First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [109]
Nina struggled to regain her equilibrium. "Jack, are you all right?"
Unable to find his voice, he nodded.
"It was coming straight at you; I was sure it would bite you."
"It would have," Jack said, a little dazed himself, "but something slowed it down."
"That's impossible."
"Nevertheless, something did. A shadow came between the snake and me."
Nina looked around. "What shadow, Jack?" She passed her hand through the space Jack indicated. "There's no shadow here, Jack. None at all."
Alli twisted in his arms, taking her face out of his shoulder. "What happened?" she whispered.
Jack kicked the snake's body away. "Nothing, Alli. Everything's fine."
"No, it isn't, something happened," she insisted.
"I'm taking you out of here, Alli," he whispered as he took her back out through the kitchen and down the hall. "Your folks are coming to meet us."
The Marmoset's house was crawling with the heavily armed detail Nina requested. Along with them came two EMS attendants with a rolling stretcher, a nurse, and the Carson family doctor. But Alli refused to be parted from Jack, so he and Alli, with Nina at their side, strode out of the house with the escort.
Alli put her lips to his ear. "I felt something, Jack, like someone standing beside us."
"You must have blacked out for a minute," Jack said.
"No, I felt someone breathe—one cool breath on my cheek."
Jack felt his heart lurch. Could it be that Alli had felt the shadow, just as he had? His mind lit up with possibilities.
He climbed into the ambulance with her clinging to him. Even when he managed to get her onto the stretcher so that the doctor could examine her, she wouldn't let him go entirely. She was clearly terrified he'd leave her alone with her living nightmare.
He gripped her hand, talking of the good times when she and Emma were best friends, and gradually she relaxed enough for the doctor to take her vitals and administer a light sedative.
"Jack . . ." Alli's lids were heavy, but the abject horror was sliding off her face like a mask. "Jack . . ."
"I'm here, honey," he said with tears in his eyes. "I won't leave you."
His voice was hoarse, his breathing constricted. He was all too aware that this is what he should have said to Emma a long time ago.
PART FOUR
THIRTY - SEVEN
THE EARLY January sunset was painting narrow bands of gold and crimson across the low western sky when Jack met with Dr. Irene Saunderson on the wide, Southern-style veranda of Emily House.
"I've tried every way I can think of—and any number of new ones—to get through to Alli," Dr. Saunderson said. She was a tall, stick-thin woman with dark hair pulled severely back into a ponytail, accentuating a high forehead and cheekbones, bright, intelligent eyes. She looked like a failed model. "She either can't or won't tell us what happened to her."
"Which is it?" Jack said. "Can't you at least tell that much?"
Dr. Saunderson shook her head. "That's part of what's so frustrating about the human mind. I have little doubt that she's suffering from a form of posttraumatic stress syndrome, but at the end of the day, that tells us next to nothing. What's indisputable is that she suffered a traumatic episode. But what form the trauma took or what the actual effect on her is, we can't determine."
She sighed deeply. "Frankly, I'm at a dead end."
"You're the third shrink to say that." Jack unbuttoned his coat. A thaw had set in with a vengeance. "What about physical damage?"
"The exhaustive medical workup shows that she wasn't raped or physically harmed in any way. There wasn't even a superficial scratch on her."
"Is there a possibility of Stockholm syndrome?"
"You're thinking of Patty Hearst, of course, among many others." Dr. Saunderson shrugged. "Of course it's possible that she's come to identify with her captor, but she's shown no indication of hostility toward us, and given the relatively short amount of time she was