The Silent Girl

by Kelly Heard

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Noir; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

How do you prove you're innocent, if you don't remember your own name?They find me covered in blood-red flowers on the side of a country road. They tell me my wounds look defensive. But they think I'm guilty of a terrible crime.People from my past – strangers now – help me piece together my story. But who can I trust when I can't trust myself?I could never have hurt anyone. Could I?A totally gripping psychological suspense novel that you won't be able to put down and will keep you turning the pages late into the night. Perfect for fans of "The Girl on the Train", "The Woman in the Window" and "The Silent Patient". Readers are gripped by "The Silent Girl": "OMG what a story!... Twisty, fast-paced... Sure to keep you guessing from page one! Full of mystery, tension and suspense... Had my heart pounding... The best thriller I've read this year." "Ooh, this was a fabulous mystery!...I never knew what to expect... Kept me guessing...The ending was full on nail-biting...I couldn't put it down." "I'm speechless... This book blew my mind. I can't stop thinking about it... Gripping until you were on the edge of your seat dying turning pages like nothing. Because the book was that good." Reviews by Bee"Captivating... Vivid... Pulls you straight in... Filled with suspense and action." Bookworm 1986-

Release date: April 9, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

I open my eyes to bright fluorescent lights that send a shock to my pupils. Squeezing my eyes shut, I turn my head and tug at my arms. I feel resistance and throw all my weight against my elbows and try to sit up. This was a mistake. Suddenly, everything hurts. A pulse of pain in my head, constellations of pain lighting up my limbs, even down to my fingertips.

I can’t move.

They’ve found me.

At my side, a mechanical tone sounds at an increasing pace. Something slithers at my side, between my arm and my ribs.

If there’s no sin in your heart, the rattlers won’t bite you.

I didn’t do anything wrong, I plead. I’d never betray you.

Then prove it.

The echo leaves me with a shiver. I stare down at the writhing, gray forms, too afraid to move.

When a nurse walks in, it takes me several seconds to realize that I’m in a hospital, with IV lines that trail from both my arms. She speaks into a phone clipped to her collar: “Room sixteen’s awake.” Then, she seems to be everywhere at once. She adjusts the IV, checks the straps that hold my limbs to the bed, all the while looking into my eyes.

“You’re safe.” She checks an IV bag. “Sorry for the restraints. Didn’t want you to fall out of the bed.” Again, I try to sit up, my head jerking side to side. I rock my knees back and forth, trying to free them from whatever holds them in place. With a tearing sound, a tie loosens and they are free. I swing my feet down and find the floor, cold tile under my feet.

“Some help?” The nurse’s voice rises and an attendant rushes in. But I don’t make it far; she catches me before I hit the floor altogether. I’m still thrashing, trying to escape, as they lift me up. “She’s short,” the nurse explains. “Got out of the restraints.”

“Please,” I say, gritting my teeth. “Let me go.”

“I can get you something to help you calm down, miss.” They ease me back onto the bed. The nurse rests a hand on my shoulder. “Do you know where you are? You’re in the hospital.”

“I know,” I gasp, wheeze another breath. “I have to get out of here.”

“To where?” Now she’s listening, as if I might know something she doesn’t. “Where do you need to go?”

“Away,” I answer.

“From what?”

I think my heart stops for a moment, and in that moment I settle into her gaze. Her eyes are golden brown, dark hair, kind but serious mouth. I don’t have an answer.

“It’s alright,” she repeats. “You’re safe. Promise.” She glances to the doorway. “See? They put security outside your door.”

“Why?” I ask. This, apparently, is the first question of mine the nurse wasn’t prepared for.

“Well—since…” She busies herself with the IV, disconnecting the bag, putting on a new one, checking the port in my arm. I realize I can’t feel much. “How much do you remember?” I blink, purse my lips, feel a splash of pain.

“Tell me,” I plead.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” she says. “We’re going to try to help you get some more rest, okay?”

She turns her attention to small tasks, straightening things around the room, adjusting the blankets over my legs, updating a chart on a dry-erase board that hangs by the door. I begin to feel light, as if I’m floating away. What a relief it is, to feel less, and then a little bit less than that. Though I watch her write, the letters swim and fade before my eyes. All I can make out is the line at the top. It reads ‘Jane Doe.’

The next time I wake, it seems to be morning. With a remote calm, I see that my palms are wrapped in gauze, that both arms are either stitched or bandaged. Beneath the hospital gown, there’s a row of stitches down my chest, the dark thread like ants crawling over a red welt.

I sense the absence of pain, and realize there’s either some medicine at work here, or I’ve already died. What a cruel trick, if the afterlife looked like the inside of a hospital room.

