The Sheriff & the Amnesiac

by Ryanne Corey

  “Back from chasing her down,” Rosie explained kindly. “I’ve never seen you doing the chasing before. This is so entertaining. Don’t forget—two hamburgers. No onions, no mustard. No anything but catsup—you know how they like ’em. And grab me a drink, too. Well, go on. What are you waiting for?”

  Tyler bared his teeth at his sister with a frustrated growl, then took off running toward the front doors. He actually felt sorry for Jenny. Rosie’s not-so-subtle sense of humor took a little getting used to. He was half afraid Jenny would plant herself by the side of the highway and hitch a ride with the first trucker that came along.

  Once outside, he stopped short. Jenny was nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t figure out how she’d vanished so quickly. She hadn’t had time to cross the street and make it back inside the Cotton Tree. So where was she?

  He started jogging again, going back and forth along the rows of parked cars, even stopping once to flop down on his belly and look underneath the parked cars. This woman seemed to have a talent for pulling off disappearing acts.

  And then he saw her.

  The picture she made took him completely by surprise. She was sitting on the rear bumper of a Ford pickup at the far corner of the parking lot. Her shoulders were slumped, her hands dangled in her lap. Flickering light from the neon Ritz Classic sign colored her small figure with a ghostly rainbow of changing colors. As he stared at the unutterably weary angle of her neck and head, the realization came to him that she was fighting tears. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did.

  She looked so small from this distance, like a porcelain doll overwhelmed by the bleak silhouettes of cars and trucks. And oddly exhausted. She was barely fifty feet from the highway; a tanker truck passed and her hair snarled around her head in a wild, wind-whipped cloud. It looked to Tyler as if she had intended to cross the road to the motel, only to make it this far before she ran out of energy.

  His throat dry with a sudden anxiety, he started slowly walking toward her. She didn’t hear him coming until he was practically at her side, then her head whipped up and she pushed herself off the bumper in a quick movement. Surprisingly, her eyes were dry, glittering and immediately defensive. No tracks of tears on her pale face, as he’d half expected. Tyler was momentarily off balance. He could have sworn she was crying.

  “Don’t tell me,” Jenny said, her voice a bit huskier than usual. “Let me guess. I’m being arrested for leaving a bowling alley in a rude and abrupt manner. Don’t shoot me, Sheriff. I’ll go quietly.”

  Tyler smiled faintly. “That’ll be the day.”

  “So I’m not breaking any laws?”

  “Not if you don’t count disturbing the peace of the sheriff.”

  “What a relief. For a minute, there, I thought you were going to revert to Stone-Cold-Steve-Austin mode and toss me over your shoulder again. Just so you know, traveling upside down makes me sick to my stomach.”

  Tyler was quiet for a long moment, his thoughtful gaze never leaving hers. “You never take a breather, do you?” he asked finally. “It’s just one wisecrack after another. Why did you run out of the bowling alley like that? Rosie was just speaking her mind, she’s that way with everybody. Her blunt honesty terrifies the men in this town, which explains why she spends Friday nights at the bowling alley with her brother.”

  Jenny leaned back against the Ford’s tailgate for support, her arms folded over her chest. Closed, locked away and guarded. “Whatever. I promise I won’t lose any sleep over it. Actually, your sister seemed like a nice person. Kind of hard to believe you two are related.”

  “You must have been a porcupine in a past life. Why do you bristle every time I try to make polite conversation? I’m a nice guy, Trouble. No threat at all.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” she said, mocking him with her wide brown eyes and innocent voice. “I’m like that, completely gullible. Willing to believe anything. Just another empty-headed little woman for you to—”

  “Give it a rest, kiddo,” Tyler said quietly. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. You’re okay.”

  Any other sort of comment she could have handled easily. But the unexpected sympathetic comment unnerved her. She avoided his eyes, looping her thumbs in her jeans pockets and staring intently at the black asphalt. She counted four flattened wads of bubble gum in one square yard. “Of course I’m okay. I’m always okay.”

