by Don Prichard
Silence again, then questions about surviving on the island. The tension seeped out of Jake’s muscles, and he began to relax. These answers were bearable—the adventure of events rather than the anguish of loss.
“Tell us about the three people you were stranded with,” Dana said after a while.
Jake’s heart lifted. Yes. The three people he loved; who had become his family on the island; whom he wanted his children to love. He started with Betty—a childless widow in her late sixties, on the cruise with her grandniece, Crystal. Then Crystal—eleven years old, an orphan who lived with her grandparents. And finally, Eve—courageous, caring, capable, the one who had rescued Betty and Crystal, had towed them back to their damaged lighter to sail to the island. She had gathered fruit each day on the island, had sewed him up after a leopard attack.
He stopped, suddenly conscious he had talked more about Eve than the other two.
“You didn’t say how old she is.” Dana sat erect in her chair, eyes focused on her father.
“Early thirties.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“What’s she do for a living?”
Jake shrugged. “She never told us.”
“All that time on the island and she never told you?”
Jake flinched at the sarcasm in Dana’s voice. “She … avoided it, and we didn’t pry.”
“So she could have been a criminal, for all you knew?”
Brett frowned at her. “Dana, what’s the matter with you?”
“Can’t you tell?” Her voice leaped at Brett like a wild tiger. “Dad’s in love with her!”
“That’s ridiculous.” Brett let out a loud guffaw. “He’s hardly said a thing about her—”
Dana thrust her chin at him. “Only twice as much as about the other two. A year on an island with someone that fantastic—what do you think, Brett?”
Jake’s cheeks burned.
Brett stared at him. “Dad?”
Not the timing he’d wanted for this news. He cranked out a weak smile. “Dana’s right. We fell in love just before we were rescued.”
Dana turned her face to the wall. Brett studied the green and beige carpet.
Jake’s mouth went dry. “I’ll always love your mother. Her death tore me apart. I thought I’d never stop hurting.”
“But you aren’t hurting now. You’ve moved on,” Dana sniped.
“C’mon, Dana,” Brett said. “After you met Bentley, you didn’t grieve as much.”
Dana’s face turned a bright pink shade, and she darted a glance at her father. “It’s not the same thing. Bentley’s not replacing someone I love.”
“Bentley?” Jake said.
“My boyfriend. You’ll meet him tomorrow. And when will we meet this, uh … woman, Dad?”
“Eve,” Jake said. “Eva Gray.” He hesitated. “Soon. When we’re all ready.”
Which, gauging from his daughter’s response, might need to be longer than he’d expected.
Chapter 12
July
“Dad?” Eve’s hand shook at the weight of the telephone receiver. She pressed it tighter to her ear as a nurse wheeled a clattering hospital bed into the room next door. All Eve wanted was to hear her father, to talk to him again.
“Eve, are you okay?” Her father’s voice crackled across the line from Firenze, Italy.
“I am.” She squeezed her eyes shut to forestall brimming tears.
For a week she hadn’t been able to talk to him. Only Chaplain Peterman had been allowed to visit as she lay rigidly in bed, afraid to move lest she set the room spinning. She could peek at her dear friend, glimpse his closed eyes and his lips moving in prayer, feel the warmth of his hands enclosing hers, smell the faint musk in his aftershave. But hear him she could not. She was a prisoner, cut off by a whirling room and the dead quiet of a tomb between her ears.
She opened her eyes and relaxed her grip on the telephone receiver. “My hearing came back yesterday. I was able to sit up without getting dizzy, and this morning I stood. I’m sitting in a chair now.”
“You can come home then?”
“The doctor says I can go after the Fourth of July weekend—on Monday—if I continue to do okay.” She dropped her hand over the edge of her chair and ran her fingers across the silky leather of the suitcase he’d sent from Italy. “Thank you for the luggage. And for the money for clothes.”
“So you got to go shopping?”
