Читать книгу Dark Tides - Celia Ashley - Страница 8

Meg observed the doctor’s examination of the man in her kitchen as he conducted a series of clinical tests for concussion, examined him for further injury, checked his vitals, and palpitated his abdomen and other areas for tenderness. Caleb Hunter tolerated the process with an appearance of strained patience, looking as though he wanted to be left alone. What Meg wanted was an assurance he wasn’t going to die.

When he had completed his exam, Dr. Redecker stepped back, looking Caleb in the eye. “You don’t show general confusion, just a specific lack of recall. There is a difference. You are battered and bruised, but not broken, although your head injury may be more than I can determine from my examination here. I would suggest a trip to the hospital—”

“No.”

“Young man—”

“No, thank you,” Caleb said.

“Then I have done what I can,” Dr. Redecker muttered, closing his medical bag. “Rest your brain. That is no joke. No reading, no computer, no television, no work.”

Caleb frowned.

“I guess that last goes without saying until you remember more details of your life,” the doctor continued. “I will say nothing of this visit to anyone, but I strongly urge you to contact the police. They may be able to help you. If your symptoms worsen, you must go to the hospital. In the meantime, rest, and I will check on you in a few days’ time.”

Caleb lifted his head. “Rest where?”

“A hospital bed would be most appropriate. Since you have refused that advice, I can only say I don’t know.”

Shaking and releasing Caleb’s hand, Dr. Redecker turned to head in Meg’s direction.

“Let me get my checkbook,” she said to him, pushing off from the counter.

He waved a hand in dismissal. “I’ll forward the bill. When he remembers who he is, he can pay. The shelter still operates at the far side of town. Maybe you can take him there.”

Meg nodded, thanking the doctor again before walking him to the front door. Upon her return, Caleb had not moved except to turn his head once more in the direction of the window. She studied his profile, the curve of his eyelid down to the crow’s feet at the corner, the length of lash, dark and thick, the purpled line of his jaw, the slight arch of his nose as if it might have been broken at some point in his past. This was what she did, studied faces and drew them, painted them, fit them into illustrations in such a manner as to depict emotion and action. She saw none of that in his face at the moment, only an inability to move and a reverberating emptiness.

“Caleb.”

He turned slowly at the sound of his name, recalled from the echoing void.

“You can stay here for a few days.”

He shook his head. “I don’t—”

“Yes,” she said. “There is a guest room you can use. I have a lock on my bedroom door. I’m not worried.”

“But maybe you should be.”

Meg narrowed her eyes in study of the earnestness of his expression. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It seems sensible, though.”

“And yet…”

“And yet what?” he said with a deepening of the furrows on his brow.

“And yet I know things sometimes. I’m not worried.”

Crossing the kitchen, Meg headed for the back stairs to the floor above. She paused to pick up a book off the lowest step and clutched it against her breast.

“But you don’t know me,” he said.

Looking back, she found him seated in the same position, hands between his thighs, watching her.

“I told you I don’t,” she answered.

“And I have to believe that.”

“What choice do you have?”

He conceded the validity of her question with a flicker of his gaze. “Do you often dream of people you don’t know?” he asked, the tone and phrasing of the query harsh. Meg frowned.

“I’m sorry,” he went on, “but I don’t think I’m mistaken in believing that dreaming of someone, then having them turn up on your doorstep, or at the very least the beach leading to your doorstep, is not a usual occurrence.”

“I dream a lot.”

“Of people you don’t know,” he persisted.

“Of many things.”

“And these things you dream of come true? In some way, they come to pass?”

“Sometimes,” she said, “yes, they do.”

“Why do you think that is?”

For someone so befuddled by lapses in memory, his intellectual functioning did not seem impaired. Meg tightened her grip on the book, the edge of the cover pressing into her fingers. She drew a deep breath and then another.

“I wish to God I knew,” she said. “It’s hard when you don’t know which of the things you see will happen and which will not. You end up jumping at shadows, trying to foresee everything, then you ignore it all, hoping it’s meaningless, unable to recognize the one dream you should have paid attention to.”

Picking up his glass of juice, Caleb drained the remnants. “And what did you dream about me?” he asked, his voice muffled against the back of his hand as he wiped pulp from his lip. “Something that might help me, do you think?”

Leaning against the doorframe, Meg let the book slide to her waist as she tried to recall. “I don’t remember, exactly,” she said, unable to find the details. “I had no recollection of having dreamed at all until I saw you. Only then did I know I hadn’t dreamed of Matt this morning, of all mornings.”

