Forget Me Not: A Novel (Crossroads Crisis Center) by Vicki Hinze Page A

could bear to go on living. That alone kept him going, made it possible to drag himself out of bed every morning and into bed every night without wishing for the permanent escape of oblivion.
    He’d been forgotten, but he hadn’t forgotten Susan and Christopher. He owed it to them never to forget, so he kept getting up and going to bed and spending all his time in between trying to catch their killers.
    Yet he had to admit, in the dead of night when he was staring at his bedroom ceiling in the darkness, that the three years without success haddriven him to the breaking point. How much longer could he bear living with his failures?
    One minute at a time
.
    He repeated the litany in his mind. When the nightmare started, he’d worked to get through one day, but as time dragged on and despair grew, he’d gone down to an hour. More time passed, more despair led to hopelessness, and all he could stand was a minute. Without so much as a single solid lead, how much longer would it take to reduce him to fighting to keep going one second at a time?
    “Ben?” Peggy sounded uncertain if he was still on the line.
    “I’m here.” He swallowed around a lump. “Where’s the woman now?” No way could he make himself call her Susan.
    “Here. She wasn’t sexually violated, but she was battered and has a head injury. Lisa Harper ran some tests to be safe. So far everything’s come back okay.”
    “Except she can’t remember who she is. And she just so happens to look like my dead wife, and she just so happens to call herself by my dead wife’s name.” Ben sighed, soul weary.
    She was another one out for money.
Thanks, Uncle Rudard
.
    When Christopher was three, Ben had inherited more money than he could spend in several lifetimes from his uncle Rudard, an Englishman he’d never met who had amassed a fortune but was spiritually bankrupt. He’d charged Ben, because of his faith, to spend the money to do good things.
    Those good things took form in Crossroads Crisis Center, Susan’s dream.
    Yet with money’s perks came its liabilities and, according to police, these types of scams happened all the time to people of means.
    “This is nothing new, Peggy.”
    “No, this has never happened. Trust me, Ben. This woman is different. You haven’t seen her or talked to her, or you’d know it. Her injuries are consistent with her claims, and Lisa is convinced the woman is legitimate—and not at all like the one last year. She’s sane.”
    Dr. Lisa Harper was an intern. Gifted, but on this, considering the situation, Ben wanted the most expertise and experience available. “What does Harvey say?” Dr. Harvey Talbot was the senior psychologist at the center. A former military officer, devoted to his job, and uncannily shrewd at detecting impostors.
    “He did the first psych interview with Lisa right after they determined Susan was physically okay. Preliminary finding is Dissociative Fugue, but he wants to run more tests.”
    Ben glanced from the ceiling to the wall, plucked at the edge of the covers. “Temporary amnesia due to head injury or stress.”
    Peggy’s lip smack carried through the phone like static. “Lord knows the poor woman’s suffered both.”
    Ben’s heart suffered a tug. He shunned it, refused to allow this stranger’s situation to tap into his compassion. He would not, could not, be touched. He had nothing left to touch. “And you know this, of course, because she says so.”
    “Yes, and because between the hospital and the center I’ve been at this for nearly a decade, and I can read liars at fifty paces. Granted, Harvey is better at it—and when you were crisis counseling, you were good too—but I’m not a rookie and I’m no slouch. This woman isn’t a liar and she’s not crazy,” Peggy insisted. “I also took a statement from Clyde. He found her in the woods, beaten and bloody. She couldn’t even stand up on her own.”
    “Who did you say found her?”
    “Clyde Parker.”
    A fuzzy image