A Forever Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  “So what are you doing?” he asked, gesturing at the immobile computer screen. “Just waiting for it to come back to life?”

  “I’ve got a call in to the software tech support people, but I have a feeling it might be a while before they get back to us. In the meantime—” she shifted her chair around and reached for a thick folder on her desk “—I’m resorting to the old-fashioned method of looking through old reports manually to see if I can come up with any sort of a lead.” With a smile, she added, “That comes under the ‘no stone left unturned’ heading.”

  Turning away from the confounding computer, she looked at her brother. “You didn’t answer my question. Did Angel remember anything?”

  He recalled the way the woman had worded it. “That cooking relaxes her.”

  “Let me rephrase that. Did she remember anything useful?”

  “Like her name, rank and serial number?” Gabe guessed, clearly frustrated by the negative answer he had to give her. “No.”

  “You know, when this thing finally comes back from the dead—” she delivered less than a gentle tap to the side of the computer “—we could try taking Angel’s fingerprints and see if we can come up with a name that way.”

  He was less than pleased about the implication behind his sister’s suggestion. “You mean see if she has a criminal record?”

  Alma looked more closely at her brother as she said, “No, I was thinking more along the lines of a driver’s license, but hey, if you think there’s a criminal record out there with her picture on it—”

  “I don’t,” he snapped, cutting her off before she could continue down this path.

  “Okay, then we’ll look through the state’s DMV records,” she said, keeping her voice low-keyed. “Or maybe we’ll get lucky and find out that our mystery woman works for the government, or that she served in the armed forces or the reserves at one point.” She flashed her brother an encouraging smile. “It’s going to take a while,” she predicted. “But we’ll find out who she is.”

  “She may not want us to find out who she is.”

  The latter speculation had come from Joe Lone Wolf. The deputy had apparently slipped soundlessly into the seat behind his desk while she and Gabe were discussing the best way to find out Angel’s real name.

  Caught off guard, Alma’s hand instantly covered her heart as if to keep it from jumping out of her chest. “You know, you could try making a little noise once in a while, Joe,” Alma complained. “Let people know that you’re there.”

  His expression remained exactly the same as he said, “I thought I just was.”

  “I think I’m going to tie a bell around your neck,” Alma threatened.

  But Gabe’s mind was on what Joe had said last. “Why wouldn’t she want us to know who she was?” Gabe asked.

  “A lot of reasons to try to lose yourself,” the deputy answered matter-of-factly. In the world he came from—the reservation where he’d spent the formative years of his life—there’d been a lot of people who preferred making their way through life unnoticed. “Maybe she did something and she’s on the run.”

  “I don’t think—” Gabe began, ready to defend the woman.

  “Not exactly hard, faking amnesia,” Joe pointed out, cutting Gabe off. “There’re no scientific tests around to use in order to prove that a person does, or doesn’t, have amnesia.”

  “She’s not faking it,” Gabe insisted.

  “And you know this how?” Joe challenged, willing to be convinced.

  To back up his point, Gabe told them what happened last night. “She had a nightmare and she woke up screaming. There was this terrified look in her eyes.” Gabe paused, knowing that he couldn’t find the right words to express the feeling he’d had when he’d looked into her eyes. He knew she was on the level. Nothing could convince him that she wasn’t.

  “You had to have been there,” he finally conceded with a sigh. “But I’d bet a month’s salary that she’s on the level.”

  “Last of the big-time spenders,” Alma quipped affectionately. When her brother rose to his feet, Alma put her hand out to keep him where he was. “Relax, Gabe, I believe you.” She looked at Joe pointedly. “So does Joe.”

  “Yeah,” Joe chimed in after a beat. He’d sounded more convincing this time, but then there was never a great deal of feeling infused in Joe’s tone, so Gabe let it slide. He didn’t feel like getting into an extended, heated argument about that now.

  “So what are you going to do if Angel doesn’t remember anything more than how to deftly handle a frying pan?” Alma asked her brother.

  He looked surprised at the question. “Me?” he asked. “Why me?”

  Alma looked at him. “Because you seem to have appointed yourself her guardian angel, taking her under your wing so to speak.” Light chocolate-colored eyes met dark. “Taking her home,” Alma added, lowering her voice but keeping just the tiniest hint of emphasis evident in her tone.

  Gabe knew damn well where his sister was trying to go with this. She thought he saw a substitute for Erica in Angel. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “The house has got three bedrooms, Alma,” he reminded her.

  “Yes, but only one bed,” she countered.

  “Which I let her have,” Gabe immediately retorted pointedly.

  “Ah, always the gentleman,” Alma rhapsodized. “Relax, big brother, I’m just teasing you. Personally, I’m glad you’ve taken such an interest in her.”

  “I’ve taken an interest in her case,” he emphasized. “An interest in helping her find her identity. I’m not interested in her personally,” Gabe insisted.

  “So, you can separate the two just like that, can you?” Joe asked. He sounded skeptical.

  Gabe turned around to look at the man. Wrapped up in bringing his point home with Alma, he’d forgotten that Joe was even there. “I liked you better when you weren’t making a sound.”

