DSA- Two months prior to Miss Parker’s disappearance

Mister Parker is standing opposite Mister Raines, his eyebrows creased with determination.

“The Centre is not what is has been,” Mister Raines wheezes, holding on to his oxygen-tank while Mister Parker clutches the edge of his desk.

“Your daughter is failing. Her team is failing. You know as well as I do that we cannot tolerate that any longer.”

He waits for a reply but does not receive one. After a short pause he goes on, even more insistent this time.

“We have to make that one work.”

He gestures towards the file that is laying on the desk. It is opened to the last page, obviously having been studied by Mister Parker already.

“This is just what we need,” Raines says, stepping forward, his eyes bulging out of his skull in an almost manical way.

Mister Parker finally lets go of the desk and folds his hands.

“I understand,” he says, the reluctance suddenly gone. “And I will take appropriate measures.”

Raines looks satisfied but not yet relieved.

“You will carry out the plan.”

“I assure you that.”

Mister Parker tenses as a thought suddenly seems to hit him.

“We’ll have to let her go for that.”

Raines, already on his way to the door, turns around menancingly.

“Let her go,” he emphasizes, giving the words a very different meaning without changing a syllable. “Yes.”
Mister Parker raises the corner of his mouth in disgust as Raines slowly walks out, the shrill sound of wheels accompanying his every step.

He closes his eyes when the door falls shut.

Jarod

I awoke to the warm October sun filtering through the leaves of the trees in front of my bedroom window. Blinking against the light I caught a glimpse at my alarm-clock and was satisfied to find that it was only seven o’clock.

Since I was on day shift today, I had expected to not be able to be sleeping off my hangover completely. The aftereffects of the previous night’s drinking, however, weren’t half as bad as I had expected. That was probably the reason why I was awake even before my alarm went off.

I threw back the covers and walked towards the door.

Pausing in the doorway I inhaled the scent of the trees that came in through the open window in the hall, enjoying the morningly silence.

Walking towards the study I decided to catch up on some paperwork until Miss Parker would get up. From experience I knew that she could sleep until noon if she was left alone.

I frowned as I realized that the door of the study stood half open although I remembered closing it. I gently laid my hand against the wood and pushed the door fully open.

The study was my favourite room in the house. I had always suspected that the house had been designed around it since the lawyer I had rented it from was a very hard-working man, single and basically married to his work. Due to that fact the study was the largest room in the house, floor to ceiling windows overlooking the garden that was divided from the beach only by means of a fence. The walls were of a light yellow and decorated with tasteful modern paintings. One wall was completely covered in bookcases in front of which stood a cream leather couch.

I liked to keep everything tidy so that the only thing that was not where it belonged was Miss Parker who sat on the couch, dressed in pyjama trousers and a t-shirt. She was completely engrossed in a book that she held between her hands like a treasure.

“Miss Parker?” I asked softly, but she still winced, startled.

When she looked up I recognized a look of fascination in her eyes. Her smile was careful, as if she wasn’t sure whether to be happy or frightened.

“What is it?” I asked, approaching her, trying to read the book’s cover.

“This seems so familiar,” she replied, flipping through the pages.

“What is this?” I asked.

She raised the cover for my inspection.

“A textbook on business law?” I asked, slightly amused beside myself. “I guess you were bored and couldn’t find anything else to read?”

The spark of agitation died in her eyes.

“I had trouble sleeping,” she said.

“Nightmares?”

“Not quite.” She carefully closed the book and put it next to her on the couch. “I dreamed that I was chasing somebody and just couldn’t catch him. I woke up to that feeling of…” She raised her hands in a gesture of defeat. “… absolute dissatisfaction. I felt like I wanted to cry and didn’t know why.”

She snapped out of her reminiscence when she realized that I had not yet responded to what she’d said. Her gaze lingered on me for a second before she obviously decided to drop the topic.

She gave me a tentative smile and pointed towards the window.

“I hope you didn’t mind me just walking into the room. I couldn’t go back to sleep and it just caught me, you know…”

She dreamily looked out of the window, gaze directed at where the beach was visible in the distance. “I think I might go for a walk on the beach later today,” she said. “Somehow I feel like I love the beach.”

I watched her in that perfectly innocent posture, arms slung around her bent legs, chin propped upon her knees. She turned her head back to me and rested her cheek against her thigh.

“I called my credit card company this morning. They say the card wasn’t valid. It seems that my name is not in the database.”

Small wonder. The Centre had their employee’s credit cards running via their accounts so they could keep track of them if necessary. To avoid any trouble, the credit cards usually bore the logo of some credit card company.

“That’s weird,” I said. “But I am sure that there’s a good explanation for that. It’s probably expired or something.”

