by David Archer
“Chance?” Tommy asked. “Did you find Mom?”
Chance laid a hand on his shoulder, then knelt down and pulled both of the boys into a hug. “Not yet,” he said. “But we will. We just have to have faith. We all just keep praying, asking God to bring her home safely.”
Dinner was quiet, and then Chance sat on the couch with the boys as they watched a movie. He didn’t think any of them really paid any attention to it, but it was necessary to have some kind of normalcy return to their lives, and he knew it. As the evening wore on, he kept them close and reassured them that their mother would be coming home, until it was time for them to go to bed. Since no one had attempted to bother any of them at the house, he decided to let the boys go back to school the next morning.
That plan turned out to be a bust, however. He was awakened several times during the night, each time by the sound of one of the boys crying and begging for his mother to come home. When he finally roused himself out of bed the next morning, he told Grandma to keep them at home, and to let them sleep as much as they could. He kissed his baby daughter goodbye and left the house, headed back to the office.
There were no new developments by the time he got there, and everyone gathered in the conference room. They went over the little they knew once again, hoping and praying that they would catch something they missed, but two hours later, they were going over it for the ninth time.
Chance was about to speak, but suddenly his phone rang. He stepped out into the hallway to take the call.
"Chance Reddick," he said as he answered the phone.
"Mr. Reddick? This is Doctor Catherine Peterson, and I'm with the trauma ward at Las Vegas General. I have a patient here who came in with a note pinned to her, naming you as an emergency contact. I saw the news reports a little while ago about your wife being missing, and—I believe it’s her."
Chance’s eyes went wide. “Gabriella? She’s there?”
"I'm pretty certain it’s her. I recognized her from the picture on the TV news report a little while ago, and I wanted to let you know immediately. I’ve already called the police, of course, they should be here any moment."
"Thank you,” Chance said. “We’ll be there soon as possible."
"That’s fine. Can you reach her family? She's been asking for her brother and sister."
Chance narrowed his eyes. "Her brother is on the way here, so I can bring him along, but her sister died when they were kids. She’s been asking for Annabelle?"
This piqued Peterson’s interest. "Yes. She has no other sisters?"
"No, none. Listen, doctor, we’ll be there as soon as we can."
"Good," Peterson said. "I’ll see you as soon as you arrive."
They hung up, and Chance hurried back into Josie’s office. Pete, Jake, Carol, and Tina all stopped talking and turned to look at him.
"Gabriella has been found," he announced, "alive! Somebody dropped her at the emergency room at Las Vegas General with a note saying I was her emergency contact. The doctor just called me and said she recognized Gabriella from the news reports."
“Are you serious?” Pete demanded.
Jake asked, "How did she get there?" Both of them rose to their feet.
"I don't know that part yet. What I do know is that she's asking for her brother and sister, even though her sister died years ago."
Carol got his attention. “Max is on the way here,” she said. “Should I call him and tell him to go on to the hospital?”
“That’ll be fine,” Chance said. “I'm heading down there now.”
“Not without us, you’re not,” Pete said. They all followed Chance out of the office, with Pete pushing Josie’s wheelchair and rushing to keep up.
Las Vegas General was only a short distance away, and they arrived just a few minutes later. They were all shown to a side room, where they were told to wait for Doctor Peterson. Max was already waiting there.
"Oh, thank God you’re here," Max said when he saw them. "I was just told to wait here for Doctor Peterson."
"Do you know anything about how Gabriella is, or how she got here?"
“Just that she’s here. I only got here a couple minutes ago, myself.”
“But you don’t have any idea what happened to her, right?” Carol asked.
“Not just yet,” Max said. “Like I said, they just told me to wait here and the doctor would be in pretty shortly.”
Josie pointed down the hall suddenly. "Hey! That might be Doctor Peterson coming now."
A young female doctor in scrubs, a lab coat, and sneakers was approaching them from the hallway. Everyone grew quiet as she entered and looked around at them all.
