Читать книгу Sudden Recall - Jean Barrett - Страница 12

Whatever it was, it was vital. Something he had lost and had to recover before it was too late. That part was clear, though nothing else was.

He wished his head would stop hurting. If only he could achieve that much, ease the throbbing inside his skull, he was certain he would remember just what it was he was trying to find.

Then a new thought struck him. Maybe it wasn’t a something from which he had been separated but a someone. Could that be right? Yes, he was sure of it now. Someone was waiting for him, someone who needed him. Or was it the other way around? Was he the one in need?

In his confusion he wasn’t absolutely certain of anything, only that he had to get there. Wherever there was. He was so disoriented he had no idea what this place was or how he’d gotten here. Neither the hour nor the weather were his allies.

It was late, sometime in the middle of the night. He could sense that much. And there was water off to his right. A river, he thought. He could see lights on the other side, and more lights off to his left. Between them was this strip of darkness along which he had been wandering. For how long he didn’t know.

A parkway, he decided. That was the explanation for the grassy strip. He was alone and on foot along some city parkway. A wind blew off the river, cold and wet, pelting him with needles of rain. He wasn’t dressed for the weather. Drawing the collar of his light jacket up around his neck, he turned and moved away from the biting exposure of the broad river.

That’s when he realized that more than his head was hurting. His whole body was sore, aching with the effort of each step. Had he been in an accident?

He came to a wide boulevard where the traffic at this hour was light. On the other side were the glowing lights of what looked like a convenience store, one of those places that never closed.

They would have aspirin in there. If he could get some aspirin inside him, relieve the stabbing inside his head, he was confident his brain would find the answers he was searching for.

He shuffled across the thoroughfare, and into the store. The light was dazzling after the darkness outside. It took him a moment to adjust to the glare. Then he saw that the store was deserted except for him and a young attendant at the checkout counter talking on her cell phone.

He found the aspirin at the rear of the store. There was bottled water nearby. He took both the aspirin and a bottle of water up to the checkout.

“Customer,” the attendant said into her phone. “Gotta go.”

She ended her call and turned her attention in his direction. There was a startled expression on her face when she looked at him. It puzzled him for a second, and then he remembered how wet he was from the rain. He must look as if he’d fallen into the river.

He placed his purchases on the counter and reached for his wallet in his back pants pocket. There was no wallet, not in that pocket or anywhere else on him. Had he been robbed? The young woman was staring at him.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Forgot something.”

He left the aspirin and water on the counter and retreated down one of the aisles. When he was out of sight of the checkout area, he stopped and searched again through all his pockets, trying not to panic, trying to understand.

But there were no funds on him anywhere, not in his pants, his shirt or in his jacket. No money, no credit cards and no identification. Nothing at all.

In desperation he clutched at the sides of his jacket. And that’s when he felt it. Something deep down inside the lining. His hand plunged again into the lower left pocket, this time finding a tear in one corner. His fingers dug through the opening, fished around, and finally closed around two small rectangles of thick paper.

Not concerning himself with how they had gotten there, whether they had slipped down into the lining by accident or whether they had been deliberately concealed there, he hoped only that they would tell him who he was and what was happening to him, if not why. He withdrew his discoveries.

One was a photograph of a young, solemn-faced boy. He didn’t recognize the child, and there was no writing on the back. There was printing on the other rectangle. A dog-eared business card. Hawke Detective Agency, it said. Under that, beside the emblem of a golden hawk, was a name and address. Eden Hawke, 99 Mead Street, Charleston. There were also a phone number and an address.

None of it triggered any memories. None of it meant anything to him. But it was all he had, and he suddenly knew that he had to go to the address on this card. That it must be the place he was seeking, and that there was someone there waiting for him.

A phone. He remembered seeing a pay phone in a corner at the back of the store. He had no money to place a call, nor any wish to make that kind of contact. No desire to do anything but reach that address. But first he had to locate it. Public phones were accompanied by city directories, and directories had maps in them. A map that could tell him how to get to 99 Mead Street.