Beyond the foot of the bed, a window offers a view of blue-edged mountains that rise above the sleepy town below. I watch the stoplights changing, which they do slowly, as if there’s no reason to hurry. As if from far away, muffled through water, I hear the door open. Then, a woman in blue scrubs is opening a dressing on my arm, cleaning the skin beneath.

I watch the nurse working, feeling my dry lips crack as I smile.

“Thank you.”

Startled, she almost drops the gauze. “You’re awake!” She seals the bandage with a light touch. “I’m going to get the attending.”

I try to nod my head, but my neck is stiff. Instead, I return to the window. Beyond a row of trees, there’s a pond, and from here it looks as shallow and reflective as a hand mirror.

A white-coated woman with graying brown hair enters the room, followed by a younger man I take for a student of some sort. The attending pulls up a chair and sits at my bedside.

“Good morning. How are you feeling?” she asks me.

“Hard to say.” I begin to study my body: the bandages that cover one arm, the cuts and scratches that line the other. There’s a jagged wound on my chest, neatly held closed with tiny stitches. When I lift a hand, I can feel half-healed marks on my face, too.

When the forest cooled at night, the dew settled on the leaves. Like a chill mist, a realization settles over me. I don’t know where I am. My shoulders tense and pain reverberates up my neck. I reach up to touch my head and feel a bandage at my temple. The doctor gently pulls my hand away. “We’ll get to that. What’s important is that you’re safe now.” I pull back, rest my hand on my knee.

“First, maybe you’d like to introduce yourself?”

Why are they asking me this? The whiteboard still reads ‘Jane Doe’, and I wonder if they really don’t know, or if this is some sort of test.

“Or maybe you can tell us what year it is?”

“Two thousand and ten.”

“That’s good,” she answers. “June 3, 2010. You’ve been unconscious for three days.”

The doctor nods to the student standing behind her, and he takes a step forward. He’s holding a clipboard and wearing an ID tag that reads ‘Resident.’ “We’d like to find your family. Maybe you can try to tell us about where you’re from. What do you remember?”

“My brother.” My mouth forms the words as if from muscle memory. When I say them, I’m suddenly aware of a charge in the air, almost as if I expect speaking so to conjure something. I wait for the words to call up an image, a voice. But there’s nothing.

“So—you have a brother.” The resident nods and makes a note. “What’s his name? Do you know where he lives?”

“Miles,” I breathe, realizing with some despair that I don’t. My chest feels heavy and weightless both at once, and I say it again. “My brother. I have to find him.”

“Yes, but any specifics that come to mind?”

I raise both hands to my temples, as if I can squeeze the thoughts loose, and feel a sharp jolt of pain. The doctor gestures at one of my bedside monitors with her pen. “You see, this is a stress response. Heart rate up, BP up, but her pulse ox is steady. Miss?”

It’s something less than comforting to hear them discuss me while I’m sitting right here. At least the resident makes eye contact with me.

“You’re about thirty years old. You don’t have any tattoos or identifying scars. The police returned something of yours. We—”

“Police?” I interrupt. “Why?”

They exchange a glance, and the attending answers. “It’s standard procedure. Would you like to see?”

“Standard procedure for what?” I ask. The resident opens a plastic bag and takes out something silver, which he offers to me. I wrap my hand around it, a tarnished metal charm on a length of twine. It looks like a symbol, a semicircle topped with two crisscrossed lines, one bold dash underneath. Though it’s fascinating, smooth and cool to the touch, it calls up no thoughts in my mind, no memory.

“I can’t remember anything,” I stammer, turning it over in my palm. “This was mine?”

“You were wearing it when you were found.” The resident answers me without looking up from his clipboard.

“Found?” I demand, holding back stronger language. “Is anybody going to tell me what happened?”

“You see,” the attending says, barely raising her eyes to mine. “We were hoping you might be able to tell us.” She nods to the younger doctor, who reads from his clipboard.

“Unnamed patient, discovered roadside by a motorist, who then called emergency response.” His pen runs down a list of text, and I see that he’s skimming. “Negative for sexual assault. Negative for drugs and alcohol—although, some drugs are in the system only for a few days, so that might not give us the full picture.” I move to cover my face with my hands and see red seeping through the gauze on my palms. I can’t help but feel there must have been a mistake. That these hands can’t belong to me.

The attending clicks her tongue and indicates the monitors again. “See, you need to keep an eye on these. BP’s still up. We’ll let the nurse know about that when we’re done here. What notes do you have?”

“Head injury,” the resident answers. “Considering all of the circumstances, I’d say—amnesia, likely related to brain injury.”

