by Anne Stuart
She finally found she could smile. "I'll be happy to."
"Oh, I nearly forgot. Lieutenant Ryker would like the pleasure of your company," she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, picking up the discarded hospital robe and heading for the door. "Don't let him scare you—he's all bark and no bite. Dr. Hobson's told him to go easy on you, but I wouldn't count on it. Just don't let him browbeat you." She smiled. "Good luck to you."
And then she was alone once more, staring down at the shiny green vinyl floor and wondering what ghastly crimes she had committed.
None. She knew that with an instinct both sure and comforting. Unfortunately she had no memory, no way to refute any accusations.
Maybe she wasn't suspected of anything. Maybe she was just being paranoid. She looked down at her elegant clothes and considered her absent husband. Somehow she didn't think paranoia was a major part of her difficulties.
Lieutenant Ryker was more than happy to inform her what her difficulties were. He was a middle-aged man, with sandy hair, sandy eyes, and a tense manner that was slightly intimidating. Not the ogre that the nurse had painted, but no charmer either. She sat across from him in the private lounge and crossed her ankles with a casual disdain that seemed to come naturally.
"Mrs. Winters, we're releasing you into your husband's custody today—against my better judgment, I might add. You must remember that you have given your oath that you'll remain in his care until this matter is cleared up." His eyes were faintly contemptuous.
"What matter?"
"Dr. Hobson told me you have a temporary memory loss." He looked skeptical. "How very convenient for you. To summarize briefly, Mrs. Winters, you were found in a wrecked car near the Jersey coast with a dead man beside you in the passenger seat. We finally got an ID on him, no thanks to you. George Andrews. You had a concussion that may or may not have been caused by the accident, and the autopsy showed that rather than dying from injuries sustained in the accident, your companion had been strangled. Now obviously you haven't the strength to strangle a man of Andrews's height and weight. Obviously, also, you must have a good idea who did it."
"Why do you say that?" she countered swiftly. "How do you know that man didn't knock me unconscious before someone showed up and strangled him?"
"Highly unlikely, Mrs. Winters. There were signs of a struggle—you had bloodied and broken fingernails, and there was no blood on Andrews's body."
"Blood? What about DNA testing…?" From somewhere in the recesses of her knowledge came the question.
"It was your blood, Mrs. Winters," he said wearily. "And the dead man isn't your only problem. There's also the question of $350 thousand found in the trunk of your car. Your fingerprints are all over that money, Mrs. Winters. Yours and Andrews's." His voice was hard, implacable and furious. "You have refused to cooperate with the police from the first moment you regained consciousness, telling us absolutely nothing, and you still refuse to do so. We know several of your companion's aliases from a fingerprint check, but after that the trail gets cold. We know he was a criminal, Mrs. Winters. A petty, blackmailing criminal." He shook his head angrily. "Maybe your husband will be able to convince you to do the honorable thing."
And maybe you can go to hell, she thought silently, maintaining an impassive countenance. "What was I doing with this man? Where was my husband?"
"I think you can answer that far better than we can, if you wanted to. All we know of your movements is that you left your husband five weeks ago, two weeks before you turned up in that wrecked car. Perhaps you've changed your mind and feel like enlightening us?" He didn't look hopeful.
She shook her head. "I'm afraid I can't." Despite the man's hostility she wanted the same answers that he did, and she made an effort to smile politely. "I simply don't remember. Not right now, at least. I should before long, or at least that's what the doctor assures me."
He snorted, his contempt obvious. He must have thought she was a spoiled, frivolous creature, and yet she didn't feel very frivolous, except for this silk suit she was wearing. Had she got it from her handsome husband, she wondered, the one she'd run away from? Or from her dead lover?
"Is my husband here yet?" she asked, dreading the moment when she had to meet the stranger who would have so much control over her life, the stranger she had run from. There seemed no way to avoid it much longer.
Apparently there was. "He's not coming," Lieutenant Ryker said shortly. "He's gotten a friend of his to come and get you. I don't imagine his feelings toward you are any too charitable right now."
"I imagine not," she agreed faintly, wondering desperately what, besides a husband she hated, would await her when she arrived at her forgotten home.
