Without a Past

by Debra Salonen

  He glanced over his shoulder. Sam and the lawyer had disappeared, but Andi still sat there, her gaze on him. At the last minute, she gave him a small Andi smile, and his heart took flight. With her behind him, anything was possible.

  AFTER WHAT had possibly been the longest day of her life, Andi crawled into bed ready to sleep for a week. But before she could turn off the light, she needed to sort through the faxes that had arrived while she was helping Donnie scope out the recovery site.

  Settling against her puffy feather pillows, she picked up the top sheet. A copy of a newspaper clipping.

  Does progress grind to a dead standstill because a small group of motivationally challenged citizens are about to face changes to their comfortable status quo? “Stop!” they cry with fake concerns for the environment. I’ll buy that argument when I see the last of their aerosol cans hit the garbage in paper—not plastic—bags.

  The terse opinion piece dealt with some regional, interstate commerce issue in the Midwest. She couldn’t have chosen a side based on the column. While the arguments made sense and were well-written, the writer’s antipathy seemed directed at both sides.

  She selected another. As she read, Andi’s distress grew. After a long, emotionally draining day, the last thing she needed was confirmation that the person she was working so hard to save was someone she’d never in a million years have been attracted to if they’d met under normal circumstances.

  Jonathan Jackson Newhall was an educated man of means. A respected investigative journalist with ties to some of the largest newspapers in the country. According to Mr. Rohr’s investigator, Jonathan had taken a leave of absence for personal reasons last November and hadn’t been heard from since. Apparently no one found this alarming, given the man’s lone-wolf attitude.

  “We just assumed he’d rented a cabin in the mountains to hunker down and write his great American novel,” an editor at one paper was quoted as saying.

  Andi glanced at her bedside clock. Ten-thirty. Ida Jane was sleeping peacefully. According to both Jenny and Linda, Ida had had a good day. No flights of fancy, no temper tantrums. At dinner—a delivered pizza—Ida had expressed her pleasure about being invited to visit Kristin in Michigan. Andi didn’t bother correcting her. Kristin had moved so many times, who could keep track?

  As she reached for the lamp, the phone rang. It was Kristin.

  “How’s Ida Jane?”

  “Fine. She had a good day. Even with all that’s happening around here.”

  “Maybe she just needed to be home.”

  Both Jenny and Kris handled Ida’s aging problems better than Andi did. Andi wanted to be understanding like Jenny or kindhearted like Kristin, but instead she argued with her aunt. She wanted to turn back the hands of time and she wasn’t very good at it. She needed help even if it meant swallowing her pride and reaching out to her sister.

  “Listen, Kris, you don’t want to hear this, but I think you should move back to Gold Creek.”

  Andi heard her sharp intake of breath. “I have a life here, Andi. In Oregon.”

  “I know. But you have family here. In California.”

  She pictured all the empty rooms in the bordello. Any one of them would make a perfect massage studio. “You could set up shop here. Free rent. Or maybe the basement. When I was down there the other day I thought it would make a cozy office space for someone.”

  Kristin didn’t speak for a moment. “Aren’t you forgetting something? Gloria Hughes.”

  Andi reached for the copy of the Gold Creek Ledger that had been in her mailbox when she returned home from the courthouse. She scanned the half-page column until she spotted her name.

  “I don’t know what you’re worried about. The old crone has it in for me, not you. Listen to this. ‘Glory has learned that an extensive modernization of one of Gold Creek’s most disreputable, but well-loved buildings, is under way. Let us hope Andi’s coffee sales justify such a massive undertaking.’”

  “She called the bordello disreputable?” Kristin exclaimed. “Them are fightin’ words.”

  Andi chuckled. It suddenly struck her that she’d missed this easy-going repartee. She and Kris hadn’t talked like this in years. “Maybe the well-loved part was supposed to ease the blow. I only hope the old bat goes easy on Harley. I mean, Jonathan.”

