She's Not There (11 page)

Buchanan reached over to his bag on the passenger seat and pulled out his Armasight binoculars. He had bought them years ago for a night birding trip to Assateague Island to spot great horned owls. But the goggles were perfect for situations like this.

He trained the binoculars on the porch. The little white dog was pawing at the shins of the young woman. She bent down to pick it up and held it high like a baby, tipping her face up to the porch light.

The woman’s face glowed bright and clear in the hard green light of the binocular lenses. It was the face of the young ballerina in Amelia’s scrapbook.

Buchanan set the binoculars aside, picked up his cell and punched in a number. Alex Tobias answered on the third ring.

“I’ve found your wife,” Buchanan said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Amelia wasn’t sure what made her do it. Maybe it was the soft weight of the accumulated kindnesses of the last two days. The redheaded woman at the pawnshop who had handed over the money, the old black man on the bus who had shared his wine, the waitress at the Red Bone Café who had brought her toast, and Martin the hairdresser whose gentle hands had given her a new way to look at herself.

Maybe it was just because Hannah rekindled a shadow of a memory of someone in her past who had once been good to her. Whatever it was, Amelia, sitting on the porch wrapped in the old quilt with the little dog in her lap, felt safe enough to tell Hannah what had happened.

When she was done, Amelia was glad Hannah couldn’t see her face clearly in the shadows cast by the porch light. It was a long time before Hannah finally spoke.

“You really got no memory?” Hannah asked.

“It’s coming back, slowly,” Amelia said. “But I can’t tell sometimes which ones are real and which aren’t.”

The porch swing creaked as Hannah sat back. “My first husband gave me a diamond necklace,” she said. “It was as bright as one of those Fourth of July sparklers. I found out it was just glass, as phony as he was.”

Amelia looked over at Hannah, waiting.

“Maybe memories are like that,” Hannah went on. “The fake ones can look the most real.”

“I can’t remember anything about the night I got hurt,” Amelia said. “Only a man with dark hair and a feeling that he was trying to kill me.”

“You really think it was your husband?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know,” Amelia said softly. “I just know I have to get away from him.”

The creaking of the porch swing stopped. Hannah had gone silent and still. From somewhere close by came a church bell, tolling the hour—seven o’clock.

Amelia looked over at Hannah. The old woman was just sitting there, staring out at the dark street. Had she imagined it, that note of disbelief in Hannah’s voice? It seemed like such a crazy story now that her head was clear enough to really consider it. But that gnawing fear wasn’t crazy. It was real. So was this new fear, that maybe she had made a mistake in confiding in the old woman. God, would she ever be able to trust anyone again?

“It’s getting cold,” Amelia said softly.

Hannah nodded and folded her sweater tighter over her chest.

“Would you like some more tea?” Amelia asked. “I can go in and heat up the water.”

“No, I’m fine,” Hannah said. “I’m a little tired, though. I think I’ll go tuck in early tonight.” She rose slowly and started to pick up the tray.

“Leave it. I’ll take it in,” Amelia said.

Hannah gave her a long look and then nodded. She opened the screen door, waiting. Angel jumped from Amelia’s lap and followed Hannah inside.

Amelia pulled the quilt up around her shoulders. She stayed outside for another ten minutes, but finally the cold started to seep into her bones. She rose, picked up the tray, and went into the house, pushing the front door closed with her hip.

In the kitchen, she washed the cups and set them to drain on a towel. Her ribs, still bruised from the car accident, ached, and she knew sleep would come hard tonight. Maybe a long soak in the tub would help.

The phone rang out in the foyer.

Amelia hurried to pick it up, hoping it was the dog spa calling back about Brody’s arrangements. Mrs. Chapinski had called about three that afternoon and promised Amelia she would call back when she had everything finalized.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Tobias? This is Kristin, from Fantasia.”

“Oh, yes, good! Were you able to arrange to get Brody to me?”

“Well, almost. We’re closed now, but Mrs. Chapinski wanted me to call you before I left so you wouldn’t worry. We need Brody’s vet to sign a health certificate first or Delta won’t take him. So I’m going over to your vet tomorrow to get his papers. The first day the airline can ship him is the day after tomorrow.”

Amelia leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. “Thank you, Kristin.”

“I’ll call you back tomorrow when we get everything nailed down, okay?”

“I appreciate this, Kristin.”

“Oh, by the way, I hope your mom is okay, Mrs. Tobias.”

Amelia opened her eyes. “My mom?”

“Mr. Tobias said she’s in the hospital.”

Amelia straightened from the wall. “You talked to my husband?”

“Yeah, this morning. He called to see how Brody was doing. Right after I talked to you.”

“Kristin, did you tell him where I was?”

There was a long pause on the other end.

“Kristin, did you tell my husband where I was?”

“No, I just gave him your mom’s phone number. Geez, Mrs. Tobias, is there—”

Amelia hung up. Her heart was hammering.

