Back on Bittercreek Ranch

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “Who’s your friend, Mase?” the woman asked.

  “Hey, Lauren.” He stepped forward and kissed the lovely young woman on the cheek. “I brought you a little business. Jane Doe. The kids and I found her up in the Uintas. Damnedest thing. She was just lying in the middle of the logging road up near Whitney Reservoir. Claims she doesn’t remember who she is or how she got there.”

  Beside him, her spine stiffened at his choice of words and the inherent suspicion in them. “I don’t remember! Why on earth would I lie?”

  He ignored her heated defense of herself as if she were an annoying little bug. “I did a little triage on the scene. Looks like she cut herself somehow on her face—a while ago, I’d guess, judging by the dried blood—and she’s got a heck of a goose egg on the back of her head.”

  “But no ID?”

  “Nothing. No car, no purse, no nothing, at least not that I could see. I didn’t reconnoiter the whole area, though. I’m wondering if she might have taken a wrong turn up there somewhere, then had an accident and wandered away from the scene.”

  “What a mystery.” The doctor gave her a curious look that made her feel a bit like a primate in a zoo exhibit.

  “She seems to think little green men in a spaceship dropped her off,” Mason said.

  “I do not!” she exclaimed. “I was merely responding to your suspicions with sarcasm.”

  For some reason, that seemed to amuse him. A corner of his mouth lifted then he turned back to Dr. Lauren Maxwell. “On the way out of the mountains I put in a call to Daniel, since mysterious Brits with head injuries are his territory. He should be here any minute. I figured maybe you could check her out in the meantime, see if anything’s permanently busted.”

  “Of course.” The physician gave her a friendly smile that was undoubtedly meant to be reassuring. “I’m sure everything will be just fine. Let’s get you cleaned up, shall we?”

  She studied the other woman, but she couldn’t seem to make herself move, reluctant suddenly to leave Mason Keller’s side.

  How perfectly ridiculous. She didn’t even know the man and what she did know, she didn’t particularly care for. He was dictatorial to the children and had treated her with nothing but harsh suspicion since stumbling upon her.

  She knew she was being silly to cling to him but he and his Tagalog-speaking children were the only relatively known commodity in her world right now and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving his side. What if he left her here?

  When she couldn’t seem to make her legs cooperate to follow the young physician, Mason turned to her. For the first time since he’d found her, his gray eyes softened and his expression seemed to relax slightly. She blinked at him, disoriented. Why did he suddenly look so familiar?

  “Go on,” he urged quietly. “We’ll wait out here until you’re done.”

  “Promise?” She despised the slight quaver in her voice but couldn’t seem to help it.

  “Stick a needle in my eye.”

  Slightly reassured, she followed the young doctor down a hallway to a small examination room painted in a soothing blue and decorated with dried flowers and a pile of magazines stored in what looked to be a large antique washbasin. There was a mirror in the room above the sink and she had the disconcerting realization that she had no idea what kind of reflection she would encounter there.

  The doctor gave her a friendly smile and pulled a hospital gown from a drawer built into the examination table. “So you have no memory of your name or anything?”

  She shook her head, embarrassed and afraid all over again.

  “Mason called you Jane Doe. Do you mind if I call you Jane until we find out your real name? It’s better than ‘hey, you’ and that way I’ll have something to put on your chart.”

  The name didn’t seem wrong, exactly, so she nodded. In an odd way, it actually felt good to have a name to hang on to, even if it wasn’t the correct one. “Jane is fine,” she murmured.

  “Good. And you can call me Lauren, all right?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, Jane,” the doctor said. “Let me wash my hands then we’ll get started. Have a seat.”

  She climbed onto the examination table and had time to wonder how she could possibly know that contraption hanging on the wall was called a blood pressure cuff but she couldn’t remember her own bloody name.

  “All right, then, let’s take a look.”

