Chapter Ten

December 26

A swollen gray sky spat snow as Slade and Holly drove through town early the next morning. With stores not yet open, the town felt abandoned.

Holly stared out the side window, watching the buildings sweep past, lost in thought. Last night when Slade had kissed her, she’d believed it would open up her memory like a floodgate. Instead, she’d felt confused and…afraid.

Now, she tried not to think about the kiss or Slade. All she could think about was the blood typing results in her purse. Inconclusive. The baby could have been hers.

So why did someone call from the hospital last night to say the blood typing proved the baby wasn’t hers? She wanted to believe someone had “fixed” the results. But what was left of her rational mind knew that the young nurse who’d called Slade last night might not have understood the report.

She realized she was beginning to question her own sanity. What if they found out that she’d given birth somewhere near the hospital, alone? What if she’d been the person who’d brought the baby—and herself—to the hospital? Maybe there was no mystery at all. Just that she was very, very sick.

She tried to concentrate on what she would say to Dr. Parris. Thinking herself crazy wasn’t helping. It was too close to what she suspected was the truth.

“Do you trust this Dr. Parris?” Slade had asked this morning at breakfast.

“Yes.” The answer had come so quickly, she’d had to stop to think why. “He doesn’t like Inez.”

“He told you that?”

She recalled only one time Inez had come up to Evergreen. “There was a row,” Holly told Slade. “I heard it from the sunroom. I didn’t even know it was Inez, although I probably should have. I saw Dr. Parris rush by in the hall and I stuck my head out to see what was going on. That’s when I saw Inez. She was giving the staff hell over something. I never did find out what. But Dr. Parris took her aside and spoke with her and she left, obviously angry. I caught the expression on his face before he saw me. He definitely didn’t like her.”

Now, as Holly stared out the side window at the passing town, she wondered what Inez had been so upset about. Inez hadn’t stayed that time, but she must have come back if she’d sat in on sessions with Dr. Parris when he’d discussed Holly’s possible guilt over Allan’s death.

That seemed strange—that Dr. Parris would let Inez attend sessions, especially after their initial meeting. Or had that been the first time they’d met?

She rubbed her temples. Why could she remember Inez’s first visit and not the others? Her head ached too much to think. She reached for her purse. It’s time for me to take my pill. Her hand wavered just over her purse. Slade had taken the pills.

But that wasn’t what stopped her. It was the thought: It’s time for me to take my pill.

Where had that come from?

She felt a rush of panic as another thought rear-ended the first. Take your pill. You need that pill. The pill is the only thing that helps you.

But she didn’t have to have the pills. She’d forgotten on Christmas Eve and hadn’t taken one yesterday. It wasn’t as if she was addicted to them. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure about that. She definitely couldn’t remember feeling better after taking them. What she remembered, though, was Inez insisting they helped.

She’d never been one to take pills. Not even aspirin. Except when she had a headache, which was rare. How had she come to depend on pills? Because since she’d met Allan and his sister, she’d seemed to have headaches all the time.

No, she realized, that wasn’t fair. The headaches had started before then. When her mother’d died. Holly’d had a headache the night she met Allan. Is that when he’d suggested the pills? Had it started that far back?

She shook her head, amazed that she’d been taking the pills for so long. Desperation. She realized she’d been desperate to believe something would help her memory loss, her mental confusion, her…fear that she was losing her mind. And she was still desperate, she reminded herself as she glanced over at Slade.

She noticed his hands and was fascinated by their size and shape and strength on the wheel. Long fingers. Strong, masculine hands. Hands that had touched her most private places. Shocked, she looked away.

Hadn’t she just substituted him for the pills? Put her faith in him, convincing herself that he would help her, just as she had the pills? Only she was clear enough now to know that he might not be any better for her than the drugs.

