What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(58)

“She doesn’t know.” Tracy told Dan an abbreviated version of the story.

“You believe her?”

“I do, but mostly because the people who’ve known her all these years believe her. I listened to her closely; I knew what words to listen for from living with Therese all this time. She never broke her accent. Never has, according to the people who’ve known her.”

“How did she get an accent?”

“No idea. I’m getting her medical records to see if it’s mentioned.”

Tracy told Dan that Childs looked at the photographs of her mother and father as if she was looking for the first time at photographs pulled from someone else’s photo album, but not when she saw Anita Childress’s photo.

“That’s the thing that convinced me she was being truthful. If she was faking this whole thing, she would have faked not knowing her daughter also, wouldn’t she?”

“Seems likely.”

Tracy explained to Dan what Childs had said. “Do you remember when I was pregnant, and I had those vivid dreams?”

“I thought that was from the bizarre cravings you were having and what you were eating.”

“I dreamed of Daniella. I told you I dreamed of a little girl, but more than dreaming about her, I felt an attachment to her.”

“So what now?”

“That’s up to her. I told her when she’d made a decision, I’d help her, whatever she decided.”

“Did you tell her you might be giving someone another bite at the apple, that someone might have tried to kill her twenty-five years ago?”

“Not in so many words, but yes, I warned her about the investigations she was working.”

Dan offered to pick up Tracy at SeaTac, but she was landing late and told him she’d catch an Uber and see him at home. She disconnected and took a sip of her Tito’s vodka with cranberry before she opened her emails and listened to voice mails she’d neglected all day. Anita Childress had left a message and asked Tracy to call.

With some trepidation, Tracy did.

“Detective Crosswhite. Thanks for calling me back.”

“Not a problem.”

“I wanted to apologize about my call the other day. I was just upset because of what my father was going through.”

“There’s no need to apologize, Anita. I know how difficult this must be.”

“You were right though. You did warn me. I just didn’t want to hear it. My father and I talked, and he said the decision was mine to make, that he could handle whatever I chose to do.” Tracy had the sense that Anita was going to back out; her father’s pain would be too great. “I want to know,” she said. Tracy let out a held breath. “I want you to move forward.”

The question now, however, was whether Melissa Childs wanted to move forward. She’d spent more than two decades in Escondido. She’d established a residence, started a business, found a life. No doubt she felt comfortable there. Escondido had become her home. Would she risk all she had established to meet people she did not know and had no history on which to build? Would she upend the safe, secure life she had forged for herself for uncertainty? Had she just left a husband behind, Tracy didn’t think Childs would do it.

But it wasn’t just a husband.

It was also a mother. And a daughter—physical bonds that tugged at Childs’s subconscious, that even her amnesia had not completely severed.





C H A P T E R 2 3

Back in Seattle, Tracy spent the next morning going through Melissa Childs’s medical records. The pages documented how Childs had arrived at the Palomar Medical Center’s behavioral center, and each day of the four months she had spent there. The doctor in charge of her treatment, William Wexell, a neurologist, initially opined that Childs’s amnesia was the result of the head wound she’d suffered and that her memory would come back to her in time. As the weeks passed and that didn’t happen, Wexell grew increasingly more interested. Tracy assumed Childs was the lab mouse who didn’t react to the stimuli like all the other mice, which made her unique and worthy of study. Wexell tried a number of different techniques to jar her memory, including medications, each without success. His interest grew and eventually peaked, then seemed to decline, marked by some frustration, and finally ended with resignation.

Childs was not going to get better.

She was not going to recover her memory.

His treatment pivoted to helping her start a new life. In June, the hospital facilitated her securing a California driver’s license and a Social Security card and learning how to drive again. The hospital rehabilitation center gave her several tests to determine her interests and her proficiencies. Childs had a gift for numbers and expressed an interest in working in a compatible field. She enrolled at Palomar, and a nurse at the hospital knew the owner of the H&R Block in town and secured a bookkeeping position on a trial basis. Childs worked part-time while she went to school. She checked in with Wexell every two weeks, then once a month. Each meeting she reported no change in her memory, but a growing satisfaction with the new life she was creating.

As her sessions progressed, Wexell asked Childs if there were any people in her life outside of work colleagues, whether she’d started dating, had any feelings for anyone. She didn’t. Wexell told her it would be healthy for her to consider dating, as well as finding a hobby that might expose her to members of the opposite sex. Childs chose volunteer firefighting.