Kitabı oku: «Father Fever», sayfa 3

Chapter Three

September

Where did he go from here?

David reread the three paragraphs on his monitor for the sixth time.

Jake stared moodily out the back window of the cab as it made the turn to Janie’s bungalow. He hadn’t had a letter in months, but then he hadn’t written her, either. Life had been too hard, too dark to chronicle it for her.

The cab pulled up in front of 722 Bramble Lane. Jake paid the driver and stepped out.

Janie was sitting on the front steps with a cup of coffee and a book. She looked up at the slam of the car door, froze for a moment, then dropped the book and the coffee.

The cursor blinked at the indent on the next paragraph as he waited for inspiration.

She ran into his arms?

He ran into hers?

She walked inside and slammed the door?

Jake pounded on the door?

David hadn’t a clue. He was writing the last chapter of his novel, trying to make his hero’s personal dreams come true after the hell he’d put him through in the previous three hundred pages.

But David couldn’t guess how Janie would react after she’d been skillfully wooed, willingly seduced, then left to fend for herself while Jake answered the CIA’s call after assuring her he was through with the work.

As he’d done at least once a day for months, he thought back to the costume party last February, and the woman who’d appeared in his living room like the realization of a dream.

He remembered her smile, the shape of her chin, snippets of their conversation. There were gaps in his memories. The champagne, the antihistamine and only four hours of sleep the night before had combined to knock him on his butt, but he recalled one crystal clear glimpse of her.

A heart-shaped face. Eyes the color of his favorite chambray shirt. A smile that tripped his pulse. And breasts that spilled out of her Empress Josephine dress like exotic blooms.

He could close his eyes now and catch the rose-and-spice scent of her that had clung to him when he’d awakened in the sitting room. He’d been alone on the futon with part of her slip caught in his fist and the taste of her on his lips.

He couldn’t remember what had happened, but he could imagine. The first few minutes of their meeting were clear in his memory—and he’d been plotting her seduction since then.

He remembered taking her upstairs, pouring more champagne, taking her in his arms and…had he told her about his lonely childhood, or had he just dreamed that? He couldn’t be sure.

But he wished he could be sure he hadn’t hurt her, offended her, upset her.

He’d tried to find her, but without a name or any idea what she did or who the friends were she was visiting, it had been impossible.

Even Mrs. Beasley hadn’t known who she was, though she remembered the dress. She’d arrived with friends, she said, and that was all she knew.

David got up from the computer and went downstairs to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee and read the editorial page and his horoscope. He forced himself to write three pages every morning before allowing himself that luxury. Otherwise, he’d find a dozen excuses to keep him from the computer.

He’d submitted a full synopsis and three chapters of the novel to an agent in New York, primarily as a way to make himself finish it.

Writing columns, though putting him under the stress of three weekly deadlines, had been easy compared to writing fiction. And in a way, his work as a government agent had been the same. He’d had a clear subject, his own observations and feelings to draw from, input from other people.

In writing fiction, he sat there all alone, except for the demanding blink of the cursor. There were no source materials. Everything came out of his heart or his head and usually lived there behind closed doors, resisting his every effort to force them open.

When the doors did open, the material came at him haphazardly. It made him hurt, made him laugh, made him angry, made him wish he’d chosen to do anything but be a writer.

Until he put just the right words together and made a nebulous thought clear in a beautiful way. And then it was all right. He was all right.

But every morning was a fresh struggle. Every day he had to figure out just how he’d done it the day before.

He poured some Colombian roast into a plain brown mug and carried it to the living room coffee table where he’d left the paper.

He turned on the television for the noise. Dotty, his housekeeper, was away for a few days, Trevyn was somewhere in a remote spot of the Canadian mountains, taking pictures for a calendar, a commission he earned every year. With Bram in Mexico on a case for his already thriving detective agency, Cliffside was quiet as a tomb.

He folded back the editorial page as the weather report promised another week of Indian summer for the Oregon coast. Then the newscaster’s voice said, “We’ll show this item one more time for those of you who are joining us late or missed last night’s report. This woman was found in the Columbia River off Astoria by a pilot boat. She’s in fair condition at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, but cannot remember her name, where she lives, or how she ended up in the water. The Coast Guard reported no capsized boats or distress calls.”

David looked up from the paper, his attention snagged by the story—and felt his heart stall in his chest. He got up, knocked over his coffee in the process and stood stock-still in shock.

The grainy photo of the woman remained on the screen while the newscaster pleaded for anyone who knew this woman to contact the Astoria police.

