She did, ripping off the purple ribbon that bound it up in a big bow. There was tissue paper inside. Pink. She pulled it apart. “Shoes. New shoes!” She clapped her hands together at the sight of the little lilac high-tops, and suddenly they were on her feet in the snow again. But they weren’t. Left them inside. It was icy cold. Bare feet. No time. A woman’s screams cut the air.
Wskakuj do srodka, szybko! . . . Siedz cicho! . . . Get inside! Stay quiet!
Bells. So loud. Loud! She put her hands tightly over her ears. She was panting, hyperventilating. Banging.
“Tell me, Roksana,” Alex said. “What are you doing?”
“Inside. Get inside. Bells.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. She couldn’t breathe. “The knife is coming. Big shiny knife . . .” She screamed. Pain sliced over her face. Blood! Everywhere. Banging from the guns. “Mila!” she screamed. “Gone. Mila!” She began to sob. “Home, home, home!” She searched wildly for the key. Key gone. Gone . . .
Vaguely she heard a word. Four. Three. Then louder. Three!
Two.
One.
“You’re coming up, Angie. You’re safe. Warm. You’re back. Safe. In a comfortable chair, back in Alex Strauss’s house, my house. Safe. All safe.”
Her eyes flared open. Her gaze shot to her palms. No blood. She felt her mouth, her scar, her ears. No stickiness. No hot blood. No coppery smell. Her entire body was shaking, and her face was wet with tears.
CHAPTER 34
After her session with Alex, Angie drove straight to the marina to find Maddocks, but he was not at his yacht. So she’d gone home, showered and changed out of her cop uniform, and grabbed something to eat at Mario’s—her favorite little Italian restaurant in old Victoria. She found Maddocks home when she returned to the marina closer to midnight.
They now sat on the sofa in his cabin, dog at their side, sipping a fine whiskey as waves slapped and chuckled at the wooden hull of his old schooner and halyards chinked against masts outside. Maddocks absently ruffled Jack-O’s ears as he listened in heavy silence to Angie’s account of the day’s events—everything from Jacob Anders and his lab, to the floating foot DNA bomb Pietrikowski and Tranquada had dropped on her, to Milo Belkin and the hit on his prints, to Grablowski and his threats, and how his mention of twin-speak had driven her to a shocking hypnosis session with Alex. How she’d heard the names Mila and Roksana and seen a man’s face clearly in her mind. A man who’d gifted her shoes in a prettily wrapped box, just like the little shoe that had washed up in Tsawwassen containing her DNA profile.
She drew her socked feet up under her butt and curled into the warmth of Maddocks’s body as she spoke. His solid comfort, the feeling of having an ally, reminded her of all the reasons she did love having him in her life and why she did want to fight to keep him there. Yet she still felt as though something was slipping away—like fine hourglass sand through clenched fingers. And his mood was different tonight—she hadn’t seen him like this before. Something was simmering hot and fierce just beneath his very controlled and cool exterior.
“You okay?” she said, looking up at him.
He nodded. “How about you? How’re you handling this? How do you feel?”
She gave a snort. “Like the truth is locked inside me, and I can’t quite get it out. I . . . I self-identified as Roksana in my memory,” she said. “Alex and I looked up the name afterward—it is Polish in origin. And I screamed the word Mila. It’s also a Polish girl’s name. I saw more of my surroundings this time. I—we—Mila and I, I think—were in a clearing in a forest. Surrounded by exceptionally tall trees. Wide trunks. Way wider than my outreached arms. Cedars, I figure, in retrospect—droopy branches with reddish bark that looked stripped into shreds. A big ancient cedar grove. Moss, lichen, dandelions. A clearing where berry bushes grew—blackberries. There was water, ocean beyond the forest. A big building with a green roof where a red man lived. Docks. Several, making square shapes in the water. One with a building on it. I thought of them as fish pens.”
“Red man?”
She looked up at him. “I have no idea what that means.”
“And the docks?”
“A fish farm maybe? They reminded me of the docks outside Jacob Anders’s lab buildings.”
“The trees could have seemed extra tall because you were small in the memory,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. “Sometimes when you return to places of childhood, something like an old family house that once appeared so large can seem tiny, shrunken.”
She swirled her whiskey glass, watching the play of yellow against gold in the liquid. “I know. The man who gave me the shoe box was also huge. And I saw his features clear as day—they’re burned into my brain now. I’ll never forget them. A roundish face. But not a flabby round—strong. A wide, aggressive brow. A nose that looked as though it had been broken a few times. Eyes set deep under that ledge of brow. Dark-blond hair cut military short. Very bright blue eyes, all twinkly bright.”
“So he wasn’t the red man?”
“I didn’t get the sense that he was. The red man . . . I felt the red man was bad. The man with the shoe box was nice.”
“Twinkly? As though you liked him?
“I don’t know.”
“To describe eyes as twinkly—that’s not a perception born out of fear or of someone dark and nasty.”
“I guess not. But then after I took the shoes from him, my memory flipped right into a black and negative nightmare. The terror I felt was real. I had a sense it could have been him after us in the snow.”
Maddocks inhaled a deep, slow breath of air. “This is heavy stuff, Ange. But maybe you’re also extrapolating—having seen photos of the ROOAirPocket high-top, having received news of the possible DNA match, and after having seen Anders’s docks, you might be inserting this into your other memories. That DNA match still has to be proved—it could still be an error.”
She shook her head. “I saw her, Maddocks. My twin. It had to be her. A mirror image of myself. Me but not me. I now feel in my bones, with every molecule of my being, that the DNA test will come back positive. And seen through this new paradigm, I believe that my memories are all starting to make some logical sense now. I feel less crazy. And if one of the DNA profiles on those semen stains or the hairs also comes back as a match to Milo Belkin, we’ve got him right there. DNA and prints. We can use this to crack him wide open—make him talk, make him tell me what happened that night, who that other man might be.” She paused. “Who my parents were.”
“So it wasn’t Belkin himself you saw in your memory?”
“No. I’ve seen Belkin’s mug shot. It wasn’t him. I’ve got a meeting with Belkin at noon tomorrow at the Hansen Correctional Centre.”
Maddocks’s gaze flared to hers. “Is that wise?”
“How can I not?”
He held her gaze, long and steady. In his eyes she read worry, and she hated seeing it there.
“The RCMP is not going to be pleased with you hitting their persons of interest first,” he said quietly. “Because it’s just a matter of time before Pietrikowski gets the same hit on the bloody patents that you did. They’re going to want to be the ones interrogating Belkin in connection with their floating foot case.”
“Their case is my life. And any civilian has the right to go visit an inmate.”