Almost Remembered

by Marilyn Tracy

  Chas saw the first smile he’d seen on Allison’s face in hours. She masked it swiftly by the simple expedient of covering her mouth with a single finger, holding her lips compressed.

  He nearly chuckled aloud at seeing her amused.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, her voice muffled. “What happened?”

  “What happened was this trio of hooligans decided they’d get themselves a little peep show is what they did. So they rigged up the camera on a remote and let ‘er run while all the ladies was walking up and down the porch steps.”

  “That isn’t what we—Ow!” Jason tried protesting, but was halted midstream by a twist of his earlobe.

  The triplet behind Sammie Jo—Chas thought it was Josh, though it was difficult to tell when they were all dressed up—swallowed convulsively, then burst out, “We didn’t mean to do what you’re saying, Aunt Sammie Jo!”

  One of the others took up the chorus. “Honest. We didn’t know—”

  “How were we supposed to know it would just catch feet and stuff. Honest!”

  Josh, or whichever one he was, danced out of range of Sammie Jo’s feisty eyes and well out of reach of her hand. “Let ‘em go! We didn’t mean anything.”

  She turned loose of the other two boys and placed her hands on her thin hips while they rubbed their ears and looked pained beyond imagination, though having felt her grip, Chas wasn’t terribly surprised.

  Sammie Jo made a slow circle, eyeing each of the miscreants. “And who’s going to pay for this broken equipment, I’d like to know?”

  “We didn’t know it would get stepped on,” Jason said, rubbing his ear.

  “We’d already filmed the farm guys like you said. For a documentary,” Jonah added.

  “So we thought a documentary of Mom’s wedding would be cooler.”

  “Yeah, like, we didn’t think—”

  “Darned right you didn’t think!” Sammie Jo snapped. “But that doesn’t fix the equipment, or make up for Martha Jo twisting her ankle falling over the danged stuff. Lucky for her that Tom Adams can’t keep his eyes off her, or she’d have fallen for sure. But he caught her just in the nick of time.”

  “You gotta believe us. We didn’t know it would hurt anybody.”

  Martha Jo entered the kitchen about that time, limping just a little, less noticeably than Allison did, in fact. “I’m fine, Sammie Jo, really. No damage done.”

  Chas thought he’d never seen Martha Jo looking prettier, with her face slightly flushed and a stray strand of hair tickling the nape of her neck. He thought of the many times people in Almost had tried pairing the two of them. Just as they’d tried with Taylor and then Carolyn.

  He flicked a glance at Allison, who no longer looked amused. She looked ready to bolt again. He turned to see what she was looking at with such fear.

  All he could see was Martha Jo, pointing her finger at the boys. “You guys! You’re gonna owe me.”

  The boys burst into their litany of innocence. If they had once had the courage to look up, they would have seen every adult but Allison smiling.

  Again Chas looked from where Allison stood, obviously fighting an urge to run, to Martha Jo, a woman who couldn’t hurt a fly if her very life depended on it. But just behind her he could see Tom Adams, nearly half a head shorter than Martha Jo, grinning from ear to ear.

  Sammie Jo, never one to back down from a fight, wasn’t finished with her temper yet, though after a long and pointed double take seemed somewhat mollified by Martha’s glowing looks. “I’m glad to hear you aren’t hurt too badly. But that doesn’t take away from what these boys have done. Haven’t had the fancy stuff three days, and already going and breaking it.”

  Josh cried out, “But this isn’t the new stuff.”

  “And we didn’t mean to break anything, Aunt Sammie Jo!”

  “Double honest, we didn’t.”

  “Shush, now. Meaning to do something and doing it are two different things.”

  Chas saw Allison cover her mouth. To anyone else, it would appear she was trying hide a smile. As she had earlier. But to him, it looked as if she was trying to withhold a scream. Her eyes, wide and frightened, lifted from the shadows of the hallway and turned to his.

