Neither of them had heard Barry come in, and both jumped at the sound of the unexpected male voice. He was in his stocking feet, his muddy shoes held at arm’s length away from his body. Katy had to laugh in spite of being startled. He was regarding the shoes as if mud were some hazardous contaminant.
“Where in the world did you walk?” Katy asked. She hadn’t seen dark, gooey mud like that when Jace took her back to the river.
“I got into some mucky place out in the woods. I’m a city boy,” he added with a good-humored laugh. “With my sense of direction it’s a wonder you didn’t have to send out a pack of search dogs to sniff me out.”
After dinner the two of them played Scrabble, Katy winning easily, which she found frustrating. How come she could remember a word such as egalitarian but couldn’t remember this good-looking, laughing guy who said he loved her?
He stayed on, going through photograph albums with her the next day, turning back his cuffs and getting an endearing smudge of flour on his face when he rolled out pie crust for her, helping Mrs. L. weed the garden while Katy looked on, pulling out a camera and snapping shots of her at unexpected moments. He even tenderly gave her a pedicure that evening, laughing as he carefully if inexpertly applied a shimmery pink polish to her toenails peeking out from beneath the cast.
But on the third day, she unexpectedly collided with a totally different side of him.
Chapter Eleven
The hour was early, not yet seven a.m. Katy had just taken a semi-shower and sponge bath. Oh, how glad she’d be when she could soak in the tub for an hour! She was struggling clumsily into shorts when she impulsively decided to call Dr. Fischer and report on her doctor’s appointment. At this hour, she could catch the doctor at home, before hospital rounds.
She picked up the phone, and the ugly, threatening words spewing from it like verbal sewage rammed shock waves through her.
She was so astonished than rather than instantly replacing the phone as common courtesy and respect for privacy demanded, she simply held it a foot away from her ear as the harsh blast about some unpaid bill or loan continued. Barry finally interrupted with a raw curse of his own and added tightly, “You’ll have your money. I paid up before, didn’t I? Business couldn’t be better, and I’m working on something big now.” He sounded angry and scornful, but Katy also heard a note of bluff or bluster in his voice, plus a raw undercurrent of fear.
“Don’t try to con us, Alexander,” the rough voice retorted. “We are not happy with this. And you know how unpleasant things can get when we’re unhappy.”
Katy replaced the receiver quietly and glanced at the clock. It would be almost ten o’clock in New York now, which was where he’d probably placed the call to this person to whom he owed money. Loan shark? The term leaped out of that fund of general knowledge that frustratingly excluded her personal past. And a question also leaped out and landed like a hard fist in the pit of her stomach. Was she the ‘something big’ Barry was working on?
She expected him to come downstairs looking agitated and worried, but he was his usual affable, charming self over breakfast, giving no hint that he’d just been cursed and threatened. Katy was still in shock over the ugly phone conversation, but she couldn’t ask him about it, of course, nor could she challenge him about the ‘something big’ he was working on. But Barry was observant enough to notice that she rearranged rather than ate her scrambled eggs.
“Something wrong this morning?” he inquired as he refilled the coffee cup she’d already nervously emptied twice.
She evaded a direct answer. “I guess I didn’t sleep well.”
He reached across the table and tilted her downturned chin up. “That’s because you need a loving husband to hold you in the night and chase away bad dreams,” he whispered with a teasing smile. “Kat . . . Katy . . . let’s get married today.”
“Today?”
“No waiting time required in Nevada! We’ll drive over to Reno, have a quick ceremony, honeymoon in the bright lights for a couple of days, and then fly back to New York.” Persuasively he stroked the side of her throat with his fingertips. “I do have to get home, hon. It’s been wonderful here, but New York is where the action is. For both of us.”
If she’d been tempted to go back to New York with him before, the overheard phone conversation made her reconsider. In fact, even though she felt guilty adding to whatever difficulties he already faced, there was something she had to do.
