by Laura Parker
He heard her heels tapping across the rough planks of his porch as she approached. He imagined that she wore something silky and fluid that would slide off easily under the impetus of his hands. He paused a few feet from his open door and waited until she was an indistinct shape in the darkness beyond his screen.
“Joe Guinn?” Something familiar in her tone. Something Yankee in the inflection. This was not Lauren.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“The private investigator?”
“That’s right.” Joe’s amorous hopes evaporated as he retucked the end of his towel below his navel. This was a prospective client. “What can I do for you?”
“I want you to find someone for me.”
Her voice backstroked through his memory. He reached for the porch light switch as he asked, “Who?”
“Me.”
The yellow halo of light jumped to life, illuminating the very last person he ever expected to see. He sucked in a breath of astonishment. “Halle?”
Chapter 2
A thunderclap right by his ear could not have jolted Joe more.
Halle—pronounced “holly” like the berry bush she told strangers—Halle Shipmann. nee Hayworth, ex-Guinn, was staring back at him through the rusted webbing of his front door screen.
Surfacing emotions adrenalized his nervous system. His vision narrowed to a star point of light and then widened so quickly he felt dizzy. His heart expanded like a balloon, pumping as if a sawed-off shotgun were aimed point-blank at his chest.
As his gaze bored into her through the screen she shook her head slightly as if to shake off the daze that had for a second or two bound them both. Riveted by an intensity he hadn’t experienced since she walked out of his life, he watched unfamiliar dark tresses shift over her shoulders. That was Halle. When they were married she changed her hairstyle and color with the seasons. She had been a strawberry blonde with a razor cut the last time he’d seen her. She had been two years younger and still Mrs. Joe Guinn the last time he’d seen her. She had still been his the last time he’d seen her.
He finally met her gaze, frank and arrested by the sight of him, and every instinct for self-preservation sounded an alarm. He wasn’t ready, wasn’t nearly prepared emotionally to see her again.
He leaned a bare shoulder against the doorjamb and even managed to sound casual. “Well, well. What brings you all the way out here?”
He saw her eyes widen fractionally. The yellow bulb leeched the green flecks from the well-remembered hazel, leaving them muddy. “I came to — to —”
She frowned slightly. She had always frowned just that way when trying to remember something that momentarily escaped her. Then she smiled the tough-girl tender-woman smile that had hooked him day one of their meeting. “I know this is going to sound strange, but did you just call me by name?”
Joe shrugged, folding his arms across his bare chest. He wasn’t going to give anything away until he knew exactly what he was up against. “So what?”
To his surprise she put a hand to the screen and be saw that a swath of surgical tape and gauze spanned her left palm. When she spoke again his gaze lasered in on hers. “How could you possibly know me?” the whispery tone of her question seemed to escape despite the fact that she sounded as if she held her breath.
Anger swamped Joe’s reserve. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
She flinched though he had not raised his voice. He saw her fingers curl as if she were trying to cling to the screening. “What I mean is, who do you think I am, Mister Guinn?”
Joe checked the impulse to answer with the phrase, “My ex” He didn’t like any reference to the act that had x-ed out what had once been the emotional center of his life. The divorce was her doing. If this were her way of testing his attitude, he wasn’t going to make it easy for her.
Yet he couldn’t take his eyes off her. For a fraction of a second the professional part of him recorded her in detail, as if he might need at some later time to verify a description of her. She wore a white peasant blouse and gauze skirt. The woman he had married believed in dressing for success yet this was obviously department store discount merchandise. Still, the figure beneath the clothing was as he so achingly remembered it. So was the high curvature of her cheekbones, the blunt tip of her nose that made it look as if it had been chipped, and the wide mouth and square jaw that anchored her face clearly on the side of attractiveness versus prettiness.
Behind his towel, the halfhearted arousal he had been summoning for Lauren Sawyer jumped suddenly to life. It had always been that way for him where Halle was concerned. Even after three years of marriage the mere glimpse of her entering a crowded room was enough to give him the hard-on of an eighteen-year-old. In less time than it took to blink he knew he was in trouble. The reminder reinforced his sense of distrust.
“Why don’t we cut to the chase? You tell me what it is you want. I assume you came all the way out here for some reason other than to play twenty questions.”
His tone seemed to brace her. She backed up a step, releasing his screen. He could guess from past experience that her expression accompanied a blush that the yellow light masked. “Actually I have a perfectly good reason. It’s business, as I stated before.” Again the smile that dared any man to meet it and not be affected. “It’s going to take quite a bit of explaining.”
From the way his body reacted to her smile he knew that he was dangerously close to committing a felonious assault. Or...would she go willingly with him into the sexual heat of desire that was licking at the back of his eyeballs even as his face remained perfectly expressionless?
That had been the most cherished thing he had discovered about her. She had seemed so reserved, so aloof. She did not even like him to kiss her in public. So he had not been expecting the uninhibited amorous woman she had become the first time they made love. Exhausted and exhilarated, he had asked if the reserve was a joke. She had blushed and said it was him — only with him had she ever behaved that way. Only now she was remarried and some other—
“Mister Guinn?” The sound of her voice snapped him back to the moment. She had opened the screen door several inches but he stood blocking the way. “May I come in?”