  Kristin asked for an update, then commented. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about Harley getting any bad press unless Gloria finds out you’re in love with him.”

  Andi choked on the sip of water she’d been about to take. The glass wobbled in her fingers and spilled a big puddle in the middle of her down comforter. “Who said anything about love, for heaven’s sake?” she cried. “He’s a friend. I’m just trying to help.”

  She slapped the water off her lap.

  “Andi,” her sister said with a sigh, “aren’t we too old to play games? You care about the man. Admit it.”

  If I do, will you make a play for him? Immediately ashamed of her thoughts, Andi pretended to make light of her sister’s suggestion. “Who is this again? What if you’re not really Kristin? You could be spying for Gloria.”

  Kristin laughed. “I could prove it’s me but that would mean telling truths both of us would prefer to forget. Like the time you put a box of ants in Jane Fenway’s pantry because you thought she was too mean to her dog, Fred.”

  “Ferd,” Andi corrected. “The dog’s name was Ferd. And Jane wasn’t nice to anybody. And you helped collect the ants.”

  “He was a good dog.”

  Andi felt a weight lift from her shoulders. Suddenly it was possible to say, “You may be right about my feelings, Kris, but I’ve got to tell you I’m really confused, too. For one thing, I’m not sure who he is. You wouldn’t believe all the stuff the lawyer dug up and it’s only been one day.”

  “Bad stuff?”

  “Not exactly. He’s smart and successful, but the things he writes are kind of cold. In a way, he reminds me of Gloria Hughes,” she said, trying for a lighthearted tone.

  “Really?”

  “No. I was kidding. Sorta.”

  Kristin made a sighing sound. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. You only have to deal with that person if he gets his memory back, right? Until then, he’s just Harley with a different name.”

  Andi sat up. “Wow, Kris, that’s pretty smart.”

  Kristin’s chuckle held a wry note. “I do my best. Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you Friday. And I’ll think about what you said, but there are certain…complications.”

  Andi sighed. “Life is complicated. But Ida Jane isn’t getting any younger, and, frankly, I’m out of my league.”

  After she hung up the phone, Andi got out of bed and walked into the bathroom across the hall for a towel. The planking beneath her feet creaked in a comforting way. She loved this rickety old house of ill repute. She loved her sisters, too. Maybe if Kris were closer, she and Andi might finally talk about the stupid fiasco that had shattered their relationship in the first place. Two sisters, one guy.

  The irony of her present situation wasn’t lost on her. This time there were two men—in the same body.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JAIL, HARLEY THOUGHT, is a great place to think. In the three days since his arrest, he’d used the time to “find himself.” The New Age phrase took on a different meaning when applied to his situation, he decided.

  Harley now had a report that chronicled his life—all the highs and lows. His mother’s death in a car accident. His scholastic achievements and occasional brush with the law. “A rebellious youngster acting out,” his lawyer had termed it. His father’s second marriage. The sale of the family business—a newspaper that Jonathan’s great-grandfather had started.

  Like acid eating its way through steel, the past crept into his awareness. It started in his dreams, then exploded in fragmented bursts accompanied by blinding headaches into his consciousness.

  Dr. Franklin, who’d visited him at his lawyer’s behest, had given him
new insight on his form of amnesia. She told him that she’d done a little research on frontal lobe amnesia. She believed he might never completely recover the “factual” memory of his life prior to the accident.

  “The brain operates in two hemispheres, Harley. The left and the right. To put it simply, the left side deals with facts, the right is more creative. Since your injury took place on the right side—which controls the left hemisphere—your mind is going to rely on the right half to fill in the details that it finds hazy,” she’d told him.

  The explanation made perfect sense to him. Since the crash, he’d slowed down, found joy in nature and the world around him, instead of rushing through life at a breakneck pace to get the jump on the next story as JJ Newhall apparently had. Her theory explained why headaches hit when he tried to push for left-brain “perfect” recall.

  “Your mind is integrating what was lost with the new way you’ve learned to look at life, Harley,” the doctor had said.