“I’m sorry, Barry, but I can’t just jump into marrying you.” She swallowed before determinedly rushing on. “In fact, under the circumstances, I think we should consider our engage—“
He crossed her lips with a finger to shush her. “No! I won’t let you say it.” His voice was agitated but tender. “Kat, you aren’t being fair! Don’t you owe me more than tossing me out like an old shoe?”
His passionate plea brought her up short. Was she being unfair? Did she owe him more? The questions rattled her but didn’t change her mind.
“Barry, I can’t marry you! I don’t even know you!” Truly an understatement, she thought with a shiver. “And I’m not sure I want to return to modeling.”
“You can’t mean that! I’ve already lined up new assignments so you can start work immediately when you return to New York.”
“You shouldn’t have done that without consulting me.”
His mouth compressed into a hard line, and the angry flicker in his eyes surprised her. And told her she was correct in her suspicion that she was the “something big” he was counting on to extricate him from his financial troubles. The tender caress along her throat turned to a hard brush of knuckles, and for a moment she had the horrified impression that he was going to draw back his fist and strike her. She jerked back, neck stiff, shocked eyes riveted on him.
Then his hand slid around to cup the nape of her neck gently, and she felt guilty about the brief, unwarranted suspicion.
“Kat, you’re not the kind of woman to sit out here in the sticks and rot! You’re too smart, too beautiful.” He smoothed a wisp of hair at her temple and smiled affectionately. “And as stubborn as ever, of course. Same old infuriating Kat, even with your memory gone, aren’t you? Although sweeter now. Yes, definitely sweeter.”
Kate twisted the coffee cup in a nervous corkscrew of circles, uncertain how to react to this abrupt switch from tenderness to fury and back to tenderness.
“We’ll put our engagement on hold, if that makes you more comfortable. But I can’t accept that it’s ended, Kat. I won’t accept that.”
An engagement “on hold” sounded meaningless to Katy, but she was suddenly too anxious for Barry to leave to argue details. He hadn’t actually done anything, and perhaps she was being unfair, but tension and apprehension about the web of personal and career entanglements he was trying to tighten around her still throbbed in her rigid neck muscles.
***
Barry left later that day. He kissed her on the cheek and said he’d call in a few days. She felt like kicking herself that she’d allowed the status of their relationship to be so imprecise, because as far as she was concerned, the engagement was over. But she had, at least, convinced Barry not to express-mail her another ring.
She called Jace that evening. He came over, and they sat on the front deck in the meadow-scented dusk and sipped iced tea as the stars came out. They talked about the last few days, although Katy reluctantly knew she couldn’t tell him about that disturbing phone call. The fact that she’d listened was bad enough; she certainly couldn’t reveal to someone else the contents of that private conversation.
“How do you feel about him now that he’s gone back to New York?” Jace asked finally. She suspected he knew she wasn’t telling him something.
“Relieved,” Katy answered simply.
Jace smiled as if he approved her response. “Will you go back to New York eventually?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“B
eing a well-known model is the dream of a lot of girls.”
Yes, it had obviously been her dream once. But was it now?
They didn’t spend all evening talking about Barry and modeling and New York, however. Some new boys had arrived for the summer session, and Jace was excited about them. One of the mares had a new foal. The school was on the verge of receiving a substantial corporate grant with which to buy new classroom computers. There’d been a smelly crisis when a skunk wandered into an open door of the dormitory.
She felt at ease with him. Secure. In an easy patch of wordless but comfortable companionship, the deep croak of a frog punctuated the chirpy music of night insects,
“It sounds as if there must be a million of them,” Katy said idly.
“You mean the crickets?”
Katy slowly straightened her slouchy posture in the wooden deck chair. “Crickets?” she repeated.
“I think they make the sound by rubbing their legs together. Probably a mating call or maybe a territorial claim.”
Katy wasn’t interested in how the insects handled their communications or love life. Yet a strange tingle shivered through her. Crickets. She repeated the word slowly. “Crickets.” And again, almost wonderingly, “Crickets.”
