Page 97 of Stay Awake
“The police are looking for a murder suspect.” He shoves a flyer at me. “Take it. I don’t need it.”
I read the notice as I shuffle through the crowd of bar patrons spilling across the sidewalk. It contains the same grainy photo I saw on the TV of a woman who looks just like me. It’s impossible to read the writing under the photo until I’m near a streetlight.
“Police are asking the public to call the hotline number below if they have any information on the whereabouts of the woman in the photograph. Her name is Liv Reese. Her height is five foot six and she is described as…”
Electricity crackles inside my head. It goes faster and faster, mimicking my racing heartbeat. The police really are looking for me in connection to a murder.
It’s ludicrous to think that I’d kill anyone. On the other hand, I know that I blacked out for a period of time because I have no recollection of anything that happened between the time I answered a phone call at my office on a sunny summer’s day and the moment I woke on the Amtrak platform clutching a train ticket to Miami. There’s obviously a missing gap of time that I can’t account for. And if there’s a missing gap of time then how can I be certain of anything?
I slip into the doorway of a Korean restaurant and scan my thumbprint on the cell phone the bartender gave me earlier. The phone unlocks. A series of voicemails and text message alerts immediately pops up on the screen.
They’re from someone called Ted. I don’t know anyone by that name. But when I listen to the first voicemail, it’s apparent that Ted knows me.
“Liv, it’s Ted. Where are you? You were supposed to stay in the apartment.”
“Liv, it’s Ted again. Please call me. It’s urgent.” He recites a cell phone number.
His messages get increasingly frantic.
Liv. I’m heading back to the apartment to see if you’re there,reads one of his texts.
In the last voice message, he sounds almost resigned. “Liv, it’s Ted. I’m guessing you fell asleep and don’t remember me. You’re probably asking yourself why some guy called Ted is calling you. Please check your emails. It will explain who I am and why you urgently need to call me. You are in danger, Liv. Read the email. Do it now and then call me!”
I follow his instructions and tap the email icon. The top message in my inbox is an email from Ted containing a photo of a journal entry written in my own handwriting.
A man called Ted woke me this morning. He pounded on the door of a basement apartment where I was sleeping on a camping mattress on the floor. I didn’t know why I was in that apartment. I also didn’t know who Ted was, even though he claimed to know me. It felt as if I’d woken to discover that I was living someone else’s life.
Ted explained that I’m suffering from memory problems. I forget everything going back almost two and a half years, when Amy and Marco were murdered.
Yes, they were murdered.
I didn’t believe it until Ted showed me a news article. He’s since shown me other articles explaining what happened in horrifying detail. One article was illustrated with a photo of me on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over my face as paramedics lifted me into an ambulance. The article said I was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. There’s a scar on my torso from where I was stabbed. Ted says I’ve never remembered what happened because I was in a coma afterward. Once I recovered, I moved to London where we met and fell in love.
Things didn’t work out. Ted moved to New York for work. I stayed behind. Apparently I was fine for a while, going about my life without any memory problems, although Ted says the underlying trauma of the murder left me with insomnia, and what he calls an unhealthy obsession with finding out what happened the day Amy and Marco were killed.
Sometime over the past few weeks, I began having memory problems. Ted only found out a couple of weeks ago when I turned up at a function out of the blue without remembering him. He said he’s since taken me to a specialist who believes that my memoryresets every time I wake up, taking me back to the day of the murder.
That’s why I didn’t recognize Ted this morning. That’s why I didn’t recognize the basement apartment where I was sleeping, even though I’ve apparently lived there for several weeks after renting it when I left London. That’s why everything Ted tells me about the past two years feels as if it’s happened to someone else.
Ted’s moved me to this apartment to keep me safe. He made me write warnings on Post-it notes that he stuck next to the front door. They’re to remind me not to go out. Ted’s worried that Amy and Marco’s murderer may come for me.
The letter goes on to explain the intricacies of my condition, Ted’s and my rocky relationship, and the reasons for our breakup.
If the journal entry hadn’t been written in my own handwriting, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it.
I look up from my phone. Several cops are standing in a huddle by a patrol car down the street near the bar. I consider approaching them and telling them that I’m the woman they’re looking for.
I take a step forward and then withdraw back into the shadowed doorway of the restaurant. I can’t bring myself to do it. A crowd of bar-goers take videos of each other while they wait to be allowed back into Nocturnal. The last thing I want is to be handcuffed and shunted into a police car while dozens of people post videos of my arrest on social media. The public humiliation would be excruciating.
I do the next best thing. I dial the number of the police hotline printed on the flyer that I’m holding.
Chapter
Fifty-Five
Wednesday 9:49P.M.
The siren lights from the patrol cars parked outside Nocturnal shone through the stippled glass, casting a purple haze across the sea of revelers as Darcy Halliday and Jack Lavelle pushed open the doors and entered the loud and stifling bar.
