Shadow Woman: A Novel

by Linda Howard

  Al closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because he’s Xavier, that’s how. Shit. This means he has a mole in here, or somehow he’s got eyes and ears on us that our sweepers didn’t pick up, or he got this location and followed us all to our homes. He’s a patient bastard; he’d spend weeks figuring everything out.”

  Followed him home? Panicked nausea rose in Dereon’s throat. “He knows where I live? Where my wife and kids are?”

  “Don’t worry. He won’t kill you unless he needs to.”

  “That’s reassuring!” Dereon said sarcastically, too alarmed to care how he was talking to his superior.

  “It is, actually.” Al heaved a weary sigh. “If he wanted you dead, you already would be. You have to understand how Xavier thinks. He didn’t let us in on that little secret to scare you shitless—though evidently he succeeded in doing that anyway.”

  Being Forge, he couldn’t let Dereon’s panic pass by unremarked. He expected his people to be in control—of their jobs, of the situation, and most of all, of themselves. “He let us know that he’s on top of us, and he also knows that we now have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to find out exactly how he found out. We have to run security checks, we have to put fresh eyeballs on everyone who works here, and we have to turn our vehicles and homes inside out, looking for bugs.”

  Dereon took a deep breath, forcing himself to look at this strategically, the way Forge was doing. “Will we have to move locations?”

  “Possibly, but there’s no guarantee that he doesn’t have physical eyes on us and will simply have us followed to the new location, in which case we’ve gained nothing and wasted resources. There’s also the possibility that by reacting the way we now have to react, he’ll be able to learn even more about us by watching what we do.”

  In other words, Xavier had them by the short hairs, and had his own reasons for letting them in on the secret.

  Chapter Four

  Lizette lay quietly in bed, her mind racing. It was weird, but she felt okay, as if the awful sickness had never happened. She was a little shaky from throwing up so much, but overall … okay. No headache, no nausea, just an almost overwhelming sense of urgency. But, an urgency to do what? She had no idea, unless it was to act as normal as possible.

  Something was seriously wrong when she felt as if acting normal were crucial. She felt well enough to get up, but lying in bed seemed the safest thing she could do right now. Wouldn’t someone who was really sick be lying down? Act normal.

  So many alarming things had happened in such a short space of time that she could barely catch a thought to examine it before another one booted it out, demanding attention. She’d worked at Becker Investments for five years … maybe. She didn’t know. Maryjo had said she hadn’t had a sick day in three years, so did that mean she’d worked there only three years, or had Maryjo simply pulled “three years” out of her hat without any reason? People did that; Maryjo had probably been rushing around, getting ready for work, her mind half on the day ahead of her, so she’d already mentally disconnected from the conversation and “three years” had popped out. It didn’t mean anything.

  Rather, it might not mean anything; taken in context with the fact that she didn’t actually remember going to work for Becker Investments, it could mean a lot.

  Going to work somewhere wasn’t something that would be forgotten. You might forget the last date you went to the dentist; you didn’t forget the first day at a new job—or getting the job in the first place. That was the biggest gap. She had no memory of putting in an application, of talking to anyone. All she could remember was simply living in this house and working at Becker, her routine set and unremarkable, going about every day as if it were exactly like the day before.

  Living … in this house. Dear God, she didn’t remember moving here, either, didn’t remember choosing to live in this suburb of D.C. She just did. She’d simply accepted it, without curiosity, the way she accepted that grass was green, but now that she truly thought about it the gap was terrifying.

  Item: The face in the mirror didn’t match the one in her memory. That was somehow the most important one, yet she quickly shied away from examining it more closely right now.

  Item: She thought she’d worked at Becker Investments for five years, but if it was really three, what had happened to those other two years?

  Item: She didn’t remember starting work at Becker Investments, period.

  Item: She didn’t even remember moving to this little house.

  Item: She was suddenly, inexplicably certain that she was being watched, that her calls were being monitored, that there might even be cameras in the house watching her.

  The most likely explanation for all of those things was that she had either become seriously mentally ill—and overnight, too—or she’d developed a degenerative brain disease, a tumor, something logical even though the possibility was terrifying. A tumor would also explain the nausea, the headache, even the paranoia. The idea was weirdly comforting, because that meant she was sick instead of crazy—

  The phone rang, interrupting that line of thought, and she rolled over to grab the cordless unit from the charger on her bedside table. Diana’s name and cell number showed in the caller ID window. Quickly she thumbed the talk button. “Hi,” she said. Her voice still sounded thick and nasally.

  “How are you feeling? Maryjo said you have that stomach virus.”

  Startled, Lizette glanced at the clock and saw that it was after eight. She’d been lying in bed worrying over what had happened—what was happening—for a lot longer than it seemed. Diana was already at work, and of course would have talked to Maryjo when Lizette didn’t show up on time.

  “The vomiting has eased off, at least for right now,” she replied. “But I think the headache was the worst. It was so bad I thought I might be having a stroke, so I did the stroke test on myself—you know, checked that I could smile, then that I could raise both arms, recited numbers to see if I could remember them.”