In the silvery starlight Jace peered at her curiously. “You’ve developed a sudden interest in bugs?”
Katy laughed. An interest in bugs? She, who had screeched when she encountered a quarter-inch, many-legged thing in the bathtub the other night? “No, I don’t think so.” She resumed her comfortable slouch in the wooden chair. Crickets surely didn’t interest her. Yet the word inexplicably lingered, like a familiar echo inside her head. Crickets.
Before he left, Jace again invited her to Sunday services at the school, and this time she cautiously accepted.
***
She held herself aloof from the message, however, as she sat beside Jace that Sunday in the chapel sweetly scented with bouquets of the roses now in full bloom. She had come because she wanted to be with him, not because of some sudden softening in her resistance to the spiritual. When the chaplain called everyone to prayer she bowed her head with the others, but her thoughts were rebellious challenges, not submissive prayer: Okay, God, if you’re out there and haven’t forgotten me, where’s my memory?
Yet she reluctantly had to admit that the music almost got to her. Little Ramsey sang “God Will Take Care of You” with such sweet purity that she had to blink away tears. Why, she thought almost angrily, did it all feel so familiar? Why did it call to her? She was no believer naively trusting that God would take care of everything. She knew better!
The powerful question that followed that defiant claim made her hands curl rigidly around the hymnal. How did she “know better”?
Her thoughts hovered on the edge of the pit like a diver poised to plunge into dark waters. No dive came, but she refused to soften her unyielding stance simply because she couldn’t answer the question. She just knew, that was all.
Yet her hostility toward the Lord didn’t keep her from staying for dinner in the dining room. She met other members of the staff, plus the wives of two staff members who shared an apartment in Yreka during the week so they could hold jobs there. Both were older than Katy, but she welcomed the female contact. One small bit of awkwardness arose when one wife pointed out that she and Katy had met before, but Katy couldn’t remember her, of course. She was glad Jace had kept his promise not to tell anyone about her memory problems, but she also had the unhappy feeling she now came off looking like a New York snob who dismissed the locals as too insignificant to remember. Determined to erase that impression, she suggested lunch the next time she was in Yreka for a doctor’s appointment. The woman, Shirley Edmundson, looked surprised but readily accepted and offered her cell and work phone numbers.
***
He stood at the plate-glass window on the tenth floor, hands braced on the windowsill, deep carpet luxurious underfoot. But his thoughts were not on carpet or the view of tall buildings and slow-moving traffic in the urban canyons below. His thoughts were on Kat Cavanaugh.
Or, to be more accurate, on the woman who was a dead ringer for Kat Cavanaugh.
He turned, pulled the wallet from his hip pocket, and studied the small photo snapped when she was unaware of the camera. Wouldn’t she be surprised, he thought with the twist of a smile, if she knew he carried it with him like a good-luck talisman?
He wouldn’t have believed the similarity possible except for the concrete fact of her presence there on the ranch, if the amazing truth were not right here in this photo. Those same aristocratic cheekbones, those incredible blue eyes, those fantastic legs! Impossible. Yet it was true. She looked enough like the real Kat Cavanaugh to be her clone. The buzz-cut hair was a shocker, of course, but it was also an advantage because it drew attention away from any minor discrepancies of face or body. Not that there really were discrepancies, however. Maybe a few more pounds on her elegant frame, but they were in all the right places.
But there was her personality. Oh, yes, that was a difference, a huge difference. This one was actually nice, a word he doubted had ever been applied to the real Kat.
The first phone call had almost panicked him. He’d thought it couldn’t possibly mean anything but big trouble. Who was she, anyway? What if someone came looking for her?
But now, in spite of today’s latest wrench-in-the-works disaster, his confidence was running on high octane. He’d kept the financial problems hidden and had most people fooled, but things were not going as well as they looked on the surface, not by a long shot. The situation was, in fact, beginning to crumble and stink like a ball of rotten cheese.
