Obsession

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “Come on.” Straightening, he held out his hand to her. If he was feeling anything approximating the jumble of conflicting emotions that had just hit her, he gave no sign of it. “I want to get where I can see the road. If we sit at the picnic tables, we can watch everything that’s going on around here without being noticed. Unless someone knows precisely where to look, they won’t spot us.”

  She took a deep breath. The worst of the shock seemed to be receding—as long as she didn’t think about those damned tiles. Even letting the smallest memory of her kitchen floor into her mind threatened to send her world tilting on its axis.

  Because no matter how she spun it for herself, there was no reconciling the difference in the size of those tiles.

  Stop. Don’t go there. You’ll make yourself crazy.

  The thing was, though, she was very much afraid it was too late: She already was.

  “How do you know that?” Katharine put her hand in his simply because his was there in front of her and resisting required more effort than doing what he wanted. His hand closed around hers, warm and strong, and she allowed him to pull her from the car. Only when she was on her feet and the steamy heat was wrapping itself around her like a hug did she notice how cold she was. Goose bumps covered her arms. She had to grit her teeth to keep herself from shivering. Her legs felt unsteady. Taking a step sideways, she leaned against the side of the Blazer for support. The blacktop was hot beneath her bare feet, and getting hotter by the second. Shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, she was suddenly thankful for the too-long hem of Dottie’s pants. If she hadn’t discovered the insulating properties of little puddles of rayon just when she did, she would have been doing her own personal version of an Indian war dance right there beside the car.

  “I’ve stopped here before. It’s on the way to the cabin.”

  He dropped her hand as he closed the door behind her, then pressed the button on his key ring to lock the vehicle. She knew that was what he did, because she heard the beep, but she really wasn’t paying much attention because she was trying so hard not to compare mental images of the tiles.

  There has to be an explanation. . . .

  “Katharine.”

  Startled out of her near panic by the forcefulness of his tone, she looked at him in surprise. He was standing right in front of her, arms folded over his chest, giving her the kind of look that made her think he had probably said her name more than once. Meeting his gaze required that she look up, and as she did so, she registered just how tall he truly was: The top of her head barely reached his chin. His eyes were narrowed against the sunlight, she saw, and his mouth looked surprisingly grim.

  Again, she was struck by that disconcerting sense of déjà vu. Had she stood with him like this before?

  Where? When?

  “Hmm?” she murmured distractedly, her eyes searching his face. Every feature was familiar, but she could recall no details at all about any interactions they might have had prior to this morning. She knew him—and yet she didn’t.

  Weird. Weird. Weird.

  Her heart started to thud.

  “Can you make it?” His tone was impatient.

  He meant could she walk to the picnic tables. Katharine blinked a couple of times in an effort to clear her mind, then nodded, again because any alternative was bound to be more trouble than simply agreeing with what he wanted her to do. As she straightened away from the Blazer, she was suddenly aware of how bad she really felt. She was dizzy, weak-kneed, and tired to the bone. Her head hurt and her stomach churned and she was freezing despite the blazing heat that was multiplied tenfold by the intensifying effect of the blacktop. But the worst thing of all was knowing that she had lost it.

  Absolutely, totally, without a doubt lost it. Because what other explanation could there be?

  She was a skinny blonde named Katharine Lawrence. And those tiles had to be the same.

  “Careful,” he warned when she started hotfooting it (literally) toward the grass and almost tripped over her borrowed pants in an effort to keep her feet off the sizzling pavement.

  She didn’t bother to reply. Awkwardly joggling from foot to foot took concentration, especially when stopping was not an option unless she wanted fried feet.

  “Jesus Christ,” he added in a resigned undertone, coming up behind her. He swung her off her feet and into his arms before she had any idea of what he meant to do. “Don’t you have any shoes?”

  “Hey,” she protested as she grabbed on to his shoulders for support. They were wide beneath the limp blue shirt, sturdy and well-muscled, and the arms cradling her were sturdy and well-muscled, too. “There are some in the duffel bag.”

  “Here’s a radical thought: Maybe you should try putting them on your feet.”

  “Next time I have a few spare minutes when nobody is trying to kill me, maybe I will.” Her tone was tart.

  That made him smile. His eyes crinkled and his mouth quirked at the corners, and he flicked a glance at her.

  “Point taken.”

  With her arms wrapped around his neck, she had an up-close-and-personal view of his profile. It wasn’t classic, precisely, but it was handsome and manly, and the crooked smile struck a chord deep in her memory bank: She’d seen him smile like that before, she was almost sure, but again, no details surfaced to back up the feeling. The sun beat down on them, gleaming off the unruly dark gold waves of his hair, deepening the tired lines around his eyes and mouth. He was looking tense, and with a little wake-up call of surprise, she saw that he must be almost as scared and jumpy as she was. Driving a getaway car for a woman running for her life was almost certainly not something he did every day. Getting pulled into the thick of a murderous (possible) government conspiracy likewise must be new to him. She hadn’t thought of it like that before, but now that she did, she saw that he was really being a mensch about everything. More than a mensch, in fact: a hero. Her hero.

  Which, paranoid, ungrateful creature that she was, immediately struck her as suspicious.

