Noelle had stopped, drinking in the words.
“O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?
How long will you look the other way?
How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul,
with sorrow in my heart every day? . . .
But I trust in your unfailing love.
I will rejoice because you have rescued me.
I will sing to the Lord because he is good to me.”
The man’s voice shook at the end as he touched his wife’s hand.
“Arlene and Hitch Johnson,” Eli had said into her ear. “They used to attend our church. She’s had Alzheimer’s for about six years now. He broke his hip eight months ago, finally moved in next door to his wife. They’ve been married fifty-six years.”
Fifty-six years. Did Arlene still remember him, even just a shadow of their life?
Her throat tightened.
“O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?” The words had found her bones; now they clung to her as she drew the blanket tighter around herself.
If she was a woman of faith, why did it feel as if God had forgotten her? She pressed a hand to the cold window. “Are You there, God? Do You know me? Do You remember me?”
She waited, listening in her heart, but heard nothing in reply.
Lights scraped the trees, wiped across the house. Eli’s truck came up the driveway, then eased into the garage.
Where had he been at this time of night?
She tucked her hand inside the blanket and watched him walk into the house under the glow of the outside motion lights. He was hunched against the cold, his expression fierce.
Yes, he looked like a sheriff.
She heard the front door open, heard him stamp his feet, then the tumble of his shoes as he kicked them off.
Not long after, the door to the basement shut as he lumbered downstairs to the den.
“But I trust in your unfailing love. I will rejoice because you have rescued me.”
She turned away, went to the bed, and climbed in, her head on the pillow, relishing the smell. The chill had receded from her bones, the blanket giving sufficient warmth. She tucked her nose inside it, sleep finally curling through her.
Perhaps tomorrow, she’d wake up and remember everything. Perhaps tomorrow, her life would return to her.
Find me, God. Please, don’t forget me.
Sometimes Emma’s imagination could run away with her, chase her all the way into her dreams.
Sometimes it even put her inside Kelsey’s skin.
Although Emma knew it couldn’t have happened quite this way, the reports she’d read, testimonies of others, and her own knowledge of Kelsey and her father crafted a story that haunted her in the wee hours of the morning.
She would always be standing behind the counter, the lights over the gas station pumps like an oasis as the early evening twilight fell like a blanket over the town. She’d be ringing up Hitch Johnson’s bait, minnows scurrying in the Styrofoam container, while she kept one eye on the pumps outside.
No matter how hard she looked, however, she never saw him drive up.
The reports said he drove an orange Chevy Camaro, and she didn’t know if she placed it from her memory or simply created it on her own, but in her dream, it just appeared outside, the motor rumbling.
And then she turned toward the next person in the checkout line.
He simply materialized, like the car had. Parker Swenson.
Those who knew him came forward in the Deep Haven Herald to comment on the days when he played football for the Huskies, although everyone knew he’d spent more time on the sideline than the field. He had a record, though—possession from the year he lived in Minneapolis. But because he was a hometown boy, no one bothered to do their homework.
Sheriff Hueston had seen him that day but made no mention of errant behavior.
Still, in her dream, as Emma looked at him through Kelsey’s eyes, she only saw the stringy hair tied back in a ponytail, the stubble of his unshaven face. The smell of cigarette smoke and the odor of grease lifted off him, curdling her stomach. He wore a grimy brown ski jacket and stuck his hands in his pockets as he said, “A pack of Pall Malls.” His voice scored through her like razors.
She looked above to the stock of cigarettes. Pulled down a pack. Dropped it onto the counter. “ID please?”
The doctors speculated that he might have simply snapped, although the autopsy showed traces of marijuana in his system. Neither motivation gave him a bye for pulling the gun, for pressing it to her forehead, the barrel cold against her skin.
She raised her hands, met his dark eyes. “Please.”
Emma always said a feeble please, her heart in her throat. But she had no doubt Kelsey—born from Hueston stock—said something more. Whatever it might have been, it made him hesitate because they found her between the bakery rack and the cooler as if she might have been escaping.
