that.
‘You seem a lot less unhappy today,’ Ranald adds, studying my face. ‘Less . . . angry. And you look nice.’
He glances down shyly, ragged fingernails still poised above the keyboard.
‘I’ve come to terms with things,’ I reply. ‘I’m making the best of a difficult situation.’
The words are generic, but they seem to satisfy him.
‘That’s great,’ he says, then boasts, ‘Go on, try me. Ask me any question you’ve always wanted an answer to. I’ll find it for you. I mean it. I can find anything. Nothing’s safe from me.’
‘Carmen Zappacosta,’ I say so suddenly that it catches us both off guard. ‘Find out what you can about her and I’ll be in your debt forever.’
‘You mean it?’ he says eagerly. ‘Like you and me might finally go out for that meal?’
‘If that’s what it takes,’ I say, deliberately keeping things vague. ‘I guess, maybe.’
It’s worth a shot. I mean, I can’t remember the faintest thing about Carmen Zappacosta apart from her name, but maybe information about her exists somewhere outside my heavily compromised brain.
Ranald looks at his screen then up at me. ‘You’re sure that’s it? You just want me to look up some girl?’
He sounds disappointed, like what I’ve asked for is too easy. The computer nerd wants a challenge? Wonder how well he’d go with: Find out what my real name is. Tell me the real reason why I keep waking up in other people’s bodies with no memory of how I got there and no idea why it’s even necessary. Or how it’s even possible.
Instead, I nod. ‘That’s it.’
Small steps, small steps and patience are required here. Work out what it is about Carmen Zappacosta that I’m not supposed to know, and the rest will follow. I have to believe that.
Ranald begins by typing Carmen’s name straight into the empty box on his screen. I don’t need to correct the spelling; he gets it first time. There are eighteen pages of ‘search results’, and when Ranald clicks on the first reference — a newspaper report complete with colour photos — I have to remind myself to shut my mouth at what I’m seeing. I hadn’t known stuff like this was out there, capable of being organised, gathered, found.
Ranald gives a short laugh when he sees my expression. ‘You have to know what you’re looking for on the internet, and take it all with a huge grain of salt.’
Still, I’m fascinated, and I lean forward to scan the article. As far as I can tell, Carmen Zappacosta is a scrawny sixteen-year-old kid with a great set of pipes who recently survived being snatched by some kiddy-fiddling choirmaster with a prior history of stalking young girls in his care. It’s a sad story and my heart bleeds for her, really it does. But human nature being what it is, it’s hardly surprising.
For a long moment, I study a close-up of Carmen’s face. Pale and patchy complexion; dark, bruised-looking eyes; dark hair like a mushroom cloud of ringlets, almost too wild and heavy for her small, fine-boned head. The picture was taken at the hospital just after she suffered a devastating bout of post-traumatic amnesiae minute she’d been actively co-operating with the police, the article said, giving lucid and damning evidence against her attacker, and the next she claimed to have lost all her recent memories, as if they’d been . . . erased.
That gets my attention.
When I’m done reading I nod, and together Ranald and I navigate the rest of the search results on the page, reference by reference. They don’t seem to be in any kind of chronological order.
‘Why did they give Carmen the keys to the town of . . . Paradise?’ I wonder, before I realise that I’m talking aloud. ‘Where is that?’
Why do I suddenly feel so . . . uneasy?
‘Would Paradise,’ when I repeat the word, one eyelid begins to jump again, ‘even require keys?’
Ranald shrugs, clicks in and out of a few other sites while I look over his shoulder.
‘I remember that case now,’ he exclaims as he skims a web page he’s just opened. ‘The place where it all happened didn’t look particularly, uh, Paradise-like from the news footage, but I think the town rolled out the red carpet for Carmen because she managed to free two other girls that the guy was keeping prisoner in this dungeon beneath his house.’
‘What were the names of the other girls?’
Ranald closes the page we’re looking at and clicks in and out of a couple more before replying, ‘Jennifer Appleton and Lauren Daley.’
The words are barely out of his mouth when, inexplicably, I see Luc before me. So vividly that he might be standing right here with us, in this room. His beautiful mouth is both cruel and amused, the way he looks when he’s playing a joke on someone, or setting them an impossible task. I grasp at the air with my hands, unable to hold onto the golden vision of my lost love, knowing that I am suffering some sort of waking dream, a hallucination. It’s a message to myself, a reminder. Of what?
Luc, my love, what am I supposed to remember? Help me.
Ranald’s still peering at his screen and hasn’t noticed my strange reaction. ‘Lauren was imprisoned the longest, just over two years. She was the one from Paradise. The whole town — almost two thousand people, it says here — turned out to welcome her home when she was discharged from hospital. They had the ceremony honouring Carmen the same day.’ Ranald’s eyes flick up to me then back to the screen. ‘You wouldn’t believe she could do that, would you? Save herself and two other people. She blinded the guy as well. He’s never going to see again, they say.’
A voice calls out, ‘Lela?’ from the back of the shop; it’s slow, deep, heavily accented, unfamiliar.
I turn, see that it’s Sulaiman the cook speaking. A guy who hasn’t bothered to address me with anything more than a flick of his eyes or a grunt since I got here hours ago. I meet his dark, steady gaze through the serving hatch separating the kitchen in, thehe front counter, raise an eyebrow at the interruption.
‘You are needed in the kitchen,’ he rumbles.
I stare at him. Since when? Why now, when there isn’t another soul in the joint? He stares back unblinkingly.
‘Excuse me,’ I say tightly to Ranald.
He nods, looking down, and takes another sip of his coffee. I can tell he’s disappointed. But after I walk away, he opens up a new window and begins working again, intently.
Chapter 5
When I reach the kitchen, Sulaiman says without warmth or preamble, ‘Unload the dishwasher.’ He indicates with one hand a big, stainless-steel machine wedged into a back corner of the room.
There’s so little floor space in here that I have to skirt him carefully to avoid touching him. I hate being touched — it’s something instinctive in me; I’m big on personal space, on the whole live and let live thing. And it’s funny, but it feels as if Sulaiman’s giving me a wide berth, too, almost as if he doesn’t want me around even though he was the one who called me in here.
‘That’s all you want me to do?’ I say, stomping bad-temperedly over to the hulking machine, unable to keep the anger out of my voice. ‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No.’ His reply is curt. ‘I need clean dishes. Without them, it is impossible for me to do my work. Everything has its place, everything in its place, or it is chaos, Lela. You should know that. Reggie jokes that you are the “dog’s body” around here, but it is no joke, I think?’
I don’t bother to answer, just bend to study the machine’s complicated-looking control panel. I finally work out which button is supposed to pop the front door open, and cough as a cloud of steam shoots straight into my face. The dishwasher’s contents are scalding to the touch but I don’t hesitate, grabbing handfuls of side plates, servers, bowls, trays, pots and pans and slamming them into messy piles on the bench closest to the burners, to his big hands. Let him make sense of them all.
‘Lela . . .’ Sulaiman warns.
I ignore him and continue to layer things quickly and haphazardly on top of each other. I have to catch Ranald before he leaves. There’s so much I need to know. There’s something important that I’m missing about Carmen’s story, a whole bunch of somethings. Some clue as to how I got here must be out there inside his
