Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

was my mother.
    She must have sedated me in the beginning, and she must have hypnotized me repeatedly to muddy my memories. I was a child, and my world had vanished. I believed what I could see and touch. I answered to the name I was called.
    Yet somehow I’d clung to scraps of my other life. My memories were amorphous, and I doubted my own mind, telling myself I had an overactive imagination. But I held onto my real self by inventing Kathy. My imaginary friend was me, Cathy, Catherine, kept alive in the only way I could do it.
    My sister hungered for the kind of attention Judith gave her. She’d needed little persuasion to become Mother’s adored child. Her memories of our real parents probably faded rapidly, with some assistance from hypnosis.
    I was the troublesome one, haunted all my life by faces and voices and images that made no sense to me, and always feeling left out of the love between Mother and my sister. Stephanie Dawson was the one Mother wanted, the one she could make into another Michelle Goddard. I was an innocent bystander, caught up in it all.
    How could she have believed she’d never be found out? Had there come a time, after grief’s sharp edges dulled and she was rational again, when she’d looked at what she’d done and known she would be discovered someday? Everything depended on her control of my memories and curiosity. For twenty-one years it had worked. I could only imagine her desperation when she realized I was breaking free of her.
    I rubbed the back of my neck, stiff and painful with tension, and rose to pace between the bed and desk. Under my bare feet the short green carpet felt rough and unyielding. The room smelled of lemon polish, as our house always had after Rosario’s energetic attacks on the furniture.
    Mother had given us a good life, in so many ways. We’d been cared for, catered to, encouraged, supported. We were the center of her existence. No professional duty was more important than our piano recitals, class plays, parent-teacher conferences. She took us everywhere from art galleries to amusement parks. She had no private life that didn’t include us.
    But she wasn’t our mother. She abducted us from a playground and took us halfway across the country and twisted our minds and lied to us and cut us off from our family. Her actions had led directly to my real father’s suicide. She might have played a part in the deaths of her own husband and child, months before the abduction. In the end her crime had driven her to turn a knife on me, and then herself. 
    So much loss, such a horrifying waste. I wished I could hate her, with a sharp cleansing wrath. I wished I could crush the pity I felt for this woman who tried to fill her empty heart and life with her husband’s other child.
    ***
    I called Luke and talked for an hour, telling him everything I’d learned and put together.
    “What now?” he asked when I finished.
    “I’m going to see her.”
    “Oh, God, Rachel, I hate the thought of you going through this alone. Why don’t I fly out? Tomorrow’s Saturday, I don’t have to worry about appointments—”
    “No, don’t. I need to do this by myself.” But I had to smile at his protectiveness. “Thanks for wanting to help, but I’ll be fine.”
    “Promise you’ll come back to me soon?”
    “I’ll come back to you soon.”
    “I love you,” he said. “Whoever you are.”
    I laughed, even though tears had sprung to my eyes. “I love you too,” I said for the first time, and meant it.
    ***
    I wouldn’t think about how I was going to tell her who I was. I wouldn’t think about my sister’s part in this, or about our other sister and brother, our grandparents and aunts and uncles, a whole large family that I sensed lurking in the background of my memory. All I cared about now was seeing the woman who had given birth to me.
    My fingers shook as I put through the call to the number Steckling had given me. A woman’s husky voice answered on the second ring, and I was momentarily unable to speak.
    “Hello?” she said again.
    Somehow I got the words out. “May I speak to Barbara Olsson, please?”
    “Speaking.”
    “This—” I cleared my throat. “My name is Rachel Campbell—”
    “Oh, right.” Her voice lifted, became warm and friendly. “Jack Steckling called and said you’d be getting in touch. I’d be glad to talk to you. When do you want to come over?”
    My throat threatened to close off speech. The voice that came out sounded