“When we realized you’d be sticking with me,” Bix continued, “we knew we had to get rid of it. You never said so, but I knew it wasn’t yours. So I tossed the registration, dumped a few things from the car into a box in case Katie might want them, and took the car to a friend of mine.”
“Another friend?” Josh asked. “Let me guess . . . he traffics in stolen cars.”
“But he’ll give you a fair deal. We came home with that Skylark out there, which was a lot nicer than that piece-of-shit Dodge. And seeing as he and I are friends, I got a steal.”
“Literally, I’m sure,” Josh said. “You know a lot of shady characters, Bix. Are you some kind of criminal?”
“No,” Bix said, shaking his head, “but a lot of my friends are.”
“What is it you do, then?”
“Whatever I have to.”
Josh shook his head and Caitlin stepped in. “Do you remember the name on the registration you took from the Charger?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t seem important at the time. He wasn’t getting the car back, whoever he was. I didn’t need to know his name.”
Caitlin frowned. Bix had thrown out what could have been an important clue. Damn. An opportunity lost. Still, there was a lot Bix could tell them.
“Please go on,” Caitlin said.
“What else do you want to know?” Bix asked.
“Everything. What I used to do. What I liked. Any friends I made. Everything you can think of about me . . . about us.”
Bix nodded. He seemed to be thinking.
She added, “Anything you say might spark a memory, Bix. Even a small memory, something minor, might get the dominoes to start falling.”
“You want to hear about us?”
“Among other things.”
“If you want me to talk about us,” Bix said, keeping his eyes locked on Caitlin’s but pointing at Josh, “then he either keeps his mouth shut or he goes outside and sits on the porch.”
“He’ll be good,” Caitlin promised for Josh. She looked at her husband, who shook his head in resignation.
Over the next several minutes, without Josh’s occasional interruptions—for which Caitlin couldn’t really blame him—the information flowed faster and more freely. Caitlin learned a lot, but nothing she heard created a spark to ignite a memory. According to Bix, after Caitlin was equipped with a new appearance, a new used car, a new identity, and some new clothes that Bix had paid for, it was time for her to get a job. Bix had another friend—at this, Josh chuckled under his breath—whose cousin was willing to hire her to wait tables and pay her off the books, which they thought was a good idea given her phony identity documents. So Caitlin worked her hours, Bix did whatever Bix did to make money—he was not terribly forthcoming about that—and, if he was to be believed, they fell in love.
At that, Josh was unable to contain a scoff, and Bix turned to him. Instead of being angry, he smiled.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked.
“That she was in love with you?” Josh said. “No, I don’t. It may have seemed that way to you. Maybe she even enjoyed your company, for some reason I couldn’t possibly imagine. But she couldn’t have been in love with you. Not really.”
“Yeah,” Bix said as he rose from his chair. “You’re probably right.” He grabbed a couple of the empty beer bottles and headed to the kitchen. A moment later he left the kitchen, but instead of returning to the living room, he headed down what appeared to be a hallway.
“You think I hurt his feelings?” Josh asked without seeming the least bit concerned that he might have done so.
“You are being a bit rude,” Caitlin said. “He’s trying to help us. Besides, think about it from his point of view. Up until a little while ago, he and I were in love.” The look on Josh’s face made her rephrase that. “I mean, he thought the two of us were in love. One minute, we’re a happy couple in his mind, the next he finds out I’m married to another man and I don’t even remember him. That’s got to be hard, right?”
Josh mumbled something Caitlin couldn’t make out.
“I’m sorry, Josh,” she said. “I know this can’t be easy for you. It’s not easy for me, either. Bix knows . . . things about me. He has intimate memories of the two of us that I don’t have. It’s almost like I was roofied or something,” she said, referring to Rohypnol, the infamous date rape drug, “but the effects of the drug lasted half a year.”
After a moment, Josh sighed. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “Yeah, it sucks to hear that guy talk about . . . the time he spent with you, but I keep forgetting how terrible it must be to have no memory of a significant chunk of your life.”
