by Todd Wynn
Sara veered off the sidewalk and into the grass. Jeremy followed. Larry Greyson Memorial Park was right in the middle of downtown Juniper, surrounded by old buildings that had been restored and converted into modern shops. It was a great place for an afternoon stroll. As they admired the tiny ponds and the winding rows of rose bushes, Jeremy asked whether she planned to stay in Juniper or return to Nova Scotia. She didn’t know. He asked what she wanted to do with her life. And once again, she didn’t know.
“Well, what do you know?” he asked in a way that made her laugh.
“I wish I knew,” she replied. She sat on the edge of a marble slab that formed the base of a statue depicting a galloping horse. Jeremy leaned against the shoulder of the metal horse.
“So, how old are you?” he asked.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She couldn’t stand to hear herself say I don’t know one more time. She suddenly became serious.
“There’s something that I should tell you,” she said. He saw that conflict in her eyes again.
“What?” he asked, petting the horse as if it were real.
“I have a certain condition . . . I can’t remember.”
“Is that the condition?” he asked. “Or are you saying you can’t remember the condition?”
“That’s it,” she clarified. “I have no memory of anything before eight months ago.”
“You mean amnesia?”
“I guess,” she said. “But I think it’s something different.”
She had Jeremy’s attention, now. He reached up and took hold of the horse’s flowing mane, settling in for a long story. “You’re going to have to explain that,” he said.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“How about the beginning?” he said.
The simplicity of this comforted her. At least she knew exactly where the beginning was.
“Okay,” she said with a sigh, “that takes us back to December eighth of last year.”
Sara’s mind drifted back. It all started eight months ago, at the Downing Springs Mall. Sara had awoken and found herself on the floor in the corner of a department-store dressing room. From that low angle, she was looking right under the dressing-room door to see a pair of high heels walking around racks of clothes.
Sara got the impression the store was about to close, and she wondered whether she should be headed to the exit. Something was missing, though, and she was waiting for it. She was waiting for the memories that would flood back into her mind and explain how she arrived here.
No memories would come, no matter how hard she tried to summon them. Instead of a memory, she had a folded piece of paper taped to the back of her hand. She peeled the tape back and unfolded the note, which was as frank and direct as it was startling:
Your name is Sara Collins. You won’t remember anything. Don’t even try. You live with Rupert and Margaret Nathan above their hardware store. They think you’re from Nova Scotia. Just go along with it. If anyone detains you and asks you strange questions, stick with that story. But don’t mention this note to anyone!
Somebody will return in about a week and contact you to fill you in on everything and let you know where to go from there. Try to blend in until then.
Nathan's Hardware: 215 Alabaster Ave - Juniper, IN
Destroy this note immediately!
What she did immediately with the note was read it again . . . and again . . . and again. She was trying to find the humor in it . . . trying to understand it as a joke . . . trying to find some purpose in it. The note made no sense at all, except for one little fact: she had no memory of her identity.
Somewhere among the multiple readings, she had gotten to her feet and had sat down on the bench in the corner of the dressing room.
Knock-Knock-Knock. A knuckle rapped lightly against the dressing-room door.
“We’re about to close,” a woman’s voice said. “If you have any purchases, you’ll need to take them to the register, now.”
Sara folded the note and pushed it into her pocket. She slid the latch and opened the door. The lady was still standing there, pointing to her watch.
“You have about three minutes,” the lady announced, on the verge of turning annoyed.
Sara smiled and walked right past her. The note had instructed her not to try to remember anything. This was a pointless directive. All Sara could do was try to remember. Over the next eight months, trying to remember would become her preeminent preoccupation.
To put it more accurately, Sara could remember almost everything. She remembered the language. She remembered the days of the week . . . the months of the year. She could name most of the fifty states. She even remembered what foods she liked. There was a strange duality to her memory, though. When she tried to recall her childhood, she felt a dull, nagging blankness. She felt it again when she asked herself about her parents. It was as if these parts of her past were being kept from her.
Sara exited the store and remembered where she parked her bike—even remembered the combination to the lock. Part of her was looking over her shoulder for secret agents who might detain her and ask her these strange questions, as the note mentioned. The other part of her hoped all this was nonsense.
As she made her way to Nathan’s Hardware, with dusk settling in over the little town, she was satisfied that no agents, secret or otherwise, were after her. Everything was peaceful. She had entered the address into her phone and was able to follow the directions. As she turned on Alabaster Ave, she began to recognize landmarks. She had definitely been here before. She would be able to find her way without the map.
When Sara finally arrived at Nathan’s Hardware, it was a dreamlike experience. She knew her way around, but she couldn’t remember having been there before. She moved up the stairs, anticipating each creak of the wooden steps, surrounded by a comfortable familiarity.
She wondered what the note meant when it said, They think you’re from Nova Scotia. If she wasn’t from Nova Scotia, where was she from? Why would the note go to the trouble of telling her where she wasn’t from, while failing to tell her where she was from?
