HOMETOWN HERO
By Robyn Anders
Copyright 2005 by Rob Preece, all rights reserved. Except for use in any review, reproduction or use of this work in any form is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Cover art copyright 2005 by Jane Graves, all rights reserved.
Published by BooksForABuck.com
June 1, 2005
Chapter 1
Russell Lyons, lately Lieutenant in the U.S. National Guard but now just an ordinary citizen, glared at the reporter.
She was cute, with short brown hair and puppy-dog-brown eyes gazing up at him through small rectangular glasses. She’d been snapping pictures of him getting ready for the parade.
He wanted her to go away.
“I really don’t understand what possible interest an interview with me could have for your readers,” he told her for maybe the tenth time.
“You’re a hometown hero, back from the wars,” she said. As if he needed reminding. “Of course people are interested in you, in your experiences, and in how the war changed you.”
He would be interested in remembering his experiences and how he’d changed too. Since he had no memory of anything before he had awakened in an army hospital in Germany, he didn’t think he had a lot to contribute.
“Even your readers might understand that I’m going to have a hard time explaining the ways I’ve changed since I can’t remember anything about the way I was.”
She pursed her lips. Strangely he found his gaze fixated on those lips.
“I saw you at the newspaper archives the other day,” the reporter reminded him. “You must have come across your name once or twice. That should give you an idea of who you were. Now my readers would like to know who you’ve become.”
Yeah, he’d spent some time at the newspaper office looking for his past. And yeah, he’d come across his name a time or two. Or a thousand times was more like it. He’d been captain of the football team, lead pitcher for the baseball team, point guard on the basketball team, voted most likely to succeed of all seniors at Shermann High School in central Missouri. The only thing was, none of the stories brought any memories with them. They might as well have been written about someone else. The roadside bomb had stripped him of his memory as completely as it had stripped the man riding with him of his life—a man he couldn’t even remember.
He clenched his fists in frustration. The doctors said he would probably recover his memories eventually. With or without them, he intended to get that golden life back. No foreign freedom fighter was going to take that from him.
The reporter with the puppy-dog eyes was waiting and he decided to give her a quote.
“Tell your readers I’m happy to be home in the warm embrace of my family and friends, proud to have served my country, and ever-more-certain that Missouri is the best place in the world. If there are any other usual clichés you newspapermen use, throw those in too.”
“Newspaper woman,” she reminded him.
He’d known that. Known it and hadn’t wanted to think about it. He was an engaged man.
“Do the doctors think your memory will return?”
“My doctors are completely clueless.”
The ace reporter for the Shermann Advertiser-Dispatch, didn’t even bother suppressing her wince. “Still have that Lyons arrogance, though, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“Come on, honey.” His fiancée, Heather Cochran, couldn’t have been a more distinct contrast to the dark-haired reporter if she’d tried. Tall, slender, elegant, with hair so blond it was almost white, she seemed to dance rather than walk. “Hi Cynthia. Have you got what you needed?”
“No.”
“Oh, Russell. Don’t tell me you’ve been giving Cynthia a hard time. Anyway, there’s a parade waiting on this hero and we don’t want to make the people wait.”
Heather brushed an invisible bit of lint off his uniform tunic, handed him his cap, and turned a thousand-watt smile on the reporter.
He admired the way Heather had of taking charge, of keeping everything organized and in its place, no matter how trying the circumstances. She’d organized this parade from the start, persuaded the Mayor to declare a town holiday, and then turned out the VFW, Indian Guides, Boy Scouts, and Shermann High marching band to participate.
“Right, Heather.”
She started to bustle him out, but he stopped and turned back to look at the reporter. “I really don’t know what else I could tell you, Cynthia. Writing an article about me would be like writing an article about a startup company before its management even conceived their product. I’m a blank slate.”
Heather shook her head. “You don’t have conscious memories, honey, but you’re the same person underneath. I can feel it. You’re going to have to trust me on this.” She turned her considerable attention on the reporter. “Cynthia, you’ve written this story a thousand times. I sent you the official engagement report I wangled out of the army and photos of Russell’s Purple Heart. Just make Russell look good. He deserves it.”
“But—”
“Cynthia, we’ve really got to go. We’ll do lunch some time. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about buying a bigger ad in the Advertiser since we’re almost done with the expansion on dad’s department store.”
“Talk to Andrew about advertising, Heather. I’m a reporter, not management.”
Heather flashed her most winning smile. “I didn’t go to high school with the advertising department. I’m a ‘person person.’”
“I’ll do the best I can on the story,” Cynthia said.
“I guess I’m as ready as I’m going to be.” Russell stood, stretched his back where a few hunks of shrapnel remained as nagging reminders of the explosive device that had stolen his memories.
Cynthia had turned away, but she stopped suddenly. “Have you looked at the stories in the high school paper?”
He shrugged. “I tried. Everything was lost in the fire when the old high school burned down. Nobody thought to preserve copies anywhere else.”
“I’ve got a set from when we were there.”