She shrugged. “Somehow I feel like whoever I was didn’t want to be able to be tracked down.”

She smiled sadly. “It’s like being thrown into an episode of the X-Files.”

“The X-Files?” I echoed, weighing the unfamiliar term on my tongue.

“Seriously? You don’t know the X-Files?” she asked, smiling widely. “You don’t seem to know a lot of things. I mean it wasn’t so bad that you didn’t have any idea who Karl Lagerfeld was but I would have thought Dior to be popular enough for you to know.”

I shifted uneasily, quite eager to avoid that topic with her, but she did not seem to suspect anything out of the ordinary.

“I guess it’s that doctor-thing,” I finally said. “So much work… such a limited amount of free time.”

Very convincing, I told myself sarcastically but she didn’t seem to have a reason not to buy it.

She carefully touched her head-wound with her fingertips.
”When will those come off?” she asked.

“Let me see,” I told her and gently shoved the strands of honey-colored hair back from her forehead to get a better look at the stitches.

“Looks okay,” I told her. “But I would advice for them to stay put a while longer.”

Her eyes were closed while I’d examined the wound and since they remained so, I did not see a fit reason to remove my gaze from her face.

Her lips were parted slightly, her expression almost completely relaxed. I couldn’t imagine another scenario in which she’d been so trusting towards me.

I was a second too slow in looking away as she reopened her eyes. Her gaze focused on me and she smiled yet again.

The amount of smiles I’d received from her during the last 48 eight hours couldn’t equal the amount of sneers she’d given me over the years, but coming from her, it was actually quite impressive already.

“Jarod,” she said oddly softly.

The genius I was I didn’t realize what was about to happen until her lips brushed mine. Her eyelids fluttered as if about to close and I could feel her warm breath on my skin.

She jerked back before I could.

“That would be very stupid,” she stated in a hollow voice that pulled my wandering mind back into reality. She was absolutely right.

“Yeah,” I replied, not quite able to not sound breathless.

She got up quickly and wrapped her arms around her upper body.

“I need a shower,” she said. “Could you give me the hotel’s addressn later?” She smiled uneasily. “Just so I won’t have to take avantage of your hospitality for an unnecessarily long amount of time.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You are welcome to stay as long as you want, Miss Parker.”

She looked more relieved than I would have expected.

“Do you really mean that?” she asked.

“I do.”

And I did.

Sydney

I had long ago realized that Broots was not to be told everything. I had been at the Centre for so many years that I was capable of facing most facts with a reasonable amount of self-control. He was not.

He was probably not even aware himself that he was harboring feelings for Miss Parker but if he’d known what I knew, those would have been his undoing.

It might still have been an assumption in his eyes, but I knew for a fact that there was something very disturbing that surrounded Miss Parker’s disappearance.

I was not sure how her visit at Broots’ place was connected to all of this, but I would find out eventually. Even the Centre’s secrets tended to be found out about sooner or later.

I stared down at the substance report I had received earlier, trying to connect the dots. I could only hope that the solution to this puzzle was not the one that had begun to form in my mind. But why would she have been on that particular medication if she had not…

I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. I just wished it was as impossible as I felt it to be. But it wasn’t.

I just had to get accustomed to the fact that Miss Parker was not the person she had been. She, too, had changed over the years.

The scene I had witnessed a few weeks ago was still so vivid in my mind that I could play it like as DSA. Miss Parker, dressed as carefully as she usually did when scheduled for a rare meeting with her father, was looking as perfect as could be but her face told a different story.

She had just been about to leave her father’s office, a horrified look gleaming in her eyes when he had called her back.

I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop and I hadn’t been able to understand what her father had said to her, but I had been able to read what had been written on her face. She did not like whatever he’d been telling her, but she also knew that she did not have another choice.

“Don’t make me do that, Daddy,” she had almost pleaded with him, but I knew her so well that I had been able to tell from the look in her eyes, that she would do whatever he told her.

I remembered the exact thing that had come to my mind when I had watched her nod obediently and then walk away, not even half as briskly as usual.

Poor little girl, still starving for her father’s approval. How long would it take her to understand that, whatever she did, she would never gain it? But more importantly: How far would she go for the illusion of his love?

I sighed and looked back at the report.

There it was. The final part of the puzzle. Right in front of me.

The last piece of evidence for the ultimate betrayal.

Jarod

When I returned from a short eight hours shift at the hospital I found Miss Parker at the kitchen table, a glass in front of her, a half empty bottle of vodka next to her.

I sighed inwardly, more wary than shocked at the sight since I should have expected something like this to happen. I was dealing with Miss Parker after all.

“Hi Jarod,” she slurred, then added. “I’m sorry for drinking all of your… vodka.”
She smiled, then giggled and eventually bit her lip.

