Nancy Bush's Nowhere Bundle: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide & Nowhere Safe. Nancy Bush

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      Chapter I

      Today ...

      Liv swam up from the nightmare, soaked in sweat, an aborted scream passing her lips. Heart racing, she blinked in the faint, early-morning light sneaking beneath her bedroom window shade. What time was it? Five? Five-thirty?

      Closing her eyes, she willed her galloping heart to slow down, aware of the fragments of her dream but unable to completely grasp them. Didn’t matter. She’d had enough nightmares to know this wouldn’t be the last one—far from it—and though the dreams weren’t exactly the same, they represented a deep trauma that years of therapy had never completely uncovered and erased.

      At Hathaway House Dr. Yancy, who’d had enough compassion and understanding to actually make Liv believe she was really trying to help her, had once said, “I think it’s something you saw.”

      Like no shit, Sherlock. She’d seen her mother after she’d hanged herself.

      But Dr. Yancy had shaken her head slowly when Liv had been quick to point that out. Liv was always quick to defend herself. One of the problems, apparently, that had landed her in Hathaway House in the first place.

      Dr. Yancy had then added, “You saw something else. Something you can’t—or won’t—let yourself remember.”

      That had caused a quickening in Liv’s blood. An inner jolt of truth that had sent perspiration instantly rising on her skin as if she were having a hot flash. Her mind had clamped down hard, or so Dr. Yancy had told her, when she’d insisted she couldn’t remember anything other than the horror of her mother’s suicide.

      But, though Liv denied Dr. Yancy’s claim, she didn’t completely disagree with it, though she never said so at the time. There did feel like there was something she did feel. And with it was the sensation that she was being followed. Stalked.

      Now, years later, the question of whether her stay at Hathaway House had helped or hindered her still remained unanswered. None of the other so-called doctors and quacks at Hathaway House would have ever committed themselves to the kind of bold statements Dr. Yancy put forth; they all hid behind compassionate expressions and deep frowns and not much else. At the time even Dr. Yancy hadn’t really wanted to show her hand to her contemporaries because they would have undoubtedly berated and dismissed her. Liv knew enough about the institution’s politics to read between the lines and consequently she thought they were all a bunch of chickenshits with minimal understanding of the human condition and maximum interest in hanging on to their jobs.

      But that wasn’t really the question, was it? The question was: had Olivia Dugan been “cured” of her sweat-soaked nightmares and dark depression—the very reasons why, as a teenager, she’d been shuffled off to Hathaway House in the first place? Had Olivia Dugan learned to combat the triggers that sent her heart palpitating, palms shaking, thoughts colliding around inside her skull like pinballs, firing the wrong neurons, causing her to make wild, unreliable choices?

      The answer? A resounding no. Though she had lied and pretended and acted and done every damn thing she knew how to do to be released from Hathaway House, as far as a cure went, the answer was still no. She didn’t know how to combat the triggers that started the nightmares and increased the depression. Even if she knew what they were. Even if she told herself to stay away from them.

      Because last night, one of the triggers had been pulled. A blinking red light had welcomed her home. The answering machine. A warning beacon. A voice from a stranger. She’d reluctantly picked up the receiver and listened to the phone message.

      The phone message . . .

      Now, Liv threw off the covers, shivering a little. She climbed out of bed and padded to the kitchen, a journey that took about ten steps across the tired carpeting of her one-bedroom apartment.

      The phone message.

      Lawyers had found her home phone number and left her a message. That was the trigger for her nightmare. She’d tried to ignore the blinking light when she’d tossed her keys on the counter. She’d asked herself for about the billionth time why she kept the phone and voice mail at all. Most of the time she liked the idea of being off the grid completely. That’s why she didn’t carry a cell phone. If that made her a Luddite, then so be it. She was a little frightened of technology anyway. She didn’t want to be on someone else’s radar. It just didn’t feel safe. Dr. Yancy had told her she was hiding from something, and she supposed it was true but she didn’t care.

      Still, Crenshaw and Crenshaw had found her phone number, so she’d phoned back and the lawyer—Tom Crenshaw—had asked her for her address. She’d been reluctant to give it to him. Not that he couldn’t find it, she supposed; he was just asking to be polite.

      He said he wanted to send her something—a package. But he was cagey as hell about what that package contained, and only when they’d gone back and forth and he’d finally convinced himself that yes, she СКАЧАТЬ