“Thank you.”
Angus had no idea what she was thanking him for. But the fact that it might be for bringing her to this forsaken place burned away the last bit of his detachment. Whatever distance he’d been trying to nurture died a quick, ignoble death on Main Street, between Fairview and Langhorn.
He couldn’t let her go in there.
Leaning over her, Angus quickly pulled the passenger door shut before she had a chance to get out.
Obviously confused, she looked at him quizzically. “What are you doing?”
It was perfectly clear what he was doing, he thought. What wasn’t clear was why—and he was still working the reasons out in his head.
“You’re not staying here,” he told her with finality.
Part of her felt like a prisoner who’d just been given a stay of execution. But stay of execution or not, her current situation was still very much up in the air.
“I’ve got nowhere else to go.” The hollow sound of the words mocked her.
Nowhere to go. No home, no one waiting. What if that were all true? Not just temporarily but for always? She didn’t think she could bear that.
“Yes, you do.”
He said it with such conviction, the protest temporarily evaporated from her lips.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, he found his way still clear. Angus pressed down on the accelerator and pulled away from the curb. He wanted to get going before he changed his mind or, at the very least, decided to have it medically examined.
You would figure that a thirty-year-old guy with his background would have gotten hard-nosed by now, Angus thought. Or at least callous enough not to succumb to a pair of sad violet eyes, no matter how incredible they looked.
Especially when the owner of those eyes wasn’t even batting them at him seductively.
Seduction he knew he could have handled. Easily. It was the fear, the vulnerability he saw within those eyes that had delivered the knockout punch. A technical knockout.
He’d been TKOed—and she’d never even lifted a hand.
“Where are we going?” she finally asked.
“My place.” Making a U-turn, Angus didn’t look at her as he answered. He didn’t have to. He could feel the waves of her apprehension crowding into the front of the car between them. “It’s not what you think,” he assured her quickly. “I just couldn’t leave you in a place like that.”
He wouldn’t have left his dog in a place like that, if he’d had a dog.
She felt herself wavering between relief and uneasiness. But she had to trust somebody. And there was just something about Angus MacDougall that told her he was a good choice.
Choice. As if she had any.
Stifling a soft sigh, she dragged her hand through her tangled hair. “Won’t your wife mind if you bring me home without at least warning her first?”
Was that genuine concern, or was she trying to feel him out for information?
Angus smiled to himself. Maybe he had been in this business a bit too long. He might not be hard-nosed, but he was certainly getting cynical.
“I don’t have a wife.” He slanted a look in her direction. The woman had stiffened and was trying not to show it. He took no affront. For all she knew, she could have wandered into the office of a homicidal maniac who happened to give out business cards. “I do have a daughter, if it makes you feel any better. Her name’s Victoria. Vikki,” he amended.
Vikki, at seven, had opinions on almost everything, most of all on matters pertaining to her. Dealing with her was a bit like trying to find his way through a minefield without losing any limbs.
Angus felt, rather than heard, the woman’s sigh of relief. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that...”
He spared her the agony of trying to find the right words.
“Yeah, I know. I’d be the same in your situation.” He flashed what he hoped was an encouraging, sympathetic grin in her direction before looking back at the road. “But you have to sleep somewhere, and I figure you might as well do it in a place where the sheets are clean and no one’ll get in your face with questions you can’t answer yet.”
He couldn’t possibly know how grateful she was, she thought. Whether he realized it or not, he was giving her a lifeline to cling to. Someone familiar to hang onto. His was the only face she knew.
She blinked and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “You’re being very nice.”
Angus shrugged. Gratitude always made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t anything that he’d had even a nodding acquaintance with when he was younger. He’d never learned how to handle it.
“Just maintaining good client-private investigator relations.” The confused expression on her face registered after a beat. “That was my card in your pocket,” he began to explain. “That means that someone I’ve dealt with sometime in the last year and a half must have given it to you.”
He noticed that she took out the card again and turned it over in her hand.
“How do you know that? The time, I mean. Why a year and a half?”
Pressing down on the accelerator, he made it through the yellow light. The car behind him braked suddenly, its tires squealing.
“Because before then, I didn’t have business cards. Just an ad in the business section of the phone book. Maybe if I run some names past you, one of them might mean something to you.” He kept the names of all his clients in a small navy bound book that he carried with him in the back of his car. You never knew when a name or a number might come in handy. “That’s all it takes, sometimes.” He spared her another look. She seemed to be relaxing just a fraction. He congratulated himself on the progress. “Just something to trigger your memory.”
If only it were that easy. Her mouth curved in a smile. “Are you always this optimistic?”
He grinned as he turned into the parking lot closest to Harris Memorial’s emergency room. “Always.” He winked at her. “I consume a lot of sugar.”
She seemed to become aware of her surroundings for the first time since they drove away from the shelter. She stared at the building, then at him.
“You live in a hospital?”