“Not before the vertigo hit. So I asked Stella and Marianne, my co-workers at the district attorney’s office, to pick up some things for me yesterday. They’re coming over this evening to help me try them on.”
“Those are the two girls you remembered a week ago?”
“Yes.” She smiled. Both women were well into their fifties, not quite girls.
She had recognized the office manager and the receptionist the second they stepped into her room four days after her father left. Stella—short and round, but with a mod haircut and expensive clothes to ward off frumpiness—and Marianne, with her pug nose and a smile perpetually stretched from ear to ear. Their mouths had dropped open when Eve called out their names. Only after she saw their expressions did she grasp the fact that she remembered them. Remembered them—at first sight!
The next day vertigo nailed her to her bed.
Her father’s voice brought her back to their conversation. “You sure you’ll be well enough to travel? Monday is only three days away.”
“The doctor said no planes, but a car will be fine. The drive will give Dax and me time to get reacquainted.”
“I … hope you’ll like him.” Anxiety cemented her father’s words together like mortar between bricks.
“Dad, please tell me what happened with Dax and his friend and me. What kind of trouble did we get into?”
The line was silent.
“Why won’t you tell me?” She began to tremble inside. This was the third time she’d asked him, the third time he’d refused to answer. “You know I’m going to ask Dax.”
Her father sighed. “I’m sorry, I never should have said anything to you. Can we just move on—”
“No! I don’t like people knowing something about me that I don’t know.”
When her father didn’t say anything, she clamped her jaw shut. He had erected a brick wall between them. This time she wasn’t going to be the first to speak.
At last he said, “All right, Evie. I promise we’ll talk about it when we get together.”
She exhaled raggedly. That was probably the best she was going to get out of him. “I’m still going to ask Dax about it.”
“You can do that. But you’ll wish you’d waited.”
“I’m tired of waiting. Why should I?” Her voice reverberated in the room.
There was a long pause, and then words heavy with sadness. “Because it’s bad, Evie.”
Suddenly she remembered his telling her she had refused to speak to him for years. It was she, wasn’t it, who had put up the barricade.
A shiver ran up her spine and spread goose bumps over her arms. Maybe, just maybe, it was best not to know what lay on the other side.
***
Eve’s suitcase stood at the door. A straw summer purse, a gift from Marianne, lay at the end of the stripped hospital bed. Inside the purse were a federal employee identification card and a checkbook with a year’s back pay. She sat in the chair, teeth brushed, hair combed, dressed in a new shirt, slacks, and sandals—and shook. Today was Monday. Today she would meet her brother and drive from Chicago to New York. Would she remember him?
She got up and paced the room, refusing to poke her head into the hallway to look down the corridor. The clatter of dishes on trays and the acrid odor of coffee and overcooked bacon drifted into her room. Her mouth watered at the thought of food. Her dismissal papers had been signed before breakfast, and she’d now have to wait to eat until she left the hospital.
She wished Chaplain Peterman would make an exception to his sched
ule and come by. He usually made his visits after lunch. He had stopped by Sunday night to watch the Fourth of July fireworks on TV with her, and to say goodbye.
It struck her for the first time that she didn’t know his full name. She dug into her purse and pulled out the business card he had given her. His first name was George. George Peterman. Warmth softened the tight ball in her stomach. He had asked her to look him up when she got back from her father’s in New York. Chaplain Peterman would help her find an apartment, help her find a church. She would have asked him, in any case. Without him she was alone in Chicago. No one else here counted. Not as friends she could share her heart with anyway.
She thought of his question from Sunday night. He had asked her about God—did she remember Him, know Him at all? Joy had burst in her like one of the exploding firecrackers on TV. “Yes,” she’d said. She had found Him in the deep caverns of her soul when the hospital room whirling over her head and the silence echoing between her ears had sent her running for a refuge. A safe place where she could curl up and be still, call out and be heard.