He’d shot her twice, once in the back.
That’s when Emma longed to awaken. She tried, but the dream had tentacles, held her tight, forcing her to watch as a man walked in. He wore the brown uniform—dark pants, pale shirt, his utility belt around his waist.
The dream slowed then, bowed out and became like molasses. Parker turned, took one look at the deputy, and shot.
Every time, shock tore through her. Every time, she hated herself for not crying out, for not warning the man. Every time, she caught his gaze as he fell, his chest torn open at close range.
Every time she heard her voice, screaming. Daddy!
“Daddy!”
“Emma—wake up!” Carrie’s voice at the door.
Light splashed over her as Emma kicked her way from the dream. Her heart pummeled her chest; sweat beaded over her body. She lay in the tangled sheets, catching her breath, making a noise that frightened her.
Daddy.
Carrie sat on the bed and caught her hand. “You have to stop having these. You’re going to wake the neighbors and they’ll think I’m in here with a knife.”
Emma ran a hand over her forehead. “Every time my mother calls, I have nightmares for days afterward.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t take the gig this weekend. Maybe it’s too soon.”
Emma sat up, pushed her hair from her face. “I need the money. And it’s not in Deep Haven—it’s at a resort about ten minutes out. I’ll go, play the wedding, leave. Easy.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
Emma shook her head. “I can do this.”
“I’m not so sure. I know I said you have to make peace with this, but it’s been three years, Emma. Someday you’re going to have to forgive yourself.”
Emma wrestled her way out of bed. The cold air shocked the rest of the dream from her mind. She stared out at the street, early morning light now dribbling over the city, turning the buildings to pewter, dingy brown. “How do you forgive yourself for surviving?”
“You weren’t even there.”
“But I was supposed to be.” She turned and gave Carrie a sad smile. “I was supposed to work, but I had a band concert at school. The stupid flute. I hated the band.”
Carrie got up, came to the window to stand beside her, looping her arm through Emma’s. “You didn’t hate the band. You hate the fact that you feel guilty for living.”
Emma flinched. “After Kelsey died, I thought I’d come down to the Cities, get into the music scene, and start playing her songs. Keep her alive, you know? But . . . I’m gigging as a backup bassist, I haven’t had my own show for two years, and I’m not making it, Carrie. I should just go home. But I can’t. Everything about home reminds me of how I’ve failed.”
“Including that hot guy you met the other night.”
Kyle. The hot guy. Oh, if only she could erase him from her thoughts, but he dogged her. That smile, suddenly directed at her after all these years. And the way he’d kissed her, so impossibly gentle, so delightfully perfect.
He made her want to go
home.
“That hot guy was Kelsey’s brother.”
“You told me,” Carrie said. “You’re trying to live Kelsey’s dream down here, aren’t you?”
“It was our dream. Kelsey’s and mine. We shared it.”
Carrie turned away from the window. “Whatever you say.”
“Carrie, I want to be a musician.”
“True fact: you can be a musician in Deep Haven.”
“Not and hit it big.”
“How big do you want to hit it, Emma? What do you want your life to look like? Gigging every weekend in dives? Because I don’t see you in the studio, I don’t see you adding words to those reams of music, and frankly, I don’t see you loving the city life.”
“I love the city life.”
“I think you love Deep Haven more. In fact, I think the reason you don’t want to go home has less to do with the tragedies in Deep Haven and more to do with the failures here. Go back. Maybe the nightmares will end.” She squeezed Emma’s arm as she walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Emma got back into bed. Pulled the covers over her head. Go back. Right.
Her nightmares didn’t have a prayer of ending.
Kelsey lay in her bed, curled into the pink afghan their grandmother had knit for her.
No, no, not Kelsey. Mom.
Kyle stood in the hallway between his room and Kelsey’s, unable to move.
