But why?
She was used to his habits and the way he acted around her, used to Duncan. She didn't want anything between them to change.
What was she thinking? That Duncan was interested in her in a way that she couldn't accept?
No, that was ridiculous. They'd already covered that ground the time that he'd kissed her.
If anything was wrong, it must be her imagination.
Chapter 11
She and Duncan had never gone anywhere alone together until today, and she realized that she was as nervous about dinner together as a girl on her first date. Which was an unfortunate comparison, she told herself. This wasn't a date. This was just Duncan.
When he rapped twice, she opened the door to her room. He'd had his hair cut before they left Wyoming, and while it usually grew slightly down over his ears, now it didn't. His ears looked pink and shiny, as though he'd scrubbed thoroughly for this outing, and she wanted to smile at the idea. Instead she only stepped into the hallway to join him.
When he took off his coat in the restaurant, she saw that he had put on a suit. She'd never seen him wearing a suit before, but he looked wonderful in it. She couldn't recall ever thinking that Duncan was handsome, but now she realized with a start that there was no man in the restaurant who was better looking.
The waiter came to take their order. Duncan ordered a steak, and when Jane hesitated and said that she didn't know what she wanted, he ordered the same thing for her. She was glad, because she found that she couldn't think about the choices on the menu with him sitting across from her looking as though he was hanging on her every word. This was another difference from the way things were at the ranch.
What to talk to him about? She cast about for something, anything. She didn't understand why it should be so hard to think of a topic; talk had always seemed to flow easily between them, and she'd always loved their lively exchanges.
She knew that Duncan was having an equally hard time trying to start a conversation. But this was small solace when her tongue seemed to have turned to lead and her brain was too mushy to think. She had an idea that they were both thankful when the waiter brought their salads.
Every word Duncan said seemed pulled from him, and it was unnatural, unreal. Jane wished that she had made this journey alone, and then was glad she hadn't. She was grateful for his presence and most of all for his help. His help... Maybe they could talk about tomorrow.
"Do you think I should bother to go to the hospital when we get to Tyree?" she asked.
He latched onto her question as though it were a lifeline. "I think the first stop should be the sheriff's department. Then you can decide if it's worthwhile to go see this Carlton Jones and his son or whether you want to drop by the hospital."
A shadow passed across her face. "I know all the nurses and doctors at the hospital would be glad to see me. I was a favorite. Yet I'm reluctant to go there." She finished the last of her salad and sat back.
"Why?" Duncan wanted to know.
She shook her head. "Why should I deserve any more of their attention?"
"They'll be happy to see that you survived," Duncan said. "There's a lot to be said for that. It wasn't easy."
"No, it wasn't," Jane said, recalling all the times she'd been evicted and the close call when she might have been shipped off to the mental hospital. When you were on the streets, if anyone suspected you of acting irrationally, they'd get suspicious. Sometimes it was hard not to act irrationally when your head had been aching for a solid week and you'd gone without a decent meal for that long.
"It's not easy for you to think about those days, is it?" Duncan observed with a sharp look after the main course arrived.
"I suppose not. After all, I don't feel that far removed from that time in my life." She regarded him with a wistful look.
Duncan stopped eating and held her gaze with his own. He reached over and covered her hand where it rested in her lap. "Those days are over," he said firmly. "Believe it."
Embarrassed by the steadiness of his gaze, she lowered her eyelids. They finished eating in silence, but it was a comfortable one.
After dinner, Duncan surprised her. "Let's go into the lounge," he said.
Through an archway framed by wrought iron scrollwork Jane saw a bar where people were sitting and drinking, and from farther inside came the sounds of a live band.
"I don't know," she said doubtfully, but Duncan overcame her objections when he took her hand and led her inside.
In the small cocktail lounge they were seated at a table about the size of one of the big dinner plates at the ranch, and Jane commented on this. Duncan laughed. She hadn't thought that what she said was all that funny but was pleased that Duncan thought so. Maybe she'd think of something else to make him laugh. She couldn't stand the way either of them was acting tonight.
They ordered drinks, but Jane didn't know what to order and took Duncan's word for it that she would like a whiskey sour on the rocks. When it arrived at their table, she sipped it and made a face.
"It tastes like rotten lemonade," she said, and he smiled but didn't laugh.
"Why don't we dance?" he suggested. He started to get up, but her hand on his arm stopped him.
"I'm not sure I know how," she said, eyeing other couples on the dance floor. One man was whirling his partner around and around in wide circles; as Jane watched, he dipped her so that her long hair touched the floor.
"All you have to do is follow me," Duncan said as though that settled everything, and before she knew it they were standing on the edge of the dance floor facing each other. Jane's knees felt a bit unsteady, but she thought it was because of the alcohol in her drink. She put her left hand on his shoulder, the way the other women on the floor did with their partners, and discovered to her consternation when he took her right hand in his that her palm was sweaty. If he noticed, he didn't react.
