by Hillary Avis
Allison nodded. She knew exactly what Kara meant. After Paul lost his memory, it seemed like everyone whispered behind her back and avoided her. It’s like they thought it might be contagious, or like they thought she had somehow caused it. Any friends she’d had seemed to evaporate along with her bakery customers. “That’s why I started fostering dogs, to be honest. They’re good company and they don’t gossip.”
One corner of Kara’s mouth turned up in a half-smile. “Where is that little dog, anyway? What’s his name? Bungee?”
Allison grinned. “Close. It’s Pogo. He’s at home. I wore him out with a long walk this morning, so I didn’t take him to the grocery store. I just stopped here on the way back.” With a jolt, she remembered that she’d left her groceries in Harman’s truck outside, with a dog who had likely finished off that jar of peanut butter and started in on the rest of her provisions. “You know, I should probably get going.”
“Wait.” Kara grabbed her upper arm. “You were asking about Harman. Does this have anything to do with Gertrude Winter’s death?”
A guilty look must have flashed across Allison’s face, because Kara’s expression grew more intent. “It does! Why are you meddling still? Her death was ruled an accident!”
“I’m not meddling,” Allison said stubbornly, wresting her arm away. “Now, if you’ll excuse me...” She moved to leave, but Kara stepped in front of her.
“What do you know? What are you hiding from me?”
Fear pooled in the pit of her stomach. “Nothing! I’m just—” Allison broke off, looking around frantically for inspiration. Her eyes lit on a smudge of peanut butter on the sleeve of her blouse, and she relaxed. “I’m just worried about his dog. He hasn’t been feeding her enough. I hoped maybe he inherited some money from Gertrude so he could afford some more dog food, but it sounds like he didn’t.”
Kara’s grip relaxed and her shoulders slumped. “See? Why didn’t you just say that to begin with? Now I just feel stupid.”
Well, because I hadn’t thought of it yet, Allison thought, feeling slightly guilty for lying to a police officer...and someone she was supposed to be playing nice with. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. Are we still on for brunch on Sunday?”
Kara perked up. “Oh, right. Feast and Flower at ten?”
Allison nodded. “I’ll tell Myra. Hey, Tanya,” she called. She pulled out a five and put it on the counter and patted it. Tanya turned. “Can you get Kara a beer?”
Tanya’s gaze slid behind them to the sheriff’s table, and then she nodded tersely. She set a second bottle near Allison’s mostly empty one and scooped up the money.
“I think she stole your change,” Kara remarked when Tanya didn’t return. She rolled her bottle of beer between her palms. “Want me to take her down to the station?”
Allison’s eyes widened until she saw Kara’s mischievous grin. She shook her head. “Nah, we’ll call that her tip. I’m sorry to say, I really do have to go now.”
“Thanks for the drink, friend.” Kara held up the bottle toward Allison, and then smiled self-consciously as she took her first sip. “It’s just what I needed. The friendship, not the beer.”
Chapter 27
Allison made a quick exit from the Why Not, sure that her groceries had been demolished by the hungry dog she’d left to guard them. But when she got to the truck, the dog was still nosing at the peanut butter jar that she held between her front paws, even though she’d licked it whistle-clean, her fluffy tail waving like an enormous white flag.
“Well, aren’t you a good girl?” Allison gave her a pat, which cranked up the tail-wagging, and then snagged the handles of her grocery bags and pulled them out of the back. “Be good, and I’ll make sure there’s more where that came from.”
As Allison walked away from the truck, she saw the dog stand up out of the corner of her eye. It looked like she intended to jump out and follow Allison home. Allison held up her hand and the dog froze. “No, honey. You stay. I’ll make sure you get what you need, don’t worry.”
The dog seemed to understand her. With a sigh, she flopped back down in the bed of the pickup, and Allison trudged a block back along the highway and then down Rosemary Street toward home. Her groceries felt heavier than they had earlier, even with one less peanut butter jar weighing them down.
