The 7 Lb., 2 Oz. Valentine
Page 6
He looked dubiously at her robe. She wasn’t even dressed yet.
Erin found that she could still read his thoughts. That was very heartening. She placed a plate in front of him. “I’m very fast when I have to be. That used to always surprise you.” She smiled. “I guess it still does.”
Setting down her own plate, Erin sat down. She paused a moment just to absorb the sight of Brady eating.
He felt her eyes on him. His fork hovered over the plate. “I eat better without an audience.”
“Sorry.” But she couldn’t help smiling. This felt wonderful, Erin thought gratefully. Everything else would fall into place as they went along.
She just knew it.
It had been one of the longest days he’d endured since he found himself walking along that dark, empty alley. Dark, empty, like the recesses of his mind. Each hour had literally crawled by on scrapped knees, even though it had been packed at the restaurant and he’d been working almost nonstop from nine until Erin had picked him up at four.
He’d been waiting for her to return ever since she pulled away from the curb that morning. The word physicist had been rolling across the planes of his mind like a marble searching for a niche to lodge in. Something told Brady that he was standing just on the brink.
He looked at her now as she drove him to Edmond Labs. Questions were multiplying in his mind. “Why did you keep my possessions?”
That was a strange question. She would have thought that the answer would be rather obvious to him. “Well, I couldn’t very well let them be thrown out.”
He was doing his best to understand. “But you thought I walked out on you. On everyone,” he amended, trying to make sense of what she was saying. Given that, surely another woman would have thrown everything away. “Weren’t you angry?”
She smiled, remembering for both of them. “At first,” she admitted. “But then I started thinking that it wasn’t like you to just leave, no matter how angry you might have been—”
He still hadn’t gotten all the details of that last day. “Why was I angry?”
She’d tripped herself up this time, Erin thought. Her mind scrambled for damage control as she tried to read the street signs. She’d only traveled this route a few times before.
“You know that discussion I mentioned we had the last day…”
“Yes?”
“Well, actually, it was more like an argument,” she said cautiously.
“About what?” Brady prodded when Erin didn’t continue.
“Nothing specific,” she lied, hoping that he would forgive her later if he eventually remembered the content of the argument. She shrugged carelessly. “Just one of those things that blows up out of nothing.” Maybe once the baby was born, he would look at it that way.
Brady tried to visualize arguing with her and couldn’t. “Did that happen a lot with us?”
She was relieved that she could be truthful again. “No, as a matter of fact, that was the only time.” She gave him the details that she had gone over a hundred times in her mind in the last five months. “You left to cool off. You were going to St. Louis on a business trip the next day, so when you didn’t come back that night, I thought you were still angry. Then I got really angry because you hadn’t said goodbye to me.”
Pride had been behind that, she thought ruefully. Stupid pride. If she hadn’t let it get in the way, she could have started looking for him immediately.
“You were only supposed to be gone for two weeks. After three passed, I finally went to your apartment. Your car was still gone, and I thought that maybe you really had decided to stay in St. Louis.” She licked her lower lip. “Before you left, you said something about staying in St. Louis permanently. I thought it was just anger talking, but when you didn’t return, I flew up there to look for you.”
She remembered it vividly. The odd look on the desk clerk’s face when she’d asked if Brady had checked out the week before. The man had indignantly recalled that Brady hadn’t had the decency to cancel the reservation he never made use of. She remembered, too, the awful feeling in the pit of her stomach as she’d sat in the back of the taxi on her way to the police station.
“You never checked into your hotel. I filed a missing person’s report on you that afternoon with the St. Louis police.”
“St. Louis?” he repeated. “Why didn’t you file it in Bedford?” That seemed only logical to him.
“Because I didn’t think you were here. The airlines told me, after a great deal of pleading on my part,” she explained, “that you had used your ticket. You had flown to St. Louis.”
Looking back, she realized that it must have been the mugger who had flown in Brady’s place, or maybe it was someone the mugger had either sold or given the tickets to.
He didn’t remember flying to St. Louis. “Gus found me here.” He gave her a date that corresponded to the day after he had left her apartment.
She stopped at the light and leaned out the window to read the street sign.
“All the time I was looking for you in St. Louis, you were here.” Erin shook her head. There was no sense in agonizing over it now. “But that’s all behind us.”
That was just the problem, Brady thought. He had no idea what was behind him. “And what’s in front?”
She wanted to say “us,” but that part would eventually be up to him. She wanted Brady to love her, to remember loving her and to accept both her and the baby. But she couldn’t make him. And even if she could, she wouldn’t. It wouldn’t mean anything. He had to come to her on his own.
She glanced at him, a bright smile she didn’t quite feel on her face. “A reeducation, starting with the lab where you worked. I called Mr. Waverly this morning and explained everything to him.”
Erin had called the head of Brady’s former department as soon as she had arrived at the flower shop this morning.
The name meant nothing to him, even as he repeated it. “Waverly?”
“He was your boss.” She could almost hear Brady trying to remember. She’d met Jacob Waverly only once, at a Christmas party he had given. She’d had to coerce Brady into going. He liked small gatherings, not large parties. She was at home anywhere.