I sat down across from her and rested my elbows onto the tabletop.

“You shouldn’t be drinking,” I said casually. “Your body is in no state to deal with it.”

“I’m sorry…” she repeated, now sounding like she was. Well, she’d certainly be in the morning.

I could see anguish in her eyes yet again as she fully looked at me for the first time.

“I did everything I could think of,” she said, her voice unsteady from the effects of both alcohol and tears that were welling up in her eyes. She counted at her fingers whose nails I noticed to be bright red once again. There was something about the way she moved her fingers that fascinated me.

“I called the hotel and drew a blank,” she closed her eyes and opened them again. “I called every damn registration office in Delaware and the surrounding states… and drew a blank.” She raised her hands in defeat. “The only thing that I found out about myself is that I am very skilled with nail-polish…” Her raised eyebrow told me that she had noticed my staring at her hands. “… and…” she held the Vodka bottle out towards me. “… that I speak Vodka.”
She giggled once again, her despair obviously forgotten in her alcohol induced dazed state. She pointed at the bottle’s label that was in Russian and translated it apparently without any effort. She then replaced the bottle on the table with a considerable amount of noise and reached for her glass.

I caught it before she could and got up to empy it into the sink while she remained seated, looking after me with a sulky look in her eyes.

“Don’t take my only friend from me,” she said, then laughed quietly. “Oh, I lost so many memories already. I hope I can remember any of this in the morning.”

“I think you will,” I replied dryly. As far as I could estimate she wasn’ that drunk. “We just have to make sure that you have something to eat and enough water, then you’ll be okay.” I opened the fridge to take out everything I needed to make her a sandwich while she silently poured herself a glass of water.

“Why do I speak Russian?” she asked. “Do you think I am a Russian speaking lawyer? Or maybe I am a Russian speaking manicurist who knows a lot about law, or I am a Russian woman married to a rich lawyer who is so bored that she reads his textbooks and spends her days painting her nails.”

I wasn’t quite sure whether she was very drunk or whether she was just cultivating a different sense of humor. Miss Parker had never been one to show much self-irony but people changed…

She stepped next to me and stole a bit of lettuce, ripping it with her fingers and stuffing bits into her mouth.

“Hey, about this morning…” she tried to catch my eye and, when I refused to look up, raised my chin with her fingertips. “I wondered whether one of us was married when we first met.”
Unable to maintain my silence, I frowned. “What would make you think that?”

She shrugged in a motion that looked like that of an absolutely careless child.

“I don’t know… it’s just… I really felt like kissing you this morning, but I just…” the last three words blurred into each other so she repeated them, more clearly this time. “.. but I just felt like it would be horribly wrong.”
I handed her one of the sandwiches and took a bite of the other to prevent having to give her an answer. It wouldn’t have been necessary since she was perfectly content going on herself.

“So I thought that it would be a marriage thing… since my instincts also tell me to trust you.”

“Do you think you can trust your instincts?” I asked without actually meaning to. The words had simply tumbled out of my mouth.

“Guess so,” she munched, her clouded mind already off the topic again. “Great sandwich, though.”

“Thanks,” I said because I really wasn’t sure what else to say.

“I can feel the alcohol lift off me,” she announced and I didn’t believe her one word.

She’d found out about being able to speak Russian by accident. How long would it take her to find out that she was fluent in Japanese and French, too? She knew that she’d obviously always been caring about her appearance, she was rediscovering her tastes in beverages, food and clothes but would she ever be able to piece together her life from all this?

In a way she reminded me of myself when I had first got out of the Centre. There had been so many new things to discover but none of these discoveries that had felt so spectacular at first, had been sufficient to give me my family back.

Maybe that was what she felt like. She was taking slow steps but wasn’t able to retrace the old ones. She was heading one way, unable to follow the one she knew she had come from.

I had never been one for drinking, but since she had, I could almost understand why she would try to drink the despair away. It didn’t mean that I approved of it, but it served to make me sad for her.

“Do you remember anything else?” I asked her and watched as she took small bites of the sandwich I had made for her.

She swallowed, then shrugged.

“I don’t remember much of anything. I just find out things. Like the law stuff. It’s like a big puzzle coming together.”
A big puzzle I would have been able to solve for her in a heartbeat. It was just that I had already grown to love that new side of Miss Parker, that had gradually begun to show and became more apparent with her growing confidence in me.

When she leaned back and closed her eyes it was not only the hands that I couldn’t take my eyes off.

Mister Lyle

There wasn’t usually much in this place that could confuse me. The sudden disappearance of my sister, however, was one of those rare occurences that really made me wonder.

When she hadn’t been showing up for work for a full week, I confronted Sydney about it. Everybody’s favourite shrink was not amused at all. One could actually say that he looked rather grumpy as I casually dropped her name.