  Jane sat quietly while the doctor looked her over. “This cut on your face looks superficial,” she said. “I imagine it stung quite a bit but I don’t believe you’ll have a scar. I think I’ll order a tetanus shot under the circumstances, just to be safe.”

  The doctor shifted attention to the bump on her head and Jane couldn’t contain a gasp at the pain at her gentle probing.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll leave it alone now.” She stepped away. You said you don’t remember anything at all before Mason found you?”

  Terror.

  The bitter, metallic taste of fear in her mouth.

  I have to get out of here. Help me. Oh, help me.

  The impression slammed into her out of nowhere. She caught her breath, grateful she was sitting down.

  “No,” she finally managed, frightened by the strength of the memory but somehow loathe to share it with the other woman.

  The doctor studied her. “You’re obviously British, though you might be an expatriate, I suppose. Do you have any idea at all what you might be doing in our little neck of the woods?”

  “No. It’s as if there’s a huge closet in my mind with all those memories jumbled away. I know it’s there. It has to be. But I can’t manage to fit the right key.”

  She paused, then finally voiced the question that had haunted her since she’d opened her eyes on the road and found Mason Keller standing over her. “Doctor, will I ever remember?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give you a straight answer to that. All I can tell you is that you appear to have suffered a nasty head injury. It wouldn’t be unusual for such an injury to result in some degree of memory loss, but whether that’s permanent or not, I can’t say. I’m sorry.”

  Jane hugged her arms around herself, cold suddenly even though the room’s temperature was comfortable.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. I’d like to take an X-ray and possible CT scan, just so we know for sure what we’re dealing with, all right?”

  Jane nodded, though she doubted any medical test could explain away the fear that seemed to simmer just below the surface.

  * * *

  “It sure is good to have you back in town, Mase.” Lauren’s receptionist Coralee Jenkins beamed at him, her wide features friendly and open. “I know you were doing important work in the military—your dad was mighty proud of you for it—but we missed you while you were gone.”

  Mason had to force himself to smile politely. The last topic of conversation he wanted to dig into was what he’d been doing with himself while he was away from Moose Springs.

  He had always liked Coralee. He’d even dated her daughter for a few months back in high school, and Coralee and her husband Bruce had always gone out of their way to treat him better than an obnoxious punk like him had deserved.

  Still, he had to wonder what Lauren’s receptionist would have to say if he filled her naive little ears full of his real activities during the last dozen years instead of the politely vague cover he provided to family and friends.

  In her quiet, safe world, she would probably never believe the kid who had stoically endured a thirty-minute lecture from Bruce after he’d returned Sherry home fifteen minutes past curfew could spend more than a decade submerged deep in a shifting world of lies and deceptions.

  Coralee would understand little of that world—and he had to admit, that’s just the way he liked it.

  “How’s Sherry these days?” he asked, keeping one eye on Charlie and Miriam watching a television set in the corner of the waiting room where SpongeBob SquarePants was frying up Krab
by Patties.

  The question diverted Coralee, as he’d hoped. Her eyes lit up and she reached for a framed photograph on her desk. She handed it over the counter to him and he studied the picture for any trace of the perky, flirtatious cheerleader he’d dated in the suburbanite who beamed back at him, flanked by a handsome balding man and a trio of red-haired kids. He couldn’t see much resemblance to that girl he’d known, except maybe for a little devilish light in her eyes.

  “Great,” Coralee said with a proud smile. “Just great. Married to an Ob/Gyn in Utah County and she keeps plenty busy raising my three grandkids. Aren’t they something? The baby just turned two. He’s a handful, I’ll tell you. Keeps her running all day.”

  She went on to detail Sherry’s soccer-mom lifestyle that seemed completely foreign to him, but he surprised himself by managing to carry on a halfway coherent conversation anyway.

  Adaptation.

  That was the key to being a good counterintelligence agent. His first lessons after being recruited from the Army Rangers had focused on learning how to conform to his surroundings, to blend in and appear part of the landscape, whether that was a crowded Manila bar or a tiny fishing village in Mindanao.

