If you are who you appear to be…I wondered about that statement, but I decided to file it away until later.
“I want to ask you about the medication I’ve been receiving,” I said. “Did you prescribe it?”
“Of course. But I hadn’t intended you to lose more than the unpleasant memory of your recent trauma.”
“You might have overdone it, in that case. What were you covering up?”
“Did you really wish to remember a car accident? Aren’t such unpleasant, frightening events best deleted?”
I glared at her. “I certainly don’t think that was your decision to make.”
Meng chuckled. “Who else then? This is my domain, after all, Draith.”
There was something in her face, something predatory. It was as if she held the gun and not I. She didn’t seem perturbed by the fact I was armed. I wasn’t pointing the gun at her, but a normal person would have been eyeing the weapon with concern. Instead, she had the attitude of a principal sternly rebuking an errant student.
“I’ll be getting back to my station, Dr. Meng,” Miranda said quietly.
Dr. Meng nodded. She still wore that confident, bemused expression and continued to gaze at me. I thought about waving my gun around and ordering Miranda to stay put, but somehow, it didn’t seem worth it. No one appeared interested in calling the cops. They didn’t seem to know quite what to do with me, but they didn’t actually fear me. It was disturbing.
“Could you take your foot off my desk, Draith?” Dr. Meng asked. “I believe you’ve leaked some lymph fluids on my blotter.”
With a sigh, I eased my foot off the desk and put it down beside its twin. In a way, it was a relief. They both ached, but the one on the desk had begun to throb.
“Why don’t you just tell me what all this is about?” I asked. “Start with the beginning. How did I get here and why have you been holding me?”
Meng stared at me for a moment, then laughed loudly. She shook her head. “I’m not here to help you nose around, Draith! Have you forgotten everything?”
I leaned back and tried to look confident. I had a flash of memory then, something I knew was a snippet of my real past. I remembered buying her a drink in a bar. It had been a strange place full of strange people. I grabbed hold of the memory before it could fade away and tried to make the most of it that I could.
“Of course not,” I said. “I remember buying you a drink once—not long ago.”
Meng shook her head. “You’re wrong. That was a long time ago, in a distant place.”
I didn’t argue, having no way to judge the honesty of her words. I did note that she seemed mollified, however. She didn’t know how severely my mind had been erased. That was just how I wanted things.
She took something out of her pocket, a metal object. She placed it upon the desktop between us with a mysterious air. It was bronze in color and looked well aged. Staring at it, I realized it was a statuette of a woman with wings raised in midflight.
Dr. Meng was studying me, watching my reaction closely. “What do you think of that, Quentin?” she asked, using my first name for the first time. “How does it make you feel?”
I flicked my eyes up to meet hers, then looked at the statuette again. I shrugged, feeling nothing special. “I thought the Maltese Falcon was supposed to be black.”
She glared at me and moved her hand toward the thing, as if to snatch it up again in a fury. I felt as if I’d insulted a religious icon of hers. Perhaps I had.
“Fine,” she snapped. “Your resistance is high—but that’s not an excuse for rudeness.”
“Um, why don’t you tell me what it is?”
“It’s a hood ornament,” she said. “The rarest of them. Found right here, on this scrap of land where they built this sanatorium.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to sound impressed. It looked like a hunk of old bronze to me. It would serve fairly well as a paperweight, but appeared likely to fall over if bumped.
“We think Harriet Frishmuth sculpted it around 1920. She did a lot of these, and due to the stamp, we know it was forged at the Gorham Foundry in Providence…”
“Look,” I said, tapping my fingers on her desk, “I’m sure this antique is worth thousands, but I don’t see—”
“Always you play the fool,” she snapped, cutting me off. She picked up the statuette and eyed it closely. “It’s worth millions, billions—perhaps more. It’s priceless, like all of its kind.”
My eyebrows were riding high in disbelief. “Billions? For part of an old car?”
“Not just any old car. It came from here, at this crux point. It was probably mounted on an automobile that moldered away in the barn of some desert rat before they developed the area. I’m not sure why it became a local nexus—but it did.”