“I don’t think so.” Joe placed his arm across the opening, anchoring his hand on the jamb. He felt the towel tucked at his waist slip but decided he would be damned before he made a grab for it. She wanted to know how he felt about her? She might yet get lucky. “I’m not feeling very friendly tonight. Besides, it’s after business hours.”
“It’s important.” Her voice dropped into a more persuasive register. “Very important.”
So that was it! Joe fought the impulse to answer in kind. She had always liked role-playing games. During their marriage they had played Cop and Collar, Stud Service Review, Pickup Encounter and a dozen other very private games that inevitably led to steamy fun in bed. Once he would have joined in the spirit of her game—whatever this was—without a second thought. That was then.
Two years’ worth of pent-up anger and frustration surged through him on a sea of beer. She had walked out on him. She had initiated the divorce. She had refused to even meet him during the dissolution of their marriage. She had refused to allow him to explain the reasons why and how his world had been blown to pieces. She had refused to be there for him at the very time he had needed her most. For exactly those reasons, and half a dozen more, too many emotional risks—all his—were at stake.
He looked at the place where her hand was folded over the edge of the screen door. She was left-handed and he noticed that while she wore a bandage, she did not wear a wedding band. He had never known her to take off her wedding ring while they were married. Something spiteful made him hope this meant there was trouble in her new paradise. Considering the shambles his life had become in the aftermath of her desertion, he was in no mood to be generous.
“Why don’t you just tell me why you’re here and then I’ll decide what I want to do abou
t it.”
She looked taken aback but the blank surprise didn’t last two seconds. After all, he surmised, she had to come twelve hundred miles from Manhattan to Gap just to find him. He hadn’t expected her to simply go away. But she did release his door. It swung closed all but the last inch.
“Very well, Mister Guinn.” Her chin lifted. “I want to hire you. At least I did until you began—well, never mind. I was in a traffic accident recently. I woke up in the hospital to discover that everything was intact but my memory.” He saw the right side of her mouth quiver but she recovered. “I have amnesia, Mister Guinn, and I need you find out who I am, unless...”
She looked up at him through the smoky haze of the screen, her eyes shining more brightly than before. Jesus! Tears. “Can you tell me who I am?” She asked the question as if it were burdened by the sum total of her emotional life.
Too much emotion. Joe let the contents of her previous statement roll over his head without comment. He was way past trying to figure out why she was saying any of this. All he felt was great resentment that she could find no better way to reintroduce herself into his life than by this cheap trick. So why was the sight of her enough to set loose this thumping, pumping pressure of desire?
The only other question in his mind was how to get rid of her before he lost control. Hell! He was trembling.
“You’ve lost your touch.” His tone was not friendly. “The amnesia story is too far-fetched even for a gullible country boy like me.”
He reached out and jerked the screen door closed. “Once you didn’t want anything to do with me. Now I don’t want anything to do with you.” He shut the door in her face.
She pressed against the screen in anguish as the sound of the slammed door reverberated in the air about her. She rapped her knuckles on the wooden frame. “No! Please! Mister Guinn? Please!”
No sound answered her frustrated cries, though the porch light went dark. He didn’t believe her story. That didn’t matter. He knew her!
She took a deep breath, trying to steady a heart that had been galloping since the moment Joe Guinn opened his door.
Holly! He had called her Holly. Or maybe he had said Molly. Polly? His speech had been slurred. She did not have. to guess the reason. He was holding a crushed beer can in his hand.
She reached up to knock again but her hand never rapped wood because she heard the dead bolt slide home. She might have lost every memory more than two weeks old but common sense told her Joe Guinn was not likely to come to his door again this night. More than that, his hostile stare and posture said that he didn’t like her—maybe didn’t like women in general. Wonderful. A beer-swilling, chip-on-his-shoulder, woman-hating private investigator might hold the key to her identity. What was she going to do?
Behind her the banner she had read in the headlights of the taxi that had brought her out here rustled in the breeze. It read Happy Birthday, Joe. Her mind conjured up the image of the damp bath towel slung precariously about Joe Guinn’s lean hips. It struck her that maybe she had interrupted a very private oelebration. That would explain why he wasn’t pleased to see her and wouldn’t let her in.
She took another calming breath. See? Rational explanations.
She turned from the door and walked a few steps to the edge of the porch before her thoughts halted her. She had even more pressing troubles than the brooding man behind the dead bolt.
With a shock she realized she had not asked the taxi that dropped her off to wait for her. It was obvious to anyone with half a brain that taxis didn’t exactly cruise east Texas back roads looking for passengers. Why had that not occurred to her before now? She was a good ten miles from her motel room. What was she supposed to do now?
This time deep breathing didn’t deter the anxiety creeping back over her. Though it was a warm night shivers coursed up and down her spine. An overwhelming sense of futility dragged at her courage. Who was she kidding? How could she hope to uncover her lost life when she could not even trust herself?