"Which one of you is Mr. Reddick?"
Chance moved forward and shook hands with her. "I am. These folks are our friends. Pete and Josie Dixon, Carol Musgrave and Jake Claridge, Tina Reynolds, and this is Gabriella’s brother, Max Vasquez."
Chance pointed to everyone in turn, and Peterson greeted them all, thanking them for their speedy arrivals. She got down to business as they all seated themselves on the assorted furniture in the room.
"I recognized Mrs. Reddick from a news bulletin I saw on the TV a while ago," Peterson told the others. "She had a note pinned to her that said to call her husband and had his cell number. I'm afraid the police already took the note, but it looked like it had been typed on some old typewriter."
"Where did you find my sister?" Max asked. "We've all been worried sick, and the FBI is even involved in looking for her."
"She was dumped outside of the emergency room. I was actually the first to notice her and bring her inside."
Chance waved a hand to get the doctor’s attention. "How badly is she hurt?"
"I'm sorry to say that she’s in pretty rough shape. It looks like someone beat her all over, even on her feet. She’s also got a lot of drugs in her system. OxyContin, alprazolam, lorazepam and others we haven’t identified yet."
Everyone stared at her, recognizing the dangers of so many drugs in her system.
“Is she conscious?” Chance asked.
"She is, but she isn’t necessarily coherent. She was also very cold when I found her. She couldn't walk without assistance because of the drugs and the beatings."
Directly opposite Peterson, Jake had his brow furrowed in thought.
"Is Gabriella being treated for hypothermia?" he asked her.
"Yes—I've been taking care of her, myself. She was also very dehydrated when I found her, probably a side effect of some of those drugs, so we’ve got her on IV fluids."
"Good,” Chance said. “Has Gabriella asked for anyone other than her sister or Max?"
The doctor shook her head. "Not to my knowledge,” she said. “That’s all she’s actually said, just that she wants her sister Annabelle and her brother Max.”
"She hasn’t said anything about who did this to her?" Chance asked. “Nothing about who actually kidnapped her?”
Peterson shook her head again. "No. Somebody dropped her off, just pulled up outside the ER door and literally shoved her out of the vehicle, then drove away so fast that nobody could see anything like a license plate."
Chance growled. "Do you remember anything about the car?"
"It was big, but I only saw the back end of it. It could have been an SUV or a van. I’ve already told the police about it, and they should be here any moment."
Josie waved a hand to get her attention. "Any chance you can get me to wherever your security video footage is? If I can get a look at it, I can go over the footage from when Gabriella was left outside. I might be able to get some kind of identifying information about the vehicle."
Peterson called a security guard and told him to take Josie down to the security office and let her look at the footage. As they started off down the hall with the guard pushing her wheelchair, Sherilyn Roberts, her partner Jim McCord and two police detectives were brought into the room.
Between them all, it took only a few minutes to bring them up to speed. Doctor Pe
terson waited until they were finished, then asked if they were ready to go and talk to Gabriella.
“Hold up a minute,” Jake said. “I'm a little concerned about the fact that she hasn’t asked for her husband, or her children. Doctor Peterson, is she aware of her surroundings, do you think?”
"It’s like I said,” Peterson replied. “She’s conscious, but not really coherent. I'm not actually certain she’s aware of where she is, let alone what she’s been through.”
Jake nibbled on his bottom lip for a moment, then looked at Chance. “I think maybe we should be cautious about this,” he said. “The drug cocktail they found in her system could easily cause some pretty serious mental aberrations, maybe even including amnesia. It seemed like she may have forgotten that her sister is dead, and the fact that she hasn’t asked for you or her children makes me wonder just how much she might’ve been affected. Chance, would you consider letting me and Carol and Max go in alone for a moment?”
Chance looked at him for several seconds, then slowly nodded his head. “Okay,” he said. “I'm just worried about what she’s been through. You honestly think she might have forgotten about all of us?”
