by Nancy Bush
She headed into the kitchen and looked around, could name what was in every closet and cupboard. Her memory problem was hard to define. Sometimes she just blanked out and was gone. She would surface fairly quickly, but it always felt like she had to reboot her mind.
Those moments happened whenever she got too close to the accident. Then the gray curtain would slam down on her and she would miss pieces, and when she came to completely, she wanted to gulp in air as if she were being suffocated.
She hadn’t seen Sadie in the living room and she wasn’t in the kitchen. Jules looked out the window over the sink and saw that Sadie was lying on a lounge chair. She’d rolled her capris up to her knees and unbuttoned her shirt down to her bra. It didn’t look that warm out, but Sadie was soaking up the sun, a pair of sunglasses on her nose.
Good. Jules wasn’t ready to get into conversation just yet. She checked the refrigerator, more out of habit than anything else, and found a fresh pitcher of iced tea. She shot a grateful glance outside, which Sadie couldn’t see from her angle, as she poured herself a glass.
Even though she enjoyed her privacy she was glad she wasn’t alone, glad she had both Georgie and Sadie, though she was looking forward to Sam coming back.
As she was taking her first sip, she heard Georgie’s door open and slam shut, then footsteps march down the hall to stop suddenly. She pictured Georgie standing outside Jules’s bedroom door. Then the footsteps resumed and came back down the hall to the kitchen. Jules turned as Georgie appeared by the white kitchen table, her eyes hollow, face drained of color.
Before Jules could ask what was wrong, Georgie declared, “Xena’s mom said that somebody killed Daddy.”
Jules had a flash of memory. Joanie Bledsoe. Brown hair clipped at the nape. Favored shapeless, loose-fitting dresses. Divorced. A helicopter parent hovering over her two daughters. It was a surprise Xena was here without Joanie. Damn the woman for shooting off her mouth. “Oh, Georgie,” she said, her heart pained for Joe’s daughter. “We don’t know what happened yet. Sam’s looking into it.”
“You were there,” she accused.
“Yes, I know, but . . . Georgie, I can’t remember what happened. I only know what people have told me.”
Georgie frowned, looking a lot like Gwen in that moment. Jules didn’t have to be told that she and Gwen had never gotten along well. Gwen was the ex-wife and Jules had been the current one, and never the twain shall meet.
“Did you kill him?” Georgie asked flatly.
“What? God, no!” she answered in shock.
“Then why is he dead and you’re still alive!” Her eyes suddenly filled with tears and she angrily dashed them away. Sniffing loudly, she glared at Julia. “How come you made it and he didn’t?”
“I don’t know. I wish your father was here more than you could possibly know.”
Georgie swallowed several times, the tears still coming. “You miss him?”
“Yes.” She couldn’t remember him as well as she should, though she sensed she’d been thinking about him. Maybe her sleep had not been as dreamless as she’d thought.
“You always wanted to be alone before,” Georgie said.
“Did I?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember?”
“As I said, I’m kind of struggling with my memory.”
“You said that you and Dad fell out of love,” she offered up belligerently.
Jules would have liked to argue, but the words sounded right, like something she might’ve said. “If I could, I’d reset the clock, get him back, make sure we’re all safe,” Jules said with some heat, despite how much she felt for the girl’s pain at the loss of her father. “But I just can’t.”
Georgie seemed to accept that.
“Xena doesn’t have a dad. He’s not around, anyway,” Georgie said. “It’s just her mom and her and her sister, Alexa. I don’t want to be like them. I want to be a whole family.” Now the tears started falling in earnest, but when Jules made a move to comfort her, Georgie backed sharply away.
“I’m sorry, Georgie. I’m really sorry.” Jules’s words were heartfelt.
“I want him back.” She could barely get the words out.
Jules nodded. “Do you want me to call your mother?” she asked, searching for a way to comfort the girl.
“NO! No! I told you. I want to be with you.” She looked half panicked, and Jules remembered suddenly how strained Gwen and Georgie’s relationship was. “I just want Dad to be here, too, and I don’t want anybody taking his place.”
“No one’s going to take his place.”
“What about Uncle Sam?”
Jules had picked up her glass and taken another sip, but started choking a bit.
“I don’t want you sleeping with my uncle. I like him, but don’t do that, okay?” Georgie said, sounding a lot older than her years.
Sleeping with the enemy . . . That phrase seemed to haunt her mind and it made her head hurt. “I’m not sleeping with anybody,” she stated firmly. Where was this coming from? Surely nothing the girl had observed. Then from Gwen? Or Joanie . . . or whom?
“You dated Uncle Sam before you married Dad,” Georgie said stubbornly.
“Who told you that? Joanie Bledsoe?”
“Is it true?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“But you remember it?”
Jules was saved from answering when the door to her bedroom opened again and Xena called plaintively, “Are you coming back, Georgie, or should I go home?”
“I’m coming,” Georgie yelled over her shoulder. She held Jules’s eyes, seemed to want to say something else, but then she headed back to her room.
Deciding it was best to let the girl work things out for now, Jules carried her iced tea to the kitchen table and sank into one of the chairs. Good Lord. She’d had a pretty good relationship with Georgie; she could recall that. But she could see the girl half blamed her for Joe’s death.
