by B. J Daniels
This woman was a walking shell of that woman, and he couldn’t help but wonder what had happened since to make her that way.
“I’m sorry, you just caught me by surprise,” he said, looking into all that blue again. Just as he had a year ago, when she’d come running out of the snowstorm and into the street. He’d tried to stop his pickup in time, but the snow and ice— He’d jumped from his truck and run to her. She’d lain sprawled in the snow just inches from his bumper. When she’d opened her eyes in the headlights, they were that incredible blue—and blank. Not as blank as they were now. There’d been something in her expression…something that had hooked him from the moment his gaze had met hers.
“Here,” he said, offering her a chair as he closed his office door, afraid she’d change her mind and leave. “What can I do for you?”
She seemed to hesitate, but accepted the chair he offered her, sitting on the edge of the seat, her handbag in her lap, her fingers clutching it nervously.
He leaned against the edge of his desk and stared down at her. Easy on the eyes, but hard on the heart, he thought. He knew better than to get involved with her again. But curse his curiosity, he had to know.
Last year when she’d come to in the street, he’d picked her up and put her in the cab of his pickup, planning to take her to the hospital. But she’d pleaded with him to just take her somewhere safe. She had no memory. No name. No past. But she’d been convinced someone was trying to kill her and had pleaded with him not to involve the police.
“I need your help,” she said now.
“My help?” he asked, still looking for some recognition in her gaze. But it appeared she didn’t know him from Adam! Either he wasn’t that memorable or the woman had a tendency to forget a lot of things. “Why me?”
She shook her head and clutched her purse tighter. “I’m afraid this was a mistake.” She started to get up.
He was on his feet, moving toward her. “No,” he said a little more strongly than he’d meant to. “At least give me a chance.”
She lowered herself back into the chair, but seemed apprehensive of him. Certainly not as trusting as last time, he thought with no small amount of resentment.
He’d taken her in and tried to unravel her past, believing she must be suffering from some sort of trauma.
But two months later, he was the one who’d gotten taken in. Just when he thought he might be making some progress into her past, she’d disappeared without a trace, along with a couple hundred dollars of his money and a half dozen of his case files. He’d spent months looking for her, fearing someone had killed her. Wanting to wring her neck himself.
And now she was back. Alive. And in trouble. Again.
“I’m afraid you’re going to think I’ve lost my mind,” she said, her voice as soft as her skin, something he wasn’t apt ever to forget. She shivered as if her words were too close to the truth.
“Why would I think that?” he asked, wondering if she could just be playing him. It was too much of a coincidence that she’d come into his life twice—both times in trouble, on Christmas Eve and supposedly with no memory. At least, this time, no memory of him, it seemed.
“The help I need is rather unusual.”
He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Try me.”
She seemed to relax a little now that he wasn’t towering over her, but she still clutched her handbag, still looked as if she might take off at a moment’s notice. Is that what had happened last time? She’d gotten scared? Scared of what he was going to find out about her? Or had she just planned to rip him off the whole time? And all these months he’d been telling himself that she’d just gotten cold feet about what was happening between the two of them.
“I think someone stole my baby.”
He stared at her. She had a child? “Wouldn’t you know if someone had taken your child?”
“I know it sounds…crazy, but, you see, that’s just it, I’m not sure.”
Déjà vu. This would have been a good time to tell her he couldn’t help her. Wasn’t about to get involved in her life again. But he had to know who she was and where she’d been all this time. And why. Why she’d conned him. Why she’d stolen from him. Mostly, how much of it had been a lie.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” he suggested. “Like with your name.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said with obvious embarrassment. She kneaded nervously at her purse and he could tell she was having more than second thoughts about coming here.
He gave her a smile. “Take your time.”
Her answering smile was like bright sunlight on snow. Dazzling. And it had the same effect on him it had had a year ago.
“My name is Holly Barrows. I’m an artist. I live in Pinedale.”
Pinedale? Just fifty miles over a mountain pass from here. Had she really been that close all these months? “How long have you lived there?” he had to ask.
“All my life.”
So is that what had happened? Her memory had returned last year and she’d just gone home? It seemed a little too simple given that she’d been so convinced someone was trying to kill her. Not to mention that she’d stolen his money and case files—then apparently forgotten him. And Christmas past.
“Please go on,” he encouraged.
“When I gave birth….” she said, the words seeming to come hard. “…I have little memory of the delivery. I think I was drugged.”
“You gave birth in Pinedale?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know where it was, just that it wasn’t a normal hospital. I think the room was soundproofed and the doctors…” She looked away. Her hands trembled. “When I woke, I was in County Hospital. I was told that my baby was stillborn. I don’t know how I got there. But I keep remembering hearing my baby cry. When I asked to see my baby at the hospital—” She stopped, seeming to be fighting to compose herself. “—I knew the infant they gave me wasn’t mine.”
He stared at her in shock. “The hospital let you see your stillborn baby?”
“See it, hold it, name it,” she said in that same blank, distant voice. “So the mother knows it’s really gone.”
