Unseen

by Nancy Bush

Genres: Female Sleuths; Romantic Suspense; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

She Woke Up With No Memories. . . She wakes up in a hospital room...bruised. . .bloody...confused. She knows her name is Gemma La Porte--but that's all. She doesn't remember smashing her car. She doesn't remember anything from the last three days. But a policeman, Deputy Will Tanninger, is waiting for answers and wants to know if she's responsible for a fatal hit-and-run. . . But Remembering Her Past Could Kill Her. . . Hoping to restore her shattered memory, Gemma has no choice but to put her trust in Will. But if it turns out she's guilty of murder, he has no choice but to arrest her. Torn by her growing feelings for Will, and haunted by her shadowy past, Gemma is determined to learn the truth. But, in this case, the darkest truths are unknowable--and the deadliest enemies are unseen. . .

Release date: March 30, 2009

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 383

Sample

A yellow moon rose over the line of fir trees, so close and huge that it seemed like an artist’s distorted vision, not the real thing. He watched it climb slowly upward through dispassionate eyes. It sent an uneven strip of light across the field behind his two-room home and glimmered in the pond that was ruffled by a light wind.

As if in response to the moon’s appearance, a light switched on in the main house across the field. Equally yellow. An evil color. A witch’s color. He was glad the house was so far away, wished it even farther.

For a moment he saw her standing in the field, dark, near-black hair flowing around her shoulders. She wore her witch’s garb and she stared back at him, her eyes black pits, her mouth curved.

“C’mere, boy,” she said, and he wanted to go, but she was looking beyond him. She wasn’t beckoning him. She’d never asked for him.

Still, she stripped off her clothes and melted into the pond. A moment of shadowy reflection and then just moonlight.

She was a witch. She had to die. And he was the hunter.

He gazed hard at the moon, now glowing a ghostly blue-white, shed of its earthly restraints, higher in the sky, smaller, more intense. He closed his eyes and saw its afterimage on the inside of his eyelids.

Witches had to die. He’d already sent two back to the hell they’d sprung from. But there were more. And some of them were filled with an evil so intense it was like they burned from the inside out.

He’d found the one who’d stolen from him. He’d been on a search for her, but she’d eluded him until last night. In a moment of pure coincidence, he’d seen her walking across the street. Wearing her witch’s garb, hair flying behind her and tangling in the wind that swooped down, bitterly cold for such a mild autumn.

He’d followed her and it had been a mistake because he’d gotten too close. She’d sensed him. She gazed hard at him and he turned sharply away, afraid she’d recognize him. But then she’d been the one to run away, out the door as if Satan were at her heels. And she’d put herself out of his reach, but it wouldn’t be for long because now he knew where she haunted. Now he knew where to find her. Soon, he would strip her bare, crush her naked body with his, thrust himself into her again and again as she howled and scratched and screamed.

Then he would throw back his head and roar because he was the hunter. A wolf. Hunting his prey.

Jaw tense, he threw another look at the moon, now a white, hard dot in a black sky. The natives called it a hunter moon. The full moon seen in the month of October.

October…

The witch’s month.

He was the wolf. And it was time to hunt the witch.

She wished him dead.

She knew about him. Witnessed the way his gaze ran lustfully over some preteen girl. Saw how his eyes glued to her athletic limbs and small breasts, how his lips parted and his cock grew hard.

But wishing wasn’t enough. It almost was, but it wasn’t quite. Sometimes wishing needed a little push. So, she waited for him to go to an unlucky place, the kind of place where bad things happened. Deaths. Accidents. Poisonous secrets. She knew about those places better than anyone because bad things had happened to her at an unlucky place a long time ago, and she’d spent many formative years getting payback for those bad things.

She waited with her jaw set. She was good at action, not patience. But today it had all come together, his unlucky place had materialized: a soccer field, with lots of tweens, their limbs flashing in nylon shorts and jerseys. She herself was very lucky and when people asked her name, which wasn’t often because she avoided encounters with strangers as a rule, she told them, “Lucky,” and they generally oohed and aahed and said what a great name it was.

People were stupid, as a rule.

The soccer fields were full of young bodies. A jamboree was taking place: kids of varying ages playing half-hour games and then moving on to another field to challenge another team. The boys were playing on the north-side fields, over by the water tower. The girls were closer in, on the hard-packed dirt of the south-side fields—fields that looked as if they’d been forgotten by the parks department. Fields good enough for girls, not for boys.

