“It’s okay,” he assured her, pulling her close and feeling the pounding of her heart pulsing wildly against him. “You’re safe.”
“Safe,” she murmured, her breath coming in jagged, uneven gasps. “Safe.”
Chapter 8
“Logan.”
Rain leaned forward and nodded. “Do you think it means something?”
Michael McGhan reached for the glasses perched on his head and slid them into place at the bridge of his nose. “It undoubtedly means something,” he admitted, picking up the chart from his desk again. “We just don’t know what that is.”
Rain watched as he read through the file again, feeling herself growing more agitated and more anxious the longer he read. She wasn’t sure why she felt so uneasy. It wasn’t as though the doctor had been unpleasant or the appointment was going badly. On the contrary. She found Dr. McGhan to be a kind, compassionate man with a warm, pleasant personality and professional “bedside manner.” She’d had no difficulty in talking to him. He listened carefully to what she said to him and his questions had been insightful and thought provoking.
So why was she becoming so annoyed? Why did his careful study of her file make her feel resentful and angry?
After a brief introduction, the doctor had reviewed and discussed with her all the medical records Dr. Martinez had forwarded to him, made a brief diagnosis and outlined a course of treatment. She’d felt comfortable, optimistic even, about firming up the weekly sessions he recommended and discussing the various forms of therapy he offered. However, when he began asking her about her dreams—about Logan—she’d felt herself tightening up.
She thought about last night, about the nightmare and about waking up in Joe Mountain’s embrace. It hadn’t been the first time he’d been there when she’d awakened from a nightmare, but it had been the first time she’d found herself in his arms.
Of course, she’d been too upset, too frightened to question why he’d been there, or why it had meant so much. She’d just been grateful. His arms had felt strong and secure around her and in them, she had forgotten about the fear and the terror. She had forgotten about Logan. He had held her for a long time, held her until she could sleep again and falling asleep in his arms had been the best rest she’d ever had.
“Logan,” Dr. McGhan said again. Lowering the file, he pushed his glasses back up onto his forehead. “Nothing else, just Logan, right?”
“Just…just Logan,” Rain mumbled, opening up her hands and rubbing her damp palms across the fabric of her skirt. She shifted uneasily in the chair. “Everything always seems so mixed up, so confusing.”
“In the dream,” he said, leaning back in his chair and tenting his fingers together. “And you can’t tell from the dreams if Logan is a person or a place.”
“Sometimes it seems that it’s a person,” she confessed, thinking about the shadowy figures from her nightmares and feeling her body react to the fear even now. “Then other times I’m not so sure.” She stopped, giving her head a shake. “I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not Logan.” She looked up at him and shrugged. “I just don’t know.”
Dr. McGhan lightly tapped the tips of his fingers together. “How do you feel about the name?”
“How do I feel about Logan? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“The name Logan, does it solicit any particular response from you?”
“Well, yeah,” she said sarcastically. “It makes me afraid to go to sleep.”
“But what about now? Are you still afraid?”
She shifted again. “Not really. It just seems like a name now.”
He tapped his fingertips together again, thinking. “It’s interesting,” he said after a moment, reaching up and grabbing at his glasses. “I think it might be a little more than just a name to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s obvious you don’t like talking about it. You don’t even like saying it.”
“I—I don’t,” she admitted.
“Why do you suppose that is?”
A rush of color filled her cheeks and she suddenly felt exposed and unprotected. That he could read her so easily made her feel foolish and had her feeling defensive.
“You’re the doctor, you tell me,” she snapped. It was apparent from his expression that the sarcasm had surprised him and she immediately felt bad. “Look, Dr. McGhan, I’m—I’m sorry,” she added quickly, glancing down at her lap and curling her hands closed. “You’re right. I don’t like talking about this. It bothers me to think about those dreams, to think about Logan.”
“Because it makes you feel frightened.”
She nodded, thinking again of the icy fear of her nightmares and the warm comfort of Joe’s arms. “Yes.”
“It makes you feel helpless.”
She paused for a moment. Now that she thought about it, he was right. “Does that seem important?”
“It could be,” McGhan admitted. “The feelings you have for Logan—whomever or whatever Logan is or represents to you—are conflicted. It would make me think the name isn’t one you feel possessive or particularly comfortable with.”
“What would that mean?”
The doctor came forward in his chair. “To speculate a little, it would be my feeling that if Logan is a name, then it isn’t yours.”
Rain’s eyes opened wide. “What makes you think that?”
“Like I said, I’m just speculating, but from what you say and your reaction, Logan represents something fearful to you. In other words, you don’t get a warm fuzzy from it the way you did from…say…cooking.” He lifted his hands in a small shrug. “And most people aren’t afraid of their own names, especially in their subconscious.”
Rain sat back again. “I never thought about it like that.”
