The Forgotten Girl Read online

  “We should make sure,” he said.

  * * *

  We often think of our memory as a vast library containing volumes of information—a place where “books” are stored and sometimes lost. It’s a romantic notion, but an inaccurate one. In truth, it’s more like a factory, with forklifts speeding along the neural pathways and production lines operating 24/7. In recalling a childhood Christmas, for instance, we don’t send some dusty librarian to hunt through the holiday department, but rather assemble a team of neurons from pertinent regions of the brain to encode and reconstruct the desired memory. It’s an efficient system, but complex and susceptible to malfunction.

  Memories deteriorate. They get lost forever. I don’t know—nobody does—whether they actually disappear, or if the conjunctions necessary to reconstruction become damaged. I favor the latter theory. You ever smell something—a perfume, home cooking—that whips you back in time, floods your brain with recollection? Sure you have. I like to believe that all lost memories are equally recoverable. They just need the correct stimulus.

  It’s a little different when certain memories have been stolen—plucked from your head like they were never there to begin with. Scientists argue that this isn’t possible, but I know that it is.

  “We need to find her.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Jackhammer had procured a chair from somewhere and sat opposite me. His expression hadn’t changed. He could have been waiting for a bus. Again, I considered my father’s theory about microchips in the brain and automatons. Maybe he wasn’t so crazy.

  “We are proceeding under the assumption that you are telling the truth, and that Ms. Starling has performed her little party trick on you.” He linked his fingers and leaned toward me. The chair creaked, offering the impression of a tree bowing in the wind. “Let’s just see if there’s anything left.”

  I nodded, as if that were all fine with me. As if they were suddenly being reasonable. Something warm trickled from my swollen left eye.

  “Sally Starling isn’t her real name,” Jackhammer said. His blank eyes felt like the backs of cold spoons, placed on my cheeks. “She was born Miranda Farrow, June 1991. That makes her twenty-four years old. She used the name Charlotte Prowse after her parents abandoned her at age fifteen, then became Sally Starling when she moved to Green Ridge six years ago. Places of employment include Marzipan’s Kitchen, Pennywise Used Books, and the Health Nut.”

  I knew those places well, but nothing stirred in my brain.

  “Her last known address was apartment eighteen, Passaic Heights, Green Ridge, New Jersey.”

  My address.

  “We spoke to the landlord: Mr. Ralph Bauman. He told us that you and Ms. Starling had been living there for five years. Good tenants. Quiet. Always paid your rent on time. He hadn’t seen her for a week or so, but had no reason to believe she’d moved out. She certainly didn’t notify him. No forwarding address or number where she could be reached.”

  “This is…” I couldn’t find the right words. My body was slumped and something inside my skull hissed like a cracked pipe. “This is all news to me.”

  A folder appeared in Jackhammer’s hand. I didn’t see which of the thugs had handed it to him. Possibly the one who purchased his footwear at the same place as Frankenstein’s monster. From it, Jackhammer pulled a sheet of paper. He studied it for a moment, then held it up for me to read.

  “The rental agreement for your apartment,” he said. “Signed August twentieth, 2010, by co-tenants Harvey N. Anderson and Sally Starling. Tell me, Harvey … is this your signature?”

  I looked at my strike-through scrawl, identifiable even through the tears in my eyes, and nodded. Sally Starling’s signature—a vivacious, bubble-like cursive—sat beside mine. I was positive I’d never seen it before.

  “Mr. Bauman was kind enough to make a copy,” Jackhammer said. I thought I detected a smile in his voice, but when he lowered the agreement I saw that his mouth was a humorless gray line. “We can be very persuasive.”

  “Yes,” I said stupidly.

  “Jogging any memories, Harvey?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  He blinked, slid the agreement back into the folder, and took out a color photograph. It was a headshot. Sally Starling, I assumed. Tousled, mousy hair. No makeup. The kind of girl my heart gallops for. She had a zit on her chin that she hadn’t tried to hide. There was a crusty something—perhaps dried tzatziki—on the bib of her Health Nut apron.

