Jewel returned to her workshop area, trying hard to sort through the bits and pieces of information that were coming both from the cloudy areas in her brain and from Hurricane’s words. She knew there had to be some sense to be made of all this, yet it was just out of reach. Yet there must be something, something that she knew ahead of time. Unable to forget about it, she walked back over to the stairs by the safe and sat down in front of it.
As she studied where the drywall had been cut, Hurricane sat down beside her. “What are you thinking?”
She shrugged. “It’s not a professional job.”
“No, it isn’t,” he agreed, his voice calm.
She looked over at him. “Did I do this?”
His gaze was steady, as if the idea had already occurred to him. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
“I can’t.” She showed her palms. She went back to the safe, pulled open the door, and studied the contents. “I knew it was here. I knew everything was here, yet hidden.”
“But not hidden from you.”
“Sure it was,” she disagreed, looking back at him. “I knew it, but I couldn’t see it.”
“No, so somebody hid it on purpose, but, because you already knew it was here, it wasn’t hard for you to see through that deception.”
“Yet you’re the one who saw through it,” she stated, a hint of accusation in her tone.
“That was mostly Stefan, seeing energy around it. So I followed his lead and took out the drywall.”
She nodded, as she stared at it. “I guess drywall isn’t hard to put in, is it?”
“No, it sure isn’t, and it’s not a very big safe,” he noted. “This isn’t more than one foot square, and they used what’s known as a Texas drywall patch to cover it up.”
She nodded. “And that’s not all that hard to do either?” she murmured.
“No, there would be plenty of DIY videos online that would show you how to patch this fairly quickly,” he replied. “So somebody who wanted to hide it could do so fairly easily.”
She nodded. “I don’t know that I could do any drywall work,” she murmured.
“Do you know anybody who does this work?”
She shrugged at that too. “I mean, it’s fairly smooth, it’s simple, but this whole piece juts out.”
He nodded. “Yet you wouldn’t think anything of it, if nobody had shown you the safe was here. It would have just been a strange design, and you would have gone from there thinking that’s all it was.”
She nodded, but, as she looked down, she noticed several other juts. “Do you think other things are hidden behind these other jutted spots?”
Startled, he studied it, then frowned. “You tell me.”
“Well, I can’t,” she snapped and glared at him. “I can’t tell you anything.”
He knocked on the other panels in question and got a hollow echo back. “I think they are just part of the architecture here.” Just then his phone rang. She half listened as he frowned into the phone and then his face cleared. “Hello, Detective, thanks for contacting me. … Yes, I know Stefan can be very insistent when he needs something,” he added, with a chuckle. “In this case we appreciate it very much, as we’re a little skimpy on details for her accident. … No, she’s right here with me.”
He looked over at her and put his phone on Speaker and placed it midway between them. “It’s the detective on your case.”
She called out, “Hello, Detective.” At least if he knew she was here and consenting, it would allow him to pass on information.
The detective, his voice calm and almost ponderous, asked, “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, except for a lack of memories.”
“Amnesia?” he asked, his voice sharp.
“Maybe, selective amnesia for sure,” she replied, trying to hold back the bitterness. “It’s pretty rough when I don’t know what’s going on or if I was attacked. And, if I was, then who the hell did the deed.”
“If you weren’t attacked, how could you possibly explain what happened?” the detective asked her.
“I can’t explain a thing because I don’t even know all of what happened. The hospital didn’t give me much information, which is why Stefan reached out.”
A moment of silence came on the other end. “I intended to meet with you before you were released,” he explained. “Can I come by now?”
“Ah …” She hesitated and looked back at Hurricane.
He just shrugged and replied, “Sure, why not? The sooner we find out what’s going on, the better.”
“Okay, good,” he said, and then he shuffled some paperwork. “I have one address on file, but I was there a couple days ago, and nobody answered. Is that where you are?”
“Nobody answered? Did it look like anybody was there?” she asked curiously.
“No, it looked deserted, and mail was piled up outside. I left it in a cardboard box that was just off to the side.”
