She's Not There

by P J Parrish

  “Mr. Tobias?”

  Speck was back. He gave Owen a quick once-over and then focused again on Alex. “We found your wife’s car,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Out on County Road 29, about two miles off Alligator Alley.”

  It took Alex several seconds to pull up a mental map. Alligator Alley was the slang name for I-75, the interstate that cut across Florida from one coast to another. But 29 was just a two-lane blacktop road off the Alley that ran south through the wildest part of the Everglades. He had been on that road once, years ago, when a bunch of clients had gathered down at the Rod and Gun Club in Everglades City. Until you reached Everglades City, there was nothing on that road but scrubland and drainage canals.

  “Do you know what your wife was doing out there, Mr. Tobias?”

  Alex looked at Speck. “I . . . I don’t know.”

  Owen pushed forward. “Are you accusing him of something?”

  Speck looked up. “Not yet.”

  “Then this interview is over,” Owen said.

  “Who are you?” Speck asked.

  Owen stared at him. “I’m his attorney.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The sunlight streaming through the window woke her up. Amelia blinked and slowly sat up, her body in knots from being curled into a ball on the bus seat all night. She pulled her purple plastic glasses out of the seatback pocket, put them on and looked across the aisle. The old man and the boy were gone. The bus was empty.

  She looked out the window. The bus was parked in front of a small Greyhound station that looked like it might once have been a drive-in restaurant before it had been repainted red, white, and blue. Passengers were standing around smoking cigarettes and drinking from Styrofoam cups.

  Picking up the duffel, she went out into the bright sunshine. The bus driver was coming toward the bus carrying a silver travel mug when she stopped him.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Brunswick, Georgia, ma’am,” he said. “You’ve got about twenty minutes for a breakfast break and then we’re pulling out.”

  She touched his arm as he started to board. “There was an elderly black man traveling with a little boy,” she said. “Do you know where they are?”

  “They got off last night at Daytona,” the driver said over his shoulder as he climbed on the bus.

  Amelia looked around the narrow street lined with old live oak trees, the twisted branches netted with Spanish moss. It was warm, and the humid breeze had a pleasing briny tang to it, as if there were fishing boats nearby. Across the street was a small white brick building with a sign above the door that read RED BONE CAFÉ.

  Clutching the duffel close, she walked toward the café. Inside, it was a sliver of a diner just wide enough for four red vinyl booths along the windows and a Formica counter with six old-fashioned round stools. It smelled of burnt coffee and bacon. She slid onto a stool next to an old man in overalls, eyed the apple pies in the glass case, and ordered a coffee and toast.

  The coffee was strong and peppery, a taste she recognized as chicory, and she had to douse it with milk. But the toast, limp with butter, was delicious, and she wolfed it down.

  God, she was so hungry.

  And dirty. She needed a shower.

  A blast of a horn made her look to the window. The passengers were filing back onto the bus. The waitress came over to refill her coffee and Amelia started to pull out some money but then paused. Even the smallest movement made her ribs ache, and she felt fragile, as if her body were made of glass. She knew she couldn’t get back on that bus.

  “Is there a hotel nearby?” she asked the waitress.

  “Well, there’s a Motel 6 near the mall. But that’s way out by the interstate.”

  “Is there anything here in town?”

  “Not really.”

  The waitress was staring at her in a way that reminded Amelia of the redheaded woman back in the pawnshop—intense curiosity coupled with an odd, almost protective tenderness. Amelia resisted the urge to touch the gauze covering her chin.

  “Okay, I know one place you could stay, maybe,” the waitress said. She leaned over the counter and pointed out the window. “That’s Gloucester Street. Turn right there and head through downtown. Turn left on Union Street and look for an old yellow house with a big wraparound porch. You can’t miss it. The woman who lives there is a friend of mine. She takes in boarders sometimes. Her name is Hannah. Tell her Missy sent you.”