“I can’t say at the moment,” Jake said, “but I think she may need to be handled delicately, at least at first. Let us go in and talk to her, see how she reacts to seeing her brother. That could tell us a lot, right there.”
“All right, then,” Chance said.
Peterson agreed that Jake’s idea was a good one, and offered to lead them to Gabriella’s room. "Let's go."
Chance, Pete, and Tina sat down again while Max, Carol and Jake followed Peterson to the trauma unit. Gabriella was alone in a private room, just a couple of doors down from the nurse's station. She was dressed in a hospital gown, and hooked up to various things monitoring her condition, but not one of the three of them was ready for the shock of seeing Gabriella so badly abused.
The young woman's skin was marred with cuts and bruises. Both of her lips had been split, and the skin around her right eye was a deep shade of purple, indicating that someone had punched her very hard. Her wrists, hands, ankles, and feet were bound in gauze and sports tape, covering the cuts in those places.
Even worse was the hollow, vacant look in her eyes. Jake had seen this look a few times before with trauma victims, but he wasn’t prepared to see it on a friend and coworker. Clearly, something terribly traumatic had happened to her, and it was a lot more than just physical.
Gabriella’s eyes were open, but she was staring up at the ceiling, and there was no sign she was actually seeing anything at all. Jake gave Max a slight nudge and he stepped up beside his sister’s bed.
“Hey, sis,” he said. “I'm here. How are you doing there?”
Slowly, she turned her head so that her eyes could find his face. She stared at him for a moment without showing any sign of recognition, and then her eyebrows came down.
“Max?” she asked, doubtfully. “Max? Where is Annabelle?”
Doctor Peterson leaned toward Jake, looking slightly puzzled. "Pardon me, but who was Annabelle?" she whispered.
Jake sighed. "Max and Gabriella's sister—she was the middle child, with Max being the oldest and Gabriella the youngest. She committed suicide when she was sixteen, and Gabriella was only ten. Max was about twenty at the time."
"Oh, my goodness; I'm so sorry. Don't tell me Gabriella found Annabelle."
"No,” Jake said, “but I understand she found the note Annabelle left behind. From what I was told, Annabelle jumped off a bridge into floodwaters. There were a few witnesses, but her body was never found."
"Never found?" Peterson asked. “Isn’t that a little unusual?”
Jake shrugged. "It happens. Apparently, there were a few people who claimed to have seen her jump in, and others saw a young woman’s body floating in the torrent, so that pretty well confirmed that the suicide note was real. I think there was a search, but they never managed to recover her body."
Peterson turned to Carol. "You are a friend of hers?"
"Best friends. Gabriella is the little sister I never had. It sounds like something is a little scrambled in her head right now."
"It also sounds like you could be a surrogate for her sister, if that's really how all the math is adding up for her." Peterson mused. "Why don’t you go up there and try talking to her?"
"Okay,” Carol said. She stepped up beside her boyfriend and Gabriella turned her eyes to look up at her.
Chapter 11
Things had suddenly gone crazy just a couple of hours earlier. Gabriella had slept fitfully for an hour or so, only to be woken up by her captor yelling at her some more, and beating her again, first with her fists and then with a mop handle. By the time she was finished, Gabriella could barely stand, and her mind was a mixture of shock and horror because she simply couldn't believe who the kidnapper was.
A short time later, the demented woman came back and told Gabriella that she was going to be released, but the next thing she knew, a hypodermic needle had been jabbed into her arm. Something about that terrified her, and she knew there was something she was trying to remember about needles, but it wouldn’t come out of the recesses of her mind. She could feel the drug in her system, but she was having trouble focusing, and she simply couldn’t remember what it was she was trying to focus on. She must have passed out at some point, because she suddenly woke again as she struck the cold, icy pavement of the parking area outside the emergency room at a hospital.
