Once She Knew

by Sheila Connolly

  “I’m going to have to improvise a bandage.” A towel was too bulky . . . how about a sheet? What about antibiotics? Sterilizing the wound? Mentally she reviewed the contents of her meager medicine cabinet. Band-Aids. A small tube of Neosporin. Not a lot to work with.

  The fire was blazing now, throwing waves of heat into the room, and Jonathan had stopped shivering. Claire climbed the stairs and took a pillowcase from the bed, but when she tried to rip it, it resisted. She carried it down the stairs and with a kitchen knife reduced the pillowcase to manageable strips. She sat down next to Jonathan again, and squirted a healthy amount of antibiotic goo toward the gash, then gingerly began to wrap strips of pillowcase around his arm. Now, how to secure her handiwork? Was there even a damn safety pin in the place?

  She had a brainstorm. “Hold that,” she ordered. Jonathan had been watching her progress with a befuddled expression, and he dutifully laid his hand over the loose ends, wincing slightly. Claire tore off a thinner strip of pillowcase and wrapped it around the bandage, ending with a tidy bow.

  “There. That’s not going anywhere. You can relax now. I’m done.”

  He made a face. “A bow?”

  She glared back. “Hey, I don’t exactly stock surgical supplies. And I assume we’ll have to change the bandage, so I might as well make it easy to take off again.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Claire watched her bandage for a moment, and when no bloodstains appeared, she tucked the blanket more securely around Jonathan’s torso again. She stood up, then dropped into the chair next to the couch and assessed his condition: not shaking, not bleeding, holding a cup all by himself. It was time for some answers.

  “All right, start explaining,” she demanded.

  “You know who I am.” There was that odd look again.

  Claire nodded.

  “And you know why I’m at Greenferne?”

  “You were invited, right?”

  “Yes. I’m giving an interterm seminar. And I’ve been staying off campus, at a friend’s house. She’s out of town at the moment, but she offered me the use of her house while I was here. It sounded better than staying in a local motel for two weeks.” He took another healthy swallow of tea, draining the mug, then held it out to Claire for a refill.

  “Go on.” Claire filled the mug. When he continued to hold it out, she gave him a look of disgust and added sugar. “You want me to stir it too?”

  “Huh? Oh, no.” He picked up a spoon and stirred. “Anyway, I’ve been here a week. There was a student staying at the house, too—some girl who couldn’t make it home for break, so Annabeth asked her to house-sit while she was gone.”

  Claire was getting impatient. “Could you speed this up a little? Get to the good stuff. And who’s Annabeth?”

  “Annabeth Rankin—she’s my friend. She teaches at the college.”

  Rankin . . . that name rang a faint bell. Wasn’t she the current holder of the Greenferne Chair for Women’s Studies? And Jonathan knew her? Odd.

  He went on, “Anyway, everything was fine until tonight. Then the doorbell rings, I go to the door to answer it, and it’s this serious-looking guy in an overcoat who flashes a badge and says he’s with the FBI. So, okay, fine—I know I haven’t done anything wrong, and it’s not even my house, and it’s starting to rain, so like a good citizen I let him in. And then Susie—that’s the student—comes down the stairs, takes one look at the guy, and pulls out a gun and starts shooting at him.”

  Claire stared incredulously at him. “You want me to believe that? Why on earth would she shoot at him?”

  “You think I know?” Jonathan shook his head. “So she’s blazing away, and the FBI guy pulls a gun and returns fire, not that I blame him. Then another guy comes pounding up the front walk, and bullets start flying every which way. I see the first FBI guy go down, and I decided to get the hell out of there. Somewhere in there I guess a bullet hit me, but I couldn’t even tell you whose.”

  Claire mulled that over briefly, and decided it was a pretty thin story. “So you’re telling me that instead of sticking around, or looking for help, you hightailed it for the woods in the dark? Why didn’t you just head for a neighbor’s house, find a phone, anything like that?”