The beat was slow and rhythmic, and the tune was not something that she recognized. It was good music for dancing, however, and as she loosened up, she found that she was stepping on Duncan's toes less and less. He wasn't a spectacular dancer, like the man who was showing off on the opposite side of the floor, but after a while their feet began to move in predictable patterns.
He looked down at her. "See, I told you it would be easy," he said, his eyes glinting with pleasure. He pulled her slightly closer, and she stiffened again, but when she learned that it was easier to follow him when he held her like that, she relaxed.
He smelled of fresh pine scent, and she remembered that Mary Kate had told her that he used a pine-scented shampoo. She smiled at the memory. That had been on the first day that she'd arrived at the ranch, when Mary Kate had given Amos a bath with that shampoo.
Duncan chose that moment to lean away from her. His expression was puzzled. "Something funny?" he asked.
"Just remembering something Mary Kate said," she told him, and he replied, "Let's not worry about Mary Kate while we're on this trip." After that he pulled her so close that his chin rested against the top of her head and her body was pressed to the length of his.
The colored lights over the bandstand glowed bewitchingly. She and Duncan let the other dancers flow around them and moved their feet only slightly, and Duncan held her closer and closer until she was full of the scent and the feel of him in her arms. For that was where he was, in her arms, and the sensation was so new and so overwhelming that she chose not to say anything until she could get a handle on the way she felt about it.
On the occasions when the music stopped playing, they didn't sit down but waited for it to start up again. Before they'd got up to dance, while she was watching the other couples on the dance floor, Jane hadn't realized that dancing was anything more than a refined type of exercise. She hadn't been prepared for the way the music made her feel or for her reaction to being so close to Duncan.
It was confusing. She'd already decided—in fact, she thought that they had decided together—that their feelings for each other
weren't sexual. And yet this was definitely a sexual stirring. Sexual electricity, even.
When she'd lived in Chicago, there had been buildings that she passed every day, and she'd grown accustomed to the look of them. And then for some reason, maybe when she was riding a bus or walking down a street she seldom used, she'd look up at a building that had seemed so familiar before and wouldn't recognize it from the new angle. Away from the ranch she was seeing, feeling, experiencing Duncan from a different perspective.
They had forgotten about their unfinished drinks on the table, and when the band took a break, they came back to find that the ice had melted. Duncan took one taste of his whiskey and soda and made a face.
"I'll order more drinks," he said.
Suddenly she didn't want to dance anymore, didn't want to sit across from him at this tiny table and make small talk. Fill-in words weren't enough, she wasn't enough. She wasn't up to any further posing or posturing for his sake or hers.
"I—I think I'm ready to go back to my room," she said quickly. "It's been a long day." She could think of no other way to put an end to whatever was going on between them.
For a moment he looked as though he was going to object, but then Duncan apparently decided to play along and to ask no questions. He paid the check without comment, although she knew that he was watching her. She turned away, unwilling to explain herself.
Duncan had driven the car across the highway to the restaurant in case it started to snow, and neither of them spoke as they drove back to the motel. She turned slightly to look at him, admiring his strong profile. He didn't speak, so maybe he felt as constrained as she did.
At the door to her room, Jane turned to face him and forced herself to smile.
"Thanks, Duncan. It was a lovely dinner," she said. She had to restrain herself from the impulse to reach out and touch his cheek with her fingertips.
He smiled, too, but the smile didn't reach his eyes and there was a pensive quality to it.
"I'll see you in the morning," he said. "We'd better get an early start."
"Right," she said. Her heart started to pound, and she knew that if she didn't go inside her room right away, he would bend his head and kiss her.
"Good night," she murmured quickly. She closed the door, leaving him standing there.
At that moment she was sure that Duncan recognized the highly charged emotional tension that was developing between them, and that in some way he was even responsible for making it happen.
She slept fitfully between the chill sheets of her bed, jolted awake several times during the night by unfamiliar noises. People talking in the corridor, doors opening and closing, the moan of the plumbing pipes—all of this made her uneasy. She felt so alone in her sterile motel room. She knew that it would be unseemly for Duncan to sleep in the same room with her under their present circumstances, but all the same she missed the familiar sounds that accompanied him. At the ranch she could hear him running the water in the morning as he shaved, knew the familiar thwump! that his closet door made when he closed it just before coming downstairs in the morning.
She was lonely, she realized. Lonely for Duncan, the sound of his voice and the pleasure of watching the expressions on his face as they came and went. Lying on her stomach, clutching the stiff motel pillow, she finally slept.
* * *
Breakfast the next day was hurried because they wanted to get on the road. Fresh snow had fallen in the night, and ice had left hoary patterns on the car's windshield. Duncan scraped the ice and snow away, and soon they were headed south toward Tyree.
Sometimes they didn't see a car for miles on the rural roads. The only things that accompanied them on their journey were wires swinging from pole to pole in front of fields white with snow. Duncan seemed worried and withdrawn. Jane tried to engage him in conversation several times, but after she realized that he wasn't responding in anything but monosyllables, she gave up. She wished he would be his old self again. If anyone had the right to be anxious and upset this morning, she did. After all, she was facing the prospect of finding out who she really was, and she could only imagine the impact that the discovery would have on her goals and her dreams.
