Guarding Suzannah

by Norah Wilson

  ~*~

  Four hours later, Ray sat across the desk from Dr. Lawrence Greenfield, the neurologist who’d just finished Grace’s workup.

  The six cups of coffee he’d downed had sobered him up, but his stomach lining felt like he’d been drinking battery acid.

  “So she’s going to be okay?” Ray had been through such a wild range of emotions in the five hours since Grace had dropped her bombshell, he didn’t know how he felt about this news. Christ, he didn’t even know how he was supposed to feel. He eyed the doctor, who looked way too young to be fooling around with anyone’s grey matter. “She’ll walk away with no real injury?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. At least not yet. She did suffer a Grade 3 concussion.” Dr. Greenfield leaned forward in his chair, steepling his hands. “Brain injury is more of a process than an event, Detective. It can escalate over as much as seventy-two hours, so we’ll have to wait and watch for the next little while. What I can tell you is she has no focal injury we can pinpoint with conventional imaging.”

  “Focal injury?”

  “No concentrated damage in any one area. The scans were clean. On the other hand, any time a patient loses consciousness, we have to be suspicious.”

  “What do you mean, suspicious?”

  “She could have a diffuse injury, where the pathology is spread throughout the brain, rather than focused in a specific spot. We’ll have to follow her for a while to rule out more subtle brain injury.”

  Ray slouched back in his chair, kicking a leg out carelessly. “She’s conscious now?”

  “Yes. And anxious to see you.”

  Ray rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Then I think I’d go back and look at those scans again, Doc.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She can’t possibly want to see me.” He congratulated himself on how matter-of-fact he sounded. “She left me tonight. She was on her way to join her lover when she had her accident.”

  Dr. Greenfield blinked. “She told me she was coming home from an interview with a man who raises miniature horses, and that you’d be worried that she was late.”

  The pony interview? “Doc, that interview was a week ago. The story ran on Monday.”

  “I see.” Dr. Greenfield leaned back. “Well, this puts things in rather a different light.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we could be looking at a retrograde amnesia.”

  Amnesia? Oh, Christ, he was in a bad novel now. “But you said she’d escaped injury.”

  “Amnesia can accompany any loss of consciousness, however brief, although I thought we’d ruled it out.” Greenfield removed his glasses and polished them. “She identified the date and day.”

  “Couldn’t she have picked that up from the EMTs or the hospital staff?”

  “Absolutely. Amnesia victims can be very good at deducing such things from clues gleaned after the accident. But she correctly answered a whole host of other questions for me, including the results of Tuesday’s municipal election.”

  Ray digested this information. “Is it possible she remembers some things, but not others?”

  “Oh, yes. In fact, it’s quite probable.” Dr. Greenfield replaced his glasses. “Amnesia can leave holes in the memory, with no predicting where those holes will appear. The location of the gaps can be as random as the holes in Swiss cheese. In fact, we call it Swiss cheese memory.”

  Terrific. Freaking wonderful. “So she might remember the election results, but not the fact that she’s taken a lover??

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  To his credit, Greenfield’s gaze remained steady, but Ray could read eyes. Faint embarrassment, carefully masked empathy for the cuckolded husband.

  “Or she may not have forgotten Romeo at all, right, Doc?” he rasped. “Just the fact that she told me about him.”

  “That’s also a possibility,” the neurologist conceded. “Whatever the case, Detective, I can vouch for the fact that she seems genuinely anxious to see you. She’s very much in need of some sympathy and support.”

  Ray made no comment, keeping his face carefully blank.

  “I should add that new memories are especially vulnerable, since it takes a few days for your brain to move them into permanent memory.” Dr. Greenfield hunched forward again. “Do you use a computer, Mr. Morgan?”

  Ray struggled to follow. “Of course I do. Who doesn’t?”

  “Well, to make a very crude analogy, fresh events, whatever might have happened in the last couple of days, are to your brain what random-access memory, or RAM, is to your computer. If the computer unexpectedly loses power before a bit of data gets stored on the hard drive, it’s lost. You can boot up again, but whatever was in the RAM has been wiped out. Thus, with any loss of consciousness, it’s possible to lose memories that were in transition.”

  Great. She’d probably forgotten she’d dumped him.

  Ray stood. “Well, no time like the present, is there, Doc? Let’s go see my darling wife.”

  Dr. Greenfield’s eyes widened. “Surely you don’t plan to tell her … I mean, you won’t –”

  “Won’t what? Suggest she call her boyfriend so she can cry on his shoulder instead?” Ray drew himself up, growing in height and girth, and let his expression go flat in the way he knew inspired fear. Bad cop to badder cop. “Why shouldn’t I? She chose him.”

  Dr. Greenfield looked singularly unintimidated, no doubt because he’d already seen the raw edge of Ray’s anguish.

  Damn you, Grace, how could you do this to me?

  “The fact remains that she seems to need you right now. She’s quite distraught. The last thing she needs is to be upset any further. If a diagnosis of retrograde amnesia is confirmed, I’d like to give her a chance to recover her memories on her own.” Dr. Greenfield’s intense gaze bored into Ray. “Can I have your cooperation on that point?”

  Ray stared back at the doctor, unblinking. “I hear you, Doc. Now, take me to her.”