  A smattering of a smile creased Joe’s lips for a moment. “Just asking the obvious.”

  Most of the time, Rick left his office door open. In part as an invitation to his deputies, letting them know that they were free to enter at any time if they needed to ask him or share something with him. As a consequence, he could hear everything that was going on—whether he wanted to or not.

  In his opinion, this back-and-forth thing about a young woman with no memory who fate had dropped on their doorstep had to stop. It wasn’t leading anywhere but to a huge headache for him.

  Rick stuck his head out of his office. “Isn’t it about time one of you went on patrol so the good citizens of Forever can go on believing that they have an actual sheriff’s department looking out for their well-being?”

  Gabe didn’t have to be told twice. He was immediately on his feet. He could use a break from Alma’s inquisition and Joe’s knowing look.

  “I’ll go,” he volunteered, grabbing the hat he hardly ever wore. For form’s sake, he always kept the hat close by just in case he ever needed to put it on for some reason. Most of the time, the tan Stetson just rode on the seat next to him.

  “Say hi to Angel for us,” Alma called after her brother as he walked out the door.

  Gabe made no answer, he just kept walking. He figured it was better that way all around.

  Chapter Nine

  Eduardo Rubio was polite, but cold and distant when Miss Joan brought the young woman with the light blond hair through the kitchen’s swinging doors and introduced them to each other.

  To prove his point that not just anyone had what it took to keep up with the fast-paced orders placed by the lunch crowd—or the dinner crowd for that matter—Eduardo deliberately hung back and gave free rein to the young woman whom his boss had put into his kitchen. He opened the industrial-size refrigerator and allowed her to look around, then pointed out the pantry in what was close to utter silence.

  “You will find everything you need there,” he concluded, never really elaborating on which “there” he was referring to.


  That said, Eduardo waited for the chaos to begin, convinced that this small woman with the improbable name of “Angel” would go running from the diner as fast as she could within the half hour.

  He was wrong.

  In less than a half hour, the previous fixture in Miss Joan’s diner discovered that not only could this pretty little interloper keep up, she did it with a style and grace he couldn’t help but admire, turning out meals with a little something “extra.” They even looked inviting and festive on the plate after she finished arranging them.

  For his part, Eduardo had never concerned himself about appearances when it came to the meals he prepared in Miss Joan’s diner or in his own home for that matter. The customers who came in at these peak hours were focused on just grabbing something edible and getting back to work. As long as they enjoyed the taste, nobody really seemed to care all that much about what it looked like on a dish.

  But this young woman, he had to grudgingly admit to himself, filled the orders and each serving was a poem onto itself, a feast for the stomach and the eyes.

  Even Eduardo couldn’t help but notice.

  Silently surrendering, he began to work alongside of her.

  “Where did you work before you came here?” Gabe asked. Wherever it had been, they had to have had an excellent training program, he couldn’t help thinking.

  The feeling of well-being that had been growing within Angel for the past forty-three minutes—the feeling that she’d somehow “returned” to an area that was familiar to her, to someplace that she actually “belonged”—began to break up like so many soap bubbles above a sink full of soaking dishes.

  Why did he have to ask her that?

  If the short-order cook had asked her what went into making beef Stroganoff, she could have rattled it off from memory as if she was reading the recipe off a chalkboard. It just felt like second nature to her. Right now, she felt like a composite of a huge host of recipes, nothing more.

  But the man had asked her something that she couldn’t answer. Something that brought her situation home to her again—that she didn’t know where home was. Or who represented home to her. She didn’t know anything, she thought in frustration.

  The short-order cook just asked for the most elementary answer to the most elementary of questions, and she had nothing to offer him.

  Nothing to offer herself.

  It stood to reason that she had to have learned what she was doing in this kitchen somewhere—most likely a restaurant or some catering business or maybe even a doting mother or aunt had seen to her training—but exactly where she’d learned all this was utterly beyond her scope of knowledge.

  Suppressing a sigh, she told him the truth. “I don’t know.”

  Eduardo looked at her, equally suspicious and confused. Was she having fun at his expense? Did she think he was some foolish old man to be disrespected this way?

  “What do you mean, you do not know? Of course you know. Why is it a secret? Did you learn to do this in prison?” he demanded, plucking the most unlikely setting out of the air. It was absurd and he knew it because no one taught anyone something even remotely sensually appealing in prison kitchens. From what he’d heard, it was all very utilitarian. If inmates weren’t poisoned, or made wretchedly sick by what they ate, that was considered a successful serving.

  At a loss, wishing she could get used to this emptiness in her head, Angel raised her eyes to the man’s face and shrugged helplessly. “Because I don’t,” she told him.

  “What, were you abducted by funny little green men and taken to their spaceship where they taught you all this?” he jeered, gesturing around at her handiwork. He was growing extremely annoyed that she didn’t think enough of him to share such an insignificant piece of information.

  Angel sighed as she watched over three separate meals, one on the grill, two on the burners, all frying at the same time.

