by Alice Sharpe
She’d known this was coming. Without her wallet and the ID it contained, she couldn’t rent a car. She needed Simon’s help and yet she was willing to admit it was asking too much. Gazing longingly across the way at a plane taking off from the airport, she said, “I can’t buy an airline ticket but I can get on a train. Take me to a station. I understand how hard this all is for you as a policeman. I don’t want to keep imposing—”
“Stop,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t care about me, this isn’t about me.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“What it’s always been about,” he said, but then pressed his lips together. “I think we should stay off the main roads. They managed to follow us once before. We can’t risk that again.”
“Carl said I wasn’t innocent in all this. What did he mean?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“But you suspect something. Was he talking about the man who was murdered in Blue Mountain?”
“I think so,” he said reluctantly.
“I wonder if I knew him. Did you?”
“No. And before you ask, I have no idea if you knew him or not. I have no idea if you know any of the older men you’re meeting or why you’re meeting them or what your father wants. I don’t know if you’re involved in a murder or if you’re a hapless victim.”
“I’m involved,” she said softly. “I may not have actually killed anyone, but it’s obvious I’m in the middle of it all.”
“I guess it is,” he admitted.
She pressed her fingers against her forehead.
“Carl Baxter and Chopper are dangerous men,” Simon said. “They’ve set off a bomb that could have hurt who knows how many people. At least one man is dead. Not revealing their identities to the cops so they can be apprehended will put more people in harm’s way. I can’t justify that, even if it hurts you. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” she said.
“I have to turn in their names and a description of their vehicle. I have to tell the cops where they’re headed so they can be apprehended, which means I’ll be leading the cops toward us, too. But thanks to you, they’ll be in one part of town and we’ll be in another. I’ll do it anonymously, but it has to be done. I’ll do my best to keep you out of it.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s my father. He’s going to such lengths to make this all a big secret and it seems everyone knows. Am I bringing disaster down upon his head?”
“Regardless of your father’s situation—which we don’t really know—and your involvement, Carl and Chopper are both dangerous men who have proven they’re willing to kill innocent people. We can’t stand by and allow them to hurt anyone else.”
“You’re right, we can’t. But you promise me you’ll do what you can to keep my father out of harm’s way.”
“Frankly, it’s not your father I’m worried about,” he said.
“I know, but do you promise?”
“Yes,” he said at last, but he didn’t sound happy about it.
Chapter Ten
Simon drove as Ella dozed fitfully beside him. Not familiar with the area, he ended up driving in circles and wasting most of an hour before getting back on the right track. The condition of his back made driving difficult. It would have been a lot easier to take primary instead of secondary highways, and for the entire time it took him to break free of the city, he seemed stalled in one road-construction project after another.
Plus, it was nearly impossible to get comfortable. He knew he needed his back attended to, but he couldn’t bear the thought of stopping the truck. He might not see a tail back there, but he could feel one. He wanted the cover of darkness before they stopped.
He couldn’t get Jack out of his head, either. Who was he? How did he know Ella, and more to the point, perhaps, how did he know Ella was in trouble? And why did he say he was following Simon? He flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror, expecting to see a parade back there, but the road was empty of everything except an old converted school bus. Hard to imagine Carl, Chopper or Jack driving that.
Beside him, Ella mumbled incoherently, her head rolling to the side toward the window. Her voice, thick with sleep, was soft but desperate when she mumbled, “No.” Her hand fluttered on her lap and then rose to her face. “No!” she repeated.
Her eyes flicked opened and she caught a sob in her throat.
“You okay?” Simon asked, sparing her a long glance.
She swallowed. “Yeah.”
He handed her a bottle of water he’d bought at the station when he’d found he couldn’t quite get behind coffee. After she took a long drink, she straightened in her seat and looked out at the changing countryside. “Man, how long was I out?”
He glanced at his watch, back now on his own wrist. “Two hours and thirty-three minutes.”
“I was dreaming,” she said.
“I figured. Your father?”
“Hmm—we were dancing. I was wearing a pink dress and he was twirling me around and then he started to fade, like a ghost, just disappeared into thin air. I was frantic….”
He touched her uninjured hand. Between the two of them, it was getting hard to find an area of skin that wasn’t bleeding or bruised. “It was a dream,” he murmured.
“It was so real. Oh, Simon, I don’t know what to do. What if the police want him? What if he, I don’t know, robbed a bank for instance? Maybe that’s why he fled the U.S.A. and moved to Canada.”
“We have extradition agreements with Canada. He couldn’t evade the U.S. law in Canada.”
“Maybe he’s hiding. Or maybe he did something else that wasn’t illegal, just immoral.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” he said firmly.
She stopped fussing, going as far as flashing him a smile. “I get tied up in knots.”
“I don’t blame you.”
She narrowed her eyes as she studied him. Then he heard her sigh. “I’m also selfish. I forgot how hurt you are. Stop the truck.”