  “So-o,” she said on a long, drawn-out note, her arms around his neck tightening a little as he passed the Dumpsters, stepped over the concrete berm, and started walking across the grass to the picnic tables with her, “why are you being so nice to me?”

  He flicked her another one of those sideways glances.

  “I’m a nice guy, remember?”

  The glimmer in his eyes was a twinkle, she discovered. It grew more pronounced as she frowned at him.

  “Right,” she said, clearly unconvinced.

  He laughed.

  The odd thing about it was, his teasing didn’t completely eliminate her suspicion, but it did make her relax a little. The old adage about looking gift horses in the mouth popped into her mind, and she decided it was an old adage because it was true. Anyway, the bottom line was that she felt safe with him. She did not feel at home, exactly, in his arms, but she didn’t feel like she was being manhandled by a stranger, either.

  “You can put me down. We’re on grass,” she pointed out.

  “Too late now: I’ve already thrown out my back.”

  That crack she considered unworthy of a reply. He carried her easily, like she weighed nothing at all, and she had a moment there when she found herself almost admiring his strength until she realized she probably didn’t weigh anything, now that she was a skinny blonde with big jewelry and perfect nails and brain damage. That last thought was so upsetting that she barely even registered anything else until he set her down with something less than grace on the picnic table’s bench. The molded plastic was surprisingly comfortable, she discovered. The heat was still palpable, thick and enervating as the inside of a steam room, but a delicate, lacy patchwork of shade from the elm spread over the area like a shadowy doily, sheltering it from the direct rays of the sun, making the temperature, oh, say, ninety in the shade.

  To her poor, frozen self, the sauna-like heat felt good.

  “Okay, so why don’t you start by explaining to me why you thi
nk you’re losing your mind over floor tiles,” he said, settling in beside her, his long legs just brushing hers and his forearms resting comfortably on the tabletop. He spared her only the briefest of glances as he spoke. Instead, his eyes fixed on the overpass with its ramps that curved down past a background of leafy forest to the road they’d just left. There was traffic, she saw, as she followed his gaze, lots of traffic coming off the near ramp and going up the far ramp and pulling in and out of the surrounding businesses and zipping along the highway in front of them. But none of the various vehicles caught her eye, none of them appeared to be searching for anyone, and besides, unless someone was right on their tail, she was pretty sure there was no way anyone was going to be able to find them in such a busy place. They were the proverbial needle in the haystack. Realizing that made her feel a tiny bit better. Or at least safer.

  His words brought the competing images of her kitchen floor from last night and today forcibly to mind. There was no mistake: No matter how she tried to reconcile the two, they were indisputably different. The question became, then, how much should she tell him? Should she keep the changing tile sizes to herself? Only total surprise had made her blurt out her discovery like that in the first place. But the thing was, she couldn’t figure out what was happening. If she kept trying, her brain would burst.

  The tiles made no sense.

  With her elbows resting on the table, she dropped her face into her hands and closed her eyes.

  “You’re going to think I’m insane.”

  “That’s presuming I don’t already.” The dryness of his tone brought her head back up again. She narrowed her eyes at him, and he made an impatient sound. “Come on, spit it out.”

  Her stomach tightened. Her toes curled into the soft carpet of grass. Her hands clenched convulsively.

  “Last night,” she said carefully, “Lisa and I were tied up on my kitchen floor. I was on my stomach, with my face as close to that floor as it could possibly get. I saw that floor perfectly. And it was made up of tiles that were twelve-inch squares.” She paused, wetting her lips. “Today, when that man was chasing me, I fell on the kitchen floor. My hand landed on one of those tiles. Not only did I see it, but I felt the size of it. That tile—all the tiles—were six-inch squares. Same kitchen, same kind of terra-cotta tile. But the size of the tiles changed.”

  His attention had shifted from the traffic. His eyes bored into hers like twin lasers.

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  12

  "That’s what I keep telling myself. But believe me, it’s the truth.”

  "You must be mistaken.”

  "I’m not mistaken.”

  “Hallucinating, then. Or . . .”

  As his voice broke off, she gave him a warning look.

  “Or nuts?” she finished for him, too sweetly.

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “Thanks,” she said with no small degree of bite. “You’re being a big help here.”

  “What kind of medication did they have you on in the hospital?”

  That was a good question. "Actually, I wondered that, too.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How would I know? I was unconscious, remember? I was the patient. You’re the doctor. Don’t you know?”

  Their eyes met and clashed. He frowned.

  “I wasn’t there in the capacity of your doctor. I didn ’t prescribe the medication, I didn’t administer it, and I don’t know what it was. I could check, but that doesn’t help us right now.”

  Again with the “us.” Okay, for that she was willing to forgive him a certain amount of insensitivity.

  “Could they have given me something that maybe causes hallucinations?”

  “Maybe.” He paused, seeming to think the matter over. “But it’s pretty far-fetched to imagine that it would cause you to hallucinate about the size of the tiles on your kitchen floor. I mean, what a thing to hallucinate about.”

  Just remembering what else she was possibly hallucinating about made her head hurt. It was too much—she couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. With her mind on overload, she needed help.

