by Dale Mayer
The girl involved had dropped out. The teacher had been fired. But Trevor didn’t think he’d faced charges, and he wasn’t sure why. He sat back and tried to remember the name of the teacher. But it eluded him. In a way he felt sorry for the man. He’d disappeared afterwards whereas the girl had laughed and talked about it like a conquest. As if she’d gone after him on purpose.
And she likely had. She’d been that kind of girl. She’d also had a boyfriend at the time who hadn’t been as impressed. But she’d just laughed it off and told him to deal with it.
But the teacher…and his wife…interesting he couldn’t remember their names. Surely it wasn’t important. But it bugged him, the names just sat in the back of his mind, refusing to come forward.
He returned to the information but although the police had done their due diligence, nothing had come of it, and as it had gone cold they’d deemed his death an accident.
He’d always wondered if it hadn’t been suicide. At least when he wasn’t looking at his fellow students and wondering if one of them had killed him.
Chapter 28
She rolled over then rolled over again, hating the sense of unease lying just beneath the surface. She’d slept heavily but only for a few minutes while Trevor was working beside her.
Damn he was sexy. In that half-light, the shadows highlighted his lean features, the square jaw, and total focus on his laptop.
Was he as unaware of her as she was aware of him? Lord, that would be seriously sad. She’d been attracted to him since their first meeting but being a mess, she was hardly going to take him over that step into an intimate relationship. With memories all screwed up, she couldn’t trust the nudges in her head. The only one she couldn’t ignore was the one that said she’d met him before. But who knew where?
Trevor was special. A knight in shining armor. Look at the way he’d stepped in to help her. Not just at the beginning when he gave her the protection of his name, but even now. She had gotten bank cards but hadn’t thought to take cash out. So far he’d paid for everything.
He obviously wasn’t broke, but she didn’t want to be beholden to him any more than she was already. Maybe she could gift him a chunk as thanks for saving her.
Somehow she figured he’d be horribly insulted if she did. Her eyes drifted closed.
Still, she couldn’t have him go to all this expense for a stranger.
She opened her eyes again. The room was dark, but he was still working on the laptop, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“You should be sleeping,” he murmured without looking at her.
“I was,” she said in a sleepy voice. “Memories are rolling through my head. I did use the name Miasha to hide from my father. Silly because I had to use my legal name to buy the shop in the first place.” She sighed. “I feel like such a failure at times.”
“Maybe. But it was an understandable attempt on your part. Besides the flower shop made you feel happy so who cares about him.” He frowned at her. “Go back to sleep. You haven’t had anywhere near enough rest.” He sounded so concerned.
She wanted to laugh. He was so damn good looking. Somehow she’d fallen into a marriage with someone she’d never have considered would be available to her. Her boyfriends had been on the bad side. Because those guys were the only ones who were only a little terrified of her father. She’d dated one bad ass from the bad school a long time ago. It hadn’t lasted obviously but as a trip on the wild side, it had been crazy and disheartening. She’d walked away after six weeks. Some things should be experienced in small doses, and this guy had no intention of sticking to one girl. So when she caught him with another girl – his old girlfriend – she’d found out later – she’d walked. He’d yelled behind her, Good riddance and that she’d be back. They all came back.
Well, his ego had been healthy, that was for sure. Hers had taken a beating back then, but it wasn’t like she had anyone to bemoan her situation to. She knew her father would do something seriously bad to the kid who’d taken his daughter’s virginity in the back of his pickup truck on a starry night. She smiled. It had a shitty end, but there’d been some very good things to the relationship. Never knock a guy who’s got a lot of sexual experience and is quite happy to take his time – at least in the beginning.
She’d loved her time with him. But it was stolen. She knew it. He knew it. Regardless of how he felt about it at the end.
There was no way she’d even recognize him now. He’d been headed down an ugly path in life. He’d hung out with a rough crowd. She’d spent some time with them all, got to know several, had really liked one, but she wasn’t the type to pull a double-cross out of the air or cheat on her partner so she’d regretfully kept her hands off.
When her eyes drifted closed again and she gently dozed in the history in her mind, she wondered if these thoughts were only now coming to the surface that she’d disposed of a mess of blocks. Had they been in the deep dark recesses of her mind for a reason? She let the memories drift in closer, reveling in the sense of completion she felt. She wasn’t done by any means but that she could now remember the boyfriend, his group. That stage of short-lived rebellion…
She opened her eyes and caught sight of Trevor’s profile.
And sucked in her breath.
“Boots?”
Trevor froze. That gaze swung her way and like a laser it locked on her. “What did you say?” he asked in a shocked tone of voice.
“Boots? Were you called Boots way back when?”
He took a deep breath, then gave an abrupt nod. “I was. How did you know that?”
Frowning, she struggled to sit up in the bed, then turned to face him.
“Can you read minds now,” he said only half joking, but his tone hard.
Damn. She shook her head, wondering why she hadn’t kept her mouth shut. The name had just blurted out.
