Chapter 8
As they pulled into the parking lot of the back entrance to the warehouse, Abigail felt a twist in her stomach. The main entrance where they had been before was where the main players had been shot and killed along with one of the police who showed up, but the back lot was where the ring leaders had executed the head of their rival group and triggered the investigation that had led to the whole thing. Even though only one person had died here, it felt worse somehow.
“I really don’t like it here,” Bee said, “it’s creepier, something about it being so small and secluded.”
Yeah... Maybe that’s it, Abigail thought as she got out of the car. If you turned the other way, you’d head out into the less populated sections of the area. There were people living out there, but it was basically empty.
“Hmm...” she said, “I think—I mean, I agree—but it also feels like something else. Maybe knowing what I know happened here, like I feel there’s a difference between straight-up murder of one person and the collateral damage of a drug bust gone wrong. You know?”
Bee shrugged. “Maybe, hey, look—doors open. You wanna go explore?”
Her eyes lit up, and she fished a flashlight out of her pocket. Before Abigail could say anything, she was heading toward the slightly ajar door, and she found herself following Bee into the darkened doorway.
“I don’t think we should…” she whispered, unsure why she was whispering. “I feel like we’re trespassing!”
“We are trespassing,” Bee whispered, “I mean... Probably.”
She pushed on a door in the dark office space and it creaked open to expose a surprisingly well-lit warehouse.
“Huh, very effective skylights,” she said, gesturing at the high roof where several panels were actually skylights, but other panels had clearly fallen in and left huge gaps open to the sky.
The floor was waterlogged from all the rain that had fallen through over the years and Abigail could smell the dank wetness as soon as the door opened. There was a flash of the backseat, and freezing water swished around her calves.
“I don’t think...” she started to say, but something in the open space caught her attention.
Abigail stepped down the small concrete set of steps and a growing sense of urgency swelled in her stomach. The shelving units that lined the far wall were nothing more than sheet metal laid out between two arms protruding from sturdy looking posts. There were stacks of old wooden pallets and rotting cardboard boxes strewn across them, but the image in her head was very different from what she saw in front of her. In her mind, she felt they should be stacked up high with plastic-wrapped pallets and wooden-sided crates.
“Abby?” Bee asked. “You okay?”
“I... Don’t know,” she answered truthfully. There was something going on, for sure, but she wasn’t certain if it was her lack of sleep or the smell triggering an emotional reaction.
Abigail crossed the floor. Her left sneaker sank into a puddle that had formed in a divet and the dank water soaked it through. She yelped and jumped away from it.
“Oh gross,” Bee commented, “what are you—”
Abigail shook her foot and continued past the puddle, weaving between the shelving units.
There was something about them. She didn’t know what but…
“Abby!?” Bee called across the warehouse, her voice echoing in the cavernous space, making it sound more frantic than it probably was.
Abigail squeezed her eyes shut, the sound reverberating in her head, “Abby!! Run!!”
But it wasn’t Bee’s voice she heard—it was Jacob’s.
Panic filled her chest as she turned to look through the shelves at Bee, but what she saw in her mind’s eye wasn’t the dilapidated concrete and rusting walls—it was a packed warehouse and a group of men huddled together.
She tasted vomit, but she wasn’t being sick. She realized that it was a memory creeping into her reality. Abigail took a deep breath and held it until her lungs hurt. This was not one of the recommended practices given to her by Doctor Lavender, and it would either make things much better or much worse. The searing pain it elicited in her chest centered her and brought her back to the real moment.
As she let her breath out slowly and tried to return to a normal cadence, she thanked her lucky stars that it hadn’t triggered a panic attack. The taste of bile was gone but it had been replaced by a tangy metallic one. Her fingers came away red when she pressed them to her lips. Bee called out her name again, and Abigail peered through the shelves at the woman, who was carefully picking her way across the floor.
“I’m fine, Bee,” she called out, her voice shakey, “Sorry, I kind of spaced.”
The truth was that she wasn’t entirely sure how long her mental obstacle course had taken, but on the balance of probability, Bee was unlikely to have taken more than thirty seconds to give up on shouting to her and crossing the floor.
“I don’t believe you!” Bee called back in a singsong voice. “What the hell, Abby?”
She slipped between the two shelves and joined Abigail where she was standing.
“I’m sorry,” Abigail said again, “I just, you know, uh…”
Bee stared back at her. She knew some things about Abigail’s medical history but, as she often did, Abigail had tried to minimize the gory details.
“I just had a bit of a flashback,” she explained. “Amnesia doesn’t really work like on TV. It’s unpredictable especially when there’s trauma involved and being here triggered a memory. Sometimes strong memories, when they come back, feel very… current. This is just a theory but I think it’s something like a PTSD crossover.”
Nodding slowly, Bee held out her water bottle, “right… water?”