  There weren’t even any options to consider. Dan was it.

  “That’s not all.” God, her head was pounding. She pressed her cold fingers to her temples in an effort to calm the relentless beat. “The thing is, I don’t seem to”—here she hesitated, searching for the right word—“know myself.”

  He stared at her for a moment.

  “Just for the record, I’m not a damned shrink. And is there some particular reason why you feel the need to know yourself right now?”

  It was difficult, she discovered, to sustain soul-destroying angst in the face of total obtuseness. Her hands dropped to rest on the table, her spine stiffened, and she glared at him.

  “I’m not talking about lacking an inner understanding of my psyche. I’m talking about not recognizing myself. ” There was a definite caustic edge to her voice. “Physically, I mean. The person I see when I look in the mirror is not me. At least, it’s not who I think I am.”

  “What?” He looked at her like she had suddenly grown two heads.

  “I’m not blond, okay? I’m not skinny like this. I don’t have perfect teeth, or a perfect manicure, or own big sapphire rings or diamond earrings.” She touched the sapphire ring as she mentioned it, then as she glanced down at it and saw its big, bright, obnoxious sparkle, started anxiously turning the too-loose bauble round and round on her finger. “Look, it doesn’t even fit. It’s too big.”

  He glanced at the ring, then back up at her.

  “Katharine—”

  “That’s just it.” Her voice shook. She stopped twisting the ring and clasped her hands together instead. “I don’t think I’m Katharine. I don’t feel like Katharine. I feel like I’ve been dropped down into some stranger’s life.”

  By this time her pulse was racing and her breathing had quickened. She had his total attention now. There was an arrested expression in his eyes, and his gaze was fixed on her face.

  A beat passed in which they simply stared at each other.

  “You took a pretty hard blow to the head,” he said finally.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m hoping it’s that, or the medication they gave me. The other thing is”—she sucked in much-needed air—“I seem to be missing a lot of memories. I mean, for example, I recognized you when I woke up in the hospital this morning, but I can’t seem to remember things like how we met.”

  “Ah.” Comprehension suddenly dawned in his eyes, and she knew he was recalling her earlier fishing expedition into that very topic.

  “Ed, too. I mean, I know about Ed, who he is, that he’s my boss and that we’re . . . involved, and I can picture him and all that, but when he called me, I didn’t recognize his voice. And the only thing I feel when I think of him is distrust. No, fear.”

  His brows knit, and he looked as if he would say something, but she forestalled him by rushing on.

  “Somebody’s looking for something, and they think I know what it is and where it is, and I don’t. Somebody tried to kill me, and I don’t have a clue who, or why.” She swallowed. “I don’t seem to feel anything. Emotions, I mean. Like Lisa. She was one of my closest friends. She got k-killed in front of me.” She closed her eyes. “I know that, but I can’t seem to feel it. I don’t feel the grief I know I should be feeling for her. And—and that gorgeous, expensive town house. It isn’t me. I didn’t decorate it. It’s not my taste. Those aren’t my things. I don’t live there. And now the tiles. I know it seems stupid, but this thing with the tiles is just the last straw.”

  “I can see where it might be,” he agreed, and she felt his gaze on her face. Then he added, “Try not to worry about it too much. Whatever it is, we’ll sort it out.”

  That “we’ll” was the most comforting thing he could have said. Her eyes opened, and she rewarded him with a small, unsteady smile. His gaze slid down to her mouth, then rose to
meet her eyes again. His expression was suddenly impossible to read.

  “All I can think of is that this has to be some kind of weird amnesia,” she said. “But . . .”

  Her voice trailed off despairingly, and to her dismay she could feel her eyes starting to well up. She tightened her lips as she felt them begin to tremble. The thing was, she never cried. Or at least, the old her didn’t. But this was the new her, and it had been a really bad, horrible, no-good day.

  Watching, his eyes hardened. His lips tightened. His expression went from unreadable to—what? Unsympathetic?

  “Yeah, well, don’t let it throw you,” he said. His attitude had changed in an instant. He was distancing himself from her. She could feel it. His voice was almost brusque. Maneuvering his legs out from beneath the picnic table, he stood up and looked down at her with a frown. “Come on, time to go. If there was anyone following us, we would have spotted them by now.”

  She had been so wrapped up in pouring her troubles out to him that she had completely forgotten that they were watching for a possible tail. Her eyes widened and her gaze shifted, sweeping the parking lot, the highway, the adjoining businesses, the ramps. Vehicles of every description were swarming all over the place like busy little bees. If it had been up to her to keep track of who was whom and what was what, she would have failed miserably. Fortunately, it hadn’t been up to her.

  “Oh. Right.”

  His change of tone was so abrupt that it was disconcerting. It also—although she didn’t like admitting it, even to herself—hurt her feelings a little. Clearly, the guy wasn’t up to dealing with weeping women. Which actually worked for her, now that she thought about it, because she had no intention of crying, anyway. The only thing crying ever did for anybody was make their nose all stuffy, and she was way ahead of the game there: She already couldn’t breathe through her nose. She’d had herself under control again as soon as she had felt the threatening tears.