Holly’s fall from grace as well as her intermittent drug-use woes had been well publicized among Hollywood insiders. Amy’s offer of help and much-needed counseling had been a precious lifeline to someone whose telephone calls were no longer returned and whose longtime agent had just cut her loose.
And after hearing about Holly’s rocky relation ship with her family, after learning about the Rocking P, Amy had been only too eager to put Holly in touch with Rex Rogers. Of course, those two weren’t exactly mere nodding acquaintances.
As the People article had pointed out, they had worked together on several separate cases and won monetary settlements in most of them.
When she had first seen the magazine piece, Holly had been naively proud that Amy and Rex had been able to find so many other people to help other people just like her. She had thought that, with Amy as a partner and with the Rocking P as the site for a treatment center, she, too, would be able to make a contribution to their pioneering work.
But now, for the first time, she saw it for what it really was-a scam. How many of the families mentioned in the article had paid damages for something that wasn’t necessarily true? How many of the supposed memories were being artificially augmented, Holly wondered, and how much had each of their families payed up to bury the past?
Amy Baxter may have started out in life as a scholarship/charity case from the wrong side of the tracks, but she was well on her way toward amassing a fortune from a very lucrative practice, especially with Rex as her sidekick. If she happened to turn up a family with enough money to make it worthwhile, some of that money was bound to find its way to their treatment center; she and Rex could soon settle into partnership with a self-sustaining cottage industry of counseling the victims and suing the perpetrators.
The silence of the house nudged its way through Holly’s solitary musings. Rex and Amy must still be out somewhere, maybe together, maybe separately. But when one or the other of them came back, Isabel was bound to tell them what had happened in the kitchen. If Amy once realized Holly knew the truth…
The sense of her own danger came back again, as strong or stronger than when it first struck her in the kitchen. But if her friend Amy was really the enemy, where in God’s name could Holly turn for help?
In the end, she was forced to beg for aid from the least likely source, her cousin Burton Kimball. Maybe he was a wimp, but she didn’t know anyone else to ask.
Standing by the old-fashioned dial-type phone on the table in Cosa Viejo’s upstairs corridor, and keeping her voice low lest she be overheard, Holly tried calling Burton’s office. His secretary told her he was out, most likely for the rest of the after noon. Could she take a message? No, no message.
Even more frightened, Holly tried to think of another solution. Was it possible, with everything that was going on, that Burton might have taken the day off? Pulling open the drawer in the table, she searched through the phone book until her trembling fingers finally located the Kimball’s home number. A woman answered after only one ring.
“Who is this?” Holly asked.
“Linda Kimball. Who’s this?”
Holly had never met the woman Burton had married, but this was bound to be Burton’s wife.
“Is your husband there?” Holly asked, rushing on in a strangled whisper.
“Ivy?” Linda said. “is that you? Are you all right? You sound strange.”
Ivy! Holly had both envied and hated Ivy all her life. Ivy was the good girl, the favorite, the one who never got her clothes dirty; who never made mud pies out of eggs from the henhouse, who never thought up practical jokes to pull on other people. And yet, until Linda Kimball mistook Holly’s voice for Ivy’s, it had never dawned on Holly how much they were alike, how much they sounded alike.
“I “I’m not Ivy; I’m Holly,” she managed. “I’ve got to talk to your husband. Right away.
“What about?”
“About his father; about mine.”
“Burton isn’t home,” Linda said, her voice suddenly closed and flat. “He isn’t here, and I have no idea when he’ll be back.”
“Where did he go? I’ve got to see him now It’s important.”
“As soon as he gets back, I’ll have him call you.”
“Don’t do that. He can’t call here.”
“How can he get back in touch with you then?
“I don’t think he can,” Holly Patterson said “because by then it’ll be too late. By then I’ll be dead.”
With that, she hung up the phone. She looked up and down the hall. The house was still unnaturally silent, but even then she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive outside.
Panicked, Holly knew she had to get out. Now.
That was the only way to save herself. Holding her breath, she crept back down the stairs, grateful for the strip of carpeting that covered the hard wood risers.
Pausing on the ground floor, she heard Isabel working industriously in the kitchen, chopping something, singing under her breath, but there were voices outside. Rex and Amy were walking up to the back door from the garage. They’d be there any moment.
Still wearing her nightgown, robe, and fur-lined bedroom slippers, Holly tiptoed across the slate entryway and let herself out the front door. She walked bent over, hoping that, by staying close to the ground, she could avoid being seen by anyone, including Isabel’s gardener husband. She crept around the far side of the building and made for the ivy-covered terraces at the back of the house where she had once tried to seduce poor Bobby Corbett.
Without looking back, she scrambled down the four-foot drops between levels of terrace. At every step, the thick, straggly vines reached out to entangle her feet and send her tumbling, but she kept on. At last she came to the far end of the property, where a barbed-wire fence barred her way. Beyond that lay the first few far-flung boulder massive hunks of rock waste that had bounced high and fallen wide as they tumbled down the steeply angled flanks of the dump.
As Holly tried to wiggle through the fence, sharp wire barbs caught on threads of her terry cloth robe. Unable to free it at once and intent only on reaching the dump, Holly slipped out of the robe and went on, leaving the white cloth dangling on the fence behind her like a June bug’s discarded shell.
It was desperately cold that day, but even with nothing on but her nightgown, Holly didn’t notice.
She had eyes only for the massive multicolored dump with the achingly blue sky arching far above it. All her life, that dump had exerted a strange, inexplicable pull on Holly Patterson.
When she reached the bottom, she hesitated, but only for a moment. For all her life, she had wondered what was on top of that dump. Today, to save her life, she was going to find out.
She was halfway up when Amy’s voice found her. “Holly! What are you doing? Come down! Come down right now before you hurt yourself!”
Holly closed her eyes, trying to resist the inescapable pull of that beckoning voice.
“Come… down… right… now!”
Holly wanted desperately not to hear that voice, not to respond, but she did. Without even having to leave the bottom level of the terrace, Amy began to count.
“Ten,” her voice called out in that powerfully soothing cadence. “Nine, eight, seven…
Slowly, the numbers worked their inevitable way down to zero. They burrowed their way deep into Holly’s consciousness like so many writhing worms, devouring both her will and her new found memories.
When Amy’s commanding voice stopped Holly’s ascent, she had been near the lip of the two hundred-foot-high dump, climbing fearlessly Halfway down, she happened to glance at the desert floor one hundred feet below her. She gasped with shock to see how high she was, how far she had climbed. Trembling with fear in every limb, she had all she could do to continue down.
Somehow, for a few moments at least, Holly Patterson had forgotten that she was desperately afraid of heights.