  “Seems absurd,” Jackhammer said, “to ask if you recognize a woman you lived with for five years.”

  “I don’t recognize her,” I mumbled. The woman in the photograph—agreeable as she was in her crunchy, au naturel way—was a stranger to me.

  “Very private, your girlfriend,” Jackhammer said. “Very careful. Like you, she doesn’t own a cell phone or subscribe to social media—the things that tie you to society. It was difficult to find a current photograph of her. But once we determined her location and the alias she’d adopted, we found this: the Health Nut’s employee of the month for February 2015.”

  I looked at her again, because it was far more appealing than looking at my blood on the floor, or any one of my dour tormentors. She had hazel eyes, the color of turned leaves, and her nose was slightly off-center. Her face shape, though, was perfectly oval, and I imagined how it would complement the cup of my palm—how I could cradle her brow or jaw, and it would be the counterpart to my hand. I wondered if the rest of our bodies would enjoy a similar harmony, and if we’d make love like strawberries and cream.

  “Anything, Harvey?”

  And yeah, there was … something. But was it a memory, or imagination? I closed my eyes and concentrated. A woman, swaying her hips to music I couldn’t hear. Her dress was knee-length. It switched between blue and yellow.

  “Harvey?”

  “Dancing,” I said distantly.

  “Sally?”

  Impossible to tell. She had no face.

  “Tell us what you see.”

  That blue/yellow dress flickering around her knees. Her arms making flowing motions. I pushed deeper, but there was nothing more. It was a sketch done in pencils, partially erased.

  My eyes crept open. Jackhammer was leaning forward in the chair, only inches from me. I could smell his breath, which had decidedly more personality than his face.

  “Harvey?”

  “I think I’ve been brainwashed,” I said.

  He stood quickly and the chair toppled backward. I thought he was going to beat the dancing woman from my mind. Instead, he ran a hand through his average hair, righted the chair, and looked at the others.

  “Make the call,” he said.

  * * *

  I can’t tell you how long I was in that boxlike room, alone and bleeding, tied to a chair. There was no window, so I couldn’t use the light to measure time, and my body clock had been damaged by Jackhammer’s fists. It could have been a day, or three days, or a week. I faded in and out like a ghost in an old movie, never unconscious or asleep, but caught in a surreal daze where pain and fear were ever present. My throat was too dry to scream.

  Escape was out of the question; I was too weak, and the thugs kept guard outside the door. I heard them shuffling their feet, clearing their throats. If they spoke to one another, I didn’t hear them. I told myself that if they were going to kill me, they would have already. It was a small comfort.

  So time passed in mysterious excerpts. I suffered deeply and prayed shallowly, and worried for my father, whom these thugs knew all about, and who was delicate and paranoid. I imagined them bringing him here, wide-eyed and confused, and Jackhammer pressing a gun to his forehead. Dig deep, Harvey, the thug would say expressionlessly. Tell us about the dancing girl. And my old man would puff out his chest and regard me through his single whirling eye. Goddamn Russian sleeper agents, he’d say. The red hammer is fa
lling.

  My wrists flexed weakly at the rope binding me to the chair. I counted my pains and wept. It felt like a circular saw was buzzing around the inside of my skull, scoring the bone, and with any sudden movement my head would fragment like a fortune cookie. My dreadlocks—clotted as cows’ tails—had absorbed blood like sponges.

  I faded in … and out.

  Was it average Wednesday? Or slightly-better-than-average Friday?

  Out … and in.

  Three words kept floating into my mind, and sometimes they’d lodge there like arrows in a bull’s-eye: Make the call. What did that mean? Who were they calling? It couldn’t be good, right? Let him go. Now that was good. But make the call … no, that sent unpleasant vibes racing through me.