The photo showed a woman on a stretcher, long red hair wet and lank against the pillow, her eyes closed. Her features were difficult to distinguish, but he knew the shape of that face, the delicate point of the chin. It was Constance! And her stomach mounded up under the blanket covering her, clearly in a very advanced state of pregnancy.

His heart hammered its way into his throat. Oh, God.

In his fuzzy memories of that February night, he saw her lying atop him, her hair free of the confining headpiece. He’d been filled with lust for her and she’d been so warm and responsive.

Though he struggled to remember, he still couldn’t recall what had happened after that.

Until he awakened later that night with part of her slip in his hands and her scent clinging to him.

“If anyone has any information about this woman, please call the Astoria police.”

After all this time! After all his efforts to find out who she was! Pregnant and with amnesia?

He tucked the pad under his arm, grabbed his keys, his cell phone and his jacket as he raced out to the garage. He climbed into the silver-blue sedan between Trevyn’s truck and Bram’s Jeep and dialed the number from the broadcast before racing down the road to the highway.

His conversation with the officer to whom his call was transferred was surreal.

“I’m calling about the young woman fished out of the Columbia River last night,” he said, trying to sound calm rather than the way he really felt.

“Your name, sir?”

“David Hartford from Dancer’s Beach. Is she all right?” he demanded.

“I believe so. You know who she is?”

“Yes.” He knew who she was. She had walked out of his dreams, lived in his heart.

“And what’s her name?”

“I…ah…don’t know.”

“But I thought you knew her.”

“I do. She came to a party at my home. But we were all wearing…masks.” It wasn’t until he got to the last word in his explanation that he realized what this must sound like to the officer. “It was a fundraiser,” he added lamely, “for the historical society.”

“I see. And she didn’t tell you her name?”

“No, I was dressed as a Musketeer and she…” He could feel his credibility diminishing. “No, she didn’t.”

“I see. Then, how do you feel you can help?”

He hadn’t really considered that. He’d just wanted to see her. “I can take care of her,” he said, “until you find out who she is.”

“We can’t release her into your custody, sir, if you’re not a relative.”

“But you don’t have a relative if you don’t know who she is! What’ll become of her when she’s ready to leave the hospital?”

David was at the highway now and had to concentrate to turn into the morning rush-hour traffic.

Fortunately the officer didn’t have an answer for that until David was comfortably ensconced in the stream of cars driving north.

“I’ll have to look into that for you, sir.”

“Thank you,” David said. “I’ll be there in three hours.”

“It’s a long drive from Dancer’s Beach, sir. Take your time. We’ll be here.”

ATHENA SAT IN THE BACK of a cab taking her from the Astoria Airport at the Coast Guard Air Station to Columbia Memorial Hospital. She folded her arms against the need to hold on to the front seat and shout “Faster! Faster!”

She couldn’t believe that she’d seen her sister on the news, pale and limp and pregnant, dragged out of a river like an old boot. She couldn’t imagine what had happened.

And she wasn’t entirely sure which sister this was. She and Alexis and Augusta talked on the telephone once a week, but she hadn’t seen either of them since their masquerade party fiasco in February. They’d met up again at the car that night as planned, both Lex and Gusty convinced that the Musketeers could not have been involved in anything illegal.

“He was too considerate,” worldly Lex had insisted of her Musketeer.

“Too…sweet,” Gusty had sighed.

The following day, they’d all returned home and Athena had spent the next month determined to find incriminating information on David Hartford. She’d hounded Patrick until he’d used every last source he knew, and still his results were unsatisfactory. He could find nothing on Hartford or his friends to take to the police.

“Hartford seems to be a paragon of virtue and journalistic skill, Bishop was decorated several times in the army, and McGinty was simply a drifter when he wasn’t taking brilliant pictures.”

“But what about the gaps in time you can’t account for?” she’d asked.

He’d sighed. “I’ve done everything, Athena. It’s just not there.”

“But how can that be? I thought with all our information on the Internet, everyone’s life story was vulnerable to everyone else’s scrutiny.”

“I don’t know. I’ll keep looking, but be prepared for it to take a while.”

That had been seven months ago.

Athena was trying to accept the situation, to convince herself that their aunt had left the house to Hartford just because she’d wanted to.

And then she’d watched the ten-o’clock news while on her treadmill and stared at her sister’s face on television. But the photo was grainy, though a very distinct pregnancy was clear. She’d heard her own little cry of surprise.