What the hell was going on? She knew Alex never would have called to ask about Brody. Maybe it was someone else? She struggled to retrieve a face from her memory, the face of the dark-haired man in the car. Maybe it hadn’t been Alex. But who else would want to kill her?

A noise outside, like a pounding. She hurried into the front room and turned off the lamp. She crawled onto the sofa under the window and peered out the gap in the curtains. Nothing . . . just a car rolling slowly away down the street, the deep
thump-thump
of its music echoing in the dark. She watched until the sound faded and the red taillights were gone.

“Hon, what it is?”

Amelia spun.

Hannah was standing in the doorway. “What are you doing down here in the dark?” She started to the table, reaching for the lamp.

“No, leave it off!”

Hannah stared at her for a moment and then came slowly forward. Amelia looked back out at the street. She could see nothing moving, except the branches of oak trees dancing in the wind.

“What is it?” Hannah asked.

Amelia turned to her. “He knows I’m here, Hannah.”

“But how?”

“He called my dog’s groomer, and they gave him your phone number.” Amelia slid off the sofa. “I have to go.”

“Hon, wait a minute. Amelia, wait—”

But Amelia was already up the stairs. She ran to her room and pulled the Vuitton duffel from under the bed. She changed into jeans and a T-shirt and packed the rest of her clothes. She headed to the bathroom and emptied her toiletries from the plastic hospital bag into the cosmetics bag she had bought at the mall.

When she got back to the bedroom Hannah was there, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the white dog.

“Listen, maybe you should just go to the police,” Hannah said.

“No. They won’t believe me. Until I can remember what happened, I can’t prove anything.”

Amelia threw the cosmetics bag into the duffel along with her new iPad. She tugged on her boots and slid into her sweater coat. She turned in a quick tight circle, looking around the room to see if she had left anything. When she looked back at Hannah, the old woman was standing up.

She was holding a gun.

Amelia’s eyes went from the gun up to Hannah’s face.

“Take this,” Hannah said, coming to her. “My daddy gave it to me for protection after my second divorce.”

Amelia shook her head. “Hannah, I can’t—”

“Yes, you can.”

“I don’t need this.”

“Yes, you do.”

Amelia tried to take a step back, but Hannah grabbed her hand and set the gun in her palm.

It was cold and heavy. “How does it . . . ?” Amelia asked.

“It’s just a plain old .38 revolver. You just take the safety off, point it, and shoot.”

Amelia’s eyes went from the gun in her hand up to Hannah’s face.

“You hold it like you do a man, hon,” Hannah said. “You’re in charge of when it goes off.”

Amelia stared at Hannah, then she laughed. It came out as a hard, nervous bark.

Hannah gave a grunt and a small smile. Amelia slid the gun into the duffel and zipped it up. When she looked back, Hannah was at the window, peering around the downed shade.

“I didn’t want to say anything earlier because I didn’t want to scare you.” She looked back at Amelia. “I thought I saw something, across the street in the church parking lot, a light that came and went, like someone smoking a cigarette inside a car.”

She let the shade fall. “I might be wrong, but you best go out the back just in case.”

Amelia picked up the duffel from the bed. The white dog was curled up on the chenille bedspread. She stroked the dog’s head and then turned to Hannah.

“Where are you going?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know,” Amelia said.

“Will you at least find a way to let me know you’re all right?”

Amelia nodded, then she gathered the old woman into a tight embrace.

“Go,” Hannah whispered.

Amelia broke free and hurried from the room. She didn’t look back until she was out the back door and into the alley. The lights inside the house dissolved into a yellow blur. She wiped the tears roughly away, hoisted up the duffel, and disappeared into the dark.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In the cold moonless night, a night that was slowly shrouding itself in a fog, she couldn’t be sure which direction she was heading. But the smell of the river was growing fainter behind her, and she had the sense that she was heading back toward downtown. And once she found her way there, she could make it back to the Greyhound station.

Amelia stopped abruptly.

No . . . she couldn’t go to the bus station. It would be the first place Alex would go. He had been smart enough to get Hannah’s phone number from Kristin and he would be smart enough to figure out that she had taken a bus to get here. She couldn’t risk it.

Where could she go?

Straight ahead, she could see the faint glow of Christmas lights, strings of them draped from the streetlamps downtown. She looked right, but saw only small houses, their windows lit with the blue throb of televisions. A car was coming slowly down the street, heading her way. She ducked behind a hedge and waited until it disappeared.

She turned to her left. Far off, maybe a hundred yards or so, she could make out a steady stream of fast-moving headlights. It was a highway, the road Hannah had taken the day she drove her to the mall. And the mall was out by an interstate, she remembered.

Martin the hair stylist was there in her head, and what he had said when she saw her short, dark hair for the first time.

No one’s going to recognize you.

It wasn’t enough, she knew now. It wasn’t enough to just change how she looked. She had to change everything she did, even the way she thought. She had to become a woman, inside and out, who Alex would never recognize.

Amelia Tobias would never do what I am about to do. But Amelia Brody will do whatever it takes.

With a quick look around to make sure no one was following, she headed toward the highway.

