Once Forgotten (Riley Paige Mystery #22)

PROLOGUE

Rachel Bennett closed her front door and slid the deadbolt home.

The satisfying click anchored her in the quiet house, her breathing still slightly labored from her evening jog.

Sweat cooled against her skin in the air-conditioned entryway, and she tugged at her damp t-shirt, unsticking it from the small of her back.

She kicked off her running shoes, lining them neatly beside Rudy’s polished loafers.

The contrast between her worn athletic footwear and his pristine business shoes seemed to her a perfect metaphor for their marriage—different trajectories that somehow complemented each other, most of the time anyway.

“Just me,” she said aloud to dispel the silence. The emptiness of the house wasn’t unexpected—Rudy out with his poker buddies, the night stretched before her in peaceful solitude. Or so she thought.

Rudy would be gone for hours still. His Wednesday night poker game was sacred and inviolable, a tradition he’d maintained with the same group of financial consultants since before they’d met.

She used to mind his absence, but lately, she welcomed these evenings to herself—time to think, to fold paper, to simply exist in a space that demanded nothing of her.

Rachel padded into the living room in her socked feet, flicking on a lamp that cast a warm glow across her army of origami creations.

They perched on every available surface—cranes with delicately extended wings, geometric spheres assembled from dozens of precisely folded units, dragons with tails that curved and scales suggested by hundreds of tiny folds.

She smiled at them, these paper children born of her newly steady hands.

Six weeks ago, she couldn’t have created a simple paper boat. She had been too restless, her mind too scattered to follow the precise sequences required for even the most basic models. That was before Marcus Berridge and his unorthodox therapy sessions.

“Your impulses are like paper,” he’d told the group during their first Zoom session. His voice had been so calm, so measured. “They seem rigid, unyielding, but with the right pressure, applied in the right places, they become something beautiful. Something controlled.”

She’d scoffed then, silently, keeping her face neutral for the camera.

Origami as therapy seemed like New Age nonsense, the kind of thing her marketing firm would package and sell to consumers desperate for authenticity.

She knew Rudy would feel the same way, which was why she never told Rudy anything about the sessions.

But soon the treatments seemed to work amazingly well, and Rachel was now making origami figures almost obsessively, feeling calmer as she completed every one of them.

Rudy could only guess that she had taken up a new hobby, but even so, he could see that it was making a world of difference to her.

His eyes lit up with hope that perhaps this unusual activity would help her control her infamous impulsivity.

“Besides,” he’d kept saying, “the figures are pretty.”

Rachel picked up the most recent creation, a complex lotus flower with sixteen perfectly symmetrical petals.

She’d worked on it for three days, following Berridge’s instructions to complete each fold with complete awareness, to feel the paper resist, then yield.

Her thumb traced the sharp edge of one petal, remembering how her colleagues had reacted when she’d launched their latest campaign without consulting the rest of the team.

The way their faces had fallen, then tightened with anger.

The way her boss had called her into his office afterward, voice low and dangerous.

“This is your last chance, Rachel,” he’d said, not meeting her eyes. “I can’t keep protecting you from yourself.”

The lotus felt fragile in her palm. She set it down carefully beside a cluster of miniature stars, evidence of her progress, her commitment to change.

Rachel moved toward the kitchen, intending to grab a glass of water before heading upstairs to shower.

The tile floor was cool against her feet, grounding her in the present moment, another technique Berridge had taught them.

“Notice the sensations,” his voice echoed in her mind.

“Allow them to anchor you before you act.”

She reached for a glass from the cabinet, but something caught her attention from the corner of her eye—the window above the sink was cracked open, a thin line of night air slipping into the house.

Rachel frowned, pausing with her hand still on the cabinet door.

She seldom left windows open, especially ground floor ones.

“Did Rudy...?” she murmured, but she knew her husband wouldn’t have opened it. He was even more paranoid than she was about home security.

She crossed to the window and pushed it closed, turning the latch with a decisive click and shaking off the touch of unease.

She must have opened it herself earlier, perhaps while making coffee that morning, and simply forgotten.

After all, Berridge was always reminding her that her attention could be selective, especially when she was fixated on a task.

“Just forgetfulness,” she told herself firmly. “Not everything is a sign of impending doom.”

Still, as she climbed the stairs toward the second floor, water glass in hand, Rachel couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.