  Diana laughed. “I’m sorry, I know you must feel terrible, but I can just see you doing that. Smile—check. Raise arms—check. Remember numbers—check. Even when you’re sick, you make all of your ducks get in a row.”

  “Ducks are unpredictable; you have to crack the whip over them or they go renegade and cause all sorts of trouble.”

  “Your ducks are the most well-behaved ducks I’ve ever seen,” Diana assured her, still laughing a little. “Now, have you called your doctor?”

  “No, I went back to bed and must have dozed off. I don’t have a regular doctor, anyway. If I don’t start feeling better, I’ll go to a pharmacy and pick up something for nausea. Or see a doc-in-a-box.”

  “You need a regular doctor.”

  “Doctors are for sick people. I don’t need one when I’m healthy.” And yet … she’d had a regular doctor, Dr. Kazinski, when she was younger. She’d had regular checkups and flu vaccinations, Pap smears and mammograms, the whole be-responsible-for-your-health deal. But then she’d moved, and for some reason she hadn’t gotten a new primary care physician. Why hadn’t—pain speared her temples, and she leaped off that train of thought like a hobo. Sure enough, the pain ebbed, and she could concentrate on what Diana was saying.

  “But you aren’t healthy now, and here you are, without a regular doctor.”

  “It’s just a virus. It’ll wear off on its own. The only danger is if I get dehydrated, and I’ll be on the watch for that.”

  Diana sighed. “Well, I can’t make you go. But I’ll check on you again when I get off work, okay?”

  “Okay. And—thanks.” Thanks for caring. Thanks for taking the time to check on me. It struck Lizette as she disconnected the call that, other than Diana, there was literally no one else in her life who would do these things.

  How had that happened? When had it happened? Growing up, and in college, she’d had a multitude of friends around her. Family, not so much, not since her parents died. She had an uncle in
Washington state … maybe. She hadn’t had any contact with him in years, so he might have moved—hell, might have died. There were also some cousins she hadn’t seen since she started grade school; she wasn’t certain she could remember their names, had no idea who her female cousins might have married or where they lived. She wished she’d made more of an effort to stay in touch, wished they had done the same. But when you weren’t close to begin with, becoming close was sometimes not in the cards.

  She’d been eighteen when her parents died, so even though Uncle Ted and Aunt Millie had come to the funeral, they evidently considered her a full adult because they hadn’t offered any aid other than a “call us if you need anything” platitude before they were on the plane going home. She’d been on her own. The mortgage on the house had been paid for by her parents’ life insurance policies, plus she’d had a chunk of change left over in addition to her college fund, so she hadn’t been in any financial difficulty.

  Emotional difficulty, yeah. To be suddenly severed from her family ties had been an unbearable shock. For a year, she’d mostly stayed in the house, talking to her friends sometimes, but gradually that contact had dwindled down to almost nothing. She hadn’t wanted to leave the last place on earth where she’d felt safe, hadn’t wanted to socialize, hadn’t laughed even though she’d spent hours in front of the TV watching sitcoms that had presented an unrealistic and sometimes twisted version of what her life had been before her parents died in a mass of twisted steel and plastic.

  Eventually her friends had stopped calling. Slowly but surely, though, she’d begun to pull herself out of the abyss. Her mom and dad wouldn’t have wanted her to drown in grief, to stop living her own life because theirs had ended. They’d been investigating colleges with her, talking about where she might like to go, what she was most interested in doing as a career. So, at nineteen, she’d started sending out feelers to the real world, in the form of college applications. Before the accident, she’d really wanted to go to Southern Cal, to stay near home, and because the house was now paid for that still seemed like the most practical option. Forcing herself out of her cocoon wasn’t easy, but she’d done it. Her friends from high school might have faded away, but once she began living a real life again, she made new ones at college. Funny how they’d dropped away, too, except for a very occasional—as in maybe once a year—e-mail or Christmas card.

  From Uncle Ted and Aunt Millie, there had been nothing, and for a while that had really hurt. Now, though, they seldom even crossed her mind. When they did, she’d feel nothing except distaste. She didn’t want to have anything to do with them; what kind of asshole jerks would leave an eighteen-year-old on her own like that, without even a weekly phone call to check how she was doing? To hell with them and their kids, the cousins whose names she couldn’t remember. When she’d left college and sold the house, moved to the other side of the country, she hadn’t bothered to send them her new address.

  Which, in a way, brought her back full circle. She remembered her life, remembered the details, the emotions, all of the big things and some of the little ones, like snapshots in her head. So why didn’t she remember going to work at Becker? And why didn’t she remember buying this house? It was her house. She made payments to the bank every month. But—no. Nothing.

  She stared up at the ceiling. Just how big was this gap in her memory?

  Very methodically she started back at the beginning. Okay, so there was nothing for the first two years. How many people remembered anything from their babyhood, anyway? Very damn few. She’d met only one, as a matter of fact, a—

  The pain that exploded in her head was blinding, leaving her clutching her head and moaning. Right behind it came a rush of nausea. She shot out of bed, stumbled and lurched to the john, hung over the toilet for what felt like an endless amount of time. This was the worst episode yet. It left her wrung out and weak, sitting on the cool bathroom floor with weak tears running down her cheeks.