Despite giving a hungry dog a good meal and a lonely cop a beer, she felt like she’d failed—and not only because she didn’t have any peanut butter to replenish the pantry. She’d spent the last couple of hours running around spying on elderly people who were basically her neighbors, and she had nothing to show for it except a guilty conscience.
“Just because they aren’t flashing money around doesn’t mean they don’t have it,” she reminded herself. The sweepstakes lady said someone from Remembrance claimed the prize, so it had to be one of them—they were the only ones who knew that Gertrude had received the winning ticket. Hedy and Harman weren’t stupid people. They had to know that if they flashed some cash around a small town, the talk would start, so they were just sticking with their normal routines. It was probably easy—they’d both been doing the same things in the same places for decades. But they couldn’t sit on the money forever. At some point, one of them would slip up and show their hand.
“And I’ll be watching,” she said aloud.
“Watching what?” Taylor’s head poked out of the oak tree Allison had inadvertently paused beneath, startling her badly. She dropped a bag of groceries, sending a can of tomato paste rolling along the sidewalk toward the gutter. She stopped it with her foot just before it went over the curb and disappeared down the storm drain that led to Claypool Creek.
She picked it up and jammed it back into the fallen grocery sack, flustered. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
He stared at her upside down as he clung to the lowest branch. “It’s five o’clock. I’ve been home for hours.”
“Right. Well. I need to get these things in the fridge.” With her cheeks burning, Allison hurried inside and put her groceries on the table in the foyer. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to slip up and show her hand. It seemed like everyone was watching her, from the police to the kid next door!
And someone else might be, too, she thought uneasily, as she closed the front door behind her and locked the deadbolt. The woman with the salt-and-pepper hair who destroyed Paul’s memories hadn’t followed the rules of guardianship. Who knew what else she might do? Even though Allison didn’t know who she was, if she had read all of Paul’s memories, she undoubtedly knew who Allison was. She could be watching her even now.
Allison shivered. She scanned the back yard for shadowy figures before letting Pogo outside. She watched him through the window as he did his business and she put the groceries in the fridge, and then called him back in right away. She carried him upstairs, drew all the curtains, and curled up in bed with the quilt over her head. Safe.
She stroked Pogo as he nuzzled under the covers beside her. “Don’t worry. We’ll be OK.”
Of course, the dog wasn’t the one worried—she was. But as long as she kept her head down and didn’t slip up in front of Kara again, she had some time to watch Hedy and Harman’s every move until one of them revealed their secret sweepstakes money. She had time to figure out why the page thief had gone to so much effort to cut out Paul’s memories of the last twenty-five years. And she had time to figure out how to help Paul rebuild his brain so she, Paul, and Emily could be a family again.
There was hope. And her biggest hope was Emily’s visit to Golden Gardens on Saturday.
Chapter 28
Friday
Allison spent the rest of the week lost in the library. She filled her notebook with lists of the titles in each room, carefully cataloging the topics and locations so she could find the books again when she went searching for the rest of Paul’s memories.
She hoped that mapping the location of his memories in the library would help in two ways. First, if she found remaini
ng memories from the last twenty-five years, like the one of baby Emily in the hospital, she might be able to remind Paul of them, so he’d have a lattice to grow his new memories on. And second, if she could find the memories that had been cut out, she might better understand why the page thief had done it to begin with.
It was a useful exercise; in scouring every inch of the house, she found a feature she hadn’t noticed before—a trapdoor in the ceiling of the upstairs landing. When she opened it, a cloud of dust fell into her face as a ladder slid into place, offering her access. She mounted the rickety steps cautiously. It was clear no one had been up there for some time, longer than the two years Myra had spent as guardian. Perhaps even the guardian before that, the one who had stolen Paul’s pages, hadn’t been up here. If so, then she might have missed cutting Paul’s memories from any books that were stored in the attic.
Though she was barely over five feet tall, Allison had to stoop to avoid hitting her head on the attic ceiling. Weak beams of sunlight penetrated the dim, peaked room through a tiny window in one end. As her eyes adjusted, she was disappointed to see that the attic was empty of books or bookshelves. The only object in the space was a chest of drawers on four spindly legs.