The house felt different somehow, the air disturbed in ways she couldn’t quite articulate.

She paused halfway up, listening. Nothing but the hum of the air conditioning and the distant tick of the grandfather clock Rudy had inherited from his parents.

At the top of the stairs, she turned toward the bathroom, eager to wash away the remnants of her run with a hot shower.

Her muscles ached pleasantly, a reminder of the five miles she’d pushed through.

The evening jogs were another of Berridge’s suggestions—a physical outlet for her restless energy, a way to exhaust the body so the mind could find stillness.

Rachel had almost reached the bathroom door when she noticed it—a faint, golden flicker spilling from the partially open bedroom door further down the hall.

She stopped, water sloshing gently in her glass.

Had she left a light on? No, not a light.

The quality of the illumination was different, more unstable like a candle.

She hadn’t lit any candles today. Rudy didn’t care for them—he complained about the artificial scents giving him headaches.

Rachel set her glass down on the small hall table, her heart beginning a dull thud against her ribs. She moved toward the bedroom slowly, one hand outstretched, pushing the door wider.

The bedroom was bathed in a gentle, dancing light. A single candle burned on her bedside table, its flame bending and straightening in invisible currents of air. Beside it lay an origami crane, the paper a deep crimson that appeared almost black in the dim light.

“What the hell?” she whispered, taking a step into the room.

Rachel knew she hadn’t made that particular crane. And she definitely had not lit a candle in the bedroom. Someone had been in her home. Someone might still be here.

She backed toward the door, reaching to grab her phone from her jogging shorts, call 911. Her muscles tensed, ready to sprint down the hallway, down the stairs, out the front door if necessary.

But she wasn’t fast enough.

A rustle of movement registered behind her. Before she could turn, before she could scream, she felt it—a sharp, sudden prick in her upper arm, like an angry insect sting.

“Wha—” The word died in her throat as a strange heaviness swept through her body, radiating outward from the injection site with terrifying speed.

Rachel tried to spin around, to confront whoever had attacked her, but her legs no longer obeyed her commands.

She stumbled forward instead, her knees buckling as if they’d suddenly forgotten how to bear her weight.

The room tilted sickeningly, the candlelight stretching and blurring as she toppled toward the bed.

She landed face-first on the duvet, her cheek pressed against the cool fabric. Panic exploded through her mind, but her body remained still, unresponsive to her desperate internal commands to move, to fight, to flee. Her lungs struggled to expand, each breath becoming more laborious than the last.

Soft footsteps approached the bed. Rachel strained to move her eyes, the only part of her that still responded at all.

A figure moved into her peripheral vision—just a shadow, a suggestion of presence rather than a clear form.

Gentle hands rolled her onto her back, arranging her limbs carefully, as if positioning a mannequin. Or a corpse.

The crimson crane appeared in her narrowing field of vision, hovering for a moment before being placed deliberately on her chest, directly above her struggling heart.

“Beautiful,” a voice murmured from somewhere above her. “Just like the other one.”

Other one? Rachel’s mind grasped at the word, trying to make sense of it through the growing fog of oxygen deprivation. Her lungs burned with the effort of drawing air, each shallow breath more difficult than the last.

She wanted to beg, to plead for her life, but her lips remained frozen, her tongue a useless shape in her mouth. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, tracking silently down her temples and into her hair.

Rudy’s face appeared in her mind—his easy smile, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed.

Would he find her like this? How long before he came home from poker night, tipsy and affectionate as he always was after winning a few hands?

Would he understand what had happened? That she hadn’t simply fallen asleep with a silly origami creation on her chest?

The room grew darker around the edges, her vision tunneling to a small circle of candlelight. Rachel could feel her heart laboring, its rhythm becoming increasingly erratic as her body fought for oxygen that her paralyzed respiratory muscles couldn’t deliver.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Not when she was finally getting better, finally gaining control over the impulses that had nearly destroyed her career, strained her marriage.

The irony wasn’t lost on her, even as consciousness began to slip away—she’d spent so much time fighting for control, only to die completely helpless, unable to move a single finger to save herself.

The last thing Rachel saw was the delicate edge of the crimson crane rising and falling almost imperceptibly with each weakening beat of her heart.

Then darkness crept in from all sides, swallowing the candlelight, swallowing her consciousness, swallowing the future she’d been so carefully rebuilding, fold by meticulous fold.