Beautiful Stranger

THE THUMP WAS HIS first indication something was wrong.

After completing the long drive from Thornwood back home, Josh pulled into his garage, more than ready to change out of his suit and grab some food. He stepped on the brake. The car lurched to a stop.

And a definitive thump resounded from the trunk.

He froze, his weariness after the long day forgotten. An uneasy suspicion raised the hair at the back of his neck.

The trunk was supposed to be empty. The thump indicated it wasn’t. Something was in there, something fairly sizeable from the sound of it.

Had someone put something in the trunk? He couldn’t imagine why. An animal might have climbed in, except he didn’t know how any creature would have managed it.

That left a person. He hadn’t stepped away from the car when he’d stopped for gas on the way back. The only place where he could have picked up a stowaway was Thornwood.

Josh quickly considered his options. Sitting in the car wasn’t one of them. It occurred to him that anything—or anyone—in the trunk could get into the car through the backseat, and vice versa, which was the only way anyone could have gained access to the trunk in the first place. He’d already sat there long enough to raise suspicions in the mind of any unwanted passenger that he was onto them.

He shifted the vehicle into park and shut off the engine, then hit the remote control to close the garage door before climbing out of the car. If there was someone in the trunk, particularly someone from Thornwood, he didn’t want them to get away. He was in enough trouble without setting a mental patient loose.

Once outside the car, he flipped the switch next to the kitchen door to keep the garage light on, not about to have it go out and leave him in the dark with whomever might be in there. He reached for the heavy wrench he’d left sitting next to the step after working on the leaky kitchen sink. The weight of it felt good in his hand. There was no telling if he’d need it, but he wasn’t about to take any chances.

He moved to the back of the vehicle. Lifting the wrench above his head, he braced himself, then slid the key in the lock and threw the trunk open.

A pair of familiar brown eyes—wide and gaping with familiar terror—stared back at him.

He barely had time to react to his discovery when the woman lunged forward. Getting out of the trunk wasn’t exactly the easiest proposition with her body practically curled into the fetal position. She somehow managed it, albeit without much grace, heaving herself out of the enclosed space and landing on the floor in front of him.

He took a step back out of her way, but didn’t stop her. He hadn’t wanted anybody in his trunk to begin with. He wasn’t going to argue with her vacating it.

Once on her own two feet, she stood before him, her chest heaving, her body tense and fidgety. Her eyes darted every which way, clearly seeking an escape. He saw the moment she realized that, with the garage door closed, the only exits were the two doors in the near back corner of the garage—one leading outside, one into the house—and he was standing between her and the door.

Her eyes narrowed a fraction as her gaze shot up and down his body. Probably gauging her chances of rushing him and getting around him. From the way her lips thinned and she swallowed hard, she must have decided they weren’t good.

“Calm down,” he said in his most soothing tone, the one that had been known to settle down even the most terrified child in the E.R. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

In response, her eyes flicked to the wrench he still held aloft.

He slowly lowered it to his side, keeping himself on alert to defend himself if necessary. Not that he would probably need the wrench for that. Viewing her in a standing position for the first time, he could see that she was no more than five-six at the most, and thin. He had more than half a foot and a hundred pounds on her, easy. But he knew nothing about this woman or why she’d been at Thornwood, or what she was capable of. After all, the last time he’d seen her, she’d seemed completely unaware of her surroundings, with drool running down her face.

Only that brief moment when their eyes met had indicated she was lucid—and scared. The fear was still there, along with a fierce determination, and this time there was no doubting she was fully cognizant. He suspected if he dropped the wrench, she’d be on him in a heartbeat, scratching and clawing and kneeing, in her desperation to get away. He would defend himself if he had to, but he really didn’t want to hurt her.

He tried the soothing tone again. “Take it easy. Let’s both take a breath and see if we can’t talk for a second.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she shot back. Her voice was hoarse as though from disuse, yet calm despite her obvious tension. “Look, you don’t have to get involved. Just let me go and you can forget you even saw me.”

