A Woman With A Mystery Part 7

But he'd opened Pandora's box, and he couldn't close it until he knew what was inside. It was a character flaw, his inability to leave things unfinished. His mother's murder was one of them. Holly Barrows was the other.

Holly gave him a faint worried smile as she let him in. "So you met Inez."

He wanted to ask her what had possessed her to marry into a family like that. But he feared he already knew. "I need you to tell me about your husband's insurance policy. And your breakdown."

She winced and turned back toward the living room. "I would imagine you could use a drink."

He watched her sort through the bottles of liquor in a small bar against the wall, pa.s.sing up several different Scotches to pull out a bottle of Glenlivet and pour him a couple of inches. Straight. No ice. She poured herself a cola on ice.

"How did you know I drink Glenlivet?" he asked when she handed him his drink.

She seemed startled by the question. "I'm sorry, I should have asked. I just a.s.sumed-"

"-that all private eyes drink that brand?"

She dropped into one of the wingback chairs, the gla.s.s in her hand shaking. She looked scared. He knew the feeling.

"I don't know why I do half the things I do, if you want to know the truth." Her voice broke as she glanced up at him, tears in her eyes. "I'm sure you wonder why I married a man twenty-three years my senior. I wish I could tell you." She dropped her gaze, took a drink and licked her lips before looking at him again.

"I wish I could tell you a lot of things." This time she met his gaze unflinchingly, reminding him of the woman he'd known a year ago, making him remember the feel of her lips on his mouth, on his skin. Holly had been scared last year, convinced someone was trying to kill her. But there had been a strength of will about her that he'd admired. She'd had no intention of giving up without a fight.

This was the first time he'd seen it in this Holly. It stirred all the old feelings and some new ones. This was the kind of woman he could fall in love with. Had Had fallen in love with. fallen in love with.

"I have blank s.p.a.ces in my memory," she said, even her voice sounded stronger, more determined. "Some are only for a few hours. Others...are for...longer. I married Allan after one of those blanks. To answer your question, my husband left me well off financially. But that wasn't the reason I married him."

"Inez said you and Allan were trying to have a baby, an heir."

She jerked back, startled, her gaze nothing short of shocked. "She told you that?"

"Was it a secret?" he asked.

"No, it's just...not...true. Allan and I never-" She waved a hand through the air. "-consummated the marriage. Allan had no interest in...any of that."

Slade stared at her, more than a little confused. "Then why did he marry you? I mean-"

"I know what you mean. To be truthful, I have no idea how we got together or why." She smiled ruefully. "I've never admitted that before. At least not aloud. I can't explain why I've done a lot of things I've done in the last year."

He held her gaze, debating whether to tell her he was one of the "things" she'd done.

"I didn't marry him for his money, if that's what you're thinking," she said.

"How long have you had these...lapses in memory?" he asked, not about to touch the other.

She looked as if she wasn't quite ready to drop the other subject, but then sighed and said, "They started a little over a year ago."

"About the time you met Allan?" he guessed.

"Yes," she said, frowning. "I guess it was."

He could think of a variety of causes for memory loss. Epilepsy. Alcohol blackouts. Multiple personality disorder. Head trauma. Psychosomatic amnesia.

But he'd always been suspicious of coincidence. And it was one h.e.l.l of a coincidence that Holly's memory loss had started about the time she'd met Allan and his sister Inez.

"Have you seen a doctor about it?"

She nodded. "Dozens of specialists, including Dr. Parris at Evergreen Inst.i.tute. They all say the same thing. There is nothing physically physically wrong with me. That leaves Inez's theory that I make up the memory losses to cover things I've done that I'm ashamed of." wrong with me. That leaves Inez's theory that I make up the memory losses to cover things I've done that I'm ashamed of."

He wondered if she was ashamed of what she'd done with him. "Evergreen Inst.i.tute?" Where the upset Dr. O'Brien visiting Inez earlier had been from. "Is that the sanitarium you were committed to?"

"Yes, Inez talked me into it." She let out a humorless laugh. "My so-called breakdown was nothing more than relief. And regret that I'd ever married Allan in the first place. And, of course, confusion because of the memory loss."

"Did you ever see a Dr. O'Brien at Evergreen?"

"No," she said. "He must be new."

Slade had hoped for a tie-in. No such luck. Other than the one common denominator: Evergreen.

Holly seemed upset. "Inez believed Allan and I were trying to have an heir?"

He nodded, watching her closely.

"Well, he got his heir, didn't he?" she said.

"But it's not his baby."