  Tyler sighed like a man heavily burdened with a puzzle he couldn’t solve. “There you go again, getting all thorny and defensive on me. I’m not here to torture you, believe it or not.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.” He paused, picking his words carefully. “You looked…lonely.”

  Jenny stared at him. Blunt honesty—she hadn’t expected that. It must run in his family. The physical pain that constantly lived in her chest breathed with new fire, ragged heartbeats filling her throat.

  Lonely?

  Truth be told, she could hardly remember back to a time when she had been anything but lonely. But she was acutely uncomfortable that he suspected it, that he had recognized it in her. When she had stalked out of the bowling alley, she had been propelled by righteous indignation and an all-too-familiar urge to leave everyone and everything behind. Once outside, however, and without any warning at all, the starless sky had suddenly become too dark and the night too cold and the motel across the street too far away. Too many hurdles to jump. She had sat down on the bumper of the nearest truck and closed her eyes, concentrating on suppressing the cold sickness inside of her. She just needed a little time, like a wounded animal who crawled in a cave to heal. But he had come along and pulled her back to reality before she was prepared to face it again.

  “I want you to stay away from me,” she said. “Please.”

  And then she pushed past him, her eyes on the neon vacancy sign of the Cotton Tree Motel. Sanctuary. That was where she needed to be right now, holed up in her room with the chain on the door and the curtains drawn. And tomorrow she would be gone from this place, on the road to somewhere new and blessedly unfamiliar.

  Afterward she didn’t remember seeing the oncoming car. One second she was furiously walking, thinking and planning, the next she was blinded by headlights, frozen in place like a startled deer trying to cross the road. There was a terrible roaring in her ears: it may have been herself screaming or Tyler shouting or the deafening screech of brakes.

  Light and sound, then…nothing.

  Tyler never let her out of his arms until they kicked him out of the emergency room at the county hospital. And then he stood immediately outside the little white curtain that was pulled around Jenny’s bed and shouted at the nurses who came and went, feeling as if he was dying by inches. His limited medical training told him Jenny wasn’t seriously injured. Her vital signs were strong, and he’d detected no sign of broken bones. But she hadn’t regained consciousness since the car grazed her, tossing her like a limp rag doll in a sickening somersault onto the soft shoulder of the road.

  At that moment Tyler discovered what terror was. He’d faced wild broncos and crazed Brahma bulls, he’d been stomped on, tossed head-over-heels and dragged through the dirt…but never had he been afraid.

  Until tonight.

  He scarcely drew another breath until nearly an hour later, when Dr. Grady Hansen came out from the curtained cubicle and told him Jenny would be just fine.

  “Fine?” Tyler barely recognized the strained sound of his own voice. Grady’s professional opinion was less than reassuring. It was hard to look at someone you’d gotten drunk with in high school and think of him as a qualified doctor. “What do you mean, she’s fine? What about all the blood on her face and hair? She wasn’t even conscious. Did you see her knees, Grady? Her jeans were shredded. And her ankle was swollen. Did you see that?”

  “I noticed it, yes.”

  “Then what do you mean fine? There was a knot on her head as big as a softball. You’re not very o
bservant, Grady. We need a second opinion—”

  “Yell a little louder,” Grady snapped, snagging a fistful of Tyler’s shirt and dragging him out to the waiting room. “There are probably a few ladies in the maternity wing who didn’t hear you.”

  “I need a doctor, not a damned comedian.”

  “You need a swift kick in the butt,” Grady threw back, unimpressed. “That lady back in there needs a doctor. I’ll be putting a few stitches in her elbow and right knee. I’ve also ordered X rays of her ankle. I’m worried about a fracture. And she has regained consciousness, so relax and go patrol the parking lot or something while I try and do my job, okay? If all goes well, you should be able to take her home in a couple of hours.”

  “Home?” Tyler said blankly.

  Grady frowned. “She’s a friend of yours, right? When you brought her in, I just assumed…”

  Tyler closed his eyes, a wave of relief washing over him. The heavy crushing sensation in the vicinity of his heart finally began to ease. He dropped his body back against the wall, needing the support. “Yes. She’s my friend. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Well, good. I can’t release her unless I know she has someplace to recuperate. Go get yourself a cup of coffee, Ty. You don’t look so hot.” Grady turned away, then looked back over his shoulder and wiggled his eyebrows above his wire-rimmed glasses. “By the way—love the shoes, Sheriff.”

