More than half the members of the Shermann Junior League were either single or divorced, and the idea of moving hunky soldiers, even wounded hunky soldiers, into town got enthusiastic support. Even Jane Lintz, who had been known to devour a quarter section of hog by herself, was eventually brought around. With Heather as President, the Junior League didn’t decide things by majority vote, but by unanimous consensus. It just happened to work out that whatever Heather wanted was what the members chose to support unanimously.
Cynthia was ecstatic that, for once, she could actually write a news story on the Junior League meeting rather than the usual collection of the trite and pure cliché. Heather had researched the problems within the military health care system and handed out colorfully printed pages of statistics on how many soldiers were coming home wounded and on the tragic percentage of them who had no homes to return to. Cynthia could use those as the basis for another story—one the patriotic local residents would respond well to.
“Hang on a minute,” Heather whispered to Cynthia as she stepped past her. “I want to brainstorm something with you when the meeting is over.”
Heather was a nice enough woman, but she had never been best friends with Cynthia, never come to her for brainstorming advice before. Cynthia wondered if Heather had seen through her act and recognized the attraction she felt for Russ. An attraction she tried to convince herself was only a teenage crush, despite the fact that she’d held onto it for fifteen years.
As the meeting ran down to gossip and conversation over cookies, Cynthia proofed her story on her laptop, corrected a comma and a transposition, and read back quotes to the members.
That was fun for the women, who enjoyed the chance to correct misstatements and sound more articulate than they really were, adding ten-thousand-dollar words every time they got a chance. Finally, just as the last cookie vanished down Jane Lintz’s trap, Cynthia typed the ‘30’ and uploaded it to the newspaper. She’d gotten one task done. Better yet, the Junior League charity drive would provide a great background for the feature story she still had to write about Russ and his return from the war.
“Thanks for waiting, Cynthia.”
She looked up, surprised to see that the other members, even the four women jokingly referred to as Heather’s Praetorian Guard, had left the two of them alone.
“Oh, sorry, Heather. I was just finishing the story. That research you did adds a lot. I hadn’t realized how overstretched our military medical facilities were.”
“Come walk with me.”
Despite her high heels, Heather moved right along.
Cynthia had to take about two steps for every one Heather made with her long legs, but her comfortable shoes, and the energy she got from the daily runs she’d started when she’d been in college, let her keep up.
Despite the sun, a breeze had picked up from the north, scattering the few leaves remaining from an almost forgotten fall in front of it. It might be spring further south, but here in Missouri, there was still plenty of winter left. Gray clouds piled up like mountains to the north, only temporarily held at bay by the sunlight.
“When Russell told me about how many soldiers were stuffed in that hospital where they sent him,” Heather said, “it makes me think a lot of what I do is pretty frivolous.”
“Come on, Heather. I’m not going to buy the hair shirt. You run a department store that keeps about a quarter of the town employed, keep busy with more activities than any ten people, and you’re a good sport about it when people dump more work your way.” And she had the most beautiful man in Missouri as her fiancé.
Cynthia rubbed her arms, wishing she’d worn a jacket.
Heather turned to her grinned. “Right. No more bull. I wanted to ask you to see if you could spend more time with Russell. He’s going to play poker with the guys tonight and that might help bring back some memories, but you know guys. They don’t talk about the kind of things that you and he talked about today. I mean, a long conversation for them is mentioning that somebody caught a fish and wondering whether it’s colder than their wife or the other way around.”
Cynthia hated the way she sounded when she giggled but she couldn’t help it. “You are so bad.”
Heather giggled back. “Tell me about it.”
A part of Cynthia wanted to grab onto Heather’s suggestion and run with it. But Heather couldn’t know what she was really asking, wouldn’t guess the way Cynthia’s desire flamed up every time Russ touched her, every time she even looked into his dark eyes. She needed to backpedal, get away before Russ stole her heart and damaged it beyond repair.
“But Russ and I didn’t spend much time together in high school and, other than covering his investment company when he was buying up downtown and transforming it, I didn’t see him much afterwards, either.”
They turned on Main Street, heading up a steep hill that rose to one of the bluffs where Shermann’s older homes and businesses were located—high above the flood plain of the great Missouri River.
“You wrote that long article about how the call-up of our National Guard unit meant that we were losing our police force, our fire department, and half our farming,” Heather reminded her. “You quoted him in that.”
“I’m not sure that’s a whole lot deeper than discussions about fish.”
Heather waited while Cynthia tried to unstick her foot from a big wad of gum on the sidewalk. Why didn’t Heather ever get caught in things like that? She always wore spike heels that made her legs look like they were a mile long and she never wobbled and never stepped in anything that didn’t need stepping.
“Russell says he thinks you’re helping him so I hope you’ll continue,” Heather said. “Anyway, I appreciate anything you can do.”