"No. But it also doesn't seem to make any difference to her. Does that make any sense at all?"

"No." He was glad she'd noticed. If she'd been crazy, she wouldn't have noticed, right? He studied her, wondering if she didn't seem a little less blank this evening. "You told Dr. Parris at Evergreen Inst.i.tute about your memory loss?"

"Of course. It had only just begun then, and Dr. Parris a.s.sured me it was probably caused by the trauma of losing my husband so soon after the marriage." She looked up at Slade. "I knew it wasn't that. But I had lost my mother just six months before that. My father died when I was nineteen, so my mother was the only family I had."

"I know what it's like to lose your parents," he said. "I lost my mother when I was twelve, and my father not quite a year later."

"I'm sorry." She looked down at her hands clutched in her lap.

"Did the stay at Evergreen help?" he asked, suspecting he'd met her last year about the time she'd left the place-and according to Inez, without properly signing herself out. Interesting.

"Not really."

"Why did you leave without checking out of the place?" Slade asked.

She frowned. "I don't know. It's odd that I would run away from there. Evergreen Inst.i.tute is really more like a fancy spa than a sanitarium. I mostly just slept and read and rested."

He was glad to hear that. He'd been imagining an asylum with padded cells and straitjackets and screams in the night. He worried that when Holly found out about their past, it might send her back there.

"But I don't remember leaving Evergreen-or how or why."

"Inez made it pretty clear how she felt about your pregnancy," he said, still wondering what hold the older woman had over Holly.

"My pregnancy was none of her business," Holly replied hotly. "I'm not ashamed of anything. Least of all that. I should never have told her that I didn't think that baby at the hospital was mine. Or about the memory loss. She's afraid people will think I'm crazy. But maybe I am crazy."

"Do you you think you're crazy?" think you're crazy?"

She hesitated, but only for a second. "No. I think.... I don't know what to think."

He doubted that. She had a theory, she just wasn't ready to voice it, probably because it was so off-the-wall. Nor was he sure he was ready to hear it.

"Has your memory ever come back after one of these blanks before?"

She shook her head. "Only the birth of my baby. If it's really a memory."

But she had remembered something else. She'd remembered that he drank Glenlivet Scotch straight. It was a small thing, but it made him wonder if her memory wasn't coming back and that was why she'd come to him. Again. He hoped to h.e.l.l he was right.

But the question was, what had caused her memory loss in the first place?

"How long do these memory lapses last?" he asked.

She shrugged. "They vary. Usually I just sense holes in my memory. Time has pa.s.sed but I can't remember what happened during that time-obviously something when you realize you're pregnant and yet can't remember even meeting a man, let alone...." She looked away, seeming embarra.s.sed. "That's why it's so hard for me to believe that the memories of the birth were real. I'd never remembered anything, not even vaguely."

"Maybe it was the trauma that caused you to remember," he suggested, wanting to believe something was spurring the return of her memory.

"Or maybe it was love? I wanted this baby more than anything. I'm sure that seems odd to you, considering that I don't know who the baby's father is. But while I can remember nothing of those missing months, I have a good feeling about the man who-" She broke off and took a drink of her cola.

She had a good feeling about him? Is that why subconsciously she'd known to hire him to find the baby? Their baby?

Or was she pulling his string? The thought had crossed his mind, especially in light of the day he'd had. He didn't trust anyone. He was even beginning to question his own instincts.

"I don't know what is real anymore," she said, sounding close to tears as she got up to refill his gla.s.s. He hadn't even realized he'd drained it. "Just that I have to find my baby. And save her."

He watched her go to the bar again, wondering what she had to save her baby from. And knew she had to be wondering the same thing. He started. "Her?"

Holly didn't respond.

He watched her turn. Her eyes were vacant, her face ashen. "Holly?"

He'd known a boy in school who was epileptic. Rather than seizures, he had lapses where he would just zone out for short periods of time. Looking at Holly now, he was reminded of that boy.

"Holly?"

She blinked, her eyes luminous and filled with fear as her gaze came back into focus. "I said her," she whispered, sounding scared. "Oh, I remember her."

He waited, almost afraid of what she'd say.

"During the delivery, something was wrong. They were rushing around, frantic. I tried to see what was going on. I thought something was wrong with my baby." Tears welled in her eyes. "One of them left the room. When the door opened, I heard another woman, another patient. She sounded as if she was in labor."

She looked down at the gla.s.s of Glenlivet in her hand as if she couldn't remember how it got there, then handed it to him. But instead of returning to her chair and her cola, she walked into the studio.