  He felt the force of her appeal for help as if she physically thrust it at him. He felt rocked by the sheer agony in her gaze.

  Suddenly, inexplicably he was frightened for her. What troubled her so much that she would turn to him?

  Jason groaned. “Community service,” he said.

  “Darned straight,” Sammie Jo barked, though her voice broke on what Chas knew was a repressed chuckle. “Two weeks.”

  Allison dragged her hand from her face.

  Chas felt her effort and inched toward her.

  “I can always get the equipment replaced,” she said. She cleared her throat. “It’s still under warranty.”

  Without looking at her niece, Sammie Jo said, “That’s good to know, honey. And that’ll be just about the right amount of time for the boys to work, thinking about how they’ll be more respectful of people in the future and will be more careful with their things. Won’t it, boys?”

  “But—”

  “No ‘buts,’” she snapped.

  “Yes’m,” came three downcast replies.

  Chas edged still closer to Allison, aware of her shallow breathing, the side glances she took at the back door. Was she afraid someone would enter suddenly, unexpectedly... or was she mapping out an escape route?

  Sammie Jo paced the kitchen in short, staccato steps. “Now, let’s see, you’ve already fresh painted Martha Jo’s place just a month back.”

  “Her son had to help us,” Jason said hotly. “He made the bomb!”

  Sammie Jo leveled a sharp look at him before lifting her eyes to Allison. Not meeting an amused kindred glance, she turned her attention back to the boys. “And you’ve - already done the beds at Alva Lu’s and painted the trim at Charlie Hampton’s...”

  “They can work with me for a while,” Chas said.

  Sammie Jo turned to give him an appraising stare. Her eyes softened, and a slight smile tilted her lips. “Why, thank you, Charles. That’ll do just fine.”

  Her face remained as soft when she turned back to the errant preteens. “And you’ll do everything he says and not bother any of the animals, is that clear?”

  The boys had brightened considerably. They’d often told Chas that working off the community-service hours Taylor had long ago established as the only means of discipline was best at his clinic. They had Billy to follow around and the animals to pet and feed. And often Chas would let them exercise the horses that might be in for whatever doctoring was needed.

  And now he would have an excuse to see Allison at least two or three times a day. Maybe she’d open up to him, tell him what was troubling her.

  He looked over at her again. Her eyes were on the back door.

  If he’d thought of it, he might have broken the camera equipment himself.

  Chapter 5

  The man whose last name was Quentin watched the departure of the wedding couple from a safe distance some one hundred yards away.

  He’d learned about the wedding from the ancient man who hired him to work his fields. And for a split second of raw fear, the first he’d felt in months, he’d been afraid he’d seriously misjudged Allison and that she’d returned home to marry the country stud, a mare in heat, running home for a repeat performance.

  But it had been her sister, the graceful woman with all those boys, who had married some Texas Ranger. Now that was a particularly ironic twist in Quentin’s plans. Who would have guessed Allison would have a Texas Ranger in the house to protect her?

  But the Ranger was leaving town, his only thoughts on his new bride.

  However, he decided, even if the Texas Ranger weren’t leaving town, he’d never have looked twice at the battered old pickup or its present owner. And no matter how cautious the Ranger might be, he’d never equate the theft of a car in Lubbo
ck—and the murder of its owner or the murder of a hitchhiker—with an itinerant farmworker helping break ground and do soil preparation in Almost.

  And now that the Ranger was leaving town for his honeymoon, his little FBI buddy would be heading out also. And Almost would be virtually lawless. The man renamed Quentin chuckled. What a town. And what a concept, Almost lawless.

  He smiled, not the patented Hollywood smile he’d given the cafe people in Anton, but a tight grin of mastery. A smile he knew better than to let others see; for some reason, it frightened them. -

  But he had cause to smile. Everything had been working according to schedule.