The doctor shakes her head. “Incorrect. You’ve seen the MRI. The concussion was determined to be mild.” They speak as if I can’t understand them. “The scan did not return brain injury that would be consistent with memory loss.”

“But—”

“Dissociative amnesia, most likely,” the attending says. “Repressed memories, essentially. You’ll see this in instances of trauma or intense stress. But,” she adds, “the good news is that it’s virtually always temporary.” She turns a neat, professional smile my way. “We’ll send the nurse back in. Get some rest.”

“No snakebites?” I ask. The doctor turns to me with a quizzical, annoyed glance.

“No,” she answers. “No snakebites.” The doctor tilts her head. “Why?”

“A—a dream, maybe.” The doctor leaves the door open when she walks away.

The nurse must have been waiting just outside the door, because she returns immediately.

“Sorry,” she says, leaning close and moving the collar of my gown to look at the stitches there. “Just checking on this.” She’s in constant motion, returning the chair to its place, checking the monitors, adjusting the blanket over my legs. Though I realize she’s doing a job, that doesn’t make me appreciate it any less. “It’s a teaching hospital,” she says. “They forget patients are people, sometimes.”

“You heard all of that?” I grimace with embarrassment.

She purses her mouth and checks my blood pressure again.

“What happened?” I ask her, holding the necklace. “Why did the police have this?”

“Your injuries don’t look accidental.” She pauses, holding her hand out. I put my hand in hers, and she turns it over, indicating scratches around my wrist, a couple of broken nails, the cuts that reach up my arm. “These are defensive wounds. Put all of that together, it’s safe to assume you’re a victim of a crime.”

“But what happened?”

For the first time, the nurse sits still, turning her warm brown eyes my way.

“We don’t know. But you put up a fight. You don’t get cuts like that unless you gave someone hell. And you heal fast,” she says.

“Thanks—I guess.” I’m not sure that it was a compliment, but it’s something concrete. With a surplus of nervous energy, I notice that the doctor left her pen at the bedside tray. I pick it up, twirl it in my hand.

“You’ll be feeling better before you know it,” she assures me. “My name’s Anjali.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“You too. Can I get you anything?”

“Do you have anything I could write or draw on?”

“Let me see what I can find,” she says, walking out of the door.

Anjali returns with a lined notepad and a packet of colored pencils. “I borrowed these from the pediatrics unit,” she says. “But you can keep them. They have plenty.”

I thank her, and she leaves me to my thoughts.

The pencils seem to jump into my hand, to move with their own instinct when I hold them to the paper. I can’t grip the pencils the way I want to, the cut in my hand threatening to open when my palm bends, so I sketch loosely, and the motion of doing so is enough to bring some comfort. I draw shadows and lines, which soon take form, beginning to draw out the images in my mind. I fill a page, then flip to the next. Looking down at the pencils in my hands, I feel a warmth, nearly a presence. I blink, and a recollection comes to the surface of my mind: a hand around mine, a piece of construction paper on a tabletop, a figure with soft hair. Just as quickly, the sensation flees. I don’t know how, but I’m certain that I have a mother, that she taught me how to draw.

With the paper beneath my hands, the cuts that line my wrists and hands seem fainter, less demanding of my focus. When the day shift ends, Anjali comes back to tell me goodnight. When she sees my work, her face softens into a smile.

“See? You haven’t forgotten everything.” She admires the notepad. “You’re an artist.”

I wish Anjali a good evening when she leaves, then sit the pencils down, take a moment to study what I’ve drawn.

A woman reclines in a bed of flowers. She’s in shadow, but I know her dress is blue. Above and around her, red flowers blossom, like great, shimmering fish. And then, uninvited, the thought springs into my mind: I’d like to be there now. Back there in a meadow of flowers so red, they could make the blood in your veins seem less than real.

Through the glazed window, I can make out faint shapes in the hallway. I hear footsteps, then see a silhouette. Male, light hair, with sturdy, square shoulders. Before I know what’s happening, I can feel my heartbeat in the back of my throat, and I’m stumbling to my feet. Colored pencils scatter across the floor, and I slip on one as I crawl for anywhere to hide, finding only the dusty space between the bathroom door and the wall. I see a man’s face, hard eyes, a line of a scar through one eyebrow. Behind the door, I crane my neck to look at the window again. From this angle, I can’t see anything. When half an hour has passed, I slowly creep out, collect my pencils and paper, and sit holding them against my chest, watching the door. When the morning nurse comes in to check on me, I’ve fallen asleep huddled over my knees. I don’t know why or how, but I know I’m not safe here.