Erin tried to summon the man’s image in her mind. “Tall, skinny man. Looks like the model for Icabod Crane.” Another reference he probably didn’t know. She sighed. “Never mind.”
But Brady knew that anything, no matter how insignificant, might somehow be the catalyst to opening the door to his past. “What?”
“Icabod Crane,” she repeated. “You probably don’t know what I’m talking about.”
It was so odd what he could remember and what he couldn’t. The morning after his mugging, he’d had to look at a newspaper to know what state he was in, but he knew without doubt what Erin was referring to.
“Legend of Sleepy Hollow, right?”
She beamed. “Right.” Erin came to another light and looked at him curiously. “You know that?”
She was no more mystified than he was. He watched the road intently as she began to drive again. “Erin, there are so many pieces floating around in my head. I know some things without knowing how. Other things…” He shrugged. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it.” He certainly couldn’t find one.
Brady glanced to his left. She was going to miss the turn. “Make a left.” He pointed. “There.”
He was pointing to a turn in the middle of the road. The next light was at the end of the block. She remembered that she had to make a left at the signal. “The entrance is up ahead.”
He knew that, he thought. He knew that. “Yes, but there’s a side one, as well. Duffy’s on du…ty.”
Brady stretched out the word as the impact of what he was saying hit him like a starburst right between the eyes. Shock mingled with relief and extreme pleasure.
“I remember, Erin,” he said excitedly. “I remember Duffy.” Then, as if to prove it to her—and maybe himself—he began describing the man. “Full head of w
hite hair, big grin. Always had a story.”
Erin turned where he told her to. Sure enough, there was a guard’s gate in the distance. Her heart hammering, she pulled over to the side of the compound. Her fingers were trembling as she yanked up the emergency brake. The car idled in Park.
He wanted to see Duffy with his own eyes, to see someone he had suddenly remembered knowing. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
Erin didn’t answer. Instead, she leaned over the bucket seat and hugged him as hard as she could. “I don’t care if you remembered a funny white-haired old man and not me. You remembered something. You remembered, and that’s all that matters.”
Blinking back tears, she kissed him. The lump in her throat was huge and it took effort to squeeze the words out. “You remembered.”
Overwhelmed by the moment and by her display of affection, Brady could say nothing. He was vaguely aware that another woman would have been hurt that he couldn’t remember her but did remember a wizened old guard. Brady looked at her thoughtfully for a long moment. The lady was really something else.
Sniffing, Erin drew back into her seat. She shifted the car into drive and released the brake.
“Okay, now let’s see what else we can get you to remember.”
“Erin,” he said softly, “I’m sorry I can’t remember…us.”
She pretended to shrug it off. “That’s all right. You’ll make it up to me when you finally do.” She glanced at him. “You’re that type.”
He settled back in his seat again. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Erin drove toward the entrance and the guard’s small booth. Just as Brady had said, a white-haired man emerged from his station, a clipboard in his hands.
Duffy, she thought, bless him.
5
“Mr. Lockwood!” The pleasure in Duffy’s gravelly voice was unmistakable. The old security guard leaned over, peering in through the open window on Erin’s side. He extended a gnarled hand to Brady and shook it with feeling. “Where have you been? I thought for sure you’d left us.”
Brady exchanged looks with Erin. “In a way, I guess I did.”
Duffy’s keen sky-blue eyes shifted to Erin. The cloud of confusion disappeared from his face immediately. “Ah, well, now, I can see why that would be. Is this the missus then?”
Erin didn’t wait for Brady to refute the guard’s assumption. “Mr. Waverly is expecting us,” she told Duffy. “He said he’d put us on the list.”
With a flourish, Duffy flipped through the papers on his clipboard. “Sure, there you are.” The old man tapped a blunt index finger at the line with their names on it. “Right here on line twenty-two. Brady Lockwood and Erin Collins,” he read. His eyes shifted to Erin. “You’d be Ms. Collins then?” She nodded.
He beamed at Brady as he handed two visitor badges to them before retreating. “Good to see you again, Mr. Lockwood.”
Brady nodded. “You don’t know how good it is to see you.” How good it was to see someone who was vaguely familiar.
Duffy leaned into the booth and pressed a button on the control panel. The gate slowly retracted, allowing them entrance onto the compound.
“Go on in.” He waved them forward. The guard chuckled to himself as he passed a hand over his pointed chin. “I don’t have to tell you where to go.”
Erin bit her lower lip. She spoke quickly to spare Brady the frustration of admitting to yet someone else that he had lost his memory. “I’m afraid that this time, you do.”
Duffy’s white eyebrows drew together like winter clouds preparing to drop snow on the ground. He scratched the front of his head, pondering the remark. The navy blue cap perched precariously on the back of his head threatened to fall off. He tugged it back into place.
“Okay. It’s the third building on the left. The squat one with two floors,” he added for good measure, pointing out the building.
“Room 230,” Brady said suddenly. The number materialized in his mind’s eye as Erin drove the car through the gate.
He was trying so hard, she thought, sympathy curling through her. Erin shook her head. “No, we’re meeting Waverly in his office. Room 211.”
