Blood Memory by Greg Iles Page A

overpowering wave of déjà vu that hit me when I first saw that glowing print is all the proof I need.
    That bloody track is mine.
    The question is, whose blood was on my foot? My father’s? If enough genetic markers survived Natriece’s luminol bath—and if I can get a sample of my father’s DNA from somewhere—a hair from an old brush, perhaps—then a DNA test can tell me whether it was his blood or not. Big ifs. And even with my contacts at the crime labs throughout the state, a DNA comparison could take several days. In the meantime, I have only my memory—or the lack of it—to go on.
    I remember almost nothing from the night my father died, nothing before I walked through the rain to the dogwood tree and saw his body lying motionless on the ground. It’s as though I simply materialized from the grass. Without my voice. And it was more than a year before I spoke again. Why? Where was I when my father died? Asleep? Or did I witness something? Something too terrible to recall, much less speak of? Pearlie knows more about that night than she’s told me. But what is she holding back? And why? Once she states something to be true, she rarely goes back and adjusts her version of events. But maybe I don’t need Pearlie. For the first time in my life, I have a witness to that night’s events that cannot conceal or distort events: blood. The oldest sign of murder, Abel’s blood crying out from the ground —
    “Mayday!” cries a voice in my head. “Mayday! Mayday!”
    That voice is the product of five years of dive training. It tells me when I’m nearing the crisis point. The level of oxygen in my tissues has fallen to a point where most people would be unconscious. In fact, most people submerged for the length of time I have lain here would be dead by now. But I still have a margin of safety. My thoughts have condensed from a bright stream of consciousness to a single line of pulsing blue light. The message carried in that blue light has nothing to do with my past. It’s about my baby. She is here with me, cosseted in the sheltered pool of my uterus, a core organ if anything qualifies as one. Most women would excoriate me for risking my baby’s life this way. In another situation, I might do the same. But I’m not in another situation. A lot of women, finding themselves pregnant by a married man, would already have scheduled an abortion. But I haven’t done that. I will not. This is my baby, and I intend to have her. I risk her life only by risking my own. As for my motive…the pulsing blue thread of light in my mind tells me this: my baby can survive this. When we rise from this water, we will be one, and nothing Sean Regan says or does will have any power over us —
    My body tenses. Opening my eyes, I see a dark figure hovering above the water. Slowly, a golden spear separates from the figure and descends toward the surface, directly above me. I shove the rock off my chest and burst up into air and light, sputtering in terror. A tall man stands at the side of the pool, a ten-foot-long net in his hands. He looks more frightened than I.
    “I thought you’d drowned!” he cries. Then he blushes and turns away.
    I cross my arms over my breasts, only now remembering that I went into the pool in my underwear. “Who are you? Where’s Mrs. Hemmeter?”
    “Magnolia House.” He’s still looking away. “The assisted-living home. She sold the house to me. Do you want to put on some clothes?”
    I kneel so that the water covers me to my neck. “I’m decent now.”
    The man turns around. He has sandy brown hair and blue eyes, and he’s wearing khakis and a blue button-down oxford shirt. Several tongue suppressors protrude from his shirt pocket. He looks to be in his early thirties, and something about him strikes me as familiar.
    “Do I know you?” I ask.
    He smiles. “Do you?”
    I study him but can’t make the connection. “I do. Or I did.”
    “I’m Michael Wells.”
    “Oh my God! Michael? I