“Of course, that’s not to say there couldn’t be a dozen other explanations,” he pointed out. “An abusive mate, a child, a relative.” He pushed the chair back from the desk and stood up. “I’m just tossing around some thoughts.” He walked around the desk, stopping in front of Rain and looking down at her. “I’ve treated a number of amnesia patients and there are no two cases alike, but they all seem to have one thing in common.” He leaned back against the edge of the desk. “How they recover memories is never the same. There’s a good chance you could experience a number of—” he lifted his hands, making quote signs with his fingers “—recollections—random images, feelings, impressions that pop into your head unexpectedly whether you’re dreaming or awake. Some may turn out to be significant, some not, but I can tell you that to try to determine the significance of each one is impossible.”
He reached down, slipping his hands over hers and helping her to her feet. “That’s what we can do here—we’ll talk about those random events, work with them, maybe try to make a little sense of them. What won’t be helpful is for you to spend the rest of your time obsessing about things that might never make sense.”
“Like Logan?”
Dr. McGhan nodded. “Maybe Logan is significant and maybe he’s just a bogeyman left over from when you were a kid.”
Bogeyman. She liked the perception of Logan as a figment of her imagination. She also like Dr. McGhan and left his office feeling more optimistic and hopeful than she had in days.
“All set?” Joe asked, quickly rising to his feet when she stepped into the doctor’s waiting room.
“All set,” she repeated. She swore he looked concerned, as though her well-being mattered to him, but she cautioned herself about losing perspective. She couldn’t afford to do that with Logan and she couldn’t with Joe Mountain, either.
“You wanted to see me?”
Joe looked up at the sound of Ryan’s voice and frowned. “I wanted to see you twenty minutes ago.”
Ryan shrugged, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Rain couldn’t find the key for the postage machine. I was helping her look.”
Joe rolled his eyes. Ryan had never hung around the office as muc
h as he had in the last three weeks, but then Rain hadn’t been working in the office until the last two weeks, either.
Almost a month. It seemed impossible to think that it had been over three weeks since Rain had walked out of the desert. Three weeks ago he would have thought they would have been much further along, would have thought they would have had something more to go on than they did, some concrete leads to follow.
Instead, he’d been slammed by one dead end after another. They had circulated photos of Rain to every agency, bureau, television station and newspaper this side of the Mississippi. They’d circulated the sketch of the man she’d described to the crime artist during their sessions together, but nothing had come of that either. Even the afternoon they had spent in the desert had failed to trigger anything. He’d driven her over every square inch of land in a fifty-mile radius from where he’d found her, but try as she could, no memories were forthcoming. They’d both gone home that night feeling frustrated and thoroughly disappointed.
On a road to nowhere and frustrated by the brick walls and blind alleys of unanswered questions, he’d decided he’d waited long enough. He couldn’t afford to sit back and wait for something to come to him, he had to get out there and make it happen.
He had stayed in the office late last night, poring over missing persons reports for the umpteenth time, examining and reexamining, looking for something he might have missed, trying for a different angle, a new light. But nothing had stood out, nothing he hadn’t seen and investigated a dozen times already. He’d gone home feeling frustrated and thoroughly depressed.
The house had been dark when he’d gotten there. Rain had no doubt turned in hours before. He’d forgone the dinner she had left out for him, restlessness taking what little appetite he might have had. After having checked on the stable and brushed down Sycamore, he’d gone up to bed feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. Unfortunately, though, sleep just hadn’t been in the cards. After tossing and turning for the better part of an hour, he’d flipped on the light and reached for a sportsman’s magazine on the nightstand.
A feature story on fly-fishing had seemed like just the kind of slow-paced article that would put him right to sleep, but something in the long-winded account had him forgetting about his restlessness and had him sitting straight up in bed.
The article described a spot ideal for fly-fishing and a company in Utah that manufactured a new kind of lure. But it wasn’t the advice about flies that had caught his attention, but rather the name of the town itself. It all but leapt off the page at him.
Logan.
He’d gotten up and torn the house apart looking for a map, eventually finding one to confirm what he’d read. It had taken a little searching, but sure enough, there it had been in the northernmost part of the state, right off Highway 91—Logan, Utah, population 32,762.
“Going somewhere?” Ryan asked, pointing at the road map spread out on the desk.
“Didn’t you say you had a buddy who was a deputy sheriff somewhere in Utah?” Joe asked, ignoring the questions as he turned back to the map.
“Kane County,” Ryan said, pointing to a shaded area on the map. “Just the other side of the border.”
“That’s what I thought. How good a buddy is he?”
“He’s not a buddy exactly,” Ryan explained, giving him a skeptical look. “Just some guy who dated my sister for a while.”
Joe looked up from the map. “I hope they parted in good company.”
Ryan’s gaze narrowed and he gave Joe a suspicious look. “Why?”
Reaching for the telephone, Joe handed the receiver to Ryan. “Because you’re going to call your old buddy and ask him for a favor.”
“What?” Ryan looked down at the telephone in his hand as though he’d never seen one before. “What kind of favor?”
“Call him up, ask him if he’s got any connection in Cache County. There’s something I want to check out in that area.”
“Cache County! That’s way the hell north of Kane.”
“So I want you to call your friend and find out if he knows anyone up there.” Joe reached for his hat as he headed for the door. “If not, ask him if he could make a few phone calls and find out who would be the best person to talk to. I want information on any missing persons, runaways, abductions—anything like that.”