As she came closer, she saw the chest wasn’t a bedroom dresser, but instead contained dozens of tiny drawers—it was an old-fashioned card catalog, the kind she had grown up with in her school library. A wave of nostalgia washed over her as she remembered thumbing through the soft, worn cards while she researched her fifth-grade report on Norway. It had seemed magical then, before the internet, the way she could find all the books she needed in such a convenient way, without having to scan the shelves.
A card catalog for this odd, jumbled-up library would be even more useful. Allison slid out the first drawer and saw it was arranged alphabetically by last name. Finding all of Paul’s memories might be easier than she’d anticipated! Her heart quickened as she opened the “R” drawer and thumbed through it until she reached the Ryes—Allison and Paul, in that order.
She pulled out Paul’s first card and held her place in the drawer with the fingers of her left hand. She was surprised to see that, rather than a typical card catalog entry with a shelf location to the left, this card had a date. April 8, 1962. Paul’s second birthday. To the right, the entry read “Rye, Paul. Touched the flame of a blue birthday candle. Got a blister on his forefinger.”
Allison frowned. She pulled out another card. This one said “May 21, 1968. Rye, Paul. Forgot to set the timer on a batch of blueberry muffins. Burned them to a crisp.”
That made her smile. She knew the story well, as Paul had told the story of his first baking experience in his grandma’s kitchen a hundred times over the years. The pan of burned muffins had disappointed him so much that he vowed to make them until he got it right. And he had. A few weeks later, he’d entered a batch of his not-burned muffins in the county fair and won a blue ribbon for baking in the juvenile division.
Now she understood what the card catalog contained. It wasn’t the titles, subjects, and locations of memories in the library. The cards were memories themselves, albeit brief ones that didn’t erupt into a movie when she read them. It was only then that she noticed a tiny label taped on the front of the chest. Through the peeling, yellowed cellophane, she could just make out “Catalog of Errors” written in spidery pencil. She slid the blueberry muffin card back into place and shut the drawer.
Then she paused, her hand still on the metal loop that served as a handle for the “Rh–Rz” drawer. What if she looked at the cards for her own errors? Not the mistakes she’d made as a child or the dumb things she’d said to friends—instead, she could look at more recent errors. Maybe the cards would show opportunities she’d missed when she was visiting Paul, ways she could have connected with him that she hadn’t seen in the moment. Maybe the cards would show her errors that she could learn from, just as Paul had learned to be a better baker from his blueberry muffin fiasco.
She pulled open the drawer again and found her name. She flicked through the cards to the back of her section and selected the card with the most recent date. Her most recent error, from only two days ago. “Rye, Allison. Knowingly left a dog in the care of a negligent owner.”
She swallowed hard then, guilt flooding her body. She knew the card was right—she’d told the dog to stay in Harman’s truck because it was more convenient for her, not because it was best for the animal. She put the card back and grabbed her phone from the back pocket of her jeans so she could call Rachael. She stood there, holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, and doodled in the dust on top of the card catalog until Rachael picked up.
“Hi Allison. Sorry—just feeding the pack. Hang on a second.” Rachael’s voice was nearly drowned out by the sound of barking dogs. The phone clattered and the barks faded. “OK, I’m in the closet. I can hear you now.” Rachael giggled.
Allison blew away the dust that had accumulated on the tip of her finger. “Remember that dog I told you about—the one Harman Winter has tied to a tree? I saw the dog on Wednesday, and she’s not looking good. I think that instead of bringing him some of the donated food this weekend, you should try to get Harman to give her to the rescue. She’s sweet and she deserves a better home. He didn’t even give her a name!”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then Rachael said slowly, “I trust your instincts on this, but it’s not easy getting people to relinquish their pets—even ones they don’t like. Trust me, I’ve tried this many times. The instant I express interest in a neglected dog, the owners just see dollar signs.”