Sweet heaven. He couldn’t imagine. “What made you think the baby wasn’t yours if you never saw it right after the birth?”
She shook her head. “A mother knows her own baby.”
He wondered if that was true. “What is it you think happened to your baby, presuming you’re right and the baby was born alive at this other place?” Then replaced with a dead one? How plausible was that?
“I know how insane it sounds, but I keep having these flashes of memory. My baby was alive. Someone stole it.”
Someone? The same someone she’d thought was trying to kill her a year ago?
She was wasting his time. It was obvious he wasn’t going to get his money—or his case files—back. Nor any explanation, let alone satisfaction, for the heartache she’d caused him. She was a nutcase. A beautiful, desirable nutcase.
She fumbled to open her purse.
The movement should have concerned him. She might be going for a weapon. As crazy as she was, she might shoot him. But the way her hands shook, she wouldn’t have been able to hit the broad side of a barn even if she pulled a howitzer from the bag.
She tugged out a tissue and wiped her eyes.
He’d heard enough, but still, he had to ask. “Why would someone want to take your baby?”
She glanced up, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know. I just have this feeling that this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. That there have been other babies they’ve stolen.”
She was worse than he’d thought.
He rubbed a hand over his face, remembering something she’d said. “During the delivery, you mentioned the doctors. You saw them then?”
She shook her head, one glistening tear making a path down her perfectly rounded cheek. “Not their faces.” She seemed to hesitate as if what she was about to say could be any worse than what sh
e’d already told him. “They wore masks.”
“Masks? You mean surgical masks?”
“Halloween masks with hideous monster faces.” She avoided his gaze as she rooted around in her purse again. “I will pay you whatever you want to prove that I’m not crazy and to get my baby back.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. And to think he used to fantasize about finding her. “When was this anyway?”
“Five weeks ago.”
He nodded distractedly, wondering why it had taken her five weeks.
When he opened his eyes, she had the checkbook in her hand, her expression filled with hopefulness as she looked up at him again.
Sweet heaven. He couldn’t believe that a part of him would gladly leap on his noble steed and ride off to battle evil for this damsel in distress yet again. Except that she’d punctured a hell of a hole in his armor the last time around. She’d gone straight for his heart, and he wasn’t apt to forget it, no matter how desirable, how beautiful or how crazy and in need of help she was this time around.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said, getting to his feet.
Slowly, she lowered her gaze to her lap. He watched her put the checkbook back into her purse and rise from the chair.
“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” she said without looking at him.
He watched her walk to the door and thought he should at least suggest she seek medical help. Did she know a good psychiatrist?
But he let her go. She was either a crackpot, or a con artist. Her name probably wasn’t even Holly Barrows.
He listened as her boot heels tapped down the stairs, and he waited for the sound of the door closing on the street below, before he picked up his beer bottle and went to the window again.
It had stopped snowing, the sky dark, the air cold against the glass. He watched her hurry to a newer SUV parked at the curb. Out of habit, he jotted down her license-plate number when her brake lights flashed on.
Why had she come to him with this latest ludicrous story? Hadn’t she gotten what she’d come for the last time?
She pulled out into the street, and he had to fight the urge to run after her.
As he started to turn from the window, he caught a movement on the sidewalk below and looked down. The Santa bell-ringer no longer had his pot. Or his bell. He was looking after the retreating Holly Barrows and talking hurriedly into a cell phone.
Slade felt a jolt as the Santa glanced up toward his office window. The look was brief, but enough. Slade swore and scrambled around his desk and out of the office. He launched himself down the stairs, nearly falling on the wet steps, his mind racing faster than his feet, and burst through the door to the sidewalk.
The Santa was gone—except for his red hat and white fake beard lying on the pavement.
The quiet snowy darkness settled over Slade as he stared down the now-empty street. He’d seen the Santa’s alarmed expression when he’d looked up and spotted Slade at the window, recalled the agitated way the man had been talking into the cell phone.
Worry clutched at him the way Holly Barrows had clutched at her purse. Sweet heaven, could she have been telling the truth this time? More important, had she been telling the truth a year ago when she’d thought someone was trying to kill her?
Suddenly a thought lodged like a stake in his heart. If she wasn’t crazy, if Holly Barrows really had been pregnant and had delivered a baby five weeks ago, then— If nothing else, he’d always been good at math.
He stumbled back against the side of the building as he stared down the street in the direction her car had disappeared. If there really had been a baby, there was a damned good chance it was his.
Chapter Two
“Are you all right?” Shelley asked him as she sliced a loaf of homemade cranberry bread. Her kitchen smelled the way their mother’s used to. Something was always cooking.
“Fine, why?” He leaned against the counter to watch her, trying to put on his best holiday face.
It was obvious to anyone who saw them together, that Slade and Shelley were siblings. Shelley’s hair was the same thick, dark blond as his, her eyes a little paler hazel. They’d both taken after their father’s side of the family. Like him, she had the Rawlins’ deep dimples. They were, in fact, fraternal twins.
