Yesterday Lost

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Okay. Anytime.”

  “Isn’t there something we could do to jolt my memory? Give it a jump start or something?”

  “I’ve been trying to give myself a crash course in amnesia,” Dr. Fischer admitted. “But it’s a tenuous area. Hypnosis has been used, and there are drugs that induce an altered mental state in which repressed memories may surface.”

  Mind-altering drugs. Hypnosis. Robin shivered in instant aversion.

  “But neither drug intervention nor hypnosis has been particularly successful with amnesia, and I really think time is our most effective tool. From what I understand, lost memory may dribble back in bits and pieces, or there may be one sudden dramatic breakthrough.” The doctor hesitated before adding reluctantly, “Although there have been a few rare cases in which lost memory never returned.”

  ***

  Two more days. Robin couldn’t see that her hair was making any faster comeback than her memory, although Dr. Fischer assured her it was. Some of the staples in her scalp had been removed, with the warning that she wasn’t to do any tugging or pulling in that delicate area. Later today she would be moving to the doctor’s home, and the generous doctor had already supplied new clothes to replace the shredded ones in which she’d been found.

  This morning Robin was working out with the crutches again, following a horseshoe pattern back and forth around her hospital bed and practicing turns. She’d spent a restless night. For some reason the possibility that the black hole in her mind held some appalling secret about her past had preyed on her all night, even outweighing the fear that her memory might never return.

  She was just negotiating the tricky maneuver of the turn when a voice at the door said uncertainly, “Kathryn?”

  Robin lifted her gaze from keeping track of feet, cast, and crutches. The woman peering cautiously through the doorway was sixtyish, gray-haired, her face wrinkled but rosy, figure sturdy in pink polyester pants. Slowly, almost hesitantly she moved closer, until she was peering directly into Robin’s face, her blue eyes behind bifocals searching. Almost wonderingly she reached out and fingertipped Robin’s shaved head.

  “Oh, Kathryn, your hair . . . your beautiful hair! But it is you, isn’t it?” Then she smiled, a smile that lit up her worn face with radiance. “Yes, it is. Kat, it really is you!”

  The crutches trembled in Robin’s hands. “You know me?”

  “I wasn’t positive when I saw the picture in the Sacramento newspaper, but now that I’m here— Of course, I know you. Oh, Kat, Sweetie, it’s so good to see you! I know you said you wanted to get away and think for a while, but I was getting worried when I didn’t hear from you for so long.” Her bifocaled gaze took in the cast and shorn hair, and her tone gently scolded when she added, “Apparently with good reason.”

  “Are you . . . my mother?”

  “Oh, no, honey, I’m not your sweet mother.” The woman shook her head regretfully, gray hair wisping around her ears. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe we should sit down.”

  The woman, who acted as if she’d had experience at this sort of thing, gently helped Robin . . . Kat? . . . to the chair, eased the immobilized leg onto the footstool, and briskly located a folding metal chair in the corner for herself. She pulled it up close, bringing a clean-scrubbed scent of soap mingled with a hint of vanilla.

  “I hardly know where to start. I’m Lenore Lennox?” She offered the name on a questioning note, as if hoping it meant something to the young woman in the chair. When Robin shook her head regretfully, she went on.

  “I’ve been your parents’ cook and housekeeper for years. I don’t know how else to break this to you, since you can’t remember— They’re dead, Kat. Thornton and Mavis, they died last summer, August second.”

  Her parents were dead. Even though she couldn’t remember them, a pang of loss opened a great, fresh emptiness inside her. Was this the emotional shock she’d desperately tried to block with her loss of memory? Yet at the moment another question overrode even this harsh news. She leaned forward, hands clamped tensely around the arms of the chair. “Mrs. Lennox, there’s something I have to know—”

  “Mrs. L. That’s what you’ve always called me. Mrs. L.”

  “Mrs. L., before I disappeared, did I do something terrible, something unforgivable?”

  Mrs. L.’s bright blue eyes widened, startled. “You? Oh, no, Sweetie, of course not! You were just so confused and uncertain about your career and life, and terribly broken up about your parents’ deaths.” She patted Robin’s knee comfortingly.

