Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,65

my driver’s license. I was so raw and swollen, no one would have believed that the face on it was mine. Water had gotten under the laminate, and the name, address—most of the print on the license was illegible.

“I spent weeks in the hospital, months in rehab.” He glanced down at her. “I started to walk again, but still I didn’t know who I was or where I’d been. I kept coming back to that driver’s license, holding it up to the light, examining it, trying to decipher the name. I had to guess at some of the letters. I Googled every possible permutation until finally I found my own death notice. I’d been dead for six months. It felt unreal.

“I tried to find out more about myself. Finally I found that ridiculous photograph of the three of us all dressed up for Halloween. Remember?”

Diana did. They’d started out thinking they’d go as the Three Musketeers and ended up as the Three Stooges. As Larry, Daniel had worn a flesh-colored bathing cap with teased-out steel wool glued around the sides and back. Jake had gotten a buzz cut so he could go as Curly. Diana as Moe wore a black wig with bangs down to the bridge of her nose. She’d practiced that sour, disgruntled Moe expression, fueled by a pugnacious chin. Daniel and Jake had drilled her on the routines, and for one drunken night, she’d completely gotten into what they found so hilarious about the slapstick shtick.

She’d broken down after that and actually watched some of the Three Stooges shorts. Soon she’d had enough. But it made her realize that for all the violence the knuckleheads inflicted on one another, they shared a genuine affection.

Daniel shifted Diana off his lap and helped her to her feet. Then he sat in one of the rolling office chairs. “Did we have a great time or what?” He tilted the chair back, crossing his arms and grinning at her. The familiarity of the pose took her breath away. “That photo of us, goofing around like that—it was the trigger. After that, things started coming back to me. Know what I remembered first? Before my parents, before my hometown, before anything else I remembered Toro, the black Lab we had when I was a kid. Memory’s weird.

“Soon, more and more memories came back. But it was months before I could even think about what I was going to do next. By then, I’d started to remember what happened.”

He went on, but Diana barely listened. Pick, pick . . . That was the sound she’d heard as she and Jake had waited on the icy ledge, their climbing ropes coiled on the ground. She’d tried to peer over the edge, but the wind had buffeted her, eager to bite any part of her that was exposed. She’d slipped her balaclava back on, crouched, and listened as Daniel sank his picks into the ice and drove in one crampon then another. She’d imagined him pushing and pulling his way up.

Then a moment of utter silence. She’d thought, He’s reached the second screw hold as she waited for the sound of his ax and a reassuring shout that he was on the move again. Instead there had been a cry and a sickening thud.

Diana had scrambled to the edge of the outcropping, desperate to see what had happened and almost slipping over herself. Daniel’s howl of despair had grown alternately fainter and louder as it bounced off frozen rock.

“Daniel!” Diana had screamed, the wind flinging the words back into her face.

Frantically, arm over arm, Jake had hauled up the climbing rope. From the end dangled an empty safety harness.

Afterward, after the search party returned with only his dented helmet, everyone had asked how this could have happened to an experienced climber. Theoretically it was impossible to fall out of a properly rigged safety harness. But it was even more impossible to survive the kind of fall Daniel would have taken.

She stared up the wall of the silo to the ledge on which Daniel had perched. He must have made the descent using the rebars. No ropes, no climbing harness. A single misstep would have been his last.

“Were you free climbing then too?” she asked, interrupting him. “Is that how you fell? Is that why you insisted on coming up last?”

He gave her a long look. “It was the Eiger.” He spread his hands, that bad-boy charm still working for him. “How could I do it