The jukebox wheezed to the end of its song and a bartender yanked the electrical cord out of the wall before it could start another one. “Last call for alcohol.”
Andrew looked around the rapidly emptying bar. “Yeah, here’s one. Thanks to you, we’re walking home four miles through the mud. Do you want to start now, or do you want to finish your beer first?”
Chapter 6
Cynthia reached her apartment parking lot and decided she couldn’t just go in. Heather had always been her friend and she owed it to the woman to come clean on what had happened, and to explain what was going to happen next. Not that she was really clear on what had happened but obviously Heather had assumed there was more going on between her and Russ than was actually the case.
More mud, picked up from the Ugly Spot parking lot kicked up over her nice car as she re-engaged the clutch and pulled out. Her car was going to look like a mess in the morning, but at least it was just dirt. It would wash off. She doubted whether the moral filth that had attached to her would be as easy to clean.
She pulled into Heather’s driveway, parked, and rang her doorbell.
“If it’s Russell, you can just get lost.” Heather’s voice sounded hoarse, as if she’d been crying.
“It’s Cynthia.”
A click sounded. Heather was letting her in. Cynthia had to hope that was a good sign: that Heather hadn’t decided to take drastic steps to eliminate any competition.
“What are you doing here, Cynthia?”
Heather still wore the sleek evening dress she’d modeled so beautifully, its cutouts displaying strategic pieces of her perfect body, the long slit up the side showing off beautifully shaped legs. Even her hair was still perfect. Only black streaks down her cheeks marred the perfection.
“I figure we need to talk.”
“About how you stole my boyfriend. I asked you to help him recover his memories, Cynthia, remember. Not to replace them with whole new ones.”
“I didn’t mean—“
“Who cares what you meant to do. It’s what you actually do that matters.
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“Really?” Heather piled scorn into the word. “That look of guilt on Russell’s face was just there because he couldn’t think of any better way to look. Don’t you think I’ve noticed the way he’s been shying away from me, Cynthia?”
Cynthia took a deep breath. “I kissed him. That’s all.” It was the truth, although calling what she and Russ had shared a kiss was sort of like calling the Missouri River a damp place. It was true, in a way, but it understated the magnitude.
“One kiss?”
“Well, one time. Last night at the party.”
“Nothing before that?”
“Before that, it was strictly professional.”
Heather nodded. “That explains why he didn’t want to come home with me last night. He was thinking about you. You know what? I suppose I should thank him for that. I wouldn’t want any man using me for sex while he thought about another woman.”
Cynthia didn’t think Heather sounded grateful at all.
“I’m sure Russ wouldn’t do that.”
“Russ? You call him Russ but he’s always been Russell. How come?”
Cynthia hung her head. “He asked me to.”
“Interesting.” Heather pulled herself off her leather couch, walked over to a wet bar, and pulled a bottle of vodka from a glass shelf.
“Okay, here’s the deal. The two of us are going to sit here, drink until we’re stoned out of our brains, then we’re going to figure out what to do with Russell, or Russ, or whatever he wants to call himself.”
For just a moment, a soft voice of conscience nagged at Cynthia. Heather was going to propose something mean. She should just walk out while she had the chance. But she forced that voice down. Russ was all grown up. If he’d wanted to break his engagement to Heather, he could have done so. She would have been ostracized by much of the town if she had been the cause of the breakup between their star prince and princess, but she could live with that more easily than she could live with the knowledge that Russ had treated both her and her friend as disposable sex-toys.
The way she figured it, whatever diabolical plan Heather came up with, it was nothing less than Russ deserved. Besides, there would be plenty of time to refuse to go along with Heather’s plan once she knew what it was.
“I’ll mix the drinks,” she offered. “But I’m only going along with this if you’ve got chocolate somewhere.”
Heather giggled, then blew her nose. “You know, Cynthia, I think we’re going to be able to stay friends. I’ve got a two-pound bag of M&M’s. What do you say we eat them all?”
“What kind?”
“The kind with almonds.”
“Deal.”
After a couple of drinks, Heather wiped off what was left of her makeup, dug a couple of old t-shirts out of her closet for the two to wear, and started coming up with schemes.
“Too bad Russell doesn’t have a dog we could kidnap.” She’d been thinking about a dog every since she’d come home to her empty apartment the previous night.
“We could give him one,” Heather suggested. “Then kidnap it afterwards.”
Cynthia had a feeling the plan wouldn’t sound so good when she sobered up in the morning, but after a couple of screwdrivers and the better part of a pound of chocolate, it sounded like a killer.
“You don’t think he’d be suspicious?”
“Why would he be?”
“Wouldn’t you be suspicious if two women who were mad at you suddenly gave you a dog and then it disappeared?”
“We’re women. We think sneaky things all the time. Guys' brains don’t work that way. Besides, we won’t just come out and give it to him, we’ll make him think he found it.”
Heather giggled, then continued. “Mostly, guys brains don’t work at all. Russell wasn’t like that, and that’s why I liked him from the start. He always had confidence, and he always seemed in control. He wasn’t like those guys who forget how to talk if you even smile at them.”