Providing, that is, this was Charleston he was in and not some other city far away. And why didn’t he know? Never mind, he promised himself as he moved down the aisle toward the phone. It would all get sorted out.

There was a display of sunglasses with a small mirror at eye level, to see what the glasses looked like on you. He caught a glimpse of himself as he started past the display. Coming to a stop, he peered into the mirror, shocked by his image.

No wonder he was in pain and that the attendant had been jolted by the sight of him. The unrecognizable face that stared back at him looked like a battleground. One eye was bruised and so swollen it was half shut, his bottom lip split open, a raw wound on the bridge of his nose, blood smeared on his cheek.

Something had happened to him out there all right. Something very bad. No time to wonder about it. Later. He had to get to Mead Street.

Backing away from the mirror, he went on to the phone. A directory was attached to it by a chain. The cover under the heavy black binding told him what he needed to know. He was in Charleston, South Carolina. The street map inside the directory provided him with the location of Mead Street.

He would need the map. Tearing it out of the directory, he folded it and placed it in his jacket pocket along with the business card and the photograph.

He had to get out of the store before that attendant got nervous and called the cops. Maybe she already had. He didn’t want the police, didn’t consider asking the attendant for help, either with medical assistance or directions. He wasn’t sure why, but instinct told him there was a potential danger in this situation that he had to avoid.

He left the store, head lowered, and went out into the wild blackness of the night. There was a street sign on the corner. He read it and then checked the map under the streetlight. Mead Street was twelve blocks from this corner. Not far, but light-years away in this weather and in his condition. But he would manage it. Somehow.

It was a struggle. The wind had risen again, blasting rain into his face. In several places he stumbled over limbs that the storm had torn from the trees. He fell once and fought the temptation to just lie there and forget he must be oozing blood and that every step was agony. Picking himself up was an effort, moving on an ordeal. But he did it.

There were few people out in this weather, and at this hour the traffic almost nonexistent. A cab did pass by. If only he could have hailed it. He couldn’t. He had no money for a taxi.

There was another car that made him melt into an alley. A police cruiser. He didn’t know why he should fear it, but a sense of self-preservation had him blindly doing just that. He wasn’t challenged, which meant they probably hadn’t spotted him. The cruiser turned the corner and disappeared.

He emerged from the alley and went on, driven by an urgency he didn’t understand. He was worried, too. Worried that he wouldn’t make it, because both his head and his leg were hurting like hell. He was limping badly and so weak and dazed that he had trouble with his bearings.

Where was he now? How far had he come? He wasn’t sure, but it looked as if he was in an historic district. There were rows of vintage houses, most of them shuttered and all of them crowded to the edges of the brick sidewalks.

Mead Street. He saw the sign for it by the gleam of an old lantern on a post. He was almost there. Dragging himself along the length of the street, he searched the numbers and came at last to ninety-nine.

With a white frame and a narrow face, it was one of those Charleston structures known as a single house. The kind with a fanlighted door at one end of its front wall that opened onto a piazza at the side of the building. He didn’t know how he knew this, but it seemed that he did.

There was a brass plate on the door and sufficient light from a nearby street lantern to permit him to read it. He was so spent by now, so light-headed from his exertions, that he almost passed out when he leaned down from his considerable height to peer at the lettering. Steadying himself, he focused on the plate. Hawke Detective Agency, it said. He had come to the right place.

Why he should trust a private investigator any more than the police, he didn’t know. And what made him think anyone would be here at this hour?

They were questions for which he had no answers. Nor was his mind functioning with any clarity. His head was swimming now. There was only one clear emotion inside it. Relief.

He didn’t bother knocking on the door or looking for a bell, both of which might be loud enough to draw attention to him out here on the street. He didn’t want to risk that. Instead, he reached for the knob and turned it, and since the door was actually a gate and not really a door at all, it was unlocked. Just as he had figured, it opened on a piazza that overlooked a storm-littered garden at the side of the house.

Then he was inside and the door closed behind him. Inside and mercifully safe.