“I was so alone,” she told Peterman. “I didn’t even have myself for company—what was there to share?” She hunched her shoulders to her neck. “No memories. No history. No mistakes to ponder. No joys to relive. Only questions.”
She looked at him, her brows knit together, her eyes scanning back and forth between his. “Who am I? That’s what I kept asking myself. What if I never remember?”
Her lips pinched together and her gaze dropped to the floor. Peterman’s hand covered hers and the warmth lifted her eyes back to his. “That’s when I remembered God. Not just that I knew of Him from your prayers, but that I knew Him.”
Peterman’s grin wrapped around her and lifted her like a soaring kite. Emboldened, she shared her fear with him—how, like a caged animal being released into the wilds, she was clinging to the open door of the cage, afraid to venture out into the unknown.
“I’ve remembered my birthday and my coworkers Stella and Marianne,” she said. “That’s all. I’ve met Bradley Henshaw, my boss, whom I can’t remember, and ten coworkers I also can’t remember. I’ve learned I’m a federal prosecuting attorney, but I have absolutely no recall of the law, nor of any cases I ever tried, and especially nothing of this … this Romero case.” She glanced at her suitcase, where she had stuffed the files Henshaw had thrust at her with the demand she get current on them.
“I have a father I can’t remember. He tells me I’ve rejected him for a reason he refuses to tell me, and I have a brother I also can’t recall, who was somehow involved in that reason.”
She glowered at the chaplain as if he were to blame. “So here I am, entering life at age thirty-four, having lived all of three weeks that I can remember—one of them flat on my back with vertigo.” She flicked her hand dismissively. “And tomorrow? Oh, well, hey, off I go on my own. Easy-peasy.”
“Oh, you’re not so badly off.” The chaplain winked at her.
This time Eve’s scowl was genuine.
“There’s a precedent, you know.” His eyebrows rose, and he locked eyes with hers. “God brought Adam and Eve into the world as fully-grown adults with no memories. They had knowledge, communication, personalities, and unknown skills and aptitudes they would discover over time. They weren’t blank slates, Eve. Neither are you.”
She smiled, recalling Peterman’s parallel and the comfort it had brought her Sunday night.
As if knowing she was thinking of him, Peterman appeared next to her suitcase. By his side was a tall, skinny man with blond hair reaching past his shoulders, a yellow T-shirt, and blue jeans ragged against the heels of dirty tennis shoes.
“Hey, little sis.”
Everything inside her went rigid. Dax.
She remembered him.
Remembered his hands imprisoning her arms.
Remembered his friend lowering his jeans.
Remembered every detail her father had refused to tell her.
She felt her eyes bulging. Ceiling and floor crackled with electricity, blazed white-hot across every nerve in her body. She flared her nostrils and sucked in air so blistering it exploded into red-orange flames inside her head.
“Get him out of here!” she screamed. “Get him out!
Chapter 13
Stella barged into the District Attorney’s office, startling the spit out of Bradley Henshaw. His heart jumped again as she slammed the door. “Boss! Eve’s bodyguard, Sam, on the phone. Trouble at the hospital.”
Brad swept the receiver off its cradle. “Henshaw.”
“Sam here. Eve’s brother showed up, but she threw him out. Screamed bloody murder until he fled. The doctor had to sedate her.”
“Where’s the brother?”
“Down the hall, pacing.”
“Talk to him and call me back. Eve okay?”
“The chaplain’s with her.”
“No matter what, don’t let her leave the hospital.”
He hung up and regarded Stella. “We’ve got a problem.”
She dropped into the chair across from his desk, eyes glued to his.
He repeated Sam’s information. “Do you know what this is all about?”
She shook her head. “The nine years I’ve known Eve, she’s never talked about her family. Never spent a holiday with them either, as far as I know.”
Brad drummed the fingers of his right hand on his desk. “I don’t want her leaving our protection. Too risky.”
