“I am grateful to you and the sisters. If you will give me your name and an address, I’ll send you money…payment for your services and—”
“We do not want your money. We want you to sit.”
“If you could direct me to the train station—”
“There is no train station,” the Mother Superior snapped. “Now, sit.”
“I can’t sit down! I have to leave! Now!” I looked around the small, crowded room. I was wearing a cotton nightgown that wasn’t my own, and I clutched at it with bloody fingers. “I need my clothes and shoes, please.”
“You don’t have any shoes,” Mary said. “When we found you, you were barefoot.”
I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I just looked at the innocent faces and tried to ignore the evil that might have followed me to their door.
“I need to leave,” I said slowly, searching the Mother Superior’s eyes. “It would be best if I left…now.”
“Impossible,” the Mother Superior said, then turned to the sisters. “Wenn das Mädchen denkt daß wir sie in den Schnee rausgehen lassen würden, dann ist sie verrückt.”
My hands shook. My lips quivered. I know how I must have looked, because my new friend, Mary, was reaching for me, easing closer. “Don’t you go worrying, now. You aren’t in any trouble. The Mother Superior just said—”
“Snow.” I pulled aside a curtain, looked out on a vast expanse of white, and whispered against the frosty glass, “She said snow.”
“Oh, that’s nothing.” Mary took the curtain from me, sliding it back to block the chill. “These parts of the Alps are very high, you see. And, well, we’ve just had a bit of an early spell.”
I jerked away from the window. “How early?” I asked, silently chanting to myself, It is June. It is June. It is—
“Tomorrow is the first of October.”
“I…I think I’m going to be sick.”
Mary grabbed me by the arm and helped me limp down the hall, past crucifixes and frosty windows to a bathroom with a cold stone floor.
I retched, but my stomach was empty except for the glass of water, my throat filled with nothing but sand. And still I heaved, throwing up the bile and acid that seemed to be eating away at my core.
When I closed my eyes, my head felt like a top, spinning in a place without gravity. When I finally pulled myself to my feet and leaned against the bathroom sink, a light flickered on, and I found myself staring into a face I totally didn’t know. I would have jumped if I’d had the strength, but as it was, all I could do was lean closer.
My hair had been shoulder length and dishwater blond my whole life, but right then it was a little past my ears and as black as night. I pulled the nightgown over my head, felt my hair stand on end from the static, and stared at a body I no longer knew.
My ribs showed through my skin. My legs seemed longer, leaner. Bruises covered my knees. Red welts circled my wrists. Thick bandages covered most of one arm. But it all paled in comparison to the knot on the side of my head. I touched it gently, and the pain was so sharp that I thought I would be sick again, so I gripped the sink, leaned close to the mirror, and stared at the stranger in my skin.
“What did you do?”
Everything in my training told me that this was not the time to panic. I had to think, to plan. I thought of all the places I could go, but my mind drifted, wondering about the places I had been. When I moved, the pain shot through one ankle and up my leg, and I knew I would have a hard time running off that mountain.
“Here, here,” Mary said, pressing a cool rag to my head. She brought a cup to my lips, made me drink, and then I whispered, “Why did you call me Gillian?”
“It was what you kept saying, over and over,” she said. Her Irish accent seemed thicker in the small space. “Why? Isn’t that your name?”
“No. I’m Cammie. Gilly is the name of…my sister.”
“I see.”
My mind swirled with the options of the things I should and shouldn’t do until it finally settled on the only question that mattered.
“Mary, is there a telephone?”
Mary nodded. “The Mother Superior bought a satellite phone last summer.”
Summer.