by Sylvie Kurtz
“Everything’s fine. She’s just having her cut cleaned. She won’t even need stitches.”
The door behind Chance opened and the doctor smiled. “There she is now. Right as sunshine.”
She looked whiter than the cemetery gate guarding his grandfather’s grave. “Are you sure? She doesn’t look good.”
Taryn’s eyes widened. The doctor chuckled. “There’s nothing wrong with her time won’t take care of.”
“She’s been feeling sick lately, too. Maybe you should keep her overnight for observation.”
“Son, your wife is the healthiest civilian who’s crossed that door today. If it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna keep those hospital beds for someone who really needs one.” He taped a protective bandage over the stitches. “There, that should do it.”
The doctor reached for Taryn and brought her next to Chance and touched the bandage on her right temple. His burly laughter filled the room. “A matched pair. Why don’t you go home? Is there someone you can call to pick you up?”
They took a taxi to a motel a few blocks away. Chance insisted Taryn take a bath to relax, then lie down for a nap. After his own shower, he fingered the fogged mirror, tracing the features that were both alien and familiar. At least the image confirmed he was concrete, not the hollow ghost he feared he was becoming.
Emptiness whistled through him. As he dried himself, a useless train of questions chugged in his mind. Who was he? Kyle, the angry teen? Chance, the sheriff, the husband, the friend? He felt like neither.
What did he believe in? What did he want out of life? What made him him? Drained of memory, he had no more substance than the shower mist clouding the mirror.
The only thing anchoring his shadowed self was the woman on the other side of the bathroom door. Her faith in him was both a burden and a balm.
But his quest to give himself an identity had nearly cost Taryn her life. If she’d been hurt in that accident, he could never have forgiven himself.
The towel stilled in his hands. You’re real picky about maintenance. Accidents happened. Parts failed. Did you really think Carter would forget? Was Carter’s need for revenge strong enough for him to resort to tampering with the truck?
He pulled on jeans and strode out of the bathroom. Instead of taking a nap, Taryn was dishing out Chinese take-out onto paper plates. She blushed when she caught his gaze drifting to the mound of fried rice piled on her plate. “I’m hungry.”
Her embarrassment, her hunger, soothed him in a way he couldn’t understand. Both were so normal in the mess his life had become. “Where’s your cell phone?”
She nodded toward the dresser where the phone sat in the charger. “Who are you calling?”
“The garage where the truck was towed.”
The mechanic took his time coming to the phone. Chance paced a tight circle from the door to the table. The scent of soy sauce, chicken and vegetables made his stomach rumble.
Taryn’s curious gaze added a layer of tension. Those mesmerizing blue eyes followed his every move. Then he caught the hunger of her look as she took in the anxious flexing of his bare torso. Warmth spread through him, thick and needy. He tried to shrug off the sudden desire, but it clung to him, kicking his pulse up a notch. The blue of her eyes darkened. Her lips wrapping around the straw of her drink caused a jolt of anticipation so strong he had to turn his back on her or he’d regret his impulsive action.
When someone spoke in his ear, for a second he forgot why he’d placed the call.
“I’m glad you called,” the mechanic said.
Chance cleared his throat. “What’s the damage on the truck?”
A pneumatic drill whined in the background. Something clanged to the floor. The mechanic listed a handful of parts that would need replacing. “Now here’s the interesting part. I found a pencil lead blocking your fuel pressure regulator valve.”
“A pencil lead?”
“The kind you’d find in a mechanical pencil.”
“How did that get there?”
“Well, now that’s an interesting question. Know anyone who’d want to tinker with your truck?”
Was Carter desperate enough? Did he have the mechanical knowledge? But Lufkin wasn’t his territory. I will protect what’s mine. Did Garth feel Chance was a threat to Ellen? Chance didn’t see him as the kind of guy who’d get his white shirt soiled with grease. “How long would it take to tamper with the valve?”
“About thirty seconds under the hood, if you know what you’re doing.”
“How long before the engine shuts down once it’s started?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes.”
Exactly the bracket of time from when they’d left Mr. Talberg’s home to when they’d reached the intersection. Mrs. Talberg had seemed more than eager for them to talk to her husband. Did she have a stake in Kyle remaining lost? Did the ex-principal? Chance hated the way everything and everyone was now suspect.
They spoke for a few more minutes before Chance hung up. His bare foot grazed Taryn’s ankle when he sat down to eat. The touch set off a chain reaction of need so strong, he pushed back his chair to avoid a repeat performance.
“The truck’s going to be out of commission for at least a week,” he said, focusing on the food on his plate. It wasn’t doing much to fill the hollowness growing wider inside him. “We’ll have to rent a car to get back to Gabenburg.”
The fork she held paused in front of her mouth. “We can’t go home yet.”
“The truck was tampered with. You could have died.”
She put the fork down and tilted her head. “Doesn’t that make you wonder why?”
“It makes me want to get you where you’ll be safe. I think we should leave tonight.”
She stared at him for a long moment, making him wonder at the thoughts whirling in her mind. “We have to stop in Ashbrook.”
“I’m not taking a chance Carter Paxton will play out his plan for revenge or you getting caught in the middle of it.”