“Interesting,” she replied. “Okay, well, I guess you should come to my studio. That’s where I am right now.” She gave him the address, ended the call, and then sat back, looking at Hurricane. “Did you see a cardboard box with mail?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot.”
She just nodded and asked, “What the hell is going on?”
“The sooner he gets here, the sooner we can ask him some questions and maybe get a few more answers,” Hurricane offered.
She hopped to her feet and stated, “Let’s not tell him about the safe.”
“Yeah, and how do you want to hide it?”
Startled, she turned and looked back and winced. “Can you at least put the drywall back into place and try and just hold it there?”
“You want me to just sit here on the stairs and hold it?” he asked, his eyebrow shooting up.
She glared at him. “That’s not what I meant.”
He nodded. “Okay, let me see if I can fix something up.” And, with that, he got to work, and she headed downstairs to her workshop area again.
Hers was one open workspace loft, with the bedroom on a half space, half a floor up. In her mind, it felt like a good place for her to be, like home or something. Yet it didn’t feel quite right, as if unfamiliar to her or simply because it had been violated. Something was not sitting right with her.
She didn’t know what to say about it. Obviously it had been violated. She found it hard to refocus though, and just knowing that the detective was coming for some reason made her extremely nervous. She shifted anxiously around the workshop, picking up tools and replacing them, but her mind wasn’t on it at all.
Finally a gentle hand came down on her shoulder, and Hurricane suggested, “Why don’t you sit down?”
Startled, she looked at him. “Why?”
He pointed to where she had arranged all of the tools in a row. “It’s the third time you’ve arranged them.”
Her shoulders sagged. “I’m just worried about what he’ll say.”
“Another reason to sit down and to try to relax. I’ll put on some fresh coffee, and you can spend a minute just calming down. Then we’ll see what he has to say. It doesn’t have to be bad news. Remember that.”
“Maybe not bad news, but it sure doesn’t feel as if it’s good news either.”
He smiled. “Let’s not judge the news before we get it.” He chuckled. “Any information that we learn will be to our benefit.”
“Our benefit?” she challenged, glaring at him. “You can get up and walk out of this at any time. I can’t.”
“No, you can’t,” he agreed, his gaze searching. “But I wasn’t planning on getting up and walking out. You remember that.”
“Oh.” She frowned at him. “Why not?”
At that, he stated, “It’s not who I am.”
“Maybe not, but maybe it’s who you should be.” And, with that, she turned and walked over to one of the kitchen stools at the island and sat down. “I’m not trying to be difficult. … At least I don’t think I am. I don’t even know what I’m really like as a person.”
“I am certain that you are very creative, independent, and outspoken, and it’s quite likely that you don’t take anything new into your world very easily.”
At that, she slowly raised her head and stared at him. “Where would you get that assessment from?” she asked. “I didn’t think you knew me. To me, it just looks like I am being difficult.”
“It not that you’re being difficult, but I think this whole scenario is difficult for you.”
She waved her hand. “I think it would be for anybody.”
“Exactly, I agree with you. And, for some people, it would be even more unnerving. In your case I think it’s a situation where you’re trying hard to stay afloat, and I think you’re doing a damn fine job. We found the necklace, though I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do with it. We don’t know if it belongs to somebody and what your job was with it.”
“To repair it,” she stated baldly and shook her head. “But something else is in there, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Of course. That’s the part that we still need to understand.”
She nodded. “I get that. I just don’t know quite what I’m supposed to do with all this.”
“Nothing at the moment,” he reassured her.
Just then the doorbell rang. She froze and looked up at him in shock. He reached out a gentle hand. “Easy. That will be the detective.”
She let out her breath slowly. “Wow, I didn’t realize just how unnerved I am by this whole thing.”
“That’s why you need to just sit back and relax a little bit. We don’t want to set the detective off, thinking something wrong is going on here, when there isn’t.”
“But isn’t there?” she asked, looking at him.
“We don’t really know what’s wrong and what isn’t yet. And we don’t really want …” Then he stopped and shook his head. “Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you do want the police involved. Do you? If you do, that’s a different story.”
