Finding Fiona by Emily Ann Ward Page B

surprised
he didn’t yell, ‘I told you so!’
    They stopped at a red light. Fiona gazed
outside, watching the pedestrians pass in front of them. This
wouldn’t make exposing the Alarias’s guilt easy. “We need to find
that girl.”
    “ What girl?” Troy asked.
    Fiona glanced at him, realizing he didn’t know
about the girl in the car. She hadn’t ever felt comfortable
speaking about her strange memories with him. She explained the
memory to him.
    “ Why do you want to find her?” he
asked.
    “ Maybe she can help us turn in the
Alarias,” she said.
    “ Why would she do that?”
    “ Something had to happen in between
me crashing the car and then being in her car…” Fiona trailed
off.
    “ Yeah, she probably stabbed you
twice and left you for dead,” Troy said.
    “ But then what happened to Greg
Alaria?” she asked. “I was with her and not him, and she took me to
the harbor where there were people and I think she started
screaming for help. Hannah said she heard screaming, but she said I
probably wasn’t strong enough.”
    “ But who could she be?” James
asked.
    That was one of many questions Fiona had, but
she had to focus on just one for now. They had to find the
Alarias’s assistants, coworkers, daughters, sisters. Women
connected to her parents. Anyone that may want to help
her.
     
    * * *

Chapter Eight
    Troy took a long way home from the Chief
Medical Examiner’s office, but the Mercedes SUV from earlier didn’t
reappear. Fiona wondered what the driver would have done had he
kept following them. Did they just want to know where they were
going? Or did they have plans to capture Fiona and use her? If they
didn’t find her at Hannah’s house, how long would it take them to
find her at the Elmscott house?
    The thoughts made her leery. She felt like
someone was going to jump out at her as she jogged from Troy’s car
to the backdoor of the house. As soon as she was inside, she
called, “Hannah?”
    Hannah’s voice came from the second level.
“Yeah, I’m up here.”
    Fiona breathed a sigh of relief, walking
upstairs. Keith sat on the couch, watching TV, and Hannah was
working at the dining room table directly behind the
couch.
    “ Hey, how’d it go?” Hannah asked as
they came upstairs. “Did you see his car again?”
    Fiona shook her head as she sat down, putting
the folder on the table. “No, we lost him halfway there, and he
wasn’t there on our way home.”
    Hannah pulled the folder toward her. “I can’t
believe he was following you.”
    “ Careful, there are some graphic
pictures,” Fiona warned her. “She was definitely a
replica.”
    “ Are you serious?” Hannah asked,
her eyes wide. She opened the folder and grimaced at the first
photo. Her mouth hanging open, she ran her fingers over the chicken
pox scar. “I can’t believe it… it was real… I thought this was all
crazy. But if this is really you… well, it’s not you.”
    “ No, but it was a genetic copy,”
Fiona said quietly. It was a amazing to think of a device with that
kind of power. “I’m going to look around in the lab,
actually.”
    Fiona spent most of the next few
hours in the lab, trying to piece together what remained of the
Remus project. Keith and James came in and
out, trying to help, but neither of them were much use. It was
pretty advanced physics.
    A few hours later, when she was tired of
equations that didn’t have answers, she explored the bins and boxes
in her old bedroom, poring over pictures and books and knickknacks
and paintings. Some of the things had a faint gray residue that
came off on her fingers, a weak smell of smoke.
    She, James and Keith played memory
games. She started out asking them questions about her life, but
eventually, the boys took over. Keith fired questions at
her. What were our school colors? What’s
your middle name? When was the first time you drank alcohol? He told her to just answer without thinking, and
if five seconds passed, he’d tell her the answer