  Relief about this single element of her past . . . she hadn’t done anything horrible after all! . . . was so huge, so overwhelming, that if the weighty cast hadn’t held her down, she’d have stood up and danced. She sobered instantly, however, remembering the sad fact about her parents. “How did they die?”

  “Their small plane crashed on take-off right there at the ranch, and they were killed instantly. Their bodies were cremated and the ashes shipped back to Virginia where your mother had family buried.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, desperately willing herself to remember. She felt an emptiness of loss, yes, a desperate emptiness, but no sense of personal involvement with these people so tragically killed.

  Hesitantly she murmured aloud the names the woman had called her, tentatively trying them on for size. “Kathryn. Kat.” The first felt too formal. The second jarred, like a squawk over a loudspeaker. She’d grown comfortable with Robin and felt an unexpected reluctance to let it go. “What’s my last name?”

  “Why, Cavanaugh, of course.”

  Then another thought struck her, an apprehension that had lingered ever since her almost-marriage to the icy Stanton Riker. “Am I married?”

  “No. Although I think you’ve been engaged half a dozen times.” Mrs. L. laughed indulgently, although that past sounded rather flighty and frivolous to Robin. Mrs. L. started rummaging in a floppy straw bag she carried in addition to a pink purse. “I grabbed a few pictures out of the old photo albums and brought them along. You can go through everything when you get home, of course, but I thought perhaps these would bring something back to you.”

  Photos! Oh yes. She reached for them eagerly. “Do I have brothers and sisters?”

  Mrs. L. shook her head. “No, there’s just you. Your folks were in their forties before you were born. They said they got the grand prize then, why try again? Actually, I think they were rather in awe of what they’d produced in you, so tall and beautiful and elegant.”

  She knew she was tall, of course, but it hadn’t occurred to her to think of the almost bald scalp and swollen, bruised face that looked back at her from the mirror as beautiful.

  She studied the photos wonderingly. They showed a pretty blond girl twirling as a curly-haired little ballerina, blowing candles at a birthday party, smiling beside a handsome boy at a high school prom, serious in a formal portrait. One showed her in graduation cap and gown standing between two smiling, shorter people, their arms linked around her waist.

  “That’s you with Thornton and Mavis, of course. Your father was an inventor. He always passed it off as just ‘puttering,’ but various companies paid him lots of money for all the wonderful little gadgets he thought up. Your mother was creative, too. She wrote fascinating children’s books. I first went to work for them back east, when you were just a little tyke. Later I left to go into hospital work, but when they decided to move out to the ranch in northern California, I accepted their offer to work for them again.” Mrs. L. dug in the floppy bag again. “Here’s something else.”

  A strange wave of awe rolled through her as she looked at the document. It was an original birth certificate from an eastern state. Kathryn Anne Cavanaugh.” The date made her twenty-four now, and it gave her a glorious feeling of being rooted. She was a person with a name and a past, not just an unknown who’d borrowed her name from a bird in a tree. She was
Kat.

  Mrs. L. handed her more pictures, but these weren’t glossy photos. These were slick pages cut from magazines.

  “What are these?” Kat asked, puzzled. One was a shampoo ad, the model’s long hair flowing down her bare back like a golden waterfall, her face coquettishly half turned to the camera. Another page with torn edges showed a sophisticated woman in a high fashion layout, face pouty as she dragged an expensive coat. Yet another magazine page advertising a perfume showed the same woman behind a leather-jacketed man on a motorcycle, smile flashing, long legs provocatively exposed in skimpy leather shorts.

  Mrs. L. beamed. “Don’t you recognize yourself, Sweetie? That’s you! After, as you sometimes grumbled, hairdressers and makeup and clothes people spent half a day making you look like someone else.”

  Dr. Fischer rushed in, white coat slightly askew. “I just heard someone was here—” She’d been doubly protective ever since the encounter with Stanton Riker, and she eyed Mrs. L. suspiciously.

