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What she was about to do was an unforgivable invasion of privacy, but she had a right to do this, she told herself. She had a right to protect herself.
His bag was still sitting under the bed and Nina was startled at its weight as she slid it out. She had thought Ryan would have preferred to put his clothes in the drawers or wardrobe rather than leave them zipped in his bag, and in any case, surely his clothes alone wouldn’t be very heavy.
The first thing she saw when she pulled down the zip was a cell phone, not the slim accessory that Dave Freeman had carried, but the solid, seriously expensive, cutting-edge communications device that accepted faxes and e-mails and probably satellite communications, as well.
Nina picked it up. Perhaps he hadn’t considered it worth mentioning because it had been rendered useless by the rain, she thought hopefully, removing it from its leather case, but when she pushed the power button, it sprang to life and she saw from the digital display that its long-life battery was fully charged.
It felt cool and heavy in her hand, but the shape and weight of it also felt queasily familiar. She had held this phone before…used it herself. She didn’t need an instruction booklet to tell her how to work its complex commands.
A veil billowed in her memory and she quickly twitched it back into place, drawing out the credit-card holder from her pocket and punching in the toll-free number on the back of one of the credit cards.
‘Hello, I’m calling on behalf of my—my boss who’s lost his platinum card while on holiday. I’d like to make sure you cancel it, please,’ she said croakily, reeling off Ryan’s name and the string of numbers embossed on the hologrammed silver surface.
She heard the sound of a computer being keyed and then the disembodied toll of doom. ‘Mr Flint rang and personally cancelled that card himself two days ago. According to his instructions, we’re withholding the issue of a new one until he gets back from his trip.’
‘Oh, I see. Sorry, I must have misunderstood,’ Nina managed to say before she hung up.
He had cancelled his missing credit cards two days ago.
With no more thoughts of discretion or hiding the evidence of her search, she ripped back into the bag, but the only other thing inside was a heavy rectangle wrapped like contraband inside the doubled-up black sweater he had worn when he arrived. What had he been so anxious to prevent from being casually discovered?
Snagging her fingernails on the fine wool in her hurry, Nina sat on the bed and impatiently wrenched the item free.
A hardback book?
He had been hiding an interest in reading?
A thin, grey-haired man in a tweed suit gazed up at her with an enigmatic smile from the water-stained back dust jacket. A bookmark sprouted from roughly the halfway point, and as she gingerly turned it over, she could see that edges of the pages were rippled where dampness had seeped into the body of the book.
The title took up the whole front cover.
Mind and Memory: Case Studies of Amnesia. A string of medical qualifications followed the author’s name.
Ryan had been come to Shearwater Island carrying a book all about memory loss?
She was so stunned that the full implication didn’t hit her until several heartbeats later.
Oh, God…!
‘Have you seen enough? Or do you want to strip-search me, too?’
Nina’s head jerked up and she stared blindly at the man standing grimly in the doorway. How long had he been watching her paw through his things?
She jumped to her feet clutching the book and grabbed the cell phone from the bed with some wild idea of confiscating everything that he could possibly use as a threat. He was obviously expecting some form of answer, but Nina was incapable of giving it to him. She headed towards the door, but instead of pausing for the confrontation he had invited, she shouldered past him with a sudden burst of superhuman strength that sent him staggering into the sharp edge of the wooden moulding.
‘Nina, wait…’
Cursing, he raced after her down the hall, bursting into the living room and hurdling over the couch to bar her way to the sliding door with his outflung arms.
‘Nina, don’t think you’re going to run away from th—’
‘You bastard!’ she screamed at him. She hadn’t been running away; she had been seeking a space large enough to encompass her towering rage. She threw the phone directly at his head, all the strength of her shoulder behind her deadly accurate aim, but he ducked and it crashed against the frame of the window, sending a shiver through the toughened glass.