“We were in high school together?” He would have guessed Cynthia was younger than he, at least as young as Heather who’d been a freshman when he’d been a senior.
“I skipped a couple of years of elementary school,” she admitted. “I can bring the clippings by your office tomorrow and we can go over them. Could be it will stir up some memories, give you something to talk about in our interview.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.” Nothing else had dredged even a hint of memory. It was odd. He would have thought that he would have forgotten things like which fork to use at a formal dinner, how to knot a tie, how to tell a custom-made dress shirt from one bought off the rack. Instead, the amnesia had left him with a set of useless skills and no memory of who he was. He’d spent six weeks in an Army hospital in Germany trying to call up any memory of his background, his friends, the reason he’d joined the National Guard. He’d ended up with nothing except what he could deduce from the strange set of factoids and habits he retained.
Cynthia tossed him a reluctant smile. “Right. I’ll bring them by your office tomorrow. Shall we say around ten?”
“Fine.”
“Come on,” Heather urged. “The band has already started to play.”
“I’ve got to take some pictures of that. Everyone whose kid is in the band will buy a newspaper.” Cynthia vanished out the door so quickly Russ almost missed it.
“How about after the parade, you take me to dinner and then I show you a little surprise?” Heather offered, her voice low and seductive.
He wasn’t sure why he didn’t take her up on her many offers. Heather was a beautiful woman. From the letters she’d se
nt him when he’d been in the hospital, it seemed that they had been a number since he’d been a senior in high school and she’d been the youngest cheerleader captain in school history.
Still, he couldn’t remember her. Sex with a beautiful stranger might be a great fantasy, but Heather was his fiancée. And Russ figured he owed it to his fiancée to know her at least a little bit before confusing everything with sex.
* * *
Cynthia glanced at herself in her rearview mirror and grimaced. Unfortunately, she’d remembered her makeup and her lipstick was still shiny and fresh. All of which meant this was as good as it was going to get.
She took a deep breath, gathered the bulging suitcase filled with old Shermann High ‘Shermie’ newspapers, and dragged it out of her Mini-Cooper. This was important. Her journalistic senses were sending out signals that her feature on Russell Lyons could be a barnburner, maybe even a Pulitzer Prize winner. If she could really make it shine, she had a chance to stand out—for the first time in her life. A chance to gain the respect of the people of Shermann, people who had treated her with a polite distain ever since her parents had died and she’d come here to live with her aunt.
That Russell had made her heart go pitter-patter since the first day of high school didn’t matter. What mattered was becoming someone more than the woman to talk to about running a larger ad in the newspaper.
She’d been sitting in his parking lot for half an hour already, waiting until her clock rolled around to ten o’clock so she could see Russell. She checked her notepad, her digital recorder, her laptop, then dragged out the suitcase. She was good to go.
She’d never been to Russell’s building and was expecting something a little more substantial than an empty desk at reception. Still, Russell’s office itself was spacious, if a little overly male with cushy leather chairs, shelves filled with expensively bound antique books, and a widescreen computer that made her laptop seem like something from the twentieth century.
“Want a cup of coffee?” Russell emerged from a supply room, a steaming mug in his hand. “How do you take it?”
“Cream, if you have it.”
“Can do.”
He took the heavy suitcase from her, easily lifting what she had busted her tail to drag in, handed her the cup, and got himself another one.
“Have a seat.”
His hand barely brushed against her back as he held her chair for her, but it was enough to get her hormones revved up. He sat across from her at the table, ignoring the oversized desk where framed photos of Russell scoring touchdowns, accepting trophies, and presiding over the Student Body Association created a perfect picture of this narcissistic man.
“You just happened to have all the old school newspapers?” He raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“I figured I might need them some day. I was the editor, after all. Thought they might come in handy when I win the Pulitzer Prize.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You were editor way back when you were a freshman? Don’t they normally reserve that post for seniors?”
She nodded. “Normally.”
“Wow. You must be pretty smart. Triple-promotion and the newspaper editor as a freshman when you were what, thirteen?
“We’re not here to talk about me.” The words popped out before she could control herself. Actually, the words hadn’t been so bad. The tone, though, was.
Unfortunately, Russell had picked up on it. Which was a bit strange. He’d never noticed her tone, or anything else about her before his National Guard unit was called up and he was sent off to the Middle East. It wasn’t that he wasn’t sensitive, he was just sensitive to the people who mattered—and Cynthia had never mattered, to him, or to anyone else in Shermann.
He pushed his chair back from the table. “Whoa. Are you just prickly this morning, or is this going back to some history we share and I can’t remember? I looked through all of my pictures, and I didn’t see any with the two of us so I didn’t figure we were ever a number. But, hey, if I took you out and then forgot to send you flowers the next day or something, I’m sorry.”
As if. Russell had been way too busy to make time for the slightly gawky, and highly nerdy girl Cynthia had been in school.
