Shadow Woman A Novel Page 0,41
comfort in the familiar but because for now she sensed being normal was critical to her well-being.
She left on schedule and took her normal route to work. Every so often she’d check her rearview mirror, but the rush-hour traffic was so chaotic, with vehicles dodging back and forth in the lanes, jockeying for position, that she could barely keep track of who was directly behind her at any given time. There were a lot of similar cars and SUVs, too; a vehicle would seem familiar and she’d try to watch it, only to notice a moment or two later that, wait, there was another one that was identical in color, but the headlights were a little different. And she couldn’t constantly watch the mirror and drive at the same time, unless she wanted to rear-end someone. In the end, she gave up and simply concentrated on getting to work.
At the office, she felt a little more secure. She smiled at the guard as she paused to sign in. Her ID card was clipped to a lanyard that she wore around her neck; the guard knew her, of course, but the procedure was strictly enforced. Entry into the building was controlled, and everyone had to check in at the security desk.
She got into the elevator with several other people and punched in the code that would make the elevator stop on the floor where Becker Investments was housed. The car began rising, the motor and cables whining. The elevator-code thing was more for impressing clients than anything else. After all, the stairwells were still free access, and had to be because of fire codes. Still, she had walls and people around her, and whatever was going on didn’t seem to warrant an entire assault team roping down from the top of the building.
Headache.
Willing herself not to make a sound, not to collapse on the floor, she stared hard at the abstract patterned blouse the woman in front of her was wearing. The pattern was wild but the colors were kind of muted, in grays and creams and blues, which made a nice mix.
Okay, good. Concentrating on the pattern worked as well as anything else, and she hadn’t had to resort to humming.
She got off on her floor. The receptionist was just arriving too, emerging from another elevator car, and together they walked down the carpeted hallway. “Good morning, how are you?” the receptionist said. Her name was Rae; she was pretty and maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Lizette got a glimpse of the book she was carrying: a textbook on marketing. Evidently, Rae was going to school at night, with an eye on a different field of work. Lizette had done her share of receptionist work when she’d been straight out of college, as well as waitressing. Strange, but she’d take waitressing over being a receptionist any day. It was much harder work, but at least she’d been moving, and every day had been different even though most of the customers had been regulars.
If she’d still been in school, it might have been a different story; she might have needed a quieter job, so she could get in some studying.
Then she thought back to the energetic kid she’d been. No, she would still have picked waitressing. She’d even liked the challenge of keeping certain customers under control.
Those memories, she noticed, didn’t trigger any kind of reaction. They were normal memories. But now she knew she could add assault teams, and roping down the outside of buildings, to her list of avenues to explore, along with Chicago. Evidently she’d really been into some derring-do kind of stuff.
Deep down, she felt a sense of rightness. Whatever she’d done, wherever she’d been, she hadn’t been content to sit in an office building every day.
Almost as soon as she stored her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk, Diana stuck her head around the cubicle wall. “Hi! Still feeling okay? I meant to call you this weekend, but things went nuts with the kids. I’d think about calling you, then Armageddon would break out and it would slip my mind, and I’d remember again after we’d already gone to bed.”
Diana’s kids were four and five years of age, a boy and a girl, and both of them seemingly hell-bent on breaking their necks before first grade. Having been around them before, Lizette completely understood.
“I’m still getting headaches, but it’s more off than on.” She said that to give herself some cover in case she had one