Sliver of Truth (23 page)

“What happened to me? How did I get here?”

“There’s time for all of that. Now you need to rest.”

He reached for something on the bedside table. He came back with a syringe.

“No,” I said, a sob rising in my chest. My voice sounded weak and insubstantial, like a child’s; the hand I lifted to push him away had no strength. He didn’t meet my eyes, tapped on the plastic tube.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and jabbed the needle into my arm.

The pain was brief but intense, the darkness that followed total.

“What did he say?” Jake asked. He’d let go of my arm and was watching me with concern.

“He said to run,” I answered, still looking at the phone in horror.

Jake took hold of my hand. “Sounds like good advice. Let’s get out of here. This was a mistake.”

But as he pulled me toward the trees, we could see the beams of flashlights cutting through the night. We stopped dead. There were five bouncing white points of light, maybe more, moving toward us, making their way through the woods we had come through just moments before. My heart started to thump. I saw Jake get that look he always got when we were in trouble, a dark intensity, a strategist’s concentration.

Two men had exited the car, blocking our route back toward the street. The slamming of their doors sounded like gunfire in the quiet of the park. I stared at their forms, both of them tall and thin, moving with long gaits toward us. Neither of them were Max; I could see that much even in the dark, even though I couldn’t see their faces. Of course it wasn’t Max. How foolish I had been to come, to bring Jake with me. I’d let myself be led here by some stupid fantasy.
They think you know where he is. They think you can lead them to him.
What did Grant mean? Who were these people? My feet felt rooted; something kept me staring, paralyzed. I barely felt Jake pulling at me.

“Ridley, snap out of it. Let’s go,” said Jake, moving me by placing both his hands on my shoulders and pushing me.

We turned and ran around the side of the museum, our footfalls echoing on the concrete. We had no choice; there was no way back to the street. On our way around the building, we tried a couple of the heavy wood and wrought-iron doors, the latched gabled windows. They were locked, of course. The museum was long closed. Inside were French medieval courtyards, labyrinthine hallways leading to high-ceiling rooms, a hundred places to hide. Outside we were exposed. The stone wall that edged the property was not far. I heard the sound of people running. I wasn’t sure what our options were. It didn’t seem as if we had many.

“Where do we go?” I asked Jake as we moved quickly toward the wall.

He took a gun I hadn’t seen from beneath his jacket. “We get into the trees and just keep moving south along the wall, hope that they’re not very motivated. Maybe they’ll go away.” I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny. It was then that we heard the blades of a helicopter.

It rose as if it came from the highway below us. And soon we were deafened by the sound and the wind, blinded by the spotlight that shone from its nose. The men we had seen moving through the trees were suddenly approaching fast. We ran.

I woke up calling for Jake. In my mind’s eye, I could see him falling. I woke up reaching for him but knowing he was far gone. I kept hearing that question:
Where’s the ghost?
I hated my foggy head and my weak, strange body, which felt full of sand. Something awful had happened to me and to Jake, and I had no idea what it was.

The room was empty and I wondered if Dylan Grace had ever been here at all. Either way, I had to get moving. I couldn’t be here anymore. I got up from the bed more easily than I had before. The bandage at my waist was dry and clean. I saw my jeans, shoes, and jacket on the floor by the door and, with a lot of pain, struggled into them. I looked around the room for any other belongings and saw nothing.

The hallway was deserted and the elevator came quickly. I didn’t have anything—a bag, money, a passport, any identification at all. How did I get to London? Was I really in London? How would I get home? I was too confused and scattered to even be afraid.

In the posh lobby—dark wood floors covered with Oriental area rugs, dark red walls, plush velvet furniture—there was no one. I could hear the street noise outside; the restaurant and concierge desk were both closed. It must have been the small hours of the morning. I looked around for a clock and found one on the reception desk—2:01
A.M
. I rang the little bell. A man stepped out from a doorway off to the side of the counter. He was young and slight, with ash-blond hair and dark, dark eyes. He had an aquiline nose and thin lips. He was very pale and British-looking.

