by Sylvie Kurtz
They had a whole rich life waiting for them. She wouldn’t let anything steal that from her.
THEY DROVE through town, avoiding the main drag until a parking space opened up on a secondary street. There was no avoiding walking past a few shops to reach the mustard-colored brick building that was their destination. There was no avoiding the stares, the silent condemnation, the barely disguised hatred.
Taryn was used to having people treat her husband with respect. At home, wherever he went, Chance inspired confidence and goodwill. Watching people turn from him as if he were an evil creature was disconcerting. She wanted to take Chance in her arms and shield him from their scorn. She wanted to shout back at each silent accusation, “He’s a good man.”
As they entered the library, the scent of burnt coffee made her stomach roll. The librarian at the circulation desk looked barely older than the preadolescent girl who stood on a small stool having her books checked out. Chance led Taryn around the corner to the reference section. There a white-haired woman looked up from her desk.
“You’re back.”
She wore a turquoise shirt, a black skirt and black cowboy boots. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail with a black velvet scrunchie. Turquoise dangles jangled at her ears. And if it weren’t for the painful frown etching her forehead, Taryn would have described her as friendly-looking.
“Yes, ma’am,” Chance said, offering her a crooked smile. He could still charm a snake if he put his mind to it.
“I told you. The library burned. The microfilm files were destroyed.”
“We thought we’d look through a few of your other resources. That all right?”
Joely hesitated. “Can’t be any harm, I suppose.”
Chance took Taryn’s hand and led her toward the stacks. Though she sensed the action was more for show than from desire, she cherished it.
“Where do you want to look first?” he asked once they were hidden from Joely’s view.
“The phone book,” she said. “We have a name, now, remember?”
He nodded. “Makepeace.”
They gathered phone books for this and the surrounding towns and took them to a table. In one after the other, both Yellow and white Pages, they found no mention of anyone named Makepeace.
From her desk, Joely Brahms watched them, but offered no help.
“Do you have Internet access?” Taryn asked when Joely’s gaze lingered on her. Two terminals waited, cursor flashing, in the back of the room.
“Not unless you have a library card.”
“Okay, how do I sign up?”
“You’ve got to have proof you’re a local resident. Utility bill, deed to a house, rental agreement.”
The awkward silence between them was filled with the murmurs of patrons at the circulation desk, the ring of the telephone, the beeps of the computer entering checkout data into its memory.
“Do you have any of the high-school yearbooks?” Chance asked.
“No.” The answer came too quick and the slight look toward the shelves told him exactly where to look.
As Chance went to retrieve the books, Taryn edged to Joely’s desk. She leaned in close as if she were looking at Joely’s terminal for an answer to a question. “What are you afraid of?”
“What is there to be afraid of?” Joely asked, but her laughter was strained and she glanced to her right to see if anyone was looking at the exchange.
“We don’t mean anyone any harm,” Taryn insisted. “We’re just looking for answers to help Chance.”
“Are you his girlfriend?”
“His wife,” Taryn said. “He’s a good man.”
“This here’s my life.” Joely spread her hands to encompass all of the library as if she was afraid to lose what she had.
“He’s mine.”
She turned to include Chance in her line of vision. He was feeding dimes into a photocopy machine. A burst of light exploded from beneath the cover at regular intervals. What had he found?
“Then take him and go back home, honey. Nothing good will come from disturbing dust that’s long been settled.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The sheriff. For fifteen years he’s been looking for someone to take the blame—”
Taryn leaned closer. “The blame for what?”
But no more answers would come from Joely today. Her face blanched as an officer strode toward them. The gold star on his pocket read Sheriff Carter Paxton.
Taryn stood tall, but her insides quivered. “Good morning, Sheriff.”
“I do believe I issued you a fair warning yesterday, Ms. Conover.” He stood square and solid, his bald cranium shining in the glare of the fluorescent lights overhead.
Stuffing the folded photocopied pages in the back pocket of his jeans, Chance came to stand next to her. She drew strength from his presence. “You gave me a day, Sheriff. I decided to take it.”
“My patience is short for impertinence.”
His patience looked short, period. If he were a bull out in pasture, she was sure he’d be stamping his hoof and lowering his horns.
“And mine is short for threats,” Chance said, twisting his body to protect hers. “Have you got any reason to harass innocent citizens making use of public facilities?”
A hushed silence fell over the library. Patrons stood watching, hugging books to their chests like shields. Joely seemed to shrink behind her desk.
The sheriff drew up to his full height, meeting Chance eye to eye. His gaze narrowed. His nostrils flared. “My reports should be in soon, and I won’t hesitate to grant you intimate knowledge of the county jail if I’m not satisfied with their contents.”
“Just what is it you expect those reports to tell you?”
“Why did you come back?” His eyes were hard steel. “Didn’t you do enough harm the first time around?”
“An explanation, Sheriff, that’s all I want.”
“Makepeace,” the sheriff said, spittle flying as if the name was a curse. His face was turning red and hatred blew from him as strong as a norther. “Sorry excuses for human beings, the lot of them. Couldn’t stand up to what you’d done. No, you just left someone else to clean the mess behind you.”