  Tyler looked down at his feet. He still wore the ancient red-and-green bowling shoes from the Ritz Classic. Technically speaking, he had just committed his first felony.

  He decided against arresting himself. Instead he wandered down the hall to the windowless little room that served as a chapel and sat on a hard wooden bench for over an hour. He didn’t exactly say a prayer of thanks for tonight’s miracle, but he figured that somebody somewhere understood exactly what he was feeling.

  Jenny didn’t remember much.

  She knew she’d been at the hospital for a time. She recalled talking to a youngish doctor with a droll smile and a reassuring voice. She definitely remembered somebody saying, “This is going to sting a little bit,” as they scrubbed the gravel out of her knees. And she remembered that it had stung more than a little.

  At some point a nurse wearing green scrubs had given her a shot in the hip, and Jenny had drifted away in a lovely chemical trance, completely free of pain. End of memory.

  A few minutes, a few hours, a few days later, she opened her eyes again. She saw nothing but a bright white light, obscenely bright. She found a blanket beneath her fingers and pulled it up over her head, trying to escape the light. When she emerged again, she did it by painful inches, coming out into the world like a new chick hatching from an egg. She realized several things all at once. She was wearing a completely indecent and undignified hospital gown and nothing else. It was daylight. Most startling, however, was the life-size clown with a shock of orange hair and purple-striped pants floating in the air above the bed.

  As her foggy brain cleared a bit, Jenny realized she was looking at a stuffed toy dangling from a giant hook on the ceiling. She looked to her left and saw orange wicker shelves crowded with clowns of every size and every description. She looked to the right and saw a glossy six-by-four poster of a…clown. The bold caption at the bottom read, No Bozos Allowed.

  So this was what happened when you died and had too many black marks next to your name. Saint Peter locked the pearly gates against you and sent you to clown hell.

  Her vision was growing blurred when the door swung open and Tyler Cook joined her in circus purgatory. He was wearing a blue terry bathrobe and had wet, wild hair hanging down into his eyes. The robe dangled open in a wide vee over his chest and stomach, then was crossed and belted dangerously low on his narrow hips.

  He stared at her intently, obviously startled by her tears. “You’re crying,” he said, dumbstruck. In all the painful procedures at the hospital, she had never shed a tear, nor uttered a single ouch. She’d been a rock.

  “Am I?” Blinking in confusion, Jenny touched her cheek. Yes, her fingers came away wet. “I didn’t realize. Strange.” She frowned. “What happened to me? I’m feeling…really confused.”

  “You’re probably still in shock. You don’t get hit by a Pontiac every day.” Though he tried to sound bright and bracing, Tyler was still suffering the fallout of witnessing her accident. He’d seen one or two bad accidents in his career as the sheriff, but he couldn’t remember a time when he had felt more helpless. He’d seen the car coming at Jenny and had known instantly that he couldn’t get to her in time. He simply had to watch it happen. The horror and sickening fear was still with him, slipping beneath his skin and keeping him constantly chilled. “You gave me a pretty good scare.” A vast understatement.

  “My brain is all foggy.” Jenny tried to rub her eyes, then discovered the pads of her fingers were raw and sore, as if they’d been rubbed across a cheese grater. “What did you say? A Pontiac hit me? Well, of all the dumb—ouch, my poor hands…”

  Tyler couldn’t quite gauge the degree of her consciousness. She’d come to a couple of times on the way home from the hospital, but never seemed to be completely coherent. She had the same glazed look in her eyes now as she’d had in the emergency room. White face, overbright dark sequins for eyes.

  “We’ll backtrack a little,” he said gently. “I just brought you home from the hospital a few hours ago. You don’t remember being in the hospital?”

  “I remember…yes, I remember the hospital. And I remember being in a bowling alley. But after that…” She paused, frowning. “No, it’s sort of fuzzy after that. I don’t remember a car hitting me, Pontiac, Chevy or Ford. Although I feel like I took on all three. My whole body hurts.” Then, in a different voice, “Do I bowl?”

