like Shayla’s, which Laura now suspected was a day collar.

  Information and memories and emotions flooded into her brain, small chunks interconnected by their topic.

  Confusion set in, overwhelming. As she finished reading the series she didn’t realize she’d stood. It felt like she’d climbed almost to the top of an incredibly high stone wall hiding the answer to her prayers on its other side, and all she needed to do was get a little nudge to make it over and finally see what lay hidden.

  She had difficulty trying to pull all her thoughts together. But she knew she couldn’t talk to Rob about this. He’d never mentioned any of this. And Shayla had obviously been in on keeping this information from her.

  As had their other “friends.”

  Of all of them, she suspected there was only one who would give her an unvarnished, completely truthful telling, answering any and all of her questions with blatant, perhaps even painful, honesty.

  She grabbed her phone, which she put on silent mode and shoved into her purse, and her keys, and headed out the door after walking Doogie and setting the alarm.

  * * * *

  She had to stop and buy a street map, the tiny map app on her phone confusing her even more. After looking up the address, she headed north to Bradenton until she turned in at the driveway and pulled up to the guard shack marking the main entrance of the sprawling campus housing the national headquarters for Asher Insurance.

  The guard held an electronic tablet. “Name and photo identification, please.”

  She swallowed hard, fighting back the
panic struggling to take hold in her brain as she handed over her driver’s license. “Laura Spaulding.”

  “Reason for your visit?”

  “I…I’m not expected. I’m here to see Tony Daniels.” It struck her that maybe she should have called first. What if he wasn’t there? Or in a meeting.

  She didn’t care. She needed her questions answered by someone other than Rob.

  By someone who, at an instinctive level, she trusted would not lie to her.

  By someone she trusted, period.

  She didn’t know where that trust in Tony stemmed from, but it felt right.

  For now, she’d go with that.

  The guard tapped her information into the tablet, walked to the back of her truck, presumably to note the tag number, and then snapped a picture of her driver’s license with the tablet’s built-in camera. “Just a moment, please.”

  He disappeared into the guard shack and returned less than minute later with a plastic ID badge. He handed it and her license to her, along with a paper parking pass. “Put the pass on your dash. He’s in building C, which is that one there.” He pointed it out, along with where to park. “Make sure to wear the badge while you’re on campus. When you leave, we take them both back from you here.”

  “Thank you.” He opened the gate for her and she found a parking spot not too far from the building.

  Why am I here?

  Now she wasn’t sure if this was the greatest idea. So many things floated through her head, confusing, emotions and memories and overwhelming loss and need.

  It threatened to swamp her.

  She suspected of the people she’d met so far, it would be Tony who could help her make sense of it all.

  Honestly.