Angus came around to her side of the car and opened the door, then stepped back. “I’d feel better if you were checked out.” Maybe he’d been presumptuous, but there was a reason for that. “I don’t really like that cut above your eye.” Actually, he was more worried about the possibility of a concussion, but she had enough on her mind without having to hear that.
She hesitated, looking at the squat section of the hospital that faced the lot. “I don’t have any money.”
He wasn’t rolling in it, either, Angus thought. Mentally, he juggled a few bills that he knew he could put off for a few weeks.
“Don’t worry about it.” Shutting the car door, he took her arm. Angus nodded toward the entrance, silently coaxing her. “We’ll put it on the tab.”
She took a few steps forward, but when the electronic door yawned open, she remained where she was, standing on the outside.
“I don’t know if I’m up to this. Won’t they want to know things, like my insurance company, my social security number, an address?” She looked at him pointedly. “A name?”
Was she remembering something? Angus searched her face for an indication that she’d tapped into a memory. But there was nothing. “Anything coming back to you?”
She hadn’t realized that she had just rattled all that off. “I sounded as if I’d just been through this before, didn’t I? Checking into a hospital, I mean.”
A look of concentration came over her face, but her efforts seemed to be in vain. Her disappointment was almost tangible.
Whatever she had just said must have popped up in her mind without preamble. Sighing in frustration, she shook her head.
Angus refused to let that daunt him. Or her. Taking her arm again, he led her through the opened doors.
“I guess we’ll just have to keep you talking until something does come to you. A
s for what we tell the hospital,” he said as he approached the emergency room sign-in sheet and picked up the pen, “let me take care of that.”
He signed her in as Jane Reilly.
It felt as if an eternity had dragged by before she was finally free to leave the hospital. Standing just outside the emergency room, she took a deep breath. The air smelled of rain. She absorbed the familiar scent like a dry, greedy sponge. Absorbed, too, the sight of Angus’s car. It looked like an old, beloved friend to her. Technically, she supposed it was.
He read the signs correctly. “You hate hospitals?”
“I just don’t like getting poked and prodded.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
Getting in, he backed the car out of the spot.
“Who’s Jane Reilly?”
The question caught him off guard. “Just someone I once knew.”
He aligned his car with the security box and tapped out the security code number he’d been given by the outpatient registration receptionist. The striped pole slowly rose in a crooked salute, allowing them to pass.
No, that wasn’t fair, he thought. Jane Reilly was far more than just someone he’d once known. She deserved better at his hands. Even if, ultimately, he hadn’t fared better at hers.
“Vikki’s mother,” he murmured. The barrier fell back into position behind them as he waited for a dark green van to pass.
He’d said “Vikki’s mother,” not “my ex-wife.” The woman looked at him. The warm smile had faded. His jawline was just the slightest bit rigid, as if he’d braced himself against the onslaught of memories. At least he had memories, she thought enviously.
“You weren’t married?”
Nothing wrong with her mind, Angus thought. Her question roused a bittersweet sensation within him. He wasn’t closemouthed, but he generally wasn’t all that talkative either. Not about some things, anyway. Tonight was different, though. For some reason, he felt the need to talk.
Maybe it was because talking to her didn’t matter. This wasn’t anything she’d be likely to remember once her own memory returned. It wouldn’t be important enough to her. Not the way it was to him.
“No.” His voice echoed back at him within the car. He hadn’t realized how sad that word could sound. “She never wanted to get married.” He’d asked her three separate times before finally giving up. He shouldn’t have given up so easily, he thought ruefully. “Marriage was too conventional for her.”
If the name belonged to someone else, there might be complications if she used it. “Won’t there be some sort of a problem, my using her name?” she asked.
The bittersweetness mushroomed, threatening to swallow him up. Angus reminded himself that it was all in the past. Nothing he could do to change that, or any of it. There was no point in agonizing.
The feeling wouldn’t leave.
Eyes on the road, he shook his head. “None that I can think of.”
He sounded different, distant. Had she tread on something she shouldn’t have, or was that just her imagination?
Because she was desperate for some kind of answers to at least this, she pressed on past a point that had a No-trespassing sign.
“Where is she now?”
Sometimes he wondered that himself. Other times, he let his imagination take over. “Scattered to the four corners of the world.”
He could almost visualize it. Jane had been so vital, such a free spirit. It seemed appropriate somehow, thinking of her gliding on the wind.
The woman beside him was silent—trying to understand, he guessed. “She died six months ago,” he told her. “I didn’t know until after she was cremated.”
No use in going over that terrain, either, he told himself. There was nothing to be gained.
“You didn’t stay in contact with her?”
“No.”
He’d damned himself for that a thousand times. If he’d remained in touch with Jane, if he’d insisted on it, then he would have known about Vikki. More than that, he would have been part of her life from the beginning instead of jumping into fatherhood feet first, seven years after the fact.
