Page 61 of Torment

18

Jolie

“Are you ready to begin,Ms. Chast… I mean, Ms. Sinclair?”

I gave Detective Beck a tight smile. “Yes. And you can call me Jolie or Ms. Chastain if you want. I suppose there’s no point pretending to be someone else anymore.”

She nodded slowly, fixing me with an assessing gaze. “Are you absolutely certain you’re ready to go through this? I know you’ve had some time to try and process things, but if it’s not enough, I understand. We can always reschedule the—”

I held up my left palm. “It’s fine. Really. I’m ready.”

“All right.” After clicking a button on a recording device, Beck picked up a silver pen. She held it poised over a notepad which sat on the desk next to a folder filled with paperwork. “Three weeks ago, on December the 17th, you walked into Ochsner Baptist Medical Center and said you needed help. You told the triage nurse that you’d been kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured for several weeks before managing to escape. After you were admitted, the hospital contacted the police on your behalf. Is that right?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“You told them in your initial statement that you had no recollection of who kidnapped you.”

I swallowed thickly. “Yes, that’s correct.”

When I made it back to New Orleans, I tried to turn Mason in, but I kept faltering and found myself unable to speak his name. It felt as if ghostly hands were wrapped around my neck, choking back the words. The idea of him being locked up was far more distressing to me than anything he’d forced me to experience during my captivity.

In the end, I lied. I said I had no idea who took me, and I was simply wildly lucky to have escaped.

“Now that you’ve had some time to think things through and start processing what happened, has that changed?” Beck asked.

“No.” I licked my dry lips. “I still don’t remember anything useful.”

She leaned forward slightly. “Nothing’s come back to you at all?”

I shrugged. “I wish I could remember, but whoever took me drugged me regularly. I don’t remember ever seeing their face. I don’t even remember their voice. Or voices, if there was more than one.”

Beck flipped through some of the paperwork in the file until she reached a particular sheet. She pushed it toward me. “When the doctors at the hospital ran a toxicology screen on you, they found traces of sedatives in your bloodstream.”

That made sense. Not long before Mason let me go, I was bitten by that angry rattlesnake in the swamp. As part of my treatment, I’d been given quite a lot of sedatives over several days to ease the pain and suffering.

“Like I said, I was frequently drugged,” I replied. I could hear that my voice was quavering slightly. I really needed to get my shit together.

“The doctors stated that this particular sedative doesn’t usually cause memory loss, even in high doses,” Beck said. Her tone was gentle, but it had a very slight accusatory edge.

“I suppose there’s a first for everything.”

She cocked her head, lifting a single brow. “Yes. I suppose so,” she said. She quickly wrote something down. Then she looked back up at me, flashing me a reassuring smile. “Could you walk me through the rest of your statement now?”

“Sure.” I put my hands on my lap, trying to relax my posture as much as possible.

Beck picked up the first page of my initial statement. “What happened on November 4th, 2018?”

“I woke up early and drove out to the Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area. I always go there to watch the sunrise on Sundays. When I left about half an hour after the sun came up, I noticed a car following me.”

“What color was the car?”

I lowered my gaze. I hated lying. “White.”

“Did you notice the make and model?”

I shrugged. “Sorry, I’m not good with that sort of stuff. It just looked like a regular white car with four doors. I didn’t notice any other details.”

Beck nodded encouragingly. “That’s okay. What about the license plate? Do you happen to remember any of it?”

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