by Sylvie Kurtz
“Chance, let’s go.”
His gaze fixated on Ellen, he didn’t move. The woman twisted in Garth’s grasp, reaching her stick arms toward Chance. Her features contorted into a grimace of pain. Her mouth opened. Tears streamed down her cheeks. The scream that finally pierced through was inhuman. “Kyyyyyyle.”
Chance jolted back as if slapped.
“Kyyyyyyle. Kyyyyyyle.”
Her agitation increased.
“Leave,” Garth said, holding her hard against him.
The nurse rushed back in and plunged a syringe into Ellen’s arm.
The scream became a whimper. “Kyyyle.”
She collapsed into Garth’s supporting embrace.
Through blurred vision, Taryn shoved Chance out of the room, down the hall and into the truck. She wanted to let her tears fall, wanted to collapse from the grief swirling inside her, wanted someone to tell her everything would be all right.
Go home, go home, a small voice inside her insisted. Grandy’ll take care of you. You’re pregnant. You need to take care of yourself, not run around on a fool’s errand. No man is worth losing yourself over.
No, she wasn’t her mother. She wasn’t going to run home like a rejected mongrel. She wasn’t going to suffer silently and let everything she believed in fall apart.
This wasn’t the Chance she knew. He was confused. He was hurt. But the man she loved still existed somewhere in that buried memory and she would find him.
If he couldn’t do his job, then she would.
Leaning against the truck while Chance sat unmoving inside, she wiped her tears with one hand, and dug through her purse with the other. She found the cell phone Angus had given her, then dialed.
“Hello.”
“Angus, what was Chance wearing when you found him?”
“What’s this about?”
“I’ll explain later. What was he wearing?”
“Taryn, sweetheart—”
“Angus, please.”
There was a heartbeat of silence. “Not much. Just jeans and those were pretty much in tatters. His whole body was bloody and beat.”
“Was he wearing a belt?”
“No.”
“Boots?”
“No.”
“Shirt?”
“No. Taryn, where’s this going?”
No rodeo belt buckle, no cowboy boots, nothing that clearly identified him as Kyle. That didn’t prove a thing either way, but it didn’t confirm anything, either. Suddenly, she was at a loss. Even after watching Chance do his job for ten years, she didn’t have a clue where to go next to find the evidence she needed to prove him wrong.
Angus would know what to do and she desperately needed someone else to make the hard decisions.
“Chance thinks he’s Kyle Makepeace, a boy who might have caused his brother to drown and a woman to end up in a nursing home. But he’s not. I just know it. He’s not anything like that. Angus, what should I do?”
Angus hesitated again. “I think you should come home.”
Leaving only causes grief.
“I can’t leave Chance.”
“He needs to work this out on his own.”
Leaving her exactly where she’d started—alone and pregnant. Would her heart grow hard and cold like her mother’s? What would happen to her child if she went back home and became the passive creature her mother had raised?
Grandy would take care of her. But that wasn’t the life she wanted for herself. And if she didn’t fight for what she wanted, then she’d regret her decision. Just as her mother had.
“Can you do me a favor?” she asked Angus. Her heart was beating fast and her stomach was rolling again. She had no idea if she was heading in the right direction. What if she took a wrong turn? She swallowed hard. At least she would have gone down fighting. For her baby’s sake, she couldn’t give up.
“Anything, sweetheart.”
“See what you can find on a John Henry Makepeace. He’s dead, but someone is managing his property and I need to find that person.”
“Taryn, sweetheart, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Please, Angus. Chance needs the whole truth, not just the mismatched bits and pieces he’s getting now.”
There was another uncharacteristic hesitation on Angus’s part. “How is Chance?”
She glanced at her husband. Shock still etched his face in acid clarity. But he was strong and so was his will to survive. Why else would his brain have wiped his memory clean, not once, but twice? She wouldn’t let him judge and execute himself. She would, as the doctor had suggested, re-create the whole scene for him and prove to him how wrong he was. She would find the explicit memories he couldn’t recall. Basic nature didn’t change. And Chance was a good man.
“He’ll be okay.” She hoped. She prayed. “Oh, and Angus, is there a way to find out if there’s an outstanding warrant for Kyle Makepeace for attempted murder?”
“You’re rocking a chair in a roomful of long-tailed cats.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I should have gone with Chance and left you home.”
“I would have followed.”
Angus sighed. “I know.”
CHANCE COULD NOT ESCAPE the endless loop of his mind. Death, dying, drowning trapped him on a never-ending roller coaster. He was Kyle. He had allowed his brother to drown. He had rendered a promising young woman into nothing more than a shell going through the motions of living.
“I’ve still got those pages you photocopied from the yearbook.” The rustle of pages, Taryn’s voice, and the noises from the diner reached him through the blackness of his thoughts. “We could look up some of the names, see if any of them live here in Lufkin. Ask questions.”
Her blue eyes came into focus. The hypnotic quality of her gaze centered him, made him swallow back a knot of distress.
He wanted to reach out to that trusting calm. But he wasn’t Chance Conover, the man she knew. He was Kyle Makepeace, a man whose rage had hurt the people he supposedly loved. He didn’t want to hurt her, too, but as long as she stayed by his side, that result seemed inevitable. He had to drive some distance between them.
