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doorway. Detective Basso stood just inside the room’s entrance. His arms were folded over his chest, his eyes alert.
    My body reflexively tensed. Mom must have felt it; she looked beyond the bed, following my gaze. “I thought Nora might remember something while it was just the two of us,” she told Detective Basso apologetically. “I know you said you wanted to question her, but I just thought—”
    He nodded, signaling that it was okay. Then he walked over, staring down at me. “You said you don’t have a clear picture, but even fuzzy details might help.”
    “Like hair color,” Mom interjected. “Maybe it was … black, for instance?”
    I wanted to tell her there was
nothing
, not even a lingering snapshotof color, but I didn’t dare with Detective Basso in the room. I didn’t trust him. Instinct told me something about him was … off. When he stood close, the hairs on my scalp tingled, and I had the brief but distinct feeling of an ice cube slithering down the back of my neck.
    “I want to go home,” was all I said.
    Mom and Detective Basso shared a look.
    “Dr. Howlett needs to run a few tests,” Mom said.
    “What kind of tests?”
    “Oh, things related to your amnesia. It’ll be over in no time. And then we’ll go home.” She waved a hand dismissively, which only made me more suspicious.
    I faced Detective Basso, since he seemed to have all the answers. “What aren’t you telling me?”
    His expression was as unfaltering as steel. I supposed years as a cop had perfected that look. “We need to run a few tests. Make sure everything is fine.”
    Fine?
    What part of any of this seemed
fine
to him?

CHAPTER
3
    M Y MOM AND I LIVE IN A FARMHOUSE NESTLED between Coldwater’s city limits and the remote outback regions of Maine. Stand at any window, and it’s like a glimpse back in time. Vast unadulterated wilderness on one side, flaxen fields framed by evergreen trees on the other. We live at the end of Hawthorne Lane and are divided from our nearest neighbors by a mile. At night, with the fireflies lighting up the trees in gold, and the fragrance of warm, musky pine overwhelmingthe air, it’s not hard to trick my mind into believing I’ve transported myself into a completely different century. If I slant my vision just so, I can even picture a red barn and grazing sheep.
     
    Our house has white paint, blue shutters, and a wraparound porch with a slope grade visible to the naked eye. The windows are long and narrow, and protest with an obnoxiously loud groan when pushed open. My dad used to say there was no need to install an alarm in my bedroom window, a secret joke between us, since we both knew I was hardly the kind of daughter to sneak out.
    My parents moved into the farmhouse-slash-money-pit shortly before I was born on the philosophy that you can’t argue with love at first sight. Their dream was straightforward: to slowly restore the house to its charming 1771 condition, and one day hammer a bed-and-breakfast sign in the front yard and serve the best lobster bisque up and down Maine’s coast. The dream dissolved when my dad was murdered one night in downtown Portland.
    This morning I’d been released from the hospital, and now I was alone in my room. Hugging a pillow to my chest, I eased back on my bed, my eyes nostalgically tracing the collage of pictures tacked to a corkboard on the wall. There were snapshots of my parents posing at the top of Raspberry Hill, Vee modeling a span-dex Catwoman disaster she sewed for Halloween a few years back, my sophomore yearbook picture. Looking at our smiling faces, I tried to fool myself into believing I was safe now that I was back in my world. The truth was, I’d never feel safe and I’d never havemy life back until I could remember what I’d gone through during the last five months, particularly the last two and a half. Five months seemed insignificant held up against seventeen years (I’d missed my seventeenth birthday during those eleven