“Lucille’s car is still at the campground in Ashbrook.”
“I’ll send someone to pick it up later.”
She toyed with the last remaining forkful of fried rice on her plate. Her face colored. She squirmed in her chair. “Um, your service pistol is in Lucille’s car.”
“What’s it doing there?”
She shrugged. “Grandy made me take it. It was easier to just pack it than to argue with her. I’m sorry.”
“Your grandmother let you go when she thought you might be in danger?”
“Not exactly,” Taryn said, but didn’t elaborate. She started picking up the empty food cartons and sweeping them into the trash can. “And we’ve also got to stop by the river.”
He frowned. “The river? No. Who I am doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is getting you home safe.”
As he said the words, he wished they were true. He’d already found out enough of his background to know there was nothing positive to be gained from staying. But if that was all there was to him, why wasn’t the emptiness filled?
Wringing a napkin in her hands, Taryn sat down. “Chance, you know that’s not going to work. You can say it doesn’t matter, but it does.”
He stood up, turned his back to her and raked a hand through his hair. How could she read him more clearly than he could read himself? “Adding more details to what we’ve already found isn’t going to make a difference.”
“You’ll be restless until you find all the answers.” She came to him, slid both arms around his waist, pressed her head against his back. Contentment sighed through him. “That’s not what I want from you.”
Her arms around him felt wonderful. She was warm and soft and so comforting. The scent of her wrapped around him like a spell. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself playing the role she wished for. But it would be a lie and lies had already cost him so much.
“I’m not Chance, Taryn.” Who am I? “I can’t give you what you want.”
“Wh
ich is why you have to finish what you started.”
“No, not if it means you’ll get hurt in the process.”
Arms still looped around his waist, she turned until they stood face-to-face. “Remember when you were in the hospital in Beaumont?”
The blue eyes staring up at him so frank and sure had him swallowing back regret. He didn’t deserve that trust. “I try not to.”
“The doctor said the reason you lost your memory was because the conditions were the same as when the accident happened fifteen years ago. Something about the river jogged your past back to life.” Her fingers skimmed his chest, his neck, then rested alongside his jaw. His throat went dry. “I’ve been thinking that maybe if we go to the river, to the place where the accident happened, it’ll jar your memory again.”
Temptation was sweet on his tongue. “Taryn—”
The bleating of the cell phone on the table cut short his retort. She let him go, answered the phone, listened. Then she looked at him. “That was Angus. There’s another reason we need to stop in Ashbrook.”
“Why?” he asked, suddenly feeling so adrift without the warmth of her against him that he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his arms, with his body. He was mist again, twitching this way and that at the whim of his forgotten past. Taryn was right. Without all the answers, he would forever be nothing more than a ghost of himself.
“J. D. Brahms is the trustee of the property once owned by John Henry Makepeace.”
THE NEXT MORNING, rain beating down from a sky as bleak as his thoughts, Chance drove back to Ashbrook. He’d spent a restless night haunted by the unending horror looping in his mind, by the sweet torture of Taryn’s body spooned to his.
Taryn sat beside him, entertaining him with stories from their past. The soft sound of her voice was as close to a caress as he dared to take.
He wanted to credit the headache jackhammering inside his head to the cold front coming through. But he knew the origin was something darker.
Urgency forked inside him so intensely, he felt split by it. Part of him had to find the whole truth about that day fifteen years ago and make amends where they were required. Part of him had to bring Taryn home to safety. The last thing he wanted to acknowledge was the needle-sharp need to find where he belonged. If it wasn’t by Taryn’s side…
“There’s a spot,” Taryn said, pointing at the curb a block from the Ashbrook library.
“Stay,” he said as he turned off the engine. “I’ll go talk to Joely. No sense in both of us getting wet.”
She ignored him. Chance sighed. She was as stubborn as a two-year-old—and as persistent. He found himself smiling. Life with Taryn would never be boring. With his faltering step came a heartbeat of regret. As best he could, he shielded her from the rain with the morning’s paper.
Joely sat at her desk, squinting at her computer screen. Her red layered skirt and vest were paired with a white blouse and a bloodstone bolo tie. A red scrunchie held her white hair back into a ponytail.
“Morning, Ms. Brahms.”
A blaze of fear zapped in her eyes before she could squelch it. “Please leave. I don’t need any more trouble.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were the trustee of my grandfather’s property?”
She stood up so fast, her chair rolled back and clanked into the set of metal shelves behind her. A dictionary splattered to the floor. Looking toward the front desk, she scurried around her workstation. “You’ve got to leave.”
Standing between him and Taryn, she urged them toward the side door. Then her footsteps hesitated. She stopped, raced back to her desk and picked up her purse.
In the stairwell, she stopped again and rifled through her purse. Her voice echoed in the narrow space. “Here, take this.”
She slapped a key into his hand. “It’s to your grandfather’s place.” Her gaze darted up and down the stairs. “I can’t talk now. I’ll meet you there after I get off work.”
“Why not get it over with?” Taryn asked.
Did she fear, like him, that Joely wouldn’t show if she was given too much time to think?