“Oh, Ms. Jones. You must want your things,” he said. “Do you have your claim check?”

I reached into my pocket and (how about that?) retrieved a small ticket stub. I handed it to him without saying anything. I was afraid I might throw up on the gleaming wood. He nodded cordially and moved into the cloakroom, came back with the beat-up messenger bag I’d been carrying before all this (whatever it was) had happened. I took it from him and flipped it open. My wallet, notebook, passport, keys, makeup, cell phone were all inside. Somehow the sight of my stuff, benign and familiar, made me feel sicker and more afraid.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said gently. I looked up at him. “But you don’t look well.”

I shook my head. The whole encounter was surreal; I couldn’t be sure if it was actually happening. The ground beneath my feet felt soft and unstable. “I’m not. I’m . . . not sure how I got here. Do you know? How I got here, I mean? How do you know my name? How long have I been here?”

He walked from behind the counter and put an arm around my shoulders, a hand on my elbow. I let him lead me toward a couch and lower me onto its cushions.

“Do you think, Ms. Jones, that I might call you a doctor?”

I nodded. “I think that might be a good idea.”

I caught him looking down. I followed his eyes and saw that the blood from my wound had soaked through its bandage again. A rose of blood bloomed in the snow white of my shirt. A shirt I didn’t recognize as mine.

“Ms. Jones,” I heard him say. He was looking at me with the most sincere concern; his voice sounded slightly panicked. He seemed like a very kind person.

“Ms. Jones, you sit right here and—” he was saying. But I never heard the end of his sentence.

PART TWO

The Ghost

13

Jung believed that one of the major reasons for violence against women was an unintegrated
anima,
or the archetypical feminine symbolism within a man’s unconscious. He believed that all men have feminine characteristics and all women have masculine characteristics. Men, however, have been taught that the feminine parts of themselves are shameful and must be repressed. The result of this suppression has been a kind of global misogyny, soulless sexual encounters, and whole cultures where women are unsafe in their own homes. It’s part of Jung’s theories about the shadow side, the dark part of ourselves that we strive to hide and destroy, only to be confronted by it again and again, usually in the form of an “other.” He believed that this aspect of the human psyche was the root of all racism, cultural bias, and gender hatred, that the us-against-them mentality was a thinking pattern exhibited by those who had not embraced their shadows, who projected the hated parts of their being onto a group of people they believed to be opposite to themselves.

I’m the girl with my homework done and my pajamas on, watching Max ride his bicycle up and down the street. It’s late and cold but I’m darkly envious of his freedom. I wonder if he’s darkly envious of my Howdy Doody pajamas and freshly washed face. Maybe we are the same. Maybe we are each other’s shadows.

I awaken to sirens and these strange thoughts and this image of Max in my head. New York City sirens and London sirens are so different. London sirens with their waxing and waning seem so much more polite.
Coming through,
they seem to plead.
Stand aside.
New York City sirens are boldly insistent, downright rude.
What the hell are you waiting for?
they want to know.
Get out of the goddamn way. Can’t you see this is an emergency?
When you live in New York, you live with the sound of sirens in the periphery of your consciousness. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars—it seems like there’s always someone in trouble in the city, always someone racing to the rescue. You stop hearing it; it becomes part of the city music.

London sirens seem mournful. They seem to say
Something awful has happened and we’ll respond the best we can, though it’s probably too late
. New York sirens are brazenly sure that they can save the day.

It was a London siren I heard, waxing and waning, fading off into the distance. It took me a second to realize that I was in a hospital room, cool and quiet. It was dim, with some light coming in through a small glass window in the door and from between the drawn blinds and window frames—not from sunlight but from street lamps. I didn’t know what time it was.