“It’s not that simple. I have to believe it’s not going to take the folks back at Thornwood long to figure out that you’re gone and, when they don’t find you on the grounds, start contacting anyone who left at roughly the time you disappeared.”

“All you have to do is tell them you don’t know anything about me, and you’re off the hook.”

“I don’t think I can do that.”

A knowing gleam entered her straightforward gaze, and her mouth twisted with bitterness. “Because you don’t want to be held responsible for letting a crazy person loose on the streets, right?”

“Are you crazy?” he said mildly.

He carefully watched her reaction. There was none of the anger or outrage he might have expected, merely what seemed like resignation. Interesting. “No.” She lifted her hand against the skepticism she must have anticipated would greet the comment. “I know that’s probably what all the mental patients say. But I’m not.”

“All right,” he said, privately reserving judgment. “I’m Josh, by the way. Josh Bennett. And you are?” he prodded when she said nothing.

She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes considering. He didn’t know what she saw, but he suspected he hadn’t been examined this thoroughly on his last credit check.

“Claire,” she said finally.

She didn’t elaborate further. He figured it wasn’t worth pushing the point. “Okay, Claire. Why don’t you tell me why you were at Thornwood?”

She sighed, the sound so full of weariness it tugged at something inside him. “I don’t know. Four months ago I woke up there with no idea how I’d gotten there. This Dr. Emmons told me I’d suffered a mental breakdown. He didn’t get into specifics, saying there was time for that later, and when I demanded answers, he just gave me this patronizing look, like I was a misbehaving child.” She arched a brow, her expression turning wry. “Or a crazy person, I suppose. He just said they would take good care of me.” She practically snorted at that. “The next thing I knew, they were sticking a needle in my arm and I was knocked out.”

“What about the next time you saw him? Did he tell you more then?”

“I never saw him again. I was in and out of consciousness for the first month—out of it, mostly. Anytime anyone noticed that I was aware again, they’d bring out the needles. It didn’t take me long to figure out if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a drug-induced haze, I couldn’t let them know when the drugs wore off.”

“So when I saw you sitting on the veranda this afternoon, you were pretending, with the drooling and all?”

She hesitated before answering, as if not sure how much to admit. “I have been for the past few months. Not all the time. They were still drugging me, of course, though I think they were lowering the dosage. Or maybe I was getting used to the drugs. Either way, I gradually started to be more aware. I just never let them see when I wasn’t out of it anymore.”

“And no one on staff noticed that you were pretending for, what, three months?”

In spite of his best efforts, he couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of his voice. It was clear she hadn’t failed to notice.

“As long as I wasn’t causing trouble, no one paid too much attention to me. I was never examined by a doctor while I was conscious, and it was obvious the nurses and orderlies were only there to cash a check. They did what was necessary to provide a basic level of care, but otherwise none of them gave me a second glance. I was basically invisible.”

He couldn’t help frowning. The image she painted wasn’t the same Thornwood he’d heard wonderful things about, or the one he’d visited that afternoon. The place seemed a marvel of efficiency.

But that feeling he’d had when he was there, that something was somehow off about the place, nagged at him in a way that couldn’t be attributed to a forbidding exterior. It wouldn’t be the first case of something being too perfect to be believed, or at the very least, not all it seemed.

“Even so, you wouldn’t have been admitted for no reason.”

“But maybe for the right price.”

“What are you saying? That they were paid to admit you?”

“And keep me there. Think about it. Why else would they fail to explain exactly why I’d been brought there? Why keep me drugged for months rather than offer any kind of therapy or professional treatment?”

“But who would do that? And why?”

She paused, her gaze sharpening. “Can I trust you to keep this conversation between the two of us?”

“You mean doctor/patient privilege? I’m not your doctor.”

“Nor do I want you to be. I just want to know you won’t repeat what I’m going to tell you.”