  “Look.” Kat thrust everything at her, photos, birth certificate, magazine pages. “My name is Kathryn Cavanaugh. Except I go by ‘Kat.’”

  Dr. Fischer studied everything, her frowning gaze jumping back and forth between photos and her patient while Kat explained about her parents and Mrs. L. Then, almost as if she were a lawyer grilling a hostile witness, the doctor snapped questions at the housekeeper. How long had Kathryn Cavanaugh been missing? Had Mrs. Lennox reported her disappearance? Where was this ranch?

  Kat had been gone about three months, Mrs. L. said. After her parents’ deaths she’d returned to her career in New York, but several months later she’d come back to the ranch. She’d stayed a couple of weeks, then asked Mrs. L. to take her in to Redding to meet some friends.

  “I didn’t report her missing because she wasn’t, really. She was gone, of course, but she’d said she wanted to get away and think for a while. She didn’t say how long she’d be away. I was just supposed to look after the place until she returned.”

  “Did you see these ‘friends’?” Dr. Fischer’s tone put the word in suspicious quotation marks. “Were they male or female?”

  “I didn’t see anyone. She had me leave her at a restaurant. They were supposed to meet her there.”

  “That explains why I didn’t have a car when I was found,” Kat pointed out. “I was with these friends.”

  Not the most admirable of friends, however, if they’d abandoned her on an isolated beach without identification or money. Although that was perhaps accusing them unjustly. Purse or billfold could simply have been lost while she was sloshing in the surf.

  “This ranch you want to take Robin . . . want to take my patient to. There are what, cowboys there? A manager?”

  “Oh, no. Just me. A handyman from across the road helps me out occasionally. And there are my cats, of course, Maggie and Tillie. Actually, it isn’t really a ranch, although we always call it that. It’s just a lovely eighty acres of trees and meadow and river hidden back in the mountains of northern California. Thornton and Mavis liked it out there by themselves in the middle of nature.” Mrs. L.’s sturdy fingers twisted the knee of her pink pants and occasionally pushed nervously at her glasses.

  “I’m doubtful about my patient being so far away from proper medical care.” Dr. Fischer frowned, then looked at Kat. “And I really think you should see the psychologist.”

  “You said yourself that time was the best healer.” Kat felt a little sorry for the housekeeper. Who wouldn’t feel uncomfortable under Dr. Fischer’s machine-gun onslaught of suspicious questions! “And Mrs. L. has worked in a hospital with patients herself.”

  “Really?” Dr. Fischer didn’t sound convinced.

  “Have you any idea how long before Kat regains her memory?” Mrs. L. asked.

  “It could be a few days or weeks or months. It could be never,” the doctor added with what Kat felt was almost too-brutal honesty.

  Mrs. L. did not seem dismayed, however. “That doesn’t matter,” she said firmly. “We’ll manage.”

  Kat quirked a finger to bring Dr. Fischer closer so she could whisper in her ear. “I don’t think she’s planning to carry me off to some evil den of iniquity.”

  Dr. Fischer glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. L., who was perched on her metal chair looking rather like an anxious, pink-polyester-clad bird. Finally the doctor smiled a little sheepishly. “I’m acting like an overprotective hen with a lone chick, aren’t I?”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  Dr. Fischer picked up the magazine pages again. “I should have guessed. So tall and slim and long-legged, so beautiful and elegant. And those spectacular cheekbones! What else could you be but a model? Would you believe, that’s the very same shampoo I use?” She smiled with the old tease. “May I have your autograph, O famous one?”

  The reality was just beginning to sink in with Kat. She was a model, apparently a fairly successful one. She didn’t feel like a model. Which didn’t mean anything, of course. She didn’t feel like anything else, either.

  “I’d really like to start home as soon as possible.” Mrs. L. sounded both anxious and apologetic. “I don’t like to be on the road after dark.”

  “What about my hospital bill?” Kat asked Dr. Fischer. “And your bill, too, of course.”

