"What the hell did Quidd do to her during the Stemwinder mess?" Lee's fury at Quidd was only growing as he rubbed his sore jaw and thought about what had caused it.
"Nothing," Francine answered. She then gestured toward his face where it was beginning to swell. "You okay there?"
"Yeah," Lee grumbled, still a little stunned by Amanda's assault on him. "She...Uh...she thought I was trying to hurt her or hurt the baby and she..." He gestured with his fist. "I...Uh...she completely blindsided me."
"Hmm," Francine mused. "Has she been taking more hand-to-hand lessons since she started formal agent training?"
"I don't know, but I know I never saw it coming." He smiled slightly in spite of the pain. "It was a beauty right hook though."
"Well, maybe there's hope for Amanda yet," Francine replied, amusement dancing in her eyes.
"But you still haven't answered my question. What happened to her after Stemwinder fell apart? Amanda told me they'd been grilling her for hours, but she never gave me a lot of the details."
"It's just like she said. They grilled her for hours, nothing more."
"Francine, come on. How long have we known each other? Don't you think I can tell when you're being less than truthful?"
Setting the serving tray on the kitchen counter, she hurried into the dining room and said, "You know what? Now that we've got Amanda fed, you should eat too. I'm betting you haven't had a decent meal since this whole thing started." She busied herself with the food still on the table. "You like cream cheese on your bagels, if I remember right."
"Would you cool it with the bagels, huh?" Lee said as he entered the room behind her.
"Look, I know that I may not have Amanda's skills in the kitchen, but I can still spread cream cheese on a bagel. I mean, how much culinary talent does that really take?" She placed a newly-doctored bagel on his plate, then reached for his discarded coffee cup as well as her own and brushed past him to the kitchen. "I bet you can use a warm-up on your coffee too."
Lee followed her back into the kitchen. "Okay, Francine, cut out the happy hostess routine and just give me a straight answer, would ya'?"
After finishing pouring the coffee, she finally turned to face him, let out a deep sigh and said, "You don't know what it was like after Stemwinder was compromised and you disappeared. Smyth was out for blood, wanted your head on a platter." She then crossed to his refrigerator. "Cream and sugar, right?" She then fixed him with a devilish grin.
Lee glared at her for a moment, but couldn't help laughing at the knowing expression on her face. "Thanks, Francine." He smiled at her attempt to lighten the mood and added, "But if you poison my coffee with sugar, you'll be the next one thrown out."
Francine chuckled softly as she poured a dollop of cream in Lee's coffee and handed it to him. She picked up her own coffee cup, then linked her free arm with his and said, "Come on. If you'll agree to sit down and eat, I'll tell you everything I know."
Lee nodded. "Yeah." They made their way back into the dining room and took their seats across from one another. "I guess I can't let all your efforts here go to waste." He nodded to the spread on the table and picked up his bagel. "Now, tell me what happened."
Francine sighed again, nervously picking at her English muffin and began, "Smyth's exact words were 'Sweat the housewife and bring me Stetson's still-beating heart.' He insisted that Amanda was in it with you, accused her right to her face of being just as big a traitor as he thought you were. When her polygraph results were somewhat shaky, he ordered a Class A interrogation with Quidd at the helm."
"What?" Lee said, abruptly dropping his half-eaten bagel on his plate. He knew how rough a Class A interrogation could be, the mind-bending drugs used and how they could affect people. It was just one step short of torture.
"Relax, Lee," Francine urged him with a hand on his to cool him down. "He never followed through on it, but there was a moment that he was in the interrogation room with Amanda when he threatened her with it, told her that Smyth had ordered it if she wouldn't cooperate voluntarily. He never got a chance to do it though. Billy put a stop to it right away and decided that the best way that we could figure out what was going on was to turn her loose and see if she led us to you." She paused for a moment as she reflected back on it. "Of course, knowing what I know now, it makes perfect sense...Her polygraph results being all out of whack, I mean. She was hiding her personal relationship with you." She recalled how upset Amanda had been in Billy's office when talking about Sonja Chenko. "Billy was right in what he said yesterday. I should have guessed then that you two were involved by the way she reacted when we were talking about your little Russian lover."