She didn’t understand. “I mean, where I used to work. My office. It’s room 230.” He could visualize it, though why that and nothing else, he didn’t begin to comprehend. Brady closed his eyes for a second. The window. He remembered the window. His eyes opened, filled with surprise. “It overlooks an atrium.”
Yes! Erin thought.
Emotion danced through her as she drove toward the building Duffy had pointed out. “I’m sure it’s a wonderful atrium.”
Jacob Waverly did look as if he had posed for Icabod Crane some thirty years ago. He presented a tall, gaunt appearance even when he was sitting down. His thin, patrician face was sunken-in, despite the amount of pasta he liked to consume during his frequent lunches at the Italian restaurant located a few blocks away.
Right now, a smile reposed on it, and his eyes were kindly behind his thick-lensed glasses as his secretary ushered in Erin and Brady.
Waverly quickly rose from behind his steel desk and clasped Brady’s hand heartily in his. With a nod of his head, he dismissed his secretary. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, Lockwood.”
There was no doubting the genuineness of his words. He’d assured Erin when she called to tell him about Brady’s condition that Brady was respected and liked by everyone. He was eager to do anything he could to help.
“We all thought you were—well, never mind what we all thought.” He waved the matter away. “It was wrong.”
He’d believed, as had others, that Brady had been killed in St. Louis, to become one of those unsolved crimes that haunted the annals of crime files. Waverly had been extremely pleased to receive Erin’s telephone call this morning.
“Sit, sit.” Waverly gestured to the chair directly behind Brady. “And you, too, of course, Ms. Collins.” He took in her very obvious condition with surprise. “Due any day now, I imagine.”
She hadn’t thought she looked that large. “Not for another month.”
Waverly nodded, barely hearing her, as his attention shifted to Brady.
“Ms. Collins told me about…the ‘problem.’” His voice had dropped a decibel when he uttered the euphemism. “I want you to know that I’m prepared to help in any way necessary.” Waverly placed a fatherly hand on Brady’s shoulder. “It just hasn’t been the same without you here. No one seems to know as much as I thought they did.” He chuckled softly.
Erin looked at Brady, jumping ahead to what she hoped was a logical conclusion based on what Waverly intimated. “His work was always very important to Brady. I thought, perhaps, if Brady could come back here to work, to observe,” she amended, “it might help him remember. He already remembered Duffy,” she added quickly, hoping that would support her suggestion.
Waverly laughed. “I shouldn’t wonder. Duffy’s a hard man to forget. Talks up a storm, given half a chance. I imagine everyone on the compound will know you’re back by this time tomorrow.”
The man paused, seriously considering Erin’s suggestion. Waverly leaned a hip against the desk and looked at Brady thoughtfully. “Are you back, Lockwood? Are you ready to come back?”
Brady looked around the office slowly, taking in every last detail and searching for a match within his mind. It looked distantly familiar, as if he’d seen this all in a dream once, but where and when continued to remain unclear.
His eyes came to rest on Waverly. The man was watching him, waiting patiently. “I’d like to,” Brady answered.
That seemed to be all Waverly needed to hear. He straightened. “Here, why don’t we go to your former office and then to the lab so you can look around?” He was already leading the way to the door, then paused as he looked back at Erin. “You can remain here if you’d prefer.”
But Erin was already on her feet. “No, I prefer to remain with him,” she assured Waverly as she took Brady’s arm.
It was coming back to him, at least a small shred of a memory. When he walked into his office, Brady knew exactly where things were supposed to be. But when he opened a drawer, the folders inside were unfamiliar to him. It was just like receiving a blow to the pit of his stomach. The disappointment was almost devastating. He’d been so sure.
Brady shoved his hands into his pockets, masking his frustration. “I guess I don’t remember, after all.”
“No, no,” Waverly assured him quickly. “Pierpont moved into your office when you didn’t return. He’s boxed some of your things. We can have maintenance bring them up again.”
Brady looked at Erin. “Then I do remember.”
She smiled at him as she threaded her hand through his. This had been a great idea, she congratulated herself. “Yes, you do.”
It hadn’t taken long for word to spread throughout the building. The floor was fairly honeycombed with small, partitioned cubblyholes that served as offices for the backbone of Edmond Labs, and it seemed everyone had known Brady. Within minutes, the area was flooded with people who had interacted with him on a daily basis. Greetings and exclamations of surprise came from all directions.
Brady didn’t recognize any of them, and the strain was telling.
Erin looked at Waverly for help, and the man read the imploring look in her eyes.
“Why don’t we go down to the main lab?” Waverly suggested. Brady gratefully allowed himself to be ushered away.
Waverly silently observed Brady as he moved through the laboratory with a familiarity that was so ingrained, it seemed second nature to him. Apparently you could take the man out of the physicist, but you couldn’t take the physicist out of the man, Waverly thought.
“Why don’t we do what Ms. Collins suggested?” he proposed to Brady. “Why don’t you come back here, say, on a part-time basis, perhaps start working with an assistant on one of your old projects and see where that takes you.” Waverly smiled at his own suggestion. “Something that wasn’t due yesterday.”