Her lip curled. Figures, she thought. She wasn’t a man-hater, but she had definite thoughts about certain members of the male sex. She was responsible for the deaths of several of their gender and didn’t regret any of them.

She waited in her stolen car. Well, not stolen exactly. Appropriated for a specific purpose. She’d learned a few things during the twenty-seven years she’d been on the planet. She knew how to take care of herself. She could accurately fire a gun up to twenty yards. Well, fairly accurately. And she could break into and steal older-model vehicles—the only kind she would drive because she distrusted air bags. Those things could kill you. She knew a guy who would dismantle them for her, which was a good thing, because it was getting harder and harder to find vintage cars available for her purposes, although she currently had a ready supply from Carl’s Automotive and Car Rental. Hunk O’Junks. That’s how they were advertised by the amateurish spray-painted sign posted off Highway 26, about fifteen miles east of Seaside, Oregon. Hunk O’Junks. Yessirree. They could be rented for $19.99 a day, but Lucky didn’t bother with that. A sorry line of tired-looking vehicles they were, too, but they served the purpose. No one noticed when they were gone. No one commented when they were returned.

Cars were a simple matter to hot-wire. And she was adept at using a flat bar to slide down the inside of the window and pop the lock. It was then child’s play to dig under the dash, yank the wires, spark the ignition and drive away.

But the Hunk O’Junks were perfect in one more aspect: the owner left the keys under the mat. In the early hours of this morning she’d simply helped herself to the one farthest from the flickering vapor light at the corner of the automotive garage and driven away. The horny mechanic and sometime car thief who’d shown her the ropes and introduced her to Carl’s Automotive had been as unfaithful as a rutting bull. She’d used him as a means to an end and they’d almost parted friends. But he’d pushed it, had actually attempted to rape her. Lucky had been down that road before and nobody was going to try that again and live. She’d grabbed a nearby table lamp’s electrical cord and wrapped it around his neck. He’d been bullish enough to scarcely notice, so involved was he in spreading her thighs and jamming himself into her. She’d pulled the cord taut with all her strength, with all the rage of injustice she’d nursed from years of abuse. He passed out and she held on. It hadn’t been his face she was envisioning; it was someone else’s. Someone faint in her memory, yet dark and looming. Twenty minutes later she’d surfaced slowly, as if awakening from a long illness, her fingers numb, her mind clearing. She didn’t have much faith that anyone would believe her about the attempted rape, so she gathered up the lamp and its cord from the dirty and sparse living room he called home, wiped down everything she’d touched, and left someone else to find his body. She’d made the mistake of entering his home after this, their last car-thieving lesson, because she’d begun to think they were friends.

She hadn’t made that mistake since.

Now, she slouched behind the wheel of her current Hunk O’Junk, her gaze centered on a light brown van parked near the jamboree parking lot exit. This maybe wasn’t the best venue for what she’d planned, but it could be worse. And it was where he trolled. And it had that unlucky feel she could almost taste. Edward Letton wasn’t aware that he was being followed. Didn’t know she’d found him out, that she’d tailed his van through parks and malls and schools, the environs of little girls.

Lucky had originally picked up on Letton by a means she didn’t fully understand herself. They’d crossed paths in a small clothing store in Seaside, a place that specialized in beach togs and gear. She’d brushed past him and read his desire as if he’d suddenly whispered his intentions in her ear, making her skin crawl. Glancing back, she saw the way his gaze centered on a young girl who was trying hard to display her breast buds as the real deal, the tiny buttons pushed up by an underwire bra, the girl thrusting them forward, her back arched like a bow. She was around eleven. Gawky. Un-formed and unsure. She both hung by her mother for protection, and stepped away from her scornfully, as if she couldn’t bear the idea that Mom was so old and completely uncool.

Letton stared and stared. He was so hungry Lucky felt his lust like a living thing. It filled her senses as if he were secreting pheromones. Made her ill. So, she started following him. That day she tailed him a good fifty miles, all the way back to Hillsboro and the untidy green-gray house where he lived with his adoring, mentally-suspect wife. Not the brightest jewel on the necklace, her. Letton was some kind of middle-grade manager at a machine-parts company. Lucky had watched him from the parking lot of his workplace and followed him around, in and out of restaurants, to an all-you-can-eat place where she seated herself in the booth in front of him, her back to his. Even though he was with a co-worker she sensed he’d unerringly watched the girl in the T-shirt serving soup whose chest was so flat she could have been a child.

