Shades of Eva Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mitchell?”
    “Like a nut in a metal press.”
    I tried again, unsuccessfully, to make out
her face. It was still too dark. Then something else came to mind:
a tattoo. She had a tattoo on her arm. April. Sapphire. Something
like that. “Your arm. Your tattoo,” I said, prompting Amelia to
explain.
    “Amethyst,” was her only reply; that and a
long, steady stream of smoke out her nose.
    I guess a better question would have been
what do you want with me, but I honestly didn’t care. I was in too
much pain, and she just happened to have been there, a Good
Samaritan who happened to have had a gun. She’d also happened to
have probably saved my life, and happened to have volunteered to
stay overnight to see that I was okay. But had she really told the
docs I was her husband?
    Amelia uncrossed a long pair of shapely legs
and leaned forward, her face a bit more visible now. I couldn’t
tell what color her eyes were, not just then, but there was
something intense about them. Something penetrating!
    “What are you doing here?” I asked her.
    “Here, as in Neah Bay, or here in this
room?”
    “Both.”
    “I’m doing you a favor. That guy you got
into it with wants to finish the job. Said he knows where you live,
and knows where you’re going.”
    “So what!”
    “So what?” Amelia said laughing just a bit.
“Do you have a death wish, Mitchell?” She sat back and re-crossed
those long legs of hers. “That wasn’t a fight you were in. That was
a suicide attempt if I ever saw one.”
    All of a sudden it dawned on me that she’d
been calling me by my right name. This was—this had to be—someone
from back home. “How do we know each other?” I said.
    “We don’t, but I know who you are. You’re a
hard call to trace! What the hell are you doing out here in
Washington under some alias? You have no warrants. Your people
aren’t from around here.”
    “My people?” I replied cracking a nervous
grin to go along with the nausea welling up in me. “You better
start telling me what you want, or I’m calling security.”
    I tried unsuccessfully, again, to sit up,
and started reaching for my call button.
    Amelia just laughed. “I am security. You
have about thirty stitches in your back so don’t start yelling or
you might pop. I’m a private investigator. My aunt was a patient at
the Coastal State Asylum with your mother…and I rent your mother’s
childhood home.” 
    The Asylum Amelia was referring to
was the River Bluff State Mental Institution—otherwise known as the
Coastal State Psychiatric Hospital in my old hometown. It was the
mental institution where my parents had met, the place where my
mother was lobotomized. It was all part of that complex I called
the past, something I had been trying to forget, if not
amputate.
    And I thought Amelia just said she rented my
mother’s childhood home.
    All I could muster was a pensive, “I don’t
know what you’re talking about,” and proceeded to insist that she
call me Mark Engram.
    Amelia didn’t take my denial, or my
stubbornness, so well. She threw something at me. I remember the
weight of it because it hit me where Meade must have punched me in
the ribs. I’d say it weighed about two pounds. I let out a pathetic ow and reached down for the object.
    Amelia stood up. It looked as if she’d just
unsheathed a knife and was coming at me with it. I thought for a
moment I was hallucinating, or flashing back to Meade pulling a
knife on me in the street. But I wasn’t imagining this. Amelia had
a knife in her hand.
    I sat up as best I could and instinctively
threw my arms up.
    She reached the blade out toward the thing
she had tossed at me and cut a string that wound around it. I guess
it was more like a quarter-pound of bundled papers she’d hit me
with. A wad of pictures, letters, and postcards rolled out in a
sort of timeless indifference upon my lap.
    “What are these,” I said fumbling to take up
one of the photographs. I could barely see its