Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,45
her wheelchair easily navigating the steps down to the sidewalk and off the curb. Pam’s silver van was parked in a handicapped spot in front of the building. She used a remote to open the van’s door. A platform slid out and Pam rolled onto it and waited for it to rise. When it was level with the van, she rolled inside and positioned her chair where the driver’s seat had been removed.
The passenger door slid open and Diana got in, holding Daniel’s walking stick. She sat back, barely aware of the door sliding shut, of Pam whirring up and back, positioning the wheelchair and locking it in behind the steering wheel. The van was so much like the one Diana had been driving home from college when she had her first full-blown panic attack. So high off the ground, the windshield so close to the car in front of them. That first time, she’d been ambushed. This time she saw it coming.
Pam started the van and, using one of the hand controls attached to the steering wheel to accelerate, pulled out into traffic. Diana grasped the door. Her heart sped and the walls of the van threatened to fold in on her, but a part of her seemed to remain on the outside, watching and monitoring her response, observing pedestrians darting across the streets or making their way up and down the sidewalks. That detachment—it was her pill doing its work.
“Take your time. Control it,” Pam said as she crossed over the highway and into downtown Boston.
Diana looked over at her, startled. She understood.
Pam rolled down the windows on both sides of the van and cold air filled the interior. “Just breathe.”
Diana sat back. The vise that gripped her slowly loosened.
Minutes later, Pam parked the van in a handicapped spot alongside Trinity Church, its steps and arched front now in deep morning shadow, its central tower and two side towers looming overhead.
Only about a dozen pedestrians were in Copley Square. Like a holographic image, Diana envisioned Ashley standing there in the middle of the plaza, barely fifty feet from where they’d parked, wearing the same clothes Diana had on now and offering a cell-phone salute to the Fairmont Copley.
Across the street was the pillared front of the library where the improv participants had assembled. Behind her was the Copley Plaza Hotel, where Superman had been launched from a top-floor window.
“Spontaneous Combustion is in that building over there,” Pam said, pointing past the plaza, across Boylston. Diana recognized the building with the decorative ironwork at the roofline. “You ready?”
Pam waited until Diana nodded before rolling up the windows and opening the van doors. Holding Daniel’s walking stick, Diana got out. She raised her jacket collar and folded her arms. With Pam rolling along beside her, Diana walked to the spot in the center of the plaza where Ashley had stood. She was right here. Diana looked around, envisioning what it had been like with the plaza crowded with pedestrians. She looked across the street and imagined a glowering Aaron Pritchard, standing at the light watching her. But then what happened?
The offices of Spontaneous Combustion were across the street, on the top floor of a building tucked between a CVS and a Starbucks. Eddie, who’d talked to her on the phone, set up Diana and Pam in a small, windowless video editing room. The walls were painted black, and three computer monitors were set on a shelf over a worktable with a single keyboard and mouse and banks of control panels. Eddie showed them the basics of how to work the system and left them to it.
There were six video files. The first one started with Eddie, standing on the library steps, wearing a director’s cap and addressing the crowd through a bullhorn. The camera stayed with him. Diana slowed to half speed whenever the camera zoomed out to take in any of the crowd.
A few minutes in, Diana thought she spotted Ashley. She paused the video and backed up. Sure enough, there she was, standing at the back of the crowd listening to the director’s instructions.
Diana replayed the video, more slowly. The camera caught Ashley throwing a look behind her, then stepping into the crowd and getting swallowed up. Diana backed up again and froze the screen on Ashley’s face as she looked over her shoulder and in the direction of the camera. She zoomed in.
“A little blurry, but what do you make of that expression?” Pam asked.