The doorbell rang again, and he turned and walked to the front door. He opened it, and she heard conversation in the background. When she turned around, Hurricane accompanied an older man, a little rotund and maybe in his early fifties, with an eagle-sharp look in his eyes.
“What happened here?” he immediately asked, looking at the disarray around him.
“A break-in,” Hurricane noted. “We’ve cleaned it up a bit, but I have photos of the original mess, when we first entered the property. We presume it is related to the attack on Jewel. I’ll send those pictures to you, and we’ll sign any statement you need.”
The detective nodded. “Not per procedure but I’ll take it.” He studied her for a moment and stated, “You’re looking a bit better than when I saw you in the hospital.”
She gave him a half smile. “Yeah, a little bit. Now, if only I knew what had put me in the hospital.”
“And that’s what I’m here for,” he replied, his voice serious. “I’m not sure what happened to you, but whatever it was had a pretty strong impact on everyone around you.”
“What did happen?” she asked.
“All I can tell you is what I have in the report.” He handed the paper copy to Hurricane and asked, “Did you want to read about it or be told?”
“I want to be told,” she stated, “but I’ll take the copy to try and get my brain wrapped around it afterward, when I get over the shock.”
He smiled. “I guess that’s not a bad way to look at it,” he agreed. “The fact of the matter is, your body was found on the side of the highway. We have the location per the GPS of the caller who found you. It’s in the file. You weren’t wearing anything, not a mark on you, but your body was cold, and it appeared that you had possibly been dead for one to two days,” he shared intently. “As I gathered, whoever found you then called 9-1-1, and the caller remained anonymous, just saying that he would take your body to the nearest hospital. Once you arrived at the hospital, you were determined to be deceased, placed in a body bag, and taken to the morgue. While you were awaiting autopsy, you woke up.”
She just stared at him. “I was in a body bag in the morgue,” she repeated, her voice faint. “Good God.”
He nodded. “I would like to think that the morgue would have realized you were, in fact, alive before they started an autopsy, but I really don’t know how that works.”
“Has that ever happened before?” she asked him in shock.
He gave a half laugh. “Not in my experience, no. I guess my question is, has that ever happened to you before?”
And again, hard for her to understand.
“I researched and found a couple diseases where people can appear to be dead. It’s like a sleeping disease, and I … Given your case was so unique, and I have come across Lazarus syndrome, it’s a possible explanation for you. People appear dead but, … but they do come back to life.”
“Are you asking if I have a disease like that?” she asked curiously.
“You tell me.”
“I have no idea. If I do, it’s the first I’ve ever heard about it,” she stated bluntly. “Presumably, at least I would hope, the hospital ran a few tests to find out for sure.”
“All the tests came back negative,” he noted.
Her breath came out in a sudden gust of relief. “I know I shouldn’t be relieved at that, but I am because that sounds terrible. To think of it happening once is bad enough, but to think that this could be repeated is terrifying.”
He turned and looked at Hurricane. “What’s your relationship to her?”
“A friend,” he replied, as if he had expected the question.
And, of course he probably had, whereas she had been staring at Hurricane, hoping he could give some coherent answer because she didn’t have one.
The detective just nodded, then turned back to her. “Now that you are awake and conscious, what do you remember?”
She shrugged. “I woke up in the hospital, and that’s where I have the first comprehensive awareness. Other than that, I don’t know. I don’t know how I ended up on a highway. I don’t know what happened to my clothing. I don’t know anything at all,” she stated, “and it’s fairly traumatizing to think that so much could have gone on, and I wouldn’t have any clue.”
“The mind does a lot of wondrous things,” the detective shared. “Really, its job is to protect you right now, and that’s what it’s doing. The problem is, that makes it very difficult to get any answers.”
She swallowed hard and then slowly nodded.
“Can you tell me anything about your life before this?” the detective asked.