“You think I can’t tell when something is bothering you?” she asked. “Something more than Christmas.”
Christmases were always hard on him. This one was especially tough after what he’d found in his mother’s letter, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
“Remember that woman? The one I met last year about this time?”
She kept cutting the bread. “The one who couldn’t remember who she was. You called her Janie Doe.” She frowned. “I remember how worried you were about her when she disappeared.”
“Yeah, well, she waltzed into my office late this afternoon.”
Shelley stopped slicing to look over at him, and he wondered if she realized just how involved he’d gotten with Janie Doe. “Then she’s all right?”
He shrugged. He wouldn’t exactly say that. “The case is complicated.” That was putting it mildly. “But I can’t get it off my mind.”
“It? Or her?”
“Both,” he admitted with a sheepish grin. That seemed to satisfy her.
“Would you carry this into the living room? Norma called to say they were running a little late.”
“I hope they come,” Slade said, wondering how badly the chief didn’t want to read the letter he’d found.
“Of course they’ll come,” Shelley said in surprise. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without them. Well, Norma, anyway,” she added with a laugh. Chief Curtis seemed as fond of Christmas as Slade was.
Shelley put out a tray of snack food while Slade poured them each a glass of wine. With Christmas music playing on the stereo, he helped her decorate the tree. It had become their tradition, since being on their own, to decorate the tree on Christmas Eve, then take it down right after the new year, and always at Shelley’s.
The first Christmas after their mother’s murder had been the worst, with both parents gone. But the chief and Norma Curtis had helped them start new traditions and Slade had gone along with it for his sister. As far as he was concerned, he could skip the holiday all together and never miss it.
“This is one of my favorites,” she said, stopping to admire a small porcelain Santa. “I remember it from pictures of when we were just babies.”
Their mother had loved collecting Christmas ornaments. She could recount where she’d gotten each, many from friends or family, and what year. Each one had special meaning for her.
He watched his sister cradle the Santa in her palm and couldn’t help but think about the Santa bell-ringer below his office window earlier. It kept him from thinking about other Christmases—and his mother.
After he’d missed catching the Santa bell-ringer, he’d returned to his office and tried to call Holly Barrows in Pinedale. Of course there was no listing. Why wasn’t he surprised? She’d probably made up the name.
Not that he knew what he’d have said even if he’d found a number for her. I think Santa Claus had my building staked out and I think he was looking for you? He would sound as crazy as she had.
But he couldn’t quit worrying about her. Or worse, worrying that she might be in real trouble—and he hadn’t taken her seriously. Between that, and worrying about his mother’s letter—and the possible implications of her words, the last thing he wanted to be doing tonight was decorating a Christmas tree. He felt antsy and anxious. Both incidents had shaken him—and during a season when he didn’t feel all that grounded anyway.
He and Shelley had just finished decorating the tree when the chief and his wife arrived.
“Slade, get them some wine,” Shelley said as she took their coats and shook off the snow. “You must be freezing.”
“Nothing like a white Christmas!” Norma exclaimed and
moved to the fireplace. “Oh, your tree is just lovely!”
“Want to help me with the wine?” Slade asked the police chief pointedly.
Curtis sighed but followed him into the kitchen. Chief Curtis was built like a battering ram, neckless and balding, with a florid complexion, a reputation for being outspoken to the point of being rude and as tough as a rabid pit bull off his chain. Slade knew the chief’s bark was worse than his bite, but he still had a healthy respect for the man.
He handed him the letter, then proceeded to fill two glasses with wine, knowing Shelley would get suspicious if they took too long.
“Do we have to do this now?” Curtis asked, looking down at the yellowed envelope in his hand. “Damn, Slade, it’s Christmas Eve.”
“Roy Vogel didn’t kill her. Now I know there was someone else. A man. A secret lover who wanted to remain secret. Maybe at all costs.”
Curtis shook his head. “You just aren’t going to let this go, are you?”
“No. I can’t. And considering how my parents felt about you, I wouldn’t think you could either.”
Curtis shot him a withering look, then slowly opened the flap and withdrew the handwritten pages. They crackled in his thick fingers as he unfolded them with obvious hesitancy.
“Well?” Slade demanded when Curtis had finished reading.
“It’s vague as hell,” the cop said with his usual conviction. But Slade noticed that the older man’s hands shook a little as he folded the paper, forced the pages back into the envelope and handed it to him. The letter had obviously upset him as much as it had Slade.
“She admitted she’d been secretly meeting someone she didn’t want Joe to know about, and she pleaded with Ethel not to give away her secret,” Slade said as he put the letter back into his pocket. “What’s vague about that?”
“She didn’t say she was having an affair,” Curtis pointed out, keeping his voice down so the women couldn’t hear in the next room.
“I’m going to find out who she’d been meeting,” Slade told him as he handed the chief a glass of wine. “Are you going to help me? Someone had to know. Maybe one of her friends. Or her hairdresser. Or the damned meter reader. Someone.”