In some ways they’d been huge rivals, but the rivalry had existed only in Cynthia’s mind. She wasn’t supposed to know it, but she’d only gotten five votes when she’d run against Russell for Student Body President. The annual ‘best student’ scholarship had been the killing blow, though. A single ‘B’ in Physical Education had kept her from edging Russell out for the scholarship that would have let her pursue her dream—the journalism program at Northwestern University. Without the money from that scholarship, a scholarship Russell had simply added to the rich assortment of athletic, academic, and activity-based scholarships he’d effortlessly collected, she’d been forced to live with her aunt, attending the program at University of Missouri Extension in Jefferson City while Russell had breezed through a business program at Yale.
Her only saving grace was, at least he’d never been interested in journalism. He probably would have beat her at that too, and never noticed he’d just rolled over her, crushing her into the mud.
“We never dated each other and I’m not angry.”
He caught her with those midnight blue eyes of his. “We never dated? I must not have had very good judgment back then.”
“You’re assuming it was your choice.” Which was a laugh. Of course it was his choice. There wasn’t a single girl in Shermann High who wouldn’t have dumped whatever boyfriend she had and gone out with Russell if he’d so much as crooked a finger at her. Unfortunately, Cynthia was no more immune than the next woman.
He ran a hand through his thick black hair, growing out now from the military buzz he’d brought home from the army hospital. “You know, you’re right. How strange. I wonder why I assumed that it would be up to me?”
Maybe because he had looked in a mirror. She kept her mouth shut.
He shrugged. It didn’t matter. “Right. So, do you want to leave those papers with me, or don’t you trust me to get them back to you.”
“It isn’t about trust. Our deal was, I let you look at them and you let me interview you.”
Russell frowned. “You know, Cynthia, there were forty soldiers in that parade. Some of those guys who fought World War II have great stories, and they aren’t going to be around forever. There’s nobody left from World War I, you know. When I was a kid, there were still some, but they’ve all died. All their stories are lost forever now. And the Vietnam guys, some of the things they were talking about curled my toes.”
“I’m sure that’s very—“
“Then there’s me.” Typically, Russell didn’t even notice she was talking and kept on rolling. Rolling over Cynthia like she imagined he’d rolled over whatever enemies he’d run across when he’d been in the Middle East. “I can tell you about the hospital in Germany, about what it felt like to look at Heather’s picture and wonder who the heck was that woman on my nightstand. If I had a drink or two, I might even be able to tell you about how the man in the bed next to mine had screaming nightmares every night.
“And guess what? That’s my whole life. That’s everything I remember, ever.”
Humility from Russell Lyons? If she hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have believed it possible. In the fifteen years since she’d first seen him in the freshman assembly, she had never, ever, known a time when the golden boy, Russell Lyon, would even think about suggesting that someone else’s story might be more interesting, more important, than his own. The sickening thing was, he’d normally been right--just as he was wrong now. The people didn’t want to hear another story about the fading memories of the greatest generation. They certainly didn’t want to hear anything about a war they still pretended had never existed. They wanted to glory in today’s war, today’s action, today’s victories, today’s returning hero. “I think our readers would love to hear about your experiences in the hospital.”
He considered, his deep-blue eyes penetrating hers like scalpels. “Really? Okay. The army takes good care of their wounded. They’ve got the latest equipment and, with all of the casualties we’ve had, the doctors get a lot of practice and have gotten really good at their jobs. Lots of guys who would have died in earlier wars are coming home to lead productive lives. There isn’t a lot more to tell.”
She didn’t believe that, but she was a good enough reporter to recognize when her source was shutting down. “Okay. Tell me about how you’re adjusting to being back in Shermann.”
* * *
Russ glared at the infuriating woman across the table from him. He’d agreed to this interview to humor Heather and because Cynthia had promised him her help in getting a piece of his life back. Neither of those reasons meant he intended to expose all of the pain and anger that were his sole remaining memory of a war he must have set off to fight so full of hope and certainty. At least he assumed he had set off hopefully. His parents and Heather had deleted his actual e-mails he'd sent them after being called up, but they’d all assured him he’d been gung-ho, just as he’d always been gung-ho about everything, they said.
He didn’t feel so gung-ho now. Weeks in a hospital, weeks of hard work on rehabilitating a body that had experienced more overpressure than the human body is supposed to endure, weeks of agony sandwiched between the mind-numbing blur of morphine, and then a hard week of withdrawal from the pain-drugs had sapped him of that youthful energy. But he was still young and he wanted it back, along with everything else that the war had ripped from him. Which was why he was sitting here putting up with the interview. In the suitcase, Cynthia didn’t just have high school newspapers, she had his past. One way or the other, he was going to get it back, reclaim his place in the town, and once again be the golden man of Shermann, Missouri.
“Right. About being back in Shermann. Everyone has been very nice. Salt of the earth. Missouri folk are the greatest.”
She wrote that down, apparently oblivious to his abuse of multiple trite clichés. Had he always been a cynic? He couldn’t remember, but he’d have to ask Cynthia. Heather didn’t seem to pick up on nuance. Her response to questions that required introspection was to shrug her pretty shoulders, wrinkle her pretty nose, and suggest a shopping trip—or sex.
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