She felt like a watch with a broken stem: she was ticking all right, but she wasn’t set to the right time. The simplest things frightened or disconcerted her, like the fact her face still surprised her each time she looked into a mirror. Yet she had discovered in the hospital that she knew without thinking when to turn on the TV for “Oprah.” She didn’t remember how old she was or her phone number or her address but she had complained when a nurse parted her hair on the wrong side. Wrong side? Everything about her was off center. There was only one thing about which she had no doubt.
Someone was after her.
A shiver, bringing up goose bumps, hit her. She was on the run, running away. Fear was the first emotion she experienced upon opening her eyes in the hospital. Fear was the dominant emotion she had experienced ever since.
She placed a white-knuckled grip around one of the set of square posts that held up the porch roof. Wood splinters dug into her palm through her bandage but she barely noticed.
She had awakened in the hospital with a terrorizing sense of panic even before she realized she didn’t know where she was or even who she was. The doctors had said she had suffered a concussion in the accident. Commercial buses didn’t require seat belts and she had hit her window during the collision. They had explained in great complicated detail about impact brain injuries, swelling and pressure causing headache, confusion and rarely transient memory lapses or loss. All she hung on to was the reassuring promise that her condition was not as serious as amnesia would make it seem. And that, in time, her memory should return. They had explained away her anxiety by saying it was perfectly normal for her to have moments of disorientation, claustrophobia, even panic until her memory came back. She had tried, and failed, to believe them. She’d had no form of ID on her person: no driver’s license, no credit cards — nothing.
Was this terrible sense of foreboding, the need to find shelter and lie low, real or imagined? Standing on this dark porch in the middle of nowhere beneath a star-sifted night, her fears seemed more real than ever before. They had compelled her to come here in the first place: to find out the truth.
After her release from the hospital this morning, she had decided to discover who she was before whoever it was caught up with her.
She had picked Joe Guinn’s name out of the yellow pages. Not that there had been a great deal of choice of private investigators listed. She was definitely in small-town, USA. Yet his name had leaped up at her, not in recognition exactly but with a positive, compelling feeling that he was the right man for the job.
Uncannily, that sense of rightness had increased when he answered his door. Some sense of recognition — no her reaction to him had been more subtle than that—it was more like window-shopping and then spotting the perfect dress that you didn’t even know you were looking for.
Certainly he was not the kind of man who at first glance seemed tailor-made to provide a sense of security, With- beer can in hand, wild dark unkempt hair and unshaven jaw, he’d loomed in his doorway like every city dweller’s idea of a backwoods’ nightmare. Despite the towel, she wasn’t even convinced he’d lately been near a tub. Yet, for one brief second, Joe Guinn had caused a calming inside her that gave substance to her sense of having chosen rightly.
Then he had blown her sense of security sky-high. He knew her! Knew Holly — Molly?
“Doesn’t sound right,” she whispered and realized that her voice was being drowned out by a strange roaring.
She put her hands to her ears but the noise was inside her. Panic rushed back into the void left by fleeing calm. She had been assured that the symptoms of her concussion were over. Maybe. But the sudden thought that she might have been walking around all day in plain sight of many people who knew her, of someone who might be after her, was close to giving her a heart attack.
Sensing that she was being watched, she turned to look back over her shoulder. Though she could not be certain she thought she saw the curtain in the window to the right of the door move fr
actionally. Joe Guinn was watching her.
She deliberately turned to face him, anger making her a little more brave. For better or worse, her need to know the truth bad become entangled with the life of the stranger behind that curtain. As if she didn’t have problems enough. As if her head weren’t throbbing with unanswered questions. As if the roaring weren’t growing louder instead of receding.
There was no warning that the world was changing, just a gentle slow slide into oblivion. She went down so smoothly she did not even bump her head.
Joe swore viciously under his breath as he slammed his door on the most tempting woman he had ever known. He hadn’t missed the stricken look on her face before the door eclipsed her. He didn’t need her beating on his jamb or hear her plaintive voice to know he was being the worst kind of coward. He couldn’t help it.
She had gotten to him, gotten to him big-time.
Still...
He turned and reached for the knob. Then he thought about what today meant to him, thought about what the date had once meant to both of them. He reached a little higher and shot the bolt home.
Today would have been their fifth wedding anniversary. If he had opened that door a second time, he would have slugged or kissed her—either way she would have been in serious trouble.
Turning away, he hurled his empty beer can across the width of the living room, past the dining room and through the pass-through window that separated it from the kitchen. It struck the refrigerator and bounced noisily into the sink. It was a maneuver he had perfected during his many hours of unemployment these last two years. Usually, a successful throw made him smile. Tonight it was just physical release. Actually, he was pumped enough to juggle the living room furniture.
Halle Hayworth had a talent for making dramatic entrances into his life. The first time he saw her she’d been bending over a collapsed pedestrian in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Summer on the Texas prairie had nothing on ultraurban Manhattan when it baked in a July heat wave. The thermometer had climbed into the midnineties while humidity percentages of seventy plus glazed the air. Heat sheered off the surrounding concrete and glass and filled the streets like clear Plexiglas waves. It was no wonder an elderly woman had succumbed to heat prostration. What was amazing was the fact that an expensively dressed young woman had paused to help a stranger.