  The bus was just pulling away when Amelia emerged from the café. She watched it disappear and then started toward Gloucester. She passed through a small downtown of old red brick buildings that had been restored as cafés and shops. The lampposts were hung with American flags and baskets of geraniums. There was a sign in a real estate office window advertising tickets to a Christmas Eve mass, and a man on a ladder was stringing up Christmas lights.

  Christmas? It didn’t feel like Christmas here. But she wasn’t sure what Christmas really felt like. She walked on, the sun warm on her face.

  Was she an impulsive person? She didn’t have any idea. But her decision to stay here in this strange town hadn’t come from some sudden, irrational urge. Sometime in the night on the bus, as she was drifting down into sleep, she had realized that going all the way to Charlotte was not a good idea. It was a big city—that much she could remember—and a city was a place where she could disappear and be safe from the man who haunted her dreams. But she could also get lost there. What she needed now was a place with boundaries and fences, a place where the streets had names instead of numbers, a place where she could feel real again instead of anonymous. She needed a place where she could heal and try to remember what had happened to her.

  She turned onto Union Street and walked down the block. The yellow house was there in front of her, a big shabby Victorian almost hidden by trees and vines. The front door was open, and as she climbed the steps, she could see beyond the screen door to a long narrow hallway and a staircase. There was no bell so she knocked on the screen door.

  She heard barking and, a moment later, a small white poodle appeared behind the screen door, still barking but wagging its tail so hard it almost fell over.

  “Angel, shut the hell up!”

  A tiny woman came to the door, hair as white and tightly curled as the dog’s, face lined and pale, and a mouth stained with bright red lipstick. She gently nudged the dog aside with her slipper and opened the screen.

  “What can I do for you, hon?”

  Amelia smiled. “I’m looking for Hannah.”

  “You found her.”

  “I was just at the Red Bone Café and the waitress said you had rooms for rent. I need a place—”

  “I know. Missy just called and said you’d be coming. Well, come on in then. Don’t mind the dog. She’s half-blind and full crazy.”

  Amelia followed the old woman down the hallway toward the back of the house. The poodle trailed behind, its toenails tapping on the wood floor. Amelia glimpsed small, high-ceilinged rooms stuffed with old furniture. The cross breeze made the thin curtains sway like ghosts in the shadows.

  In the kitchen, Hannah motioned for Amelia to sit at an oak pedestal table. The room was hot compared to the rest of the house, and Amelia caught the smell of cinnamon and baking apples. She saw three pies sitting near the window.

  Hannah came over to the table carrying a spiral notebook with a Hello Kitty emblem on the front. She saw Amelia looking at the pies.

  “I’d offer you a slice, but I make those for sale at the café,” she said. “I got some Little Debbie donuts if you’re hungry.”

  “No, I had breakfast, thank you.”

  Hannah sat down and flipped open the notebook. “So what’s your name?” she asked, pencil poised.

  “Amelia Brody.”

  “How long you staying?”

 
She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Can I rent by the week?”

  Hannah’s eyes dipped to the Vuitton duffel on the floor and then came back up to Amelia’s face. “I used to take in a lot of boarders, mainly the shrimpers before that all dried up. Nowadays I’ve got to be careful who I rent to because I’m getting too old to worry about other people’s problems, and everybody seems to have problems these days.” She tapped the pencil on the pad. “I gotta ask you, hon. You got somebody after you?”

  Amelia hadn’t seen a mirror since the thrift shop. She could only imagine how disheveled she looked, how bad the bruises were by now.

  “No, I was in a car accident,” she said.

  Hannah was staring hard at her, and Amelia resisted the urge to touch the gauze on her chin.

  “My son Greg—he’s living in Atlanta now—he keeps telling me I should get a computer so he can send me e-mails instead of birthday cards,” Hannah said. “He says that if I had a computer I could check people out before I rent to them. You can find out anything about anybody with a computer, you know. I don’t trust the damn things, though.”