Days pass, but my memory does not return. Instead, I have to build things from scratch, and I collect facts with determination. I know that my body is strong. That I heal quickly. Within days, I’m walking on my own, and not long after that, a nurse removes the stitches from my temple.

I learn that I’m in Hazel Bluff, South Carolina. That it’s a kind of joy to watch the sunlight changing on the little town beneath my window, the shifting shades of green on the mountains rising toward the west. The nurses offer to let me walk outside, but I pace the halls instead. I don’t like the idea of being alone.

But I’m still working on mirrors. It takes a physical effort not to flinch when I see myself, even now the swelling has improved. Ginger-blonde hair, which is the exact color of dust when it needs a wash, but has a warm spark to it when it’s clean. Eyes blue, or almost blue, though it seems to depend on the light. And I have a cut lip, and a rainbow of bruises around my cheekbones and eyes. I comb my hair twice a day in the bathroom, trying not to look in the mirror. I part it on the side to cover the line where my stitches came out. The truth is, there are marks all over my body, although I try just to focus on the fact that they’re healing. That’s the only reason I look at them, keeping a daily catalogue, a roll call. When it gets to be too much to know, I color in the blank pages of the book.

On the first morning of the second week, tired of sitting in bed, I bring my colored pencils and notepad to the upholstered chair in the corner. Hearing a knock at the door, I put down my pencil.

“Good morning.” A woman stands in the doorway, tall and slim, with an upright posture and a measured tone that lets me know she’s either law enforcement or military.

“Hi.” I’m not sure I like the idea of any kind of unexpected visitor.

“I’m Selena Radford. Police detective.” Without asking if she can come in, Detective Radford crosses through the doorway and sits in the chair nearest to mine. I’m correcting my own posture, straightening my hair, something about the precision of her appearance making me self-conscious. Her dark hair is in a low, tight braid, and she wears a blazer over a crisp dress, and I see the flash of a badge on her collar. “I’d like to talk about what brought you here. I understand another officer came by several days ago, but you were still unconscious.”

“Nice to meet you, Detective.”

“You too, ah—” She glances up at the dry-erase board, then turns back to me. “You’re probably tired of Jane Doe, aren’t you?”

“I should be used to it by now,” I answer. Her manner isn’t very friendly, but there’s something I can appreciate about someone who isn’t trying to win me over, so I put my notepad down to show her I’m listening. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be. I still don’t remember anything. Nothing useful, at least.” Her smile is measured and professional, but I notice the curve of her cheek, the striking line of her brow.

“You’d be surprised what might be useful,” she answers. As commanding as she is, I almost didn’t notice that she’s also terribly pretty.

“I remember family, a little bit,” I tell her. “My mom. And my brother—Miles.”

“Anything else?”

I shake my head. With nervous hands, I pick up my notepad again and open my unfinished picture, begin to draw. “It’s calming,” I explain. The detective glances at the picture, then back to me.

“Sophia, right?”

“No—no.” For some reason, my voice jolts out before I realize I’m answering. “I meant to say, I don’t know. Why?”

“Not you,” she says. “You were found wearing a necklace, with a distinctive charm. This is that symbol, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I answer. I cross the room and take the necklace from the bedside tray, then show it to her from where I stand.

“Do you know anything about it?”

“Astrology,” she sighs, shaking her head as if she’s embarrassed to admit she knows it. “That’s the astrological glyph for an asteroid, a faraway one. But the name of the asteroid is Sophia. Which, in turn, is involved with ideas like knowledge. The feminine aspect of the divine. It’s nonsense. I just happened to recognize it because my grandmother thinks she’s some kind of mystic.” She taps her fingers against her knee.

“Sophia,” I repeat. I like something about this name, about its soft consonants. To hear Detective Radford say a name, for a moment, almost made me feel as if I had my own.

“It means something to you, then,” she says, picking up her pen and making a mark in her notebook.

“Maybe it did once.” It’s clear enough she doesn’t entirely trust me.

“This isn’t an interrogation,” she says, as if she’s reminding herself as well as me. “The circumstances being what they are, it’s important we consider every possibility.”

“Nobody’s told me what the circumstances are. I see that you know more than I do.”

I hold my chin up and turn my face to the window. I haven’t shed a tear since I woke up here, and today is not going to be the day I do.

“I see,” she answers. “Apologies. I’ll go over the report with you. Is that alright?”

“I’d appreciate it,” I answer. Detective Radford begins to read from her clipboard, using the same measured, practiced tone. Several times she starts a sentence, then cuts off, seems to skip down a few lines. I watch her with eyebrows raised.

