by Edie Claire
Jason considered. “Have you looked at the folder you brought with you?” he suggested. “In your suitcase?”
Laney remembered no folder in her suitcase. “Show me what you’re talking about.”
She directed Jason to the cabinet, where he found her bag and extracted a report folder from the zippered pouch in the top which, in her previous searches for underwear and sleep pants, she had overlooked. He set the folder in her hands, and even in the darkness she could make out the University of Oklahoma logo on its cover. She remembered having put some of her class notes in it before she rushed home to see her mother last spring. But when she opened it, she found none of those documents. What she found was her passport, some original newspaper clippings about the Peck tornado, and a bunch of loose photographs. She had spent enough time staring at the newspaper articles to identify them without looking closely, but the photographs were harder to make out. She tried holding one up closer to the window, but was immediately rewarded with a sharp shaft of pain in her temple.
“Ouch,” she said involuntarily, dropping her hands to her lap and closing her eyes. “Bad idea.” The anxiety was creeping up on her again, but the sensation seemed less acute now, and she decided to try and push through it. Maybe if she—
“You want me to tell you what I see?” Jason offered.
Laney had nearly forgotten that he was there. She bit her lip with indecision. The staff at the hospital were all very nice, but taking the time to help her work through her personal problems was not in any of their job descriptions. Jason must have better things to do as well, but at least he was offering. And she was just selfish enough to let him. She held out the picture, her eyes still closed. “Please,” she asked. “And thanks.”
He took the photograph from her hands, and she felt the folder being lifted from her lap as well. A series of creaks told her he had settled back in the chair.
“Keep your eyes closed,” he suggested. “I’m going to lift the blind a little.”
Laney complied. He was quiet for a moment.
“They’re pictures of a little girl,” he said finally. “Pictures of you, obviously.”
Her brow furrowed, which hurt. She raised a hand and massaged her forehead. “Of me?” she exclaimed, baffled.
“Well, it’s clearly you in this one with a little dog. You’re only a toddler, but your nose and chin are pretty distinctive, as well as your eyes.”
“What’s so distinctive about my—” Laney shut herself up. It felt weird to know that he was studying her face so closely and noticing such details… particularly when the pain was so bad she couldn’t look at him at all. But it didn’t matter. “Go on.”
“There are several with your mom,” he continued. “One with an older woman I’m assuming is your great-grandmother. Another with her and an older gentleman both. And this one’s from a birthday party. I’d say you look two or three, maybe? I’m not good with kids’ ages.”
Laney recognized his descriptions. They were all photographs she could remember leafing through in the family album on the shelf in the living room. Pictures that Christi had taken before digital cameras became a thing, back when she still bothered to make print copies. “Are they all pictures of me?” she asked. “Aren’t there any of just other people?”
“No,” he answered. “You’re in every picture.”
They sat quietly for a moment. Then Laney felt suddenly, inexplicably angry. “This is ridiculous,” she barked. “Who does that? What egotistical moron carries around their own baby pictures?”
She thought she heard him chuckle. But his next words held no trace of levity.
“I’m sure you had a good reason.”
“I’m not sure of that at all,” Laney argued. “As far as I can tell, I lost my mind even before I hit my head. Tell me honestly, when we first met, did I seem crazy to you?”
He waited entirely too long to answer. “No, you didn’t seem crazy. You did seem… well, preoccupied. Focused. Like you were on some sort of mission, and my friendly chit-chat was an annoyance to you.”
Laney raised an eyebrow at his tone, which held a tiny, yet definite hint of affront. If “friendly chit-chat” meant idle flirting, then he was probably right about her reaction. She’d never been into wasting energy on men she wasn’t interested in, particularly narcissistic types who craved constant attention and flattery. But she did try to be polite about it, so if he’d come away wounded, she’d either been majorly distracted, in the bitchiest mood of her life, or he simply wasn’t used to rejection.
She cautiously peeled open one eye. Oh, yeah. It was the third one. When a guy that gorgeous graced a woman with his attention — whether he was actually interested in her or not — he would expect her to simper like an idiot.
Laney moved on. “Well, I think I was losing it,” she admitted. “My aunt told me I seemed messed up. She says I took off without telling anyone where I was going, much less why.”
The blackness crept up again. Her stomach heaved.
“I mean, who does that?” she continued irritably, talking more to herself than she was to him. She was frustrated, she was scared, and she was angry about both those things. “Who drives north in the middle of January, for God’s sake? Carting around their own freakin’ baby pictures?” Her voice choked on the words. Tears threatened, but her pride helped her hold it together. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “You really don’t have to listen to this. It’s okay if you leave now. I’ll be fine.”
His voice, when it came, didn’t acknowledge her offer. “There’s no question you came to Tofino with a specific goal in mind,” he said gently. “So what if your motive isn’t easy to reconstruct from your suitcase? There’s no reason it should be. Nothing about any of this makes you crazy.”
Laney sucked in a breath. He did make a point. “You’re right,” she said more calmly. “And thank you. Maybe I wasn’t out of my mind then. Now’s another matter.”