“Pick up images, do psychometric? Telepathy?”
“I don’t even know what those are,” she whispered. “It was a name from my past.”
He reared back. “Sweetheart. We lived in very different worlds back then. And that name is definitely part of my history, but not a good part. How do you know it?”
At that, she remembered the boyfriend’s name. “Remember Sticks?”
His eyebrows shot up to his hairline. “Not too many people know either of those names.”
She winced. “Right. I can’t say that stage of my life was happy either.”
He closed his laptop and turned to face her. “Tell me.”
“Not sure I should actually. Kind of wishing I’d kept my mouth shut if the truth be told,” she muttered. “I guess the blocks were good for something.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding in understanding. “The blocks you removed are allowing memories to slide back into your consciousness.” He laughed. “There are lots of memories I’m glad are nothing but distant bits and pieces.”
“Right and presumably I will have that same benefit with time, but right now it seems like the memories are in Technicolor and right here in my face.” She winced. “And I’m wishing they weren’t.”
“So where do you know those two names from?” he asked, his gaze intent as he studied her face.
“I dated Sticks for a few weeks,” she admitted.
“You what?” Trevor reared back to stare at her. “How the hell…”
“Yeah, see I have a rebellious streak. My father and Will refused to let me date any of the nice guys I met so I dressed up and went to find some bad guys that might have the guts to face my father down.” She shrugged. “It was stupid. Dangerous as hell and yeah, it didn’t last long.”
“You and Sticks?” He shook his head. “There’s no way I’d have ever guessed it.”
“Right, until the blocks were removed I didn’t recognize you.” She was also a little miffed he didn’t recognize her, but she kept that to herself.
“Lord. If you’d been my daughter, hanging around that group… I’d have given you a good spankin
g and locked you up until you were thirty.”
She laughed. “Yeah, my father pretty much threatened the same thing when he found out I was going out with a college boy not long after Sticks and I broke up.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Sticks liked them all ages.” He stared at her in bemusement. “I still can’t get my head wrapped around the idea.”
“Neither can I.” She paused. “But I remember you. I really liked you. Liked the way you were inside.”
“Well, there wasn’t much to like on the outside.” He snorted. “I hated my life and was ready to do anything to make it better.”
“Why do you think I was slumming,” she said with a grin. “But I went straight to a college boy afterwards.”
“So you had to dip into the ghetto for a taste and after that you ran straight upscale.”
“Hey, I might not have made the best decision at the time, but it was pretty damn easy to see the writing on the wall and recognize I was out of my element.”
“I’m still trying to figure out when you were there. If you knew me…”
“Sticks had gone back to his old girlfriend. I found them together so I walked,” she said candidly. “I don’t think he was faithful at any point in the six weeks I went out with him, but what do I know.”
“Six weeks?” He snorted. “For Sticks that was a long time, except for his one on-again off-again girl – but he had a diet of side dishes. No wonder I don’t remember you.”
“Well, I wasn’t blonde then. I was a redhead. Wore a leather jacket from my father’s gardener that was beat up and scratched to shit. A ton of makeup to hide my face, and heels. I always wore heels back then.”
His gaze widened. “Oh no. You weren’t Candy, were you?”
She laughed. “Oh God, even that name sounds so bad.”
“And you were bad,” he cried. “You drank with him, attended our stupid parties down at the railroads…” He moved the laptop and reached out to grab her chin and turn it toward him… “Holy crap, it is you…”
She grinned. “Yeah, but you’ll never see me look like that again.”
“Good,” he said in all seriousness. “You never belonged there. Even then. We used to wonder what the rich bitch was running away from. You were there for a few weeks then gone.”
“And now you know why.” She paused. “I guess I didn’t really fit in, did I?”
“No, honey. You were way too nice.” He smiled in memory. “You had manners. Expected to be treated well and maybe because of that, we did. We joked about you all the time. But it was more that Sticks was moving up in life. Hell, I had the hots for you back then, but you were Sticks’s girl, and I didn’t poach. I figured that when it was over I’d see if you were interested, but when it was over you checked out and I never saw you again. And I looked,” he admitted.
“And now I’m your wife,” she said with a fat grin.
He looked startled at the reminder then laughed. “Oh my God. You are too. That’s so funny. Sticks was pissed when you left. He was the one who did the ditching…and hadn’t been too kind about you leaving.” He paused then added thoughtfully, “I think he might have known you were pretending to be someone else. He often joked you were his ticket out of the ditches. When you disappeared like that…”
“He’d been pissed.” She grinned. “I acted like a lady then too. I lifted my nose in the air, gave his girlfriend a snooty look and walked. All the way back home and back to my life. I ditched the biker tough girl look. After seeing his girlfriend, I knew I’d been just playing and put on the clean cut lady look and danced into the closest college.”
“You were a player?”