Abigail smiled her thanks and took the bottle, sipping slowly.
“Can we, uh…?”
“Go? Yeah, absolutely,” Bee said.
They’d made it all the way into the car and out onto the road before Bee’s obvious curiosity won out.
“Can… can I ask what the memory was? You seemed… really upset.”
Abigail let the question hang in the air for a moment, always intending to answer but unsure how to do so without sounding completely insane.
“Well,” she started, pausing while Bee navigated a tricky turn, “um… it’s going to sound like not very much but I remembered being there, with Jacob.”
“Givens?” Bee asked. “Why were you in there?”
Shrugging, Abigail fiddled with the zip on her purse, “I don’t know, I really thought I’d never been there before when you mentioned going and poking around. I remember being behind those shelves. Hiding.”
She looked over at Bee, trying to gauge a reaction, but she was busy watching the road.
“You guys were dating, right? Maybe you were looking for somewhere to hook up?”
Jacob’s panicked shout ran through her mind, “Abby!! Run!!”
An involuntary shudder ran through her.
“No,” she said firmly, “that’s not it. I remember being scared, like, properly scared, not worried about being in trouble—and I think I was sick, at some point.”
“Had you been drinking?” Bee asked, then continued when Abigail shook her head, “Were drugs your thing?”
“No, I mean plenty of people smoked weed but it was never really that attractive to me,” Abigail replied.
Bee looked uncomfortable. “Maybe you were, you know, looking for a place to just make out or whatever and… did Jacob ever get…? I mean, you’ve said before that his dad could be violent. Was Jacob like that at all?”
Shaking her head, Abigail rushed to answer, “No, no, absolutely not. I can see why you might worry about that, but no. Not ever.”
They sat quietly for the rest of the drive and when they finally pulled up outside Abigail’s house, Bee turned to look at her seriously.
“I feel like you should have someone around for a bit…”
Despite the prickle of annoyance it triggered in Abigail, she knew Bee wasn’t wrong.
“I’m going to go over my old notebook. I wrote some stuff down when I was here last time,” Abigail said, opening the car door. “You can join me if you like.”
Bee hurriedly followed her out of the car and towards the house, “sure, of course.”
After checking her watch at the door, she added, “Cleo is coming for dinner in a few hours, Byron will be here after that.”
Abigail watched Bee for a reaction out of the corner of her eye but there wasn’t one. Maybe she had been wrong about them having dated or disliking each other, but she was so sure Byron made himself scarce every time Bee was around…
“I have to leave about an hour before the truck will open at the hospital,” Bee replied as they made their way through the house and into the kitchen.
Indicating the document box that was open on the table, Abigail set about making tea for them both.
“There’s not much, just an account of what I could remember,” Abigail said, “the doctors always hedged their bets by saying it was all only a guess. I did hit my head, it was quite bad, but they wouldn’t expect an impact that caused that kind of damage to be severe enough to cause brain damage. We were found in about three feet of water. It filled the car to my waist, but they couldn’t see any signs I’d been under the water. Conclusion—head bang plus trauma of being trapped in the water equaled amnesia.”
She turned to ask Bee if she wanted sugar but stopped as she took in the look on Bee’s face.
“What?”
“It’s just… you’re so calm about it,” Bee said, “it’s—”
“Disconcerting? I know.”
“No, actually, it’s kind of a relief to meet someone who reacts the same way as me,” Bee said, smiling, “it’s remarkable how quickly talking about stuff like this becomes routine.”
That gave Abigail pause for a moment, what was Bee referring to?
“Yeah…” she said, hoping Bee would elaborate, and only continuing when she didn’t, “I guess, I dunno. The medical stuff is easy. I repeat it a lot to a lot of doctors. The problem with it is that I’ve been told a thousand times that I can’t really rely on my brain, and I know I can’t. The only thing I feel I can remember from that night is being in the back seat of a car and sinking into deep water—but we crashed into a pond that wasn’t deep enough to cover the car, let alone sink…”
Abigail ran her forefinger gingerly down the scar on the back of her neck.
“So, they reckon it’s a power of suggestion thing? You, what, invented it to explain the trauma?” Bee asked.
“Kind of, yeah,” Abigail said, “and I’m worried that I did the same thing today… what if being somewhere that I know all this criminal stuff happened, while looking into the crash… what if I just imagined it?”
Bee shook her head and answered carefully. “I understand that… but you said these flashbacks are memories, that it’s like that when a memory comes back to you, right?”
Abigail nodded, “Sure, but…”
“If those feelings only happen when memories come back, and those feelings happened today, I’m going to put my money on it being a memory.”
There was a sinking, twisting feeling in Abigail”s stomach as she replied, “I actually agree, but, if I’m honest, what I remembered today? It scares me.”