Found: One Marriage

by Laura Parker

“Like what?”

  She pushed the hair back impatiently. “Oh, a frisson of memory, some brush of psychic awareness.” She met his gaze with a touch of spirit in her own. “That name, Daniel Shipmann—it feels empty. Flat. There’s nothing in it, not like when—”

  Joe’s gut clenched. “Yeah?”

  Halle shook her head. “It’s stupid.” But then she looked up again, meeting his watch-your-step stare. “Why should your name mean more to me than my husband’s?”

  Oh God! He didn’t know whether to shout for joy or run and hide. He’d felt the attraction from the moment they’d set eyes on one another again. But now she’d admitted it. The connection between them was not severed. How easily she lured off point his own emotional gyroscope.

  “Maybe it’s because I’m here.” He took pains to keep his voice even. She might be forced by her situation into an emotional striptease but he knew better. “I’m real to you because you can see and tou—talk to me. That’s the difference.”

  She stared at him in challenge. “I wonder.”

  The need to be honest gripped Joe. He wanted to tell her everything, how she had been the first and only love of his life. How, if he hadn’t messed things up, they would still be together. Shipmann had been a mistake, a detour, a blind alley. That was why, even without a single memory to bolster or blast her impressions of him, she knew him deep in her bones. The love had never left.

  Instead he slid toward the edge of his seat. Retreat and regroup seemed a good idea. “Want a curly top cone? They’ll dip it in chocolate if you want.”

  “No.” She stuck out her leg and propped her foot on the wooden seat opposite, blocking his exit from the booth. “Tell me more, Joe. Was Daniel handsome? Smart? Nice?”

  He glowered at her and crossed his arms in a pose of manly impatience. He wanted off the hot seat. That meant placing her in it. “He was rich, if that’s what you mean.”

  Halle frowned. “Why would you think I was asking about that?”

  His dark gaze accosted her across the width of the table. “You are rich. Rich women think men are only after their money unless the guys they date have more than them.”

  Halle gave the idea some consideration. “I don’t know that I ever thought about it.”

  “Trust me. You thought about it.” His voice remained flat, abrupt, unflattering. “Your friends wouldn’t let you think about anything else.”

  “How do you know?”

  He was no longer looking at her. “I told you, we were roommates for a while. You used to tell me things.”

  “I see.” Trying to keep things light, Halle reached for a curly fry from her untouched basket and dipped one end into the tiny paper cup of ketchup before continuing. “So then we sort of compared notes on our love lives, like best friends.”

  “Something like that.” Again that glance, sharp but guarded, ready to pounce but offering nothing.

  Halle bit off a small piece of potato. “What was she like?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who made you need to confide in me.”

  Joe suddenly grinned at her and to her amazement a dimple made its first appearance. “What makes you think there was only one?”

  Halle chuckled. “All right. So you’re not hard on the eyes. And Mr. Personality, to boot.”

  “Don’t forget, a prize catch.”

  Her smile softened. “Didn’t anybody ever catch you?”

  Joe looked down at the remains of his lunch. “Yeah, for a while. But I made the mistake of thinking it was permanent and she saw it as a trial run in which I failed to make the grade.”

  “How did you fail?”

  Oh no, he wasn’t going down that road. Not now, not here. He gently shoved her foot off his bench and stood up. “It was all a long time ago. I don’t spend much effort recalling painful events. If you’re wise, you’ll follow my example. You and Shipmann went your own ways. Over is over. All we have is here and now.”

  “It’s certainly all I have,” Halle said softly.

  He tried not to feel sorry for her. He tried not to feel anything. It was so much easier when he didn’t connect to her. But it was too late. He reached to still the finger she was stirring in the ketchup cup. “This isn’t easy for either of us, Halle. I know what you want from me but I can’t hand you back your past like it was a gift to give. Even if I filled you in on every detail of what I remember about you, it wouldn’t mean anything because they’d be my memories. Unless the memories and feelings come from you, they don’t count. Okay?”