  He had been good at that part of the job. Whoever would have thought that subterfuge and deceit would come so naturally to a hick cowboy from Utah?

  He had spent so long trying to be someone else, it was sometimes hard to remember who he was.

  “Speaking of kids,” Coralee said suddenly, “those sure are a couple of cute ones you brought back with you.”

  He ignored the blatant opening she gave him to spill the details he was sure she hankered after about Charlie and Miriam.

  The Moose Springs gossip line was no doubt buzzing like crazy when he’d showed up after all these years with a couple of Filipino kids. A few trusted friends knew as much of the story as he could freely tell, but the rest of the town probably had all kinds of ideas about where Charlie and Miriam came from.

  He had to wonder what the gossips would say when word got out that he’d found a mystery woman up in the mountains.

  Somehow his plans to come back to a quiet, uneventful life on the ranch weren’t exactly coming to fruition.

  He was spared from having to come up with a polite answer to Coralee’s conversational probe by the door opening. A moment later the Moose Springs sheriff sauntered inside, looking big, bad and hard as a whetstone.

  The other man took one look at Mason and narrowed his gaze. “I should have known trouble would follow your sorry ass back to town.”

  Mason slowly straightened. “You got a problem with my sorry ass coming back to your town?”

  His cool tone had the children looking up warily. Before he could reassure them, the sheriff’s stern expression melted into a grin and he slapped Mason on the back, the male equivalent of a hug.

  “Damn, it’s good to see you, man!” Daniel Galvez exclaimed. “How long has it been? Three years? Four?”

  “Something like that.”

  Mason hated that he had come to avoid his good friends over the years. Friends tended to ask the kinds of questions he couldn’t answer honestly, like what he was doing with his life. Since he hated lying to his friends the way he did to everyone else, it had become easier just to stay away.

  “How’ve you been?” he asked Daniel.

  “Good.” His grin slipped a little but Mason pretended not to notice. “Dispatcher tells me you’ve got a mystery on your hands.”

  “Not my hands. You’re the law around here, hard as that still is for me to believe.”

  “That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

  Mason quickly explained the events of the last three hours.

  “Whereabouts did you say you found her?”

  “I’ve got the GPS coordinates out in the truck. But you’ll know where it is without them. Do you remember that time in high school we camped up near Sulpher Springs with Truman and Fricke? This was about a mile down from where we camped.”

  “Yeah, I know the area. Give me the coordinates and I’ll send a deputy up there to see if he can find any kind of vehicle pulled into the brush or down a ravine or something. I can also check missing persons reports in the region, although it may be a day or two before anything turns up. What do you plan to do with her in the meantime?” Daniel asked.

  Mason frowned at the odd question. “Do with her? Not a blasted thing. I drove her down the mountain for medical attention and brought in the authorities. As far as I’m concerned, my work here is done. I’ve got enough on my plate without adding this, too. I’m done with it. The woman is your problem now.”

  He heard a small noise in the doorway, just a strangled gasp. He waited about five seconds, then shifted his gaze to the doorway where she stood, his Jane Doe, looking pale and fragile.

  He had no doubt that she’d overheard his callousness, heard him referring to her like a piece of garbage nobody wanted.

  Damn.

  CHAPTER 3

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a bother to everyone.”

  That low, proper voice sent an oddly tangled shaft of guilt and heat through him. He didn’t care for either emotion. He had no business being attracted to this woman, not when the only thing he knew about her was that he couldn’t afford to trust her. And he certainly had nothing to feel guilty about, not when he had two children to protect.

  “We all just want to help you, Jane.”

  While Lauren spoke to the mystery woman, the reproach in her eyes was for Mason alone.

  “Jane?” Mason seized on the last part of Lauren’s comment. “That’s her name? Is she starting to remember?”