  Not everything, perhaps, but who could have guessed that Allison would have forgotten him? Who would have guessed that a steel-trap mind would have soft, malleable mesh in it somewhere, a mesh that allowed all traces of her memory of him to disappear? Was that his fault? How could he have taken that peculiar possibility into consideration?

  Once he would have been fascinated by this seemingly aberrant behavior. He might have studied it in depth. But those days were gone. All that mattered now was reaching Allison. Making her pay for all the pain, all the misery she’d put him through.

  He drew a deep breath, held it and expelled it slowly, forcing himself to relax. The time was right. And the plan was working. Hadn’t he discovered her exact travel arrangements? And hadn’t he flown into Lubbock a day before her, stolen the car and pulled the title with only the registration papers? And hadn’t he met her at the airport just as he should have, just as he had promised her he would?

  And hadn’t she walked right past him as if she’d never seen him before in her life?

  And weren’t they both here now, in the ridiculous little town she’d said she hated but, down deep, loved so much that she’d cried when telling him about it, begging them to welcome her back home, to be enveloped into their small-town fold?

  She’d rejected everything he offered her. She’d forgotten those Almost tears, those pathetic little pleas, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t forgotten a single detail she’d told him.

  As he watched the wedding guests milling around the front yard of Taylor’s house, he toyed with the fishing line in his pocket. In his mind, he could hear Allison’s sleepy voice. There isn’t a trace of standing water for nearly a hundred miles, but every man in Almost has fishing gear.

  He tried to pick Allison out of the crowd leaving the reception now. But she remained inside, hidden from him again. But she wouldn’t be for long. And then she’d be his forever. The way she was meant to be. He pulled the fishing line from his pocket and let one end of the coil spiral to the ground.

  She’d be hooked. And by a bait she’d given him just three months before. A gruesome bait to be sure, but one that would reach the deepest part of Allison, would touch her at the most fundamental of terror levels.

  He chuckled aloud. Oh, yes. I’ll hook you then. Line and sinker, Allison. Hook, line and deadly sinker.

  The cleanup finished and fine dishes once again lifted to their niches in the china hutch that had once belonged in her mother’s dining room out on the ranch, Allison fought a headache as she bade farewell to Aunt Sammie Jo and the few others who had lingered to assist with all the mess.

  She sank into the living-room sofa and dropped her head on the back with an audible moan. The silence surrounded her like a soft, warm blanket. She congratulated herself on the fact that she’d passed every minute of the time since she’d been in Almost without a memory lapse.

  In fact, except for a few seconds of lost time at the airport luggage carousel and her swift—but marginally controllable—panic attacks, she’d really suffered no more than just the natural tensions surrounding coming home after a fifteen-year absence and her own doubts about her mental condition.

  She tried not thinking about the peculiar holes in her memory, but as always, her mind, that reporter’s mind that sought out mysteries, shot straight to the problem. Car accident, memory loss. It had to be physiological, then. Cause and effect.

  She couldn’t remember anything from the moment of the accident until waking in the hospital room. And from that point on, everything became sketchy. But her first real sense of time displacement or lost time had been during her stay in the hospital.

  She remembered seeing the door open in her hospital room and then a nurse suddenly standing beside her bed. But three hours had lapsed in between.

  Could she be suffering a multiple personality disorder? She’d done an interview with a woman who claimed to have ten personalities, and nine of them were documented by her psychiatrist. The woman frequently encountered moments of “lost time,” suddenly “waking up” in different clothing than she remembered wearing, in different places than she’d expected, one time even in a foreign country.

  “Er...Miss Leary? Allison?”

  She froze for a moment, not opening her eyes. She thought Chas had left quite a while before. Her heart jolted once, painfully before she realized that he would never have called her Miss Leary. She opened her eyes to see his son, the boy who looked nothing like Chas but conveyed every nuance of his presence nonetheless.

  The boy ran his hand across his face in a gesture she’d seen Chas do a million times in those days so long ago. He hitched a shoulder up a little on the left side, as if apologizing for something before acknowledging the deed had been done. And this was something she’d also seen Chas do.

