Date Rape New York by Janet McGiffin Page B

dog saw me last night walking toward the Hotel Fiorella with a man. He was wearing a black down jacket and a dark knit cap. He was shouting in Italian. Her dog bit him. Oh, I almost forgot. The detective is going to phone you.”
    “No!” Laura shrieked.
    “Laura, I have a dark hole in my—”
    “Oh, Grazia, who remembers everything in our lives? Even when our parents tell us, we don’t remember all our childhood. We can’t change the past. Why remember it?”
    “Because the man who assaulted me telephoned my hotel. He left two anonymous messages. The last was half an hour ago. I was in the hotel lobby at the time. He told the desk clerk that he knew I was there but would leave a message anyway.”
    Long silence. “What were the messages?”
    Grazia read them off.
    “The bastard!”
    Grazia was startled by the venom in Laura’s voice. She pressed on. “What if he comes to my room pretending to deliver my takeout dinner? What if he attacks me when I open the door! You need to help me find him so the police detective can arrest him!”
    “I wish I could help you. I really do.” Laura’s voice was tight with strain. 
    “Then tell me what I was talking about last night. The detective says if I knew that, I could make a connection to someone.”
    “It was too noisy to hear what anyone was saying.”
    “What hotel were you staying in?” demanded Grazia again. But the line was dead.
    Grazia flung down her phone in frustration. Laura said she wanted to help but she wasn’t answering any of Grazia’s questions; she couldn’t even remember the name of her hotel!
    A tap on the door made Grazia’s heart race. She threw herself at the peephole. Edmondo held up a takeout carton. He handed it through the narrow opening she provided, and she quickly closed and triple-locked the door. Rejecting the round table, she ate her supper on the floor.
    Feeling steadier with food inside her, she turned her attention to the new clothes that she had shoved into the dresser drawer. The designer jeans and red silk blouse were at the medical examiner’s lab. She never wanted to see them again—for that matter, she no longer had a desire for any of these new clothes she had bought the day she was raped. Sophia might want them. The kind young Italian maid had told Grazia that she worked part time at the Hotel Fiorella and studied English four hours a day at a New York language school. Sophia could come back to Naples with her, Grazia thought. She could be Grazia’s live-in housekeeper and cook. Grazia had never been one for cooking.
    Grazia looked stonily at her new clothes. How happy she had felt bringing them back from her Saturday shopping spree. She had lined up the shopping bags so as to try her purchases on again on Sunday morning. If only she could remember those Saturday night hours when some man had kicked her clothes around the room. If only she could see him in her memory. She put her hands over her eyes and waited.
    But as she stared into the dark hole of not remembering, panic grabbed her heart with its icy fingers. She opened her eyes. Cindy was right. It would be better to recover psychologically before she delved into what memories she had of her attacker. Grazia ran the taps for another bath, emptying in the rest of the tiny bottles of hotel shampoo. Was this her second bath of the day or her third? She just couldn’t feel clean.
    In bed, she thought about the small plastic bottles of chemically induced serenity in her cosmetics case. Instead, she reached for her laptop. She would research Rohypnol and the other drugs that her attacker might have used on her. Learning how these affected her brain might help her gain control over this panic.
    An hour later, she sat back, appalled.
    As Janine had explained, Rohypnol caused anterograde amnesia. That meant the “lost” memories would never come back because they never formed. She would never remember anything that happened after she took the drug. First came