There were a door and windows off the front of the piazza. Probably the agency’s office. The windows were dark. But at the rear of the piazza, where the house turned in a right angle, were lighted windows. He staggered toward their welcoming glow.

He didn’t make it. Halfway along the piazza, his body finally betrayed his determination. Although it felt as though he was collapsing in a silent slow motion, he must have toppled with a crash. Because as he lay there, helpless on the wet bricks, a door banged open and light spilled onto the piazza.

There was the sound of hurrying footsteps, a little cry of alarm, and then he sensed someone kneeling beside him, caught the whiff of a fragrance. A feminine scent that was warm and comforting. Something that made a man want to sink into its sweetness.

He lifted his head and just before he slid into unconsciousness, he managed to plead in a strained, husky voice, “Am I home?”

HE WAS CONSCIOUS again but still so disoriented he was only dimly aware of his surroundings. What was this place? A bedroom apparently, since he felt a firm mattress under him and a warm quilt drawn over his prone figure.

But it was hard to be certain of that since the room was in almost total darkness. The only source of illumination was a thin strip of vertical light, which was the result of a door left slightly ajar somewhere on the other side of the room.

All right, he was in a bedroom. But whose bedroom, and where? He wanted to believe it was his own room, that he belonged here. But he couldn’t be sure of that either.

He hated his confusion. Hated this state of helplessness that prevented him from…what? He didn’t know, but it nagged at him. There was something he was supposed to do, someone he was supposed to see, but he couldn’t recall what or who.

And then he heard it. The sound of voices drifting through the crack where the door was ajar. Two people engaged in a conversation out there in another room. Voices so low that he couldn’t make out their words, only their tones. One of them intense, earnest. The other calm but equally insistent. Her voice.

He recognized it now, remembered its reassurances to him. As soothing as her hands on him, as silken as her scent. It was all right then. If she was here, close by, then he was safe. He could forget all the rest, worry about it later.

He was so damn sore and exhausted that he needed to do just that. The voices droned on and then faded altogether as he drifted back into unconsciousness.

“YOU CAN’T DO THIS, EDEN. It’s wrong. The man should be on his way to the E.R., not stretched out back there in your guest room.”

Eden watched as her friend and neighbor from the apartment upstairs placed her medical supplies back in her bag. There was an expression of pronounced disapproval on Tia’s delicate Asian face.

“He’s not at risk. Didn’t you say it yourself when you patched him up? That someone with a body that fit wouldn’t need a hospital to recover?”

“Well, I shouldn’t have said it. I’m a nurse-practitioner, not a doctor, and if there should be any complications—”

“Then I’ll see to it he has whatever attention is necessary.”

“When?” Tia demanded, revealing a form as dainty as her features when she came to her feet. It was a figure that belied her strength. Tia had demonstrated that robustness, a result of her work with patients twice her size, when she had helped Eden bear her midnight visitor into the guest room where he had been stripped and examined, his wounds treated. All of which Tia had handled skillfully, if unwillingly.

“As soon as he tells me what I have to know,” Eden promised her.

“Let the police question him then. You should have called them right away.”

“And see him taken away?” Eden shook her head obstinately. “No, I won’t risk losing this opportunity. I won’t trust hearing what he has to say from anyone but him personally.”

“Eden, this is reckless. The guy could be dangerous. Probably is dangerous. Stumbling in here out of nowhere like that, no identification on him, absolutely nothing to suggest who he is or where he came from.”

“He won’t hurt me.”

“Why? Just because at the moment he’s too weak to be a threat?”

“No, because my instincts tell me this is a decent man. Couldn’t you hear it in his voice?”

“What I heard were a few mutters that didn’t make sense. But what I saw worries me. Those injuries aren’t the result of some accident. I think he was beaten, brutally beaten. And I’ll tell you something else. He has several old scars on his body, a bad one on his right leg.”

“I noticed.”

“Then those scars should have told you this is someone with a history that might not be so good and that you shouldn’t have him here. Come on, Eden, you’re thinking with your emotions, not your head.”

