Sliver Of Truth

“Well, yes,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and resting her eyes on my face. “An American woman shows up at a London hotel and checks herself in, hangs the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on her door for two days. The only time anyone hears from her is when she calls to find out where she is. She’s then discovered to be suffering from a badly infected gunshot wound when she stumbles into the lobby at the end of the second day. She collapses and is rushed to the nearest hospital. Though she has sufficient ID, passport, cash, and credit, there is no record of her arriving in London on any commercial flight in the past six months. I’d say that warrants an open case, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded slowly. She was official but not unkind. Her eyes were a pale blue. She was small, petite as she was thin; she looked like a runner, a fast and strong one.

“How did you get to England, Ms. Jones? And what are you doing here?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

It’s a weird thing to admit. Have you ever woken up one morning after a night of drinking and found yourself in a strange apartment, a strange person sleeping beside you? It’s like that but much, much worse. I felt as if I’d woken up in someone else’s body.

She blinked at me twice. “That’s hard to believe,” she said finally.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s true.”

She gave me a blank, assessing look. There was something cold and robotic about her in spite of her prettiness, in spite of her soft, smoky voice.

“Who shot you, then?” she asked matter-of-factly, as though she’d settle for that small bit of information as consolation.

I shook my head again. The ground had fallen away beneath my feet and I was floating in a life that didn’t belong to me.

“Are you aware, Ms. Jones, that you’re a ‘person of interest’ with the New York City Police Department, wanted for questioning in relation to the murder of a Sarah Duvall?”

That morning came rushing back to me, how Sarah fell and died in front of me, how I chased the man in black and was apprehended by the police. Dylan Grace came to get me and took me to Riverside Park, where I fled from him. It had all gone worse from there. I thought of Grant and his stupid website. Jake falling. I grasped for what had happened to us after the helicopter rose from nowhere, drowning us in light and sound. The harder I thought about it, the further it slipped away. I felt a terrible nausea, a pain behind my eyes.

“The FBI would like a go with you as well, in connection with a man named Dylan Grace.”

I thought about the things he’d told me in the park. More lies? How could I be sure? Had he been in my hotel room or was that a dream? I remembered that he’d looked bad himself, that he’d jabbed me with a needle. I shook my head again.

“You really don’t know what happened to you, do you?” she asked, incredulous, handing me a tissue from the box by my bed. I wiped my eyes, blew my nose. I entertained flashes of memory: running with Jake along the stone wall at the Cloisters, gunshots cracking the night air, falling hard to the ground as if I’d been shoved, the dark shadow of a man whose face I couldn’t see asking, “Where’s the ghost?” Most of all, I knew there was pain-white hot, total, nearly indescribable in its intensity, the kind of pain that mercifully kills memory.

“No,” I said finally. “I really don’t.”

But between you and me, that wasn’t the whole truth. Memories were filing back quickly. I remembered a knee on my back, a black hood being placed over my head. I just couldn’t make sense of anything. It was a nightmarish jumble.

“Does the name Myra Lyall mean anything to you?”

I nodded my head slowly.

“An American crime reporter with the New York Times,” she said. “She had some connection to you, if I’m not mistaken. She wanted to talk to you regarding an article she was working on about Project Rescue. Then she disappeared.”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Sarah Duvall was her assistant.”

I nodded again.

“We found Myra Lyall’s body yesterday in a canal about a mile from King’s Cross, one of our red-light districts. She was in a trunk. In pieces.”

I think she doled out the information like that for maximum impact. I tried to think about what she said in abstracts, not in logistics. Still the nausea and the shaking, which had been diminishing, returned with a vengeance.

“No record of her travel to London, either,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I felt some combination of grief for Myra Lyall’s end and terror at how it had happened. I wondered how I had made it to a plush Covent Garden hotel and she had wound up in a trunk in a London canal. In pieces.