Girl With a Past Read Online Free Page A

prosecuting soon. His secretary had done her
best to stop my entrance, but I pushed past and opened the heavy
oak door.
    “Dad, I can’t find the Zodiac file. Did your
new secretary do something with it?”
    “Al,” my startled father looked up from the
law book on his massive oak desk, “what do you want with it?”
    I plopped into one of his leather guest
chairs, “To look at it.”
    “Why?” He removed his reading glasses,
studied my face.
    I returned his stare, scowling at him. “Do I
have to have a reason?”
    “Why the sudden interest?” Dad asked, as the
chime of a new email caught his attention.
    He glanced at the laptop on his desk.
    “I don’t know . . . I had a dream a couple
weeks ago, it’s been coming back. Probably from you keeping that
file around when I was a kid.” I swung my legs over the arm of the
chair trying to appear casual. If I told Dad about the nightmares
that had gotten worse every night, if I said, “I’m afraid to go to
sleep because I’m haunted by this terrifying image of a dark figure
in a black hood,” he’d be alarmed. He’d want me to “talk to
someone.”
    Especially if I told him I woke up with
blinding headaches after each of the nightmares––pain in my head
that felt like half of my face had been blown off.
    The dreams started my freshman year at Cal
and got increasingly frequent and more intense each year. Then,
last summer I paid a visit to a great aunt in Pacific Heights. I
saw this kid on a bike. He was about sixteen. Strong déjà vu. My
heart leapt, then fell. Something about him was familiar. He looked
like some one but I couldn’t think of who. I watched his dark head
disappear as he rode away and my heart ached with loss. I had no
clue why I reacted like that, but the dark nightmare got even worse
that night.
    Now, in my senior year, the headaches that
followed the nightmare were so bad I often missed morning
classes.
    Then again, if I told him, maybe he’d stop
looking at his computer and talk to me. “Hey, Dad!”
    “What?” He closed the lid of his laptop and
leaned back in his fancy black mesh chair.
    “When I was little, I used to sit at your
desk at home and pretend I was a lawyer.”
    “Yeah, you sure did.” He smiled at the
memory of his five-year old daughter playing prosecuting attorney,
how I would pick up the phone and mimic his voice and attitude when
talking to defense attorneys.
    “That file was on your desk for years. I
looked for it after dinner when I was over last night and it wasn’t
there.” I could vaguely recall the contents of the folder; I
remembered that I felt a strong connection to the incidents.
    And my first totally bad headache started
while I was looking at newspaper clippings included with the
papers. “Mom thought you’d brought it to the office.”
    “Al, please, there’s no need to dig all that
up again. It’s ancient history.”
    “Where is it?” I grinned at my father. He
was a good guy; all my school chums were hot for him. He still had
a full head of strawberry blonde hair, although it got lighter
every year. He and Mom spent enough time on golf courses, tennis
courts, sailboats, and ski hills to maintain his year round
tan.
    “I put it away. Decided it was time to get
over it.” He glanced at the book on his desk.
    “Why?” I knew he needed to get back to work,
but I persisted. “Why give up on it now after decades of
obsession?”
    “Don’t you have classes today? A painting to
work on?” He raised a blonde eyebrow at me. “What are you doing
hanging around here anyway? You don’t work here anymore. Summer’s
over.”
    I swung my legs off the arm of the chair,
turned around, and leaned forward. “Dad, I’m like, totally serious.
I want to look at your file. I’m taking a criminal anthropology
class, it’s a good real world example.”
    “Al, it’s time to put all that behind us.”
He stood, walked to the window and studied the sailboats and ships
out on the bay. “If it’s a