“Wouldn’t you if you were me and this brought him here?” Her hand went out to the table beside her and snatched up the business card she had found in the jacket of his pocket. Her business card. “And this.” Her other hand closed around the photograph that had accompanied the business card. She could feel the painful longing deep inside her as she gazed down at it. “Nathanial, Tia. He was carrying a picture of Nathanial.”

Tia’s face softened at the mention of Nathanial. “Honey,” she pleaded gently, “be reasonable. Having red-gold hair and a pair of lavender-blue eyes, distinctive as they are, doesn’t make him Nathanial. He was what when he was taken? Less than two years old, right? It’s been almost three years now, and kids change a lot. The boy in that photo could be anyone.”

“It’s Nathanial,” Eden insisted fiercely. “I know it is!”

Because you want it to be. That was what the expression on Tia’s face told her. She knew what her friend was thinking, what all the sympathizers had thought and refrained from saying since Nathanial’s disappearance. That too much time had passed, that she would never recover him, that Nathanial was probably dead.

Let them think it. She knew better. Nathanial was still alive. She had never stopped believing it in all the agonizing weeks after his disappearance, in the months and years that had followed. She had never dared permit herself to believe otherwise, haunted as she was by his loss, frustrated as she was that none of the efforts of the professionals, including her own, had produced any results. But now… Oh, yes, now.

“He’s a link to Nathanial, Tia. Whoever he is and whatever brought him to my door, he’s a link to Nathanial. And however rash you think I’m being, I’m not letting him leave until he tells me what I want to know.”

“You’re vulnerable as long as he’s here. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I’m a mother, Tia,” Eden reminded her. “I’ll do anything to find my son. Anything.”

Tia sighed softly. “Yeah, I guess I can understand that kind of desperation. I just hope you know what you’re doing.” Medical bag in hand, she moved toward the door to the piazza and the outside stairway to her apartment. “The painkiller should have taken full effect by now. My guess is he’ll sleep the night through, but if he should wake up and you need me—”

“I won’t hesitate to call you,” Eden promised, following her friend to the door to see her out.

“I’ll come down tomorrow to check on him. Oh, damn, I just remembered. Quinn is picking me up first thing in the morning. We promised to spend the day with his parents down on Seabrook Island, and if I cancel—”

“Don’t cancel. Go, and stop looking at me like that. It’s not as if I’m entirely on my own. The Davises are just across the garden.”

Tia went, though reluctantly and with last-minute instructions about the patient, which she followed with a promise to phone Eden in the morning before she left with her boyfriend.

Eden was relieved when she was finally able to close and lock the door behind her upstairs neighbor. She shouldn’t have been relieved. She was all alone now with a man she knew nothing about, a stranger who had arrived out of nowhere in the middle of a wild night. There was everything about him to make her apprehensive, but her only fear was that he wouldn’t be able to tell her what she would give her soul to know.

She stood there for a moment in the stillness of the apartment, listening to the sounds of the wind and the rain outside. Then she crossed the parlor and went into the guest room to look in on her patient.

The light from the door she left open was sufficient to reveal the man who lay there, undisturbed by her entrance. She stood beside the bed, gazing down at him, remembering the body concealed now by the quilt that covered his length. It was a tall body, and though it had suffered, it was solidly built, with powerful shoulders, lean hips and long legs. A body that had been conditioned for—

What? She had no way of knowing. That was as much a mystery as the rest of him, including his square-jawed face. “Hard to tell,” Tia had observed when she’d been working on that face, “but there could be something worth looking at under all this battering.”

Restless, he stirred briefly, muttering something in his sleep before he became quiet again. Whatever it was, Eden was unable to understand it. Nothing he had murmured since collapsing on the piazza had been intelligible. Except for those first three words. “Am I home?”

She didn’t know what, if anything, he had meant by them or why at the time she had been so moved at hearing them. Am I home?

Eden mentally embraced those words now, clung to them, because only this way, remembering their poignancy, could she go on convincing herself that she was not making a terrible mistake by keeping this man in her home.