He didn’t drive the van to work. It was parked in his garage, and Lucky didn’t know about it at first. Neither did his dimwit wife. His garage was his domain. He drove a Honda Accord to work, new enough to be reliable, old enough to be forgettable. She knew those kinds of cars well.

And then she realized he used the van when he went trolling. Nobody had to tell her what he was planning. She knew that hunger. That build-up. That need. She’d been on the receiving end of it and it hadn’t been pretty.

He had almost grabbed a girl at the mall, but she was with friends and hard to snatch. Lucky had watched him, her gloved hands tensing on the wheel of her appropriated car, but he’d passed up the chance, though he’d climbed from his van and paced around it, watching with distress as his victim and friends meandered across the parking lot, ponytails flouncing, out of his reach.

But here he was, a scant week-and-a-half later. Saturday morning. Cruising past soccer fields was one of his favorite pastimes. She’d parked today’s Hunk O’Junk, an early ’90s model, half a block down from his house, dozing a bit as she’d risen before dawn. When he backed the van out of the drive, she let it disappear around a corner before she started to follow. He didn’t try any tricky moves on the way to the fields. He drove straight to the jamboree. Once there, he circled around, parking at the end spot near the girls’ fields, nose out. It was early, so Lucky parked her sedan across from him, a couple of slots down, and let him see her as she locked the vehicle and strolled across the road toward a strip mall with a coffee shop, its door open to the cool morning air. She wanted him to think she was just another soccer mom, biding time before the games, going to buy a latte or mocha.

As soon as she was across the street, she circled the east building of the strip mall and settled behind a row of arbor-vitae directly across from the jamboree parking lot. Hidden behind the trees, she put a pair of binoculars to her eyes, watching Letton through the foliage.

More cars arrived. Teams of boys and girls. Letton watched and waited as the girls banded into teams, running in their uniforms, blurs of red, green, yellow, and blue, young legs flashing in heavy shin guards and cleated shoes.

She had never played soccer herself. That had not been the kind of childhood she’d experienced. Mostly she’d plotted and dreamed of escape. Sometimes she had thought of murder.

Now she waited until another crush of people arrived—more vans spilling kids and equipment onto the pavement—then hurried back, blending in with the other moms, sliding into her silver car. Letton was too enthralled by the bounty of adolescent flesh to even notice her. She was pretty sure he was jacking off in the driver’s seat.

The teams began to gather in groups, readying for play. Every group was a tight, wiggling pack, like a hive of bees on the move.

And then a young girl, ponytail bobbing, broke free, running across the fields toward the parking lot, her gait stuttering a bit as her cleats hit the pavement. What worked on grass didn’t offer the same kind of purchase on asphalt. She was clomping toward the portable bathrooms, passing directly in front of Edward Letton’s van. He called to her. Lucky had rolled her own window down and now she turned on the engine and slipped the car into gear, foot light on the brake.

“Hey, you’re with the Hornets, right?” Letton called to the girl, climbing from his seat. He was obviously quoting from the back of their jerseys, which displayed their teams’ names in block letters. He left the door ajar for a quick getaway. She could hear the thrum of excitement in his voice as he headed toward the side door of the van, sliding it open. His pants were still unzipped.

“Yeah?” the girl said warily.

“I’ve got those extra balls your coach wanted. Let me get ’em. Maybe you could take some back.”

“I’m going to the bathroom.”

But Letton was already reaching into the van. The girl hesitated. A soccer ball rolled out and started heading toward her. She automatically went after it, the movement drawing her closer to the van. She picked it up and said, “I can’t take it now, I’ll come back for it,” reaching toward him, intending to hand it to him. He didn’t make a move to meet her, just waited for her to approach.

Don’t go, Lucky thought, foot off the brake. Stay back.

The girl hesitated. Lucky could practically feel when she made the decision that Letton was “with” their team.