“You want to confirm. Let’s confirm.”
He signaled a waitress scurrying by and asked for a phone book.
An hour and two ginger ales later, Taryn had talked to three of Kyle and Kent’s schoolmates. All of them presented a less than ideal portrait of life at the Makepeace home. Two of the three had been on the receiving end of Kyle’s short temper—one for making fun of his horse, the other for disparaging his grandfather during one of John Henry’s frequent absences. Both could still remember the sting of the blow. Kent was mostly a blur in all of their memories. Two more classmates had refused to even discuss the Makepeace brothers and hung up.
“Are you satisfied?” Chance asked Taryn after she relayed the gist of her last conversation.
“One more.” She flipped through the phone book and sipped on ginger ale.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Frowning, she looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“First you eat like you’ve missed a week of meals, then you look sick.”
She shrugged and slid a finger down a phone-book page. “There are two Talbergs listed.”
“Talberg?”
“The principal Garth Ramsey mentioned.”
“You’ve been looking peaked for the past couple of days.”
“I’m not sick, okay. I’m…” She rubbed her stomach in a soft circle.
“What?”
“I’m a morning person and I shouldn’t skip breakfast. I was hungry and ate too much, that’s all.”
But the sheen of tears dampened her eyes as she punched numbers into the cell phone. He wanted to slide in next to her and hold her, tell her everything would be all right. But given the facts they were uncovering, that was one promise he couldn’t make. The further he stayed from her, the better off she would be.
“Mr. Talberg’s out fishing,” Taryn said, “but his wife says he’ll see us.”
“You sure you want to do this?”
She nodded and looked down at the straw she was swirling in the glass. Sweat fogged the sides even though she’d asked for no ice. The swish of the soda matched Chance’s own internal hiss.
“Even if you talked to the whole class, the story’s not going to change.” Why couldn’t she see that?
“To get the whole picture, we have to see as many facets as we can. You’re too willing to take the blame.”
She thrust her chin out, but some of the determination was waning from her eyes. The dimming of that light hurt in ways he couldn’t explain. He resisted the urge to reach out and take her hand, as she’d often done to comfort him. If he touched her, he couldn’t let her go, and that wasn’t fair to her.
For her sake, he wished the truth was different. She’d already seen so much heartache in her life and he would add to her grief. She deserved a happily-ever-after ending. She wouldn’t find it with Kyle Makepeace. “And you’re too willing to deny facts when they stare you in the face.”
He pointed at her glass. “Are you done?”
She nodded. He paid the bill and they returned to the truck. Traffic lightened as they reached the edge of town and found the small ranch-style house where the principal of the Ashbrook Area High School had retired.
Barely a ripple flowed in the narrow creek where Doug Talberg had dipped his line. Oaks arched over the water. Sun spotted through the ends of the branches, giving the surface a mosaic alligator-skin appearance. The breeze stirring the branches lent the shade-drawn reptile creeping life.
Mr. Talberg leaned against an oak, a wedge of cheese and a peach spread out on a kerchief beside him. A beer in one hand, a book in the other, he seemed to be adapting well to retirement. By the neglect the ex-principal was offering his line, Chance guessed the point of this exercise wasn’t catching fish so much as relaxing.
“Mr. Talberg,” Chance said, bracing himself against the expected cold reception, “your wife said you wouldn’t mind the interruption.”
“You’d think that after thirty-five years of marriage she’d know I like to fish alone.” He put down his beer, then plucked a weed and marked his place in the book.
“We won’t disturb you long,” Taryn said.
Steadying himself against the trunk, he rose. “You boys always did know how to ruin a good day.” He looked up. His gaze narrowed beneath his bass-adorned cap as he studied Chance’s face. “Which one are you?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
Mr. Talberg’s bushy gray eyebrows rose. “So the rumors are true.”
“What rumors?”
“That you’re claiming amnesia.”
Chance spun on his heels and headed back up the small incline to the house. He could do without being called a liar for the second time in a day. His amnesia was the one truth he was certain of.
“I never did believe the river got you,” Mr. Talberg called after him.
Chance stopped and closed his eyes. “Why not?”
Everyone else seemed eager enough to believe he’d been swallowed whole by the river. Everyone seemed to think he deserved his fate. Slowly he turned back to face Mr. Talberg.
“As nasty as you were, it would have spit you out.”
Chance laughed. “Just Kyle or Kent, too?”
“Most likely Kyle.”
“I’m told your office reeked of calf manure for a while.”
“And the cafeteria floor still has a spot of grease from the time you and your friends decided to park my car in there. I won’t even go into the pep rally–bonfire incident.” Mr. Talberg smiled. “I do believe I saw more of you than your grandfather did. Sometimes I got the feeling you misbehaved just for the opportunity to talk.”
“Doesn’t sound like he was a happy boy,” Taryn said, hands in front of her like an obedient schoolgirl.
Mr. Talberg reeled in his line. “Kyle wasn’t a bad kid. He just didn’t know how to deal with all the anger inside him. The rodeo helped, but…” He shrugged. “He needed someone to ground him.”