It took her about an hour to get to the mall, a cold, tiring walk in the glare of headlights and in the wake of car exhaust. The mall lot was almost deserted and she knew it had to be past nine by now, maybe even later. She saw a road sign for I-95 North and kept going.

Then, there it was, just as she remembered. The towering yellow Waffle House sign, a Motel 6, a Shell truck stop, and beyond that the entrance ramp to the interstate. She trudged across the high wet grass of the median and headed toward the gas pumps.

If you ever get stranded, Mellie, hitch a ride with a truck driver. You can trust them.

Who had told her that? And Mellie? Who had called her Mellie? Her head hurt from the effort of confronting these frayed bits of memories that came at her out of nowhere without warning, like strangers emerging from the mist.

She paused at the first bank of gas pumps to adjust the duffel strap on her shoulder and looked around the sprawling station, gauging her chances of getting a ride. Three huge 18-wheelers sat silent and dark on the edge of the Motel 6 lot. Another one was just pulling out, grinding slowly up the ramp toward I-95. There was one rig left, idling at the diesel station. Amelia walked slowly to it.

The cab was empty. Amelia let out a long tired breath, lowered herself down onto the driver’s-side step, and took off her glasses. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes.

“You scratch that paint job and I’m gonna have to kick your ass.”

Amelia opened her eyes. The figure standing in front of her was in soft focus, no face in the harsh backlight of the station lights, just a squat body in black clothes. A woman?

“Sorry,” Amelia said, standing and hoisting the duffel onto her shoulder.

“You look skinny and strung out, kiddo. You a tweaker?”

“A what?”

“Tweaker. Meth head.”

Drugs. The woman was talking about drugs.

“No, I had to leave my house and I’m—”

The woman took her chin and turned Amelia’s face to the light. Amelia pulled away, her hand going up to cover the stitches on her chin.

“I guess you got other problems then,” the trucker said.

“Yes. But right now I need a ride.”

The woman eyed her hard. “I’d like to help you out but we got new rules because of the insurance. No freeloaders.”

Amelia scanned the parking lot. It was empty except for a dark sedan with a man inside. Who was that? Was that the same car she had seen earlier?

She looked back at the woman. “I can pay you.”

“It’s not the money, it’s the rules.”

Amelia studied the woman. Her hair was spike-cut and two-toned, yellow and black. She had a tattoo of a parrot down her neck and a tiny sapphire piercing in her lower lip.

She couldn’t let this woman get away. “You don’t look like a woman who always obeys the rules,” Amelia said.

The woman stared hard at her. “What happened to your face?”

“I ran into something.”

“Yeah, some fucker’s fist, right?”

Amelia started to explain, but suddenly she was too tired. And too desperate. “Yeah, that’s what happened. Please help me.”

The woman glanced around the parking lot and then back at Amelia. “Where are you going?”

“Anywhere.”

“I’m heading northwest through Memphis and then straight west.”

“That’s fine. I just need to get out of here.”

The woman motioned for Amelia to follow and walked her around to the passenger side of the massive truck. She opened the cab door.

“Climb on up and toss your duffel in the rear.”

Amelia climbed into the cab, taking note of the bed tucked into the space behind the seats. The other door opened and the woman climbed inside. She set her thermos in a holder between the seats and hit a button on the dash. With a roar, the truck’s engine sprang to life.

“My name’s Dolly,” she said, as she pulled the seat belt across her chest.

“Amelia Brody. And thank you.”

The truck started to move, first like a train, then more like a monorail, smooth and heavy and not as rumbling as Amelia thought it would be. She could see the truck was new, with clean windows and a leather dashboard lit up like an airplane cockpit. A photograph was wedged into the edge of the clock but the cab was too dark for her to see it clearly.

“You look like a zombie,” Dolly said. “If you want to crawl back there and sleep, that’s cool.”

Amelia glanced back toward the bed. She was exhausted but still keyed up, like she could almost feel the sting of adrenaline running through her veins. She leaned her head against the side window, and as she watched the lights of the gas station recede in the side mirror, she thought about the man in the car Hannah had seen.

Was she being paranoid? Was someone really after her or was this strange fear just a result of the concussion? It wasn’t like the headaches that came and went. The fear was always there in her gut.

“You mind some music?” Dolly asked.

“No, go right ahead,” Amelia said.

Dolly plugged in an iPod. “I sleep by day and drive by night because there’s fewer weirdos on the road. Usually, I just roll the windows down and listen to the whine of my turbo and my heartbeat. But when it’s cold like this, I need my rock and roll to keep me going. I’m working my way through the decades, and I’m up to the seventies now.”

The cab filled up with the sounds of a guitar and a man’s buttery voice. Amelia closed her eyes and leaned her head back.

“You sure you don’t want to go catch forty?” Dolly asked.

Amelia opened her eyes and glanced back at the blanket and pillows. “Yeah, I think I will,” she said softly.

Dolly turned the music down to a murmur. “I’ll wake you for breakfast.”