Before the girl could take another step forward Lucky smashed her foot down on the accelerator and jammed the horn with her fist. The car leapt forward like a runner at the gate. The girl jumped back, startled. Edward Letton forgot himself and lurched for the girl, but she’d automatically moved out of range of the silver car shooting down on them, running for the safety of the soccer fields. Letton glanced up darkly, his plan foiled, glaring murderously at Lucky. His mouth open to…what? Berate her for unsafe driving? He looked mad enough to kill.

She slammed into him at thirty and climbing. Threw him skyward. Threw herself forward. The steering wheel jumped from her hands. The sedan’s grill grazed the back bumper of the van. Someone screamed. She grabbed the wheel hard, turning, both arms straining, sensing calamity. Then she spun past the van, tires squealing. Letton’s flying body thunked off the roof of her car and bounced onto the asphalt, an acrobat without a net. He lay still.

In her rearview mirror Lucky stared hard at Letton’s body. She drove away with controlled speed, slowing through a tangle of neighborhoods, weaving her way, heart slamming hot and fast in her chest, zigzagging toward Highway 26. She had to get this car out of the area and fast.

It was only when she was safely away, heading west, keeping up with fast-moving traffic, that she saw the blood on her steering wheel.

A glance in the rearview. Her face was covered with blood. The impact had smacked her face into the steering wheel. Her left eye was closing. She hadn’t even noticed.

There was Windex in the back. Rags. Bleach. She would wipe up the evidence, clean herself and the car. All she had to do now was keep the growing pain and swelling under control. Her vision blurred.

She had to get to an off road near Carl’s Automotive, one of the myriads of turn-outs on this winding highway through the Coast Range. Later tonight she would sneak the car back onto the weed-choked gravel lot and hope that the front grill, lights, and body weren’t too damaged. The vehicle needed to stay undiscovered at the Hunk O’Junks lot for a long time.

She swiped at the blood running down her forehead, blinding her.

Not good. Not good at all.

But she was lucky. She would get away with it. She would…

She just hoped to hell she’d killed him.

Surfacing from a yawning pit of blackness, her eyes adjusted to an unfamiliar room: cream vertical blinds, cream walls, television on a shelf bolted high on the wall, blankets covering what must be her feet, wood veneer footboard.

A hospital room.

Her heart clutched. She thought of surgery. Pain. Inside her head was a long, silent scream.

Automatically, her hand flew up and touched the bandage wrapped around her head. One eye was covered. She didn’t know why, but it wasn’t the first time she’d blacked out. Far from it. But this time she’d hurt herself, maybe badly. What had happened?

She had a terrible moment of not knowing who she was.

Then she remembered.

I’m lucky, she thought, memory slipping back to her, amorphous, hard to grasp, but at least it was there. At least some of it was there.

And she was angry. Hot fury sang through her veins, though she couldn’t immediately identify the source of her rage. But someone had to pay. She knew that.

A nurse was adjusting a monitor that was spitting out paper in a long, running stream. Red squiggles wove over the paper’s lined grid. Her heartbeat. Respiration, maybe? She closed her eye and pretended to be sleeping. She wasn’t ready for the inquisition, yet. Wasn’t ready to find out the whys and wherefores of how she’d come to be at this hospital.

She heard the squeak of the nurse’s crepe soles head toward the door. A soft whoosh of air, barely discernible, said the silent door had been opened. Not hearing it close, she carefully lifted her eyelid. As suspected, the wheelchair-wide door was ajar. Anyone could push inside and stare at her, which consumed her with worry. She had to stay awake.

The last vestiges of what seemed to be a dream tugged at her consciousness and she fought to hang on to the remnants but they were slippery and insubstantial, spider threads. She was left merely with the sensation that she was heading for a showdown, some distant and unwelcome Armageddon that was going to shatter and rearrange her world. Maybe not for the better.

But then she always felt that. Always awoke with that low-grade dread which followed the gaps in her memory. Maybe someday she would wake up and not know who she was at all. Maybe her memory would be gone for good.

What would happen then?

The door swung in noiselessly and a man in a light-tan uniform entered the room. He was with the county sheriff’s department and, seeing her looking at him, he said, “Hello, ma’am. I’m Detective Will Tanninger with the Winslow County Sheriff’s Department.”

She nodded, eyeing him carefully. He was in his mid-thirties with dark brown hair and serious eyes, but she could see the striations at their edges, from squinting them in either laughter or against the sun. “Where am I?”