They reached the department store Heather managed, a three story brick building that was the largest business in the town. Heather linked a hand over the brass handle of a revolving door and licked her lips. “Listen, Cynthia, I can’t talk about this to my friends because they’d worry and maybe make moves on him themselves, but since he came back, Russell is distant. I know he’s wounded in more ways than physically, in more ways than losing his memory. I was lying earlier about him being the same man. And I want my Russell back. The man he’s become looks familiar, but he isn’t the same. He’s too serious, too thoughtful, too much the spectator. He thinks you can help. I wish you’d try.”
So, Heather was turning to the one woman in Shermann she knew was no threat? How pathetic was that?
“What? He isn’t the life of the party any more?”
The wavering breeze sharpened, the dark clouds rolling quickly from the horizon already partially obstructed the sun. It hadn’t gotten much cooler, yet, but Cynthia knew it would. The loss of sunlight made it feel as if it had already dropped ten degrees.
“Did I just sound superficial to you, Cynthia? Okay, maybe I’m not the deep-thinking sort. I like standing there and knowing that women are looking at me and wishing they could have my man, wishing that he would shine just a bit of that brilliance off on them and make their day.” She waved up at the darkening clouds. “It’s like what’s going on up there in the sky. There’s a shadow hanging over the sunshine of my fiancé and I want it gone.”
“I truly don’t know what I can do.”
“I don’t know what any of us can do, but I intend to do anything I can to bring him back, and I’m not going to let anything get in my way. I want your help on this, Cynthia. You always were the smart one. You’re the one who figures out how to do things.”
“After you decide what things are going to get done.”
Heather laughed again. “Someone has to decide. If I spent my life waiting for other people to make up their minds, I would still be playing around in Little Miss Shermann County pageants.”
The bit of cloud raced away, letting the sun peek through again, but Cynthia knew it was just a respite before the storm hit.
“We make a good team,” Heather said. “And Russell needs our h
elp.”
It was strange to Cynthia that he had asked her to call him Russ but that Heather still referred to him as Russell. The name change could be a part of the personality change. Should she insist on calling him by the old name as part of bringing him back to the person he was?
“Listen,” Heather said. “I’ve got to get back to work. We’re getting ready for the St. Patrick’s Day sale and nobody will have been able to decide anything while I was gone. I appreciate you walking with me.” She looked at the blackening sky. “Will you be all right, or should I send around one of the drivers to pick you up and take you back to your car?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Great. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night at the Lyons’ anniversary party.”
“The Advertiser-Dispatch will be there with bells on.”
Heather shook her head. “You know, it’s sort of funny that you say that. You’re a pretty girl, you know. You should, you know, blow your own horn a bit. Charlie Daemon’s divorce went through. Maybe I should hook the two of you up.”
Charlie Daemon was every single woman in Shermann’s second choice to Russ Lyons. After spending the morning with the real thing, though, Heather didn’t feel like settling for the backup choice.
Chapter 3
His parents were strangers to him.
Instinct should have let Russ drive the five miles from his loft apartment over his office to the house where he’d been raised--he’d probably driven that stretch of rural highway thousands of times over the years. Instead, he relied on the GPS unit in his dashboard to vocalize instructions. Every farm, every tree, every grain elevator was new to him, something else he never remembered seeing before.
Heather had called him that morning, reminding him of the shindig and repeating Cynthia’s warning that tuxes and evening dresses would be the thing. Unfortunately, he’d found a tux, freshly dry-cleaned, in his closet, so he had no excuse to settle for the jeans or chinos that let him be comfortable. In fact, his civilian wardrobe seemed almost devoid of comfortable clothes. He smiled at the thought that he could have been a clotheshorse. It was probably Heather’s influence. Maybe she’d gone through his closets when he’d been gone and gotten rid of what she hadn’t liked.
“Left turn in five hundred feet,” his GPS machine vocalized.
The antebellum farmhouse had been in his family for generations, stretching back to the days when paddle wheelers had served tobacco and cotton plantations lining the Missouri river and when Missouri had been a recruiting ground for both northern and southern raiders during the Civil War.
Now it glistened with fresh white paint and the glow of dozens of floodlights.
Winter, which had sent errant snowflakes and a deep frost the previous evening, had kindly retreated for the day. The break in the weather allowed the band to set up outside, where already, a few of the county’s teens were dancing, flirting, and trying to sneak drinks from the observant professional bartenders his father had imported from Jeff City.
Russ waved off the valets, parked his own car in the circular driveway, then got out and twisted the old-fashioned doorbell to his parent’s home.
It took nearly a minute before his mother arrived, flustered and out of breath. “Russell? You don’t have to knock. Just walk in.”
That was part of his problem. He wondered when he’d ever be able to do that type of perfectly ordinary thing with the friendly strangers he knew were his parents.
His mother, Alisse, enveloped him in a hug, her body smelling of powder and gardenias.
He inhaled deeply, hoping that the scents would return memories that sights and sounds would not.
Nothing. All the memories that made his life, that had created the person he had been, were as inaccessible for us as if they belonged to another person. Even scent, which the doctors had told him was connected to a more primitive part of the brain, didn’t create the Madeline moments he’d been told to hope for.
“It was nice of you to send Heather ahead,” his mother gushed as she released him from her clench. “She’s pitched in, taking over with the caterers and making sure everything will be perfect.”
