You Must Remember This. Marilyn Pappano
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He didn’t want to hear that, pretended he didn’t hear it as he circled the room. There were blinds on the windows, no curtains and nothing on the walls but a corkboard directly behind her. From across the room, he couldn’t make out any of the notes thumbtacked to the board. When he pulled out the chair beside her, he still couldn’t read them. Her writing was atrocious.
“Exactly what was Terry doing?”
“We went through old newspapers and school yearbooks, checked town records, looking for something I might remember.”
“You think you’re from here.”
“I know I’ve been here. From the start, I’ve had this feeling…” He wasn’t one to talk much about feelings, or if he did, he disguised them with other words. Instincts. Intuition. Intuition told him he’d been in Grand Springs long enough to gain a familiarity with the place. Too often he knew what was around a corner he’d never turned. He’d known in September about the eighty-foot-tall pine that would be decorated for Christmas in December. There were places—the high school gymnasium, a restaurant downtown, a clothing store—where he knew he’d been at some time in the forgotten past.
“But if you had lived here or spent any length of time here, don’t you think someone would recognize you?”
He scowled at the logic of her argument. “Maybe it was a long time ago. Maybe I’ve changed. Maybe I’m not that noticeable.”
Juliet had to bite her tongue to stop from snorting scornfully at that last comment. Not noticeable? In what galaxy? She’d seen his effect on the females in the library, from giggly teenagers to white-haired grandmothers. There was no way he could have spent any time here and the women of Grand Springs not notice him. “When you appeared in Grand Springs, you didn’t remember anything?”
“I remembered who was president of the United States. I knew that I’ve always liked Italian food. I knew I spoke fluent Spanish. I remembered plenty of things. Just nothing important, like who I am or where I’m from.” He slumped in the chair, his feet stretched out so that they nearly touched hers. She swiveled her chair a few inches to the right.
“What happened the night of the accident?” She knew there’d been a wreck, that he’d suffered a head injury and now had amnesia, but the rumor mill was short on details, and details were desperately needed if she was going to help him.
“The first thing I remember is waking up with a hell of a headache. I guess I lost control of the car in the storm and hit the guardrail.”
The storm. That was how the town referred to that weekend last June. Rains had saturated the area, and the downpour that Friday evening had been more than the ground could bear. There had been massive mud slides, closing the highways and causing a blackout that lasted into Sunday.
“Besides banging your head, were you hurt?”
He shook his head. “I left the car and started walking. The town was completely dark, so when I saw lights, I headed for them. It was the hospital. They examined me, gave me a name—”
“After the soap opera hunk,” she said, and he scowled again. Which offended him more—the soap opera part or the hunk part?
“And called the police. They were busy with the blackout and the mayor’s murder, but eventually they got around to me. They took my fingerprints and sent them to the FBI and the state. They didn’t know who I was, either.”
“So we know you’re not a cop, you were never in the military, and you’re not a crook.”
“At least, not one who’s been caught.”
She ignored his mutterings and went on. “Before the accident, were you coming to Grand Springs or going away from it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Which direction was your car facing when you regained consciousness?”
“I don’t remember. I’d hit my head. I was disoriented.”
“What happened to the car?”
He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Once things settled down and the roads were reopened, Stone Richardson took me out to find it. We couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t remember where I left it, but wherever that was, it was no longer there. We drove all the way to the interstate and found nothing.”
“So someone stole it.”
“Or it got swept away by the mud slides.”
“Is that possible?”
His look was dry, his voice even drier. “Have you ever seen a few tons of mud and rock come rushing down a mountainside?”
“I’m from Dallas. We don’t have mountainsides. We don’t even have many hillsides.”
“A mud slide can uproot trees, tear down guardrails and destroy chunks of roadway. It can move a building off its foundation and carry it away, breaking it into splinters along the way. It can destroy a town, kill anyone in its way, and, yes, it can wash away a car.”
“Didn’t anyone search for the car?” It seemed a simple enough task to her: find the places where the mud had rushed over the highway, follow it down the mountainside and find the car. If it wasn’t immediately visible, search any places where the mud was deep enough to cover it. Easy.
“When you moved here, you drove into town from the interstate, didn’t you? You saw the drop-offs in some places along the highway, didn’t you?”
She nodded. In a few places, the shoulder wasn’t more than a few feet wide, and nothing more than a steel guardrail separated a car on the highway from a two-thousand-foot fall. Other drops were less dramatic, but there were plenty where a search would be difficult at best. “Do you think your car went over one of those drop-offs?”
“I don’t know.”
“So Stone took your fingerprints and checked missing persons reports and got nothing. Has he done that recently?”
“Why would he?”
“Maybe, when he checked, your family or friends or employer hadn’t yet realized that you were missing. Maybe you were on vacation and not expected back for several weeks. Maybe they filed a report a few days or weeks later.” Picking up a pen, she made a note on the pad next to the computer. Tomorrow she would be at the police department. She would talk to Stone about trying again. “Do you have any scars, tattoos or distinguishing marks?”
He mumbled his answer as if he preferred not to acknowledge their existence. “Scars.”
Her gaze followed his right hand to his left arm, where he rubbed the thickened skin. She made a note of its location and length even as she wondered what he had done to earn such an injury.
“It’s a defensive wound.”
Given a little time, she could have figured that out. The scar ran four inches along the inside of his arm, as if he had raised his arm to ward off an attacker. But who had attacked him and why? Had he been an innocent victim or an equally guilty transgressor?
She would like to believe “innocent victim,” but it was hard to cast him as either innocent or a victim. On the other hand, it was easy to see him as aggressive, strong, take-charge, bold. It was easy to imagine him meeting an attacker head-on, giving as good as he got.
Unless his attacker was someone he couldn’t defend himself against—a woman, perhaps, a friend or an authority figure. Or unless he believed he deserved the attack. Which brought her back to her original question: what had he done?
Knowing that he could offer no more information than her wild imagination, she pressed on. “You said scars. What about the others?”
“What does it matter?”
“The