Taryn sensed the tension stringing Chance’s body tight, feared its release.
“You stole her from me,” the sheriff said.
They were going to come to blows right here in the middle of the library, she saw it in Chance’s tightening fists, in the sheriff’s pressed lips and bared teeth. The last thing she needed was to have Chance end up behind bars for assaulting an officer.
Taryn took Chance’s arm and jiggled it to get his attention. “Did you find what you needed, sweetheart?”
Chance nodded, but he didn’t take his gaze away from the sheriff’s face. “What happened?”
“Now you’re pretending amnesia.” The sheriff snorted. “Of all the low-down tricks you’ve played, this is the dirtiest.”
“Let’s go have breakfast,” Taryn said, desperation coloring her voice. “I’m hungry.”
Chance didn’t move.
“Chance, please.”
He ignored her. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to jump when I say frog.” The sheriff dug a finger into Chance’s chest.
“Chance, let’s go.” She tugged harder on his arm.
The sheriff poked again. “I want you to pay for what you’ve done.”
“Chance.” She squeezed between the sheriff and her husband and caught the next poke on the shoulder. The cruelty of the blow expelled her breath and shoved her against Chance’s chest. He steadied her and spun her out of harm’s way.
“I want you to rot in jail for the rest of your natural life.”
Chance caught the sheriff’s hand as it arched for another jab. The sheriff was deliberately trying to provoke him.
In a low and measured voice, Chance said, “You got a beef with me, you take it up with me. If you’ve got cause to arrest me, then do it
. If not, I’ll thank you to leave us alone. Good day, Sheriff.”
Holding on to Taryn’s hand tightly, Chance brushed past the sheriff, deliberately accosting his shoulder.
“I’m a fair man,” the sheriff said as the gathered crowd opened up to let them pass. “When I put you behind bars, I want to be one hundred percent damn sure I’ve got the right man. I’ll give you the equity you never gave Ellen.”
Taryn didn’t release her breath until they were outside. When she let go of Chance’s hand, she was shaking all over.
“You shouldn’t have pushed him,” she said. “You could have ended up in jail.”
“Could be I’ll still end up there.”
“Don’t say that.” She rubbed her arms at the sudden chill shivering through her. “You don’t belong there.”
“I do if I’m the monster the sheriff is making me out to be.”
No, she wouldn’t accept that. Chance did not belong in jail with the rest of society’s scum. He belonged with her in Gabenburg.
“What did you find?” she asked, striding forward onto the sidewalk to keep herself from falling flat on her face.
“Sixty-six graduating seniors from fifteen years ago. Including Kent and Kyle Makepeace.”
Her heart bumped hard against her chest. She stopped short, turned to face him and grabbed both his upper arms. “Which one are you?”
He unfolded the photocopied sheets and handed her one page. Justine Lassiter. Christine Lloyd. Mark MacDonald. Taryn sucked in a breath. Kent Makepeace. Her shaking hands made the page flutter.
The black-and-white face looking back at her was so familiar. The sharp cheekbones, the black hair, the dark eyes, the full mouth. So familiar, yet unlike anything she’d seen before. She’d seen no evidence of Chance’s life before he’d washed up in Gabenburg. No baby pictures, no gap-toothed six-year-old smile, no graduation portrait. Looking at this picture was like creaking open a door to something she hadn’t acknowledged existed.
Twice.
Because next to Kent’s picture was one of Kyle. Except for the different shirt collars, they could have been a Xerox copy of each other.
“Twins?” she asked when she found her voice again. She looked up at Chance and found a reflection of the same confusion pinging inside her.
Chance raked a hand through his hair. “Or brothers. Or cousins.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.” He took her hand and squeezed it hard. She could feel his excitement, his fear all the way down to her toes.
“We’ve got a lead,” he said. His eyes were bright with hope. “Two of them.”
Kyle and Kent. And Ellen. Was she the girl from his nightmares?
Even though this new development would take her farther from home, she knew she could not deny him the right to know himself. “Let’s follow them.”
“WANT COFFEE?” Chance asked.
Taryn shook her head, placed a hand over her stomach and turned an unhealthy shade of green. “Sprite,” she croaked.
They went through the drive-through of the fast-food joint on the edge of town, then sat in the truck in the parking lot. Taryn was sipping her Sprite and ignoring the ham and cheese sandwich they’d retrieved from the cooler.
This woman was supposed to be his wife, but he knew little about her. He should know if she liked coffee. He should know how she took it. He should know she preferred Sprite with her breakfast. But he knew none of those things. He chewed on his own sandwich and stared out the window. “How long have we been married?”
He heard the swish of her hair as she turned her head to look at him, wanted to feel its silk graze his skin.
“Seven years come September. We’ve been together almost ten.”
After ten years with a woman, he should know her inside out. He didn’t know anything about her, except that her touch made him forget the horrid vision growing stronger every night, that her loyalty to him made her overlook his amnesia and fight for him with the ferocity of a wolverine, that the feeling he would hurt her wouldn’t leave him.