  “Well, you didn’t last night.” Tyler dredged up a wan smile, trying to look reassuring. Still, something about her glazed expression kicked his heart into double-time. “You were just visiting. You’re not in a league or anything, so relax. It’s all right, everything will fall into place with a little time.”

  “What about…” She paused, trying to make some sense out of the quagmire of her scattered memories. “I remember meeting you at the Mexican restaurant. You wore some kind of a uniform, didn’t you? You’re a forest ranger or something. Your name is Tyler…”

  “Actually, I arrested you in the Mexican restaurant. And I’m the sheriff, not a forest ranger. Forest rangers have to wear ridiculous green shorts, which I would never even consider. Yes, my name is Tyler Cook. See? Things are coming back to you. For a minute there, I thought you were suffering from some kind of post-traumatic—”

  “How did I get there?”

  Tyler shook the wet hair out of his eyes to study her better. “What? How did you get where?”

  Jenny’s huge eyes looked like painful bruises in her pale face. “That place, that Mexican restaurant. Did I come with someone? I remember a little lady with white hair…”

  “Ella,” Tyler said in a hollow voice. “No, you didn’t come with Ella. Come on, concentrate.”

  “I don’t have anything to concentrate on.” Jenny had just delved deep into her mind, pre-Enchilada Ernie’s, and come up completely empty. Completely, totally, shockingly empty. “I’m not kidding. I’m going into panic mode here. I’m trying, but…” There was a short pause, then she said accusingly, “Wait a minute. You threw me over your shoulder! You carried me out of that restaurant like a sandbag. What could you have been thinking?”

  “I was thinking that I’d just arrested you!” Then, defending himself, “You weren’t going willingly. You weren’t at all cooperative.”

  “Why did you arrest me in the first place?”

  She was becoming agitated, which wasn’t good for her. Tyler sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed, making sure not to jostle her. She was confused enough as it was. “I don’t know where to start. Let’s see… First you ate dinner at Ernie’s and couldn’t pay for it. Then I found out
you didn’t have a motorcycle license.”

  “I’m a criminal?” She absorbed this for a moment, wide-eyed and apprehensive. “I don’t feel like a criminal. I’m not a Hell’s Angel or anything, am I?”

  “That depends on your definition,” Tyler said wryly. “Personally, I think Hell’s Angel describes you perfectly. But no, you were traveling alone when I first saw you. And you’re definitely a novice biker. You don’t know the first thing about motorcycles, with the possible exception of how to kill yourself on one.”

  “But I ate when I couldn’t pay for it?”

  “Not exactly. You ate and then couldn’t find your wallet. Remember that nice lady, Ella? She has a little problem with intermittent kleptomania. Fortunately, sooner or later she gives everything back to its owner. Does any of this ring a bell?”

  “Yes! Yes, I remember,” she breathed softly. “And that wicked waitress of the west was absolutely abominable to me.”

  “I think you might have seen The Wizard of Oz too many times.” Tyler was feeling a little better now. Obviously, she was just out of focus because of her concussion. Fortunately it all seemed to be coming back to her. “See? No need for panic at all. You’re fine. Although I do need to know who I should contact about your accident. I was going to run a check on your motorcycle license info, but…I was busy at the hospital threatening your doctor all night. Who would you like me to call?”

  On a wispy strand of breath, “Who?”

  “Your family. You told me you weren’t married, but there must be someone worrying about you somewhere.”

  “My family? They’re…I’m not…I don’t remember who…”

  “Jenny Kyle,” Tyler prodded gently. “Your last name is Kyle.”

  “I know that,” she said. And she did.

  But that was all she knew.

  It hit her all at once. Everyone had a family, right? Of course she had a family. Somewhere. And they probably had names and she probably had a wealth of lovely family memories stored away in the attic of her temporarily out-of-order mind. But as hard as she tried, she couldn’t come up with anything. It was as if she had been born in the corner booth at Enchilada Ernie’s.