She’d called Gusty and gotten no answer. And there was no one at the school at that hour.

Then she’d called Lex in Rome and the message on her answering machine said—in English and in Italian—that she was off on a sketching trip to try to reinspire herself and would be out of touch for a week. Alexis, in a creative mode, always sought privacy.

So, who’d been pulled out of the river? The picture had been so unclear, and even under good conditions she and her sisters could misidentify one another from a distance.

And what on earth had whoever-it-was been doing in Astoria, Oregon? And pregnant?

Athena had called the hospital to say she was the sister of the mystery woman, and canceled the next few days’ appointments. She’d taken the red eye to Portland, then an early-morning commuter flight from Portland to Astoria.

She had no love life, she told herself, but she had a family life that was complicated enough to keep four people busy.

The cab pulled up to the covered main entrance of the hospital. Athena paid the driver, then leaped out while he retrieved her bag from the trunk. She ran to the main desk, told the clerk who she was, and was treated to one startled moment of staring.

“We’ve been expecting you, Miss Ames,” the clerk said, then called someone. A policeman appeared a moment later. He was tall and slender and probably in his late thirties. “Officer Holden,” he said, hands resting on the creaky leather of his belt. “Would you come with me, please?”

“I’ll watch your bag,” the clerk promised.

Athena handed it over the counter.

“It’ll be right back here when you return.”

“Is my sister okay?” Athena asked the officer as she followed him. “Last night’s news report said she was in satisfactory condition.”

“She…was fine when the nurse looked in on her at 6:12 a.m.,” he replied, a little evasively, Athena thought.

“You say that as though you think her condition might have changed,” she said as she chased his long steps down the hall.

“Well, I think what’s happened suggests that she was feeling much better.”

“What do you mean? What’s happened?”

He pushed open the door to Room 115. Inside was an empty, unmade bed.

“She seems to have run away,” Officer Holden said.

Athena stared at the empty room, sunshine streaming in through the window and across the rumpled bedclothes, and felt her heart sink like an anchor.

“You must be her twin,” the officer said. “I spoke to her briefly last night, and though she looked a little the worse for her experience—you’re identical.”

Athena heard the question though her brain wasn’t focused enough to process an answer. She felt herself nod—yes, they were identical—but her mind was occupied with more important questions about what had happened. Why did she leave? Where would she go? And who was it—Gusty or Lex?

And the most nagging question if not the most important—who’d fathered her sister’s baby, and why hadn’t she told her sisters about it?

Then she heard a man’s voice speaking to Officer Holden and looked up, thinking it was the doctor.

But it wasn’t. This man wore jeans and a gray cotton sweater. He looked grim until he caught sight of her, then a smile smoothed the worry lines on his forehead. He came toward her and caught her arms, his grip firm as he pulled her to him. “You’re all right!” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “You looked so pale and weak on television, I thought…”

She stood in limp surprise in his arms, then he stiffened suddenly and held her away from him. A new frown appeared between his eyes as he looked her over. “You’re not pregnant,” he said in what sounded like confusion.

He looked into her eyes and she felt the contact like a physical touch somewhere deep inside where she already felt lost. “I don’t understand.”

Frankly, neither did she.

“Miss Ames,” the officer said, “this is David Hartford, an acquaintance of your sister. Mr. Hartford, Athena Ames, our mystery woman’s twin.”

Hartford! The name reverberated in her brain while she forced a polite smile and shook his hand. The Musketeer who owned Sadie’s house!

“But where’s the woman from the river?” he asked the officer.

Holden pointed to the empty bed. “Gone. I’m sorry.”

Athena’s attention was suddenly divided between correcting the officer about being a twin, and complete surprise that one of the Musketeers was here to find Gusty. “How did you know her?” she asked the stranger.

He shifted and put a hand to the foot of the bed. He had dark hair and eyes and a lean but powerful body that seemed all shoulders and upper arms.

“I didn’t know her that well,” he said, and she got the impression he regretted that. “But I recognized her. She was at a party at my home last February.”

She had to sit on the side of the bed before her knees gave way. “I…I can’t imagine what’s happened to her,” she said, her brain working feverishly to figure out how a party in Dancer’s Beach at a house that was left to this stranger by her aunt was connected to a small town one hundred and fifty miles up the coast, where her sister had been fished out of the river. And why had that drawn David Hartford?

Could this possibly get any more confusing? Or make less sense? She didn’t think so.

“What do you mean gone?” David Hartford demanded of the officer. “How can an ill woman simply walk out of a hospital without being stopped?”