  He grimaced. “I just wanted to get out of there. How well do you know the lay of the land around here?”

  “Not well—I’ve only been here a few weeks, and I haven’t been to town all that often.”

  “Well, you must know the college is on the lake, and Annabeth’s home is too, not far from the college. I went out the back and got as far as the water, and I guess I got disoriented. I mean, it was dark, and I wasn’t sure what was going on, and my first instinct was to get away from the bullets as fast as possible. I headed the wrong way along the lake, turned right instead of left. And I got lost. I thought I’d come to the college or something civilized, but I couldn’t see anything, and I kept stumbling into marshy spots, and slipping on the icy places. I had no idea where I was going, until I saw lights in your cabin here.”

  Something still didn’t ring true, Claire thought. All right, he’d been wounded, and maybe he was in shock. But to confuse left from right? To run away from lights, and people?

  “I don’t buy it. You’re not stupid, and you claim to be a law-abiding citizen. Why did you bail out? Is someone after you? The feds? Someone else?”

  He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Nothing like that. The fact is, I panicked. I’ve spent some time in the last year or two in areas that were kind of, uh, politically unsettled, and I came under fire a few times, and it really spooked me. So when bullets started flying tonight, without any warning, I guess it all came back and I just reacted without thinking.”

  What the heck had he been doing in places where people shot indiscriminately? That didn’t fit what Claire knew about him—which, she had to admit, was not much. Did his activities abroad have anything to do with the FBI showing up? Who or what were they looking for?

  He was staring at her. “Say something.”

  She didn’t know what to believe—but did it matter? “Jonathan, you need real medical help, and I’m sure you can sort this out if you talk to the police. I’ll take you into town—”

  “No!” Jonathan interrupted, with surprising force. “Please. Look, I’m not in any shape to talk to anyone right now, and I sure don’t want to face the police or the FBI in my underwear. It can wait until morning.”

  Why was he stalling? “Jonathan, if that agent is dead, or at least wounded, then there’s going to be a big mess, and you need to give the authorities your story as soon as you can.” But then she realized she could still hear the tapping of sleet hitting the windows. She opened the door a crack and shone her flashlight on the porch and the steps—now coated with a thin sheet of ice. No way was she going to drive to town tonight. Morning would be soon enough: Jonathan wasn’t going anywhere.

  Claire turned back and met his look. “You’re lucky to have made it here at all. There’s ice everywhere, so I guess we don’t have a choice. In the morning I’ll take you to the police or whoever’s in charge and you can get this cleared up.”

  His eyelids were drooping; he’d exhausted whatever energy the tea and sugar had provided, and with the warmth of the fire he was fading fast. He roused himself enough to answer, “Thank you.” He lay back, closed his eyes again and was asleep in moments.

  Claire tucked the blankets more securely around him, then surveyed the scene: dirty mugs, bloody towel, pile of soggy clothes. Clothes. That was going to be a problem. Even if his wet stuff dried by morning, it looked pretty well trashed, and as the garments warmed up in front of the fire, they had begun to stink of swamp. Something else to deal with in the morning. She mopped the bloody puddle off the floor, then gathered up the dishes and her impromptu medical materials and dumped them on the kitchen counter. She plugged the charger into the phone, in the vain hope that the power would come back on. She went back to the fire to make sure it would last the
rest of the night, dimmed the oil lamp to a bare flicker, then headed back up to her bed—with the Maglite. She wasn’t going to take any chances. Or, she amended, any more chances.

  3

  Upstairs Claire climbed quickly into bed and gathered the blankets and quilts around her again, but she couldn’t sleep.

  Oh God oh God oh God. He doesn’t remember. The bastard doesn’t remember.

  Claire didn’t know whether she was more hurt or angry, but it was a nasty mix. She curled herself into a tight ball, pulled the quilt over her head, and wallowed in cold misery. She fought back tears, then reminded herself that Jonathan Daulton didn’t deserve her tears.