  I default to my mom in moments of duress. She was a beacon of strength—my only beacon of strength—when she was alive, and I could always rely on her celestial wisdom. On this occasion, however, I turned to the girl without a face—the dancing girl. She lured me with the timing of her hips, the flash of her dress, and I went to her meekly. Who are you? I asked, stepping into the partially erased scene. Why can’t I remember you? I took her featureless face in my hand and cradled it perfectly, and I knew for certain, from somewhere deeper than my mind, that this was a memory.

  Who are you?

  I felt the tick of her hips against mine. The warming pressure of her breasts. I searched for greater detail—my brain fighting to pull together elements that simply weren’t there. I cupped the other side of her face and that, too, was perfect.

  Sally … is that your name?

  Her hair smelled of nothing. Her skin smelled of nothing.

  Why can’t I…?

  Time passed. Sometimes I was wide awake, with a wildfire of emotion burning through me. Other times I slumbered in that exhausted daze. Eventually, the door opened and Brickhead strolled in. He placed smelling salts beneath my nose and I popped to full alertness. A series of cracked sounds eked from my mouth. He held a small glass of water to my lips and I drank with my throat pumping.

  “Please let me go,” I said, and followed him with my eyes as he left, slamming the door behind him.

  Sally danced in my mind.

  Make the call.

  Moments later the door opened again, and in crawled the spider.

  Two

  He was an older man—just into his sixties, I thought—with a pale, lined face and dark eyes. His forehead was dominated by angular eyebrows and a silvered widow’s peak that glimmered in the overhead light. He wore an unremarkable gray suit, given character by a red flower pinned to his lapel.

  “Harvey,” he said. His voice was sure and strong. I detected a hint of the South in his accent. He took the seat opposite me (a pillow had been placed on it, I noticed), his long arms and legs folding neatly as he made himself comfortable.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I see my hunt dogs have been heavy-handed with you.” He gestured with one finger at my battered face. “They find the aggressive approach to be expedient. I’m always called upon as a last resort—when their weakling minds are empty of ideas.”

  The thugs appeared unfazed by this insult. They formed a semicircle behind the older man.

  “Who are you?” I asked again.

  “You”—the finger pointed now, straight as a ruler—“don’t need to know. Suffice to say that Miranda Farrow—or Sally Starling, as you know her—knows me very well. Almost as well as I know myself.”

  I shrugged and winced, then shifted in the chair. My left leg was numb. I imagined that if they ever cut my binds, it would take me ten minutes to stand. Another twenty to walk to the door. The man in the suit watched me, breathing coolly.

  “I need to find her,” he said. “She took something extremely valuable from me.”

  “And you think I know where she is?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “Are you going to torture me?”

  A thin smile touched his lips. He regarded me with those Emperor Ming eyes, and I could only imagine the wickedness behind them. A new, great fear rose through my stomach and lodged in my throat. I lowered my head and trembled.

  “We searched your computer as well as your apartment,” he said. The smile had slipped from his face but that cool air remained. “We went through all your files and folders, your browsing history, your e-mail. Came up empty. But it’s easy to erase data from a computer. You just right-click and hit delete. Empty your trash and it’s gone forever. You can even wipe your entire hard drive. It’s effortless.”

  This was a nightmare. It had to be. A long, brutal nightmare.

  “The human brain is a wildly different creature,” he continued. “We immodestly think of it as some kind of supercomputer, but it’s far more complex. We have our instincts, our emotions, our memories. A surfeit of knowledge and experience. Erasing this data is more demanding than a simple right-click. There are methods, of course—lobotomies, electroconvulsive therapy—and medications that repress emotional triggers. But to go into the brain and hand-select certain memories for deletion … impossible. So how do we begin to explain what has happened to you?”

  I shook my head. My eye was drawn to the red flower on the man’s lapel. Two shades lighter than my blood.

