Читать книгу A Hero's Redemption - Suzanne Mcminn - Страница 8

He woke, disoriented. He couldn’t see anything. He was blind. Then the lamp beside the bed popped on. He blinked, light hurting his eyes.

The windows were dark. Everything was still, silent.

His vision cleared slowly. Faded wallpaper covered the upper half of the room, white wainscoting at the bottom. A quilt in a ringed pattern hung on the opposite wall between an antique dresser and a chair.

A wave of panic washed over him. He pushed up from the bed, hissing in agony as he swung his legs to the floor. Gripping the corner of the headboard, he straightened on wavering knees.

He was naked. The woman—There had been a woman. He’d thought she’d said her name was Calla Jones, even thought she’d looked like Calla Jones. But that wasn’t possible. He’d heard her wrong, imagined the resemblance.

She’d taken his clothes off, everything but his briefs, warmed him in her bed. And he was sure it was her bed. Everything surrounding him in the room—the pretty perfume and cream bottles marching across the old dresser, the flowered wreath on the wall, the lacy coverlet on the bed—screamed feminine occupation.

He hung on to the knobbed corner of the headboard again while he took shallow, agonizing breaths and willed himself to stay upright even as black pain threatened to consume him. He tried to focus, assess the damage—his head throbbed, his ribs screamed. But everything worked, if painfully. He wasn’t broken, just bruised.

And he was in trouble. Terrible trouble. He had to get dressed. He had to get out of here.

“Oh, my God.” He heard a rush of footsteps through the agony wrapping his mind. “Get back in bed. What are you doing? If you pass out and fall, you’ll just hurt yourself more!”

Arms slipped around his waist; soft, caring arms, guiding him back down. Relief buckled his knees and he didn’t fight her, let her ease him back onto the bed in one miserable, slow move.

“You have to rest. You can’t do this.” The woman’s voice was clipped, frustrated. Warm brown eyes sparked at him. Warm brown eyes that looked just like Calla Jones’s eyes. The resemblance was startling.

But it was just that, a resemblance. Calla Jones was dead.

She tucked blankets back around him. “I think you’ve got some bruised ribs, but I’m not a doctor. And you are not a very good patient.”

She chewed her lip in the way he remembered, suddenly, she had before. She was looking at him, too, and the very real, very fragile awareness in her gaze almost hurt to see.

“We lost electricity. I had to go outside and get the generator going,” she said.

That explained the pitch-black he’d woken to, and the lamp suddenly popping on. But it didn’t explain her. She started to rise and without thinking, he reached for her hand, stopping her.

“Don’t go.” His mouth was so dry, he could barely get the words out. “Who are you?”

She stared at him. “I’m just going to put your clothes in the laundry.” She tugged her hand from his, impatient, yet there was something more than impatience in her eyes. Something wounded. “My name is Calla. Calla Jones. This is Haven Christmas Tree Farm.”

His head reeled, and for a moment he couldn’t focus or think. Then her face cleared in his vision, Calla Jones’s face, and he saw her eyes gaze to his wrists.

“It looks,” she whispered, “as if you’d been bound. What happened to you?”

Of course his wrists had been bound. His ankles had been shackled, too. And all of that meant that Calla Jones was long dead. He was dreaming, had to be dreaming. What other explanation was there?

“I don’t know what’s happened to me,” he said, his voice hoarse suddenly. He’d lost his mind, maybe. I was being transported, bound, to prison for your murder. Dane supposed he could tell her that.

She was looking at him, confusion in her gaze. She seemed young, he thought suddenly, really young, with slender hollows in her cheeks and those soft, soft brown eyes, even as he could detect the faint lines around her eyes that proved she wasn’t really that young at all. She was thirty-one. The district attorney had said so. The D.A. had passed around all sorts of photographs of her bloodied body to the jury, posted enlarged shots on huge easel boards, shoved them in front of his face while he sat in the witness box.

“You can’t be Calla Jones,” he rasped desperately, almost angrily, suddenly. What game was this? If it wasn’t a dream, then could it be some kind of cruel hoax? Anything was possible. After all, someone had set him up for murder. Now what?

He could hear a huff of exasperation, then she got up from the bed, marched to the dresser, grabbed something—her purse, he realized, and pulled a wallet from inside. She flipped the small leather case open and held it up in front of him.

“Look.”

Calla Jones’s name leaped up at him from the West Virginia driver’s license.

His vision spun to a tiny pinprick of light and blood and her. Slicing pain ripped through his head. No. Calla Jones had died six months ago. No one knew that better than him. He’d been on his way to prison for the crime, a crime he hadn’t committed, but that had stopped mattering a long time ago. His life as he’d known it had been over. He’d almost accepted it. One minute, he’d been an attorney for Ledger Pharmaceuticals. The next, he was a number headed for prison. Almost, but not quite. He’d never accept it, not really.

“Tell me the truth,” he gasped hoarsely, reaching frantically for her hand again. “You’re with them, aren’t you?”

“Them? Who are you talking about?”

“The ones who did this to me.”

“The ones who did what?” she whispered, and his vision reeled backward as if sucked through a vortex, and he could see her, now, backing away, her hand slipping from his. He was scaring her.

But she was scaring him and the spinning of his vision was making him sick.

“The ones who did this to you,” he said, almost blindly, the edges of his vision folding together now, darkness closing in.

“Did what to me?” Panic rose sharp in her voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“The ones who killed you.”

Then the black swallowed him whole.