"Sonja Chenko was never my lover," Lee stated adamantly. "I tried and tried to get out of that assignment." As he thought back to that day, his anger at Quidd only increased as he recalled how he'd encourage him to pursue the "relationship" with Sonja and to use Amanda to do it. The damned Lisbon variation. His mind then drifted to him explaining it to Amanda in their office, how they'd have to pretend to be lovers. It hadn't hit him then, but looking back on it now, he realized that her response of "I can make that adjustment," had been just one more hint that she wanted more from him and like an idiot, he'd missed it.
Francine held up her hands in surrender and replied, "Okay, I get it. All I can think is that with what Birol did to Amanda and what Quidd did by keeping her in the infirmary with no visitors, thinking that she was a babbling mess, talking about drug therapy in front of her..." She paused, took a sip of her coffee, then continued. "She must be associating his threats during the Stemwinder fiasco with her abduction. I'm not therapist, but having just gone through a similar ordeal in Afghanistan when I did that favor for Abernathy, I can see how in her mind she'd make that association and see Quidd as just as big a danger to her as Birol."
Lee nodded. "What I saw in there...It seems like she can't separate what Birol did to her from what Quidd did to her."
"When you were talking to the doctors about her condition, Amanda had a moment of panic after Billy left the room when it was just the two of us. She...for a moment, it seemed like she didn't recognize me, then out of nowhere, she screamed at me to get away from her, that I was going to stab her. I don't know where that came from. When you came in later and saw us laughing together, it was because I was trying to keep her calm. I made a very bad joke about the time that we were locked together in the freezer, how we talked about you... I had...Well, you know me, I told her not to expect you to come charging in on a white horse. Talking about that stuff, reminding her of the conversation we that had in the freezer...it...um...it seemed to bring her back to reality. Then I just asked her some questions about you, mostly being nosy, but honestly I was trying to figure out how serious you really were about her." She shook her head and commented, "I still don't know what caused her to freak out like that. One minute I was talking to her about getting her stomach calmed down and getting her some real food and the next, she was acting like I was trying to kill her."
Lee pushed his plate aside, rose from his seat and began pacing. "It probably triggered her memory of when she ate the drugged chicken sandwich that was meant for me." He ran a hand through his hair and let out a deep sigh. "Francine, can I trust you? I mean, really trust you?"
"Lee, come on," Francine said, her bright blue eyes darkening.
At seeing the hurt look on his friend's face, Lee felt a wave of guilt course through him. "Sorry. It's just that...Amanda doesn't want anyone to know, so if I tell you..."
Francine rose from her seat, crossed the room, laid a hand on his shoulder to halt his pacing and said, "Lee, if you tell me not to say anything, I'll take it to my grave, I swear."
Lee nodded. "Amanda lied to everyone about not remembering anything that happened when she was drugged. She was so embarrassed by her behavior, that she pretended it was all a blank. She only told me the truth this summer that she remembered every bit of it, including this hallucination that she had of you coming at her with a butcher knife. That's why she..."
"Ohhh," Francine replied as she idly rubbed the back of her head where Amanda had knocked her out with a vase.
"Somehow whatever Birol did to her, whatever Quidd did to her, is getting all these events confused in her mind. She told me last night that she was having trouble putting together the order that things happened in. Maybe it's not just the things that happened during her abduction, but other events too." Lee, having lost his appetite, walked toward his living room and began pacing again.
Francine followed him and countered, "Or maybe, the traumatic events of her abduction have just triggered memories of other traumatic events that have happened to her since she's been with the agency."
Lee slammed his cup down on the coffee table, sloshing its contents onto the table's surface. He flung himself onto his sofa, leaned his head back against it for a moment before sitting bolt upright. "I don't know, maybe Quidd was right about one thing. Maybe I can't give her the help she needs. Maybe...I don't know...maybe I should never have taken her out of the infirmary. Maybe I'm hurting her more than helping her."
