FOR A while after she went back up to her room, Holly sat on the bed barely allowing herself to breathe. No wonder people thought she was crazy. She really was crazy. In her mind’s eye, it was as though two parallel videotapes were running in tandem, the one from long ago and the other from Tuesday. The old one was horrifying and real. Although the colors had turned to sepia like the rusty shades of old pictures in a museum collection, the faces were still recognizable. Holly knew now who those people were. All of them.
The other was in living color, although the clouds overhead had covered the dark red cliffs of Juniper Flats in a misty gray wool blanket. First there was her father telling her the real story, while from deep inside her came the first faint rustlings of recognition and remembrance. And then the tape ended, abruptly, as though cut off in mid- sentence. After that vivid mountaintop scene there was nothing but the warm, sweet, comfortable oblivion of forgetting. After that came an unreasoning anger that her father hadn’t come as he had said he would, that he had once again betrayed her.
But that was silly. This time, she realized he hadn’t let her down at all. He had been there in the library, just as he had said he would be. He had offered to make amends, to make things right.
And she had forgotten it somehow. That was the part that didn’t make any sense, unless she had been made to forget it.
As she sat there, she tried her best to convince herself that she was wrong, that the sudden shock of panic that had overwhelmed her in the kitchen had to be some kind of horrible mistake. But it wasn’t. As much as it hurt, it was no mistake.
She knew now that no chance meeting had caused Holly and hypnotherapist Amy Baxter to stumble across one another’s paths months earlier.
Amy must have targeted her, come looking for her deliberately.
Holly’s fall from grace as well as her intermittent drug-use woes had been well publicized among Hollywood insiders. Amy’s offer of help and much-needed counseling had been a precious lifeline to someone whose telephone calls were no longer returned and whose longtime agent had just cut her loose.
And after hearing about Holly’s rocky relation ship with her family, after learning about the Rocking P, Amy had been only too eager to put Holly in touch with Rex Rogers. Of course, those two weren’t exactly mere nodding acquaintances.
As the People article had pointed out, they had worked together on several separate cases and won monetary settlements in most of them.
When she had first seen the magazine piece, Holly had been naively proud that Amy and Rex had been able to find so many other people to help other people just like her. She had thought that, with Amy as a partner and with the Rocking P as the site for a treatment center, she, too, would be able to make a contribution to their pioneering work.
But now, for the first time, she saw it for what it really was-a scam. How many of the families mentioned in the article had paid damages for something that wasn’t necessarily true? How many of the supposed memories were being artificially augmented, Holly wondered, and how much had each of their families payed up to bury the past?
Amy Baxter may have started out in life as a scholarship/charity case from the wrong side of the tracks, but she was well on her way toward amassing a fortune from a very lucrative practice, especially with Rex as her sidekick. If she happened to turn up a family with enough money to make it worthwhile, some of that money was bound to find its way to their treatment center; she and Rex could soon settle into partnership with a self- sustaining cottage industry of counseling the victims and suing the perpetrators.
The silence of the house nudged its way through Holly’s solitary musings. Rex and Amy must still be out somewhere, maybe together, maybe separately. But when one or the other of them came back, Isabel was bound to tell them what had happened in the kitchen. If Amy once realized Holly knew the truth…
The sense of her own danger came back again, as strong or stronger than when it first struck her in the kitchen. But if her friend Amy was really the enemy, where in God’s name could Holly turn for help?
In the end, she was forced to beg for aid from the least likely source, her cousin Burton Kimball. Maybe he was a wimp, but she didn’t know anyone else to ask.
Standing by the old-fashioned dial-type phone on the table in Cosa Viejo’s upstairs corridor, and keeping her voice low lest she be overheard, Holly tried calling Burton’s office. His secretary told her he was out, most likely for the rest of the after noon. Could she take a message? No, no message.
Even more frightened, Holly tried to think of another solution. Was it possible, with everything that was going on, that Burton might have taken the day off? Pulling open the drawer in the table, she searched through the phone book until her trembling fingers finally located the Kimball’s home number. A woman answered after only one ring.
“Who is this?” Holly asked.
“Linda Kimball. Who’s this?”
Holly had never met the woman Burton had married, but this was bound to be Burton’s wife.
“Is your husband there?” Holly asked, rushing on in a strangled whisper.
“Ivy?” Linda said. “is that you? Are you all right? You sound strange.”
Ivy! Holly had both envied and hated Ivy all her life. Ivy was the good girl, the favorite, the one who never got her clothes dirty; who never made mud pies out of eggs from the henhouse, who never thought up practical jokes to pull on other people. And yet, until Linda Kimball mistook Holly’s voice for Ivy’s, it had never dawned on Holly how much they were alike, how much they sounded alike.
“I “I’m not Ivy; I’m Holly,” she managed. “I’ve got to talk to your husband. Right away.
“What about?”
“About his father; about mine.”
“Burton isn’t home,” Linda said, her voice suddenly closed and flat. “He isn’t here, and I have no idea when he’ll be back.”