Mom lay asleep on Kelsey’s bed, wrapped in Kelsey’s blanket.
Had her memory returned?
For a moment, as he’d tiptoed down the hallway, he’d seen the open door and a crazy old memory rose. Kelsey, collapsed on the bed, having dragged in late from work, the sun draping lazy early morning arms over her body, her hair golden upon the pillow.
It could take his breath away as he half expected—no, desperately longed for—Kelsey to roll over and flash him an annoyed wrinkle of her nose.
Crazy hope, because of course, it could never be. Yet his breath deflated and he felt a terrible scrape of disappointment inside when he realized his mother had wrapped herself in the afghan and fallen asleep on Kelsey’s pillow.
“She’s been having trouble sleeping.” Eli tiptoed up behind him, wearing a pair of sweatpants, wet hair plastered to his head, a bathrobe hitched at his waist. He moved past Kyle and shut the door. “Don’t wake her.”
Kyle kept his voice low. “What is she doing in there? She hasn’t stepped foot in Kelsey’s room since . . .”
Eli lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know.”
His dad seemed more rested today. Last night at the game, sitting beside his mother, Eli nearly resembled the father Kyle knew, the man who’d attended his home games, the man who’d drilled into him the three-point shot.
He hated how much that memory wooed him.
He wanted to sit in the stands, cheering his own sons. Longed to set an example they might follow.
“What are you doing here so early?” Eli said.
Kyle turned in to his room. “I came to pick up my drum kit. I’m playing this weekend at a wedding. By the way, the forensics guys are done looking at Mom’s SUV. I have a pal driving it up from Harbor City later today.”
“Thanks, Kyle.” Eli stood in the doorway, watching as Kyle began to unscrew his high hat.
Kyle didn’t look at him. “Do you remember Emma Nelson?”
“Emma?” His father’s voice hitched just a little. “Yeah, sure. Lee’s daughter.”
“I saw her last weekend in the Cities. She was playing at a blues club. Got into a bar fight—”
“Emma got into a fight?”
“No—there was a fight around her. She got hurt—”
“She was hurt? How bad?”
He glanced at his father, at the worry on his face. “She’s fine, Dad. A couple stitches. But that’s not the point. I was just . . . Well, we had a good time together. She’s the one I’m playing with this weekend.”
“Which is why you’ve decided to sharpen your rusty drum skills.”
“I’m not that rusty, and frankly, I was pretty good.”
“I remember a lot of noise.” His dad smiled at him, teasing in his eyes.
Kyle had missed that. “Uh, about the hospital—I’m sorry, Dad.”
Eli looked at the floor, examining it as if there were a vital piece of evidence there. “Me too.”
Kyle set the high hat on the bed, then turned to the cymbals.
“Just . . . remember, she’s getting on with her life. You don’t want to mess with that.”
He didn’t? He glanced at his father, who was now staring at something out the window, lost for a moment.
Maybe he was thinking of Kelsey, how he’d feel if Kelsey had fallen for a hometown boy. Only, that didn’t seem like such a crime. After all, his father had been a hometown boy, and his mother hadn’t objected to living her life so far from the city.
Kyle finished with the cymbals, loading them and the high hat into a padded case. He lifted the snare from its stand and slid it into the container.
A weighted pause behind him made him glance up. His father always had a presence about him—the way he walked into a room and folded his arms could cause his sons to sit up at attention. He wore his cop look, the face that said, Tell me your story and I’ll see if I believe it.
“You’re investigating the incident, aren’t you?” Eli said.
“What makes you say that?”
“I saw Norm yesterday in town. He mentioned you’d received the autopsy report on the victim.”
“A courtesy from the guys down in Duluth. She was shot with a 9mm Glock. And cuffed across the face, leaving a welt.”
“Anything suspicious on the log? Did they dig up anything from the witnesses?”
See? His father couldn’t stay away either.