  Halle reached out with her free hand and grasped his hand where it held hers just above the wrist. “But that’s what scares me, Joe. What if when my memory comes back, the truth doesn’t feel any more real than what you tell me now?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, and you know it.”

  She offered him a troubled but brave smile. “Maybe it doesn’t. And maybe my life was already such a mess that I blanked it out on purpose when I was whacked on the head.”

  Joe ducked his head. Contributing factors, the doctor had called the possible stress-related events which might be behind her amnesia. Her divorce from Shipmann? No, he didn’t believe a marriage that has lasted less than a year could have that kind of emotional impact of Halle. Something else? Maybe. He’d have to check it out.

  “The point is, Halle, it’s the past. Now, about that ice cream.”

  “I don’t think I can eat...” But he had turned and walked toward the counter, ignoring her.

  No one was after her.

  Halle sat at Joe’s kitchen table hunched over her third cup of coffee, now cold, and concentrated on what Joe had told her the day before. He had taken time to type up the preliminary report he had handed her before they went to bed, she occupying the guest bedroom this time.

  According to his inquiries, there was no reason to think that she was in trouble or in jeopardy of any kind. She had lived a rather straightforward life. She was an only child of Valentin and Calvin Hayworth, the millionaire industrialist.

  Halle glanced at the diamond tennis bracelet that now encircled her right wrist. It, too, had been among the things in her suitcase. So then, her intuition was right about the cash found in her purse. Money had never been a problem for her.

  The rest of the report was equally terse. She was a graduate of Vassar with a degree in fine arts. She had worked for a series of galleries and auction houses in Manhattan, working her way up to one of the premier houses by the age of twenty-five. Her specialty was Native American artifacts, both North and South American. Within the past year and a half she had married and divorced a colleague, Daniel F. Shipmann. Recently she had quit her job, voluntarily. The reason she had given was that she needed time off. No one knew exactly where she intended to go or for how long. Nothing untoward had happened to her before she left New York City. She was simply on holiday until that tractor trailer made scrap metal of the bus in which she was traveling. There was one contact name and phone number on the sheet: Sarah Stuart.

  Halle pushed the paper away. The name meant nothing to her. Nor did the facts. It all sounded artificial, as if her past life were too good to be real. As far as she was concerned, Halle Hayworth might as well be a character in a novel. Where were the messy parts, love affairs, broken engagements? Even her marriage and divorce sounded antiseptic. She had come down with a case of marital bliss and recovered. Had she never bounced a check, cheated on an exam, fought with a friend, made an enemy? She was almost certain she felt as if she had. But how did one call a supposed good friend and say, “Hi, Sarah, this is Halle. Can you tell me who I am?”

  “That’s pretty pathetic,” she murmured. The only concretes of her past life so far were supplied by the paper in front of her. If she could trust them.

  No one was after her.

  Joe said he had checked his New York contacts and that the divorce from Shipmann had been amicable, no threats, no stalkings, no ugly scenes over division of property. No custody battles for chil
dren, not even a dog. He was now working in England. That left no reason to contact or fear him.

  She should feel reassured. She should be relieved. She should not be shredding her napkin into tiny pieces. She should not feel as if she were holding her breath as she waited for Joe to come back from wherever the devil he had gone before the sun came up. She should not be rattled because three hours had passed and he had not yet returned.

  She most certainly should not be terrorizing herself with grisly fantasies of a truck accident, of Joe lying in a ditch by the side of a dirt road, bleeding and alone, with no one to see or help or comfort him. She shouldn’t be indulging such nonsense but she couldn’t help it. She knew she was motivated by selfish reasons but he was her only link to the past and the present. If anything happened to him, she’d be perfectly alone.

  The sound of his truck engine coming to life just before daybreak had awakened her. Before she could reach the door he was gone. She had comforted herself with the thought that he simply hadn’t wanted to awaken her so early to tell her where he was going. That comfort lasted an hour. After the sun came up, she decided to make breakfast, in case he returned hungry. In the refrigerator she had found a carton of sour milk, one cracked egg and a tub of margarine that had begun to separate into suspicious layers. He hadn’t lied about not having much to eat.