She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Slade was driving past the cemetery. Through the chain-link fence, past the towering stands of pine trees and the snow-cold tombstones, her eye caught the huge marble monument that was a memorial to Allan’s and Inez’s father. Next to it stood the god-like statue Inez had erected over Allan’s grave and next to that—

Her heart leapt, and she sat up with a start. “Stop the truck!”

“What?”

“Go back to the cemetery. I saw someone. A woman. She was at the baby’s grave.” She didn’t have to add at the bogus Allan Junior’s grave.

Slade immediately swung the pickup around in a U-turn and sped back down the road to the cemetery turn-in. Through the pines, she could get only glimpses of the Wellington monument now. The hard-packed snow crunched under the truck’s tires as Slade wound the pickup through the maze of narrow roads, turning at Holly’s directions until she told him to stop.

The snowflakes grew larger, falling from the low, sullen clouds, silent as goose down. A magpie put up a ruckus in a nearby pine. The woman was gone.

“You’re sure you saw someone?” he asked.

Without answering him, Holly opened her door, the cold morning air making her catch her breath. She pulled her coat around her as she walked toward the newest grave in the Wellington family plot. She hadn’t been here since the funeral, not that she remembered much about that day. While it wasn’t a complete blank, it felt surreal, just real enough to hurt.

“It could have been Inez you saw,” Slade suggested as he joined her.

“It wasn’t Inez,” she said without looking at him. “There was no car.” They both knew Inez couldn’t have gotten away that quickly on foot. Whoever had been here had walked into the cemetery—not driven. As she neared the grave, she spotted the woman’s footprints in the crusted snow near the grave. Beside an ostentatious sympathy spray was a tiny bouquet of blue silk forget-me-nots tied loosely with a blue ribbon.

“It was his mother,” Holly said, knowing that to be true, the way she was starting to know herself again. She looked over at Slade. He was staring down at the tiny bouquet—and the footprints in the snow.

She followed his gaze as it chased the tracks through an empty part of the cemetery to the border of pines and the road on the other side.

Did the woman come here everyday? Or was this the first time? Would she be back? Holly felt her heart jump at the thought.

“It would be dangerous for her to visit the grave,” she said, more to herself than to Slade. “That’s why she came so early, why she parked over on the road and walked through the pines. She didn’t want to be seen.”

She turned to look at him then, blinking as if suddenly blinded by the sun. “If she knows that her baby was buried as my child—” A thought stopped her. Why would a woman agree to let her child be buried as someone else’s? “Oh, my God!” Urgently she grabbed for Slade, getting a handful of his jacket in her fist. “She has our baby!”

 

SLADE FELT the hairs stand on the back of his neck as her words echoed through the frozen cemetery.

“She traded her stillborn for our child!” Holly cried. She jerked on his jacket as if she could physically convince him by shaking the truth into him. “Why else would she agree to this? Don’t you see?”

He placed his gloved hand over hers and gently pried her fingers open, freeing his jacket to hold her hand in both of his. Her eyes shone too brightly. She tried to pull her hand away as if too nervous to hold still. He turned her palm up, sandwiching it between his hands as if to warm it, when the truth was he didn’t want to let go of her, afraid she’d fly off in a dozen different directions in a thousand different pieces.

“Holly,” he said quietly, hoping to stop her before she let her hopes run so high he couldn’t get them back down without doing permanent damage. “Why would these…people go to that kind of trouble simply to replace this woman’s child?”

She stopped, the light dimming a little in her eyes. “Maybe she’s someone. She has a lot of money or—”

“Not by the looks of the flowers she brought,” he broke in, hating to disappoint her.

“She just didn’t want anyone to know she’d been here,” Holly said.

“Then a spray like the one already on the grave would have been less conspicuous, don’t you think? Or none at all.”

He watched Holly’s breath come out in frosty white puffs. Tiny specks of snow floated down to land in her dark hair, to catch on her lashes. She frowned, fighting what he was saying.

“Another thing,” he said, motioning to the footprints in the snow. “Look at what she was wearing. An old pair of sneakers, the tread nearly gone on the heels. The snow is deep on the way in from the road. Her feet had to be cold. Why didn’t she wear snowboots? Unless she didn’t have any.”