“You were found in the mountains a couple of hours from here,” she says. “Near the side of the road. If only we could know—do you live nearby? Or did you get here from somewhere else? Whatever happened, you did not sustain your injuries there at the roadside, so we know that something happened.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, one, there are abrasions general on your right side.” She gestures with the tip of her pen. “Your shoulder, your arm. It suggests that you fell from a vehicle.” She pauses, seems to check my response. “More accurately, that you were dragged from a vehicle and then fell. The debris didn’t match the gravel on the road where they found you.” I listen to her without wincing. She’s honest, something I am far more grateful for than an attempt to gloss things over. “And you had flowers in your hair.” For the first time since she’s entered the room, her tone wavers, and I sense she knows more than she’s telling me. She lifts her eyes and I see she’s wondering if perhaps I’m the one who’s holding back details. “I don’t have all the notes here, but the flowers didn’t grow anywhere near where they found you.”

“What do you think happened?”

“We’ve had two detectives working on your case. The lack of detail, frankly, is disturbing. That’s why I’m involved. Based on the circumstances—”

“Circumstances,” I echo. That word again, a maddening allusion to things I ought to know but don’t.

“Based on the circumstances,” she continues, “I doubt that it was a random crime. However, that’s always a possibility. You’re telling me, with certainty, that you know nothing about your life prior to being here?”

“I promise,” I tell her, and though it’s as genuine as it can be, something about her is putting me on the defensive, and I know I sound sharp. “What can you do?”

“There are databases we can check. Missing persons is a starting point. It can take some time, once we begin requesting records from out of the area.”

“The doctors all said I’d remember within hours,” I say, lifting a pencil to my notepad, drawing a shadow that morphs into an angry-looking cloud. “Then it was days. Now, it’s been two weeks.”

“The hospital has relationships with several memory care facilities in the community,” she says, not sounding overly concerned. “I spoke with the charge nurse, who estimated that you’d be discharged within another one to two weeks.”

“So, what do I do?”

“When they clear you to leave the hospital, I’ll meet with you at the police station. Hopefully by then, I’ll have some returns from missing persons. We can show you photographs, compare what you remember by that time with whatever information I can gather.” I want to ask her: and then what? But she’s already folding her papers into an immaculately organized briefcase, checking the clock on the wall, then glancing with annoyance at her watch.

“Your clock is slow,” she says. “I have a meeting in ten minutes. I apologize for hurrying out like this. I’ll be in touch with you.”

“What else can you tell me about the symbol?”

“Not much,” she answers. “Sophia means wisdom, but in different traditions it’s something like feminine, divine wisdom.”

“A big idea,” I said. “For a regular first name.”

“It’s not that common a name around here,” Detective Radford answers. She reaches out to shake my hand. I grasp her hand firmly and release it.

After she leaves, I walk to the dry-erase board and wipe off the ‘JANE DOE’ with the tip of my finger. In its place, I write ‘Sophia’, then, after scrutinizing it, erase the last letter, change it to ‘Sophie.’ It’s better than nothing.

I don’t know how I got the necklace, but I’m not sure I want it out in plain sight, either. I decide to keep it under my pillow. Anjali told me that I may have given someone hell, but I certainly got more in return.

When night comes, I don’t dream. I disappear, into a sea of red. I wake in the dark and stare out the frosted glass at the hallway, my heart pounding. Each time my eyes begin to close, I jolt awake, convinced I’ve heard the latch of the doorknob twist to open. Hospitals are always cold, or, maybe, it’s the constant chill of fear. Either way, sitting awake in the dark, I hug my knees and whisper, “Sophie,” as if it’s a life raft.

Anjali arrives for her shift at seven in the morning, sharp. She opens her mouth to greet me, but her smile falters.

“You look like you’ve been awake all night,” she scolds. “You’ve got to let them prescribe you something for sleep. Your body needs it as much as your mind does.”

“I’m okay. Thanks.” I hold out my arm for the blood pressure cuff. After checking all the usual items, Anjali walks across the room to update the dry-erase board. She sees the change I’ve made and turns back to me with a grin. “Sophie,” she says. “That’s new, right? Wait.” Her eyes widen. “You remembered?”

“No,” I answer, feeling as though I should apologize. “My necklace. The symbol—it has a name. Sophia.”

“So, it’s good luck.”

“It could be bad luck as easily as good,” I answer, smiling. “But it’s pretty much the only thing that feels like mine.”

“It suits you.”

“Thanks.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“What do you mean?” I want to snap, to ask her what wouldn’t be bothering me, but I gather she knows what she’s talking about.

“You look more worried than usual,” she says. “That detective came to see you yesterday, right?”

“They want me to stay in a long-term care facility,” I mumble.

“Oh, when you leave here?”

“Yes.”

“You know,” sh. . .