“Matt?” he echoed, his face contorting. “That was your husband’s name?”

“It still is his name,” she answered. “He didn’t suddenly become nameless just because he died.”

“I…of course not.”

Meg nodded, the tiny movement tossing her bangs into her eyes. She blinked at the intrusion of hair into her lashes, at the sudden moisture blurring her gaze. She had to stop talking, lest she let loose something she would regret.

“You should rest for a little while,” she said after a silent interval. “I’ll put a towel and some more clean clothes for you in the bathroom and turn down the spare bed. I suppose lying down won’t do you any harm, even if you do doze off. I’ll wake you up regularly, if it comes to that, to make sure you’re okay. You can shower and do whatever you need to do while I’m gone.”

“Gone?” he said, rising from his seat, disheveled and wounded and wearing her dead husband’s clothes. “Where are you going?”

“After I get you those things I promised,” she said, “I’m going back to the beach. Maybe something else washed up besides you.”

* * * *

The sun had come out, heating the sand beneath her feet as she walked up from the shoreline. She’d seen no evidence of shipwreck, no clothing, no wallet, no personal items at all except for a leather watch band, which, by the looks of it, had been in the ocean far longer than Caleb Hunter.

Halfway between the tide and the steps leading to the house, Meg sat in the sand. She drew her knees up. Curving her hands around her ankles, she stared out to sea, to the rocky channel, the lighthouse, and the horizon that stretched to forever, a boundary almost indistinguishable between ocean and sky. Thinking of the vastness of the ocean, the unknown depths, the lonely, lonely stretches of open water, she felt light-headed and frightened. She had never fully understood how men so loved the sea they gave up all for her. Well, not men in general. She didn’t particularly care about the motivations of the sea-faring sector of the population. Only Matt. Matt who would always have been a wanderer, perhaps would have been destined to drive a truck over the road or something similar had he been born and raised somewhere inland rather than within the surging, siren call of the tides.

A year ago today—a day very like this one, the sun bright, temperature mild after a foggy morning—she’d answered a knock on her front door. The dying leaves on the bushes, flanking the entrance, had flamed gold in the afternoon light. The edge of Dan Stauffer’s badge affixed to his shirtfront had glinted with fire as he stood beside the Coast Guard officer. Dan had watched her closely as he delivered the news, expecting shock, no doubt, and sorrow, despite the nearly two years Matt had been gone. Or perhaps he’d merely been looking for confirmation, in some fashion, of the wild rumors circulating about Matt since he’d left her and moved farther up the coast to continue his fishing operations.

Fishing…right. The rumors spoke of more than fishing. Hearing them, she’d been saddened more than surprised. She’d prayed they weren’t true. Restless, discontented Matt with his rash schemes and his silent, smoldering rages, a criminal? She would have expected proof to be easily uncovered, if even half of the stories circulating had any basis in fact. Now, of course, none of them would ever know. The investigation had stopped with Matt’s death. As for the pain and useless, stupid guilt that had punctuated the last years of married life? Well, it seemed to her Matt’s death had only made it worse.

Lifting her face to the late autumn sun, she thought of the stranger she had left in her house, giving him free rein to go where he pleased, to steal from her if he chose, to lie in wait for her return. He could be shamming memory loss. The only thing he couldn’t lie about were his injuries. Or the look in his eyes. The images she had seen there appeared in her own mind with such vivid clarity.

Confusing images nevertheless, images that could give him no peace. She did not believe him to be lying, did not sense any danger in his presence. But could she trust herself anymore? Trust the innate sense she had relied on so often in her life? She had not seen Matt’s ship going down. Had not seen it at all, yet it had, vanishing into the dark depths of the ocean.

With a sigh, Meg yanked her ankles closer, gazing toward the horizon. Always capricious, the sea. When she chose to give up her carefully guarded secrets, there was no telling where they would come ashore. Ever.

In the town, at its highest point above sea level, stood a single stone cross with a brass plaque beneath. Every year new names of the sailors who did not return were added to the plaque. If she walked far enough up the beach, she would see the tip of the cross and the spire of the church at Church and Center Streets. Somewhere northeast of the town, and many nautical miles out to sea, lay Matt’s body, or what remained after the creatures of the deep had finished with it. Lying with the others, bones scattered to the ocean floor for degeneration by the salt and the relentless motion of the water. She didn’t like to think of it, didn’t like to dwell on Matt’s fate, his drowning. She hoped for his sake that everything had been over quickly, that one moment he’d been alive and filled with the hope of survival, and the next done, finished, drowned, without ever feeling any fear between.