“Maybe she was in too much of a hurry,” Holly said. “Or was too upset.”

He shrugged, giving her that.

Holly pulled her hand free of his, but didn’t move away from him. He watched her blink, the tears making all that blue seem endless. “If she doesn’t have our baby, then she has to know who does, right?”

He couldn’t take that away, too. “I would think she’d have to know at least one of the players.” He didn’t want to tell her that the woman might have just been paid to give up her baby. Especially if she’d known just before the birth that the baby would be stillborn. But that would mean that some local doctor was in on the switch. How else could the people behind this have found her—and made some deal for her baby?

“She knows where her baby is buried,” Holly said. “She has to know about me.”

Maybe. If she really was the mother. The county was small. Dry Creek even smaller. All the woman had to do was check the obits in the paper to find her baby. He didn’t believe this woman would know much. Just as he didn’t believe she had their baby.

He took Holly’s arm and turned her away from the grave, away from the towering Wellington monuments to the dead and back toward his pickup, managing to step squarely on Allan Wellington’s grave in the process. It was a childish show of disrespect. He didn’t like Allan Wellington. Nor could he entirely justify his animosity towards a dead man. But he planned to be able to soon. He fervently believed Allan was somehow involved in all this—even though the man had been dead for months. Slade felt it as surely as the winter cold around him.

“How do we find her?” Holly asked when they’d reached the pickup.

He’d already been thinking about that. The other mother, if that’s really who she’d been, could be added proof that the babies had been switched. Plus that mother would have given birth at the same place Holly had. She might be able to help them with that as well.

“I’m not sure,” he said as he climbed behind the wheel. He didn’t have a clue how to find her. She wouldn’t have gone for medical help even if she’d needed it. Too many questions would have been asked.

“You know, something’s been bothering me,” he said. “If these…monsters who delivered your baby, if they were doctors, why didn’t they do an episiotomy? Why were you suffering from hypothermia when you arrived at the hospital?”

“Maybe they wanted it to look as if I’d given birth alone, without any help,” she suggested as he started the truck.

“Maybe.” He thought about her memory of the three ghouls appearing frantic, the feeling that something was wrong. “That seems a little too cruel, even for monsters. Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing because they lacked the medical expertise. Maybe they weren’t doctors at all.” He didn’t like that theory because it opened up too many possibilities. “Have you remembered anything more about the room? It wasn’t just a bedroom in some house?”

She shook her head as she squinted out at the gloomy day. “The bed made me think it was a hospital because of the rails.”

Hospital-type beds could be rented. Or purchased.

“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t be positive it wasn’t just a bedroom but— Wait a minute. The ceiling.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

He looked over at her.

Her eyes were closed. “The ceiling seemed too high for a regular house. And…there was something on it.”

He waited, afraid to speak for fear of making the memory—if that’s what it was—slip away.

“A mark.” She opened her eyes and frowned.

“You mean like the roof leaked?” he asked when she didn’t continue. “Or the plaster cracked?”

She nodded. “It was in the shape of something large and scaly.”

He stared at her for a moment, then looked back to his driving. “Like a dragon?”

“Or some kind of monster,” she said with a sigh. “Obviously, I saw monsters everywhere I looked,” she added, her tone dismissing the ceiling design and the memory as useless.

He wanted to assure her that every possible memory was important. But three monsters at the end of the bed and another on the ceiling?

He shifted down at the edge of town, the pills he’d taken from her rattling softly in his coat pocket. Who knew what those pills could have made her see? he thought as he pulled into the drugstore parking lot, anxious to find out.

“Do you mind if I wait here?” she asked.

He would much rather have had her with him, but the pharmacy was near the front of the store and he knew he would be able to keep her in sight. “I’ll get you something for your headache.”

“How did you know I had a headache?” she asked in obvious surprise.