“I was a player. It’s the only way I could defy my father. That meant I was going to do it as often and in the wrong direction as possible.” She shook her head. “I look back and wonder at the things I did to defy him.”
“Why do parents make life so tough that we feel that’s our only option?”
She nodded. “You do understand.” Her grin lit up the room. “By the way – I had a huge crush on you back then too. Figured I had to break with Sticks first, but when I saw him with his girlfriend I figured you’d be the same so I walked away from you too.”
*
Trevor struggled to reconcile the girl he’d known briefly back then with the woman sitting in front of him now. He’d been attracted to her years ago, and apparently that hadn’t changed. He’d known she hadn’t belonged with them when he’d met her. She’d tried hard, but there was an innocence to her that was out of place. With it was a desperation that overlaid her actions. They’d been desperate back then too, but that was to survive, to be someone. In her case it was like a caged bird desperate to live a little. She’d had such a clean cut look. The manners she’d used. She was every inch a lady and had no idea.
All of this matched what Dr. Maddy said.
“Do you remember what else was happening around that time?” he asked curiously. His gaze caught sight of the files on the bed. He’d been reading about the murder of his old teacher when Hannah’s memories returned. It was a hell of a connection. Coincidence? Only there was no such thing.
What year had Hannah been there? Sticks had broken up with his girlfriend several times but usually only during a fight and by the time the fight was over the breakup was too. But this time his girlfriend had broken it off with him because she was seeing someone else. When had that been?
“It was in the summer heading into my last year of school. Another reason the college boys were off limits. They were too old for me.”
She smiled a sideways smile that let him know quite clearly she’d known what that meant and had likely been all over it. Especially if it pissed off her father. Not for the first time he wondered about staying single and not having kids. He’d die if his daughter went down the same path she’d gone. He shuddered at the thought. “And for good reason.”
“Sure, but I wasn’t about conforming then. I was all about escaping.”
That he could understand. “What year did you graduate?”
She told him and he checked the file. “Do you remember when you broke it off?”
“The middle of August. Father was coming home from Europe and school was starting in a couple of weeks.”
Of course. It would have to be the same time. There was no other way this could be going down. For the first time he realized that her blocks and his friends, the murder of his teacher, might just all be connected. As completely off the wall as that sounded. He struggled to fit the timing together. He explained his confusion to her.
“Wait, so my father is suggesting that you might have killed this teacher or at least know more than you are saying and that all happened the same summer I was with Sticks?”
He nodded.
“No, it can’t be. It was summer holidays.”
“Our school ran twelve months of the year. It wasn’t a normal school. It was for those that had burned their chances at any other school. They called it an alternate school, but it was for dropouts and kids that wouldn’t conform. So when you were with Sticks, we would have been in school. We did have two weeks off, but that was at the end of August. Then we started again in September the same as everyone else.”
“He should have been studying for exams then?” she asked cautiously.
“No, we never really had exams. That was part of the normal system that didn’t work for us.” He smiled at her confusion. “We did a lot of reports, projects, and hands on experiments. We had four breaks in a year.”
“So if I’d have stuck around, I could have seen you guys more? That’s part of the reason the relationship wasn’t working. We only met in the evening. I had the days to fill, and I thought you and the group were off doing stuff without me all that time. I tried so hard to get involved in your daily lives, but Sticks wouldn’t let me.”
“He couldn’t. We were in school. He was also on the edge of getting suspended, and th
at would have been his last strike and he’d have been out.”
“Why didn’t he – you – tell me?” she asked in amazement. “If I’d known school was the reason, it would have been a lot easier on me.”
“We were ashamed,” he said calmly. “That school wasn’t anything to be proud of.” He shrugged. “I didn’t stay after fall session. I finally woke up and changed my life.”
“And Sticks? The others?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “When I walked, I walked all the way forward and never looked back. I heard from a couple of them over the years, but we never hung out again. I finally understood the world didn’t owe me anything. That if I wanted to have the future I envisioned I had to make it happen – no one else.”
“That’s a tough lesson.”
“It’s brutal. But I learned.”
She nodded. “Until you met me – and my father brought it all back.”
Chapter 29
“I guess what they say is true – you can never escape your past,” she said in a pensive voice.
“You may not be able to escape it, but you should be able to live with it.” He tapped the folder. “I didn’t kill my teacher but part of me always wondered if one of that group did.”
“You mean Sticks?”
“He’s just one suspect. There were seven of us originally then down to five by the time you showed up. Me and Sticks and three others. But remember the whole school was full of misfits.”
“I remember Streets and Rags.”
“And Stones was the last one,” he said. “I lost track of them all.”
“I’m glad you got out,” Hannah said. “You guys looked like you were going straight downhill.”
“Heaven, you and I have come back full circle.” He grinned at her. “Here we are together after all.”
She laughed. “That’s the best part. From me slumming to you now up on my level…”
“Whoa, there is no way your father is going to think I’m on your level. To him I’m a no one. An upstart who dared to defy him…”