  She hated feeling like a wuss.

  But—damn, hadn’t this episode been triggered by some elusive memory that seemed to be knocking on the door of her consciousness, trying to get in? Like the reason why she hadn’t set herself up with a new primary care physician. She didn’t try to pull the memories up, didn’t try to isolate them, because that would just set off another episode. Instead she tried to think around them, to isolate the problem, just as she’d been doing when she’d gotten sidetracked by that baby-memory thing.

  She leaned her head against the wall. If she was going to do this, she probably should stay near the toilet.

  So, what was her first memory?

  Maybe when she was three, she thought. She remembered a gorgeous pink and white dress with a big flirty skirt that she’d worn for Easter; she even remembered a picture of her with her mom when she was wearing the dress, her arm stretched up as her mother held her hand. Besides remembering the photo, she also remembered being in the dress, admiring how the skirt kicked up with every bouncing step she took. She’d bounced and jumped a lot.

  Okay, that year was taken care of. How about four?

  She remembered starting kindergarten. Or maybe it was prekindergarten. Whatever. She’d sat in a teeny chair at a small round table with a girl who had fat red ringlets, and a boy named Chad whom she’d hated because he kept picking boogers out of his nose and wiping them on her, at least until she punched him in the nose. There had been other kids, of course, but all she remembered was the girl with red hair and booger-wiping Chad, the little shit.

  When she was five, she’d learned how to read. She’d sat at the kitchen table and proudly traced her finger from word to word, sounding them out, while her mom cooked supper.

  Six—first grade, and a fight with a bigger girl who called her a name and pushed her down, making her skin her knees. She’d jumped up and tackled the girl and pulled her hair.

  Seven—some first grader had thrown up in the school lunchroom and set off a massive chain-reaction of vomiting that had even involved some of the teachers.

  Year by year she went, sometimes remembering what her schoolmates had done, sometimes what she’d done, and sometimes the memory had been rooted in her parents. The year she was nine, her parents had taken her to her grandparents’ house in Colorado for Christmas, and the snow had been amazing.

  There was something for every year, until five years ago.

  She skirted around a wall in her memory, sensing that it was there but afraid to try tearing it down because whatever was behind those walls caused the headaches and nausea. Five years ago, there was nothing.

  Four years ago, there was nothing.

  Three years ago, suddenly she was living here, and working at Becker, going about her placid routine as if the two-year gap in her life didn’t exist.

  Could a tumor cause such a clearly defined memory loss? Wouldn’t it be more spotty, and include more recent memories? Short-term memories were the hardest to retain—hence the “short term.” But moving to a new location and getting a new job were important things that would jump the short-term and go straight into the long-term memory bank. Some things just did.

  Where had she moved from?

  She remembered that. She’d been living in Chicago at the time, having moved there when she was twenty-three.

  Except … maybe she hadn’t moved directly here from Chicago. She didn’t remember. What had happened during those two years that had wiped out her memory of them? And what the hell had happened to her face?

  Suddenly she thought of a way she could verify that her face wasn’t hers, which was an incredibly weird concept. Grabbing the edge of the bathroom vanity, she hauled herself to her feet and stared at the face that wasn’t her. On the off-chance she might have had some horrific accident herself and had to have reconstructive surgery, she pulled her hair back from her face and leaned close to the mirror, looking for scars.

  There. Oh my God, there.

  In her hairline, faint but definitely there. She pulled her ears
forward, trying to see behind them, which was kind of an exercise in futility. Frustrated, she grabbed a hand mirror and held it so it reflected behind her ears, and—yes. More scars.

  Stunned, she put the hand mirror down. Then she picked it up again and rechecked behind her ears. Yep, the scars were still there. Very fine, and very faint. Whoever the cosmetic surgeon was, he or she had been very good.

  So this face was hers, or at least what hers had been made to be. The real question now was, how in hell had this happened, and how could she find out?

  Chapter Five

  I thought I might be having a stroke.

  The knotted tension in Xavier’s shoulders eased when he heard that, because it was the perfect explanation for that string of numbers she’d twice recited. Even better, she hadn’t asked her best friend how long she’d actually been working at Becker, hadn’t mentioned the conversation with Maryjo Winchell at all. Good. With luck, they’d skate by this without a shit storm blowing up in their faces.

  It helped that she really was sick. Yet another episode of nausea came in loud and clear over the speakers.

  But—luck? He’d never trusted that bitch.

  He’d rather go with his own instincts, his own knowledge of her, that said the cell-phone bit was too coincidental to be a coincidence.

  He wanted eyes on her, but as long as she stayed in the house he had to stay put so he could monitor the situation. Instead he sent a secure message to a friend who would make sure nothing unusual was going on in her vicinity: “Heads up. If she leaves the house, or if you see any unusual activity—repairmen, poll takers, insurance salesmen, anything—let me know asap.”

  An IM popped up on his screen within seconds: “Will do.”