earlier expression just to get her to this point.
“I did have some sort of memory,” she replied. “I warn you, though, it was a very little one. I can’t promise it will lead anywhere.”
“Of course you can’t.” He got to his feet. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To Zoe’s. If the door to your memory is finally unlocked, she’s the one to push it open. Where’s your car?”
“Car?” Jane asked as she got to her feet.
“Yes. I parked in the lot beneath Union Square. If you’re parked somewhere else, I can drive you to your car, then follow you to Zoe’s.”
“I don’t drive. I took the bus.”
“Good.” Matt’s hand closed over Jane’s elbow, and she let him steer her toward the escalator. “That will make things much easier.”
Matt turned down the street Jane indicated and drove past a row of houses crowded next to each other. Most were some shade of off-white or tan, interspersed here and there with more boldly painted structures. Various styles were represented, from Mediterranean to English Tudor. Each rose several stories above garage doors, most with recessed ground-level entries protected by some kind of fancy iron gate.
“Nice,” he said appreciatively as he braked at a stop sign. “The Marina District has always been one of my favorite parts of San Francisco.”
When Jane did not respond to his comment, he glanced her way. She was staring straight ahead, her large smoky eyes wide and without focus.
He knew the signs. Something had frightened her. And he didn’t have to ask what it was. Her past.
He could hardly blame her. If he’d gone through the horrors Jane must have faced at the hands of whoever had gone to so much trouble to end her life, he wouldn’t be looking forward to searching that dark, shadow-filled memory, either. But he was aware, now even more than he had been when he was first assigned to her case, how important it was to pull the monsters out of the closet and defeat them.
“Jane.”
She jumped and turned to him. He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring, lighthearted smile. “Do I go straight, or turn again?”
After a getting-her-bearings glance around, Jane said, “Straight. It’s the four-story gray house on the left. You can park in the driveway.”
Matt followed instructions, pulling his black Jeep up to a double garage door of the same color. By the time he switched the motor off and removed his keys from the ignition, Jane had already unbuckled her seat belt and opened her door. He got out and followed her up the curving staircase, with its ornate wrought-iron handrail. Before he could say a word, she had stopped within the arch of the second-story portico and was opening the bright pink door.
She turned as he started to follow, her eyes dark. For one moment he thought she was going to tell him she’d changed her mind, that she just wanted to leave the past alone—and then slam the door in his face. When he stepped into the foyer as a defensive tactic, however, she closed the door behind him and glanced at her watch.
“Zoe usually naps from three to three-thirty,” she said, then moved toward a pair of French doors to her left. “She should be up by now. Wait in here, while I go up and tell her what’s going on.”
Matt followed Jane into a long, narrow room. To his right, a mahogany desk sat between a pair of bookcases. On his left, golden light spilled through an arched window onto a large tobacco-colored sofa. Two chairs sat on either side of the glass-and-iron coffee table in front of the couch, one a muscular wing chair covered in brown leather, the other a curvy, dainty thing upholstered in a tapestry flower print.
“Take a seat,” Jane said. “I don’t think we’ll be long. Something tells me Zoe will be almost as excited as you to learn about what happened today.”
Matt saw Jane’s lips curve ever so slightly before she turned and left the room. The ghost of a smile was encouraging, Matt thought as he lowered himself into the leather wing chair. However, her eyes hadn’t lost that haunted expression. It was almost enough to make him think twice about making her face the past she’d worked so hard to…well, put in her past.
After all, how often did anyone get a chance to start over, with a completely clean slate? No embarrassing mistakes to make you second-guess yourself, no old opinions to try to overcome, no emotional wounds urging you to lock your heart up, where it couldn’t get tromped on again. Jane, it seemed, had taken full advantage of this freedom, had made a new life for herself, just as she’d vowed. And now here he was, stepping in to insist that she—
“Matthew?” A soft voice broke into his thoughts.
Matt got to his feet, stood and turned to greet the tall woman with the short gray hair who moved toward him.
“Ms. Zeffarelli,” he said, taking her hand into his as she reached out. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Call me Zoe, please,” she said with a smile and just the faintest hint of a French accent. “I am sorry you and I did not get to know each other better last year. But I am happy to see that you have recovered so nicely from your horrible ordeal. And now, according to our little friend here, it seems we will finally have a chance to work together.”
Matt nodded, then glanced at Jane. Her eyes no longer looked haunted. Instead her eyebrows dipped beneath the uneven fringe of her bangs in an expression he recognized as pure determination. Her eyes locked with his briefly before she turned to Zoe.
“Well,” Jane said, “I guess we’d better get down to it.”
Zoe lifted thick black eyebrows. “You are suddenly excited now, after months of insisting you want nothing to do with your past?”
Jane shook her head tightly. “Hardly. I just want to get this over with. And I assumed you’d want to work with this memory, if you can really call it that, while it’s still fresh in my mind.”
“True.” The woman nodded. “But I would prefer that you be at least a leetle bit relaxed when we attempt this thing. I suggest we all sit down and have a cup of tea, a cookie or two, and a tiny chat before we get down to business.”
A half hour later, Jane sat in the center of the overstuffed sofa, with Zoe in the delicate chair the woman had proudly rescued from a thrift shop years before, and Matt looking right at home in the leather wing chair.
Although Jane had suspected that the combination of Zoe’s strong tea and a sugar-laden sweet—make that several sugar-laden sweets—would render her even more keyed up, she was surprised to find that she was actually feeling calm. Maybe all that stomach-churning angst she’d experienced upon arriving at the house hadn’t been due to dread. Perhaps she’d simply been hungry. After all, she’d actually only ingested a bite or two of that cookie in Maxwell’s cellar, along with a few tiny sips of that eggnog coffee.
“The tea too strong, ma petite?”
Jane turned to Zoe with a smile. “It’s always too strong. But loaded with milk and sugar, it is just perfect.”
To prove her point and clear her palate of the remembered eggnog, Jane