  “I’ll chalk mine up to research. You’re the most interesting case I’ve had in years,” Dr. Fischer said generously. “And sometimes the hospital simply has to write off certain debts as uncollectable—”

  “Oh, we can pay! The household money ran out,” Mrs. L. said. She sounded apologetic about that too. “But I have a little money of my own that Thornton and Mavis left me. I could—” She dug a checkbook out of the pink purse. “I could give the hospital fifteen hundred dollars now. Would that be enough to start with? Then Kat can send the rest when we get home.”

  Kat blinked. “I can?”

  “Why, yes, I’m sure you can. Your folks weren’t jet-set rich, but they were well off, and you inherited everything except the money I received. There’s a stack of envelopes from banks and a stockbroker waiting for you at home. And you own the ranch too, of course.”

  Kat looked at Dr. Fischer. The doctor was studying Mrs. L. with a slight frown, as if she were still vaguely suspicious. Then, apparently giving herself a mental shake, she turned back to Kat and smiled. “It looks as if I won’t have free labor to put my medical library in order after all.”

  “There’s just one thing—” Both Mrs. L. and Dr. Fischer looked at Kat as if expecting some portentous announcement of suddenly reclaimed memory. “Would you mind calling me Katy? I just don’t feel comfortable with Kat.”

  Mrs. L. beamed again, the look that turned her plain face radiant. “That would be wonderful! We called you Katy when you were a little tyke, but when you got older you wanted to be Kat because it was more ‘sophisticated.’ But I’m glad you’re going back to Katy.”

  Mrs. L. went down the hall to see about the bill. For the first time in her short memory, Katy, with Dr. Fischer’s help, put on non-hospital clothes, including a jaunty blue hat the doctor had provided to cover up her buzzed-off hair. With a certain amazement, she thought about the fact that when she arrived in the hospital she had no name at all, and now she was overflowing with them. Robin. Kathryn. Kat. And now the one that really felt . . . well, not familiar, but snug, like a good fit. Katy. Katy Cavanaugh.

  And Katy Cavanaugh, one lost puppy now claimed, was going home.

  Chapter Three

  They drove out of Benton Beach in Mrs. L.’s six-year-old Honda, both loaded with instructions from Dr. Fischer, Katy clutching an additional sheaf of pages detailing her bill. The doctor had taken the phone number at the ranch and said she’d call with the name of a doctor for Katy to see in California.

  They crossed the wildly beautiful coast mountains to hit the main north-south interstate over the Siskiyou Mountains into California, where massive Mt. Shasta floated like
a snow-clad fantasy above a fluffy skirt of clouds. Mrs. L. chattered cheerfully, bringing to life the past of a close-knit family that sounded wonderful to Katy. Pets, vacations both happy and comically disastrous, holidays with big turkey dinners and Christmas trees and mounds of presents. How could all this be missing from her mind? she wondered, angry and frustrated with herself.

  “What about you, Mrs. L? Don’t you have family of your own?”

  “Oh, my, yes. I was married once. That’s why I’m Mrs. L., of course. About all I remember of that annoying man is that he – ugh – ate ketchup on everything, including fried eggs.” Mrs. L. wrinkled her nose, then laughed. “But he did give me my wonderful son, my Evan. Evan is an executive with a big company down in Dallas, Texas, that has a nationwide line of franchised dry-cleaning establishments. I don’t get to see him as much as I’d like, but he visits me whenever he’s up this way on business. I just wish he’d stop working so hard and take time to pick a wife so I could be a grandma one of these days.” She smiled fondly even as she fretted about her son’s workaholic tendencies.

  “Do I know him?”

  “Oh, my, yes. He’s a couple of years older than you, but as little tykes, you two were inseparable.” She laughed. “When you weren’t clobbering each other, of course. Typical kids.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t remember him.” Or anything else. Momentarily dispirited, Katy stared off into the distance, where the spire of a church rose above a tiny town tucked into the folded hills. “Did we go to church as a family?”

  “Well, Easter and Christmas, although your folks weren’t really regular churchgoers. But they were always very generous in helping people and donating to worthwhile charities.”

  “So they didn’t have some big opposition to religion?” Katy remembered her own instant hostility toward Dr. Fischer’s Pastor Ross.

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.”