Holden shrugged. “They figure she did it while they were busy dispensing medications or serving breakfasts.”

“So a woman who doesn’t know who she is, where she comes from, or where to go is just wandering the street?”

“We’ve asked the television station to keep running the photo. And we’ll give it to the newspaper. At least now we know who she is.” He looked though a small notebook he carried. “Can I have her first name, Miss Ames?”

Athena made a quick decision she prayed would not further confound the situation. She couldn’t say, “It’s either Alexis or Augusta,” because the officer had just told Hartford she was a twin, not a triplet.

And while that could be easily corrected, she didn’t know what Hartford’s involvement was in all this, and having a third sister he didn’t know about might work to her advantage.

So on the shaky conclusion that Lex was still in Europe somewhere and had simply taken off on one of her art trips, and that Gusty usually checked in once a week but hadn’t this week, she replied, “Augusta. Augusta Amelia Ames.”

“Her age?” He smiled when she hesitated. “We’re gentlemen here. We’ll forget that it reveals yours, also.”

“Twenty-nine,” she said. “Five foot seven, about one hundred twenty-two pounds—except, of course, for the pregnancy.”

“Any idea where she might have gone?”

Athena shook her head. “She lives north of Sacramento, California in a town called Pansy Junction. She teaches school there. I have no idea what she was even doing here.”

“Any guesses where she might go?”

“None. Unless she’s trying to go home. But if she doesn’t remember who she is, she won’t know where that is—so I guess that doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Hartford put a hand on her shoulder. Its warmth and gentleness surprised her.

A tall man in a lab coat over jeans walked into the room. He was bald and wore glasses and a reluctant expression. A name badge on his lapel said he was Dr. Stoddard.

He stopped several feet inside the door when he saw Athena, a shocked expression on his face.

“This is your patient’s twin, Doctor,” Holden said. “Miss Ames, this is Dr. Stoddard, who treated your sister last night.”

The doctor shook his head in amazement. “You’re identical,” he observed.

She nodded.

He sat beside her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve spoken to everyone on duty this morning, and no one saw her leave. Mornings are a very busy time for us.”

“But why would she leave,” Athena asked, distress gaining control of her efforts to remain calm, “if she didn’t know where to go from here?”

“Agitation, I would guess,” he replied. “She had a blow to her forehead that probably caused the amnesia. I’ve never dealt with anything like this myself, but I did a little research last night and found that often a patient’s tendency is to run in such circumstances. If she woke up headachy and unable to come up with any answers about herself or her situation, she probably thought she could find the answers…somewhere.”

Athena asked one of the questions that had plagued her for the entire flight across country. “Doctor, did my sister say anything to you about the baby’s father?”

“No, she didn’t,” he replied. “If she doesn’t know who she is, she probably doesn’t remember her husband, either. Or her boyfriend.”

“You don’t know who he is?” Holden asked, making notes on a small pad.

She spread her hands helplessly. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant.” She focused on the doctor and reluctantly asked her second question. “Do you think her being in the water was the result of an accident, or that she was struck or pushed or something?”

The doctor shrugged. “Hard to say. The blow might have been consistent with striking the steering wheel. She might have gone off the bridge in a car.”

“But there was no sign of a crash along the guardrail on the Young’s Bay Bridge,” Holden said. “And, of course, she wouldn’t have survived a fall off the Astoria-Megler Bridge.”

Athena frowned in question.

“The big bridge to Washington,” he explained. “And so far, we haven’t found a car, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in the river, somewhere. She was recovered in the dark at high tide.”

Dr. Stoddard was paged over the public address system. He stood. “I have to answer that page, Miss Ames. I’m sorry about your sister, but she’s in generally good health, except for the amnesia. And the Astoria police are very good at their jobs. They’ll find her.”

“What about the baby?” Athena asked.

He nodded. “Also in good shape. An obstetrician looked her over, and despite what she’d been through, the baby was fine. She’s about twenty-nine weeks along.”

Holden walked her and David Hartford out into the hallway. “We’ll do our best, Miss Ames. We’ll keep running that photo on the news, and we’ll give it to all our officers and the state police so there’ll be someone on the lookout up and down the coast.”

Athena nodded. It seemed a pitiful solution when she thought of her sister all alone, lost in a void where she had no name, no past, and no connection to anyone in the present.

She just hoped to God that Gusty had a future.

If it was Gusty.

“Where will you be if I have information,” Holden asked, “or more questions?”

