Before I Wake Read Online Free PDF Page A

Cowboy and The Birds .
    Favorite music: the Pogues, the Waterboys, Neil Young. She used to know all the words to “Heart of Gold” and “Fairytale of New York.”
    He knew about childhood injuries like the broken arm she’d gotten while ice-skating on the pond behind her farmhouse. How close she’d been to her grandmother, and how her grandmother’s death had sent her into a deep depression that had lasted over a year.
    Davis liked both cats and dogs, but was more of a dog person. She’d had a black dog named Zeke that had slept on the end of her bed and kept her company when she had chicken pox. The chicken pox was caught at Sunday school from a girl named Molly. Molly’s mother had claimed her daughter was no longer contagious, but she’d arrived in the church basement covered with scabs and smelling of fever. While Molly was in the basement passing the infection around, her mother was caught screwing a guy in the bathroom of a nearby gas station.
    Ah, nothing like small-town living.
    At one time, Davis could run like hell. She’d won high school track team long-distance awards. She’d always been athletic, and it made sense that she would choose a sport and event like long distance that relied more on the individual than a team. No basketball or volleyball in her history. Group sports wouldn’t have appealed to Arden Davis then or now.
    He had copies of poems she’d written during times of duress and loss.
    First boyfriend. Second and third boyfriends. When and where she’d lost her virginity. A date rape in college.
    Copies of the diaries she’d kept on and off through junior high, high school, and a little bit of college. Last December’s murders that had led to her present decline.
    And then volunteering to be bleached.
    She was either extremely gutsy or extremely desperate. Probably a little of both.
    If Fury could have been selective, there were things in his past he would have liked to erase. But you couldn’t choose what to take out and what to leave in—although he had a theory that Arden Davis’s bleaching had something to do with her own subliminal desire to forget, like amnesia brought on by shock and trauma.
    She’d forgotten what and who she’d wanted to forget—with a sprinkling of a few additional holes.
    His briefcase held photographs of Arden, along with her family, friends, associates, pets—some of the visuals courtesy of the FBI.
    He sifted through the photos.
    Birthday shots. A photo taken in the front yard of her rural Ohio home, a two-story white farmhouse, an immaculately clean John Deere tractor in the background. Arden at age one wearing a ruffly dress with matching socks. Such a green, direct gaze for such a young child.
    Arden at age thirteen posing with Zeke.
    An idyllic life. The kind of life Albert French or Albert French aficionados liked to snuff.
    In a more recent shot, snapped through a telephoto lens just a few months ago, Arden’s straight, chin-length red hair was so vivid it looked as if it had been colorized.
    He stared at the photos, trying to connect the child to the woman from the bar.
    Two different people.
    He always said, You are what you remember. If that was true, then who was Arden Davis?
    He pulled out another photo.
    This one of Arden and a dark-haired man, taken near a mountain stream. They were sitting on a blanket, a picnic basket nearby, wineglasses in their hands. They’d set the automatic timer and put the camera on a tree stump. Shortly after the photo was taken, they’d made love.
    Fury knew they’d made love because he was the man in the photo, the man with Arden Davis. The man she’d erased.

 
Chapter 5
    Arden watched from the window of the 757 as it came in for a landing at Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia, the airplane wheels making jarring contact with the ground.
    That morning, Arden had bummed a predawn ride to Roswell from her coworker, Linda. From there, she’d taken a bus to Albuquerque International Airport, where