  Lauren shook her head. “Not yet but we have to call her something. Jane fits as well as anything else.”

  He swallowed his oath as the physician greeted Daniel with a cool wariness at odds with her usual cheerful demeanor. Where did that come from? Mason wondered.

  He didn’t have time to puzzle that out before the sheriff stepped forward, studying the mystery woman with interest.

  “Hello.” His pleasant smile seemed to put the mystery woman at ease. “I’m Daniel Galvez, the Moose Springs sheriff.”

  Mason watched closely for any sign of nervousness in her expression, the usual telltale signs of a person who might have something to hide from law enforcement. She was good, he’d give her that much. If she was hiding something, she didn’t betray it by so much as a blink.

  “What did the examination show?” Daniel asked.

  Lauren’s mouth tightened and Mason thought for a moment she wouldn’t answer him, then she shrugged. “The CT scan showed a definite head injury, relatively mild but still serious enough to warrant close observation. I don’t believe she needs to be hospitalized at this point, however.”

  “What about the amnesia?” Mason asked. Is it real or some kind of scam? he thought but didn’t add.

  “Memory loss is certainly a possible side effect of her kind of head injury.”

  “Temporary or permanent?”

  Lauren gave her patient a quick sidelong look, then shifted her gaze to his and he couldn’t miss the warning signals there for him to have a little more tact.

  “At this point it’s too early to answer that with any degree of certainty. I have every reason to believe it’s a temporary condition but I can’t say how long that particular side effect may linger.”

  “Can you give a ballpark figure?”

  “No,” Lauren said firmly.

  “Did you find any identifying features?” Daniel broke in. “A tattoo or a scar or anything?”

  The doctor shook her head. “She seems in good condition. Other than the cut on her cheek and a little bruising on her arms, she doesn’t have any other injuries. I did find evidence of a broken arm that was poorly set and a couple of fingers that have been broken in the past but that’s all.”

  Daniel wrote that down. “What about age, height, weight? Any idea?”

  “I would guess her age somewher
e between twenty-five and thirty.” She glanced down at the clipboard in her hand. “Five feet three inches tall and a hundred ten pounds.”

  “You all do know I’m standing here, don’t you?” Jane asked suddenly, her voice tart and her cheeks slightly pink.

  Lauren winced. “I’m sorry. We were talking about you a bit as though you weren’t here, weren’t we? Do you have any other questions?”

  “No. I just want this to be over.”

  Daniel gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll put out some feelers, see if we can find out who you might be. Somebody’s probably looking for you, and I doubt it will take long to solve this mystery. But in the meantime, we need to find somewhere for you to stay.”

  Daniel and Lauren turned toward Mason in unison, as if they were bobblehead dolls on the dashboard of a jacked-up GTO doing a fast turn around a corner.

  He looked from first one to the other. “What? Why are you looking at me?”

  “Finders keepers.”

  Despite the fact that Daniel was one of his oldest friends, Mason wondered if punching him would wipe that grin off his face.

  “That’s fine for pennies you pick up outside the hardware store,” he muttered, “but not so appropriate when it’s a strange woman you’re talking about.”

  “She has to stay somewhere. I can’t put her in jail since she hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Perhaps there’s a hotel I could check into somewhere close by.” Jane’s features suddenly clouded over. “Though I suppose without a purse, I have nothing to pay them with, do I?”

  Lauren shook her head. “Even if we had a hotel in town, I wouldn’t be able to recommend that. You’ve had a head injury and while you don’t need hospitalization at this point, you do need someone close by the next few days to keep an eye on you. I would take you to my house but I’m heading to a conference in Ogden for the weekend.”

  “And I’m working double shifts all week,” Daniel added.

  In desperation, Mason turned to Coralee, who had been eavesdropping shamelessly on the whole conversation. The receptionist shook her head firmly. “Sorry. No can do. Bruce and I are spending the weekend in Vegas for our thirty-fifth anniversary.”