  Amelia nodded, barely listening. Her head was starting to pound again, and she suddenly felt very tired. Something brushed her leg, and she looked down. The poodle had settled down on the linoleum, resting its snout on her feet.

  “Angel seems to like you,” Hannah said. She hesitated, then penciled Amelia’s name in the notebook and closed it. “Okay, the room’s ten dollars a night and since you’re the only renter right now I’ll throw in breakfast if you make it down to the kitchen by eight.”

  “Thank you,” Amelia said.

  Hannah rose and stuffed the notebook on a shelf between two cookbooks. “Follow me, hon,” she said. “I’ll show you where you can lay your head.”

  The room was above the kitchen and smelled of apple and cinnamon. It was large and bright with sunlight. There was a sagging bed with a paint-chipped white iron headboard, a fat carved bureau, and a round braided rug on the scuffed wood floor. The wallpaper was patterned with faded blue flowers and darker rectangles where pictures had once hung.

  Amelia’s eyes lingered on the bed. God, all she wanted to do was just crawl under that white chenille bedspread and never come out. She turned back to Hannah, who was standing in the door, holding the white dog.

  “It’s lovely,” Amelia said.

  “If you need to make any phone calls, there’s a phone downstairs in the hallway,” Hannah said.

  “I won’t need the phone,” Amelia said.

  “Yeah, no one does anymore because everyone has a phone in their pocket. I got no use for the damn things, myself. Cell phones give you brain cancer, you know.”

  Cell phone.

  Amelia had a sudden stab of memory—standing somewhere in the dark rain, holding a cell phone and listening to it ring. She could remember the feeling of her heart beating too fast and even what she had been thinking at that moment—Please, please answer the phone.

  Who had she called? Had anyone answered?

  “You sure you’re okay, hon?”

  She looked at Hannah and nodded. “I’m just a little tired.”

  Hannah smiled. “Well, the bed’s old but comfy. Don’t worry about locking your door. Nobody here does. The bath is down the hall, and there’s towels and shampoo in there. I’ll be down in the kitchen if you need anything else.”

  She left, leaving the door ajar.

  Amelia set the duffel on the bed and unzipped it. She stared down at the wad of money, debating whether to try to hide it, but then decided to leave it in the bag. She pulled out the bottle of Aleve, shook two pills into her hand, and went down the hall to the bathroom. She downed the pills with a handful of water and then looked in the mirror.

  The gauze had come loose, so she carefully peeled it off her chin. The sight of the black stitches made her wince. She would have to get Band-Aids, a nightgown, some fresh clothes.

  But not now.

  Her eyes drifted to the claw-foot bathtub. Right now, a long soak in the tub was the only thing she needed.

  She ran the water, stripped, and got in the tub. The hot water embraced her, and as she washed herself, she saw two large bruises on her left leg and a bad scrape on one elbow that she hadn’t noticed before. Several of her fingernails were ragged, and the palms of both her hands were raw and red, like she had fallen and slid across concrete.

  She eased farther down into the warm water, resting her head back on the tub’s edge. The tub was too small for her long legs so she had to prop her feet on the faucet. She lay there for a long time before she finally looked down at her feet. She sat forward and focused on them—on the gnarled toes, bulging blue veins, crusted callouses and bunions, and blackened nails. Ugly feet. Deformed feet. How had they gotten that way?

  A new question pushed its way forward in her head.

  Who was I? What was I?

  She settled back against the tub and closed her eyes. The electric current of fear that had been with her since waking up in the hospital was subsiding a little, almost as if the warm bathwater was leaching it away. But she knew it would not go away completely, that she would never feel safe or at peace, until she found out what had made her run.

  She couldn’t go back to Florida. Did she have a friend she could contact? Who had she called that night in the rain? Did she have family somewhere? The dream of floating in the blue-green bubble came back to her, and though she still couldn’t remember her mother’s name or even what she looked like, she had a strong feeling that her mother was alive.