The sheriff’s goad, intended for him, proved that. What if it was only the beginning? Would she regret standing by him?
The distance between them suddenly seemed canyon deep and unbreachable. And the sense of loss the feeling brought echoed eerily inside him like the coyote’s call in the dark last night. Lonely, he remembered thinking, and hollow.
Yet he was conscious of her presence by his side, of the subtle scent of her, feminine and sweet, of his need to bring her closer to him, skin to skin, of her liquid blue eyes looking at him, studying him. Most of all he was keenly aware of his curiously strong hunger for the missing years of intimacy with her that were locked away in some dark corner of his mind.
He knew the memories of their life together still existed in her mind. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her by following instincts that seemed awry at best. She wouldn’t deny him. He knew that, too. But he couldn’t take advantage of her memories, of her willingness to awaken his through physical expression. He wanted to come to her a complete man, not one lost between two worlds he couldn’t remember.
The need to protect her from himself was as strong as his need to hold her close and draw comfort from her unconditional belief in his inherent goodness. A goodness his vision told him was nothing more than illusion.
That, he told himself as he finished his sandwich, was a dangerous direction for his thoughts. Focus. He needed focus. And facts. Drawing conclusions before he had the facts would only drag him deeper into the quagmire of emotions flooding his frustrated brain.
If he was going to find the truth, if he was going to protect her from the ills he was stirring with his search, he needed to stay sharp.
His gaze worked a grid of the mirrors and the surrounding area. A sheriff’s car was parked down the road. The man inside was shorter than Sheriff Paxton. A deputy assigned to keep track of them? Another reason to increase his vigilance.
“What do we have?” Chance asked, wanting something other than his dismal thoughts to keep him company.
“Two names,” she said, picking at the crust of one slice of bread. “No, three. Kent Makepeace, Kyle Makepeace and Ellen Paxton.”
“No identifiers. No date of birth.” He’d used the day Angus had found him on the river as a birthday for the last fifteen years. “No full name. No social security number. No previous address.”
“We know you were set to graduate from high school.”
“But we’re not likely to get help from anyone here in town.” He was silent for a while, contemplating the large black blotches between the patches of information. “We need facts.”
“I know.”
He heard the sigh of regret in her voice, but sensed that bringing up the question of her going home would be useless. The loyalty she felt toward the man she thought she loved was too strong to abandon him. And arguing he wasn’t her husband wouldn’t get him far. She saw the same exterior she’d seen for ten years.
What was different was the unseen part of him.
“We’ll have to go to Lufkin,” he said, hoping to discourage her.
“I know.”
Chapter Seven
Joely Brahms had been right, Chance thought. Size did matter.
The Kurth Memorial Library in downtown Lufkin dwarfed the library in Ashbrook. There they found the unexpected boon of a collection of newspapers from the region, including the Ashbrook Herald, and a treasure in the Ora McMullen Genealogical collection, including a history of the Makepeace family.
Of Caddo and Scot roots, the Makepeace forefathers had settled in the area generations ago. But the spiderweb of ancestry, which should have led to an increasing lattice of names, dwindled instead to a few broken threads. Conflict between father and son, it seemed, was as much a legacy as blood.
Cutting cords. Cutting ties. What had happened to sever Kent and Kyle from their family? The genealogy didn’t hold that answer, only a series of dates of births, marriages, occu
pations and deaths that stopped in 1900.
Chance perused the newspaper microfiche files while Taryn worked her way around the World Wide Web at a nearby computer station. His eyes were burning and his head was aching from the concentration, but eventually his morning of dedicated focus was rewarded. A headline caught his attention. He straightened in his chair, then stilled. “I found something.”
He waved Taryn to come close. She hunched over him. The scent of her shampoo cascaded down to him. He held on to the edge of the table to keep his hands from reaching for a strand of her silky brown hair, his arms from reaching for her, his body from stretching up to kiss her cheek.
“Two Missing In Local Tragedy.” She read over his shoulder:
ASHBROOK, TX—Two local teens are missing and presumed to have drowned. A third teen is suffering from critical head injuries sustained when the river drove her into a boulder. She was rescued by Fish and Game officers.
Captain Julio Arcaro said the teens were trespassing on the Woodhaven Preserve late yesterday afternoon. A full search will resume in the morning for the two missing boys.
A witness told authorities that the teens had gone by the river to share some burgers and Cokes, then gone swimming to get relief from the heat. An argument ensued and the boys were carried away by the current. Trying to rescue the boys, a third victim was also swept up by the current.
“People need to take responsibility for their actions,” Arcaro said. “If these kids had obeyed the law, this tragedy wouldn’t have happened.”
Names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of their families.
An argument. Temper. The same slow sickness of anger that had been eating at him since he’d woken up in the hospital. What had they argued about? Was he responsible for this disaster? Had his anger caused Ellen’s death?
As he moved the microfiche file forward, the images of his vision crept back in. Blond hair. Dead eyes. Blood, so much blood. And those hands pushing down.
“Here’s another,” Taryn said, putting her hand over his to stop the page. The warmth of her touch eased the chill icing his insides. They read:
