Beside them, the candles flickered. Soon they’d go out.
Silence wrapped around them.
Christy forced herself to break it. “We’d better call it a night. We have a lot to do tomorrow.” She was surprised to hear how normal her voice sounded. It didn’t feel normal at all. She got up.
“Good night, then,” J.D. said and left the room.
Exhausted from the riot of emotions she’d felt today, Christy remained at the table. For a moment, she closed her eyes and savored the peace of being alone. Then she heard the sound of a car driving down the street. Opening her eyes, she saw the glimmer of headlights. She jumped up and rushed to the window in time to see a police car cruising slowly by. Thank heavens.
She returned to the table, gathered up the paper plates and plastic dinnerware they’d used and tossed them in the trash. They hadn’t thought to buy cups. She brought their glasses to the sink and washed them. Her neatness gene wouldn’t allow her to leave them overnight.
God, she was tired. She dried her hands and shuffled down the hall. She slowed as she came to J.D.’s room. The door was open and she glanced inside.
He stood at the window, forehead against the pane, staring out into the darkness. One hand grasped the windowsill; the other lay, palm open, against the glass. What was he thinking? What emotions did he feel? Desperation? Loneliness? What did he need?
He’d given her so much tonight. He’d listened to feelings she’d never confessed, even to her family. Listened with kindness and compassion. What could she give back?
Without another thought, she stepped across the threshold and went to his side.
Chapter 7
“J.D.,” Christy murmured, “you need to rest.”
His gaze fixed on the darkened street, he shook his head.
“Dr. Mayes said not to force the memories,” she said gently. “Maybe you’ll dream something—”
“I do dream,” he said. “The memories start to come, but they fade away. I can’t quite grasp them.” His hand fisted.
Christy put her hand on his arm. His muscles were so tense. She knew he was hurting, and she longed to reassure him, to hold him, but that was a threshold she couldn’t cross.
So she tried to let him know through her touch that she understood. As much as a person with a lifetime of memories could understand someone whose past had been erased in a heartbeat.
As if he read her thoughts, he spoke. “Do you have any idea what this is like? I know how a car works but not what kind of car I drive. I know how to replace the shingles on your house but not what kind of house I live in, or even if I have a house…” His voice trailed off.
“You’ll remember,” Christy said.
“How?” he asked harshly.
“Maybe tomorrow we should walk back to the place where you woke up and see if that helps. We might see something you left there.”
“Anything I left was probably washed away.”
“It can’t hurt to try,” she said. He shook his head but she went on. “You have nothing to lose.”
He sighed. “Okay, we’ll give it a shot.”
She could tell he was humoring her, that he had no confidence her suggestion would work.
He said nothing more, and they stood together, watching the night. Only the sound of J.D.’s breathing broke the silence. After a time, he seemed to forget Christy, seemed lost in his own thoughts. No, just…lost.
She touched him again. “J.D., let me help you.”
He pivoted to face her. “How?” His voice was rough, anguished. He caught her shoulders, pulled her closer. “The way we both want?”
“No! No, I can’t.” She stopped him with her hands on his chest. “We can’t. You know that. You said so.”
“Yeah.” His hands fell to his sides and he turned away. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Mistake.”
“Me, too.” She backed away, wishing she could say something to ease the tension between them, but not knowing what. “Get some sleep,” she managed. That seemed inadequate, but it was the best she could do.
“Sure.”
At the door she turned and saw that he’d walked over to sit on the bed. Maybe he would try to relax.
Their eyes met for a long moment, and then she went down the hall to her room. Tonight she didn’t bother to barricade the door. She had more to fear from herself than from J.D.
After a restless night, J.D. woke early and found the house quiet. He glanced at the clothes he’d tossed over the back of a chair and smiled wryly. Not much choice of attire. He shrugged into his too-familiar jeans, left his shirt unbuttoned, and tiptoed down the hall so he wouldn’t wake Christy. She’d probably lain awake much of the night, just as he had. Damn, he hated having gotten her into this.
He looked out the living-room window, scanning the field across the street. It was empty, so he opened the front door and stepped outside. A brisk Gulf breeze made the air feel like fall instead of late summer. The water in Christy’s front yard had drained off, but the grass was coated with a thick layer of mud. For the first time since he’d been here, the sky was clear.
The morning was beautiful, the kind of day that should make a man glad to be alive. He realized he hadn’t thought how lucky he was until this moment. He could see and hear, walk and talk. Whatever had happened to him, he’d been given a precious gift, the gift of life. He took a deep breath of salt-tinged air and smiled.
A newspaper lay near the walk. Hallelujah! The paper’s publisher must have an emergency generator. Hoping some article would jog his memory, he retrieved the paper. The San Sebastian Breeze was a small-town paper, but maybe a headline, a photo, even a letter to the editor would be the key that would open his past. Before he was back inside, he unrolled the paper and perused it eagerly.
Tropical Storm Coral and her aftermath consumed the entire front page. He found a story about the woman who’d been reported kidnapped but nothing about a man who’d disappeared. He guessed he didn’t live on the island or someone would have called in a missing persons report on him. Surely someone had, he thought, but where? How did you find your home when you had no recollection of it?
He sat on the living-room couch and opened the paper. Inside he saw a few articles about local events: a firefighters’ picnic, a meeting of the Rotary Club, the fiftieth anniversary of the hardware store he and Christy had visited yesterday.
Next, the sports page, dominated by scores of major league baseball games. He murmured the names of teams. Was he a fan? He studied the rosters but none of the players’ names rang a bell.
Page four contained an editorial about proposed changes in the parking regulations on Main Street along with several letters to the editor. Nothing that spoke to him, in fact, nothing that even interested him.
He noticed an ad for fishing equipment. He glanced at it, wondering why it appealed to him. Was he a fisherman? Was that why he’d come to San Sebastian? Somehow, he didn’t think so.
He saved the ad and put the rest of the paper aside. Then he went into the kitchen. He was leaning against the counter, sipping orange juice, when Christy wandered in, rubbing her eyes.
Her hair was appealingly tousled. Her feet were bare; so were her legs. This was the first time he’d seen her in shorts. He took a gulp of juice and wondered if she had any idea of the way her legs affected a man. Apparently not. But he felt pretty sure the evidence was becoming visible, so he quickly sat down at the table.
Christy yawned as she opened a can of pineapple juice.
“Did you sleep?” they both asked at the same time.
J.D. chuckled. “Tried.”
“Me, too.”
He was glad she refrained from asking if he remembered anything.
“Want to walk down to the beach after breakfast?” Christy asked.
He shrugged. “Might as well.”
“We’ll take the gun,” she said and went to get it.
Then she insisted on straightening the kitchen before they left. J.D. would have settle
d for dumping the paper plates in the trash, but she had to wipe off the table and counters and rinse out the juice cans. “You must be a great nurse,” J.D. said, watching her. “I bet you zap every germ in sight.”
“I do.” She laughed as she tossed the last paper towel in the trash. “I guess I picked up neatness from my mother. If my brother and I didn’t keep our rooms straight, we got grounded. I remember almost missing a birthday party because of a dirty sock.”
“Almost?” He opened the door.
“I convinced Mom I dropped it on the way to the hamper.” When he raised a brow, she defended herself as she went outside. “There was just one sock on the floor so that made sense to her. Besides, it was the truth.”
They strolled the few blocks to the beach as if this were an ordinary outing on a bright summer morning. But as they approached the spot J.D. pointed out, his mood became somber.
The sand was littered with seaweed and bits of driftwood that had washed in during the storm. Broken seashells lay like sad mementos of the surging tide. But other than that, the long expanse of beach seemed undisturbed.
J.D. stared at the Gulf. Two nights ago it had been a raging beast, close to swallowing him alive. Now the water was calm, broken only by whitecaps dancing over its surface.
He waited for a revelation, but nothing came. Neither the beach nor the road gave him the slightest hint about how he’d gotten here. Despair clutched at him. His mind was as empty as ever.
“We should search the area,” Christy said.
She was right, but he had little hope of finding anything. They began looking, moving in concentric circles. J.D. bent every now and then to peer closely at the sand or to scoop up a handful and let it run through his fingers. It told him nothing. It was just sand.
Buried under a pile of sand, he found a beer can. It wasn’t rusted, so he surmised it hadn’t been there long. He picked it up, turned it around. Had he been drinking and driven off the road?
He shut his eyes and imagined himself at a bar. What would he ask for? He conjured up a bartender, had him ask, “What’ll you have?” The first thing that came into J.D.’s mind was Scotch.
Okay, maybe he wasn’t a beer drinker, or maybe his imagined scene didn’t mean a thing. He hurled the can down the beach.
“Are you okay?” Christy said, frowning at him.
He’d almost forgotten she was here. “Fine,” he said.
“Look, there’s a piece of metal over by the rocks,” she said, pointing. “Maybe it’s from your car.”
And if it was, would he recognize it? More to placate Christy than anything else, he started for the rocks. She tagged along beside him.
He picked up the mangled piece of chrome. Could be from a bumper. Any bumper. From his? No way to tell. Archaeologists constructed whole civilizations from shards of clay. That sure as hell wasn’t his field because this metal object told him nothing. He tossed it, watched it hit the rock and bounce off into the sand.
“I guess this was a bad idea,” Christy said. “There’s nothing here.”
“Yeah,” J.D. mused, “which makes me think I’m right. I didn’t have a wreck. Someone drove me here or drove my car away.”
“Could you have crashed somewhere else and walked here, then passed out?” Christy asked.
“Maybe, but that doesn’t match with someone messing with your car.”
“Couldn’t that be a coincidence?”
He shook his head. “Fits too well with my scenario. Someone didn’t want me getting help or reporting what happened to the police.” He turned his back on the surf. “Let’s check along the road. We have a better chance of finding something there.”
“What?”
“Something I dropped, provided I recognize it.” Which wasn’t likely. He started up the rise, remembering how difficult the same walk had been the other night. At the side of the road, he began another slow survey.
Christy walked beside him. “There’s a cigarette pack,” she remarked, “but you don’t smoke.”
He glanced at her. “Oh?”
“No, if you did, you’d miss it too much by now. In fact, you’d be a raving maniac.”
“You’re right,” J.D. agreed.
Christy grinned at him. “See, I’m picking up your skills.” When he smiled back, she added, “I also know that earring over there isn’t yours.” She picked it up and held it up to his lobe. “No holes.”
“Right again, Miss Marple,” he said, then sobered. “How did I know to call you that?”
“Everybody knows Miss Marple. It’s world knowledge, not personal information,” Christy said.
J.D. refrained from kicking a rock in his path. “Yeah, I’m a walking encyclopedia. Britannica Man.”
He turned slowly, taking one more look around. From what could be seen now, no one passing by would guess the drama that had played out on the beach the other night. He supposed whoever had dumped him there had counted on that. “Let’s go back,” he said. “I’ll get some work done on the house.”
As they started along the road, the sound of a car behind them, coming fast, alerted J.D. He grabbed Christy’s hand and pulled her away from the road. They stumbled down the hillock to the beach and waited. Her pulse thudded under his hand, his own echoed it.
The car drove past without slowing. He stared after it. Inside were a boy and girl, two teenagers out for a joyride. Nothing sinister after all.
As the car disappeared, something flashed in J.D.’s mind. Fear? Recognition? No, a sense of being confined. Dark all around him. His lungs crying for air. Then nothing. The spark of memory died.
“Are you all right?” Christy asked. “You’re dead-white. Did you remember something?”
“Only a feeling. Claustrophobia.”
“From the sound of a car?”
“Yeah, makes no sense,” he said, then added, “Ready to go?” She nodded, and he took her hand to help her up the steep rise to the road. He didn’t want to let go, and she didn’t ask him to, so he kept her hand in his all the way home.
Christy busied herself inside while J.D. worked on the exterior of the house. She could hear him hammering. Such an everyday sound, she thought. She almost felt as if this cottage was becoming theirs. Not a good idea.
Midway through the morning Billy Coates showed up to repair her car. In the garage, he peered under the hood, then turned to her. “How’d this happen?” he asked in a puzzled voice.
“Beats me,” Christy said. “I drove it the morning before the flood. Somebody must’ve gotten into the garage later that day.”
“Did you report it?” he asked. She nodded, and he said, “Probably won’t do any good.”
Exactly what she thought.
Billy connected a new distributor wire in minutes, she paid him and he was on his way.
Christy went back inside, cleaned the spoiled food out of the fridge, and opened cans for lunch, then went back out to call J.D. He was up on the ladder, his shirt off, his bronzed skin shiny with sweat, his muscles bunching as he pounded a board into place. He was, she thought, a mouth-watering sight. He looked like an ad for tools. The kind of ad that would make a man want to grab a hammer and build. The kind of ad that would make a woman want to grab him.
She swallowed. “Lunch is ready.”
“Coming.” He backed down the ladder, wiped his hands on a rag and came toward her.
“We have tuna and iced tea. I found some cans in the pantry.”
His eyes brightened as he came inside. “Iced tea? Is the electricity back on?”
She shook her head. “You’ll have to imagine the ice.”
J.D. chuckled as he scrubbed his hands with bottled water. When he sat at the table, he poked the tuna with his fork. “And this must be a thick, juicy steak.” He tapped the empty spot on his plate. “Mmm, and these look like great baked potatoes.”
“In our dreams,” Christy said.
He took a bite. “Want to look over what I’ve done after lunch?”
&nbs
p; “Sure,” she said.
When they finished and Christy had left the kitchen spick-and-span, they went outside. They circled to the back of the house and J.D. explained what he’d done. “I’ve replaced most of the shingles that blew off, repaired some of the boards that came loose and cleaned up the branches in the yard.” He led her around the front and pointed to one of the windows. “I’ve put the shutter back in place, but it’s old, so it’s deteriorated. Your folks may want to buy new sh—”
A loud crack drowned out his voice.
Christy turned, but J.D. slammed against her and knocked her to the ground. “What—” she gasped.
“Rifle. Stay down.”
Another shot rang out, then another.
J.D. shielded her. She smelled mud and grass, felt the heavy weight of J.D.’s body over hers, and knew what terror was.
J.D. rolled off her and motioned to the side of the house. “Get behind the bushes. Go.”
Panicked, she began to crawl. “Keep down,” he whispered, and she flattened herself on the grass and moved snakelike toward the oleanders.
She glanced back and saw J.D. rising to an elbow. “What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Trying to distract him—”
“No!” She scrambled back toward him and grabbed his arm. “Don’t sit up.”
He shoved her hand away. “I have to—”
The sound of rock music made them both turn. A van filled with teenagers sloshed down the street.
“He won’t shoot now,” J.D. muttered. “Let’s go.” He grabbed her arm and they flew up the porch steps and into the house.
Christy collapsed on the couch. J.D. peered cautiously between the window blinds. “Can you see him?” she asked.
“Uh-uh.”
With J.D. hidden behind the blinds and Christy sprawled on the couch still gasping for breath, they waited. Nothing happened.
J.D. sat down beside her. Gently, he wiped mud off her cheek with his finger. “You okay?”
“For now,” she said, but she wasn’t. She was scared to death.
“Need anything?” he asked. “Water? An aspirin?”
Stranger in Her Arms Page 8