Athena was momentarily at a loss. “Right now, I’m not sure,” she said. “I came straight here in a cab from the airport. And I’m not sure I’ll get a motel. I may just rent a car and drive around looking for Gusty myself. But you can call me on my cell phone.” She gave him the number.

“This isn’t the best time to be visiting Astoria,” the officer said. “Motel rooms are full up because of the Fish Festival. And my guess is you won’t be able to find a car, either.” He turned to Hartford. “And where can I reach you?”

Hartford gave him an address and a phone number.

Holden closed and pocketed his book. “All right. Think positive and I’ll get back to you when I can.”

Athena retraced the path down which Holden had led her, retrieved her bag from the smiling clerk, then pushed her way through the revolving doors, Hartford right behind her.

She stood on the pavement in front of the hospital. “What do I do now if I can’t rent a car or find a room?” she wondered out loud in a mild panic.

“I have a thought,” David Hartford said.

HIS IDEA WAS CRAZY, David told himself, and would probably send her running in the opposite direction, convinced he was a lunatic with designs on her body, but it just might be an efficient solution to her problem. And she looked too much like his “Constance” to just abandon her to her own devices.

She looked at him warily. “Yes?”

“My home is halfway down the coast,” he said, trying to sound calm and reasonable. He didn’t feel those things. The mystery woman he’d spent the night with and made a baby with, was wandering around lost in an unfamiliar place, cold and lonely and probably terrified. “Why don’t we drive down the coast together. We’ll check out all the little towns in between, and you can stay with me until we hear something. We’ll be better as a search team than we would be separately.”

That earned him precisely the look he’d expected. So he explained.

“She’s carrying my baby,” he said.

Her eyes grew enormous and her mouth fell open. “You’re the boyfriend?”

“Not exactly, but I have a lot invested here, too. You’re safe with me, I promise you.”

She stammered but he kept talking.

“I have a very big house with six bedrooms. I have an office at one end of the upstairs, and you can have the room farthest away from it, if you like. I can also provide you with a car.”

“Why didn’t you tell Officer Holden it’s your baby?” she challenged suspiciously.

That was a tough one. “Because,” he admitted, “the details are sketchy.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll explain when we get to Cliffside. That’s where I live. In Dancer’s Beach.”

She was caving; he could tell. Her pointed chin identical to Constance’s—Augusta’s—softened and her tight jaw relaxed.

“That’s a big house,” she said, “for a single man.”

“I like the space,” he said. “A couple of friends also live on the property, but they’re out of town at the moment.”

“Convenient,” she said.

“Fact,” he corrected.

She looked into his eyes and there was something so familiar about the way her gaze bored into him—but, then, of course it would be familiar. She was Con…Augusta’s twin.

“All right,” she said. “But I warn you. I’m a lawyer. You do anything I don’t like, and before you even know what happened, I’ll own everything you have.”

He grinned and took her bag. “That’s what I like. A shy, retiring woman. Come on. I’m the blue sedan.”

She settled into the plush passenger seat as he stowed her bag in the back, then climbed in behind the wheel.

“This is very elegant,” she said, running a hand over the blue glove leather. “Six-bedroom house, pricey car with real leather upholstery. Are you a doctor?”

“No, I’m a writer.”

“A journalist?”

“Used to be. Now I write fiction.”

“Really. I hope it’s murder mysteries so that you’re blessed with good investigative skills that’ll find Gusty.”

“Gusty?”

“Augusta.” She frowned at him. “The woman who’s pregnant with your baby. How did that happen, anyway?”

Preparing to back out of his parking space, he turned to her instead, an eyebrow raised ironically. “I didn’t know her name. And I don’t really have to explain about how babies are made, do I?”

She pursed her lips at him. The gesture was distracting. It was going to be hard to remember that she was Augusta’s twin and not the woman herself.

“I meant how did it all get so—” she was back-pedaling, her hands making a wide gesture to replace the words she seemed to feel obliged to avoid “—intimate,” she finally said. “When you didn’t even know her name.”

“It was a costume party,” he replied. “We were wearing masks.”

“And that prevented you from introducing yourselves to each other?”

“No.” He backed out of the spot and headed for the exit on a street that ran parallel to the highway. “But it made it easier to pretend to be other people.”

Gusty had made love with David Hartford? What on earth had happened that night to make her usually shy sister so forthcoming?

Athena tried to imagine Gusty making love to a stranger and couldn’t. But she had. Or maybe it was Lex who had. That would be more believable.