Since then she'd been bathed, dressed in a hospital gown and tagged with a wristband, and hooked up to a number of machines monitoring her heart and her breathing. There was an IV needle in her arm, connected to a bag hanging above her head. She vaguely noticed a couple of uniformed men standing around outside the door into her room, but it didn’t register that she was under police guard.
Gabriella had been horrified to learn that she'd been pumped full of drugs during her captivity, apparently more than once, and she was very cooperative about getting them pumped out of her system. Unfortunately, the process took away her appetite, so she still hadn't eaten yet. She was surprised that she could even sit up because she felt as if she'd been run over by a bulldozer.
She barely noticed noticed the knot of people gathered at her door, but when she did, she registered her brother first. She didn’t even have the strength at first to turn her head, until he walked up beside where she lay.
“Hey, sis,” Max said.
"Max?" she asked cautiously. It was Max, she knew, but somehow he just didn’t look right. “Where’s Annabelle?”
Max let out a sigh. “Gabby,” he began. “Annabelle is…” He trailed off, unable to finish at that moment.
Gabriella’s eyes narrowed as she stared at him. “Where? Where is she, I want to see her.”
Something in the way she was speaking made Max hesitate. He knew she had been through some sort of trauma, but it actually seemed like she could not remember that Annabelle was dead. There was something—childlike in the way she was speaking. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Carol was coming toward him. He waited until she was beside him before turning to look at his sister again.
"Gabriella," Carol began. "It's good to see you. How do you feel?"
Gabriella looked at her, confusion in her eyes. "A little hazy," she said cautiously.
Max spoke. "You've been through a pretty big ordeal, sis. Feeling hazy is probably about perfectly normal."
Gabriella just nodded, still looking at Carol with her eyes narrowed.
"Is there anything you remember about what happened? The doctor told us that she found you out in the parking lot."
Gabriella wracked her brain, trying to remember anything she could, but try as she might, she was coming up blank. It was like she couldn’t really remember much of anything, and only bits and pieces of the past were floating around in her mind.
"I'm sorry," she finally said, looking from Max to Carol. "I don't remember anything, and I'm not qui
te sure that I remember who the two of you are."
Carol and Max promptly recoiled in surprise.
“Gabriella, I'm your brother,” Max said. “This is Carol, she’s your best friend.”
Gabriella looked at them, her eyes bouncing from one to the other. “I guess I know you, Max,” she said, “but—you look so much older. I mean, you just came home from college a couple days ago, didn’t you?” She turned to Carol. “I'm sorry, but I don’t remember you at all.”
“It’s okay,” Carol said. “You’ve been through quite a traumatic experience. Don’t get upset, it will come back to you.”
“But I know you? Really?”
Carol grinned at her. “I hope so,” she said. “Max and I have been living together for the last month, and you and I have been close for the last three months or so. You introduced me to your brother, don’t you remember that?”
Gabriella stared at her. “No,” she said after a moment. “I'm afraid I don’t.”
She turned back to Max. “Where’s Annabelle? I want to talk to her.”
Max looked to Carol for a moment, then turned back to his sister. “Gabby—Annabelle isn’t with us anymore. Try to remember what happened, okay? Annabelle—Annabelle died almost 15 years ago.”
Gabriella’s eyes went wide as she stared at him. “She died? No, no, I just saw her…”
“Gabby, I'm sorry,” Max said. “I don’t know what’s happened, but it’s like you’ve lost the last fifteen years or so. Don’t you remember anything from that time? Don’t you remember your kids, your husband?”
Gabriella gasped and stared at him. “I have kids? I'm married?” She started trembling and her breath became rapid. “Max—how old am I?”
Her brother smiled softly. “Gabby, you’re about to turn twenty-six in a couple months. You’ve been married to Chance Reddick for over two years, now. You have three kids, Tommy, Andy and a baby girl named Robin. You don’t remember any of them?”
Gabriella closed her eyes and forced her breathing back under control. “Where is he? My husband, I mean.”