Mrs. Nathan’s face appeared from the kitchen, warm, friendly, and familiar. “Did you find your earring?” Mrs. Nathan asked, as sweet as could be. Sara recognized the voice. But she couldn’t locate any tangible memory of it. Now, Sara got around to hearing the words.
“I don’t know,” Sara shrugged. She quickly realized she would have to do better. “I mean . . . not yet. I’m still looking for it.”
“It’ll turn up,” Mrs. Nathan replied.
Sara turned the corner and stepped into her room. It was just as she expected. She could remember everything in the room . . . except herself. She felt a decision welling up inside her. She would either have to break down into tears or laugh out loud. She didn’t know herself well enough to guess which it would be, until she heard the laughter rumbling off the walls of her tiny room. She flopped down on the bed and hoped she could sleep off this strange day.
“Then what happened?” Jeremy asked.
“I waited.”
“You didn’t go to the police or the hospital?”
“No.”
This was starting to sound suspicious—made up even. “You still haven’t been to a doctor?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the note said not to,” she replied. “It said not to tell anyone.”
This made Jeremy laugh. He already had concerns about such a perfect girl going out with him. This could explain it. Either she’s nuts—which also explained why she didn’t have a boyfriend—or she was toying with him, trying to make a fool out of him. He wasn’t biting.
“So, you can’t tell the police or the people you’re staying with,” he reasoned. “But you can tell me . . . does the note mention me?”
“No,” she said, before detecting the facetious tone.
He didn’t want to flat out call her a liar, but he didn’t want to be t
he butt of her joke, either. Those two possibilities still loomed: crazy or toying with him. He couldn’t decide which he preferred. Either way, he needed to end this date quickly and get back to reality.
“That is bizarre,” he said. “It’s hard to believe, though.”
With that, she instantly knew she shouldn’t have told him. She should have listened to the note. She should have tried to repair the damage by telling him that it was just a joke—that when she gets nervous she makes bad jokes. It was too late. A separation had grown between them.
On the walk back to his truck, she tried to reestablish a normal conversation. She talked about the trees and the birds. She asked him about DePauw University—when he was going, what he would study, when he planned to return. It wasn’t working, though. Jeremy had closed the book on this crazy girl and he politely dropped her back at Nathan’s Hardware as soon as humanly possible.
“I had a good time,” she said, as she let herself out of the passenger’s side of the truck.
“Yeah, me too,” Jeremy replied, waiting for her to close the door so he could drive off.
14
The New Plan
Stewart stood in front of Stone Ridge Cabin, remembering how snow used to cover his feet here in the winter. His arms were folded, and his right hand stretched up to his face with his finger perched across his bottom lip. This was his thinking pose, and it was serving him well.
Mindy, Web, and New Guy stood around him. They didn’t have thinking poses, or if they did, they weren’t using them. What they didn’t know was that while half of Stewart’s mind was focused on their next move, the other half was enjoying a bitter-sweet stroll down memory lane. He had first stumbled across this cabin in a search for the perfect romantic retreat. As he looked down on the landscape now, every tree and rock was a reminder of her—the one who got away. Suggesting that the Redundancy Department buy the property was his twisted way of holding on to the memories.
A sudden shift in the wind refocused his thoughts, and he dived fully into the opportunity at hand. As it was his tendency, he imagined there was something big at the end of this maze, and he wanted to be the one to claim it.
“If we turn this information over, we’ll be lost in the paperwork,” Stewart reasoned. “But if we find them and bring them in . . .” he smiled a very natural smile, “we’ll get all the glory.”
Glory, Mindy wondered, was this really about glory? This was a new concept to her. She had never operated with glory as an objective.
“Is everybody in?” Stewart asked, as an afterthought, much the way someone pushes you out of an airplane and then asks whether you have a parachute.
Web nodded, because he always nodded when Stewart expected him to. New Guy wore his usual stoic glare. His purpose was to follow orders, not to make decisions. That left Mindy, who was filled with questions. But she knew Stewart had made up his mind and was only asking whether she wanted to tag along. She did. So she shrugged and said, “Sure.”
In actuality, Mindy was anything but sure. She wasn’t sure what they would be doing. She wasn’t sure they were allowed to do it. And she wasn’t sure Stewart could be trusted to make the right decisions. That’s when she felt it again. Damn it! She was attracted to him. That’s the only explanation for a mountain of unsure turning into the word sure.
This meant Stewart’s team would be stepping outside official protocol and tracking down these trespassers on its own. This gave Web pause.
“Last time we did something like this,” Web complained, “I lost like forty hours of overtime.”
“We got that figured out,” Stewart said. “It’ll all be on the clock. Don’t worry about it. This is different.”
“Forty hours,” Web moaned.
“It’s different,” Stewart insisted—a devilish grin and a look of adventure in his eye. “You heard the part about the heart-signal tracker, right?”
Web knew exactly what Stewart was thinking, but as usual, Web had his doubts.
“I don’t know,” Web said.
“What’s not to know? When do you get an opportunity like this?”
Mindy turned to New Guy. “What’d I miss?” she whispered.