She sipped at her tea and gazed through the slider across the canal to Tutti’s house. She could just see Sadie’s painted toes and legs to the right of her vision.
Get to the boat!
She half rose from her chair. Joe’s voice. Warning her. She heard it as if he’d just spoken.
Her heart was pounding, but there was no one there. She sat back down, tense. Her mind slipped back to the night before, when she’d hidden under her bed. Someone had come for her, someone who meant her harm.
What if they were still coming?
She almost called Sadie back inside, but then decided she was being foolish. She wanted Sam to return. She felt safer with him around, but Georgie’s perception about him had been disturbing.
After a few moments, she poured the remains of her melted ice down the sink, left her glass, then headed back to the bedroom. She tried to think about Joe as she entered the bedroom, but he seemed on the edge of her vision. Every time she tried to look directly at him he slipped away.
Relax . . . don’t fight it . . . ease into it....
Had they grown out of love? Georgie seemed to think so, and she couldn’t come up with anything inside herself that said differently. She’d blocked Joe from her mind because something was wrong there. When she tried to think of him she felt panic, like if she remembered it all, the whole world would fall apart.
But she needed to remember. Sam needed her to remember.
She lay down on the bed again and closed her eyes, her mind drifting to Joe. Maybe if she could remember just one thing about him. Some detail. What was it that had attracted her to him in the first place? How had they gotten together?
You met him when you were with Sam. . . .
That was right. The first time she’d met Joe was the first time she’d also met Sam. After a football game and party at Hap’s house. Hap, her sort of boyfriend at the time.
Her brain started to clamp down again and she forced herself to relax once more, counted her breaths. She could remember Hap, the spoiled, rich boy who’d chosen he
r over Martina Montgomery. Memories suddenly broke free, flooding her brain, and she had to struggle to stay calm and just let it happen.
Their three families were the triumvirate, she recalled. The three families with the most money, the most power, the most influence in the area. Her father and Conrad Montgomery and Walter Hapstell Senior. They had businesses in Portland, but were slowly spreading their interests throughout the coast, north to Astoria, south to Tillamook and beyond. Hap had decided there was no other girl for him other than either Martina Montgomery or Jules St. James, and he’d zeroed in on Jules.
She’d been flattered. She could recall enjoying being the center of attention at school, the object of envy and jealousy as she walked down the halls. It had been nice. Great, even. A much-needed bolster because of what was going on with Mama and Dad. Fights . . . lots of fights at first . . . her father threatening to leave. But those fights had turned into long, lethal silences as her mother’s “spells” grew to become the norm.
She hung out with Hap and his friends to get away from her parents, though she grew to disdain them all. Her problems were adult problems, family problems, so much bigger than who’d stolen whose boyfriend and who’d slept with whom. She didn’t care, but she didn’t let them know. It wouldn’t have done her high school rep any good to have her true feelings show through. She would have been ostracized, and the girls who envied her would gladly have turned their backs on her and flounced away. It had been important to her to be accepted.
But the toll it took to be a happy cheerleader, the effort to rah-rah-rah it while her parents’ marriage disintegrated, nearly broke her. Mama had never forgiven her for letting her little brother die, even though Jules had been too young to be responsible for him that day on the beach, even though it was entirely unfair, that it was as much Mama’s fault as anybody’s. Jules began cracking under the strain. Her father, who’d been her champion when she was little, had seemed to be fading away from her, too.
And then Samuel Ford called out to her on a lonely beach, while he’d struggled with a pair of crutches. Had he not had the crutches, she would have probably just kept on walking, running maybe, putting distance between herself and Hap and Martina and the party.
But he’d been helpless and therefore harmless, and she’d waited for him, and he’d smiled, and his hair was tossed by the wind, and his eyes were nice. She’d donned her social armor—her courage, such as it was—and pretended she was just like everybody else, that she cared about the same things as all her classmates. She and Sam had then fought their way through the wind and blowing sand, had started calling each other Sandy, and had ended up bantering over French fries at Brest’s.
Her heart began to pound as the memories came, faster and faster. She had to slow them down. Concentrate. As clear as if it had been yesterday, she remembered that she and Sam had started dating. With Sam it was easy to pretend, easy to forget the fact that her family was imploding. He didn’t go to the same high school as she did, and though he knew Hap and his gang, he was a step out. And even though his father, Donald Ford, was in the same business, or had been, as the triumverate, he wasn’t in the same league, apparently, and so Sam’s family and hers had not run in the same social circle.
At Brest’s that night, Jules had decided they were made for each other. Sam knew a lot about her, it turned out, at least the Jules that everyone else knew, and she’d realized he’d been aware of her for a while. It was flattering, a little stalker-esque, she’d told him, which embarrassed the hell out of him and only made him all the more attractive to her. That night he’d stepped outside himself in order to meet her, and that had meant something, too.
She’d fallen in love with him, and she’d thought he loved her, too. Instead of dreading going home after school to find her mother staring out the window and her father gone on another week or month or God knew how long business trip, she would race home and call Sam and then he would drive into Seaside from his father’s cabin in the woods, pick her up, and they would spend every afternoon together, almost every evening.