The hair lifted at Calla’s nape. She felt cold again suddenly, and more than a little unnerved.

The stranger had passed out now. He’d been half out of it even when he’d had his eyes open. The ones who killed you.

Was he crazy? Or just disoriented? Maybe he didn’t know what he was saying. He hadn’t been able to tell her his name. Did he even remember his name? He had a head injury.

And he was freaking her out.

She picked up his wet clothes and walked out into the front room. The urge to check the locks on the door was suddenly almost unbearable, as if she thought someone was out there, poised to break in. The stranger’s words reverberated in her head. She shook herself. It was snowing so hard, she’d barely been able to see when she’d gone out to the shed to turn on the generator. She’d been almost frightened she wouldn’t be able to get back to the house. Thank God she hadn’t had to go that far.

There was no one lurking outside waiting to kill her, not in this storm, and not ever. There was someone inside, and that was enough to make her uncomfortable. He couldn’t hurt her, not in his condition, she repeated to herself. And she wasn’t that twenty-year-old girl she’d been once, either. She wouldn’t let anyone hurt her, not ever again. The old panic deep in her gut didn’t believe her sometimes, but she did, in her heart, in her head. She was older, wiser, tougher. And the stranger was just out of his mind from hypothermia and possibly concussed.

Chuck was stretched out in the middle of the floor, flat on his back, legs splayed out in total abandon.

“This is all your fault,” she said softly as she passed the dog. His tail thumped the floor lightly but he didn’t get up. He was exhausted from his big day of following her around the farm, chasing the new kittens, and finding a stranger in the ditch for her.

Not that Calla could regret finding the man, John Doe for now, tonight, since she didn’t know his name. If she hadn’t found him, he’d have died. And she couldn’t bear that thought, knowing that bringing him in meant she’d saved a life. And it hadn’t really been Chuck’s fault, though he was the one who’d directed her to the ditch.

How had he come to be here? There were only two reasons she would have expected people at Haven Christmas Tree Farm today—to get a tree or to talk to her about a job, and in this weather, she hadn’t expected either, though there was always room for a miracle after losing both her farmhands this week. Pete had done another of his disappearing acts then Jimmy had taken off the next day. Something had scared the bejeebers out of him in the woods. Probably a bear. But there’d been no talking sense to Jimmy, especially with the recent nonsense going around town.

It had all started after a so-called paranormal detective with some cable TV channel had reported earthquakes could release “positive ions” into the atmosphere and trigger supernatural activity. She was pretty sure everything since was the product of the town’s collective overactive imagination. Either that or it was the mayor’s latest attempt at beefing up tourism. She just hoped it meant more people came to Haven to buy Christmas trees.

She flipped the light on in the small utility room off the kitchen and dumped the bundle of clothes on the butcher block counter beside the washer. The shirt was soiled from where he’d lain on the ground and she set it aside. She’d try some stain treatment, but it might be hopeless. She stuck her hands in the pockets of the pants, hoping for something, some identification, some clue to the stranger.

Nothing. No wallet—she’d noticed that as soon as she’d stripped his clothes off, but she’d been hoping—She started to pull her hand out then realized there was something. Small and wet.

She pulled out the folded bit of paper, carefully laid it on the counter and used her fingernail to slowly pull the soggy pieces apart to reveal the printed logo at the top. It was a receipt. A-Plus Cleaners, Haven, WV. There was a hand-scrawled drop-off date. June 7, she thought, but the date was blurred, the ink smeared from moisture. It looked like June 7…of next year? She picked up the wet receipt, too quickly, to hold it up to the bare bulb above the counter and it tore in her hands. She put the two halves back down on the counter, and there was that chill lifting the hair at the back of her neck again. Jeez, what was wrong with her?

Of course the date wasn’t next June. It had to be last June. The stranger must not wear his suits very often for the receipt to still be in his pocket in December. But it didn’t matter and she couldn’t read it now anyway. The receipt had torn right across the year. And she was just still good and freaked out about his earlier comment and that whole positive ions hooey. She focused on what the receipt could mean.

The stranger hadn’t seemed to recognize the name Haven when she’d asked him if he was from here, but clearly he’d had tailoring done on his clothes in town. Calla had never seen him around, but that didn’t mean much. She didn’t know everyone in Haven even though she’d grown up there. She’d been gone for nearly twelve years between college, graduate school and the career she’d thought would be her lifetime work. Then it had all gone very, very wrong, and she’d come home to lick her wounds, start over. Haven hadn’t changed much, though it had certainly grown in population.

Once the phones were back, if the stranger still didn’t remember his name, she’d be able to give the receipt to the authorities. They could call the shop. Maybe they’d have records, be able to track down his ID. Or maybe his confusion tonight was temporary. He’d know his name tomorrow.

Not that that was her problem. Once the roads were clear, he would be someone else’s problem. All she had to do was make sure he lived till then. And if he would just stay in bed, he would probably be fine. His skin had already begun to feel warmer to the touch, and his color had been coming back.

She popped the pants in the dryer and set the stained shirt to soak. And she wondered if she would really forget the stranger as easily as that, as easily as dropping him off at the county hospital or the police station, depending on his condition when she could get him out of here. She checked on the stranger again. He was alive, sleeping. She went to the living room, grabbed the folded quilt off the back of it and stretched out. She tried really hard not to think about the fact that a man was sleeping in the next room. In her bed. A stranger.

Mostly, she tried not to think about the morning.