“Sometimes it doesn’t?”
“Quite often. Quite often that particular memory—since it has few associations and isn’t chunked with other recollections—well, it’s just gone.”
“Really.”
“So don’t be discouraged. The truth is, you’re suffering from as extreme a dissociative state as I have ever encountered. To cope with that, you’ve reinvented yourself. Now the task is to get you back to who you really are. This will bring you face-to-face with a lot of the trauma you’ve repressed. It’s not going to be easy. I can tell that, already.”
“What do you mean?” Duran asked.
“I’m getting a lot of resistance—deep resistance. Even in a trance, you’re constantly dancing away from anything that might connect you to your real past. The resistance is profound.”
“Why would that be?”
Shaw smiled, his eyes kind and reassuring. “Something happened to you. Something your mind can’t accept. Maybe there was a sailing accident, and someone you loved drowned. Perhaps you felt responsible. Perhaps you were responsible.” The psychiatrist paused. “It’s just a possibility” he added. “Who knows?” He paused a second time. “We’ll try another tack tomorrow.”
After dinner, Duran walked the halls for a while, and talked to Adrienne by telephone. Then he sat down with a copy of Sail that Shaw had left for him. It was strange. The beauty of the boats was a delight, but occasionally, his eye would fall on something in the background—a swatch of landscape or the figure of a person hiking out—and it would be as if the sun were sliding behind a cloud. A low and anxious feeling would come over him, and…
He tossed the magazine aside, and snapped on the television.
Fresh from the shower after a long, cold run in the park, Adrienne toweled off and put on her underwear. Then she slipped into a skirt and sweater, and made herself a cup of coffee in the little kitchenette beside the door. Moving to the desk in front of the window, she looked out upon a construction site that was even deeper than it was wide. Finally, she sipped her coffee, and began to sort through her sister’s mail.
She’d almost forgotten about it. Bound with a thick rubber band, it had been sitting in the backseat of the Dodge for days. Now, it was time to take a look.
The first envelope she opened was from the bank. There were shrunken photocopies of Nikki’s bank statements and checks, which turned out to be less interesting than Adrienne had hoped. Nikki lived on about $4,500 bucks a month—give or take $500, one way or the other. Every once in a while, every few months, there was another deposit, also by wire transfer: three grand this September, for instance, and almost $8,000 back in February. The statement did not identify the source of the money, which led Adrienne to make a note on the Mayflower’s stationery: Transfer—$ from where?
It was a minor mystery, at best, since Adrienne was pretty sure that she knew where the money came from: the settlement her sister had made with the Riedles. Bonilla had mentioned a bank in the Channel Islands. In fact, he was going to fax her the specifics about the bank sending funds to Nikki’s account in the States. The European account might be nothing more than a convenience, or it might contain the bulk of Nikki’s settlement with the Riedles. In either case, it was a clue to Nikki’s past. Unfortunately, Bonilla never got the chance to follow through on his promise. Adrienne made a note: Query Riggs.
The checks were more or less transparent. Rent and utilities accounted for more than two grand. Duran’s fees took another big bite. There was forty-seven dollars a month to the cable company, a couple of checks to the vet. Payments to Visa, and checks to Harlow’s (Nikki’s hair salon).
So much for the checks.
The next envelope was from Chevy Chase Bank, which was the issuer of Nikki’s Visa card. Curious, she scanned the transactions, trying to make sense of them—which wasn’t hard. Marvellous Market: $19.37. Safeway: $61.53. America Online: $19.95. Amtrak: $189.60. Blockbuster—
Huh?
The Amtrak entry didn’t say where she’d gone, but subsequent charges made it obvious: Hertz (Orlando): $653.69. La Resort at Longboat Key: $1,084.06. Tommy Bahama’s @ St. Armand’s Circle: $72.91. Moe’s Stone Crab: $18.94. She looked at the dates.
Conch House Eat Place
10-08
$21.03
Sarasota Sunglasses
10-09
$226.05
All of the Florida transactions, or what looked like Florida transactions, were in the same time period, October 7 and October 12. About a week or two before Nikki died.
Which made sense. This was when Nikki had taken Jacko to the kennel. Dimly, she remembered Duran telling her that her sister had missed an appointment about a week before her suicide, and that the last time he’d seen her, she had been tan. And not just tan, she said she’d been at the beach. Some beach. A beach whose name her sister didn’t remember, or wouldn’t say.
But there it was: Longboat Key. Which was—where?
Adrienne was excited now, but frustrated, too, because Nikki’s laptop had gone up in smoke with the house in Bethany Beach. If she had a computer, she could look it up—and not just the place, but La Resort, too. Maybe the Mayflower rented laptops—but, no. A phone call to the front desk elicited an apology, and the information that the easiest thing to do would be to go to Kinko’s. There was one just up the street, about two blocks away.
A moonlighting college kid took her credit card, and signed her on to AOL. She put Longboat Key into the Lycos search engine and hit Return. Seconds later, she was looking at an aerial photograph of an eleven-mile long barrier island off the coast of Florida. Switching to a map, she saw that the island was about an hour south of Tampa, and connected to Sarasota by a causeway.
Which raised the question: what was Nikki doing there? Did she have a boyfriend? Maybe, but if she did, you’d think that she’d have mentioned it. What, then? What was important enough to make Nikki put Jacko in a kennel—which Adrienne happened to know her sister thought of as a “dog jail”—and then take a train all the way to Florida. And why a train? She wasn’t afraid to fly.
She tapped her foot. Thought about it.
Oprah. She’d go to Florida to audition for Oprah (“The Devil made me do it!”). But wouldn’t Oprah buy the tickets, and wouldn’t they be plane tickets? And wasn’t Oprah in Chicago, anyway?
What, then?
The truth was there was only one thing that had interested Nikki in the past year, and that was Satanic Abuse. It was all she talked about. So… maybe there’d been a conference of some kind. A conference for “survivors.”
She decided to try Nexis, recalling the Slough, Hawley’s user-ID and password. When the search screen came up, she entered Longboat Key—and satanic and limited the search to the past year. The computer digested the information, and came back with… absolutely nothing. No stories. So she revised the search words, substituting recovered and memory for satanic.
This time, six documents were listed. But five of them turned out to be variations on a story about a conference on Marine Ecology. The conference had been held at the Holiday Inn on Longboat Key over the weekend of October 9. And at that conference, a great deal of time seemed to have been spent discussing how well the manatee population had recovered from its decimation by red tide, and how the memory of that event was still fresh in the minds of marine biologists. The remaining article concerned stolen cars that the Longboat Key police department had recovered with the help of memory chips.
She tried a new search, this time deleting the words memory and recovered. Maybe if she just found out what had been going on at Longboat Key from October 7 to the 12th, she could take it from there. Connect the dots.
Her new search yielded ninety-eight stories. She looked through the KWIK cites, which listed the headline, the name of the newspaper it appeared in, the date, and the byline. Most of the pieces were useless—announcements of Wine Fests, gallery openings, tennis tourneys and golf matches. But there was one story that was different from all the others, and it almost stopped her heart when she saw the headlines: