Kiss (18 page)

“Where did you find this?”

“I found it the day we packed.”

Shauna tipped the contents out onto the bed. “So far, Khai, I haven’t understood anything you’ve said.”

Khai sat down, her slight form barely depressing the mattress.

“Mrs. McAllister and I went to your home the day before the movers arrived. She assigned me to the bathroom and kitchen. I was to pack up as much as I could that wasn’t breakable. She wanted to do your bedroom and living room. In particular she was interested in your desk.”

“She wanted my computer.”

“Yes. But I think she wanted more than that.”

“Like what?”

“She didn’t tell me what she was looking for, but she was aggravated not to find it. Information of some kind. The woman put her nose into every-thing, even the microwave, the tank of the toilet. Then she decided to sweep all the contents of your desk into a box. She did the same with each drawer in the house that did not contain clothing. Three large boxes. These she set aside before she left, and when I came back the next morning to let the movers in, they were gone.”

“Where did they go?”

“I have not seen them since.”

“And what is the connection to this?” Shauna spread the papers out.

“I found it above the cabinets. I was dusting.”

“You think this is what Patrice was looking for?”

“I don’t know what Patrice was looking for. But this looked like something you wanted to stay hidden. Of course, I didn’t anticipate that you wouldn’t remember what it is.”

“Why didn’t you give it to Patrice?”

Khai held Shauna’s eyes with her own, the brown and the hazel, for a few intense seconds before she settled on saying, “I understand how it would feel to have my personal secrets invaded.”

“You have secrets?” Shauna smiled at her.

“As we all do.”

Shauna glanced at the headlines of the newspaper clippings. They seemed to focus on her father’s campaign, dating mostly within the current year. The white papers were photocopies of similar articles, with a few e-mails from someone whose handle was
Sabueso
. Short and cryptic one-liners. Like:

The problem is in the profit-sharing structure.
And,

Subsidiary on page 72 has no public record—can you research?

The CD was not labeled.

“May I use your computer again?” Shauna asked. “Tomorrow sometime?”

“Yes. Any time you need. I will be out again for much of the day.” She watched Shauna scan a few more sheets of paper. “I was able to see your brother today. Ms. Riley says he is well, that we should all hope for his improvement.”

Shauna looked up and found herself tempted to simply agree with the nurse’s optimistic sentiment. Instead, when she opened her mouth she heard herself say, “I don’t think he’ll ever recover.”

Khai folded her hands around her knee and nodded, somber.

“You understand this,” Shauna said. It was not a question. “I don’t think anyone else in my family does. Certainly not Landon.”

“Some fathers hope in the impossible,” Khai said. “Sometimes it makes them better fathers.”

“Not always.”

Khai shook her head. “No. Not always. But my brother is a father, and he does this.”

“Is he a good dad?”

“Yes.” Khai took a deep breath. “His cancer is back. It has metastasized to his brain.”

“Oh, Khai. I’m sorry.”

She reached across the blue and brown pinwheel-pattern bedspread to touch Khai’s arm. Later she would remember the sensation of static that rose off Khai’s skin, the fine hairs lifting themselves to stand tall as if magnetically drawn to Shauna’s fingers. In her dreams she would believe she heard a snap-ping and hissing, a sizzle of energy arcing through some invisible space.

But then, she only heard the electric crack, felt the sting of a simple shock, and saw Khai jump up off the bed.

It was happening again.

The room disappeared and she sensed that she was collapsing on the ground, crying hysterically, screaming and yelling, screaming and yelling, at the side of an empty bassinet—little more than a basket—in a tiny room lit by gray morning light. Her raw throat hurt. She had been crying for hours.

She clutched at a blanket hanging off the side, a striped cotton cloth, green and yellow, that smelled like a baby. Her baby.

Shauna opened her eyes and realized she was doubled over on the bed, clutching her stomach, groaning.

She raised her head and saw Khai, several steps away from the bed now, staring at her, eyes wide.

“Darn, that’s embarrassing,” Shauna said, planting her face in the bed-spread. One joint at a time, she unfolded her body, which behaved as if it had been contorted for hours. Every stiff limb cried out.