Yet, he would have understood his chances and faced the inevitable with the harsh philosophy coloring everything he undertook, all the choices in his life. Fear might not have been a part of it. In later times, before the end, he used to tell her that the act of living itself was a risk, that pain and death were always right there waiting. As if she needed reminding.

She lowered her lids against the glare of the sun. The constant sea breeze tugged at her hair, loosening strands from the barrette at the back of her head. She breathed in and out, evenly, deeply, trying to banish the emotion pushing toward the surface. Gulls circled overhead, crying in the wind, waiting for a scrap or two of food she did not possess to offer. The waves crashed against the wet sand of the shoreline, curling and foaming, the beach empty, as it often was at this time of year. Late October weather could be unpredictable. Freak storms came up without warning, and the month was often too warm for the cold and ice and bitter winds that gave sailors and fishermen pause to return to hearth, home, and safety.

“Oh, Matt,” she whispered. She pressed her forehead onto her knees, squeezing her eyes shut. Always going after what he wanted, no matter the consequences. Conscience be damned. Once, he’d possessed a gentler soul. She hardly remembered that man anymore.

She heard Caleb coming through the sand a few minutes later, a hitch to his step, the drop to his knees next to her causing a deadened thud of reverberation in her hips. He smelled ridiculously like her lavender soap and detergent, making him familiar to her when he should not have been at all.

“Are you all right?”

At the tone of concern from this wounded, troubled man, Meg bit her lip, willing herself not to weep. She would not. Not for everything she’d lost, for everything she’d bartered away in an attempt to keep a man who had not wanted her after all.

“I expect I’m a good deal better than you are,” she said.

To her surprise, Caleb chuckled in response. He wriggled himself around until he’d imitated her position, gazing out toward the steel gray ocean. Thinking they had a new target for scraps, gulls circled close again, voices shrill.

“Did you find anything?”

Meg sat a minute longer without answering, feeling the balance of the shifted earth settle back into place. Struggling to her feet in the sliding sand, she brushed the clinging grains from her pants before shoving her hands deep into her pockets to still their trembling.

“I’m sorry, but I found nothing. That doesn’t mean something might not wash up tomorrow or the next day or even a month from now.”

He remained seated, his gaze intent, trying by dint of will to get her to look at him. But she would not look at the man she remembered vaguely from that place between slumber and waking, wouldn’t look at the stranger whose scattered memories winked in and out of her mind with alarming intimacy.

“Hopefully a month from now such evidence will be moot,” he said. “I can only trust I will remember everything by then.”

“Hopefully,” she agreed.

“I don’t want the police involved. Not yet.”

“I understand,” she answered.

“Do you?”

She nodded. She remembered how their questions made her seem suspect rather than a willing participant in an investigation. Of course, she hadn’t been entirely willing or cooperative. It had been Matt they were investigating.

“You should put ice on your head,” she said. “See if the swelling goes down. Dr. Redecker said that would be good.”

“Okay,” he said. “Anything else?”

She considered a moment. “Other things will bring on amnesia,” she said slowly, carefully. “Things too horrible to face.”

“Is that what the doctor said?”

“No,” she whispered. “That’s what I say.”

He lurched forward with an abrupt, awkward movement and froze, eyes wide in a troubled expression, almost as if he knew what she could see shimmering in the air, fleeing through her mind, turning on the edge of awakening. Matt, she recalled, had been afraid of her extrasensory recognition. Perhaps Caleb was, too.

He tipped his chin toward the sky, dark hair lifting in the breeze. Black-lashed tea-brown eyes narrowed against a swirl of sand he attempted to deflect with his hand as he regarded her solemnly. An attractive man, Caleb Hunter, lean and solidly built, his handsome face marked not only by bruising, but also by the evidence of a life lived, even if he could not remember it. The furrows beside his eyes spoke of days squinting in the sun, of concentration and deep passions. Yes, a very attractive man, who she had agreed to let sleep in a bed two doors down from her own.

She exhaled at the same instant he did. The tension left his shoulders. His hand dropped with a slap against his thigh. “All right.”

Crossing her arms over her chest, Meg started back toward the house that had been hers and Matt’s, where she had lived for three years without him since the day he had walked out with no intention of coming home. For all of her reliance on this stupid inner sense of hers, she hadn’t been a particularly good judge of Matt’s character in the end.

As she climbed the weathered wooden staircase, she paused to look back. Caleb had not followed but had risen and moved to stand above the tide line, watching the sea.