I lay still, scanning the room with my eyes. As they adjusted, I noticed the thin-framed woman sitting in a chair by the door. A rectangle of light fell across her. She had white-blond hair and a wide mouth that sloped dramatically at both corners in a caricature of a pout. In spite of the fact that she was slightly slumped to the side, leaning her head on her hand, she looked put-together and officious in a navy blue suit and sensible low-heeled pumps. She stared at the wall, a million miles away.

I cleared my throat and shifted myself up a bit. I was aware of a terrible dryness in my mouth and reached for the water pitcher I saw by my bed. The woman quickly got to her feet to stand beside me. She poured me a glass of water and handed it to me.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Under the circumstances, it was a difficult question to answer.

“It depends,” I said, my voice sounding hoarse and raw.

She looked at me quizzically.

“On where I am, on how I got here. On what’s wrong with me.”

I was trying for cool and smart-ass, but I felt hollow deep in my core.

She politely averted her eyes while I tried to drink from the cup in my shaking hand. Then she reached out to steady my wrist and things went better.

“I was hoping,” she said, “that you’d be able to answer some of those questions for me.” Her accent was thick, heavily Cockney though I could tell she struggled to keep that to a minimum.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Inspector Madeline Ellsinore. I’m investigating your case.”

“My case?” I said, putting the water down on the table and leaning back.

“Well, yes,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and resting her eyes on my face. “An American woman shows up at a London hotel and checks herself in, hangs the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on her door for two days. The only time anyone hears from her is when she calls to find out where she is. She’s then discovered to be suffering from a badly infected gunshot wound when she stumbles into the lobby at the end of the second day. She collapses and is rushed to the nearest hospital. Though she has sufficient ID, passport, cash, and credit, there is no record of her arriving in London on any commercial flight in the past six months. I’d say that warrants an open case, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded slowly. She was official but not unkind. Her eyes were a pale blue. She was small, petite as she was thin; she looked like a runner, a fast and strong one.

“How did you get to England, Ms. Jones? And what are you doing here?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

It’s a weird thing to admit. Have you ever woken up one morning after a night of drinking and found yourself in a strange apartment, a strange person sleeping beside you? It’s like that but much, much worse. I felt as if I’d woken up in someone else’s body.

She blinked at me twice. “That’s hard to believe,” she said finally.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s true.”

She gave me a blank, assessing look. There was something cold and robotic about her in spite of her prettiness, in spite of her soft, smoky voice.

“Who shot you, then?” she asked matter-of-factly, as though she’d settle for that small bit of information as consolation.

I shook my head again. The ground had fallen away beneath my feet and I was floating in a life that didn’t belong to me.

“Are you aware, Ms. Jones, that you’re a ‘person of interest’ with the New York City Police Department, wanted for questioning in relation to the murder of a Sarah Duvall?”

That morning came rushing back to me, how Sarah fell and died in front of me, how I chased the man in black and was apprehended by the police. Dylan Grace came to get me and took me to Riverside Park, where I fled from him. It had all gone worse from there. I thought of Grant and his stupid website. Jake falling. I grasped for what had happened to us after the helicopter rose from nowhere, drowning us in light and sound. The harder I thought about it, the further it slipped away. I felt a terrible nausea, a pain behind my eyes.

“The FBI would like a go with you as well, in connection with a man named Dylan Grace.”

I thought about the things he’d told me in the park. More lies? How could I be sure? Had he been in my hotel room or was that a dream? I remembered that he’d looked bad himself, that he’d jabbed me with a needle. I shook my head again.

“You really don’t know what happened to you, do you?” she asked, incredulous, handing me a tissue from the box by my bed. I wiped my eyes, blew my nose. I entertained flashes of memory: running with Jake along the stone wall at the Cloisters, gunshots cracking the night air, falling hard to the ground as if I’d been shoved, the dark shadow of a man whose face I couldn’t see asking, “Where’s the ghost?” Most of all, I knew there was pain—white hot, total, nearly indescribable in its intensity, the kind of pain that mercifully kills memory.