“Yes. I’ve made some progress there. I’m a jeweler, and I do repairs. This is my workspace. I have a house, as you saw. I was there earlier, but it didn’t feel like home at all. I think I must have been in the process of either moving here or just deciding that I should stay here all the time. I really don’t know for sure. I’m just going by how it feels. Maybe I was trying this out, and I would sell the house afterward.” She shrugged. “I really don’t have an answer for you there.”
“That’s fine,” he murmured, as he looked around and nodded. “This does look very much like a place that you’ve spent a lot of time in. That’s also important to know.”
“So, nobody saw what happened to me?” she asked the detective.
He shook his head. “Not that we know of, at this point, no. The doctors have run as many tests as they can, and forensics ran over your body at the same time, and no forensic evidence was found.”
She took a deep breath. “Sexual assault?”
He looked at her and shook his head. “No visible signs there.”
She nodded, feeling a certain amount of relief, and a tension inside her eased back. Realizing how much that had been a concern, she murmured and gave Hurricane a smile. “At least that’s good news.”
He nodded, but his gaze was watchful, as he studied her. “Do you have any memories along that line?”
“No. … But then I have no memories at all,” she noted, with that same flat tone that she used every time he asked a question about memories for which she had no answer.
He didn’t say anything but looked back at the detective. “Any hypotheses?”
“No, none, outside of the fact that she was attacked and left for dead.”
“The attack, that was for sure? How?” Hurricane asked him.
“No, I don’t know for sure,” he admitted. “The fact that you’re still alive could mean that you were meeting somebody, you died—or they thought you died—so they panicked, took off in hurry, and just dumped you on the side of the highway, hoping you’d be found.”
“I was found, and now the question is, who was this person and why wouldn’t they have called for help?”
“Most people don’t call for help if they’re more afraid of what could result from the problem in front of them,” he explained succinctly. “So, if getting rid of a body was easier than trying to answer questions, they would have taken that route in a heartbeat.”
“Right.” She stared at the detective. “I don’t think I have very much if any connection to that world because everything you’re saying sounds so foreign to me.”
“That’s a good thing,” he said cheerfully. “I’d hate to have to come back and to imagine that you were a part of all this shit.”
She winced. “I don’t know how I could have been, and it certainly doesn’t make any sense that I would have been, since I don’t know anything and don’t have any answers for you. Plus I was dead for two days. Who does that willingly?” Then she stopped and asked, “How long was I in the hospital?”
“Four days. You were in the morgue for the first one. Then in a coma for two days and fully woke up on the next day, released that same day.”
“Oh good God,” she wailed. “I was lying in a cold body bag for all that time?”
He nodded slowly, his gaze intent. “That’s one of the reasons everybody was so shocked. They’d figured you’d already been dead for a day, if not longer, before you ever got to the hospital.”
She swallowed at that. “That’s a long time to be out of circulation in my own life.”
“Which is why I was concerned, and why I’m here now, to see if you have any idea who you hung out with, who might have known something, who might have seen something, who might have known who you were dating, or any questions like that.”
“That makes sense,” she admitted, frowning, “but, since I’ve been here, I haven’t come up with any names or any connections for you.”
“Of course not.” He gave a hard sigh.
“Why is nothing like this ever easy?”
He shook his head. “A case like this shouldn’t be easy because we need to make sure we get it right.”
She shrugged. “It just seems that there could be so many things wrong with this entire scenario. I just want to make sure that we get it right, whatever the answer ends up being.”
“I agree with you there.” The detective nodded, looking at her intently. “Still, without something to go on, not a whole lot to say. The good news is that you appear to be fine, and, if a little memory loss is the result, that’s still pretty minor compared to what it could have been.”
“Considering that I was thought to be dead, yes,” she murmured. “Absolutely.”
He looked over at Hurricane. “I presume you have an alibi for all this time.”
“I was out of state, New Orleans, in fact. But feel free to contact my boss,” he added cheerfully, presenting his business card.
“We’ll get to it,” the detective confirmed, then stood. “A certain number of cases we never ever get any answers to,” he shared, “and I’m not saying that this will be one of them, but honestly I’ve never seen a case like this before.”