He chuckled. “You’re not crazy, Laney.” The sound of her name on his lips was oddly pleasing. “It’s just going to take some time, that’s all. You did have a major head injury. I’ll be happy to help if you want me to. Just say the word.”
She was confused again. His motive for being so helpful still escaped her. “I really can’t believe you don’t have someplace better to be,” she reiterated, opening her eyes just long enough to catch him in a shrug.
“I don’t have all day,” he admitted. “But I could spare you another half hour. What do you need?”
The offer caught her off guard. What did she need? “I, uh… I don’t even know.”
“Well, I have a suggestion,” he offered. He stood up again and crossed to the cabinet. “Which, for the record, you would think of yourself if your brain wasn’t inflamed.”
Laney smiled. His glib acknowledgment that she couldn’t think straight was paradoxically comforting.
He sat down again, and she could hear her laptop booting up. “You may not be able to look at screens, but I can. There must be something on here that explains why you came to Tofino. Just tell me what you’d like to look up, and I’ll read it to you.”
Laney felt stupid, but only for a moment. He was right. She would have thought of it herself if she wasn’t brain-damaged. Self-recrimination was pointless.
“My email, maybe?” she suggested. “I checked my inbox on my phone, but then my eyes started to explode and I didn’t get a chance to look at much else. Anyway, any mail important enough to save would be stored in the folders on my computer.”
“Gotcha.”
She talked him through the process of reaching her email folders, but after twenty frustrating minutes, they had uncovered nothing helpful. Laney didn’t save much personal email, as a rule, and in the last awful month, she’d been on her computer only sporadically.
“I bet we’ll find more in the search history on your browser,” Jason suggested. “You must have researched your route, looked up places to stay. Unless you do that on your pho
ne?”
Laney shook her head. Doing so hurt, but the sound of her own voice bouncing around in her skull hurt nearly as much. “No, my phone is crap. It’s so old it freezes up on websites; it can barely handle email. I use the laptop to go online. But as you can see, it’s a piece of crap too. I have the app set to delete my search history and cookies and everything on exit, otherwise it gets too slow.”
“Oh.” Jason blew out a breath. “Well, that does make things harder.”
Laney felt like her brain was rebelling against her. It didn’t want to think anymore — it wanted to take a nap. But Jason was here now, and he wouldn’t be coming back. She had to take advantage while she could. Who knew when she’d be able to use screens again?
“I usually make doc files,” she explained, talking as quickly as her head would allow. His thirty minutes had to be up soon. “I don’t write things out on paper too much. Maybe if you search by date, look for any new documents?”
“Good idea.” Jason clicked some keys and waited. And waited, and waited. Laney gritted her teeth. She’d hoped to get a new laptop last fall, but when she’d had to take a leave from grad school, she’d lost her stipend, too.
“Here we go,” he announced finally. “You’ve created seven files since the first of December.”
“Read the names.” That sounded rude. Geez, her head was killing her.
“FuneralPlan. Obit. DementiaResources.”
“No,” she murmured.
“Stuff2Move?” His voice had gotten softer.
She shook her head slightly.
A beat passed. “Are you sure you’re up to this right now?” he asked.
“Please just finish.”
“Finances. Tremblay.”
The pounding in Laney’s head was almost unbearable. Worse still, the panic was returning. Something bad… so bad! “What the heck is a tremblay?”
“It’s a surname,” Jason said with surprise.
“Never heard of it.” Her heartrate accelerated. She could feel the vessels in her temple pulsing.
“It’s a very common name,” Jason practically whispered. “At least in Canada.”
“Open it!” Laney squeaked. Her hands felt clammy. Stop! Don’t do this!
Jason sighed. “Laney, it’s obvious you’re in pain. We can pick this up again later, when you’re feeling better.”
She let out an involuntary groan. “No! I have to figure this out!”
“And you will,” Jason assured. “But it doesn’t have to happen right this second. I’ll stop back in again later, okay? If your head’s stopped hurting and the doc says it’s all right, I’ll read you anything you want.”
Laney wished she could argue. She wanted to demand answers, to scream and to shout and to rage — not just against the annoyance of the delay, but at this thing that gripped her insides, begging her, pleading with her to STOP THIS NOW before everything she was afraid of burst its bounds and exploded, just like the pulsing mass of fire in her skull.
“I’m going to send a nurse in,” the soothing voice continued, this time from a distance. “I’ll be back later, I swear.”
I swear I never meant to hurt you, Christi had cried near the end. I love you so much, honey. I never meant to hurt anybody, I swear.
I swear!
Laney rolled herself into a ball and buried her face in her pillow.
She could make no coherent reply.
Chapter 9
Peck, Missouri, Five Days Ago
Laney sat on the stiff-backed couch in what had been her great-grandparents formal living room, staring through the darkness at the built-in bookcases on the far wall. She’d been doing the same thing for at least an hour. She kept telling herself that she should either finish what she came for or go back to bed… yet neither thing happened. She remained where she was, motionless, as the quiet night hours stretched toward dawn.
Our Laney died.