“Can I help you?”

“No.”

Khai did not move.

“You lost a baby,” Shauna said.

Khai covered her mouth with one hand.

“I’m so sorry,” Shauna said, trying to recover her composure, not sure if she was apologizing about the child or her behavior. “Please, can I ask you what happened? I need to understand this thing that is affecting me.” She immediately regretted what she’d said. How could she dare take advantage of someone else’s tragedy in the name of solving her own mystery?

She tried to take back her request. “No, no. I shouldn’t have—”

“My daughter,” Khai said. “I lost my daughter. She was three months old. How did you know?”

Shauna spread out her arms over the top of the paper-strewn bed. “I’m seeing visions.” That was the only explanation she could come up with. “I saw you . . . I
was
you, screaming and crying by her bassinet. You were in a small room, gray, furnished with a bed and a dresser and an empty bassinet. A yellow and green blanket.”

Khai shook her head. “I don’t remember that.”

She didn’t remember? How could someone not remember that kind of event?

Well, how could Shauna not remember her own crisis?

Khai’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t understand this. All I remember is pain. I feel like I have had a dream and forgotten it on waking.”

Shauna’s head was still spinning. This encounter challenged everything Shauna had processed so far. These dreams and visions weren’t only from men, not only triggered by a kiss or a flirtation. Something else was at the center of these encounters—

“You describe our room. And her blanket. I still have it.”

“How did she die?”

“Not dead,” Khai whispered. Tears collecting in her eyes reflected the light from the nightstand lamp. “Taken.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Sold. On the black market.”

Shauna thought that if it had been her baby, death might have been the lesser evil. “How? Who?”

“By her father. He fixated on the impossible, and it turned him into a monster.”

16

In spite of the emotional extremes of her day, Shauna experienced a merciful, dreamless sleep and woke Sunday morning one minute before her alarm was supposed to go off at five thirty.

October 21. One week since her awakening. It seemed like a year.

Her phone was beeping again.

She flipped it open. Three text messages from the same number. A local number that she didn’t recognize.

3:25 > red room in the morning, Shauna take warning

3:27 > Tis better to 4get and b happy

3:40 > R U happy?

Hands shaking, Shauna punched in a reply.

> Who are you?

She waited. No answer. Had she expected one? She dropped the phone into her purse and rushed to clean up the papers and CDs that were still spread across the mattress. She pushed them into the back of her bottom dresser drawer, under her clothes. If she had wanted them hidden before, chances were she should keep them hidden now. Until she knew what they were.

Until she knew whom she was hiding them from.

She threw on a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck, ran her fingers through her hair, and decided to do without makeup. She didn’t have a steady hand to apply it.

In Wayne’s car, Shauna’s put the messages behind her. Her head was a jumble of anticipation for the meeting with Smith, reflection on her conversation with Khai the night before, and confusion over the mystery of how these visions were working. She didn’t talk much, which seemed okay with Wayne, preoccupied with his own thoughts as he pointed the truck toward the dawn.

As best Shauna could tell, she was tapping other people’s memories. Most of them seemed to involve physical pain or some kind of misery, tragedy. Maybe people were sharing them with her? Reaching out subconsciously to alleviate the hurt?

“Do you remember getting a spinal cord concussion during a football game?” she asked.

Wayne blinked as if his mind had been whiplashed out of wherever it was.

“How did you know about that?”

“I dreamed it, remember? You told me at the time you had a similar injury.”

“Yeah, I did, didn’t I? I guess I didn’t think . . . I mean, it seems really coincidental.”

“Maybe it is only coincidence. I don’t mean to make more of it than it is. I was curious if you remember what happened.”

“I don’t, actually. I remember parts of that night—the first half of the game, the hospital stay afterward. But not the actual hit. Not even the play, now that I think about it.”

He didn’t even remember the play.

Her dream
was
the play.

She wasn’t sharing memories, she was taking them somehow.

Stealing memories.

How? What was happening to her to make this possible?

She took a deep breath and a risk.

