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While she was getting ready to go out, Diana called to check on her. Lizette dutifully reported that she was feeling better, hadn’t thrown up in several hours, and was about to go pick up some OTC stuff in case things got worse. It was weird, but she felt as if she had to carefully choose every word, that everything she said was being analyzed and weighed—
Quickly she began humming, and the pain faded. Dang, she was getting good at this. Paranoid, but good.
What was the saying? Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you. But if you were paranoid, how did you know which enemies were real and which were imaginary? Look how suspicious she’d been of Maggie; would she have been as suspicious if Maggie didn’t insist on taking that rodent-dog with her everywhere she went? Was dislike of the yapper coloring her thoughts about Maggie?
Well, sure. But that didn’t mean she was wrong.
Being paranoid was a lot of work; she had no idea what to think.
But she knew what she knew, and she knew what she didn’t know. She didn’t know when she moved into this house. She didn’t know when she went to work for Becker Investments. She didn’t know anything that had happened during that two-year gap in her life.
The most alarming fact of all was that she’d spent three years not noticing any of this stuff, not even that she had a different face.
Until she knew exactly what was going on, wouldn’t the safest thing be to assume that all of her paranoid thoughts were true? If they weren’t, no harm, no foul. But if they were, then she should do her best to protect herself … from whatever.
She locked up and went to her car, which was parked in the driveway between her house and Maggie’s, very deliberately not looking up at Maggie’s windows in case the other woman was standing there watching. Her car was a silver Camry, with all the bells and whistles available, reliable, unremarkable. A chill went down her back when she realized she didn’t know how long she’d had it, that she had no memory at all of buying it. She didn’t even know what model year it was.
The insurance card and registration were in the glove compartment. She started to open it up and take the paperwork out, but remembered that Maggie would have a very good view of what she was doing if she did it there, so instead she started the engine and smoothly reversed to the end of her driveway, where she stopped completely and checked in both directions, as she did every time she left, before continuing to back out.
It was as if caution, routine, and a complete lack of curiosity were as much a part of her as her blue eyes. And it felt wrong—not the blue eyes, those were definitely unchanged, but everything else about this life she was living. She didn’t let herself actively think about it because she didn’t want to bring on one of those killer headaches while she was driving, but deep inside she accepted that everything about her life now was just wrong. The car was wrong, the house was wrong, her job was wrong—she was wrong.
She didn’t know what she could do about it, but there had to be something, damn it. Maybe she should stop trying to reason everything out, which gave her nothing except a headache—with vomiting thrown in as a bonus—and just go with her instincts.
She was on the move.
Thanks to the extra electronics installed in her car, he’d be able to tell exactly where she went. So would Forge’s people, but with luck, they wouldn’t bother putting extra eyes on her. They knew where she was, what she was doing, and why. Besides, right about now Forge had his hands full trying to figure out how Xavier had gotten so much information on Forge’s people, and plugging the hole in his security. That should keep them busy for a while.
In the meantime, he had things to do.
When she stopped at the first red traffic light, Lizette leaned over and opened the glove compartment to pull out the registration papers and the original sale papers. She’d known they were there, but she’d never read them before—again, there was that lack of curiosity that now seemed so foreign to her. The traffic light turned green almost right away; before, Lizette would have either laid the papers on
the seat beside her and waited until she stopped the next time or pulled into a parking lot to read them, but now she swiftly unfolded the papers and held them against the steering wheel, flipping through them, checking the date.
Three years. Everything went back three years, as if the person she’d been had ceased to exist five years ago, then after a gap of two years she’d come back to life as this new cautious, unexciting, routine-bound woman who hadn’t even had a real date that she could remember during those three years.
Maybe the reason was nothing more sinister than some sort of accident, which would explain the cosmetic surgery on her face and the gap in her memories. What it wouldn’t explain was the fact that she’d evidently been functional enough to buy a house and a car and get a job, which didn’t jibe with the whole not-remembering thing. People with brain injuries severe enough to cause that kind of amnesia didn’t just go forth again as a fully functional person; there would be all kinds of intense therapies that she’d remember, because as far as she knew amnesia happened from the time of injury backward, not the time of injury forward. Operating on sheer logic, the reason for all this couldn’t be a physical injury.
Mental illness, paranoia—that was more likely than an accident, which was a bummer because she didn’t want to be paranoid. But did mentally ill people ever consider that possibility, or did they simply assume the opposite?
She was doubting herself again, after deciding to go with her instincts.
The navigation screen in the dashboard caught her eye. The car had a GPS. That meant it was possible to monitor the position of her car, wherever she went. This was a car she didn’t remember buying, and it didn’t feel as if it were a car she would buy. Maybe it had been picked out for her, and came to her with all sorts of bugs and tracking devices installed. She didn’t know how to check for anything like that, but she knew it was possible.
Act normal. She just had to act normal.
She pulled into the parking lot of the Walgreens pharmacy closest to her house. There was an open parking slot right beside the door, the premium spot, the one everyone wanted. She started to wheel into it, then abruptly changed direction and circled around the interior parking spaces until she found two end-to-end empty ones. She pulled in and through, so she was facing out of the parking slot and could simply pull out and drive away. If she had to leave suddenly, not having to back out of the parking space would save precious seconds, and maybe her life.
A chill went down her back, prickled over her skull. Her instincts were suddenly shouting at her, and she didn’t like what they were saying.
They’re watching.
They’re listening.
They know where you are.
Chapter Seven
Xavier eyed the screen of the laptop that was sitting beside him in his truck. Her car was indicated by a blinking chevron, and the chevron had stopped moving. The map overlay told him she was in a Walgreens parking lot, which was good, because she’d said she was going to a pharmacy and that was the closest one to her house. She’d gone directly there, hadn’t made any unscheduled stops—in other words, she was acting exactly the way she should.