“Laurelton General Hospital. You’ve been admitted as a Jane Doe. Could you tell us your name?”

He was steely polite. Alarm bells rang. What had she done? It took her a long moment to come up with her name. “Gemma LaPorte.” She hesitated, almost afraid to ask. “Are you here to see me?”

“We don’t know how you got here, Ms. LaPorte. You walked into the ER and collapsed.”

Her hand fluttered to her head once again. “Oh…?”

“Did someone bring you? Did you drive yourself?”

Gemma moved her head slowly from side to side and she felt a twinge of pain. “I don’t remember.”

Will paused, regarding her with dark, liquid eyes. She could sense his strength and knew he was good at his job. A tracker. Someone who never gave up. Someone dogged and relentless. She shivered involuntarily as he said, “You don’t remember the circumstances that brought you here?”

“No.”

“What’s your last memory?”

Gemma thought about it a minute. “I was making myself breakfast at home. Oatmeal and cinnamon. I was looking out the window and thinking we were drowning in rain. It was a downpour. The dirt was like concrete and the water was pouring over it in sheets.”

The deputy was silent for so long that Gemma felt her anxiety rise. She sensed that he was deliberating on an answer.

“What?” she asked.

“It hasn’t rained for three days.”

 

Will Tanninger regarded the woman with the scared green eye and stark white bandage with a healthy sense of skepticism. Her skin had paled at his words. He understood about trauma-induced amnesia. More often than not, serious accident victims couldn’t remember the events that led to their hospital stay. But they usually lost a few hours, not days. In Gemma LaPorte’s case, he couldn’t tell if this was a ploy or the truth. The half of her face he could see was swollen and bruised, blue and purple shadings of color already traveling from her injured side to the other. Even so, he could tell she was rather extraordinary looking. Smooth, prominent cheekbones and a finely sculpted nose beneath a hazel-colored eye that glinted green when hit by the hard morning light coming through a twelve-inch gap in the hospital drapes.

According to the staff, her injuries weren’t as severe as they looked. Concussion. Bruising. Her face had run into something—something that could very likely be a steering wheel. Was she the woman who had purposely run down Edward Letton yesterday morning? Had she sustained those injuries in the crash? She didn’t really look much like the woman described by Carol Pellter, the young soccer player who’d narrowly missed being mowed down by the hit-and-run driver (that was Pellter with two l’s, Carol had informed him seriously when she saw him writing her name down incorrectly). She also said it “scared the shit out of me, to quote my father,” and said Father looked decidedly uncomfortable when those words shot from his daughter’s young mouth. Carol, however, was decidedly happy to be able to use the language. Her description of the driver was fairly generic: older woman, wearing a baseball cap. Upon questioning both Carol and her parents, Carol’s father made it clear that “older” to Carol meant anyone over sixteen. Will had taken Carol to the sheriff’s offices to meet their one and only sketch artist, a talented amateur not on the county payroll. The artist had tried to draw a picture based on Carol’s description. In the end Will had put the woman anywhere from her mid-twenties to her late thirties.

But the reason Will was here now, with this mystery woman, was that she’d shown up at the hospital with a head injury consistent with one caused by an automobile accident—a ramming automobile accident. She fell loosely inside the right age bracket, and she had the right length of brown hair, and timing-wise, her injuries could have occurred yesterday morning.

But Will was reluctant to ask her directly about the hit-and-run. He didn’t want to feed her information until he was ready. He was hoping she’d trip up and tell him something herself. Maybe something she wanted him to know. Was desperate for him to know. Such as that Edward Letton, who was languishing in this same hospital with multiple fractures—the most serious a crushing head injury that had required emergency surgery to stop the bleeding in his brain—had been driving a van equipped with ropes, chains, handcuffs, and items of well…torture. Dog-eared pages of crude child pornography were tucked inside the vehicle’s pockets. The workshop of a predator about to strike.

Carol Pellter was damn lucky Gemma LaPorte, or whoever, had thwarted Letton from his sadistic purpose. If the man had grabbed the girl…Will’s mind clamped shut. No need to go there.

But was the driver Gemma LaPorte? If so, he would have no choice but to charge her with attempted murder at the worst, reckless driving at the least. According to Carol she’d run down Letton intentionally, but though the deed must have been in full view of the fields, with all the noise and attention diverting the players and bystanders, no one saw much of anything except a silver car driving a little faster than it should, the tires squealing a bit. That silver car had not been found.