  “It might as well have been for all I remember,” Angel confessed, shifting her eyes to his again. The cook seemed angry. Did he think she was lying to him? She didn’t want bad feelings between them. “I don’t remember anything,” she stressed. “Not my name. Not where I was three days ago. Not why I almost drove my car over the side of the ravine.”

  Eduardo’s features softened as her words sank in. He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “You are that girl?” he asked, his inference clear. The story about the young woman Gabe had rescued from the car before it exploded into flames had practically been the exclusive topic of conversation at the diner yesterday.

  “I am that girl,” she replied, none too happily.

  Eduardo nodded, as if that was all he needed to know. Rather than remain standing off to the side, cynically observing her and searching for fault, Eduardo took his place beside her again and began helping her fill the orders in earnest.

  He was not above frequently sneaking looks to see what she was doing. Eduardo discovered that seventy was not too old to learn a new trick or two. Very quickly, the meals that he was preparing began to take on a different, less hurried, more appetizing appearance.

  “How’s it going in there?” Miss Joan called into the kitchen when the last of the orders were slid out onto the metal counter.

  “Very well, thank you,” Angel replied, pleased. She smiled at Eduardo as if he had been the one to teach her rather than the other way around.

  “I’m not hearing my angry cook picking on you,” Miss Joan said, lowering her voice a little as she came closer to the counter where pieces of paper with orders on them traded places with hot plates filled with hotter meals. “Did he give up and leave?”

  “I am here, old woman. Why would I leave? You have not paid me for this week, and if I leave, you would keep the money I have earned,” he complained. But when he looked at Angel, the hint of a smile took root. He approved of her, but he wasn’t about to let Miss Joan know this.

  “Just checking,” Miss Joan replied, doing her best to hide the chuckle she felt welling up in her throat.

  The old SOB was staying, she thought with no small relief.

  * * *

  GABE WASN’T SURE just what he expected to find when he finally allowed himself to swing by Miss Joan’s diner while on street patrol. It had been several hours since he’d dropped Angel off with the older woman.

  Miss Joan hadn’t called him to come and collect Angel, so he was hopeful that all had gone well. If it had, that meant that he’d come up with a viable way for Angel to earn a living until such time as he managed to discover who she actually was.

  A woman that beautiful couldn’t just drop off the face of the earth without someone looking for her.

  The computers were still down, not just in the sheriff’s office, but at the library and at the tiny post office, as well. All the computers were victims of some virus, which meant that for today—if not longer—no progress in the search for Angel’s real identity would be made.

  If he was being honest with himself, that fact didn’t exactly disturb him as much as he would have initially thought it would. He supposed that something about Angel drew him to her and made him really enjoy the process.

  Gabe was fairly sure that once she remembered who she was—or someone turned up who was looking for her—Angel would leave Forever.

  He was in no hurry to see that happen.

  He’d always been the type who felt that each day was to be enjoyed for its own sake. And he was certainly enjoying this one even more than he had the last one.

  He looked forward to the next one, as well.

  And, as long as she was here, he could keep an eye on Angel. Keep her safe.

  That was particularly important since Mick Henley had dropped his bombshell on them earlier at the sheriff’s office.

  “Got a minute, Sheriff?” Mick had asked in his monotone voice. It wouldn’t matter if he was announcing the end of the world, or ordering a beer, his cadence was always the same.

  Since the mechanic rarely left his comfort zone and
had sought them out, Rick was instantly alert. “What’s up, Mick?”

  “Dunno if this’ll mean anything to you, but I had to take that girl’s car apart.”

  “And what did you find?” Gabe asked. It had to be something or why else would the mechanic be here?

  Mick looked at the sheriff, then at each of the deputies before continuing. “Her brake lines were cut.”

  “But she came all this way in that car,” Gabe protested.

  “The brake lines were cut just enough to go out on her after she’d left her starting point pretty far behind her.”

  “Somebody wanted her dead,” Gabe concluded, stunned.

  “Now I know why I hired you to take Larry’s place,” Rick commented wryly.

  “But why would someone want her dead?” Gabe pressed, worried. “And who?”

  “That, Deputy Gabe,” the sheriff said in a kidding tone, although he was dead serious, “is the two-million-dollar question. The sooner we get some answers to our questions, the sooner that young woman is safe,” Rick told his deputies.

  Which was why Gabe had volunteered to go on patrol and take a second turn through his town.

  * * *

  “SO, HOW’S IT GOING?” Gabe asked Miss Joan, doing his best to sound laidback and relaxed as he walked into the diner around three that afternoon.

  For once, Miss Joan dispensed with her perpetual dour expression. Instead, her mouth was curved in what passed for a smile in Miss Joan’s case.

  “It’s going real well,” the older woman informed him. “Why didn’t you bring me this girl sooner?” she asked.

  “Well, for one thing, Angel wasn’t here sooner,” Gabe pointed out.

  Miss Joan laughed. She poured herself a cup of coffee and one for Gabe, as well. She placed both on the counter before Gabe.

  “Just pulling your leg, boy. I know all about when and how she got here—also know what a big hero you turned out to be,” she added.