  “Your other memories are intact,” he said. The lines at the edges of his eyes deepened. “You know your name, where you live, where you went to school. I’m sure you remember events from your childhood, computer passwords, the lyrics to your favorite songs. Everything appears in working order. And yet you cannot remember the woman you lived with for five years.”

  “I still think you’ve got the wrong man,” I said. “You tell me I know this woman, but the only proof you’ve got is a rental agreement that could’ve been forged. So what are you going to do? Torture me—kill me—for information I don’t have?”

  “I know this is upsetting for you.”

  “Just let me go.”

  He sat back in the seat and regarded me silently. His eyes were like hands, touching where they shouldn’t.

  “I can’t help you,” I said.

  “I need to be sure of that.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “It’s incredibly difficult to track a person who leaves such dainty footprints.” He smiled again. Full and false. “Miranda—sorry, Sally—puts down few roots, and adopts an unremarkable image so that she doesn’t stand out.”

  I considered the periphery and sighed.

  “No driver’s license, social security number, or passport. She worked for mom-and-pop stores and was paid under the table, limiting her paper trail.” His eyebrows came together, forming a bird shape across his forehead. Not a sparrow or chickadee, either, but a raptor. Something with claws. “Nonetheless, my hunt dogs sniffed around Green Ridge. They discovered where she lived and worked, and that her boyfriend busks for quarters outside the Liquor Monkey. Other than that—and although she lived in Green Ridge for six years—nobody knew anything about her. A dainty footprint, indeed.”

  The thugs stood silently, like monoliths, staring straight ahead. Hunt dogs, the man called them. I wondered how much power he wielded and felt sick inside.

  “That doesn’t explain why I can’t remember her,” I said.

  “Then allow me to spell it out for you,” the man said, and I detected the first suggestion of impatience in his voice. “Sally Starling possesses a unique and powerful ability. Just like we can erase data from a computer hard drive, she can—selectively—erase the memories from a person’s mind.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. Growing up with my old man—who believed in government-engineered hurricanes and little green men—I had become remarkably adept at sniffing out bullshit. Hell, I was a hunt dog for bullshit.

  “She fled Green Ridge a few days ago, a frightened girl, no doubt, forced to begin a new life in a new city, with a new name and a fabricated background. Before leaving, she cleared your apartment of anything that could be assoc
iated with her. Photographs. Clothes. Possessions. Any triggers … gone. There’s nothing on your computer, so it’s fair to assume she scrubbed that data, too. Simply accessed the relevant files and hit delete. She did the same thing with your mind.”

  “Bullshit,” I said again, but my heart made a forlorn, hurt sound in my chest, and that sickening feeling deepened. “You’re saying this woman—my so-called girlfriend—deleted parts of my mind?”

  “Your memories, yes. Specifically, your memories of her.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Because her life is fraught with danger, and she doesn’t want you involved.” He spread his long-fingered hands. “This is the only way she could make a clean break without worrying that you might follow.”

  “I guess she didn’t count on you guys getting to me.”

  “She knew we’d find you, I’m sure, but likely thought your absence of memory would protect you.”

  The bird shape took wing again. His dark eyes gleamed.

  “She was wrong.”

  * * *

  “As I’ve already noted, the human brain is expansive and intricate. Given the additional complexities of memory, it’s entirely possible Sally left something in your mind.”

  I closed my eyes and there she was, swaying her hips, matching the rhythm of a song I couldn’t remember.

  “Even if she has,” I began hesitantly, my good eye slowly opening, finding that red flower again. “Even if I suddenly remember everything about her, I still wouldn’t know where she is. If what you’re saying is true, she would never have told me.”

  “That’s true, but in the time you spent together, she may have mentioned something—a longing, a wanderlust—that could offer some clue as to where she went.” He extended his upper body toward me, his hands curled into bony fists. “That’s all we want, Harvey. A slice of information. A partial of that dainty footprint.”

  “I’ve got nothing,” I said. “I’m a waste of time, I promise you.”