She nodded. “I do prefer the idea of somebody coming upon me or having been out with me, when I suddenly collapsed. It does bother me to think that I would be with anybody who wouldn’t have my care or my health in mind and would have just dumped me on the side of a highway though,” she shared bluntly. “If we could find out who that was, I’d be happy to never see them again.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “Yeah, you and me both.”
With nothing else to discuss, the detective left soon afterward, leaving things murkier than ever.
*
As Hurricane came back from letting out the detective, he saw Jewel sitting there, on a kitchen stool, twisting a cup of coffee in her hands. “What are you thinking?”
Startled, she looked up at him. “What? Oh, it’s not as if that was helpful.”
“It gave us a timeline at least,” he corrected.
“No, that’s true,” she agreed, “and that just makes it all even more bizarre.”
He smiled. “It does, indeed, but I always like a challenge.” At her inquiring look, he shrugged. “So, unless you’re against the idea, I’d like to stick around, until we get more answers.”
He watched the skin under her eyes tighten, and he wondered just what reaction he was seeing. Then she relaxed and nodded. “Thank you, that would be nice.” And then she added, “You’ll also have to keep in mind that we may never get any answers.”
“I am an optimist,” he stated, “so I’ll assume that we will. This case is way too intriguing not to.”
She gave a bark of laughter. “Maybe so, but it’s not exactly the easiest to think that somebody could have done that to me.”
“No, and I’m quite fascinated at the concept of somebody having done that. Those aren’t the people in my circle, so I wouldn’t have thought they were in yours either.”
She frowned at him. “I get that people have circles of friends, but why would you think that our circles would overlap with the same kind of people?”
He gave her a ghost of a smile. “Generally, anybody who can see energy and be a part of the ether can see trouble coming at them.”
“Is that always the case?”
“Not always. We have certainly seen a number of criminals, with energy abilities, who have fooled even the best of us.”
“Even Stefan?” she challenged.
“Yes, even Stefan.” He hesitated and then said, “Now you contacted Stefan about these pearls, but did you by any chance contact anyone else?”
She stared at him. “I don’t imagine that I would have,” she replied, “but I don’t know that for sure.”
“Right. Because that would really be my number one suspect, if you had.”
“I don’t know about that,” she disagreed. “It seems like we would be judging them ahead of time.”
“I’m okay to judge them ahead of time,” he declared, deliberately hardening his tone. “Something happened to you. I don’t know whether you knew or it was done with your permission,” he said, ignoring the look of shock on her face. “However, something happened, and somebody knows something. The problem is, we’ll have to find out who that someone is.” He hesitated, looked at her directly, and shared, “And the fact is, you may not like the answers.”
“I’m already not liking the questions, let alone the answers.” she said. “So what else is new.”
“Good, so, in that case, are you okay to stay here, or do you want to go somewhere else for the night?”
She looked around and sighed. “I think we can stay here.”
“Interesting phrase. Why I think?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, turning to swivel on the stool and to look at the space around her. “I really don’t know. Yet still I have a sense of uncertainly, so very much a case of I think.”
“Okay, we’ll go with that for now,” he murmured. “I guess we’ll have to see what comes up after this. I don’t know about you, but I’ll need some food.”
“Of course you do.” She winced and added, “My stomach is not terribly thrilled at the idea of food at all.”
“No, but then you’ve been eating hospital food for days.”
“I didn’t,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I don’t think I ate any of it.”
At that, he slowly turned and looked at her. “Were they feeding you intravenously?”
“I have no idea,” she replied. “Why?”
“Because your body needs sustenance,” he stated, looking at her intently. “Unless you have some magic trick I don’t know about.”
“If I did, it’s probably a magic trick that I wouldn’t want to share with everybody because then it’s not magic anymore, is it?”
Her tone was light, but her movements were jerky, as she got up and walked around to the other side of the counter. She picked up the coffeepot and dumped the last of the coffee into her cup. Looking over her shoulder, she asked, “Did you want more? I can put on another pot.”