“Lucille and Angus Conover took him in like he was their own.”
Mr. Talberg nodded. “A fresh start, that’s what I hoped he’d found.”
“He did. Now he needs to find it again.”
Mr. Talberg emptied the beer bottle and placed it on the kerchief with the cheese and the peach. “Then take him home.”
“I don’t want a fantasy,” Chance said, itching to leave. None of these details were making him feel any better about being Kyle Makepeace.
“Then you’re not the boy I remember.” Mr. Talberg knotted the kerchief around the end of his fishing pole.
“What did Kyle want?” Taryn asked.
Mr. Talberg slung the fishing pole over his shoulder and bent down to grab his book. “He wanted it all—the fame, the glory, the girl. But I think when it came down to it all, what he really wanted was to come home to a house with someone waiting for him.” He turned to Chance. “Seems like you got your dream. Why risk it all for a past you gave everything to escape from?”
“What good is a dream that’s built on lies?”
“Ah, well, that’s something you’ve got to decide for yourself. If you’ll excuse me, I think the fish are done biting for today.”
Taryn thanked Mr. Talberg for his time.
Anger returned and now burned inside him hot and spuming, crushing his hands into fists that ached to lash out at someone, anyone, to relieve the pressure. Chance powered the truck back onto the main road and gunned the engine.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer.
“Chance. Stop. Don’t you see what Mr. Talberg was trying to tell you?”
That he’d sacrificed everything to fulfill a selfish dream? This wasn’t exactly a moment of redemption. “Stay out of this.”
“I can’t. Not when you’re this upset.”
“I told you to stay home.”
“My place is here with you.”
“You can’t handle the truth.” He rounded on her. “I am Kyle Makepeace. We’ve more than verified the fact. I’ve already ruined one woman’s life. What makes you think yours won’t be next?”
“Because it’s not in your nature.”
He gritted his teeth. She was right. Basic nature didn’t change. And his legacy was one of anger and violence. “There’s nothing in my heart except anger.”
He jerked the map spread between them. After studying it, he cranked a U-turn on the road.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to Ashbrook.” He’d put her in her car and send her home. For his own peace of mind, he needed to ensure her safety. That meant distance. A moment of grief now would save her from a harsher disaster later. She wasn’t going to end up like Ellen. He would sacrifice no one else to fulfill his selfish quest.
“Good idea. I want to find the spot on the river where the accident took place.”
“No—”
He cut his retort short when the smell of gas twitched at his nostrils. Scanning the instruments, he looked for something out of place.
“What’s wrong?” Taryn asked, too in tune with his mood change for him to dismiss.
“Probably nothing.”
The gas gauge needle hovered at the halfway mark. None of the warning lights shone. Steady traffic moved on the road, but three car lengths stood between him and the Lincoln in front of him. “When was the last time I had this truck serviced?”
“A couple of months ago. You’re real picky about maintenance.”
He could see nothing wrong, but something didn’t feel right. “There’s a garage at the light. I’ll pull over.”
The engine revved by itself. It sputtered and coughed. Chance applied the brakes. No response. The stoplight turned red. The engine died. The steering wheel froze. He couldn’t brake. He couldn’t steer.
A p
lumbing-supply truck coming the other way leaned on his horn.
“Chance?”
“Hang on tight.”
Brakes squealed. Seconds before the truck smashed into them, Chance threw himself against Taryn. He covered her with his body, protecting her from the force of the impact. Metal ground against metal. Plastic popped. Glass crushed.
The sound of buckling metal soon gave way to the hiss and pings of mangled engines. Shouts and sirens filled the air. The reek of burnt rubber and spilled gas soaked the cab.
The body beneath his was much too still. “Taryn?”
His voice seemed to come from another dimension. He moved as if in slow motion. His arms and legs felt heavy and thick. He took the too-pale face in his hands. The eyes were closed. From a gash on her forehead, blood poured.
Chapter Ten
“From what I hear, you’re a lucky man,” the doctor said as he put the finishing touches on the reopened wound over Chance’s left eye. “If that truck had hit another foot down, you and the missus might not have gotten off so easy.”
Chance hadn’t been aware of the bleeding. His only thoughts had been for Taryn. His gaze had been fixed on the blood streaming down the right side of her face.
When her eyes had fluttered open, relief had made him kiss her again and again. Though she’d insisted she was fine, he’d carried her to the strip of grass on the median separating the gas station from the road and made her lie still until a paramedic had examined her.
Then the cops had arrived and the chaos of questions and fixing blame had started. Worried about Taryn, he’d accepted a citation for reckless driving and followed her to the hospital. The truck, the insurance, the blame, they could all be sorted out later.
“How’s my wife?” Chance asked. Wrapping his tongue around the word wife felt odd. How could someone he didn’t remember be his wife? Except that she wasn’t such a stranger anymore. Over the past few weeks in Gabenburg and here, she’d become part of his life again—part of his being. He looked forward to seeing her in the morning, to having her close by during the day. He’d come to count unconsciously on her unwavering support. Her absence now filled him with dread. “Is she all right?”