“But we’ve got all that information from the Justice Department’s database,” Ryan pointed out.
“We got the official stuff. What I want is all the stuff that doesn’t get reported. The rumors, the assaults, the domestic calls nobody bothers to report on.”
“Okay, but what if he doesn’t know anyone?”
Joe stopped when he reached the door and turned around. “Then I’m just going to do some poking around on my own.”
“How long you gonna be gone?”
“Don’t know,” he said, snapping his fingers. “And don’t mention anything to Rain about where I’m going.”
Ryan frowned. “Why not?”
“I just don’t—”
“Oh, wait,” Ryan interrupted, slapping his forehead. “Wait a minute. Cache County. Logan! I get it now. You’re going up to Logan.”
Joe’s eyes opened wide. “You’ve heard of the place?”
“Only because I broke down there once—that piece of garbage pickup I used to have.” Ryan looked up at him, the wheels beginning to turn. “Yeah, Logan. Is that what she could be talking about? Logan, Utah?”
“Don’t know, but it’s worth a trip to find out.”
“Damn straight,” Ryan said, his enthusiasm building as he reached for the phone. “I’ll get on the horn to Jim in Wheeler and see if he’s got any connections up there.”
“Good, and I meant it when I said not to say anything to Rain,” Joe reiterated, stopping Ryan before he could dial the number. “This could turn out to be a wild-goose chase. No point letting her get her hopes up—not yet, anyway. Let me see if I come up with something first.”
Ryan nodded, his face serious. “Understood. She’s had enough disappointments as it is.”
Joe turned for the door. Ryan did understand. Driving up to Utah was a long shot, but they both had been in law enforcement long enough to know that cases had been solved on a lot less. While nothing Rain had said indicated the Logan from her nightmares was a place and not a person, it really didn’t matter. When you had nothing to go on, you start grabbing at straws.
“You’re leaving?”
Joe stopped at the sound of Rain’s voice, fumbling the car keys in his hand. “Uh, yeah.”
“Going to be gone long?”
He quickly glanced away. She had every right to ask. There would be telephone calls and people wanting to talk to him, but his conscience had him feeling guilty.
“Uh, yeah,” he stammered, shooting her a guilty glance.
“Okay,” she said with a smile, giving him a little wave.
“Ryan will drive you out to the house when you’re ready to go,” he added quickly, turning back for the door.
“Oh.”
He didn’t have to see her face to know that her smile had faded. He could hear it in her voice.
“You won’t be coming back to the office at all?”
He stopped and looked up, hoping he didn’t look as awkward and uncomfortable as he felt. “Probably not.”
“Is there something you’d like me to do then?” she asked. Her smile faltered despite her efforts to stop it. “At the house? Maybe with Sycamore?”
He felt small. “Not necessary. Charlie will take care of everything. If you need anything though, give him a shout.”
“I will,” she said in a quiet voice. “Maybe I could leave something out for your dinner?”
“Don’t bother,” he insisted. She had such a wounded expression it only made him feel worse. He was only trying to protect her, only trying keep her from getting hurt—again—and it was all he could do to stop himself from blurting out everything. “I’ll pick up something while I’m out. But t
hanks anyway.”
He turned and left quickly, rushing out the door and across the parking lot before she had a chance to say anything else. Frankly, he wasn’t sure how much more he could have taken. Her feelings had been hurt. He hadn’t liked doing that, but it wasn’t the first time in the last week that he’d hurt her. The week had been hell.
He’d been determined to make himself back away from her, determined to keep himself on track, but he was finding the only way he could do that was to simply stay away. He’d found one excuse after another to keep from going home at night. He’d stayed at the office late, gone on late patrols—anything and everything he could think of that would get him back to the house long after she’d gone up to bed.
It had been such an abrupt change, such a shift from the way it had been the first few days she’d been with him. Then they’d been together practically every waking hour, eating meals together and helping each other out at the office and around the house. The change had not gone unnoticed, causing a strain between them and the tension in the last few days had become almost unbearable.
He took full responsibility for everything. If a problem had developed between them, it was by his design. She’d done nothing wrong, nothing more than be a cheerful, friendly house mate with a sunny disposition and optimistic outlook. He’d been the one to change, the one looking for excuses to stay away.
While she’d had no major breakthrough as far as recovered memories, her sessions with Dr. McGhan seemed to be helping. She seemed stronger, more content and less anxious. She worked hard while at the office, having expanded her job to not only filing and answering the telephone, but having discovered herself to be quite an accomplished typist, she now worked on the computer, typing all their reports and correspondence. Ryan was enraptured by the woman, not to mention Walt and Sal at the diner.
Joe climbed into his Jeep and slipped the key into the ignition. But he knew the truth. He knew her life was far from perfect. He saw through her upbeat manner and optimistic smile. He heard her at night when she thought he was asleep, he heard her pacing the floor after the nightmares had awakened her. Even now he could hear her quiet sobs in his head, tears in the darkness that had begun to haunt him, too.
Rain Dance Page 11