He shrugged. “You get this little ridge between your brows when your head hurts,” he said, feeling strangely shy about revealing the things he knew about her.

She studied him openly for a moment. “You do know me, don’t you?”

He nodded, his gaze brushing hers, sparking like flint on granite. He opened his door, breaking the connection, telling himself to let her take the time she needed, hoping she had the time to take.

Last night, unable to sleep, he’d stayed up going through old photo albums from when he and Shelley were kids. This morning he’d put in a call to her, just wanting to hear her voice. But she hadn’t been in her room. He’d left a message asking her about the twin-angel Christmas ornament, asking her to call him. The moment he hung up, he wished he hadn’t said anything about the ornament. He hadn’t meant to.

He felt disconnected, dreading what he might find out, knowing somewhere deep inside himself that the news on neither case would be good, and wondering how he would be able to tell Holly. And Shelley.

“Slade Rawlins?” Jerry Dunn said when he saw him. “I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”

Jerry and Slade had gone to school together. They were two of a handful of classmates who still lived in Dry Creek. The difference was, Jerry had left long enough to become a pharmacist. Slade felt anchored here by the past.

He reached across the counter to shake Jerry’s out-stretched hand. For a pharmacist, Jerry had a hell of a grip. He’d played fullback on the football team and looked as if he still worked out. Jerry had married his high-school sweetheart and started a family. Slade knew why Jerry had stayed in Dry Creek. Jerry had inherited his father’s drugstore and pharmacy when his father’d retired.

“So how’s business?” Slade asked, although the drugstore was empty except for a young clerk at the front.

“Crazy before Christmas. Fortunately it’s slowed down, but hey, flu season is coming.” Jerry grinned. “It will pick up.”

Slade pulled the container of pills from his pocket. “I need to know what these are.”

“Sure.” The former fullback took the bottle, checked the prescription, then shook a couple of the pills out into a small plastic tray. “Looks like a generic of Xanax. A common anxiety medication,” he added when he saw that the name rang no bells for Slade.

“Strong?”

“Not really.”

Slade glanced toward the truck and Holly. She’d leaned back against the seat, her eyes closed. He’d hoped Jerry was going to tell him that the pills were something strong enough to cause memory loss. But Slade knew it had been a long shot. What pill was strong enough to cause a woman to forget months out of her life?

“Is there any way to test these pills?” he asked. “A lab, somewhere I can take them?”

“What about the Butte hospital’s computer?” the young clerk asked. “Can’t they run the number on the pill?”

Slade hadn’t heard her approach. She was young, college-age, blond and with a look of intelligence. Her name tag said she was Penny.

“I was just getting ready to suggest that,” Jerry said, obviously not happy about the interruption. “Want me to call for you?” he said to Slade.

“I can do it,” Penny said. “I’ve been going to pharmaceutical school and I need the practice,” she told Slade. “Isn’t that what you always tell me when it comes to your grunt work, Jerry?” She grinned as she picked up the phone, reaching over to take the tray and pills from Jerry.

“See this,” she said to Slade as she waited for the hospital to answer. She pointed to a small indentation that appeared to be a letter and a number. “The hospital computer data base can tell you what generic it is.”

“How long does it take?” he asked.

“Not long.”

“Anything else you need?” Jerry asked, sounding a little testy.

“Yeah, something for a headache.”

“I know what you mean,” Jerry said, coming out from behind the counter to help him. While they moved through the drugstore, Slade kept an eye on Holly. Jerry asked about Shelley and made polite conversation. He and Jerry never had had much in common, Slade realized.

Armed with a bottle of painkillers for Holly’s headache and a pop out of the cooler, he and Jerry returned to the pharmacy counter. The clerk was just getting off the phone.

“Wow,” she said, eyeing one of the pills as she hung up the phone. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these. They’re the same color, size and shape as Xanax, but they’re Halcion.”

“Are you sure?” Jerry said in surprise.

“What’s Halcion?” Slade asked.