  She’d also suggested he try meditation to mitigate the pain of the old memories coming to the surface. “Relax. Breathe slowly and deeply. Concentrate on the images and block out the pain. Given time, your brain will come to grips with the pictures these memories produce, and will find a way to make sense of them. They’ll no longer feel foreign and obtrusive.”

  He’d taken her suggestion, and quickly discovered he could bring to mind a collage of images from the past—like stills, as they said in the newspaper trade. Gradually, he could integrate them into a chronological picture that made sense.

  He recalled experiences from his career. He figured out what it meant when someone called him an investigative reporter. For the past few years, he’d worked as a freelance journalist, traveling around the world, sometimes with Oshi Kienda, a photographer he liked and trusted.

  One vivid image that came into his head was of an argument he’d had with his father. It had taken place in an office—his father’s presumably, but Harley didn’t know where that was. Or when the shouting match had happened. But, the subsequent image showed him buying a motorcycle.

  If he closed his eyes, Harley could almost smell the new leather. And he remembered the feel of the wind on his face as he drove, but he had no idea why he’d chosen California as a destination or why he’d turned on the long, winding road that would take him to Lars Gunderson’s Blue Lupine mine.

  At times Harley felt as though he’d stumbled into a theater and was watching a movie without any idea of the plot or who the characters were. He was slowly regaining Jonathan’s memories but couldn’t honestly remember living them. He was healed, but he wasn’t whole.

  Nor was he alone. As he’d predicted that day with Andi, this new identity brought people eager to reconnect with him. So far, he’d had phone calls from his father, his father’s second wife and their two young daughters—the trio in the photo in his wallet, and a former colleague and friend, Oshi Kienda, whom Andrew had contacted on Jonathan’s behalf.

  “There’s the rub,” he said under his breath. To the friends he’d made in Gold Creek—the caring souls working diligently to secure his release from jail, he was Harley Forester. To the people on the other end of the phone, he was Jonathan. Son. Brother. Friend.

  “But who am I really?”

  “You’re a free man,” a voice said. “Or you will be after this one last detail.”

  Jim Rohr and Sam O’Neal walked up to the painted bars. Sam carried his spotless Resistol. The other man, his ubiquitous briefcase.

  “This is it,” Sam said, shaking Harley’s hand through the bar. “We’re springing your ass today.”

  “Is Andi outside with a couple of horses and dynamite?” Harley joked.

  “My way’s less messy,” the lawyer said. “My cleaner hates it when I get dust on this suit.”

  The joking ended when Donnie arrived to open the cell door. Ten minutes later, they were seated at a table in the law library, two doors down from where Harley’s arraignment had taken place. The judge in his black robes strode in, a file in his hand. All three men rose without being told.

  He glanced their way and nodded for them to sit down. “So, Mr. Forester-slash-Newhall, it turns out Lars Gunderson was your uncle.”

  Harley would have missed the chair and wound up sitting on the floor if Sam hadn’t been there to catch him. The upsurge of noise in his head felt as if it might spill out through his eyes. “I…I beg your pardon?”

  The judge stared at him as if trying to divine whether or not he was acting. Harley didn’t care about that; he wanted to know if what the man said was the truth. He turned to his lawyer. “What’s he mean? Lars was my uncle? How can that be? I read the report. My last name is Newhall, not Gunderson.”

  Jim Rohr said calmly, “Your mother had an older brother. The two siblings didn’t have the same surname because your grandmother was widowed shortly after your mother was born, and when she remarried, her new husband adopted your mother. Lars, however, refused to give up his father’s name. Apparently, he never got along with his stepfather. He joined the army at seventeen.”

  Harley’s mind barely had digested that news when the attorney said to the judge, “After speaking with Mr. Newhall’s father, we’ve determined that Mr. Newhall’s journey to California was prompted by his father’s suggestion that he go in search of his uncle. The sad irony is that while Mr. Gunderson was acting as a Good Samaritan, he didn’t know the young man he was helping was really his nephew. A fact made even more bittersweet when you take into account his will.”