Joely’s fingers shook as she zippered her purse. “I can’t.”
She turned to leave. Chance caught her elbow. “You’ll show?”
Licking her lips, she gave a nervous nod. Her footsteps clanged on the metal stairs and she was gone.
“We’ve got to stay,” Taryn said.
Chance folded his fingers around the key. Its teeth bit into his palm. His gut tightened. Was he afraid of the answers or of something else?
“You’re so close,” she insisted, taking his arm.
So close he could almost taste the truth.
“Let’s stop by the supermarket and get some lunch fixings.” She opened the door. “We’ll take a look around the cabin. Maybe something will spark a memory.”
Rain pelted his scalp, his face. It ran down his face like tears. And he couldn’t shake the feeling he would regret this decision.
“HELLO, DARLIN’.” Rain slicked the windows of Garth’s office, blurring the world below him in liquid silver. The patter of drops against the glass soothed him in a way a mother’s lullaby never had.
“What do you want, Garth?”
“Now, Joely, is that any way to greet your dear cousin?”
“Second cousin. Twice removed.” Her words were girdle tight.
“Family nonetheless.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m just checkin’ up on you. Seein’ how you’re doin’.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“That’s good.”
“You said I’d be protected.”
“And you are—as long as you keep your mouth shut.”
He was comfortable with the silence, patient enough to let her fill it in her own time.
“You’d run over anyone in your way. Family be damned.”
He didn’t like the note of resignation in her voice. Beaten people had a way of thinking they had nothing left to lose and made even bigger mistakes.
Garth didn’t put stock in anyone but himself. Sentimentality was far too flimsy to be trusted. Family ties were the least of his concerns. Loyalty, he’d learned, had to be bought—and he’d paid Joely well for hers. “I don’t take kindly to betrayal.”
Over the line, the stirrings of Joely’s emotions filled the static.
“Neither do I,” she finally said.
The line went dead.
Garth spun his chair to face the wall across his desk. Hands tented above his lap, his gaze met the glassed shadow box in the corner. There, a frayed blue ribbon resided. The token was the only thing of his childhood he’d taken with him when he’d left Ashbrook.
One year, his mother had decided he needed a positive male role model and enrolled him in the elementary school’s Boy Scouts program. He’d hated every second of the ordeal, but he had gained something from the experience.
When he’d won that blue ribbon for top popcorn sales—above all the do-gooders of the troop—he’d seen his destiny unfold before him. He was the master of his own fate.
He never had to learn a lesson twice.
Garth picked up the receiver and dialed. “I’ve got a deer that needs stalkin’.”
Chapter Eleven
Where the sand had washed off the red subsoil, rain had deepened the ruts on the driveway to his grandfather’s house into little gullies. Behind the house, the woods were razed and the land looked odd without its green cloak of forest. Chance gazed at everything except the cabin.
He’d felt nothing before. Not the tender-sweet sentimentality one should have for his childhood home, not the expected awakening of memory, not the flash of his teenage self moving with familiarity across pictures of the past.
Having exhausted the landscape, his gaze finally settled on the house. Breath held, he waited.
He felt nothing still.
Inside, the cabin had been more or less maintained. A thin coat of dust dulled the wo
oden surface of the dining-room table, two chairs and coffee table. With no people living and breathing in the space, must had found a home and scented the air.
When Taryn sat, a faint cloud of dust rose from the plain brown cushion on the chair. Elbows braced against her knees, she watched him stalk the perimeter of the rooms.
Was she feeling sick again? She hadn’t sipped through a gallon of ginger ale as she had the past few days. Her skin had a rosy blush. Her eyes practically glowed with life. Spending the night at the motel had proved a good decision. She looked rested. Or maybe taking turns feeling blinky was one of those unwritten rules of marriage. And he certainly felt rode hard and put up wet.
In one of the bedrooms, he found a pair of twin beds separated by a window. Serviceable denim comforters covered both. Two sets of shelves nailed to the wall served as headboards. One side contained field guides of all kinds and several trophies topped with a running figure. The other was filled with horse books, ribbons and rodeo buckles.
From the chest of drawers, Chance picked up a framed picture of a boy—thirteen? fourteen?—and a black horse. Me? Caught on the mirror’s frame, faded and yellowed, were two tickets to the senior prom.
He sat on Kyle’s bed. The bedsprings squealed. Something. He should feel something. But he didn’t. He tried lying down. Staring at the ceiling, just as his teenage self might once have, he waited for the flash of a picture, the pulse of a memory. Nothing came. Hollowness blustered in the disturbed silence.
What dreams had he dreamed? What thoughts had he thought? All those years, sleeping in this bed, what feelings had he felt?
Taryn came to him, sat beside him on the bed. With fingertips, she brushed the side of his face. A trickle of warmth seeped through his skin. “The rain’s almost let up. Why don’t we open the windows to air the place and eat lunch by the river?”
Because he couldn’t bear to remain in the stale atmosphere of his unremembered past, he agreed.
From his grandfather’s cabin, an old dirt logging road led to the abandoned remains of a sawmill. Branching off to the right, an unmarked trail led to the Woodhaven Preserve and the Red Thunder River.
