he might get desperate.”
“Can you prove that he’s behind this attack on you?”
“I can’t prove shit. Why do you think that I was still hanging around the hospital after Beth got away?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you or your motives.”
“Then get me out of here, and you might find out.” He added firmly, “Clothes.”
“Why should we help you?” Joe asked. “What if you split the minute we get you out of here?”
“You take the risk. Because if you don’t, I’ll find a way to get out of here on my own. I’ve wriggled my way out of tight places before.”
“Not looking like a mummy from a grade-B movie.” Joe hesitated, then turned away. “You’d better be worth the trouble. I’ll see if I can float around the area and grab some scrubs.”
“You expect us to smuggle you out of here?” Eve asked Newell as Joe left the room.
“Yes.” He sat up in bed. “Because you want me to talk about Beth Avery, and I won’t do it until you spring me from this place. Why not do what I need? You must know that woman in the hospital they’re calling Beth Avery is a phony. So you must know there’s something nasty going on.”
“I have suspicions,” she said. “Were you the one who helped Beth hide the pills in her mattress?”
“You found out about that? Yes. I had to do it myself for the first couple weeks. After that, she had the clarity to help me hide them.”
“Was it Drogan who tried to kill her that night?”
“I didn’t know his name. Just that he was hired to do the job. But from things he said while he was working on me tonight, I’m sure that he was the one. He was angry with her. He expected a victim, and she was strong enough to fight him.” He smiled. “Hell, she was strong enough to beat him.”
And he was proud of her, Eve realized. It mattered to him that Beth was no longer the drugged, mindless creature she had been told about. The knowledge brought a rush of warmth toward him. “She was bedridden, wasn’t she? I would have thought that her muscles would have been too weak to function after all those years.”
“She wasn’t in bed all that time. It depended on what doctor was on Pierce’s favored list. From what I can glean from her medical history during most of her stay, the orders were to keep her fit and well exercised.”
“That sounds like training a horse.”
“Except they don’t keep a horse drugged and under hypnosis for the majority of their waking hours.”
“Hypnosis?”
“She had regular sessions with Pierce and an expert from Berlin from the moment she arrived here in Santa Barbara.”
“Some kind of therapy?”
“You might call it that. I understand the expert from Berlin was a Dr. Hans Gelber who specialized in erasing the damaging memories of vets who suffered trauma during wartime. I thought it curious that Pierce thought that a skiing accident would cause that serious a trauma.”
Memory erasure. She shuddered at the thought. Losing a part of your life as if it had never been. “How do you know all this?”
“I don’t know nearly enough.” His gaze narrowed on her face. “But evidently more than you. What are you doing nosing around here? What’s Beth Avery to you? You said you didn’t know her.”
“I don’t. I’ve never met her.” She paused. “But she’s my sister.”
Newell went still. “I didn’t know she had a sister. No one told me.” He shook his head. “Beth would have told me.”
Eve’s lips twisted. “We appear to be in the same boat. No one told me either until she disappeared. My mother had to sign papers that Beth’s birth was not to be disclosed. And I doubt if Beth knew about me. My mother kept her word. Beth belonged to the Averys and not to her.”
“Interesting.” His gaze focused on her face. “You don’t look like her.”
“No. But there’s a slight family resemblance.” Bonnie’s curly hair that was so like that of Beth in the photo. “And I’m sure that she looks more like her father. He was very good-looking, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Beth said he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen. She only saw him a few times a year, but she loved him. She still loves him.” He was carefully taking off the bandages on his face and neck. “The bastard never visited her since she came to that hospital.”
“What are you