The answers were there. The answers she needed, the reason she'd run.
But more than answers might await her. She couldn't picture a place, or a person. But she recognized the familiar feelings that swept over her as she contemplated her return.
Longing.
And fear.
Chapter Two
« ^ »
The car sped across the endless stretch of crowded highway, the landscape brown, dead and dreary. What an awful time of year, she thought gloomily. Everything dead from winter, the spring teasingly out of sight. She wondered dismally where she was going. Bucks County, they'd told her. Somehow that didn't sound promising.
"Excuse me, Officer Stroup." She leaned forward and spoke to the thickset shoulders in front of her. "Where is it exactly that we're headed?"
He permitted himself a stare of incredulity before returning his stolid gaze to the fog-shrouded highway. "Come off it, Mrs. Winters. You know as well as I do where we're going. To Winter's Edge, your husband's farm in Belltown, Pennsylvania. In Bucks County, where you've lived for the past seven years."
She leaned back with a languor that came easily to her, a languor she didn't like. She sat back up stiffly. "Do I know you?" she asked suddenly. She hadn't registered any sense of familiarity when she'd been introduced to the sullen hulk of her husband's errand boy, one of the local policemen, apparently.
"Your husband and I have been friends for years," he said, but there was an undercurrent in his voice she couldn't quite define. "We could have been friends too, if you know what I mean. If you weren't so picky."
She could guess what he meant, and she shuddered. "Why didn't he come and get me?" She finally voiced the question that had been eating away inside her. There was no reason it should bother her—she didn't remember the man, so why should he have the ability to hurt her? But he did. Perhaps it was no wonder that she hated him.
"I don't imagine he wants to have any more to do with you than he can help," Stroup shot back, his thick red neck mottled with irritation. "I owed him a favor or two, so I offered to take this little chore off his hands for him. Besides, I thought you might be feeling a little less uppity after getting involved in a murder."
Her eyes met his in the rearview mirror, and there was no mistaking the meaning in them. Another shudder washed over her.
"I'm feeling as uppity as ever," she said sharply, leaning back against the seat. Her head was throbbing again, and she longed for a room hidden away from everyone. Which was just what she'd get if they proved she had anything to do with the mysterious George Andrews's murder. "And you're hardly acting like my husband's friend," she added belatedly.
He laughed, a fat, wheezy chuckle. "You should realize by now that your husband doesn't give a damn what you do and who you do it with. You made sure of that a long time ago."
She turned away, trying to shut out the sight of him in the front seat, trying to shut out the sound of his voice. Anything to still the pain in her head. Obviously Stroup believed her capable of adultery as well as murder. She wondered what she could have possibly done to alienate everyone so completely. Particularly her handsome husband.
She tried to picture him. Older, the nurse had said. Very handsome. She summoned up the image of someone gentle, smiling down at her, with faded eyes and a f
atherly manner. Gray hair, slightly stooped. But the comforting image shifted, almost immediately, and the man in front of her had midnight black hair, winter blue eyes, and a cool, mocking smile that held no warmth whatsoever.
Suddenly her hands were cold and sweating, her heart was pounding beneath the silk suit, and the hairpins were digging into her scalp. Her eyes shot open, and she stared determinedly at the brown, blurred landscape. She wasn't going to let them destroy her. She hadn't before, and she wouldn't this time.
The stray memory flitted through her brain like a wisp of fog, gone before she could snatch it back. Who had tried to destroy her? And why? The past remained stubbornly, painfully blank, with only the tantalizing memory to further claw at her nerves.
The sun was setting as they pulled into a small, old-worldly town somewhere over the Pennsylvania border. The gloom of the day had worked itself up to the tangible expression of pouring rain, and she watched the dead countryside fly by the windows with unabated gloom. Heaven only knew what sort of man she was about to meet. Her husband, they told her, but how did she know whether she could believe them or not? Maybe this was all some conspiracy—maybe they were trying to make her doubt who and what she was.
If only she could believe that. She felt bone tired, her head pounding. More than anything she wanted to sink into a soft, warm bed and sleep for hours and days until this nightmare had passed. But would she be sleeping alone, or with a hostile stranger who didn't even care enough to pick her up at the hospital?
