“Why?”
“I don’t have time to explain. But I promise I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”
“Does this have anything to do with you, Ben?”
He dropped his hands from her shoulders and raked his fingers through his hair. “This has everything to do with me.”
“So, no matter what you find out there, this isn’t the end—is it, Ben?”
“What do you mean?”
“For ten years you’ve been telling me that the past is the past and you were fine with not knowing who you used to be, but that’s not true any longer. Is it?”
He said nothing.
“I’m worried about you—about us—because you haven’t been yourself. You’ve become secretive and obsessive. You wanted better ratings for your newspaper, and after finding yourself face-to-face with a serial killer, that’s exactly what you got. But I can see it in your eyes—it’s not enough.” She sighed. “If everything you’ve been doing lately, disappearing into the night at odd hours and failing to call home, is the beginning of some fantastical journey into your past, I’m not sure how much more I can handle.”
This time he placed the palm of his hand on her cheek and said, “I love you, Melony—more than ever, and I promise to do whatever I must to make our marriage work because I don’t ever want to lose you. But I also find myself yearning to know who I once was. Bits and pieces of my memory are beginning to return. You said yourself that the doctors knew that was not only a possibility but a probability. Tell me how to bury it all, and I will do everything in my power to do exactly that.”
She frowned, and he gently brushed his lips against her forehead. “Go,” she said. “Do what you have to do. We’ll figure this all out tomorrow.”
By the time he climbed behind the wheel and opened the garage door, Melony had disappeared back into the house.
It took Jessie much longer than she thought it would to find the area where the car had crashed into a tree and then rolled down the embankment before hitting another tree. Her Jeep was pointed down the hill and into the ravine beyond, two headlights shedding beams of bright light, giving her a path to follow.
She stood there for a moment, staring, wondering if she’d gone completely mad. Being out here at this time of night seemed like a fool’s errand. The sun would rise soon, but it hadn’t yet, and the creatures that used the dark as cover could see her, but she couldn’t see them. She could hear them, though. A chirp. A strange intermittent cawing. A rustling and skittering of tiny feet. The croak of a frog in the distance.
A light breeze rustled the branches of trees, and for the first time in forever, she felt as if her sister was talking to her. She listened closely, her gaze focused on the terrain. Sophie was here.
Jessie pulled the hood of her coat over her head and slipped on the only pair of gloves she could find before leaving the house. They were thin with a flower print. Garden gloves. They would have to do. She didn’t bother using the flashlight. The headlights were enough.
Taking one step at a time, she made her way down the hill to the tree that had stopped the car from rolling into the abyss.
The abyss.
The thought that Sophie might have been thrown from the wreckage and left to die among brambles and overgrown brush made her insides churn. If she was down there somewhere, hidden in the overgrown brush and weeds, would there be anything left? Would wild animals have carried her off?
The sound of a car approaching pulled her from her thoughts. She looked back to the road and saw a vehicle approaching. The tree she was standing next to wasn’t wide enough to hide behind, so she quickly but carefully stepped over the edge, where the hill met the ravine, and held tight to a shrub so she wouldn’t slide too far. She hoped the car would pass by. It could be hikers getting an early start, or maybe people lived farther down the road. She wasn’t sure.
But the car stopped and the engine was shut off. A door opened and then closed, and then opened and closed again. Whoever it was walked to the edge of the embankment. She couldn’t look into the bright lights, but she could make out a silhouette. It was Ben. He stood perfectly still. He held something at his side—a tool—maybe a shovel or a rake. No. It was a sickle.
“Jessie?” he called.
The moment she heard his voice, she saw his face clearly in her mind as he squeezed the life from Forrest Bloom. Twitching jaw, pulsing veins, nostrils flared as he tightened his grasp around another man’s neck, easily taking his life. No one else had seen the look on his face. No one else had seen what he was capable of. And after the dead man crumpled to the ground at his feet, Ben had looked her way. In that instant their gazes had locked as if in a strange secret knowing of what lurked within him.
For the first time since she’d met Ben Morrison, she realized he wasn’t the only one who wanted to know who or what he’d been before the accident, before his memories stripped his past from him, before he married and had kids and became a family man.
He was trudging down the hill now, moving much faster than her snail-like pace. As she had done, he stopped at the tree with its bent trunk and arthritic branches.
He was close. Too close.
The thinnest sliver of sun reached out to reveal her hiding place. He left his sickle leaning against the tree and came to the edge where he could plainly see her and she could see him.
Had he killed Sophie? The thought hit her without warning.
Bent over slightly, he offered his hand to help bring her up from her precarious holding. But she didn’t take the lifeline he offered. Instead she released her grasp on a handful of brittle branches and found herself sliding, unable to get a foothold. She grasped for underbrush, felt the weeds and dead branches slide between her thinly gloved hands as she fell farther and farther until she was rolling into thorny brambles that clawed at her face, forcing her to shut her eyes, afraid she might be blinded.
She hit something solid, the smack to her body taking her breath away. A dead tree had blocked her descent and kept her from rolling farther into the ravine.
For a few seconds, she merely lay there breathing. Another moment passed before she tested her arms and legs to see if anything was broken. Still in one piece, she thought.
She sat up, the tangled vines hanging tight, tearing her lightweight jacket when she pushed herself to her feet. And it was then, out of the corner of her eye, that she saw a scrap of red fabric.
And she knew even before she took a closer look that after all this time, she’d found Sophie.
Walking that way, stepping through thorns and brush, she stopped just a few feet away from Sophie’s final resting place. Her sister lay faceup in the deepest part of the thicket, protected by a blanket of thorny vines, her red dress faded by time, her skeleton intact. Jessie’s next breath caught in her throat. For a moment she stood there unable to come to terms with what she was seeing. Her insides twisted and turned.
After all this time, she’d found her sister.
“Oh, Sophie.” Tears slid down both sides of her face as she looked up toward the morning sky, now brushed lightly with orange and pink.
“Jessie,” she heard Ben shout in the distance.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood over her sister’s bones before Ben found her. Disbelief and despair had settled over her shoulders, weighing them down. Loneliness pricked her skin. She wanted to scream out at the top of her lungs, release some of the emotions she was feeling. Instead she stood quietly, trying to accept the moment fully.
“You’re okay,” Ben said, his relief palpable, before his gaze followed the direction she was looking.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.”
“You found Sophie.”