Her Gran’s words swirled endlessly in her mind, and try as she might, Laney couldn’t distill the confused jumble into reason. She wanted to settle on an explanation, be done with it, and move forward. But two distinctly different visions of reality warred in her mind.
The first seemed simpler, and saner. May was eighty-seven years old and she had moderate dementia exacerbated to the point of delirium by both the trauma of losing a loved one and the upheaval of relocation. That should be enough. Laney should give herself a shake, throw her shoulders back, and forget every single thing May had babbled while not in control of her faculties. The approach was practical, reasoned, and involved no unnecessary drama… just like Laney herself.
If only she could leave it there. If so she would be warm in bed right now, snoring away under a pile of the Burgdorf family quilts. Instead she was wide awake, laying sideways on an uncomfortable Ethan Allen reproduction with her bare feet exposed and her eyes staring at the shelves of photograph albums across the room.
The second possibility for May’s words was ridiculous. Ludicrous. Preposterous. Laney’s no-nonsense brain cells refused to go there. Such craziness didn’t justify the effort of research! There was no reason for her to reexamine the photo albums. Had they not always been on the shelf where anyone could look at them? She wouldn’t find a single scrap of evidence to bolster such an inane theory. She should go back to bed.
Laney didn’t move.
Her toes felt like ice.
Go back to bed!
Your baby pictures are in the pink book, the one right there.
Don’t be stupid. You’re being stupid.
What you are, Laney Miller, is afraid!
She jerked herself to a sitting position and slammed her numb feet onto the floor. To hell with it. She was not afraid. She would prove this was all about nothing if for no other reason than to avoid getting frostbite!
She stumbled across the room, grabbed the pink album off the shelf, and settled into an equally uncomfortable armchair with her feet tucked underneath her. She switched on a light and opened the book.
It began with her baby pictures from the hospital. There were Christi and Jimbo, beaming with pride as they held their nondescript little bundle of responsibility. To Laney’s eye they looked like teenagers, even though Christi had been twenty-three at the time, and Jimbo twenty-four. The wrinkled face that peeped out from under the knit cap could have been any newborn, and Laney flipped forward dispassionately, looking for a more recognizable image of her face.
There were plenty of pictures, and as she grew, her features became more distinctive. She’d been bald as a cue ball, but her eyes were the same cornflower blue, large for her face, and she had her mother’s high cheekbones and damnable button nose. As a baby she’d had a more rounded face with a broader chin… but of course she had. She was a baby!
Laney turned another page. Yes! There, looking back at her with a stuffed cat in her hands and a delighted smile on her face, was absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly herself.
She laughed out loud, releasing a long pent-up breath. The eyes, the chin, the cheeks, the nose, and the impish little grin were all there. Her hair had come in, finally, and it too was clearly recognizable. More of a childish platinum than her current honey blond, but limp and straight as a stick, not a curl in sight—
Laney’s breath caught in her throat. Her body went still even as her heart thudded.
Her hair. Where had it come from? She flipped back to the previous page. In the last picture, she’d been bald. She was sitting on a blanket with toys spread around, looking far too little to walk. Yet on the very next page, she was a toddler.
Laney flipped through the next few pages. Then she flipped back again. There was a gap. Where was her first birthday?
Didn’t I have a birthday party? a small voice echoed in her mind. Laney had always had a party. As an only child, her birthdays had been a family festivity second only to Christmas and Easter.
Of course you did, honey! her mother’s voice had answered. The photo place lost that roll of film, t
hat’s all.
Laney’s middle rolled with nausea. She remembered now; she remembered plain as day. The pictures had always been missing. She’d never thought about how many pictures, but now she could see how much time had lapsed. The last baby picture showed a child less than a year old — maybe as young as six months. In the next picture, she was almost two.
The next picture was after the tornado.
The album slid off her lap and fell to the floor.
This proves nothing! she told herself quickly. It only fails to disprove it! Rolls of film that required sending off somewhere for developing and printing were an antiquated concept to Laney, but she could easily believe that such materials could get lost. And if they did, there would be no other copies.
She got up from the chair and stumbled back to the bookcase. Shelved alongside her mother’s albums was a scrapbook of her own. In it she had carefully preserved all the original newspaper clippings about the Peck tornado, as well as several others that had hit nearby afterwards, including the EF5 that had destroyed the town of Joplin on the day of her high school graduation. She grabbed the book, dropped down onto the rug, and pulled out the article she wanted. She had read it so many times she knew exactly where on the page to look for the words she sought.
“Right here!” she proclaimed out loud, poking at the printed words with a trembling finger. “It says ‘an infant.’ I knew it did!” The child who had died was an infant in a car seat. Ha!
Laney sat a moment. She should feel better now. She should be able to put the albums away and go back to bed confident that her great-grandmother’s rambling fantasy had been disproved. But she wasn’t confident. And she knew why. The article said specifically that the missing body was that of an infant. But it also said that old Mr. Weimer had been sheltering with his son in his house on Third Street, when everybody knew he’d been with his daughter and son-in-law in their place over on Maple.
Newspapers made mistakes. All the time.
Damnation. It wasn’t enough! Laney needed more. If she couldn’t find it, she might never sleep again.