She felt the sudden sting of tears in her eyes, and she opened her expensive leather handbag, searching for a tissue. The lining of the purse still smelled of the cigarettes she'd tossed, and there was no doubt she'd once been a smoker. The smell of it made her ill.
Tucked inside were two handkerchiefs, linen and expensive. The first was very plain and masculine, and the initials, embroidered so carefully on the scrap of material, were P.A.W. There were pale orange streaks across the white linen, too pale to be the blood she had first suspected.
Panic filled her, swift and unreasoning, and she shoved the scraps of cloth back into the purse, no longer eager to open the Pandora's box in her lap. M.A.W. the other handkerchief had read. If Winters was her last name, then her first must be Mary or Magdalene or something of that sort. Though why the image of Mary Magdalene, the great whore, would have come to mind when she was looking for an identity was something she didn't want to think about. She only knew she wasn't going to let strangers convince her she was something that she wasn't.
The weather didn't choose to improve. She shivered slightly as the car pulled away through the deep troughs of water, out across the rain-swept highway, then leaned back, eyes shut, heart pounding. She didn't want to watch where he was taking her. She simply wanted to arrive, and face up to it when she had to.
It was far too easy to drift into a strangely altered state. She had no idea whether it was the result of her head injury, or whatever drugs they'd given her, or just stress and exhaustion. But as she closed her eyes she could see him, through a mist of anger and desire. His eyes, winter blue, staring at her with frustration and contempt. His mouth, wide, sexual, set in a thin line of anger.
She wanted to lift her hand, to touch him. To brush a strand of inky black hair away from his face, to soothe away the fierceness as he looked at her. If she could just explain…
But it was too late for that, she knew it. Too late for second chances, too late for the truth. She let herself sink back, into the darkness, into the forgetfulness that was a mixed blessing.
The sudden bumpiness of the road jarred her into reluctant alertness, and she sat up straight, guessing by the unevenness that they must be crossing a wooden bridge. She looked out the streaming windows at the long low building as they drove by. An old stone farmhouse loomed beside it, wet and forbidding in the glare of the headlights through the pelting rain. Stroup brought the sedan to an abrupt halt, the jolt flinging her body against the back of the seat.
"Shoulda worn your seat belt, Mrs. Winters," he said with a malicious chuckle. "Or did you forget that it was the law nowadays?"
Her nerves had reached fever pitch. "So arrest me," she snapped back.
"Don't I wish I could," he replied, and she had no doubt he meant it. "Maybe I'll get my chance later on. In the meantime, we're here. Home sweet home, Mrs. Winters." He leaned over the back seat. "It looks pretty deserted. You want I should see you inside?" The leer was back in his thick face.
She controlled the shiver of disgust. "I don't think so, thank you. Do I have any luggage?"
"You know that as well as I do," he answered shortly, leaning back against the seat. He smelled like stale cigarettes and yesterday's beer. "You were found in the clothes you're wearing and no sign of where you'd come from. I'm sure your husband will have plenty of other stuff waiting for you. Both of you can afford it."
She stared back at his pugnacious face, struggling to think of something suitably devastating, something that would make him flinch as he'd made her flinch. Her tired mind remained a blank. She could be cruel and cutting, she knew it with a perverse pride. At least she wasn't totally defenseless. But right now she was too exhausted and tense to find the words.
"Thank you," she murmured inanely, reaching out and opening the door into the torrent of rain.
"I'll be seeing you around," he said, before driving off and splashing her liberally with mud and water. His last words echoed unpleasantly as she stood there, and for a moment she considered running.
But where would she run to? They hadn't passed another house or a car for miles; she was out in the middle of nowhere, and the rain was like tiny pellets of ice pelting against her skin. She'd been running away when they found her. Maybe it was time to stop running. Time to face the truth, no matter how unpleasant it might be.
She moved toward the back door of the house with an instinct she didn't stop to consider, her head held low against the driving rain. Pulling at the knocker, she huddled under the tiny porch roof. There was no answer.
