She's Not There by P. J. Parrish

Something brushed her leg, and she looked down. The poodle had settled down on the linoleum, resting its snout on her feet.
    “Angel seems to like you,” Hannah said. She hesitated, then penciled Amelia’s name in the notebook and closed it. “Okay, the room’s ten dollars a night and since you’re the only renter right now I’ll throw in breakfast if you make it down to the kitchen by eight.”
    “Thank you,” Amelia said.
    Hannah rose and stuffed the notebook on a shelf between two cookbooks. “Follow me, hon,” she said. “I’ll show you where you can lay your head.”
    The room was above the kitchen and smelled of apple and cinnamon. It was large and bright with sunlight. There was a sagging bed with a paint-chipped white iron headboard, a fat carved bureau, and a round braided rug on the scuffed wood floor. The wallpaper was patterned with faded blue flowers and darker rectangles where pictures had once hung.
    Amelia’s eyes lingered on the bed. God, all she wanted to do was just crawl under that white chenille bedspread and never come out. She turned back to Hannah, who was standing in the door, holding the white dog.
    “It’s lovely,” Amelia said.
    “If you need to make any phone calls, there’s a phone downstairs in the hallway,” Hannah said.
    “I won’t need the phone,” Amelia said.
    “Yeah, no one does anymore because everyone has a phone in their pocket. I got no use for the damn things, myself. Cell phones give you brain cancer, you know.”
    Cell phone.
    Amelia had a sudden stab of memory—standing somewhere in the dark rain, holding a cell phone and listening to it ring. She could remember the feeling of her heart beating too fast and even what she had been thinking at that moment— Please, please answer the phone.
    Who had she called? Had anyone answered?
    “You sure you’re okay, hon?”
    She looked at Hannah and nodded. “I’m just a little tired.”
    Hannah smiled. “Well, the bed’s old but comfy. Don’t worry about locking your door. Nobody here does. The bath is down the hall, and there’s towels and shampoo in there. I’ll be down in the kitchen if you need anything else.”
    She left, leaving the door ajar.
    Amelia set the duffel on the bed and unzipped it. She stared down at the wad of money, debating whether to try to hide it, but then decided to leave it in the bag. She pulled out the bottle of Aleve, shook two pills into her hand, and went down the hall to the bathroom. She downed the pills with a handful of water and then looked in the mirror.
    The gauze had come loose, so she carefully peeled it off her chin. The sight of the black stitches made her wince. She would have to get Band-Aids, a nightgown, some fresh clothes.
    But not now.
    Her eyes drifted to the claw-foot bathtub. Right now, a long soak in the tub was the only thing she needed.
    She ran the water, stripped, and got in the tub. The hot water embraced her, and as she washed herself, she saw two large bruises on her left leg and a bad scrape on one elbow that she hadn’t noticed before. Several of her fingernails were ragged, and the palms of both her hands were raw and red, like she had fallen and slid across concrete.
    She eased farther down into the warm water, resting her head back on the tub’s edge. The tub was too small for her long legs so she had to prop her feet on the faucet. She lay there for a long time before she finally looked down at her feet. She sat forward and focused on them—on the gnarled toes, bulging blue veins, crusted callouses and bunions, and blackened nails. Ugly feet. Deformed feet. How had they gotten that way?
    A new question pushed its way forward in her head.
    Who was I? What was I?
    She settled back against the tub and closed her eyes. The electric current of fear that had been with her since waking up in the hospital was subsiding a little, almost as if the warm bathwater was leaching it away. But she knew it would not go away completely, that she would never