He sat for a moment, not sure if he should follow her. To his surprise, she returned a moment later, carrying a large canvas. He knew without seeing the painted side what it was. He could tell by the way she held it, the way she frowned down at the work in her hands.

"That's why I believed the room was soundproofed," she said more to herself than to him as she propped the painting against the wall and moved back to stare at it.

The light cast an eerie glow over the acrylic monsters huddled around the delivery-room scene. He was filled with even more dread each time he saw the work. There was something so raw about the paint slashes, so chilling. He felt a cold draft move through the room.

The three monsters were huddled together, hunched over, waiting with obvious antic.i.p.ation, making it hard to distinguish their shapes beneath the garb they wore. They could have been men. Or women. Or just figments of Holly Barrows's nightmarish imagination.

"I remember being scared," she continued in a hushed voice as if the walls might be listening, her gaze on that d.a.m.ned painting. "Something was wrong with my delivery. Or my baby." She glanced back at him, no doubt knowing what he was thinking. That all of these images could amount to nothing more than what Inez Wellington believed they did.

"I must have blanked out again. I woke to the sound of a baby crying," she said slowly as if the memory was playing out in her head. "I opened my eyes. My baby was lying on a small table near my bed. She was kicking her legs." Holly turned back to him. If she was putting all of this on, she was one d.a.m.ned good actress. She must have seen his skepticism though.

"I saw saw her," she whispered fiercely. "She was close enough I could see her birthmark." her," she whispered fiercely. "She was close enough I could see her birthmark."

He felt a chill. "A birthmark?"

She nodded, her gaze still glazed as if focusing inward. "It was heart-shaped and on the calf of her right leg and...she had this little dimple in her cheek." She blinked. "How could I remember something like that if it wasn't real?" There was a pleading in her tone. "How is that possible to see something so clearly, if it never happened? My baby was a little girl-not a boy-and she was alive. I saw her!"

A heart-shaped birthmark and dimples. He stared at her, his pulse pounding in his ears. The dimples were genetic; he knew that well enough. But a birthmark?

Shivering, he reached up to rub the back of his neck, suddenly anxious to leave. But he couldn't leave without Holly. He wasn't sure what was going on. And he had no proof that anyone was after her. No more than he'd had this time last year. All he knew was that he didn't feel safe. And neither should she.

"I don't think you should stay here alone," he said, wondering how he could convince her.

She looked at him in surprise. "You're starting to believe me, aren't you?"

What did he believe? That she'd given birth to their baby? That monsters had stolen the baby? That the baby had dimples and a birthmark just like his twin sister Sh.e.l.ley's? And that Holly Barrows was starting to remember, not only the delivery but-him?

"Yeah," he said as he got to his feet and walked to the window. Parting the curtains, he looked out into the empty street. He believed that the Santa on the street below his office on Christmas Eve had reported to someone that Holly Barrows's memory was returning. That meant he also believed that someone had tried to get Holly to forget.

Not that what he believed mattered in the least. Because what the h.e.l.l did he know? But he wanted to help her. How much a.s.sistance she needed was still debatable. All he knew was that he'd have a better chance of helping her if the monsters in the painting were real than if they were in her head. And if the monsters were real, then he had to find their baby-and fast. Too much time had already been lost.

He tried not to think about it. The whole thing scared the h.e.l.l out of him. Because it was so far out there. And because it didn't make any sense. If the specialists couldn't find any physical reason for her memory lapses, then that left psychological causes.

And that opened up a whole can of worms. The woman he'd met a year ago certainly had been different from this one. But a whole different personality? He didn't buy it.

"Look, let's say you're right and these...monsters stole your baby," he said carefully. "If they find out you're starting to remember the delivery-and them-well, I'd just feel better if you weren't alone right now."

She seemed to study him. "You think I should go stay with my sister-in-law?"

G.o.d, no. That couldn't be good for anyone. He didn't like the fact that Inez had talked her into committing herself. Holly seemed too smart for that. He wondered again what hold Inez had over her. "No. I think you should come stay with me."

He had so many questions, but he figured she didn't have any more answers than he did. And the questions could wait until he got her to Sh.e.l.ley's. He parted the curtains again, taking one last look out the window. The street was still empty, the sky clear and cold, making the fallen snow glow.

As he turned from the window, he heard a sound. "What are you doing?" he demanded, surprised by the intensity in his voice.

She jumped and almost dropped the gla.s.s of cola in her hand, the small plastic container in the other. "I was just going to take my pill."

He stepped to her and took the container. "Where did you get these?"

"It's an old prescription that Allan wrote for me. Inez had it refilled...."