  She remembered him—all too well, despite all her efforts to forget. That conference. She had just finished her second year of teaching, and she had been on top of the world. Her students liked her and had given her glowing reviews. She had made friends with a number of compatible people on campus, and the members of her department were collegial and didn’t play politics. The invitation to speak at the prestigious conference in Chicago had been no more than her due, she had thought. Maybe she was only a panel member, not a keynote speaker, but she could wait. She was a rising star and her time was coming.

  The conference had been everything she hoped it would be: exhilarating intellectual exchanges with her peers, splendid accommodations, even outstanding food. She had been happier than she could ever remember until she had noticed one of the other members of her panel: Jonathan Daulton. Who was he to muscle in on a serious academic discussion of the representation of women in popular culture? Based on that silly, offensive book of his? It bordered on insulting.

  When she had learned that they would share a podium, she had picked up a copy of the book and raced through it in a couple of hours, which had been easy. When she had finished, she was more than ready to rip him to shreds in front of her colleagues. But she had never had the chance. The panel convened, the questions began, and Jonathan Daulton sat like a lump, uttering monosyllabic replies and refusing to elaborate. There was no way she could take jabs at him, because he didn’t say anything worth challenging. With an effort of will she had gathered her wits and responded brilliantly and effectively to the questions tossed at her. And he hadn’t even noticed. He remained in a black funk, and Claire had wondered if he had been drinking.

  Theirs had been the last panel of the day, and a gala dinner had followed. Claire had sat with a delightful mix of friends and mentors, and had preened herself as she accepted the accolades of her colleagues. It would have been a perfect evening, except for the presence of Jonathan. He had sat morosely at a table not far from hers, and she kept catching glimpses of him out of the corner of her eye—usually when he flagged down a waiter to refill his drink.

  No one had wanted the evening to end, and somehow the group she was with had adjourned to the hotel bar, where they continued to regale each other with insider stories—and to drink. And drink. Giddy with relief that her part in the conference had gone so well, Claire had consumed more than she was accustomed to. She had been witty and effervescent, charming and erudite. At least, she thought she had; her memories grew increasingly muddled as the evening wore on into the early hours of the morning.

  And still Jonathan Daulton had hovered in her peripheral vision, at the back of the bar. He seemed to be carrying his own personal cloud of gloom around with him, and his drinking had not slowed. Claire had managed to ignore him until they had bumped into each other—literally—returning from an inescapable trip to the loo. And something had happened, although Claire was never quite sure what. Maybe it was the drinks—many, many drinks—combined with the unexpected physical contact. Maybe it was the way he looked, like a brooding Heathcliff, even if his eyes were not quite focused. Maybe she just wanted to keep the celebration going, and using this sham of a writer for her own pleasure had seemed a fitting end to the day. Hell, Claire, you were drunk, and you had stopped thinking a few hours earlier. For some reason she had never been able to explain to herself, she had fallen in immediate—well, she’d have to call it lust with Jonathan Daulton, who she despised.

  Whatever the reason, somehow they had ended up in his hotel room, and somehow she had ended up in his bed. She had awakened very early the next morning with a full bladder, a parched mouth, and a pounding head. She had taken one look at her companion, lost to the world and snoring lightly, before dashing to the bathroom and spewing whatever was left in her stomach. When she came back to the room, Jonathan hadn’t stirred, so she had quietly gathered up her clothes and slipped out, back to her room, where she had gulped down several aspirin and fallen back to sleep.

  When she had awakened again, it was nearly noon—too late for any of the closing festivities for the conference. And she couldn’t face Jonathan Daulton, so she had checked out and slunk home. She had not seen him since, and she had done her best to blot out what fragmentary memories she had of that night. He had never tried to contact her, and after a while she had stopped worrying about it. But she had made very sure that she never drank that much at a conference again.