But when high school ended Sam went to a police academy in Salem, while Jules’s situation worsened at home. By then her father was rarely home, and it was up to Jules to take care of her mother. Her father could handle neither his wife’s illness nor the pressures of his job, which seemed the lesser problem at first, but then had grown into something terrible....
Her mind suddenly tried to shut down and Jules eased back, taking deep breaths, counting first to ten, and then to twenty. There was nothing to be scared about. Her mother was gone, and her father was gone, and there was nothing inside those memories other than a long felt grief.
And then had come Sam’s betrayal. In the midst of her family’s disintegration, while her father became a ghost and her mother grew more distant, Lena St. James’s moments of awareness turning to mere glimmers before being extinguished completely, Sam took up with Martina Montgomery.
How could he? When the rest of her world was in shambles, how could he, the one steady influence in her life, the boy she was certain she loved . . . how could he betray her? Jules’s bitterness knew no bounds. All the things they’d laughed at, everything they’d shared, it was all a joke. Meaningless. When he’d tried to explain, she’d told him it was over, that they were through. She meant it, but the words had come from a well of pain. Martina had actually made the trip to Jules’s house, pretending to apologize, but in truth she’d just wanted to know if Jules and Sam were really done. Jules had given Martina an emphatic, “Yes,” which she’d learned to regret, as Sam and Tina began seeing each other in earnest.
Jules’s mother had finally ended up in a nursing home, unable to recognize anyone she’d once known. Jules, freed from her caretaker job, had hardly known what to do. She’d ended up attending Portland State and that’s where she’d run into Joe Ford, who’d been finishing up an MBA. Joe had chosen the same financial arena as his father, investments, making money with other people’s money, the same as the triumvirate. Martina’s father had retired by then, and Hap had started taking over most of the reins of Hapstell, Ltd. Devastated by his wife’s mental and physical downward spiral, Jules’s father had sold his business to Joe, and soon after Jules’s mother passed away, he’d killed himself . . . thrown himself off a bridge into deep water, never having learned to swim....
Her eyes flew open and she pulled in a shuddering breath. She was sweating and breathing hard. She rolled over and felt something hard beneath the mattress on Joe’s side of the bed. A board?
She got to her feet on her side, then walked around to Joe’s, reaching her left arm between the top mattress and box springs.
Her hand encountered the edge of something hard and metallic, and it only took a second for her to make the connection. The laptop! Joe’s laptop!
She eagerly slid it out and stared down at the silver Dell. Setting it on the bed, she opened the lid and hit the start button. It flickered on and within seconds asked for the password.
The password . . . She’d known it once before, hadn’t she? She’d gotten the Cardaman file off his computer. Squeezing her eyes closed, she thought hard, pressing her palm to her forehead to fight the pain that always came.
Easy does it ... relax . . . let it come to you.
She decided to lie down on the bed again, and placed the open laptop on her abdomen. Tried to think about Joe, his office, anything connected . . .
What was the password?
Georgie.
Immediately she inputted Georgie’s name.
Incorrect password. Try again.
Damn. She’d been so sure. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, then she tried her own name, both Julia and Jules. Nope.
Joe was mad at you for taking the file. Not mad, disappointed. He thought you’d betrayed him. He came home with the laptop on Wednesday....
And suddenly she remembered Joe fully. He’d burst in the door, upset and distracted. He’d barely spoken, just showed her the note i
n his own handwriting that read ‘Cardaman file,’ as they’d stood in the living room. She’d been sick with guilt. Felt like Benedict Arnold. When he’d asked, “Where is it?” she’d admitted that she’d given the file to Phoenix Delacourt, ready for any punishment he handed out.
And Joe had been . . . relieved?
Was that right?
Her head felt like a surf was crashing through it.
There’s more, Jules. . . . There’s more....
She heard the sound of the sliding glass door opening. “Julia?” Sadie’s voice called, sounding concerned.
She switched off the laptop, scrambled from the bed, slid the computer back beneath the mattress.
The motion sent another memory: Joe shoving the laptop between the mattress and box springs. A sound outside that had him rushing to the front room, Jules on his heels.
Joe had looked out the front window and recoiled in shock.
What? she’d asked. What is it? Is someone there?
Get to the boat!
“Julia, a boat just pulled up to your dock,” Sadie called.
Someone was at the house. Joe sent you to the boat because someone came to the house!
“What?” Jules asked Sadie, her voice trembling, panic surging through her. “What?” she demanded, her pulse pounding in her ears. It was as if Joe were here now, yelling out a warning: Get to the boat! Frantic, telling herself she was overreacting but unable to stop the fear coursing through her veins, she stumbled down the hallway toward Sadie. A weapon. She needed a weapon.
He was coming for her. A knife. She needed a knife.
There were knives in the kitchen.
Sadie had backed up and was standing in the living room at the end of the hall. Jules nearly ran into her as she barreled forward, stopping short at the last second. Sadie’s gaze was focused on whoever had arrived at their dock. Jules wanted to yell at her, warn her to hide or to run. Just get out of the way!