“What—”
“Stop it. Right now.” He pulled over to the side of the road as the old bus rumbled by them. “Change seats, I’m driving,” she said. To punctuate her intent, she opened her door and came around to his side of the truck. Opening the door, she added, “Out.”
Very gingerly, he got out of the truck, his back raging with fire. She took his place behind the wheel. “I’m driving to a motel and I’m taking care of your back.”
“We should wait for dark—”
“We shouldn’t have waited at all, I should have insisted earlier. Get in.” Once he’d climbed into the passenger seat, she pulled onto the highway. He sat sideways, his left arm against the back of the seat. Without driving to concentrate on, he felt his back start to burn.
They passed a sign announcing a city up ahead. “We’ll stop there,” she said.
“Somewhere seedy and way off the beaten track,” he told her.
“That goes without saying. I have a plan, trust me.”
He smiled. The sleep had done her good. She glanced at him and grinned, laughing a little, shaking her head. It was a familiar gesture, and for some reason, it lodged in his heart. All that was missing was the mass of gold curls that used to dance as she moved.
Oh, God, he wasn’t still harboring hope for her—for them—was he?
It was as though she read his mind. She said, “Tell me why you broke the mermaid’s heart.”
He shrugged and wished he hadn’t, because it hurt like blazes. “We grew apart,” he said.
“Explain that.”
“Well, she wanted one thing and I wanted another.”
“Do you always talk in circles like this?”
“She hated me being in law enforcement, for instance.”
“Smart girl.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s dangerous work, right? Maybe she wanted to have babies, maybe she didn’t want their father to be killed arresting some sleazeball
.”
Had her memory returned? Was she messing with him? He stared at her exquisite profile as he responded, “Or maybe she was running from something.”
She smiled. “That’s more exciting,” she said. “I like that better.”
He saw no subterfuge in the glance she cast his way.
“So you broke up with her.”
“Well, maybe it was a little more mutual than that,” he said. “She’d been keeping secrets and when I pressed her for details she blew up and called me a prying bastard.”
“What did you call her?”
“Secretive. Controlling.”
“Ouch. So now there’s no more you and her. That’s very sad, Simon.”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
They entered the town of Twilight around dinnertime. It appeared to be a small town with lots of empty buildings, the kind of thing that tended to happen when a major highway bypassed a city. Simon spied a telephone booth in the overgrown parking lot of a long-closed miniature golf course. “Pull in there, park behind those trees. I’ve got to call a friend.”
She did as he asked, getting out of the truck at the same time he did. When he reached the phone booth he looked back to see she’d wandered over to the fence surrounding the unkempt golf course, and was staring in at the old windmills and clowns that had once delighted children.
Though the booth didn’t have a telephone directory any longer, the phone itself had a dial tone, and that brought a sigh of relief. Devin took the collect call. From the background clatter, he was either washing dishes or fixing dinner. “Glad you called,” he said. “Guess what? Robert Connors was a retired policeman from guess where?”
“Chicago, like Jerry Bucker?”
“Exactly.”
“Then Connors’s murder is related to all this.”
“It has to be. He has to be the old guy your girl met at the restaurant, which means other than the murderer, she’s the last to see him alive, and there is a roomful of witnesses to identify her. The cops are going to want to question her.”
Simon leaned his forehead against the glass panel of the booth. “I phoned in an anonymous tip to the police today about the identity of the men I think are responsible for the deaths of Bucker and Connors. When this is all over, hopefully tomorrow, I’ll get back to Blue Mountain and go see the chief.”
“He’ll have your head. Withholding information, aiding and abetting—”
“Please, don’t read me the list. I knew what I was doing when I took sides a couple of days ago. I just have to make sure Ella is innocent before those two spill their guts and try to blame everything on her. I can’t take the chance she winds up in prison.”
“Now, wait a second,” Devin said with a rattle of pans that announced his inattention to what he was doing on the home front. “I thought you broke up with this girl. Why can’t you let her go?”
Simon hadn’t told Devin about Ella’s pregnancy. He wasn’t going to tell anyone other than his cousin until Ella remembered on her own or he broke down and told her himself.
Devin whistled. “You still have feelings for her.”
Simon acknowledged as much. There was no denying—or quantifying—that fact. He had feelings for her, feelings that were beginning to make him doubt everything, but this wasn’t the time to worry about it.
“Listen to me,” Devin said. “I can’t find her maiden name, but I know I’ve got to be getting close. Without a legal name change, however, her marriage to Carl Baxter might very well be invalid. But it might not.”
“Let’s take things one disaster at a time,” Simon said.
“Speaking of disasters in the making, there was some guy asking around about you. Dark, speaks with a slight Spanish accent. Know him?”
“Kind of,” Simon said.
After hearing that so far Devin hadn’t been grilled by the cops, he hung up.
He wanted to call Virginia but didn’t dare. He couldn’t risk involving her and there really wasn’t anything new she could offer. She’d told him to let Ella’s memory come back on its own and it seemed to be happening. What they needed was time. What they didn’t have was time.