  Still, a small part of her flinched whenever she came across his name. Luckily for her, his book’s early popularity, or more accurately, notoriety, had faded, but it was still occasionally held up as an exemplar of its genre, whatever that was. Despite all her efforts to put their encounter out of her mind, she still cringed at the memory. Animal lust, she figured. Heat of the moment. Never to be repeated, she had promised herself.

  And now he was here, no more than twenty feet away—and he acted as though that night had never happened. What malignant force had dropped him back into her life now? It didn’t matter: she was going to shove him out of it again as fast as she could in the morning.

  4

  Much to her surprise, Claire finally fell asleep. Maybe the adrenaline rush following her fright had drained her energy, or maybe it was the emotional firestorm that had followed, when she figured out who her intruder was. When she awoke, the interior of the cabin was bright with sunshine reflected off the snow outside, and Claire lay still, trying to make up her mind whether she’d had a particularly vivid dream the night before or whether Jonathan Daulton was really asleep—or unconscious, or dead—on the couch not twenty feet below. Only one way to find out. She disentangled herself from the layers of down and wool and tiptoed over to the railing. Yes, there he was, looking the worse for wear by daylight. Jonathan Daulton, of all the unlikely people. He hadn’t moved since last night. She felt a stab of fear: maybe he’d been worse off than she had thought and he’d died in the night? Which would be easier to handle: a live Jonathan or a dead one?

  Claire pulled on jeans, a few layers of sweaters, and warm socks, and crept down the stairs. She put the kettle on to boil for coffee, then went to build up the fire again.

  She stopped to study Jonathan in the unforgiving morning light. In the nearly five years since she had seen him, time had thinned his face, added some character lines and a few silver hairs. Despite the fact it was midwinter she could see the faint trace of a tan. Right—he had said he had been in some hot spots—the Middle East, maybe? Some unsettled country? She had no idea why he would have been there—maybe it was because many of those nations still regarded women as second-class citizens. She sneaked a quick look at the bandage on his arm. No fresh blood. Maybe she’d gotten it right.

  She shivered, and stacked some more wood on the coals. The noise, as she had expected, woke her guest. He made a startled effort to sit up, then cursed. “God damn, that hurts!”

  Ignoring his outburst, Claire went back to the kitchen and dumped ground coffee into a filter and poured boiling water over it. Impatiently she watched the coffee drip, then she filled a cup for herself and crossed the room. She dropped into the chair she had occupied the night before.

  “Good morning,” Claire offered, and sipped her coffee.

  He tried to focus on her. “God, you’re cheerful. Is that coffee?”

  “Yes, it is. Do
you want some?”

  “Please. Pretty please. Sugar, no milk.”

  “Help yourself.” Claire gestured toward the kitchen. Jonathan, after a bemused look, hauled himself into an upright position, then stood up and wrapped the blankets around himself snugly before stumbling toward the kitchen. Claire watched as he located a mug, filled it, and added sugar. He made it back to the sofa and dropped onto it without spilling anything, and drank greedily, then looked up at her. He was the first to break the silence.

  “Jesus, I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. Nothing makes sense.”

  “You remember last night? When you showed up here?”

  “More or less. Where is this place? You live here?”

  “No, actually it belongs to some friends of my parents. It’s their summer cottage. I borrowed it to finish a book I’m working on. I’m Claire Hastings. I teach women’s studies at Sophia College.”

  “Ah. I should have figured. Who else but a crazy professor type would hole up in a cabin in Maine in the middle of winter?”

  “And where do you prefer to work? Some sports bar?”

  Jonathan muttered something that sounded like “that damn book.” “You know my book?”

  “I do.”

  “I take it you didn’t like it.”

  “Perceptive of you.” Claire stood up again. “I’m going to make some breakfast. I assume you’re hungry, after last night?”

  “Starving.”

  “You must be feeling better, then.” Claire went to the kitchen area and surveyed her supplies. Eggs, bacon, bread. “Fried or scrambled?”