  A little more foraging located a can of coffee in the freezer and a mostly empty cereal box in the cupboard. Her breakfast ended up consisting of dry cereal containing tiny marshmallows washed down by black coffee.

  Halle shifted uncomfortably on her chair. Now it was nearly 9:00 a.m. and she was watching the clock as if she were timing an egg. She couldn’t shake the feeling that for all the things Joe had told her, many important things were missing from the puzzle that had become her life.

  He had practically bolted after dropping her off here the afternoon before, saying he had business to attend to. She understood that. He worked for a living. He had returned late, bringing home prepared barbecue dinners yet he refused to sit and eat with her. Claiming his intense interest in a basketball game, he’d eaten his share in front of the TV then mumbled something about work he had to finish and closed himself behind his bedroom door. When he appeared an hour later he had shoved this typed report at her then retreated to his room for the remainder of the night. It was as if he were hiding something from her. Or, was he hiding from her?

  There was something tantalizingly familiar about him. Not his face or voice. Those were too obvious. Her brain seemed to be operating on nuance not finite cues. The way his boots creaked when he walked, the tilt of his head when he listened to her, even his smell were more compelling than his features.

  She hadn’t forgotten for one instant waking up in his arms, no, in his embrace. If he’d been giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation then she was Whistler’s mother! Okay, so her attraction to him was instantaneous. Tall and tan with deeply hooded dark eyes in a lean face with hard cheekbones, hard mouth and hard chin, Joe Guinn was the kind of man a woman might notice and approach only to receive no encouragement from, and so pass on with a philosophical shrug. Cute but definitely uninterested. They’d be wrong. He’d been more than kind to her, however reluctant he had first been about it. It occurred to her that beneath his battened-down self-containment there probably lay a kind shy human being. Shy?

  “Yes!” she said gleefully. That might be the keystone to the man. Joe was shy. His uniform of T-shirts and worn jeans might cover the muscular lean body of a hunk but as far as she could tell the Keep Off signs posted in his dark eyes were permanent features. The results of his stint as a New York City cop? Or, were they more personal armor? As for his dimple, it was the last thing she had expected to see when he smiled, which he had done exactly once. She was certain he was embarrassed by that extravagant garnish of nature. Perhaps he scowled so much to keep it from showing. She suspected the woman who wanted Joe Guinn would have to go after him, build her own roadblocks, and stop traffic to get his attention. Or, maybe not. He was interested in her. It was in his gaze, intense, banked and all the more powerful for the smoldering reluctance of it.

  “Get a grip, Halle!” She stood and glanced about the kitchen. A fat lot of good it was doing her to be speculating about how to snag a man. As if she didn’t have enough problems of her own. This enforced idleness was making her even more nuts than usual, whatever usual was. She had to do something, anything or she would go crazy.

  She strolled into the living room looking for something to read. The furniture was serviceable but old, looking as though it had been placed just so and not moved for a very long time. The surfaces were a little dusty but that was easily explained by the road which led to the house.

  There was a painting of a field of blue bonnets hanging over the sofa and another of a bronco rider hung above the TV. Her critical eye automatically weighed the merit of the renderings. One pulled her in for a closer look. Even as she neared the painting she experienced an odd sense of recognition, as if the work was somehow familiar. Had she seen a copy of it before? The sensations intensified as the artist’s abilities became clear to her. The bronco buster was museum quality. She didn’t know how she knew that but the feeling was unshakeable.

  But, as she peered at it, she was impressed by the quality of the reproduction. It was an original oil done by someone with talent. The copied signature must be a joke.