So, was it intentional? Will was inclined to believe so. Carol was pretty sure of herself. And her parents, scared that Carol had nearly been run down, had been all about finding that driver and throwing the book at her. Until they’d looked through the open door of the van and seen what Will saw. Before that viewing they’d been instrumental in dialing 911 and getting an ambulance for Letton; they’d probably helped save him from dying at the site. It wasn’t until Will and another deputy were on the scene that anyone really looked inside Letton’s van. Then the Pellters stood silent and sober, possibly regretting their good Samaritan actions. When Carol wanted to see what was inside, they’d pulled her away, Carol all the while protesting that it was unfair, and that she heard her mom say, “oh, God,” and her dad say, “shit,” like they were both really, really scared, so she, Carol Pellter, deserved to know what was in that van!

Mom and Dad Pellter ignored her, staring at Will hollow-eyed, holding onto the whirling dervish that was their daughter in a protective grip that finally seemed to penetrate the spirited girl’s annoyance and she stopped fighting them and grew quiet.

Letton’s van had been impounded.

Now Gemma LaPorte was looking at him, her eye more hazel than green as the line of exterior light had shifted to illuminate the bruises on her forehead. “What’s the date today?” she asked.

“October seventh.”

“Three days,” she repeated.

A heavyset nurse entered the room, caught Gemma’s expression and turned officiously to Will. Before she could berate him for upsetting her patient, he nodded at her. “I’ll check back with you later,” he told Gemma, then headed into the hallway.

The nurse said to Gemma, “You look like you could use some more pain medication.”

Gemma was staring after Will. She felt like she could use some more pain medication, but she didn’t dare. She needed to keep her wits about her.

“Administration will be calling for your billing information,” the nurse added with a slight grimace. The duties and functions of a hospital were well-known.

Hospitals…pain…she had experienced a terrible moment when she saw a plastic mask descending over her face and smelled the scent of some drug.

“Do you know why that deputy came to see me?” she asked shakily. “He didn’t really say.”

Nurse Penny had seen a lot of patients in her forty years on the job. She prided herself as a good judge of character. Had only been fooled by someone once, and that was the bastard she eventually married and divorced. She hoped he rotted in hell somewhere.

She could certainly feel this patient’s reluctance and fear, but there was no sense of maliciousness or criminality emanating from her. She knew what that felt like. She’d been cajoled and lied to by an assortment of bamboozlers over the years and she’d seen right through them. No. This girl just seemed scared. Maybe angry. She’d muttered some vile things in her sleep, but Nurse Penny believed she was a good person at heart. “There was a hit-and-run. A man was seriously injured. They’re looking for the vehicle that ran him down, and the driver was described as a young woman about your age.”

Gemma felt cold. She absorbed the news silently. The nurse frowned, not liking the sense that the girl felt guilt. Could she have been wrong about her?

Gemma kept her silence as the nurse bustled around the room. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, not fooling Nurse Penny for a minute. Eventually, though, the nurse had to return to other duties and she left the room, pausing for a moment to look at the girl in the bed. She shook her head and left, a faint disturbance of air marking her passage.

The room fell quiet except for the soft whirs and clicks of the monitor.

Gemma opened her eye cautiously. She was alone. Lifting her arm, she examined the IV running into the skin above her wrist, felt the pressure of the cuff surrounding her upper arm. She began peeling off the tape that held the IV in place.

 

The sun skidded behind a cloud, plunging the October afternoon into early darkness, but the wolf welcomed the veil of shadow. He stood next to the bus stop bench, lifted his head and smelled the thick fall air, heavy with pent-up rain. He was glad for the clouds. He was a hunter and he preferred darkness.

A young couple sat on the bench, fighting over whether they had time to stop by her parents’ after visiting his father, who was recovering from hip surgery. The wolf was as remote to them as a distant star. He could have been invisible for all they noticed. Like the people living in the big house, he wasn’t worth noticing. He was insignificant. Unnoticeable. Maybe a little dull.

He pushed thoughts of them aside and concentrated on the woman inside the hospital. He’d followed her through all the strange turns that had brought her here. He was furious with her. She’. . .