Shifting Shadows Read Online Free PDF

and fill its own empty slot in her memory just as the telephone and automobile had.
    One thing was becoming certain. The world she remembered was gone. Years she couldn ’t account for had passed, and she was alone in this strange place. She swallowed hard as the implications hit her. Mama must be long dead, and Aunt Hester and Cousin Thad and her best friend, Rachel—everybody she knew.
    A sob caught in her throat. She couldn ’t lose everyone at once. If she was alive, surely they must be too. But she knew they were gone. She’d never see them again in this lifetime. The grief of loss flooded through her, threatened to overwhelm her. She bit her lip, fighting back the tears.
    “ How’s your head?” Dylan asked, diverting her thoughts.
    “ My head? Oh, I guess I’d forgotten about it. Much better, thank you. What on earth is that?” In her sorrow over her family, she hadn’t been paying attention to their surroundings, hadn’t noticed they were approaching a group of tall buildings that seemed to touch the sky.
    “ Kansas City.”
    When he spoke the words, she felt the information settle into place in her memory. “Yes,” she said slowly. “It is. But how did we get here so soon? It took Papa nearly half a day with our horse and buggy.”
    “ Half a day? Fortunately, since I have to come here to work every day, we travel faster than that in our modern cars.”
    In his voice she heard again the disbelief, but for just an instant she saw a flash of uncertainty in his eyes. Before she had time to think about it, he pulled into a concrete-covered lot and stopped in the midst of a crowd of other cars.
    “ We’re here,” he said.
    *~*~*
    A couple of hours later, when they walked through the glass doors and out of the building, Analise—she knew she had to start thinking of herself by that name—felt a great deal more relieved than when she’d gone in.
    The doctor, a short, balding man with a pleasant though distracted smile, had assured her that some memory loss from a head injury was common, that her memory would likely return soon. He wouldn ’t have all the test results back until tomorrow, but everything looked normal so far.
    Normal . What a wonderful word. If the tests said she was normal, did that mean she would soon feel normal?
    Or would the tests reveal that she ’d stolen Analise’s body or that she was mad? She was actually beginning to accept herself as Analise. She just couldn’t stop thinking of herself as Elizabeth too.
    “ You don’t need to check on me every four hours tonight like the doctor suggested,” she said as the streetlight changed from red to green and Dylan took her arm, guiding her across. He had stayed by her side every minute, even through the frightening, sometimes painful tests, but this frequent checking recommended by the doctor would be asking too much of anyone.
    “ You heard the doctor,” he said, his gruff tone belying the compassionate way he’d been acting. “It’s either that or you spend the night in the hospital, and you told him in no uncertain terms that you were not going to do that.”
    She looked up at his grim expression and wondered, not for the first time, if his tenacity about never leaving her came more from concern about her welfare or from the possibility that she might escape from him. She had no idea where that last notion came from, but she sensed that he wanted something from her.
    She sighed. Since she had no idea of Analise’s life prior to this day, there could be any number of reasons for his strange behavior. In any event, whatever the explanation, she was glad he’d been there, glad he was still with her, that she wasn’t totally alone in this strange land.
    Yet as they reached his automobile and he opened the door for her to get in again, as he stood so close beside her, she had to admit to another reason for being glad he was there. Even as his presence gave her a more secure feeling about this world, at the same time he made