All lights were off in the house when Sara approached. She walked cautiously once around the perimeter, looking through the windows for any sign of movement, before crouching down in front of the lockbox.
The home rental service app on her smartphone showed there were no tenants booked for this week.
Voices had been rattling around in her mind all afternoon during the orientation. They were quiet, like whispers in a church, and just beyond her perception. She took a deep breath, battling them away in her mind.
Her friend and companion, The Handbook of Clinical Psychopharmacology, could not pinpoint definite aetiology, nor conclusively name her condition. The most it could do was suggest a range of possible treatments. Sedatives reduced anxiety, but Sara knew from experience they took too much edge off. Antidepressants adjusted serotonin levels, but loosened her connection with reality. Beta-blockers shut down the effects of adrenaline, but could limit awareness of the environment.
She mixed and matched ingredients to suit the needs of the day, sometimes combining what she took with caffeine tablets to add a spike of energy, which countered any soporific side effects from the drugs.
This was the war she fought. Every hour. Every day. She preferred not to remember what things had been like before pharmacological forces arrived to break her siege. There were only vague memories, of schizoid worlds into which she retreated, dimensions where people and things were bound together with strange acausal connections.
Drugs had redrawn the battle lines, hemming in the madness and allowing her to reconnect with the world.
She concentrated on the job at hand. She needed to open the lockbox.
It was a simple device, and she inserted the tension wrench she carried with her into the bottom of the keyhole while with her other hand she placed a needle at the top of the lock. She torqued the wrench slightly while pushing the needle. The lock pins fell into place, and the box opened.
She unlocked the front door and stared down the dark corridor.
The drugs were doing their work, shaving layers of anxiety away.
The shadowy interior of the house, which would have been menacing to her at any other time, looked simply unlit, inanimate and lifeless.
She stepped inside, keeping the lights off, and guided herself by touch to the living room, which was the largest of the downstairs rooms. She drew the curtains and took one of the desk lamps and laid it on the floor. It cast a low, diffuse glow along the expanse of the grey carpet, keeping the top of the room still cloaked in shadow.
She dropped her carry-on bag to the floor, unzipped it and rooted around, removing the iPad inside and taking it to the couch furthest away from the window.
The data files were arranged under two headings: the locket and the Polaroid picture. Like an archaeologist, Sara clung to these relics, working tirelessly to find some clue that would connect her to her past. Each file had thousands of entries. She had stared at each of the clues for so long that she sometimes felt she was like psych patients who look for faces in cloud formations. The locket’s number string was, at times, a direct message from her mother and at other times a meaningless sequence of digits.
Sara flipped to the last data file, the front cover of which was the scan of a dog-eared photo, fading to sepia, of a man in his mid-twenties, in a suit and tie, with a short, military haircut. Its image had been pored over so many times by her it now seemed bleached of any significance. She flipped the image to the left, revealing a more recent picture of the man, now in his fifties.
Charles Salt.
The message had been clear.
DO NOT TRUST THIS MAN.
Too many questions had accreted over the years. Who had written the message? Was it even addressed to Sara? Could the message be trusted? In the absence of any answers, she had set this man as her north star, the only link she had to the mystery of her identity.
But who was he to her?
Ally. Friend. Enemy.
She had no idea, although at various times over the years she had created elaborate fantasies, painting Salt as each. And in each daydream she was different too, moulding herself to the contours of the persona. Without memory, her identity was plastic, a narrative easily reshaped.
Her eyes continued to flit rapidly back and forth between the current and older photo, her mind flipping between the connections and assumptions in her head.
Before falling asleep, she carefully peeled off the thin film covering her fingertips, placing each in a row on the coffee table next to her.
The fake fingerprints resembled a series of tiny pink upturned seashells.