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
“For what?”
“For . . . whatever I did with him. For everything he and I . . . for all of this,” she said, taking in the room with a sweep of her hand.
He dropped his eyes and said nothing for a moment. When he looked up again, his eyes were sad. “Caitlin, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made you ask that question. Of course I’m not mad. None of this is your fault. You didn’t mean to lose your memory. You didn’t choose to come here. To take up with that guy. No, I’m not mad. I’m not real happy about the way this is playing out,” he added, “but I’m definitely not mad at you.”
She smiled at him gratefully.
“What’s that they say about pictures?” Bix asked, walking into the room. He had a large picture frame in each hand, maybe twenty inches by twenty. He’d obviously taken them down off a wall somewhere. Caitlin could see that each was a collage comprised of several photographs. “Something about them being worth a thousand words?” he added, dropping one frame onto Josh’s lap and handing the other to Caitlin.
Part of Caitlin was afraid to look down at the frame, afraid to see the pictures. But that part of her had no chance against the part that needed to see them. She looked down. The first photo she saw was of Bix standing at the edge of a lake with Caitlin on his back, piggyback style, her arms around his neck. Bix was smiling. Caitlin thought she looked—she had to admit it—happy. In the next photo, Bix stood behind Caitlin, his arms wrapped around her this time. She was laughing hard, her head tipped back against his chest. In the third picture, Caitlin sat beside Bix surrounded by a crowd. Maybe they were at some sort of sporting event. She had her head resting on his shoulder, her mouth set in a sweet smile.
They were all like that, all nine pictures in the frame. In each, the happiness displayed on her face was genuine. In a few, she was positively beaming. She was also more heavily made up than she had been for most of her life—the part of her life she could remember, that is. But what was most evident from the array of photos was that Caitlin looked as though she had been truly happy with Bix. She glanced up and saw Josh staring down at the picture frame in his hands. He looked up, and she knew he had seen the same thing she had. She dropped her eyes to the photos again and focused on the images of Bix. There was no mistaking it—the man in the pictures was a man in love. She raised her eyes and saw him watching her. He threw her a quick wink and smiled, but Caitlin imagined she saw an underlying sadness in it.
Caitlin could doubt it no longer. She and Bix had been in love. Somehow, although she already loved Josh, she had fallen in love with another man . . . and she couldn’t remember a second of it.
“And this is where the magic happens,” Bix said, pushing open a door to reveal a bedroom. When Josh saw the double bed and rumpled sheets, he wanted—for the tenth time in the last hour—to punch Bix in the face.
“Come on, Bix,” Caitlin said. “Is that necessary?”
Josh tried to keep his eyes off the bed. It was bad enough for him to see the pictures of Caitlin—his wife, for God’s sake—captured forever in moments of domestic bliss with another man, moments that she should have shared with no one but Josh. He noticed two picture hooks on the otherwise empty walls.
He felt so, so sad. And terrible. He wished to God he had followed her out of the house that night, con
vinced her to come back inside and talk things out. Still, a small voice in his head, one he wasn’t proud of, wondered—even if she had been angry with him when she left—how much she could have ever truly loved him if she could run off and fall in love with another man in literally a matter of days. But he told that voice to shut up, reminded it that none of this was Caitlin’s fault. If anything, it was his fault for giving her a reason to leave that night, thereby setting everything in motion. Besides, she hadn’t been in her right mind for the past seven months. In a sense, it was almost as though it wasn’t really Caitlin at all who had taken up with Bix . . . though it sure as hell looked like her in the pictures. No . . . he refused to blame her. He knew she loved him, even if she might have forgotten it for a while. And, despite all that had happened, he would never stop loving her back and trying to be worthy of her love.
Caitlin stepped past Bix into the bedroom and Josh followed, still keeping his eyes off the bed. He watched Caitlin study the room. She turned to a set of sliding closet doors.
“May I?” she asked.