Jane kept consulting the map on the seat between them. Forty miles to Tyree, then thirty, then twenty.
As they approached the town, Jane's throat went dry and she tried to remember the passing scenery. That billboard—did she recall seeing it on the day of her accident? That house in the middle of that field—was the yellow brick familiar? But nothing seemed like anything she'd seen before.
Once they were there, Duncan drove directly to the sheriff's department and they went inside to meet Detective Schmidt, the man who had replaced the other detective on Jane's case.
Schmidt, a wiry fellow with a good-natured grin, ushered them into the boxy room that served as his office and invited them to sit down.
"So you came back to find out if anybody knows who you are, is that right?" he asked.
"I'm hoping that someone will remember something that will help me find my identity," Jane said.
"Everybody familiar with this case seems to think that you were pushed out of a car onto the highway that runs past Carlton Jones's farm. You had a head injury. I tend to think that you were driven to Tyree and dumped by somebody passing through. Do you remember anything at all about the events preceding your appearance in that ditch?" asked Schmidt.
Jane shook her head helplessly. "No," she said quietly. "Nothing."
Schmidt studied her intently for a moment. "Well, that makes it tough, you know what I mean? Now, as far as Tyree goes, this was kind of a big case. The papers around here published your picture and told the story of how you were found. Seems like someone from these parts would have come forward at the time if they knew you."
"There was no one," Jane said. "No one."
Schmidt shoved a folder across the desk. "This is what you came to see," he said. "Everything we have on 'Jane Doe' is in there. Do you go by any other name?"
"I'm known as Jane Rhodes, but it's not my real name," Jane said. She leafed through the information in her file. It seemed sparse, and she tried to cover her feelings of disappointment. She'd been hoping for more.
"You said you've never closed the investigation," Duncan said.
"That's right. 'Course, we didn't get very far. No clues. Mighty strange, you know what I mean?"
"Where do you think we should start looking for clues?" Jane asked.
"Talk to Carlton Jones and his teenage son, see if they remember anything. We asked them the usual—you know, like did they recall any strangers in the area that day, that sort of thing. They didn't have a clue. I hear that the kid was pretty upset, he thought you were dead when they found you."
"Do you think she's in any danger?" Duncan asked, looking up from Jane's file. "It says here that they thought at the time that her head wound might have been caused by a blunt instrument. Is there any chance that somebody might come after her now if she starts asking around?"
Schmidt considered this. "I can't say," he said after a while. "Maybe, maybe not. Seems like if somebody wanted to hurt her, they would have done it before. She was a patient in the local hospital, she worked in Apollonia, she was there for anybody to find." He eyed Jane. "Anyone ever make any threats? Bother you in any way?"
Jane thought about the men who had tried to abuse her and the person who had stolen her coat in Saint Louis. Those weren't deliberately calculated actions, though. They'd happened on the spur of the moment.
"No," she said.
"All I can say is, report anything that worries you, but we think you're safe," Schmidt told them.
They stood to leave, and Schmidt said, "Good luck with your search."
Duncan gave him his cell phone number. "You can call me any time if you get a lead," he told him.
Schmidt nodded. "We'll be in touch if we find out anything more, but frankly, we don't have the manpower for the kind of painstaking work you're going to be doing.
"
"Can you suggest a place to stay around here?" Duncan asked as they were about to walk out the door.
Schmidt chuckled. "There are a couple, but I'd recommend the Prairie Rose Motel. Turn right at the light and go two blocks. And good luck with your search."
They checked into the last rooms available at the small Prairie Rose and went out again to a nearby steak house for a quick dinner. After they ate, Jane called Carlton Jones. He seemed pleased to hear from her and to know that she was in good health, and he readily invited them to his house, saying that they could come right away.
Jane sat forward in her seat peering out at the dark fields on either side of the car as they drove to the Jones farm,.
"Do you recognize any of this?" Duncan asked.
She shook her head. "It's so dark," she said. She strained to see something, anything that would provide some bearings. "Slow down, Duncan, I think that's the sign Mr. Jones told me to look for," she said at last.
The sign said Jonesdale Farms, and the driveway led to a brown-shingled house surrounded by trees. The path to the door was shoveled clear of snow, and when they knocked, Carlton Jones welcomed them with an expansive smile.
"Come in, come in," he said, rubbing his hands together.
Jane stood awkwardly on the mat before the front door.
"Let me take your coats," he said. He spirited their coats into an adjoining room and hurried back. They sat in his living room and Carl, as he asked them to call him, wanted to be told Jane's history since she left Tyree. She obliged, skipping over the worst parts.
"The reason we're here, Carl, is that I'm hoping you might know something more about how I happened to be in that ditch," she told him earnestly.
"I wish I did," he said with a doleful shake of his head. "But I told the sheriff's men everything I knew. First thing I knew was when I found you there."
"You don't recall a car, or perhaps an odd noise, or anything at all the night before?" Duncan asked.
Until Spring Page 15