Stella gave a knowing look. “That phone call from the U.S. embassy in the Philippines this morning—you got new information, didn’t you.”
Brad handed her a sheet of paper with his handwriting scrawled on it. “My notes. Type them up and attach them to the report. I asked the embassy if there was any update on Eve’s appearance there—beyond the medivac transporting her from a yacht with two dead men on it. Turns out the Philippine Coast Guard rescued three additional people that day. Americans. They claim they were marooned on an island last year with Eve—or rather, Eva Gray.”
Stella’s eyes widened and she sat up straight. “If she used her alias ‘Eva Gray’ and stayed undercover, it means—”
“She knows something.” Brad slapped his hand on the desk and stood up. “It stinks of Danny Romero. And until she remembers, she’s getting a bodyguard around the clock, starting this minute.”
“You know she won’t put up with that.”
Brad scowled. Stella was a mother hen to the women in the office, and she knew her chicks well. “Okay, an undercover agent, then.”
The phone rang and he snatched it up. “Sam?” He punched the speakerphone button so Stella could hear.
“Yeah.” Sam let loose a number of expletives connected to Dax’s name. “No wonder she screamed. All he’d say at first was Eve must have remembered him and the fact that she hated him. Family history, none of my business, you know.”
There was a pause, and Brad could all but see steam billowing from the phone.
Sam continued. “With the threat of a night behind bars with Chicago’s best, he told me he and a buddy got drunk one night when Eve was twelve years old. Brad, he held Eve down while his buddy raped her.”
The news jolted the air from Brad’s lungs. Across from him, Stella’s face turned ash white. He slammed his fist on the desk. “Where is he?”
“He left.”
“All right, stay with Eve. I’ll get back to you.” He switched off the speakerphone.
Stella was bawling now. He thrust a box of tissues at her and stalked down the hall to the water cooler. Her wails trailed him, and he groaned when all the office staff stepped out of their cubicles to gape at him.
“Get back to work,” he barked.
He got a cup of water and brought it to Stella, this time making sure he closed his office door. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose several times while he sat and waited.
“I’m okay,” she said at last. “What do you want me to do? The hospital dismissed Eve early th
is morning.”
“Book a hotel room. Sam can stay with her until I decide on someone.”
Stella stared daggers at him. “That’s ridiculous. You can’t leave her to herself like that after what’s happened.” Her face fell. “I’d let her stay with me, but …”
“I know. You’ve got enough to handle with your son.”
“What about Marianne? Eve is comfortable with her.”
“And by tomorrow everyone in the office will know everything there is to know.”
Stella huffed. “Marianne can keep a confidence.”
Brad drummed his fingers. The drama of the past ten minutes guaranteed whispers in the office, no matter what restrictions he laid down. “All right, but she needs to know she’s putting herself at risk with Eve there.”
“Of course.”
Five minutes later, Stella was back. “Marianne is up for it. I told her to go straight to the hospital and get Eve. I’ll find someone to cover the reception desk for Marianne until tomorrow.”
“Make sure Sam knows to stick with them.”
Stella left, and Brad kicked Dax Eriksson as hard and far away from his mind as he could. He forced his thoughts back to the embassy’s phone call. Their update included three others dead on the island. The carnage reeked of Danny Romero.
Brad pursed his lips. He needed more than an undercover agent to protect Eve. He needed some way to get Romero off her back once for all.
***
Danny Romero let the office phone ring five times. On the sixth ring he lifted the receiver to his ear. Never let the caller believe he was readily available. “What?” he grunted.
“New information. The Gateway didn’t sink.”
For a moment Romero couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Emilio is alive? Joy erupted in him like a geyser. Then rage that his son hadn’t contacted him. Then fear that Emilio’s silence was because something had happened to him.
“Emilio shanghaied it,” the informant said.
Shock ripped through Romero. Emilio had swindled his own father? Rage shook him again. “Eriksson remembered this?”