Francine sat on the sofa next to him and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder at seeing the anguished look on his face. "Lee, no, don't do this to yourself. You're doing the best you can for her."
"I just keep thinking back to that time that she had amnesia, you know, the doctor said that familiar places, familiar things would help her feel more comfortable and that's...that's what I was trying to do. Her house would be better, but I can't take her there in her condition, not with her mother there. I...There's no way that I'd be able to explain it to her."
"Familiar things, huh?" Francine chewed on her lower lip as a thought occurred to her and looked around the room as if searching for something.
"What is it?" Lee asked her knowing that look on her face.
"Do you have her purse?" She continued to look around.
"On the entry table." He gestured toward the entryway and Francine quickly retrieved Amanda's purse and dumped the contents of it onto the coffee table. "Francine, what the hell do you think you're doing? You have no right to go through her things."
"Relax, Lee, I'm not invading her privacy, but I just thought of something that might help." She rooted through the pile on the table until she found what she was looking for. "A-ha! This oughtta' do it." She showed Lee the plastic sleeve she'd pulled from Amanda's wallet.
"I don't get it," Lee said with a bewildered shake of her head. "Her driver's license? How's that going to help?"
"Boy, I can see Paul Barnes picked the right codename for you, Scarecrow," she commented acidly. "Not her license, Dumbass. Look, she's got pictures of her kids in here too. I may poke fun at her for all the mom stuff she does, but one thing that we both know about Amanda is that her children mean everything to her. I mean, when she tore out of here as if her ass was on fire, and I was trying to keep Quidd from following her, I heard her screaming about not hurting her baby. Even though she was out of it, I think it's that natural protective mother bear instinct of hers kicking in."
Lee's eyes it up. "You know, you may be onto something there. If we can't take her home where she might feel more comfortable, maybe we can at least bring something of her home to her." He took the sleeve from Francine and began flipping through the photos. "This just might help. Francine, I owe you one."
"Oh, you owe me more than one," she countered. "In fact, I'm counting up just how many you owe me and I fully intend to cash-" Francine's words were cut off by the ringing of the telephone. When Lee just let it ring, she looked at him quizzically.
Lee shook his head and answered her look with, "Machine. I don't feel like talking to anyone right now." Francine nodded in understanding, but when the machine picked up and they heard the voice on it, replying to Lee's on the machine, Lee shifted slightly, his mood shifting as well.
"My daughter left a message saying that I could reach her at this number," Dotty West's voice rang out. "Why does it not surprise me that it turns out to be yours, Mr. Stetson? I don't know what's going on, but I would like very much to talk to Amanda. This whole thing has been very confus-"
Dotty's voice was cut off by Lee picking up the phone, turning off the machine and saying, "Mrs. West, it's me. No, we're not really working out of town...No, it's not like that." He flushed slightly as he replied to Dotty's last comment. "I'm afraid it's much more serious than that. Listen, I don't really want to discuss it over the phone, but there's something going on with Amanda that you should know about. Do you have pen and paper handy? I'm going to give you my address." After providing his future mother-in-law with his address and directions to get there, he said, "Can you come by for lunch around one? I promise, I'll tell you everything then."
When he finished his call, Francine stared at him open-mouthed and asked incredulously, "Are you completely crazy?"
"No, Francine, it's time. Long past, in fact." He then picked up the phone again, dialing quickly and when the phone was answered, he said, "Billy, I need a favor." He explained what was going on and what he needed from him.
In his office, Billy shook his head as he listened to Lee's request, just as Dr. Quidd barreled into his office looking as if her were about to leap over the desk. Billy held up a hand to stop him and said, into the phone, ""I'll take care of your problem as soon as I can, Scarecrow, but right now I think I may have a bigger one to take care of first."
Dr. Quidd barked at Billy, "You're damn right you do! We need to have a serious talk about Scarecrow and Mrs. King."