Finding Fiona (10 page)

Hannah handed Fiona’s phone back to her, her
lips tightened into a thin line. Fiona wanted to say something to
comfort her, but what was there? The guy she’d dated for three
months had been lying about everything and was probably using
Hannah to get to Fiona. Fiona gritted her teeth. No words could
adequately describe that jerk.

Fiona heard the front door open. She turned
and looked down the balcony as Keith walked in with grocery bags.
She wondered if Troy had moved to Boston just for her. Did he even
work at that pharmacy? She had to think about something else. “I
love this house,” Fiona said flatly.

“
It’s really beautiful,” Hannah
said, but Fiona could tell her mind was elsewhere, too.

“
It used to be an old bank,” Fiona
told her. “At least, I read that in an article.”

“
Wow.” Hannah’s gaze took in the
view, only slightly more interested.

Fiona examined the chandelier, wondering if it
was the old one, or if it was new, put in after the
fire.

“
Do they have a vault?” Hannah
asked.

“
Yeah, about that…” James said,
stepping out of Fiona’s room. “There is a vault, and it had
fireproof doors, but we haven’t been able to open it.”

Keith walked past them, his hands full. Hannah
reached forward and helped him into the kitchen.

“
Where is it?” Fiona asked
James.

“
It’s downstairs.” He called over
his shoulder, “We’ll be right back. I’m going to show Fiona the
vault.”

As they walked down the stairs, Fiona’s body
tensed. She felt like someone was going to grab her when she
reached the bottom. She jogged down quickly, passing James. He
raised his eyebrows at her.

“
Those stairs give me the creeps,”
she said sheepishly.

He took her across the lower level, past the
offices and the lab to a door Fiona hadn’t noticed before. He
opened it, and they entered a hallway. A large metal door stood to
their left with a keypad on the wall next to it. Fiona ran her
fingers over it. She’d definitely been here before.

“
No one knows the combination?”
Fiona asked.

James shook his head.

“
What’s in here?”

“
No idea. Could be anything,
really…”

“
Except for our photo albums,”
Fiona said, cracking a smile. “That would have been a good
idea.”

James nodded in agreement. “Yeah, no kidding…
although, I didn’t see any birth certificates or social security
cards. They could be in there.” He paused. “We could have paid
someone to break in, but it’s a lot of money, and Walter couldn’t
pay for it after restoring the house.”

Fiona tensed. Walter. What else did Troy lie
about? “And everything in here would still be intact?”

“
I think so. There’s no way to
tell.”

Fiona bit her lip, staring at the keypad.
“Have you tried birthdays?”

“
Yeah, birthdays, social security
numbers, phone numbers, everything we could think of.” James
stepped closer. “You think you might know it?”

She shook her head and met his eyes with a
frown. “I don’t remember anything, I told you.”

“
You remember some things,” James
said. “You remembered the fire, the car wreck, the girl who was
driving you…”

She remembered death. Not life. She
thought back to her journal–
her
journal, not Elizabeth’s
.
A smile crossed her face. “I remember getting a Rottweiler puppy
for Christmas.”

James grinned. “Alfred.”

“
How old was I when I got
him?”

“
Oh…” James’s brow furrowed in
thought. “Well, he was seven when I met you, so you were probably
nine.”

“
How did we meet?” Fiona asked,
leaning toward him.

“
We met at a high school football
game,” James said. “You were going out with a player on the team my
school was playing against.”

“
What school did I go to?” Fiona
thought she was tired of hearing of her past life, but her
curiosity was piqued again.

“
Abigail Adams, and I went to
Washington Chambers,” James said. “Even though you didn’t ask which
school I went to.”

Fiona smiled. “And how did I meet Keith,
Sarah, and Faith?”

“
You went to high school with
Keith, I went to school with Sarah, and Faith was your roommate at
NYU.”

Fiona touched his wrist and trailed her
fingers down toward his. “I’m glad you found me. I wonder…” She
sighed. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop thinking about Troy and what he
did.”

“
Me, neither. He knew where you
were all this time, and he never told anyone?” James shook his
head.

“
I can trust you, right?” Fiona
asked, making eye contact with him. “I didn’t like Troy, and I
didn’t really trust him, either, but… he was one of the few
constants in my life, and I was… I don’t know what I’m
saying.”

James gently let go of her hand to cup her
face in his own hands. “You can trust me.”

They stood in silence for a moment, and Fiona
almost thought he might kiss her. She wasn’t sure how she’d feel
about that. She felt both dread and pleasure at the thought, but
the dread won out. She had too much on her mind, and adding this
into the mix would only make things more complicated. Even if it
was James. She stepped back. “I’m getting hungry… you want to go
eat?”

James raised his eyebrows. “Sure.”

Fiona looked at the vault one last time before
they walked back upstairs.

Keith made them macaroni and cheese for lunch.
As they sat around the table eating, Fiona thought of the girl
who’d been buried. “Who identified Elizabeth Normans’s body after
the fire?”

Keith and James exchanged glances. “Walter,”
James said.

Fiona frowned, putting her fork down. “Well,
now I really doubt it was her… replica or otherwise.”

“
Why would he say she was dead when
she wasn’t?”

Fiona paused. She had no idea what went
through Troy’s head.

“
Insurance money,” Hannah
suggested.

“
He hardly saw any of that,” James
said. “He rebuilt the house.”

“
I want to see the files at the
medical examiner’s office,” Fiona said. “Was she even recognizable
after the fire?”

He stared down at his plate, shaking his head.
“Barely, but there were enough teeth left that they compared it to
dental records.”