Ella had memories of a mother and father now, and a brother, all two-dimensional figures moving through her dreams and sometimes stealing into her waking thoughts. He couldn’t help but wonder who would be next. He could tell she suspected him of having prior knowledge of her—he thought it likely only the string of worsening circumstances kept her from really pressing the issue.
He walked back to the fence, his back in such pain it was hard to think straight. She was staring at a giant plaster bear balanced on top of a white flower. The bear wore lederhosen and held a giant beer stein in one hand. Its mouth was wide open as though it was yodeling.
“What are you looking at?” he asked as he put his fingers through the wire next to Ella’s.
She leaned her head against the fence and gazed up at him. “A bird has built a nest in the bear’s mouth. Listen.”
He didn’t hear anything until a small black-and-gray bird swooped over his head and landed on one of the bear’s yellow teeth, setting off a cacophony of high-pitched cheeps from the hatchlings inside the nest.
“Starlings,” he said softly. “The scourge of American songbirds.”
“Starlings,” she repeated slowly as though tasting the word. “Starlings. Why are they the scourge of American songbirds?”
“They’re not a native bird. They drive out other birds, even destroy eggs.”
“How do you know all this?”
“My mom and dad have several acres. They love their birds. Want to hear about the innocent-looking but highly destructive house sparrow?”
She laughed, but then her eyes grew gentle. He loved it when she looked at him that way. In the past it had been an invitation for intimacy, not just sex, but a letting down of her formidable guard, a sign she was feeling safe and would allow him to get a little closer. His gaze dipped down to her waist and the small curve of her belly.
The thought her baby might not be his baby just about unhinged him. He wrapped his fingers around hers and looked deep into her eyes.
She didn’t move, but her focus shifted to his mouth as their heads drifted together. A million remembered sensations coursed through his body as his lips touched hers.
In an instant, as her lips parted, he was whisked away to the night they first met. She, draped in a million shades of blue and green, skin sparkling with glitter, eyes so big and trusting he’d been mesmerized the moment he walked into the club and saw her standing alone. By the end of the night, they’d kissed a hundred times. By the end of the weekend, they’d been lovers.
He’d thought to build a future with her despite his mother’s warnings about Ella’s reserve. And now as her warm mouth and silken tongue merged with his, he thought that way again. He yearned to wrap her in his arms and back her against the fence, take what she was offering, make her his one more time.
He straightened up as, above them, the baby birds welcomed their mother or father back to the nest. He ran a finger over her lips. If she was willing, he was willing; why pretend he wasn’t?
“For a moment there, I remembered what sex was like,” she whispered, “and I wanted to have it again, right here, right now, with you.”
“What a wonderful idea,” he whispered against her cheek.
She looked down at her left hand. “I’m a married woman.”
“Ella—”
“Even if the marriage is over, the fact is I was with him when we had the accident. He knew to expect the contact in the restaurant. In my mind, that means we were in ‘it’ together and a man is dead. I can still hear him saying I’m not innocent, and somehow, I think I believe him, I think he’s right.”
“You don’t know any of this.”
“And then there’s Jack, showing up out of nowhere but knowing my name, and cautioning against calling the police…. Just how many men do I know? Are they all lovers or have th
ey been in the past?”
Good questions. Simon stared into her eyes. “I don’t know.”
“I can see that. But you do know more about me than you’re telling.”
“Yes,” he said. “Let me be honest. My cousin is a doctor. She said ideally, you should go home and come to your memories through familiar things. She called it associational therapy.”
Ella took a deep breath. “I’ve always felt that’s the way it should have happened. I’ve been wondering ever since I realized I can’t trust Carl if he warped what the hospital doctors said, if he just told me what suited him. Maybe the doctors never intended me to have to go through this in this way.”
“Maybe you’re right. And maybe in a perfect world, you could go home. There’re just a few little catches.”
“My father needs me,” she said firmly.
That hadn’t been the catch he was thinking of. He’d been thinking more along the lines of the dead men, a bomb and her possible involvement.
And yet she’d left her houselights burning and the snow globe—he was almost positive she’d been taken against her will. Did that mean she hadn’t wanted to help her father or that she’d planned to help him all along and Carl Baxter showed up or she and Carl were in cahoots from the beginning but had a falling-out?
She’d been acting strange, she’d been keeping secrets. Was it Carl or her father or both?
“You look as confused as I feel,” Ella said softly. As he’d been mulling things over, she’d slipped her wedding ring off her finger. “Well, I may be married to the jerk, but I don’t have to wear his ring, do I?” And with that, she tossed the gold band through the fence, where it disappeared into the brush. She smiled fleetingly and added, “You’re in such pain. Get in the truck.”
“No sex right here on the ground?” he said only half jokingly.
“With your back full of glass?”
“You could be on the bottom.”
She shook her head. “Get in the truck.” She took one last look at the nest up inside the bear’s mouth. “Bye, little starlings,” she said, drawing out their name.