Stolen: A Novel of Romantic Suspense (25 page)

Her gut was a tight, hard knot and for a few moments, she was so pissed off she couldn’t even see.

“Breathe,” she muttered. “Just breathe.”

She knew how to think when she was upset. She’d done it before and she’d been in worse shape then, much worse. She could be all but bleeding and still make herself do what she had to do.

“One more drink,” she murmured. With her eyes closed, she took another, smaller sip, let it roll over her tongue and down her throat, and for a moment, the heat of it was enough to warm her belly. Thirty seconds later, she was under control as she reached for the phone and when she dialed the second number, her fingers were steady. They even stayed steady when the voice mail started to play.

It was full of static and unclear
—very
unclear. But she did manage to hear,
This is Shay. Leave a message
 … 
beep-beep!

Shay …

The freaky thing was, as unclear as the message was, the voice sounded … well, kind of like … 
her
. Including the way she always ended
her
messages … 
beep-beep
.

Swallowing, she lowered the phone and stared at it. The seconds kept ticking by, reminding her she hadn’t disconnected the line. Abruptly, she did, and then she dropped the phone as if it were a snake.

A poisonous one.

“What is this shit?”

Emails that came from her.

Phone calls that sounded like her.

But they
weren’t
her.

None of it was
her
.

Yet whoever was doing it managed to do a damn good job at pretending to
be
her.

Elliot read the email. Deleted it.

He read the next one. Deleted it.

It was an endless, ongoing annoyance and something he’d been at for more than a few hours. Many people expressed sympathy. A few talked out of the side of their mouth, although he wasn’t exactly sure what the correct phrase would be considering it was all done via email.

But so far, nobody except him and Lorna seemed to have had any direct contact with the Shane imposter—

“Wait,” he muttered.

The email in front of him.

Somebody in Westland, Michigan.

Narrowing his eyes, Elliot kept that email, and then continued on. Delete, delete, delete.

Another one in Michigan. Two people in Michigan and that was it. But somebody besides him had met her and at least
one
person had the same impression he had—the woman was off her rocker.

The big thing now was figuring out just where to go from here.

Screaming—

Bright flashes of light—

Blood—

Over and over. She saw it all and she ran from it. Ran and hid. Someplace dark and quiet, where the things that hid in the dark couldn’t find her. But still, they came. Giggling. They came giggling
.

A hand touched her cheek—it was hot, that hand, so hot. Hot and wet, and it made her hurt. “Aw, what’s the matter, princess? It will be good, you’ll see. You’ll be the princess and I’ll take care of you, just the way I should.”

In her sleep, Shay flung out a hand and gripped one of the pillows, clutching it to her chest. It was the one Elliot had used, and she clung to it as tears crept out from under closed lashes.

The lights were too bright. Michelline wanted to hide from them, hide from all of them, but she couldn’t get away. They stood by the door and every time she tried to get up, somebody would stop her
.

People with sad, worried eyes stared at her, but she
didn’t trust them. Not at all. And they asked so many questions …

“Do you remember where your mother is?”

My mother … she remembered her mother. Her mother had been called Jeannie, or Jeanette. And her girls had called her Mama
.

Softly, she whispered, “Mama.” Tears stung her eyes as she stared at the lady with tired, nice eyes sitting at the table across from her. “Mama left us. That’s what he said. The baby took her away.”

Around her, people shared that funny look they sometimes used around kids
.

“The baby took her away?” the lady asked
.

Michelline nodded, and she thought of her mother. She’d been funny, and nice, and sweet. “I miss my mama.”

Mama had long, shiny hair that twisted and curled. She smelled like roses and vanilla and cut grass
.

The closet used to smell like Mama. Not so much anymore, but it was safer there. That’s why they stayed there. Why they hid. But it wasn’t safe anymore and she hadn’t hidden them well enough …

And somebody had been giggling … giggling, and playing with something that dripped with dark, dark red …

Abruptly, Michelline started to scream
.

It took a very, very long time for her to stop—and the woman who held her was crying along with her by the time Michelline’s screams faded to sobs
.

Shay came awake, her breath trapped in her lungs like a sob, the dream frozen right
there
, a perfectly formed image, at the front of her mind.

It hadn’t been just Virna that time.

Not just Virna.

