Free Left for Dead by Kevin O'Brien Page B

holiday?”
    Claire shrugged. “I’ve been told that’s where I disappeared, but I don’t remember any of it.”
    “Really?” Linda’s eyes narrowed at her. “You aren’t holding anything back, are you, Claire?”
    She slowly shook her head. “No. Is there something you know that I ought to remember?”
    “No, nothing,” Linda said, with a tight smile.
    “Are you sure?” Claire asked. Her friend acted as if they shared some secret.
    “Really, there’s nothing,” Linda repeated.
    Claire wondered if, once again, a well-meaning friend felt she was better off not knowing some terrible truth.

Chapter 7
    “Anything going on?”
    “Nothing, nada, bupkis. She’s asleep.”
    “Did they find out anything? Did Little Girl Lost get some of her memory back?”
    “Naw. Cops were in there most of the night. Her friend and her husband did all the talking. Here, you want the paper? There’s a good article about the Seahawks.”
    “Thanks…”
    Claire heard a newspaper rustling, then one guard said good-bye to the other. They changed shifts outside her door at eleven o’clock. She’d been wondering how long she’d been lying here in the dark, and now she knew. Just an hour. But it seemed longer.
    So the guard called her Little Girl Lost, and he said it with a heavy dose of sarcasm. Were the police and hospital staff fed up with her?
    Dr. Dwoskin and Lieutenant Elmore had spent nearly three hours tonight in this room, talking with her, Harlan, and Linda. A few other doctors and plainclothes policemen came and went during the exhausting interview. They fortified themselves with stale coffee in Styrofoam cups. At one point, Yuvraj brought in her dinner. Claire barely touched her ham, which had a rainbow gleam to it. She just picked at her mashed potatoes and carrots. She let Harlan have her Jell-O cup.
    Meanwhile, Harlan and Linda gave their accounts of what had happened in the forty-eight hours prior to Claire’s disappearance. The police and the doctors kept hoping some detail in their stories might spark her memory.
    “When I came back from the meeting with my civic group on Friday night, Claire was—acting a little crazy,” Harlan told them, hunched over in his chair. “Brian had run away again. He’d packed up and slipped out that afternoon, I guess. He didn’t leave a note or anything, just took off. Claire figured out he was gone, and she wouldn’t stop crying. She kept screaming at me that I must have done something to make him leave. I hadn’t, but there was no reasoning with her. She was hysterical, poor thing. I didn’t know what to do, so I called Linda and Ron, and they came over.”
    Claire didn’t remember any of it.
    According to Linda, Claire was “practically bonkers” when they arrived. “She was crying nonstop, and trying to pick a fight with Harlan. I knew she was worried sick. She’d been through this with Brian a couple of times before, and I don’t know how she kept bouncing back. I mean, Brian is a sweet kid, but well, don’t get me started on some of the pranks he’s pulled. Anyway, I could see what Claire needed was a couple of stiff drinks and a change of scenery. If she’d stayed home, all she would have done was climb the walls and keep snapping at Harlan. So—I helped her pack some overnight things, and took her back to Ron and my casa. After a couple of brandies, she slept like a baby in our guest room…”
    Claire had been in Ron and Linda’s guest room, but didn’t recall ever sleeping in there. She could picture the room: Linda’s framed, ugly yarn-and-glue flower pictures that hung over the twin beds; a fake spinning wheel planter in the corner, holding a yarn-wire-and-pipe-cleaner flower arrangement; a bookcase with their collection of plastic snow globes from forty-eight states (“All we need is Delaware and North Carolina, and we’ll have all fifty,” Linda bragged). Some of those airport trinkets were so old, the snow had turned brown. Claire wondered