  An assortment of aging photos filled the interior of an old rolltop desk. She bent closer to peer into faces that she was certain represented Joe’s ancestors. Some pictures were sepia toned. One was a daguerreotype in a silver frame. She picked it up carefully for a better look. The man staring back at her stood bandy-legged in worn leather chaps. The leggings were studded along the outer edges with metal medallions sprouting fringe. A dark bushy handlebar moustache and battered cowboy hat all but obscured his expression yet Halle detected in the angles of his face enough similarity to suggest that he might have been a shorter leaner version of Joe. A great-grandfather, perhaps?

  Smiling, she put it back in place to search for a picture of Joe for comparison. Yet there were no photos of him at any age anywhere. It was as if the family record had stopped short thirty or so years earlier. Was that because he had not grown up here? She didn’t even know if he had been born in Texas. He’d offered her less information about himself than he had about herself. Instead of supplying answers, her perusal was adding more questions to her list. Most homes gave clues to their owners. So far, Joe’s offered as great a mystery as her own life. She had accepted everything he told her as the truth but was anyone that honest? Where would she find clues to the private man?

  She moved reluctantly to the doorway of his bedroom, hanging on the threshold like a thief with one ear cocked for the sound of an approaching vehicle. Inside was a roomy king-size bed without a headboard covered by a colorful patchwork spread. In one unobtrusive corner a computer and printer occupied a special table. The rest of the furnishings were dark and heavy maple. Like the living room furniture, they appeared to have taken root in place. After a moment’s debate, she stepped into the room.

  Though she didn’t open any drawers or even pause to read the addresses on the stack of mail on his dresser, she felt as if she were being the worst kind of snoop. Perhaps that was because there was so little of Joe on display. No sloppiness in this man. A single brown leather belt draped the arm of the high-back cane rocker near the open window. On the dresser covered by a handmade doily, a glass ash tray shaped like a boot was filled to overflowing with coins. She noticed a few were pesos. Beside it stood a bottle of cologne.

  She reached for it and twisted off the cap. The scents of lime and spice reached her nostrils even before she leaned in to take a whiff. The aroma exploded in her senses, setting off quick-cut flashes of fragmented images and sensations.

  Palm trees. A tropical beach at night. Shooting stars across a violet sky salted with the Milky Way. The incessant hiss and roar of breaking waves. Wa
rm salt air. A man’s caresses. Warmer, stronger, more potent than the dark sea in which they floated. Bodies skin to skin. Wrapped tight around one another. Surrendering to the push-pull rhythm as primal as the ebb and flow of the surf.

  Halle snapped open eyes she hadn’t realized had fallen shut. But the afterimage remained. She had been thinking of Joe. Thinking? Or remembering?

  Sexual heat suffused her body and left her skin prickled with goose bumps. Was sexual attraction behind the charged atmosphere whenever Joe entered the room? He’d said they had been friends, buddies, roommates. But what if he lied? What if they’d once been lovers?

  Heart still beating a little quickly, she looked at the label on the cologne and saw that it was from Jamaica. Did they have a past? Did it include torrid nights on a Caribbean beach? She didn’t dare ask. Not yet. Not until those fleeting images had knit themselves into more reliable ribbons of memory.

  She glanced carefully around the room, her eyes alighting on the framed diploma hanging on the wall by the door. She walked over to it and gleaned the essentials. Joseph A. Guinn had graduated cum laude from NYC with a B.A. in psychology.

  Other than his college diploma, his history seemed as curiously absent as her own. What had a Texas boy been doing in New York City?

  The stack of books on the bedside next drew her attention. At last, she thought with a grin, something personal. Reading material was a revealing measure of personality.

  She picked up the top book. It was a slickly produced history of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Below it was a mystery novel by one of the more literary writers in the genre. She cradled the books in one arm as she continued picking through the pile. Beneath the mystery was another novel, western this time, a cartoon collection, a dog-eared NYPD procedural handbook, and several copies of a professional psychology journal. On the bottom of the magazines was a half filled-out form for graduate school. She leaned over to study it. Joe was applying for entrance into the doctorate program in psychology at the University of North Texas. No, maybe not. The form was dated October of the previous year. Had he decided against it, or sent in another? Once again the clue she uncovered only led to more questions.