She remembered others.

She remembered herself. Remembered the name they’d called her.

“My name,” she whispered. Michelline
had
been her name. She could remember the way Virna had said it that day, as they sat in that quiet, too bright room, with a plate of doughnuts between them … and then something else.

Shay could remember a sudden, dark flood of terror, grief, pain … and confusion. The screams. Absently, she reached up to rub her throat in memory of the way it had ached from the screams. But she didn’t remember what had caused them. It was as though the child she’d been had just blocked all of that out.

She pushed, but even just trying to remember made her head hurt and the harder she pushed, the worse the pain got.

Swiping the back of her hand over her mouth, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stared off into nothing. The room was night dark. Her head was muzzy; the migraine had finally grabbed her by the throat and she’d been forced to take some medicine. The nightmares always left her feeling weird, and the dregs of the migraine were still there, too.

The migraine and the nightmare.

Honestly, she’d rather deal with the migraine.

“She didn’t love you,” Darcy muttered, staring at the diary entry. “Nobody fucking loved you. Ever. Except me. I’m the only one who loves you.”

But Shay didn’t seem to
get
that.

Shay didn’t realize that Darcy was the one who cared, the one who would take care of her, always.

The one who would never, ever go away or disappear, no matter how ugly Shay’s secrets were, no matter how bad her scars.

Everybody else ran away, or left, or died. Sooner or later.

But Darcy would
always
be there.

“She didn’t love you,” Darcy whispered, touching the screen. “But I do.”

Her mother had loved her.

It was a bittersweet thing to carry in her heart that day, but somehow, it managed to steady her. In the back of her mind, she had odd flashes of memory. Almost memories, more than anything else. The scent of vanilla … something richer, sweeter. Cookies …? A laugh, husky and soft.
Come on, princess, that’s enough …

Off in the dark, quiet house, the phone rang and the memory shattered, falling apart like gossamer threads.

“Damn it.” But even as she grumbled, she felt her heart kick up a little bit. Elliot … he’d said he’d call.

A smile was already forming as she went to answer. It stopped ringing before she made it to the phone, but a quick look at the caller ID was enough to dash that rising hope in her heart.

Not Elliot. Darcy. Again.

And she’d called several times. Twice while she’d been sleeping, and then once while she had been writing in her diary; Shay hadn’t even noticed.

The low, angry hiss of Darcy’s voice came back to her, echoing through Shay’s memory … 
Michelline
 …

“How do you know about me, Darcy?” she asked, staring at the phone. She wasn’t going to pick up. She didn’t care just then
how
many times the woman called. “Just who are you?”

It was, she realized, a question for which she really, really needed to have an answer.

Too bad no easy answer existed.

The data search she’d run on Darcy was several years old. She’d stayed off the general search engines, going instead to a public records base—she didn’t want to spend time combing through a thousand
Did you go to school with Darcy Montgomery
links—but the info she’d come up with was sketchy at best. The latest address wasn’t even listed. It looked like a bust, but Shay
knew
that address was legit, damn it. She’d been sending books there for two years, and she knew the books were sent out to contest winners and received. She also sent bookmarks and promotional shit, and knew
that
stuff was received, too.

Booksellers emailed her to thank her, to update mailing addresses, to request a higher quantity—all sorts of shit.

Contest winners emailed her to thank her.

That stuff wasn’t just sitting in a house somewhere.

So if that stuff was being sent out, just who in the hell was taking shipment if it wasn’t Darcy?

“This just doesn’t make sense.”

But lately, that seemed to be the sum of Shay’s entire life.

Nothing made sense.

Absolutely nothing.

FOURTEEN

“Y
OU
’
RE SERIOUS.
”

Staring at the computer, reading through the data she’d found, Shay sighed. “As a heart attack.”

On the other end of the line, Elliot was quiet. Finally, he said, “That’s disturbing on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin, Shay.”

“Tell me about it. The address where I send books … it doesn’t belong to her. It’s like she doesn’t even exist.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. But she was lying. She had a few ideas, but she wasn’t ready to speak them aloud. Not yet. It would make them too real, for one thing. And she had to handle this
now
before it got worse. If she told Elliot, he’d probably want to come with her, but he had a business to run and it wasn’t fair that either he or Lorna had to pay for the mess in her life.