  A plan . . . she needed a plan. She had to find out more about herself and her past. If she found out who she was, she could figure out what she needed to do. Tomorrow she would start over.

  The water was turning cold. She used the tiny bottle of hotel shampoo to wash her hair, then pulled the stopper and got out, wrapping the scratchy white towel around her.

  The sun was streaming in full force through the windows when she got back to her room. She found the plastic bag she had taken from the hospital and pulled out the comb. After ten minutes of tugging it through her tangled hair, she gave up. Extensions, the doctor had said; she had hair extensions.

  She felt a sudden small surge of anger. Why did she need them? What was wrong with her real hair?

  She set the comb down and looked at the bed. There were two indentations in the sagging mattress with a slight hump in the middle, as if the old bed still carried the memories of the two people who had slept there, side by side, for a very long time.

  Another flare of memory.

  Alex.

  She could feel him, the press of his body, hard and sweat-slick against hers, his face a grimace above her and his breath hot against her neck as he whispered her name over and over.

  Mel . . . Mel . . . my Mel.

  She shut her eyes, and his face was gone.

  She dropped the towel, pulled back the chenille bedspread and got into the bed. She found a comfortable spot in one of the hollows and closed her eyes.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. There was an awful noise of voices in her head, like a radio that couldn’t get a signal, and she struggled to sort them out, to figure out who was talking to her, who was yelling at her, and why. Sleep was inches away when she felt something brush her arm, soft as a caress. She opened her eyes.

  Black eyes. A blur of white. It was the little white dog. It sniffed her face and then moved away, scratching at the chenille bedspread. The dog made a tight circle, four, five times, then with a deep sigh settled into the crook of her knees.

  She reached down and pulled the dog closer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Amelia opened her eyes, she was surrounded by a soft blue blur and for a second, she thought she was back in the bubble dream. She reached for her glasses on the nightstand and put them on. The flowers on the blue wallpaper came into fo
cus. She looked down at the bedspread. The white dog was gone.

  When she swung her legs over the side of the bed, she winced. The pain was still there in her body and she still had a headache but at least she felt rested. The smell of strong coffee drifted up from downstairs. Her stomach rumbled.

  After a quick trip to the bathroom, she dressed in her jeans and blue shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen. There was a clock on the wall near the sink, a black plastic cat whose cartoon eyes and pendulum tail swung slowly back and forth. It was eight thirty.

  Jesus, she had slept more than twenty hours straight.

  There was no sign of Hannah, but there was a half-full Mr. Coffee on the counter, an empty mug, and an open cartoon of chocolate donuts. Amelia filled the mug and took a donut. She stood at the window over the sink, looking out as she ate. It had turned colder overnight, leaving a morning fog hugging the ground and making the trees in the backyard look like they were levitating. She heard the click of the dog’s toenails and turned.

  The poodle came quickly to her, wagging its tail. But Hannah, trailing behind with a leash, drew up short just inside the door.

  “Good lord, hon, what happened to your hair?”

  Amelia realized that yesterday her hair had been hidden beneath the canvas hat. “Bad perm,” she said with a smile.

  Hannah shook her head and went to the coffeemaker. “You going to want more coffee?”

  “No, I’m good.” Amelia sipped her coffee, watching Hannah pour out the carafe and wipe down the already spotless counter. “Hannah, I need to buy some toiletries and some clothes. Is there someplace downtown?”

  “Downtown? Nah, not unless you wanna pay five hundred dollars for a sweater in one of those tourist places.” She stooped to get the dog’s bowl and refilled it with water. “I’m heading out to my doctor’s appointment and I could drop you off at the mall if you like.”

  Amelia reached down and gathered the dog into her arms. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all, hon,” Hannah said. “You’d better buy a jacket while you’re there. We got a cold spell coming.”