“How could you have joined the Marines with an injury like that?”

“When you’re young and determined, there are ways.”

“Like changing your name?”

“No. That came later. I thought I explained that last night.” He seemed slightly annoyed.

“All that trouble, just to go AWOL?” she asked.

He laughed, but the tone set Shauna on edge. He waved a finger in her direction. “All what trouble? Like I said before, the desertion thing is a total fiction.”

“You don’t remember?”

“How can I remember what never happened?”

Maybe so. He might remember going AWOL and be ashamed to admit it. He might not remember the night he left.

It might never have happened, though she felt pretty sure it did.

She would try to find out. How could one find out that sort of thing?

For the duration of the drive into downtown Austin, Shauna pondered this strange ability she had acquired and wondered if there was a way for her to con-trol it. What were the circumstances that allowed her to access the memories of others? Could she create them at will? How did she get this bizarre skill? And when? Could other people do the same thing?

Then,
if
she could determine how the memory stealing—what an unattractive label, but she couldn’t think of anything else—if the memory stealing worked, could she influence which memories she had access to?

Could she use other people’s memories to help reconstruct her own past?

With access to the right people, could she find the answers to her questions about what happened that fall night, about who was trying to hurt her, about what she was really guilty of?

Did her thieving hurt people? Was she causing invisible injury in an attempt to save herself?

Wayne followed the Colorado River down to Barton Springs Road and then took South Congress Avenue across Town Lake. Shauna involuntarily closed her eyes and held her breath across the bridge, though this one was wider than the bridge on 71, with sidewalks and substantial guardrails. The capitol and down-town high-rises—the stair-stepped Chessboard Palace, the multifaceted Frost Bank Building—framed their drive toward her former home on Ninth Street.

The loft was undeniably a perk of being a senator’s daughter. She couldn’t have afforded it without Landon’s generous allowance, one of the few and easy gestures of paternal obligation the businessman allowed himself. Keeping up appearances, she always said. She had never protested too loudly, hoping that one day he might be motivated by genuine affection to provide for her.

At this time of the morning, they found a metered parking spot not too far away from the address.

Wayne restarted the conversation as they entered the complex and took the stairs to the fourth level. “I still think this guy is looking for an angle on you, some exclusive story.”

“He’s a photographer—what would he be writing about?”

Wayne shrugged. “Sometimes I think photographers are worse than reporters. Paparazzi. You sure this isn’t a setup?”

We’ll both live longer that way,
Corbin had said before he left her yesterday. Shauna wondered if she was endangering Wayne’s life by bringing him here with her.

“No, I’m not. But if it is, you know his name and where he works.”

“But he wasn’t willing at all to talk with you on his own turf, it sounds like.”

“He sounded scared.”

“He wasn’t scared when he cornered you outside the courthouse.”

“We didn’t know who he was then.”

At the fourth floor, Shauna led Wayne down a hardwood hall with only four doors leading off it. Her former home was at the east end, a corner loft with a panoramic view of downtown. A small but coveted piece of real estate.

“Six on the nose,” Wayne said, looking at his watch.

Shauna knocked on the door.

They waited.

After half a minute, she knocked again but heard nothing moving inside.

Wayne reached out and tried the knob.

Unlocked.

Shauna did not think twice about going in. Being here was like coming home. Sort of.

There were no lights on inside, though the morning sun brightened up the place. The reflective screens that protected against the glare were drawn only halfway down the surface of the panes.

No television sounds, no radio, no rustling newspaper. No scent of coffee or breakfast. Only cigarette smoke. And the sound of dripping water.

He had forgotten the meeting?

Or had she misunderstood his note?

“Corbin?” Shauna called into the main room. A permanent partition separated the open living space—a combined kitchen, dining room, and sit-ting area—from a bedroom and bathroom. The area had changed dramatically since she occupied the space. Her shabby chic had become bachelor bum. Bare brown walls, dull brown leather couches, and dirty dishes piled in the sink would have been more fitting up at one of the university frat houses. Stacks of newspapers covered almost every flat surface in the room.