Jerry let out a low whistle. “Halcion is an oldie, been around literally for years. It’s a sedative hypnotic,” he said, obviously stealing the young clerk’s thunder.

Slade felt his breath rush from his lungs. “A hypnotic?”

“There was this big case in Utah,” the clerk said enthusiastically. “A woman was taking Halcion and killed her mother. Got off too.”

“Side effects?” Slade managed to ask.

“Oh yeah,” she said before Jerry could. “Disorientation, light-headedness, mental confusion, loss of memory, paranoia.”

He felt a little light-headed himself. “Addictive?”

“Highly,” Penny said. “This stuff is dangerous. I can’t imagine a pharmacist making a mistake like this.” She eyed the prescription. “The bottle’s so old it’s hard to read where the prescription was first filled. Halcion isn’t easy to come by. It’s so dangerous that you can only get ten pills at a time.”

Unless you knew someone who could get you the stuff without raising suspicion. The question was, who had put the Halcion in the Xanax bottle? Inez was the obvious choice.

Jerry picked up the bottle, frowning at the prescription. “Dr. Allan Wellington?”

“It’s an old prescription.”

“I guess. He’s been a dead a while, hasn’t he?”

Not long enough, it seemed.

“Holly Barrows?” Jerry said, still reading the prescription.

“A client of mine. Don’t worry, I won’t let her take any more of them.”

“Good thinking. You want me to throw out the pills for you?”

“No,” Slade said quickly. “I’d like to hang on to them for a while.”

Jerry put the pills back in the container. “I’d throw them out if I were you.”

Not likely. They were evidence.

Jerry glanced toward Slade’s pickup and the woman sitting inside it, openly curious.

Slade wasn’t interested in satisfying his curiosity. He thanked Jerry and his assistant for their help and paid for the headache pills and the soda. Behind Jerry on the wall was a family photograph of Jerry and his wife Patty and a couple of towheaded little boys about six and four.

Slade felt a tug at the sight of the kids and the happy family. He tried to imagine a photo of him and Holly and their little girl—and couldn’t.

“You should see the latest photos of the kids,” the clerk said, noting what he’d been staring at. “They are the cutest things.”

He thanked Jerry and Penny again and left, the Halcion safe in his pocket.

 

GRATEFULLY, Holly took the bottle of tablets and the drink Slade handed her as he climbed into the pickup.

“Thanks.”

He was right. She had a blinding headache. After she tried unsuccessfully to unscrew the cap on the pill bottle, he took it from her, opened it and shook two tablets into her outstretched palm.

She fumbled to pop the top on the soda can, downing both pills in a swallow of throat-tingling cold liquid. She closed her eyes for a moment, knowing why he’d gone into the pharmacy, afraid of what he’d found out.

“The pills?” she said after a moment.

“They’re probably responsible not only for your headache, but also your memory loss,” he said as he started the truck and pulled back out onto the highway.

“What are they?” she asked, shocked.

“They aren’t what they say on the prescription.”

That shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her since Slade had already suspected as much. She listened while he told her about the hypnotic drug and its side effects.

She was too stunned to speak. “Then it was just the drug. Someone must have mixed up the prescription—”

“Not likely,” Slade said. “I think there is more to this than just the drug. Did anyone besides Inez have access to the prescription?”

All she could do was stare at him. Inez. “You think she was the one who—?”

“It could depend on where she got the prescription filled.”

Holly looked out the window at the passing town, remembering how Inez had asked last night if she’d taken her pill. How Inez had insisted she go back to Evergreen. How Inez had planned to fire Slade.

“The other day when I was at your sister-in-law’s, someone buzzed at the gate,” Slade said, not looking at her as he drove. “It was obvious Inez didn’t want me to know who it was. But eventually, she answered the intercom. It was a Dr. O’Brien from Evergreen.”

Holly felt sick to her stomach. She had to fight back tears of anger—and pain. For the last year, Inez had been her only family. As difficult as Inez had been, Holly had trusted her.