It hadn’t taken him long to recognize that about Heather. She was a take-charge woman, driven to make things happen and intent on creating order out of the chaos that made up so much of life. And he hadn’t ‘sent her ahead,’ of course. Instead, she’d told him she would be going, then told him what time she expected him to arrive.
Those full-speed-ahead tactics were traits he admired. Tendencies, he suspected, that had been, and were, shared beliefs between the two of them.
His father arrived in time to shake Russ’s hand. “Speaking of Heather, don’t you think the two of you need to set a date? Your mother and I want to get some grandchildren while we’re still young enough to enjoy them.”
“Spoil them, you mean, Raymond. Darling, get your son a drink. I’ll just go see if Heather needs help.”
“Still drink Old Fashioneds?” His father led him into a handsome library, then slid back a fake bookcase to reveal a hidden bar. From the labels on the bottles, Russ realized this was the good stuff.
The tricks his memory played disgusted him. He could recognize the labels to single malts and Grand Cru wines from the Bordeaux valley, but he couldn’t remember his favorite drink.
“Was that my favorite, Raymond?”
“Call me ‘dad,’ son. You always did. And yep. I don’t want to say you were a big drinker, but you’ve been known to put down more than a few.”
He’d assumed his so-called buddies had been trying to get him drunk the previous night when they’d been playing poker, the way they kept throwing whiskey shots with beer chasers at him. Had he had an alcohol problem?
“I’ll start with one,” he said. And end with the same one, most likely, he didn’t add out loud.
His father handed him the squat rocks glass, clasped him on the arm, and led him to a comfortable armchair.
“Guests will start arriving soon and I’ll have to circulate, but I appreciate you coming early, son. I thought it might do us good to talk.”
He’d been trying to find a time when he could sit down with his father alone throughout the two weeks since he’d returned to Shermann. Between his still-practicing father’s doctor’s unpredictable hours and his mother’s decision to make every meeting a chance to come to town and entertain at a local restaurant, that hadn’t happened.
“I’m glad, uh, Dad.” There. He’d done it. He’d called this friendly stranger his father. It was a step. Maybe, if he practiced long enough, he could actually start thinking of him that way, could grasp another part of his past and bring it back into his soul.
His father nodded. “Right. So, back to the subject at hand. What do you think?”
Had there been a subject at hand? Drinking, right?
He took a sip of the Old Fashioned.
It was terrible. The tastes of sugar and soda water overwhelmed the smooth texture of long-aged bourbon whiskey.
“This was my favorite drink?”
“Can’t remember when you had fewer then five.”
“I see.” That was a part of his past he didn’t need to recapture.
“But I’m not talking about drinks,” his father said, speaking patiently as if to a slow-witted four-year-old. “I’m talking about grandchildren. You and Heather have been dating off and on for a decade, son. Don’t you think it’s time to tie the knot?”
His father was a doctor. He, of all people, should realize that Russ’s memory loss hadn’t robbed him of his intelligence, but it had stripped people and things of their emotional and memory baggage.
“I feel like I’ve known her for two weeks,” he explained. “I think setting a date is a bit premature.”
His father took a deep swallow from his own drink. “Now that’s a good Martini. I just wave the vermouth its way and bam, let the gin have full reign. But, as I was saying, you need to get real, son. Heather is a former Miss Missou
ri. She would have been Miss America if it hadn’t been for that network political thing. So what if you don’t know her? She’s got a body that could start global warming all by herself.” He paused a moment to fan himself, then remembered where he was.
“Right, son. Anyway, she’s also the perfect hostess and a damned good manager. According to Freddy, Cochran’s Department Store has more than doubled its revenues and increased its profit margin by more than five percent since she took over. Even Alisse used to go to St. Louis for her really nice clothes, but she shops at Cochran’s now.”
Russ knew that. During his last weeks in the hospital, more than two hundred soldiers and officers had trekked by his room just to get a look at Heather’s photo. She was any man’s dream, a talented businesswoman, and anxious to renew the pleasures of his bed.
For all the desire she created in him, she could have been his sister, but Russ intended to work on that. Once he recovered himself, with memories or without, he knew he’d want her again. Hell, at least his reaction to Cynthia proved that the head injuries hadn’t blocked his libido. He was going to want Heather again, was going to marry her, was going to bed her and was even going to create grandchildren for the strangers whom he knew were his parents. But he wasn’t going to do it until he rediscovered, or recreated, his past.
“Sounds like people are arriving, uh, Dad.” Calling him Dad wasn’t any easier the second time. “I guess we should go down and make ourselves seen. You wouldn’t want Alisse to think we’re hiding up here.”
“Call her ‘Mom,’ son.”
Oh, yeah. That would be so easy.
* * *
The Lyons home looked like a fairy castle, glowing against the last tinges of a red and purple sunset.
Cynthia handed her keys to a teenager who fumbled with her clutch, exactly as if he’d never seen anything but an automatic before. The gear-grinding was the most frightening thing she’d ever heard, at least since she’d last seen Russ.
Hometown Hero Page 4