Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,12

hit a key, and ratcheted and dinged when the return key was pressed. A built-in time delay guaranteed that the program didn’t kick in until the middle of a day Diana called in sick so she wouldn’t be suspected.

Diana’s artistic talent had been recruited to forge Miss Brown’s signature on a requisition for a massage table and portable Jacuzzi to be delivered to President McCafferty’s office.

Then, a few months before the end of that year, there’d been an uproar when college administrators noticed that a bunch of the student names on transcripts had been altered. Elvis Pretzel and Wile E. Coyote were not students at the college. Diana’s name had been changed to Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man’s girlfriend.

No one took Miss Brown seriously when she voiced her suspicion that Diana and her oddball friends had something to do with it.

Diana began her senior year but she never graduated. That October her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Ashley was still in high school and their father was long gone. So Diana had cleaned out her dorm room and loaded boxes into a borrowed Dodge van and headed home. She hadn’t known whether to pack her books or throw them away. A brutal regimen of chemo and radiation therapy lay ahead, and Diana had no inkling of just how tough and resilient her mother would turn out to be.

The van’s driver’s seat was so high above the road and so close to the front bumper that Diana felt unnerved behind the wheel. On the drive home, sometime after midnight on Route 24, somewhere in the middle of Bridgewater thirty miles south of home, she’d started to feel as if the car was driving itself.

Her heart surged, and there was a sharp pain in her chest. She felt smothered, as if the air in the car had no oxygen. She gripped the wheel, trying to keep the van steady and gasping for breath. It was all she could do to keep the steering wheel from veering right and, as she could see clearly in her mind’s eye, the van careening into the woods.

Was this a heart attack? It couldn’t be. She wasn’t allowed to be sick. Her mother needed her. Ashley needed her.

Finally she managed to pull the car over into the breakdown lane and stop. She clawed at the window and cranked it open. The air rushing in didn’t help. Instead, impenetrable darkness seemed to fold in around her.

For what felt like hours, she sat hunched over the steering wheel, gasping and sweating, unable to move, unable to get out of the car and find the cell phone she’d stupidly packed in a satchel and thrown in the trunk.

Had that been her first panic attack? Probably. But when she was in therapy later, she remembered some earlier moments, like tremors foreshadowing an earthquake. There was the time when she was fifteen supposedly watching Ashley swimming at Wollaston Beach. She’d turned her attention away as a couple of cute boys from her high school sauntered by, and when she looked back, she could no longer see Ashley’s head bobbing in the waves. That moment was frozen in time, but she had no memory of throwing herself into the water, of swimming out to where she’d last seen her sister, only to hear Ashley calling to her from the shore and waving Popsicles that by then were dripping down her arms.

The panic attacks had increased through her mother’s illness. After her mother’s recovery, they’d abated so completely that at times Diana was convinced that she’d only imagined them. After Daniel’s death, they’d returned full force.

Her house, and in particular her office, where she now sat, had become her refuge. As long as she stayed inside and took her medication, she was safe from ambush. Just in case, she had Daniel’s driftwood to calm her. She slid it back into the stand by her desk. Along with his ashes, it was the only thing of his that she had left.

Diana returned to the living room. Ashley had done what she’d threatened: picked up all the stray bits of garbage, straightened piles, and carried away dirty dishes. Only the UPS box remained in the middle of the floor. The minute Diana picked it up she realized it was empty. Inside there was only tissue paper, a whiff of licorice, and a note.

Just borrowing them for tonight.

Promise.

xx oo

Diana lifted the shade and looked out the window. Ashley was standing by her car talking on her cell phone.