“
Could we visit it tomorrow?” Fiona
asked.

“
Fiona…” James trailed off. “Are
you sure you’re not just hoping that she was another girl so you’re
not the replica?”

“
No, I’m asking because it’s pretty
much impossible,” Fiona said, raising her voice. “This isn’t Star
Trek, James.”

They fell into uncomfortable silence. Fiona
finished her lunch, avoiding James’s eyes. Shouldn’t he be on her
side? Didn’t he want her to be Elizabeth? Wasn’t that argument
stronger if the replication had never happened? He was partially
right, of course. She wanted to be sure of who she was. But James
couldn’t deny the lack of scientific basis behind their theories.
Too many stupid science fiction movies clouded his judgment. What
did he even know about the physics that would be necessary for a
machine to replicate live creatures? This was her area of
expertise, not his.

* * *

Chapter Seven

They put in a movie to wind down, but Fiona
could tell no one was watching it. Hannah stood up five minutes in,
claiming she was going to call Troy, then she changed her mind and
sat down. She did it three more times before Fiona spoke
up.

“
Hannah, don’t call him. He doesn’t
deserve to hear from you.”

Hannah’s bottom lip trembled. Fiona stared at
her, afraid she was going to cry. She’d seen Hannah cry a few times
since they’d known each other, but mostly from those commercials
for shelter animals. Hannah stood up, taking a deep breath. “I’m
going to go blow up the mattress and lay down.”

Frowning, Fiona watched her walk to the
bedroom. When she saw Troy, and she felt like it was only a matter
of time before he showed up here, she was going to flip on
him.

She fell asleep during the movie, but it was
an uneasy nap, the voices from the movie working into her
dreams.

When she woke up, Keith was taking out the
movie. Hannah sat in the kitchen, talking on the phone, her work
spread out on the table in front of her. How could she concentrate?
Although maybe it helped to get her mind off things.

“
Where’s James?” Fiona
asked.

“
Downstairs working in the lab,”
Keith said.

Fiona glanced toward the balcony, holding back
a yawn. “Sorry for falling asleep during your movie.”

Keith smiled. “No big deal.” He turned toward
her, leaning his back against the entertainment center. “You doing
all right?”

With a shrug, Fiona stretched her legs out on
the couch. “I could be better, but I could be worse, too. It wasn’t
the best nap, but I feel so awake. I want to find out what
happened.”

“
That’s the spirit.”

“
Do you have a job?”

“
Yeah, I work security at a concert
venue.” He looked at his watch. “My shift starts at six. Saturday
nights are usually pretty busy.”

Fiona turned on her side, her head on the
armrest. “James said we went to high school together. What was it
like?”

“
It was nice, I guess,” he said
with a shrug. “We became friends in freshman year because we had
four classes together.”

“
Which ones?”

Keith launched into a reminiscence
of Abigail Adams High School
.
It sounded like a normal high school: bad
cafeteria food, drama, teachers who tried to care. But when he
started getting into specific stories, Fiona felt the familiarity
of each instance. He told her about the vice principal who they
caught smoking pot in sophomore year. The girl in drama he fell in
love with. Fiona’s science scholarship. The football game when they
met James. The party where they dared him to kiss Sarah. She felt
as though she’d watched a movie in the past, and he was telling her
the highlights of it long after she’d forgotten the
plot.

When he’d stop talking, she’d ask more
questions, and at the end of an hour, she had some sense of those
four years of her life.

“
Do you think we could visit?”
Fiona asked.

Keith’s smile faded. “I don’t know… it’s one
of the places they may be looking for you, you know?”

“
I can’t do this forever. I mean,
eventually… something’s going to happen. Either they’ll find me or
I move or they go to prison. We have to convince the police that
they killed Richard and Fiona.”

“
And what about the other girl? Or
the fact that Elizabeth is supposed to be dead?”

“
I doubt that was even her. Or a
replica, whatever. If they can test my DNA, they’ll see I’m her… or
we can at least pretend I am.” Fiona paused. “Is there any
difference in DNA with the replication device?”

Keith shrugged. “No idea. And the records were
probably destroyed, because we can’t find them.”

“
Or they’re in that vault.” Fiona
stood up. “I’m going to go look around in the lab.”

The rest of the day went by slowly. Fiona was
grateful for the slow pace after a confusing morning. Occasionally
she’d be filled with urgency, knowing unless she did something,
she’d never have her life back. They alternated between repeating
their earlier conversations, nearly word for word, and quietly
trying to decipher the research in the lab that hadn’t been
destroyed. Bits and pieces made sense to Fiona, but she didn’t
understand how it could all fit together into something that could
replicate a human being.

She spent a lot of time explaining things to
James and Keith. She knew they weren’t strong in science, even
though she didn’t remember specific details about them from her
earlier life. She wondered why they’d done so much for her. They
helped Troy rebuild the house, and Keith lived here to keep it
safe. How much longer would James have been looking for her if they
hadn’t run into each other?

That night, Fiona crawled into the twin bed in
the guest room, and Hannah took the air mattress. Once they turned
out the lights, Hannah said, “This is intense, Fiona.”

“
I know.”

“
What are you going to do
tomorrow?”

Fiona pulled the covers up to her chin. “I
have to find that girl, the one in the car. I need to find out who
they buried.” She paused. “And the Alarias… the police have to know
they started the fire and kidnapped me.”

Hannah shifted, and the air mattress groaned.
“I don’t know if I can see Troy. I have no idea what I’ll do or
say. I hate thinking that this is his house… I keep wondering what
else he lied about.”