“No!” she cried out loud. “I won’t believe it! I know I’m a good doctor. I studied somewhere. And I’ll find out the name of the school I went to when I find Barbara.”
Samantha had no doubt in her mind she would find her “friend.” It wasn’t that she knew for certain, but that she was so fiercely determined that nothing would stop her until she and Julie were reunited.
When she arrived home, she pulled the truck into the garage and got out. As she opened the back door an odd feeling of déjà vu ran over her. She had felt something strange happen in the garage the night before all these events took place. When she’d come back with Julie, she hadn’t experienced the eerie feelings. But now that she was alone, a chill was running up her spine.
She closed her eyes and stood in front of the closed door. She tried to bring back those last moments. A sense of fear filled her. The door. There had been something wrong with the door . . .
She felt her hands go up, and come smashing down. Samantha understood the gesture. She’d found the ax in front of the broken door. She’d been trapped in the garage, and had desperately hacked the wood to get out. But she’d never made it.
She wasn’t alone. There was someone else there with her.
With a gasp, Samantha opened her eyes. Her heart was pounding. She was certain now that someone had been in the garage and that that person had done something to her to make her lose her memory. If only she could remember!
The dogs had been barking ever since the truck pulled into the garage, but Samantha was only now aware of them. She left the garage and the vaguely threatening memories it conjured up, and went to let them back out of the kennel again. Sunday and Lady romped around her, wanting to play, but Samantha had to shoo them away.
She went into the house, straight up to Julie’s bedroom. Julie’s pictures were stacked in a very neat pile on her desk. Samantha took them to the bed and sat down. She began to look through them, scrutinizing each one very carefully. Julie had drawn some pictures of flowers, copying them from the book Samantha had given her. Samantha put these aside until she came to the beach pictures.
They were virtually all the same, with only a few minor changes in each. There was always a beach where a little yellow house with green shutters stood near a jetty. A child walked on the sand, her hair windblown to hide her face. Samantha studied every detail of the little girl, from her blue sandals to her yellow bathing suit. She carried an old pail and shovel. There was something very familiar about the little white crab painted on the red bucket . . .
“Oh, my God,” she gasped. The memory of the bucket had come from nowhere, but it was as clear as if she’d held the thing yesterday. And now she understood.
“It’s me,” she said out loud. “The little girl on the beach is me!”
Somehow Julie had managed to draw a very detailed representation of a summer home Samantha had visited during her childhood. She’d had a pair of blue sandals just like the child in the picture, and the house had been yellow with green shutters. Overwhelmed, Samantha let the pictures fall to the floor and curled herself up on the bed. She buried her face in the crook of her elbow and cried her eyes out. How could Julie have known about that place? Samantha herself hadn’t thought of it in . . . in . . . years.
It was some kind of clue, just like Wil suspected. Julie might even have drawn these pictures knowing she would one day have to leave Samantha. Maybe Julia was trying to tell her where she could be found! All Samantha had to do was . . .
“I can’t remember,” Samantha said. Those words had become achingly familiar in the past few days. “I can’t remember where we spent our summers!”
And then she realized her amnesia was even worse than she’d ever suspected: the more she thought of it, the more she was unable to conjure up a clear image of her family. She saw a mother figure, a woman with dark hair like her own, but with features so vague she could easily have been part of a dream. There was no picture of her father. Samantha’s parents had died when she was a young child, but if she could remember the beach house, why couldn’t she remember them too?
She started to sob again. And even though it was the middle of the day, she soon cried herself to sleep.
37
ALTHOUGH STEVEN GAZED intently out the window of the train, he didn’t really see the scenery that rushed by him. He was tired of all this traveling, of airplanes and buses and the like. He just wanted to settle down someplace and be finished with . . . with whatever Marty wanted from him.
Well, at least he was on his way to a destination. It was much better than sitting on a bench in an unfamiliar place and trying hard not to start crying. When he’d arrived in Atlantic City, he’d been completely overwhelmed. Steven had never seen crowds like that, or at least he was pretty certain he never had. Most people ignored him, but a few glanced back over their shoulders at him. He wasn’t the only young boy there, and certainly not the only black child. Why did he stand out? he wondered.