“Go ahead,” Bix said. “It’s your closet.”
“It was her closet,” Josh said.
Caitlin slid a door open and saw men’s clothes. Then she slid the doors to the other side, revealing a good deal of women’s clothing. For a moment, she just looked at it all.
“Anything familiar?” Josh asked.
Caitlin shook her head. She poked through women’s tops, a few blouses, some sweaters. From where Josh stood, they didn’t look like the kinds of things Caitlin would wear. The clothes in her closet at home were quite a bit more conservative. To his admittedly untrained eye, these clothes seemed to be stylish enough but a bit showier than she was used to. Caitlin may have been thinking the same thing because she turned to Bix and asked, “These are really mine?”
“Sure are,” he said. He leaned forward and touched the sleeve of a low-cut V-neck shirt. “You’re wearing this one in that shot,” he said, pointing to a single photo in a frame on the nightstand. Josh looked over and saw that, indeed, Caitlin was wearing the same shirt, which was indeed cut low, revealing the tops of her shapely breasts. Thankfully, Bix wasn’t in the photo with her this time, though the way she was grinning, the way her eyes seemed to be sparkling as she looked right into the lens, Josh had to wonder if Bix had been the one behind the camera.
God, this is hard, Josh thought. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to forget all about this guy, and he wanted Caitlin to do the same. He wanted her to learn enough to move on with her life, but nothing that would change the way she felt about him and the life they once shared together.
“I don’t remember any of this,” she said.
They had now completed the tour of the entire apartment, which hadn’t taken long—just the living room, eat-in kitchen, two bathrooms, a spare room—which Bix had announced belonged to Pedro, a seven-year-old boy Caitlin and he had adopted last month, before admitting that he was only joking—and finally, the bedroom. Caitlin said she couldn’t recall any of it. Yet Bix had shown them Caitlin’s things—her pajamas, makeup, the books she was reading, which, from their titles, didn’t seem to be the kinds of things Bix would read. He’d shown them notes she had jotted on various pads of paper—a grocery list in a kitchen drawer, a message by the telephone in the living room . . . even a note pinned to the door of the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a pineapple, which read simply, Love you lots. That one was a kick in the gut for Josh.
Each of the notes was written in handwriting Josh recognized at once as Caitlin’s. Finally, there were the photos, the existence of which Josh couldn’t deny, despite his overwhelming desire to not only deny their existence but to shred them all and wipe the memory of them forever from his mind. He’d have paid good money for just a small touch of Caitlin’s amnesia just then. If it hadn’t been for the pictures and maybe the handwriting, Josh might have thought that Bix had cooked up some sort of scam, that he was the one who had somehow slipped Caitlin the hypothetical industrial-strength roofie. But the photos did exist, as did the notes Caitlin clearly had written in her own hand, including the one saying that she loved Bix “lots.” Josh couldn’t deny those things, so he could no longer deny that Caitlin had lived here with Bix . . . and that she had perhaps loved him to some degree.
Caitlin’s eyes met his, and he knew that she had come to the same conclusion. She turned toward Bix and said, “I think we need your help. You know things we probably can’t learn anywhere else.”
Bix said nothing.
“You can’t imagine how hard it is not to remember anything from the past seven months,” Caitlin added. “I just want to know what I was doing, what I did. I want . . . no, I need to remember.”