His hostile stare screamed “none of your business” at me but I’d never been a person to be disturbed by such open displays of animosity. Since people stare at me like that all the time that would be quite the disadvantage.

Casually dropping her name didn’t return any results so I had to be more direct.

“Where the hell is she, Sydney?” I asked, thoroughly annoyed by his lack of helpfulness. “Did she get herself another boyfriend?”

I remembered her taking days off at annoyingly regular intervals when she had been with the Gates guy.

Sydney remained unhelpful and I couldn’t get him to utter a single useful sentence, so I left him to his files and marched into my father’s office.

He regarded my questions concerning Sis with furrowed brows. His expression once again reminded me why I was so desperate to find out where she’d gone.

I wasn’t really worried about her. If any girl was able to take her of herself, it was my sister, but it got to me that nobody let me in on secrets. I would always be the odd one out since I’d had the misfortune on not having grown up in the Centre, but this was a little too much even for me.

“Well, where has she vanished to?” I asked, wondering whether he would buy my act of concern for my twin.

“Don’t you worry about her,” he said. “She will be fine.”
Great.

"Do you know where she is?" I asked, trying to make sense of the strange look in his eyes. He hadn't killed her and got rid of the corpse, had he?

"I always do."

I tried to get something out of him for a little longer, but since he got annoyed with me and pointed out that he had a lot of work to do, I left without any results.

So I was left with my questions: Where had she gone? What had she got herself into again? And most importantly: What had she done to piss Sydney off that tremendously?

Jarod

Over the next few days we settled into some sort of routine. Without Miss Parker’s knowledge I had cut down on my shifts at the hospital to be able to spend more time with her.

She was still trying to find out about her past, but seemed to have halfway arranged herself with living in ignorance. Her demeanour wasn’t as dark as before and I found myself marvelling at the way she handled things. It was fascinating to watch how she got to know herself like you get to know a new friend.

She found out that she had no idea how to cook, that she preferred thrillers to romantic movies, that she had a soft spot for rabbits, that she easily got bored with television, that gardening did not interest her at all and that she was very easily irritated with people whose wits weren’t quite as sharp as hers.

It amused me greatly that she could only gradually get used to her own way of treating people and that she once actually regretted scaring a little boy at the supermarket so much that she bought him a chocolate bar to make up.

It was funny to see how she reacted to situations the way she would have before her amnesia, but then realized what she had just done, leaving her at a loss.

Still, as much as I enjoyed her company as the one of a beaufiful, intelligent and humourous woman, her close proximity got to me.

With her pursuit of me and reacting only with fury or plain rejection to my presence it hadn’t been difficult at all to convince myself of the fact that my attraction for her was nothing more than some memory from our childhood. But this woman was nothing like the little girl I had known, as I had hoped at first. But still I didn’t find myself disappointed at all. She was interesting the way she was and her edginess made her even more desireable.

Whenever I caught myself thinking like that, I tried to talk myself out of it, but I always knew that denial wouldn’t make the attraction go away.

We had just returned from the hospital where she’d once again been examined and declared healthy and Miss Parker stood in front of the mirror in the hall, inspecting her wound that was no longer stitched up when the phone rang.

I picked it up. “Jarod Dorian?”

“Hey Jarod, this is Michael.”

Michael Grant, the collegue I had asked to have a look at Miss Parker’s concussion.

“Sorry I didn’t get back to your patient earlier, Jarod,” he said apologetically. “My daughter was getting married and my wife had the whole family fly to Florida for the ceremony.”

“Never mind,” I said, having already forgotten about it.

“Well, I had a look at the test results. Doesn’t look too bad, actually. You said that she was suffering from a memory loss?”

I carried the phone into the kitchen and closed the door behind me.

“Yes,” I said. “She doesn’t remember who she is.”

There was a short silence at the other end of the line.

“Weird”, he said. “It doesn’t really look as if the part of her brain that’s responsible for long-term memory could be affected. I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t remember the circumstances surrounding that car-crash, but a complete amnesia seems really unlikely.”

A cold hand seemed to squeeze my heart numb.

"Are you sure?" I asked, my heart beating furiously now.

"Pretty much so. I mean if she doesn't remember, she doesn't remember, but it's a little strange anyway. There's always the possibility that the amnesia resulted from something else. A psychological thing, you know. Something like that."

“Thank you,” I said, thoughts swirling in my head.

When I had ended the call I stared out of the window for a moment.

Unlikeliness of amnesia didn’t mean that it couldn’t have happened.

But what if it didn’t? What if Miss Parker was playing some twisted game with me?

The door opened and she walked in, freezing in place as she saw the look in my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Everything was.