The Key to Midnight

unnatural. 'Shouldn't a private detective be pushy at a time like this, inquisitive, absolutely relentless?'
        Although her question was meant to sound casual, flippant, Alex saw that she was genuinely afraid of him probing too far. 'I'm not a private detective here. I'm not investigating you. I'm just a friend who's offering a shoulder if you feel like crying on one.' As he spoke, a pang of guilt pierced him, because he actually was investigating her.
        'Can we get a taxi?' she asked. 'I'm not up to any more sightseeing.'
        'Sure.'
        She clung to his arm as they crossed the palace garden toward the Kara-mon, the ornate inner gate.
        Overhead, a pair of crows wheeled against the somber sky, cawing as they dived and soared. With a dry flutter of wings, they settled into the exquisitely sculptured branches of a large bonsai pine.
        Wanting to pursue the conversation but resigned to Joanna's silence, Alex was surprised when she suddenly began to talk about the nightmare again. Evidently, on some level and in spite of what she'd said, she wanted him to be an aggressive inquisitor, so she would have an excuse to tell him more.
        'For a long time,' she continued as they walked, 'I've thought it's a symbolic dream, totally Freudian. I figured the mechanical hand and hypodermic syringe weren't what they seemed. You know? That they represented other things. I thought maybe the nightmare was symbolic of some real-life trauma that I couldn't face up to even when I was asleep. But…' She faltered. Her voice grew shaky on the last few words and then faded altogether.
        'Go on,' he said softly.
        'A few minutes ago in the palace, when I saw that man with one hand… what scared me so much was… for the first time I realized the dream isn't symbolic at all. It's a memory. A memory that comes to me in sleep. It really happened.'
        'When?'
        'I don't know.'
        'Where?'
        'I don't know.'
        They passed the Kara-mon. No other tourists were in sight. Alex stopped Joanna in the space between the inner and outer gates of the castle. Even the nippy autumn breeze hadn't restored significant color to her cheeks. She was as white-faced as any powdered geisha.
        'So somewhere in your past… there actually was a man with a mechanical hand?'
        She nodded.
        'And for reasons you don't understand, he used a hypodermic needle on you?'
        'Yeah. And when I saw the Korean, something… snapped in me. I remembered the voice of the man in the dream. He just kept saying, "Once more the needle, once more the needle," over and over again.'
        'But you don't know who he was?'
        'Or where or when or why. But I swear to God it happened. I'm not crazy. Something happened to me… was done to me… something I can't remember.'
        'Something you don't want to remember. That's what you said before.'
        She spoke in a whisper, as if afraid that the beast in her nightmare might hear her. 'That man hurt me… did something to me that was… a sort of death. Worse than death.'
        Each whispered sibilant in her voice was like the hissing of an electrical current leaping in a bright blue arc across the tiny gap between two wires. Alex shivered.
        Instinctively he opened his arms. She moved against him, and he held her.
        A gust of wind passed through the trees with a sound like scarecrows on the march.
        'I know it sounds… so bizarre,' she said miserably. 'A man with a mechanical hand, like a villain out of a comic book. But I swear, Alex-'
        'I believe you.'
        Still in his embrace, she looked up. 'You do?'
        He watched her closely as he said, 'Yes, I really do -Lisa.'
        She blinked. 'What?'
        'Lisa Chelgrin.'
        Puzzled, she slipped out of his arms, stepped back from him.
        He waited, watched.
        'Who's Lisa Chelgrin?' she asked.
        He studied her.
        'Alex?'
        'I think maybe you honestly don't know.'
        'I don't.'
         'You are Lisa Chelgrin,' he said.
        He was intent upon catching any fleeting expression that might betray her, a brief glimpse of hidden knowledge, the look of the hunted in her eyes, or perhaps guilt expressed in briefly visible lines of tension at the corners of her mouth. She seemed genuinely perplexed. If Joanna Rand and the long-lost Lisa Chelgrin were one and the same - and Alex was