“That was my fault.” He accepted the blame readily, even though he could have argued that Jane would have done something about the situation if she’d wanted to. “When Jane refused to marry me after I’d asked her a third time, I became angry and severed all ties with her. By the time I finally cooled down again, she was gone. Vanished without a trace.”
Vanished Without a trace. Was someone saying that about her even right at this moment, the woman wondered. Struggling against the despair the question brought in its wake, she looked at Angus.
“Didn’t you try to find her?”
It wasn’t hard to guess what was going on in her mind. Angus smiled.
“You’re probably thinking I can’t be much of a private investigator if I couldn’t even find one small, very pregnant woman. And you’d be right. Except that I didn’t try to find her.” And that was something he was still trying to make his peace with. “Pride got in the way.”
Angus shrugged, wishing he could as easily shrug away the guilt. “And then I guess I just got too busy. Too busy to think about her.”
Which was a lie, but it was one he’d needed to tell himself at the time. It had taken the sting out of missing her. Some of it, anyway.
The smile that curved his mouth was rueful. “I didn’t even know I was a father until six months ago when Jane’s best friend came to see me. In one hand she had a letter from Jane. With the other she was holding on to Vikki.”
“That must have been a shock,” she said. “Instant fatherhood.”
He laughed then, and there was something very comforting about the sound. It was rich, bracing, and seemed to surround her, locking the world out rather than sealing her in.
“Something like that,” he finally said.
She knew nothing about this man. And yet, she had a feeling that Angus was a good father. That he cared. After all, he’d taken it upon himself to help a stranger—how much better he must have been with his own flesh and blood. “How’s fatherhood working out for you?”
“All right.” He thought about it for a minute, wanting to be honest with her. With himself. “Slow. Some days are better than others. Vikki’s still feeling me out.”
He knew Vikki missed her mother fiercely. And there were times, when she held her head just so, that he could see Jane within the little girl. That was when he missed her most of all.
Angus pulled himself up abruptly, looking at the woman in the passenger seat. Amusement worked its way forward. “Hey, aren’t we supposed to be trying to piece things together about you?”
She shook her head slowly. “There aren’t any pieces to piece together about me.” A shy smile slipped over her lips. “And I guess I just wanted something to fill in this gaping void in my head. If I sounded as if I was trying to pump you, I’m sorry.”
He waved away the apology. “Nothing to be sorry about. And you’re wrong, you know.”
“About what?”
“About there being no pieces to work with.” She was looking at him as if she expected him to pull a rabbit out of a hat. There was no rabbit—but there was hope. “We’ve got some pieces,” he assured her.
Just as they turned into his garden apartment complex, the sky above the car suddenly lit up. An angry bolt of lightning streaked across it. Several beats later, a crack of thunder loudly announced that the short honeymoon between man and weather was over. The storm was back and it had brought the heavy artillery.
“Well, there’s one piece,” she agreed. “I don’t have a concussion.”
He pulled his vehicle into its assigned space in the carport.
“Besides that.” He could see she was waiting for him to elaborate. “To begin with, your clothes are designer label.” Uncertain surprise entered her eyes. “I didn’t have anything to read when the orderly took you to be x-rayed,” he explained. Since she hadn’t had any need of her cloth
es at the time, he’d examined them for drops of blood, tears or any other clues. That included reading the labels. “That means you either earn a good living, or your family has money.”
There was another explanation. “Or my husband does.”
He was pretty certain they could rule that out. “No wedding ring.” Angus pointed to her left hand.
She looked down at it as if seeing her hand for the first time. Spreading her fingers, she held it up. “Thieves?”
In reply, Angus took her hand in his. It felt icy, even though it wasn’t cold inside the car. She was scared, he thought, and he did his best to set her at ease.
“There’s no indication that anything was pulled off.” He drew her attention to her finger. “No scratches, no cuts—thieves are rarely gentle, especially when they’re afraid of getting caught and they’re in a hurry—no marks or even a tan line that suggests a ring has ever been on your hand.”
Releasing her hand, he continued with his catalog. “Your complexion’s healthy, you have no split ends, your fingernails aren’t broken or chewed and there are no small, white crescents on the nails, all pointing toward the fact that you’re in reasonably good health and well-nourished. Furthermore, there’s a slight callus on the inside of your right index finger, but not on your left.” He traded hands, taking the other in his. “That would indicate that you’re right-handed,” he concluded. “See?” Angus smiled into her eyes. “Pieces.”
Pieces. Tiny pieces, but pieces nonetheless. Would they somehow work themselves into a whole? Or was that all she was ever going to have—just fragments of what once was a life?
With effort, she pushed aside the thought before it overwhelmed her. “Now can you read my palm and tell me who I am?”
“That’ll take a little longer.” Angus glanced at his watch. It was later than he’d thought. It was almost nine. Two hours past when he’d said he would definitely be back. He’d called home from the police station to say he was going to be late, but that didn’t negate the fact that he’d gone back on his promise to Vikki. “Oh, God.”
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