Page 129 of The Night Before (Savannah 1)

Kelly froze. Never would she have expected the person on the other end of the line to hang up.

Not unless she’d been seen. Unless whoever was on the other end of the line—an assassin pretending to be a little girl—had been near enough to hear her and pinpointed Kelly’s hiding spot.

Damn.

Panicked, it was all she could do to hold on, not to bolt and expose herself further. Noiselessly, she slid past the barn, crawling behind a watering trough. Where would a person hide . . . here, on these grounds . . . what had the clues been? What had the caller whispered in a baby voice?

It’s dark.

Well, hell, the whole place is dark.

There’s dirt and glass and it smells bad.

Underground.

But there were several basements that . . .

And then she knew. Of course she knew.

She’d played there as a child.

Adam drove like a madman. His cell phone battery was shot, and he couldn’t call, had barely been able to hear the message that Caitlyn was on her way to Oak Hill.

His fingers curled over the steering wheel in a death grip, and he tried to shove aside the worry that had been with him since he’d put the CD he’d found in the backpack into his laptop computer. While parked in the gravel pit, he’d read Rebecca’s notes and felt a growing sense of alarm with each new discovery. How had he not seen what had been, in retrospect, so patently obvious? How, he wondered as he hit the bridge at s

eventy and saw the turnoff for Oak Hill, had he been so blind?

Rebecca had decided that Caitlyn not only suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder, DID, often called a split or multiple personality, but that the disorder had gone undiagnosed all of her life. It had worsened with time, and when she’d almost died after the boating accident, she’d taken on her twin’s persona. She’d lose track of time, and in those gaps she became Kelly, whose body was never located. Caitlyn had kept her sister alive, giving her a fake job and renting a cabin for her on the river. Whenever Caitlyn became stressed, when her heartbeat accelerated beyond the norm, when her adrenalin was pumping wildly through her veins, she became Kelly.

As she had when they’d made love.

That was the trigger.

This was new ground for DID.

Adam didn’t know of another case where the host personality took on a second personality from another real person. Usually the splits were fragmented people, all parts of the whole. Nor did the host person speak with his counterparts. That condition was much more like schizophrenia where the patient actually would see people and converse with them, even though the people he “saw” didn’t. Caitlyn’s condition was unique and had caused Rebecca, ever ambitious, to believe she would shake up the academic world and get a “million-dollar deal” to write a book.

Christ, he’d been a fool.

Blind.

Because you made one helluva mistake. You fell in love with your patient; the very women you were using to find Rebecca.

Guilt placed a stranglehold on his heart, but he set his jaw. There was no time for recriminations. Not when Caitlyn’s life was at stake.

Cranking on the wheel, his tires screaming in protest, he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the lights of a police vehicle strobing the night. Good. He’d need help. If Caitlyn was Kelly and she was somehow responsible for the murders of her husband, mother and other members of her family, she could be dangerous.

Not only to him.

But to herself as well.

Self-destructive.

Christ, no. He couldn’t lose her now. Wouldn’t. Not if he had a chance.

He hit the gas, watched the trees lining the drive flash by in a blur.

Siren wailing, bright lights flashing, the cop car screamed after him.

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