She knocked again, this time more loudly. The strain of the day, the wetness of her clothes and the pain in her head were all joining to make her furiously angry with a fate and a husband who had put her in such a miserable situation. She stared out at the rain-soaked landscape, sorely tempted to take off into the late afternoon downpour, never to be heard from again. But cowardice and discomfort were too much for her, she thought bitterly, and feeling like a fool she turned back and knocked one last time. "The hell with it," she muttered, as she pushed open the door and stumbled in.
It took her a moment to get her bearings. The interior was warm and dark, with the scent of lemon oil and wood smoke in the air, and there wasn't a sound other than the steady tick of a grandfather clock gracing the stone-floored hallway. Her high-heeled shoes were wet and slippery, and she kicked them off with a sigh of relief before moving down the strange hallway in her damp stocking feet. Her total lack of recognition should have disturbed her. They had told her this was her home—she had no choice but to take their word for it. For the time being all she wanted was to find someplace warm and sit down.
She found her haven at the end of the hall—a warm, cozy living room with a fire crackling in the fieldstone fireplace, sending out delicious waves of heat. There was no one in sight, and for the first time she thought to announce her presence.
"Hello!" she called out, softly at first. Then, gaining courage, she shouted louder. "Is anyone home?" There was no answer, just the hiss and pop of the fire. Sighing, she sank down in one of the overstuffed armchairs by the fire and took stock of her surroundings.
She'd never been here before, she told herself incredulously. If she had, how could she have forgotten it, how could she ever have left it? Even with the gloom of the lashing rain outside, it was surely the most beautiful room she'd ever seen in her life. The walls were of an old and mellow oak panelling, the ceiling low and comforting, with shelves of books all around. The furniture around her
was old, a wonderful mix of antiques and overstuffed comfort. To her right was a gateleg table with a Chinese porcelain bowl of fresh flowers on it; across the room was a Chippendale highboy that made her ache with covetousness. And yet there was no need for envy, she realized suddenly. This was her home.
She lost track of the time, staring absently into the fire. It could have been five minutes, or an hour, before she became aware of her damp, uncomfortable condition. Her silk suit was ruined, and her entire body felt clammy and stiff despite the warmth of the fire. She decided then she couldn't wait any longer for her phantom husband—she simply had to get into more comfortable clothing.
Making her way into the back hall, she turned on the lights against the late afternoon gloom. It was an eerie feeling, wandering around this vast, strange yet familiar house. At any moment she expected some stranger to pop out of a hidden doorway, to denounce her as an imposter.
But no one appeared. She climbed slowly up the curved wooden staircase with its lovely oak planks polished to a mirror shine. At the top she stopped in confusion. There were six or seven doors leading from the long, narrow hallway, and the passage itself took a sharp turn and went down two steps into another section. She had no idea which was her room.
She explored slowly, noisily, so as to alert any possible inhabitants. But all the room were deserted. Four of the bedrooms were apparently occupied, three were just as obviously guest rooms.
It was hard to decide which room could have been hers. The first contained clothes rather like the ones she was wearing: elegant, expensive, sophisticated and very uncomfortable looking. Yet they simply weren't the sort of thing that the young woman in the mirror would really want to wear, especially at her age.
But the other bedroom's closet revealed even less likely apparel. In it were dresses belonging to an obviously elegant, well-dressed matron of indeterminate age, wearing a stylishly stout size 24.
She wandered back into the other bedroom, with no choice but to accept the fact that everything was fitting in with the unattractive picture she was building of Mrs. Winters. While the other bedrooms had beautiful old flooring covered sparingly with antique hooked rugs, hers was awash with puffy white wall-to-wall carpeting. The other rooms boasted lovely old furniture, with gleaming woods lovingly tended. Her room had a matched set of expensive ugly modern furniture, all chrome and glass at screaming odds with the lines of the old room. The drapes and bedspread were satin, and the entire effect was one of tasteless opulence. She sat down at the mirrored dressing table and stared at herself over the rows of silver-topped bottles of perfumes and creams. That slightly tanned creature with the splash of freckles across her nose didn't belong in this room, did she? Somehow she had the uneasy feeling that she did.