“Nothing that’s flushed out any leads. However, Jason Backlund was out plowing, saw Ryan Nickel’s car in the ditch. He’s had a few tickets, so I tracked down the plate and registration on the car—apparently he still owns it. Seems he might have been on the road about the time of the incident; maybe he saw something. I’m headed up to the Nickels’ place today.”
“It’s imperative that we nail this guy, Kyle.”
The smallness of his voice, the worry in it, rattled Kyle. In that moment, his father appeared not like the Deep Haven sheriff but like a victim. Lines creased his face, his eyes troubled. “If this guy took a look at your mom, he might believe she’s able to identify him. The longer he goes free, the more danger she faces. We’ll let our guard down and one day—”
“I’m not going to let that happen, Dad. I’m not going to let him find Mom.”
Eli met his eyes, the cop in him now searching.
Kyle returned his gaze. “You just help her get her memory back. I’ll find this guy.”
Eli nodded, a sigh rattling out of him. “We spent the entire day yesterday going through her daily life. It jogged nothing, not even the game. She . . .” He glanced at the closed door. “She even saw Kelsey’s picture in the case at school and didn’t have a blink of recognition.”
“Then why is she sleeping in her room this morning?”
Eli scrubbed a hand down his face. “I’ve been thinking . . . maybe it would be better if she never remembers—”
“Don’t say that.”
Kirby stood behind Eli, skinny and bare-chested, his hair in knots. He needed a cut, but he’d filled out over the year as he’d lifted weights. He wore a sort of desperate fury on his face. “She’s already remembering. She made me breakfast yesterday, and I saw her in the stands. She was her normal self.”
“Her normal self before Kelsey’s death,” Eli said, then laid a finger to his lips. “Keep it down. She’s in there sleeping.” He nodded to Kelsey’s room.
“See. She does remember. Maybe she just doesn’t know it yet.”
“We all hope so, Kirby, but what you’re seeing isn’t memory. It’s who she is. When I first met her, I took her to a few game
s. She loves to cheer. And I think you stole her breakfast from her.”
Kirby’s mouth pinched into a tight line. “She remembers. You just wait.”
“But is that what you really want for her? To remember losing her only daughter?”
“She still has us, Dad,” Kirby snapped.
“Yes, she has us . . . even if she never gets her memory back. But before, she was so distraught, so beaten. Maybe this is better.”
“She was getting better. Much better. You just didn’t see it because you were never around.”
Kyle recognized his brother’s tone; he’d heard it in himself.
“I was around, Kirby. I just couldn’t take losing your mom, too.”
“Is that why you cleared out Kelsey’s stuff?” Kirby turned to Kyle, his eyes venomous. “Did you know that he came home one day and packed it all up? All her clothes, her journals, her pictures. He took down the family photos, the scrapbooks, the photo albums. Everything. He even stripped her bed. I came home from track practice, and she’d vanished from our lives. Mom was hysterical, but guess what? Dad was gone.”
“Yes, you told me,” Kyle said softly. He turned to his father. “You can’t erase Kelsey from our lives.”
“I wasn’t erasing her. I was trying to get us past it without a daily reminder of who we lost. She got better after that, didn’t she?”
“I’m not sure she ever forgave you, though.”
Eli swallowed hard. “Now do you see why it’s better that she doesn’t remember?”
“So she’ll forgive you?” Every emotion Kyle had tried to ignore since the hospital rose. “I can’t believe how utterly selfish that is.”
Eli rounded on him. “You know what? Maybe it is. Maybe I want the woman I fell in love with back. I want her to be like she was—”
“She was trying!” Kirby’s voice rose, and Kyle shot a look at the door to Kelsey’s room. “She even started painting!”
Eli hooked Kirby’s arm, dragged him into the kitchen, Kyle close behind. His voice ground to low. “What are you talking about?”
Kirby shook out of his grip. “At the art colony. They rent out space. She had a little room there on Tuesdays and Thursdays and sometimes on Fridays.”
The Shadow of Your Smile Page 12