  “What will?” Harley croaked. He pressed his knuckle into the furrow between his eyebrows. The pain hammered at his consciousness like a five-year-old with a snare drum.

  The judge cleared his throat. “Mr. Gunderson left behind a hand-written will naming you his beneficiary.”

  Despite the pain, Harley shook his head. “Why would he do that?”

  “Maybe he guessed you were related,” his lawyer said.

  “I know he liked you,” Sam said. “He called you a straight shooter. That was high praise in Lars’s book. He said you reminded him of himself.”

  “A line in the document notes that you—like Mr. Gunderson—were all alone in the world,” the judge added.

  A surfeit of emotions added to the chaos in Harley’s head. He wondered if this headache would include nausea—bolting for the door was probably not an option.

  He looked at the judge. “Do you think I killed him to inherit a worthless old mine?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed at the volume that echoed in the room. “People have been killed for less, but no, Mr. Newhall, I don’t believe that is the reason Lars Gunderson is dead.” He picked up the file. “Bail is set at five thousand dollars.” He made eye contact with the clerk, whom Harley hadn’t even noticed sitting in the corner of the room, then nodded at the three men at the table.

  Harley couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. He cussed instead. It felt good for some reason, which surprised him mightily, because as far as he could remember, he never swore.

  “YOU KNOW they’re meeting with Judge Haskell this morning, right?” Donnie asked. “I thought you’d want to be there, instead of on the mountain eating dust and wind.”

  “I’m here to make sure you guys don’t screw up,” she said, only partly in jest. Donnie gave her a knowing look.

  Andi glanced at her watch. “The meeting was ten minutes ago. Think he’ll get bail?”

  Her nose curled at the whiff of diesel exhaust that came her way courtesy of a stiff breeze. Rain was predicted and Donnie’s crew was working as quickly as they could.

  “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact,” Donnie said. He was dressed in civvies instead of his uniform.

  “Is this your day off?”

  He nodded. “I switch to nights starting Sunday.”

  A thought crossed her mind. “Didn’t I read in Gloria’s column that your ex and her hubby are out of the country?”

  His rugged features changed to stone. “So what?�
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  “So who watches Lucas when you’re at work?”

  “Mom. Why’d you ask?”

  “Just curious. Kris asked the other day. I guess it stuck in my head.”

  Andi was certain she saw a momentary spark of interest at the mention of Kris’s name, but he turned away to squint at the sky before she could be sure. Wouldn’t it be wild if all these years later Donnie was still holding a flame for her sister?

  “Is she coming for the wedding?” Donnie asked softly.

  Andi nodded. She didn’t envy either of them, if that was the case. Unrequited love didn’t have the same romantic appeal she’d once thought. For the past three days she’d felt a rift developing between her and Harley, shutting her out.

  Jenny suggested his problem might be depression. And she could be right, but Andi feared it was something else. Or rather, someone else.

  That diamond ring in his pack was a sure sign that there was another woman in Harley’s life.

  Jonathan, she corrected. Keep it straight.

  The sound of a revving motor drew them closer to the edge of the ravine. Work crews had cleared a path through the bushes. A team of dogs and handlers had scouted the area for other clues, and every speck of Jonathan’s possessions had been safely bagged.

  Andi’s stomach had almost emptied itself of half-digested pancakes when she first spotted the fractured helmet that must have been on Jonathan’s head the night of the crash. It seemed miraculous that he’d survived with merely a concussion.

  “The bike’s in amazing shape,” Donnie said.

  She nodded, her breath trapped in her throat as the motorcycle swung free of the branches. The crane, with its anchors firmly gripping the uneven terrain, groaned under the load, but the cables held.

  The huge metal arm swung toward them; Donnie pulled her out of the way. “That bike’s done enough damage without nailing you, too, kiddo.”