Cynthia could remember exactly what it had been like when one of the popular guys had spoken to her. She wasn’t surprised that Heather had the same effect on the male population—or that Russ had been relatively immune. “It’s the old blood flow issue,” she said.
Both women giggled.
“How about we leave the dog outside his office,” Heather suggested. “That way, he won’t know it’s from us.”
She knew she would find a thousand holes in their plan once she’d had some sleep and once Heather stopped pouring drinks and making her eat chocolate, but for the time being, Cynthia couldn’t think of a thing wrong with it. “Okay.”
“Right. We’ll get started tomorrow. There’s a breeder I know in St. Louis. We can drive there in the morning.”
“Okay.” Cynthia stood, and wobbled a bit. “Maybe I’d better call a cab. I’m not used to drinking and two screwdrivers and a beer are way over my limit.”
“Don’t be silly. You’ll stay here. Besides, there are still M&M’s left.”
* * *
Andrew Sexton wasn’t such a bad guy.
Which was lucky, because it took the men two hours to scramble across cornfields in the pitch black before they made it back to Shermann.
Like Russ, Andrew had gone away to college, then returned to Shermann. Unlike Russ, he remembered his reasons and shared them. He had a family attachment to the town. He got a huge sense of accomplishment in being a publisher, rather than the small cog in the big wheel of the New York Times where he’d worked his first two years out of college before his father’s illness had brought him back to Shermann. He believed in the small independent newspaper. He loved the people who embodied the ‘show-me’ spirit of their state.
Russ wanted to believe that similar motivations had driven his own return after college. That he hadn’t simply taken the path of least resistance.
The more people
he met, though, and the more he learned about his earlier self, the more he wondered who he had been. The old Russell Lyon had plenty of friends, but what was it about him that they had liked? His old coach, Darrin Coslick, seemed to like him because he’d been a sports star. Had that been all there was to being the prince of the town? If so, Andrew deserved the title a lot more than he did.
Andrew invited him in for a nightcap when they finally made it back to town, but Russ declined. Alcohol wasn’t going to solve his problems, and it certainly wasn’t going to bring back his memories.
Between the late hour when he’d fallen into his bed and fatigue from a long hike across open fields and through muddy streams, he didn’t wake up until almost noon the next day.
The sun glistened through the oversized windows of his upstairs loft: the old bricks of the building glowed a soft orange.
The familiarity of the building reassured him. He was creating new memories, developing a new sense not just of the man he was, but also of the man he could be.
He thought of Cynthia’s face when she saw him together with Heather and, for the first time, felt that having his memories return might not be the best thing. If they did return, what would happen to the new person he was becoming?
His stomach growled and he yanked on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, then padded to his stairs.
A sound at the very range of his hearing made him forget about making coffee, forget about zapping a couple of bagels in the microwave, and forced him downstairs, to his office.
It sounded like a baby crying.
He opened his front door and saw—nothing.
But the noise continued. The continuous sound of someone in pain, someone hurting.
He didn’t remember, couldn’t remember, what he had survived the battles in the Middle East, but a part of him resonated to that cry in a way he guessed no one could, unless they too had experienced the pain and suffering of war.
He froze, listening intently.
Could it be a baby? His baby?
Bile rose in his throat at the possibility that he could have been the kind of man who would leave a pregnant woman behind while still engaged to Heather?
He knew it was a paranoid thought. But he had no way of knowing, no way to prove he hadn’t been the kind of human he abhorred. Still, pure logic told him this wasn’t the likely answer. He had money. A new mother would have approached him rather than simply abandoning the baby at his doorstep, wouldn’t she?
Logic didn’t deal with the unambiguous reality that he heard something crying nearby.
His heart was in his mouth as he stepped back to the freight doors at the back of the converted warehouse where he housed his office.
It almost stopped when he opened the door.
A wicker basket held a blue blanket and something wiggling underneath it. He couldn’t see the baby’s face, but the jet-black hair reminded him of his own.
This had to be a joke. It was the twenty-first century. Nobody left babies in baskets any more.
Then the object wiggled again and he let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.
“Hey, big guy. Let’s have a look at you.”
He bent over the tiny puppy, and got a lick on his nose as greeting.
The animal didn’t have a collar or any sort of identification, but he looked like a purebred lab.
“You hungry, buddy?” Definitely a male.
The dog yipped at him.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Let’s go upstairs and I’ll get you some milk and see if we can figure out what this is about.”
As he turned, he thought he saw movement in his peripheral vision.
In a moment of stark terror, he clutched the basket to his body and rolled, putting his body between himself and the motion he’d thought he’d observed.
“Is anyone there? Does this dog belong to you?” His motion had been instinctual, something he guessed wouldn’t have been part of his earlier self, but that his body remembered from the horror of war.
A gust of wind rattled a couple of last fall’s leaves, but there was no other answer.
He shivered, some instinctual part of his brain still insisting he was in someone’s sights, in the line of fire. Protecting the small animal with his own body, he backed through the open freight door and closed it behind him.