But, for the moment anyway, he could stop worrying that some nosy busybody would initiate a search for the real Kat and maybe even turn up her body. So far as everyone now knew, Kat was right there at the ranch nursing a broken leg. In fact, he thought with a certain righteousness, if the real Kat Cavanaugh had been more like her substitute rather than the arrogant, deceitful, cruel, coldhearted, ruthlessly selfish, and ambitious barracuda she was – oh, the list could go on and on! – she might be alive today. And if this woman’s memory never returned, he was home free!
Of course, if she did start to remember she wasn’t Kat Cavanaugh. . .
He frowned. It would be harder this time. He wasn’t gut-deep angry with this woman as he had been with the real Kat. But if it had to be done. . .
He clenched a fist and slammed it toward the window, toned muscles flexing as he stopped just short of ramming the fist into the plate glass. He could do it. Oh, yes, he could do it.
Chapter Twelve
The lunch with the two wives in Yreka happened sooner than Katy expected. Her cast developed a hairline crack near the ankle, and Mrs. L. drove her into Yreka on Thursday so the doctor could inspect it. He reinforced the cast with tape although he said he wasn’t really concerned about it. The cast would be coming off soon. Freedom! Katy thought exultantly as she made the appointment for just two weeks away.
She phoned Shirley Edmundson and arranged to meet both her and the other woman, Alice Kelt, for lunch. Mrs. L. dropped Katy at the combination sandwich shop and antique store, promising to be back in an hour. Shirley and Alice were already at a small, circular table covered with a pink-checked cloth when Katy arrived. Antique kitchen implements decorated the walls, and an old-fashioned, cast-iron cookstove covered with potted geraniums filled one corner.
“I’m so glad you could both get away for lunch on such short notice,” Katy said after settling herself and the crutches. She felt awkward now that she was here. She suspected curiosity was the main reason the women had come. The waitress arrived, and hearing the specials and ordering sandwiches and drinks took up a few minutes.
“It was nice to see you in the chapel on Sunday,” Shirley offered after the waitress departed. “I don’t believe you’ve come before.”
“No, but I very much admire the work e
veryone at Damascus is doing,” Katy said. “Jace and Joe and a couple of the boys fixed my car after I had a problem with it.”
“Yes, Jace is quite a guy.” Alice smiled with surprising impishness. “But we got the impression you’d already noticed that.”
Katy felt the warmth of a blush. Were her blooming feelings for Jace that obvious?
“Don’t mind my friend the incurable romantic here,” Shirley said with a combination grimace and laugh. “After twenty years of marriage, she still makes her husband a heart-shaped cake on Valentine’s Day.”
“But it is nice that Jace seems to have something on his mind now besides work, work, work,” Alice said. “Although, with the school’s current financial problems and all . . .”
“The school’s always in a state of financial crisis,” Shirley said wryly.
“This must be more than the usual problems,” Alice said. “Hank said they’ve had to cut back on supplies. Didn’t Tom tell you?
Unexpectedly, both women looked at Katy, as if assuming she was close enough to Jace to have privileged information.
She shook her head, a little embarrassed at how little she did know. “I haven’t even seen or heard from Jace since Sunday.” She hesitated. “I’ve wondered if something was wrong over there.”
To be accurate, she’d wondered if something was wrong between Jace and her. Perhaps he’d thought one session in the chapel would turn her into a devoted believer and had been disappointed when she merely asked skeptical questions about the message.
“Oh, I don’t think there’s any real problem,” Shirley said. “The Lord always comes through. Tom is expecting new classroom computers soon. You know how computers are out of date practically before the delivery truck arrives.”
“Yes, I know.” Katy stopped short. She didn’t know anything about computers. Or did she?
For a breathless moment something edged up from within the pit and balanced on the brink of the darkness. She squeezed her hands into fists, willing the formless something to take shape. Almost…almost! Then the cheerful waitress plopped a man-sized sandwich piled thick with turkey breast and ham in front of her, and the dark pit swallowed everything again.
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