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Maybe she’d dream about the hot guy in the pharmacy again. Every time she thought about Friday night’s dream her heartbeat would speed up a little. It had been so great, the dream so intense and realistic that she’d actually felt him enter her; if she closed her eyes, she could still clearly recall the heat and sensation, and, wow, her climax had been explosive. Yeah, waking up that way in the middle of the night was well worth the lost sleep.
But Mr. X didn’t visit her dreams, and she woke Monday morning feeling a little disgruntled about it. She went through her normal routine, not because she found comfort in the familiar but because for now she sensed being normal was critical to her well-being.
She left on schedule and took her normal route to work. Every so often she’d check her rearview mirror, but the rush-hour traffic was so chaotic, with vehicles dodging back and forth in the lanes, jockeying for position, that she could barely keep track of who was directly behind her at any given time. There were a lot of similar cars and SUVs, too; a vehicle would seem familiar and she’d try to watch it, only to notice a moment or two later that, wait, there was another one that was identical in color, but the headlights were a little different. And she couldn’t constantly watch the mirror and drive at the same time, unless she wanted to rear-end someone. In the end, she gave up and simply concentrated on getting to work.
At the office, she felt a little more secure. She smiled at the guard as she paused to sign in. Her ID card was clipped to a lanyard that she wore around her neck; the guard knew her, of course, but the procedure was strictly enforced. Entry into the building was controlled, and everyone had to check in at the security desk.
She got into the elevator with several other people and punched in the code that would make the elevator stop on the floor where Becker Investments was housed. The car began rising, the motor and cables whining. The elevator-code thing was more for impressing clients than anything else. After all, the stairwells were still free access, and had to be because of fire codes. Still, she had walls and people around her, and whatever was going on didn’t seem to warrant an entire assault team roping down from the top of the building.
Headache.
Willing herself not to make a sound, not to collapse on the floor, she stared hard at the abstract patterned blouse the woman in front of her was wearing. The pattern was wild but the colors were kind of muted, in grays and creams and blues, which made a nice mix.
Okay, good. Concentrating on the pattern worked as well as anything else, and she hadn’t had to resort to humming.
She got off on her floor. The receptionist was just arriving too, emerging from another elevator car, and together they walked down the carpeted hallway. “Good morning, how are you?” the receptionist said. Her name was Rae; she was pretty and maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Lizette got a glimpse of the book she was carrying: a textbook on marketing. Evidently, Rae was going to school at night, with an eye on a different field of work. Lizette had done her share of receptionist work when she’d been straight out of college, as well as waitressing. Strange, but she’d take waitressing over being a receptionist any day. It was much harder work, but at least she’d been moving, and every day had been different even though most of the customers had been regulars.
If she’d still been in school, it might have been a different story; she might have needed a quieter job, so she could get in some studying.
Then she thought back to the energetic kid she’d been. No, she would still have picked waitressing. She’d even liked the challenge of keeping certain customers under control.
Those memories, she noticed, didn’t trigger any kind of reaction. They were normal memories. But now she knew she could add assault teams, and roping down the outside of buildings, to her list of avenues to explore, along with Chicago. Evidently she’d really been into some derring-do kind of stuff.
Deep down, she felt a sense of rightness. Whatever she’d done, wherever she’d been, she hadn’t been content to sit in an office building every day.
Almost as soon as she stored her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk, Diana stuck her head around the cubicle wall. “Hi! Still feeling okay? I meant to call you this weekend, but things went nuts with the kids. I’d think about calling you, then Armageddon would break out and it would slip my mind, and I’d remember again after we’d already gone to bed.”
Diana’s kids were four and five years of age, a boy and a girl, and both of them seemingly hell-bent on breaking their necks before first grade. Having been around them before, Lizette completely understood.
“I’m still getting headaches, but it’s more off than on.” She said that to give herself some cover in case she had one of the attacks. “No more nausea. That was over with by Friday afternoon.”
“Good. You sounded awful when I talked to you. Feel well enough to grab some lunch today?”
“Sure. See you then.”
Diana waved and headed for her own cubicle. They had lunch together at least a couple of days a week, whenever Diana didn’t have errands to run. Her kids seemed to generate a lot of errands, everything from doctor’s visits to picking up stuff for birthday parties for their day-care buddies and replacing broken items. Diana’s life was a study in damage control—real, physical damage, not the bad-news kind.
Then it hit her. Diana’s kids were four and five, which meant that if Lizette had truly worked at Becker Investments for five years, she’d at least remember one of her friend’s pregnancies … but she didn’t. She couldn’t remember when Diana didn’t have the two kids.
She’d hardly needed more proof that something was very wrong, but somehow the personal nature of this was way more convincing than her car registration, driver’s license, and tax returns. She remembered Diana’s birthday, the kids’ birthdays, things like that, so if she’d been here she definitely would have remembered them being born.
Ergo, she hadn’t been here. She’d worked here, and lived in her house, for roughly three years. The couple of years before that—anyone’s guess.
She’d been a different person, and she needed to find out who that person was, and what she’d done. Everything hinged on that.
Chapter Twelve
She thought about it all day, knowing inside that she was living a life that wasn’t hers, that the person she’d been had somehow been stolen. She had been concentrating on appearing as if nothing had changed, but maybe the key to unlocking her past was in breaking free of routine, in acting more as she imagined she’d have acted in that forgotten life.
She didn’t have to do the same thing day after day after mind-numbing day. If she was being surveilled—and where in hell had that word come from?—as long as she didn’t do anything really out of character, such as suddenly signing up for martial arts classes, she shouldn’t set off any alarms. Not that she wouldn’t like to get in some martial arts training,
but she wanted to take this gradually.
With that in mind, when she left work that afternoon, Lizette took a different route away from the office building, heading away from home, losing herself in new twists and turns, losing herself in ordinary, maddening rush-hour traffic. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, so she wasn’t in a hurry.
The workday had been uneventful—normal—and should have lulled the sense of urgency that kept her internally on edge, but it hadn’t. Normal didn’t feel normal, it felt fake, as if she should be more on guard now than she had been before. Every so often during the day she’d felt as if the hairs on the nape of her neck were standing up, warning her, indicating a high level of alarm. The fact that she couldn’t detect anything in her immediate surroundings that could possibly be alarming wasn’t reassuring. Was her office bugged? Was someone in the office keeping an eye on her? Was every keystroke on her computer being logged?
She needed a long, leisurely drive to settle her down. If anyone followed her, that would give her a chance to spot them. If no one followed her, then she’d have scouted out the territory past her usual boundaries, and she’d feel more settled when she did go home. There was nothing like a good, long drive to clear the mind; she could remember taking drives in the past when something was bothering her, not going anywhere in particular, and how her subconscious would take over and the solution to her problem would surface.