New Guy shrugged. What they both had missed was this:
About eighteen months ago, Stewart and Web confiscated a bounty hunter’s ship for landing in an improper zone. The bounty hunter was just on vacation with his family, but upon logging the contents of the ship, Web discovered a battered and worn box that turned out to be a highly illegal heart-signal tracker. This was a new one for Web, and the technology fascinated him. He never knew the heart produced a signal, let alone that it could be tracked. Web read everything he could on the subject, and he was especially struck by the repeated assertion that heart signals cannot be faked. That’s all Web needed to hear. It was a challenge he couldn’t resist.
Web accepted that a natural signal from a heart couldn’t be duplicated, but fooling the tracking device was not about nature. It was about technology. He couldn’t create a natural heart signal any more than he could create a natural heart. But he could trick the tracking device into thinking that he had. That was the theory that drove him. Stewart had seen this new hobby of Web’s as a waste of time, but he was suddenly seeing it in a new light.
“We can lead them right to us,” Stewart said.
“It’s mostly hypothetical at this point,” Web protested. “It’s not exactly functional, yet.”
“Then you have some work to do. Start thinking about how to get it functional. We’re going Home.”
Home was not a person’s house. It was the strategically chosen name of the headquarters for The Limestone Deposit Survey Group. The word Home was selected after extensive research and calculation. Once again, the purpose was to dampen suspicion and avoid attention. Thorough investigation suggested steering clear of words like Headquarters, Lab, Base, Compound, or Tree Fort. They all piqued curiosity and generated follow-up thoughts and questions. If one agent was overheard saying to another, We need to get back to the base or I just got a call from the compound, eyes would widen and curiosity would start looking for cats to kill.
Home on the other hand, was nonstimulating. Culture had trained people to have a sympathetic response to the word. When a party was winding down or the work day was coming to a close and someone said, I need to get home, the immediate response was to conjure up images of one’s own home and to reflect on how wonderful it would be to return there. On the other hand, upon hearing the phrase we need to get all this data back to the lab, people would begin to ask what type of lab, how many people work there, and more unwanted questions.
The SUV headed out of the woods, away from Stone Ridge Cabin, with New Guy behind the wheel and Stewart in the passenger’s seat. Everyone seemed to be locked away in their own thoughts. Mindy was sitting behind Stewart, watching the trees pass. She thought back to yesterday, when she first sat down with Stewart. It was at a restaurant called Tommy Clark’s, right downtown. That’s where his e-mail had said to meet. She arrived twelve minutes early and found that he was already seated at an outside table. He called her over by name, probably having recognized her from a picture in her file. She was carrying a rather official-looking attaché bag, and her dress was a little overdone for noon. He rose and took her hand as she arrived. She had offered a formal handshake, but he cradled her fingers in a way that made it clear he was a man and she was a woman. He led her into the seat across from him. The whole thing had a very James Bond feel.
“What made you want to work with limestone?” he asked, as he took his seat.
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “I guess it sounded . . .” she caught the word interesting before it could slip out. It would have made it seem trivial. She tried again, “It sounded . . . challenging and meaningful.”
“Interesting is what it is,” Stewart said, “very, very interesting. Have you ever had any encounters with limestone before?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” she a
nswered.
“Well, that’s the key . . . awareness,” he said. “We’re all surrounded by limestone. But most of us don’t know it.”
Mindy was 95 percent sure they were talking about aliens, but 5 percent of her feared he was actually talking about limestone.
“You’ll get better at spotting the presence of limestone,” Stewart said. “There are little clues and markers that you learn to pick up.”
Mindy pulled a folder from her bag. “I brought my résumé,” she said, “if that’s something you want to look at.”
“I’ve already seen your credentials,” Stewart said. “And this isn’t a job interview. For a job like this, you can’t do an interview in a restaurant. We’ll go into the field tomorrow morning, and we’ll see what happens. You just have to jump in. Then you’ll know if you can do it or not.” He shrugged. “Some people can’t take it. They get that limestone dust all over them, and they just want to wash it off and pretend it never happened.”
“I’ll try my best to fit in.”
“Oh no, don’t try to fit in. You’ll either fit or you won’t.”
Mindy suddenly feared he was trying to get rid of her.
“I hope it works out, though,” he added with a smile. “I think you would be a real asset.”
Mindy’s fear evaporated. Maybe he wasn’t trying to get rid of her.
“And pack an overnight bag,” he said. “You always want to be prepared on a job like this.”
Mindy nodded.
“How do you feel about lasagna?” Stewart asked.
A weight lifted off her shoulders. “I feel great about it.”
“Good, that’s what I ordered for you.”
Mindy wanted to be offended or at least irritated that he had taken such a liberty. But there was a confidence about him that made it okay.
As Mindy gazed out the window of the SUV, watching the trees pass, she wondered how she stacked up after her first day. Did she pass her interview? Did she fit? Stewart said she would know. As she thought back over the day, she did know. She had faced spaceships, stealth generators, aliens, abductions, and rival government agencies. Through it all, her heart pounded and her mind raced, but never once did she want to get off this ride. She fit.