“No, I’ll need food first.”
She just nodded and continued to stare out the window.
“Do you have any food allergies? Any preferences?”
Startled, she looked back at him and then shrugged. “I don’t think so. I guess that’s one of those things we’ll have to find out the hard way.”
At that, he allowed a ghost of a smile to escape. “I’d just as soon not though. We’ve already had enough excitement, and anything that might trigger another repeat—with you dropping to the floor, looking dead—isn’t something I want to experience.”
“No,” she murmured. “Can you imagine whoever would have been here and what they would have thought?”
“I can almost see why they would have run.”
She nodded. “Almost, yes. But somehow it does feel like a betrayal, and, no matter what, they should have stuck around and at least gotten me some help.”
“Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they had no internet service out there on the highway. Maybe they were a jogger with no cell phone at all,” he suggested, his tone gentle. “Maybe some poor kid found you, as he or she tramped through the forest nearby, and they had no idea how to deal with you. So let’s not judge them too harshly just yet.”
With a shrug, she replied, “Whatever. I’ll go back to cleaning this up. No food is here that’s really edible, but you’re welcome to take a look around.”
“That’s okay. I’ll order something in.”
She frowned. “I feel like some of the most common things are missing from my brain. Like it never occurred to me that you could order in.”
“I don’t think your brain is firing on all cylinders right now,” he noted. “So maybe just give it a break too.”
“Right, I’m not exactly doing any heavy in-depth brainwork right now,” she muttered.
“No? But you are because you’re still trying to figure out what happened to you.”
“Of course I am,” she cried out passionately. “How does one end up on the side of the road in the condition I was in, supposedly dead, and then wake up again?”
“I know of a couple people with this disease that the detective was talking about, the Lazarus syndrome, but I’m not sure the symptoms are the same. In this case, the heartbeat and breathing drops to awfully low levels, so mistakes can be made in declaring a death.”
“Nothing would ever be exactly the same anyway because apparently everybody is different,” she added, with just enough bitterness to have his eyes narrow.
“Stay strong,” he ordered. “We will get to the bottom of this.”
She gave a jerky head nod, got up from her stool, and told him, “I’ll go lie down.” She stopped, turned to him. “Unless you have any reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t. In fact, I think it’s a great idea.”
As she went to the stairs, she passed by the safe. “The detective didn’t notice the safe.”
“No, I don’t think he did,” Hurricane agreed.
“Why not?” she asked, pointing at it. “It’s pretty obvious.”
“Is it?” He gave a ghost of a smile. “Maybe it wasn’t obvious to him.”
She looked at him in confusion, then headed up to the bedroom. At the top of the stairs, she stopped and looked back at him. His gaze had followed her all the way up, making sure she went up to bed, a little worried about her physical condition but more about her mental state.
She hesitated at the top. “What’s the matter?” She stared at him, wordless.
He got up and walked to the bottom of the stairs and asked, “Do you want me to come up?”
She shook her head. “No. … Yes.” And then she shook her head. “No, at least not right now.”
And then he understood. “I’ll come up in an hour,” he offered. “To make sure that you’re alive.”
She grimaced. “Thanks, because, yes, that’s what I want. Somebody who checks on me and who doesn’t just dump me on a highway,” she stated bitterly. “But, at the same time, how will you know?”
His smile was deep and genuine. “Hey, I’m an energy worker,” he reminded her. “If your cord is attached, I’ll know.”
She gazed at him, startled, then gave him a dawning smile that hit him like a punch to the gut. She nodded. “Thank you. That’s the first bit of sense I’ve heard yet.” And, with that, she disappeared at the top of the stairs.
A moment later he heard her flop down onto the bed.
He thought about her words and realized just how much pain and fear was sitting so close to her energy. He called up, “If you have the means, you should work at clearing some of that fear out of your energy.”
When no response came, he wasn’t sure whether it meant she didn’t have the means or if she was just too tired to do anything. He’d remind her when she woke up again. Then he winced because it really was a case of if she woke up again, and that worried him above all. He had no idea if she would wake up.