“Sorry about the little summersault, there, pooch,” he said.
The dog’s warm brown eyes looked at him with complete trust. Exactly as Cynthia’s eyes had looked to him—before he’d shattered that trust.
He carried the dog up to his apartment, poured him a bowl of milk, and then discovered several cans of puppy food in the basket under the blanket.
“Whoever left you was pretty careful to make sure you’d be taken care of,” Russ commented. “And I think you need a name. Any suggestions?”
The dog didn’t have anything specific to offer.
“Right. I could name you Ray, after my father, but somehow I don’t think he’d understand the honor. How about Gomer?” The name popped into his head from nowhere.
Gomer nodded, licked Russ’s hand and headed for the bowl of milk.
“Okay, I think it fits, too. If you change your mind, we can call you something else,” Russ promised.
He laid out a stack of newspapers for Gomer to do his business, then phoned in a ‘found dog’ ad to the newspaper--just in case Gomer had been stolen by someone who’d later given up on him.
Once he’d finished that, he stared at the phone. He wanted to talk to Heather, to let her know, upfront, that he wasn’t committed to their engagement, that he wasn’t sure who he had been before he’d gone away to war, nor who he was now. And he needed to hear Cynthia’s voice again.
Given the look Cynthia had given him at the Dirty Spot the previous evening, he figured he would be better off talking to Heather first. He wanted to be able to tell Cynthia that he was free to explore the attraction that their kiss had proven. He just hoped he wasn’t lying, that his memories wouldn’t re-emerge and destroy what he had with both women.
Of course Heather didn’t pick up when he called her.
He left a message for her to call him, but he didn’t have a lot of hope. He’d seen her enough over the couple of weeks he’d been back in Shermann to know she never went anywhere without her phone—and always checked the calling number before deciding whether to answer. The odds were excellent that she knew he was calling and just didn’t want to talk to him.
He hung up the phone. “Well, I’m not going to break up with her by voice mail,” he told Gomer.
Gomer gave him a funny look.
“Yeah, I know I’m crazy. When my real self comes back, he’s going to kill me."
He’d meant that as a joke, but it only took him a moment to realize he’d spoken the literal truth.
He was a visitor in his own body, and he had to think of himself that way. And the more he saw, the more he realized that when the Real Russell returned, there wouldn’t be a lot left of the interloper. Twenty-eight years of experience, memories, and hard-learned knowledge would override the person he’d become in the few months since he’d awakened from a coma and stared at a stranger in the mirror.
It was too bad, because he was getting used to the new Russ. He knew there was nothing wrong with his eyesight, but if the old Russell hadn’t noticed Cynthia, there was definitely something wrong with his vision.
* * *
“He’s taking the dog inside.” Cynthia handed her binoculars to Heather and ooched around the dumpster they were hiding behind to take a picture.
Russ dove out of sight, then crouched, mostly hidden, behind a low brick wall, staring directly at her. He shouted something but distance and the spring breeze made it impossible to understand the words.
“Don’t move,” Heather hissed.
As if she could. Cynthia was frozen in place. Her head still pounded from drinking way more than her usual limit and from chocolate withdrawal pangs, but at least
her brain was working, again. And it was telling her that this was a very bad idea.
“Okay, he’s gone.” Heather wore a black body-stocking and had covered her face in camouflage paint. Cynthia had put on the olive-colored outfit she’d worn during a solitary and ill-fated dove hunt during college and never looked at since. Both had raging hangovers, which was the only possible explanation for how Heather had come up with this crazy attire. If anyone saw either of them dressed like this, they’d probably send for the white-coat people.
“Why don’t you drop me back off at home, then?” Cynthia suggested. “I’ve got to get to work. Andrew is going to kill me for missing the entire morning.”
Heather waved away Cynthia’s concerns. “As if he could find someone to replace you for what you make. Andrew knows he’s lucky to have you.”
“Maybe.”
“Speaking of which, how come you and Andrew never clicked? He’s good looking, in a sort of nerdy way.”
“Men don’t click with me,” Cynthia reminded her. “I’m the classic ‘let’s be friends’ girl.”
They were walking back to her SUV, but Heather stopped abruptly, grabbed Cynthia by both arms, and spun her so the two women were facing each other.
“That’s the worst line of nonsense I’ve ever heard, Cynthia. When we were in high school, guys might have been like that. Back then, all they were was hormones with legs. And zits. But things change. And you’ve changed. You were chubby back then, which scares guys off. And you let everyone know how smart you were, which scares them even more. But since you started running, you’ve lost weight and look good. And once you’re in your twenties, smart starts to be attractive rather than scary. I mean, would Russell have kissed you if he thought you were ‘just friends’ material?”
“He probably kissed me because I was there. Because he hadn’t kissed anyone since he lost his memory and wondered what it was like.”
Heather’s face darkened. “Then how come he didn’t kiss me? Hasn’t kissed me?”
Cynthia didn’t know the answer to Heather’s question, didn’t even want to think about it. She needed to put Russ out of her mind, out of her life.
Hometown Hero Page 9