“I feel like a fool.”

“You shouldn’t,” Slade said. “The pills are identical to Xanax. You had no reason to believe they were anything but what they said they were on the bottle.”

“Still…”

“I think your memory started coming back when you came to Dry Creek and forgot the pills in Pinedale,” he said. “Maybe you did that on purpose.”

Was it possible that on some subconscious level she’d suspected the pills weren’t really helping her?

“I talked to a friend of mine last night,” Slade was saying. “He said these kinds of drugs are used in conjunction with hypnosis.”

Hypnosis?

“You said you felt as if someone was manipulating you,” he reminded her. “Drugs and hypnosis have been used in mind-control experiments.”

Hypnosis. She tried to grasp it, her thoughts scattering like bits of paper in the wind. She’d seen a hypnotist once in a bar in Butte. He’d made grown men hop around and cluck and flap their arms like chickens. No, not like chickens. The men had appeared to believe they were chickens.

“Did Dr. Parris use hypnotism on you at Evergreen?” Slade asked.

“I don’t remember ever being hypnotized.” She did remember, however, that a hypnotist, through hypnotic suggestion, could wipe out all recollection of a person ever being hypnotized. Case in point: the chicken/men at the bar. They’d gone back to their stools, confused by the laughter and applause, believing the hypnotist had failed to put big, strong men like them “under.”

At the time, it had seemed silly. Now it was disturbing. “This drug I’ve been taking, would it make it easier for me to be hypnotized?”

Slade nodded, his gaze seeming to access how hard she was taking this. “I have a feeling you were also programmed to take the pills.”

The words she’d heard in her head this morning echoed now. It’s time for me to take my pill. Dear God. “So it is possible someone has been controlling me?”

“I’d say it’s a whole hell of a lot more than possible.”

Still, Holly hadn’t really accepted the ramifications. Inez had given her the pills. Inez thrived on control. But Allan had written the original prescription. And when she’d met Allan, that’s when it had all begun.

“But why? It has to be more than just the baby,” she said, watching the dense snowcapped pines blur by as the pickup snaked up the narrow old two-lane road toward the summit of the pass—and Evergreen Institute. She hadn’t seen another car for miles and had forgotten how isolated it was out here. “My memory lapses go back a whole year,” she pointed out.

“I wish I knew,” Slade said. “Unless they’d had something planned for you that far back.”

“You mean—” She glanced over at him. “You don’t think they purposely got you and me together?”

“No. For what purpose?”

“The baby?” she said. “Like you said, that’s all they appear to have gained.”

He drove in silence for a moment. “How could they know we would have a baby together?”

She stared at him. “Because they know everything about us. Once they were in control of my mind…they could control you as well.”

He smiled over at her. “They couldn’t make me fall in love with you.”

“Maybe they hadn’t planned on that.” Hadn’t planned on her going back to him this Christmas Eve for help. Hadn’t planned on the bond that had drawn her to him. She wanted desperately to believe that. To believe she and Slade had the upper hand. It gave her hope that they could find their baby and get her back. “Just as they hadn’t planned on my memory coming back and me coming to you for help,” she said, hoping he’d agree.

He looked over at her and smiled. “I’d like to think we’re one step ahead of them.”

His smile warmed her to her toes. “Thanks,” she said, feeling almost shy. She was changing, wasn’t she? She felt stronger. Just knowing that she wasn’t losing her mind helped. That it had been the pills making her feel that way and that someone had been unconsciously forcing her to keep taking the pills. All of it made her angry—and more intent on foiling their plans.

A thought struck her. “No one knows I’ve quit taking the pills or how much of my memory is coming back.” The thought pleased her immensely. “How long do you think we have before they know?”

Slade slowed the pickup, turned into a paved, pine-lined driveway, bringing the pickup to a stop before an ornate locked steel gate.

“That all depends on whether Dr. Parris is in on it,” he said as he rolled down his window and reached out to buzz the intercom of the Evergreen Institute.