Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,13

Squeezing the phone between chin and shoulder, she unlocked the hatchback and dropped the pile of clothing into the car. Then she stood there, hip thrown out. As Diana watched, Ashley ran her fingers through her hair, shot a few heated words into the phone, and snapped it shut. Then gave the world at large the finger. A few moments later, she drove off.

Sure, Ashley would return the new outfit. Just like she’d returned the snakeskin miniskirt Diana had picked up at a secondhand store when she was living with Daniel in New Hampshire. By the time Diana discovered it in Ashley’s closet, Ashley had “forgotten” that it wasn’t hers.

Too late, Diana noticed that Ashley had left her laptop, half hidden behind the base of the coatrack. At least that guaranteed she would be back sooner rather than later.

Diana returned to her desk. There was a new message from her in-world friend PWNED. This one was marked with a little red flag.

PWNED: nu doc—2G2B tru

She had no idea what the person behind PWNED—a term that computer gamers used to mean beaten—looked like, but the avatar was a sexy platinum blonde who moved with the grace of a gazelle and liked to end her messages with God is just an abbreviation for goddess. From asides PWNED had dropped, Diana gathered that she lived near Boston. Her QuackPatrol blog was infamous for outing so-called doctors and health-care gurus who preyed on the desperate.

Diana opened the attachment. Results within 7 days, it began. Apparently Dr. Grande in Sedona, Arizona, assessed patients through a telephone consult and a questionnaire. His revolutionary regimen to cure autism involved a weeklong liquid diet combined with six weeks of chelation therapy. Certainly sounded too good to be true.

Diana shot back a response.

Let’s nail him.

She spent the next hour researching chelation therapy. There were boatloads of patient “testimonials” but no hard science. She checked Dr. Grande’s financial ties and found that all of his clinics were owned by a corporation with headquarters in Ukraine.

When she finished up, she e-mailed PWNED a summary of what she’d discovered. A message came back less than a minute later.

PWNED: ^5

Diana high-fived the monitor back. She realized, as she glanced at the time in the corner of her screen, that it had been over two hours since she last checked her security systems. That was progress in her quest to hold paranoia at bay.

Video from the camera anchored over her front door showed nothing more than a cardinal perched on her white picket fence. Her firewall had only logged the usual pinging from drones in the outside world.

She remembered the messages from GROB. She scrolled down to find them. The first one that had come hours earlier began:

GROB: Got time to talk?

Chapter Seven

Diana was mortified that just reading GROB’s message set her tingling. He’d first contacted her months earlier in response to a question she’d posted in a forum for people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d had problems of his own to deal with, though he’d never told her what they were and she’d never told him hers.

The last time they’d “talked,” she’d shared with him the little forays she’d made—walks into her own backyard and several times around the block—and her determination to return to the real world. He’d written her back:

Small victories here, too. Today I drove to the bank and got out of the car instead of using the drive-up window. Lived to tell. World expands each day. When you are ready to take the plunge, we’ll sit on a beach. Drink a toast. Tell ghost stories and scare each other to death. (Ha Ha!) Build a bonfire and sleep out under the stars.

Diana could almost smell the wood fire, burned down to smoldering coals. It reminded her of the time that she and Daniel had camped in the Grand Tetons. They’d lain twined together in a double sleeping bag, looking up, the sky so close that Diana had felt as if she could poke Jupiter and run her fingers through the Milky Way.

That sleeping bag was one of many things that she’d simply left behind after Daniel died, fifteen months, one week, and three days ago—she knew without having to check the calendar. They had been living in a weather-beaten farmhouse and working in a converted railway container tucked into a ramshackle barn. With their nearest neighbor miles away, the greatest danger was getting mistaken for a deer during hunting season. They’d been major players in the hackers’ underground, and