“Well, Harman definitely sees dollar signs everywhere he goes, but he also hates spending money. If you remind him that a big dog like that costs more to feed and more to vet, he’ll see things differently. If I’m right, it won’t be hard to convince him to turn her over to you.” Allison held her breath and crossed her fingers as she waited for Rachael’s reply.
“I want to say yes, I really do.” Rachael’s voice was quiet and strained. “My fosters and kennels are all full, though. I had to cancel this month’s adoption event because of this dang irrigation install. I swear, everything that could go wrong with it has gone wrong. Yesterday the backhoe hit the septic tank!”
“Oh no,” Allison groaned.
“Yep. We’re at disaster level one-thousand. But next month, once the sprinkler and septic shenanigans are behind me and I can put together an event to get some of these dogs out of here, I might have space for her. In the meantime, we’ll make sure she has food and water.”
“I guess that’s better than nothing,” Allison said, remorse about leaving the dog in the truck still swirling in her belly. “Anything I can do to help?”
Rachael laughed. “Yeah, find Pogo a home so I can send you another dog to foster!”
“I’ve been working on it, I promise!” Allison was glad she had her fingers crossed, because she knew deep down that her words were a lie. If she’d been trying, she’d have easily found a sweet, well-behaved little dog like Pogo a home by now. The truth was, she hadn’t made an effort.
Sure, she’d offered Pogo to Myra and Theo and even Harman, but none of her offers had been sincere. She wanted to keep him for as long as possible, not because she thought he’d live out his best life with her, but for purely selfish reasons—because he might help Paul remember. Now that she understood why Paul’s memories were gone, she had to face the reality that Pogo wasn’t going to help him. And Pogo deserved more than being stuck in the limbo of foster care. He deserved a forever family, just like Harman’s dog did.
“I’ll find him a home this weekend, I promise.”
“Tell you what,” Rachael said on the other end of the line. “If you can find Pogo a home this weekend and are willing to take on another foster right away, I can make room in the kennel for Harman’s dog on Sunday—if he’s willing to give her up.”
“You’ve got a deal,” Allison said.
Chapter 29
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Saturday
In the morning, Allison walked to Golden Gardens with more bounce in her step than even Pogo had. She felt like she was eight years old and had won the blue ribbon at the county fair, and the day had barely begun.
“We are going to witness something special today!” she said to Pogo. He looked up at her, grinning his doggy grin, as he trotted along beside her in his bright green bandana. She hoped she’d see something special, anyway. She couldn’t help harboring the tiny fear that Paul hadn’t retained his memory of holding Emily as a baby, and she almost turned back to the library to get the Sweetest Days book. She could stash it in her tote bag and just let him have a peek before Emily showed up...
But taking a memory book to Golden Gardens was a lot riskier than reading it on the porch. Allison didn’t know what would happen then, if the book physically left the building. There was a chance that she’d lose her guardianship—or worse, that someone else would read the book and discover the existence of the library, exposing its secrets. Everyone’s secrets.
She shook off the impulse to go back and instead braced herself for disappointment. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been let down when Paul couldn’t remember something—anything—about their life together. It just terrified her that this might be the last chance for Emily. If Paul didn’t make the connection between his memory of holding an infant and the beautiful, accomplished twenty-four-year-old standing in front of him, Emily would be so hurt that she might not come visit again, ever.
As Allison and Pogo neared Golden Gardens, she saw Zack’s red Acura parked at the curb out front. Emily must already be inside. Allison’s pulse quickened, and she sped up her pace, half because she didn’t want to miss a second of her husband and daughter together, and half because she dreaded what might be happening inside. She picked up Pogo and, holding him close to her chest like a canine shield, let herself in the side door, prepared for the worst. But as she passed the mailboxes in the side entrance, she caught the familiar sound of her daughter’s musical laugh. And when she scanned the activity room for Emily’s caramel curls and found her, she saw Paul was laughing, too, as he sat beside Emily in one of the armchairs near the fireplace, his posture open and relaxed.