  “Hi, Billy,” she said, and the smile that came to her lips was uncomfortable. This was Thelma’s son. The woman Chas had married instead of her. Unconsciously, her hand stole across her flat stomach.

  Would he have married her if he had known the truth? It was an unanswerable, fifteen-year-old question. And one that belonged to the dark and murky past. Except it wouldn’t stay there.

  Billy grinned at her. It wasn’t Chas’s grin, but every bit as warm and generous. “Dad and I talked about it and we think I oughta hang out here tonight. With the guys.”

  The worst of Allison’s headache melted away by the magnitude of his offer. She’d been half dreading a night with the triplets, not that she hadn’t already fallen for each of them and not that they weren’t good boys; it was just a lot to cope with.

  But she felt obliged to offer a weak protest.

  As his father would have, he brushed her feeble objections aside with a wave of his slender, boyish hand. “I want to, really. We’re going to mess around with the video stuff.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I thought it was broken.”

  Billy shook his head. His dark, nearly black hair curled tightly against his head and shone faintly blue in the light from the lamp. “That was my old setup,” he said.

  Allison cocked her head. “But the boys got in trouble because they broke the equipment.”

  “Oh, Dad already knows it wasn’t theirs. But he said they’re better off having something to do for a few days. Besides, with them around, I get out of some of my chores.”

  Allison chuckled at the conspiratorial grin on the boy’s open face. “But surely I should tell them they’re not in trouble.”

  “Well, yeah, but Dad says that since they did break equipment, whether it was new or not, they still owe the community service. And even if it didn’t work very well anymore, Dad says you’d probably appreciate us not telling them that until next week.”

  Allison chuckled again. She’d half expected to feel a measure of resentment toward this boy, this young man, if for no other reason than that Chas had fathered him and married his mother and abandoned her in the process.

  Instead, gazing into his clear blue eyes, she found herself inexplicably drawn to him, as if whatever she’d once felt for his father was reborn in him somehow. A basic goodness, a fresh, open outlook on life, the child who would become a good man.

  “And he’s usually right. My dad, I mean.”

  For fifteen years of her life, she had thought the opposite, that Charles Jamison had treated her as badly as a man could. That Ch
as had been wrong to abandon her, to leave her for Thelma. That he’d lied and hurt her in the process. As wrong as wrong could be.

  But this young man had been raised by Chas. And the love between them was evident in the boy’s assessment of his dad, of the pride he held for him, the depth of emotion in the timbre of his still changing but already deep voice.

  Whatever wrongs Chas might have done in the past, and in her mind they were still huge and varied, he’d done right by this boy. Oh, so right.

  In the shadows of the front porch, waiting to leave until he knew Allison’s decision about Billy staying, Chas closed his eyes and listened as the two of them talked. Just hearing those voices mingling together, rich contralto and shifting baritone, was music, a symphony he’d never thought to really hear.

  He’d read articles of people who’d had surgery to gain hearing for the first time, and cried upon hearing certain sounds others took for granted...the ticking of a clock, the scratch of a dog’s paw on a back-door screen, a mother’s voice. But not even a Chopin sonata could sound as haunting and as alluring as hearing his son’s voice playing a countermelody to Allison’s.

  And when they laughed together, not heartily but softly, exploringly, as if testing the waters between them, something painful and sharp turned inside him. He would do everything he had done for the past fifteen years to have known Billy, to have lived with him, to have loved him. Oh, but how much he wished Billy had been Allison’s son.

  He opened his eyes at the damnable thought. It was as if he were wishing Billy to be someone else. Billy was who he was, what he was, because he was Thelma’s son. And all the wishes in the universe couldn’t change that, nor should they.

  “Well, Billy, if you don’t mind it too much, I’d really love to have you stay and help me out,” Allison’ said inside.

  Chas strode from the front porch and walked into the night as swiftly as if all the demons from the past were biting at his heels.