Josh truly wondered what Bix would say. Would he just tell them to leave? He’d had the plug pulled on his life with Caitlin. Who could blame him, now that he had answered so many of her questions, if he just wanted them gone? And as much as they needed to know whatever he knew, a big part of Josh hoped he would tell them both to go to hell. Josh watched Bix’s eyes move slowly around the room, then come to rest on the picture of Caitlin, the one by the bed, in which she was alone, smiling at the lens. He looked back at her and said, “What can I do?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY DECIDED THAT IT MIGHT jog Caitlin’s memory to visit specific places around the city, places with which Caitlin was familiar . . . well, with which she had been familiar when she was Katie. At almost six in the evening, it was close to dinnertime, so they drove from Bix’s neighborhood into the city proper, their general destination being an area known locally, though not officially, as the West End, where a higher concentration of restaurants could be found than in other parts of Smithfield. The first stop on the Caitlin memory tour was the Fish Place, which, according to Bix, was the pub where they had first met, and also happened to be her favorite place to eat. Also according to Bix, the place didn’t serve any fish but rather was named after Ted Fisher, the owner. At the Fish Place, you ordered steak or chicken that came with sides of potatoes. In addition to no fish, there was also a complete lack of pasta on the menu. There was salad for those who insisted on it, but the servers were reluctant to give you one unless you also ordered something that had at least a decent chance of clogging an artery somewhere down the line.
Stepping into the restaurant, Caitlin was disappointed to find that the Fish Place wasn’t the least bit familiar to her. It smelled great, though, despite giving her the feeling that she was putting on weight merely by breathing the air in here. But though she remembered reading one time that smells were possibly the most powerful memory triggers—and the aromas here were certainly powerful—it felt as though she were visiting this restaurant for the first time. Rough wood floor, a bar along one wall, booths along the other, tables in between, and two pool tables in back where Bix said he had first laid eyes on Caitlin. There were light fixtures hanging from the ceiling and a long string of Christmas lights running around the perimeter of the place, even though it was October. They probably stayed up year-round. She recalled none of it.
A smiling young woman walked toward them, menus in hand. She wore a pale blue T-shirt with a white graphic of a smiling fish head on it. “Hey, you two,” she said with what seemed to Caitlin like familiarity. “Got a friend with you for dinner tonight, I see.”
“If you say so, Candace,” Bix replied.
The woman laughed in the way that people do when they’re pretending they understand a joke that they weren’t actually in on. “This way,” she bubbled, heading toward an empty table, of which there were several, given that it was still a bit early for most folks outside of Florida to be eating dinner.
On the way there, the bartender called out to them, “What do you say, Bix? What’s up, Katie?” Bix responded and urged Caitlin to wave, which she did, and to smile, which she tried her best to do.
They arrived at their table and Candace said, “Here you go,” as she placed menus in front of
three chairs. She leaned toward Caitlin and, tipping her head theatrically in Josh’s direction, said in a faux stage whisper plenty loud enough for all to hear, “So who’s the cute guy, Katie?”
They had decided that Caitlin should pretend to know everyone she would be expected to know, so as not to attract unwanted attention, but she had no idea how to answer the hostess’s question. She knew she couldn’t say, “He’s my husband,” though that’s how Josh would want her to answer, because this woman thought Caitlin and Bix were a couple. So instead, she just laughed and sat down. Candace seemed to understand pretty quickly that she wouldn’t be receiving a response to her question, and if she were disappointed, she didn’t show it. She said, “Tim will be serving you guys again tonight. He’ll be right over to take your drink orders.”
Candace left their table and Bix said, “I think she likes you, Josh. Hey, Katie, why don’t you put in a good word for Josh with Candace?”
“She knew my name,” Caitlin said, ignoring him.
“Not your name, Caitlin,” Josh said. “The name you were using for a while, remember?”
“That’s right,” Caitlin said. “That’s what I meant.”
“No shit, she did,” Bix said. “I told you we’re regulars here. Your favorite is the steak tips on toast, by the way.”
“They’re good here?”
Josh let slip an exasperated sound.
“Sorry,” Caitlin said, “but I’m hungry.” She generally wasn’t much of a carnivore, eating red meat infrequently, but it sounded good tonight.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bix smiling. Out of the corner of her other eye, she saw Josh frowning. No, scowling. She reached over under the table and found his knee. A moment later, his hand found hers and held it.
A skinny, redheaded college-age kid in another smiling-fish-head shirt walked up to the table and said, “Hey, guys,” in that same familiar tone Candace had used. His name tag read Tim. “Are we starting with drinks?”
The Prettiest One: A Thriller Page 8
