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“Merry damn Christmas then.” Curtis hung up.
Slade replaced the receiver and turned again to the window. The snow fell in a silent white cloak, obliterating the buildings across the street. But he knew this town and everyone in it by heart.
Did that mean he’d known the man his mother had been seeing? Still knew him? He’s still here, Slade thought. And he thinks he got away with murder. He doesn’t know I’m coming for him. Yet.
He thought of what the chief had once told him about people trapped in their own lives, in their own illusions of reality, unable to get out, and wondered if he wasn’t one of them. Well, then so was his mother’s killer, he thought, as he raised his bottle, the snow falling so hard now he could barely see the Santa below his window, although he could still hear the bell.
It had been snowing the day he’d found his mother’s body. He hadn’t seen her at first—just the Christmas tree. It had fallen over on the floor. As he’d moved toward it, he was thinking the cat must have pulled it over. Then he saw her. Marcella Rawlins lay under a portion of the tree, a bright red scarf knotted tightly around her neck, one of the Christmas ornaments clutched in her hand. On the radio, Christmas music played and, as tonight, somewhere off in the distance, a seasonal Santa jangled his bell.
Behind him, the soft scuff of a heel on the hardwood floor jerked him from his thoughts. He remembered belatedly that he’d failed to shut and lock his office door. Damn.
“We’re closed!” he called out, not bothering to turn around. He took another drink and watched the snow fall, waiting for the footsteps to retreat.
When they didn’t, he turned, a curse on his lips.
She stood silhouetted against the dim light from the stairs, her body as sleek and curved as the long-neck in his hand and just as pleasing as the cold beer. She didn’t move. Nor did she speak. And that was just fine with him.
He ran his hand down the neck of the sweating bottle, enjoying the slick wet feel of it as much as he liked looking at her. Something about her reminded him of another woman he’d known and with the lights off he could almost pretend—
The bell suddenly stopped, the snow silencing everything down on the street. Slade could hear the quickened beat of his heart, the radiator thumping out heat and the faint sound of Christmas music drifting from the apartment next door.
“Mr. Rawlins?” Her voice was as seductive as her silhouette and almost…familiar.
He frowned and tipped the bottle toward her in answer, telling himself he was letting his imagination run away with him.
“Do you mind if I turn on a light?” she asked.
He did. He was tired and all the holiday cheer and the letter had left him on edge. Why couldn’t she just stand there? Or leave? He’d bet his pickup she wouldn’t look half as good in the light. And once he’d seen her, he wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore.
She flicked the light switch.
He blinked, too shocked to speak. He’d been wrong about the light. She looked even better than she had in silhouette. Dangerous curves ran the length of her, from the full, rounded breasts straining against the thin silk of her blouse beneath the open wool coat to the long, shapely legs that peeked between her skirt and her snowboots, all the way back up to her face. And, oh, what a face it was. Framed in a wild mane of curly dark hair. Lips lush. Baby-blues dark-lashed and wide.
It was a face and body he’d spent months trying to forget.
He swore under his breath, more in shock than anger, although he’d spent most of the last year looking for her, worrying that she was dead—and blaming himself for letting it happen.
“I need your help,” she said, a slight catch in her voice. “I know it’s Christmas Eve…”
He shook his head in disbelief. A thousand questions leapt into his mind, all having to do with where she’d been, what she was doing here now and why she’d left him. Oh yes, especially why she’d left him, he thought bitterly.
“What the hell do you think you—” He took a tentative step toward her, then stopped as he saw her expression. Blank as a wall. No recognition. She didn’t know him!
He let out a colorful curse.
“I really shouldn’t have bothered you.” She turned to leave.
He knew if he had any sense at all, he’d just let her go. If only he’d done that the first time.
“Just a minute.” He reached for her, afraid the moment he touched her, she would disappear again. Another one of Scrooge’s ghosts.
His hand brushed hers. She turned back to him, her blue eyes glistening with tears. She didn’t evaporate into thin air. Didn’t disappear like a mirage before him. And after touching her, he knew she was most definitely flesh and blood. But not the woman he’d known.
This woman was a walking shell of that woman, and he couldn’t help but wonder what had happened since to make her that way.
“I’m sorry, you just caught me by surprise,” he said, looking into all that blue again. Just as he had a year ago, when she’d come running out of the snowstorm and into the street. He’d tried to stop his pickup in time, but the snow and ice— He’d jumped from his truck and run to her. She’d lain sprawled in the snow just inches from his bumper. When she’d opened her eyes in the headlights, they were that incredible blue—and blank. Not as blank as they were now. There’d been something in her expression…something that had hooked him from the moment his gaze had met hers.
“Here,” he said, offering her a chair as he closed his office door, afraid she’d change her mind and leave. “What can I do for you?”
She seemed to hesitate, but accepted the chair he offered her, sitting on the edge of the seat, her handbag in her lap, her fingers clutching it nervously.
He leaned against the edge of his desk and stared down at her. Easy on the eyes, but hard on the heart, he thought. He knew better than to get involved with her again. But curse his curiosity, he had to know.
Last year when she’d come to in the street, he’d picked her up and put her in the cab of his pickup, planning to take her to the hospital. But she’d pleaded with him to just take her somewhere safe. She had no memory. No name. No past. But she’d been convinced someone was trying to kill her and had pleaded with him not to involve the police.
“I need your help,” she said now.
“My help?” he asked, still looking for some recognition in her gaze. But it appeared she didn’t know him from Adam! Either he wasn’t that memorable or the woman had a tendency to forget a lot of things. “Why me?”
She shook her head and clutched her purse tighter. “I’m afraid this was a mistake.” She started to get up.
He was on his feet, moving toward her. “No,” he said a little more strongly than he’d meant to. “At least give me a chance.”
She lowered herself back into the chair, but seemed apprehensive of him. Certainly not as trusting as last time, he thought with no small amount of resentment.
He’d taken her in and tried to unravel her past, believing she must be suffering from some sort of trauma.
But two months later, he was the one who’d gotten taken in. Just when he thought he might be making some progress into her past, she’d disappeared without a trace, along with a couple hundred dollars of his money and a half dozen of his case files. He’d spent months looking for her, fearing someone had killed her. Wanting to wring her neck himself.
And now she was back. Alive. And in trouble. Again.
“I’m afraid you’re going to think I’ve lost my mind,” she said, her voice as soft as her skin, something he wasn’t apt ever to forget. She shivered as if her words were too close to the truth.
“Why would I think that?” he asked, wondering if she could just be playing him. It was too much of a coincidence that she’d come into his life twice—both times in trouble, on Christmas Eve and supposedly with no memory. At least, this time, no memory of him, it seemed.
“The help I need is rather unusual.”
He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Try me.”
She seemed to relax a little now that he wasn’t towering over her, but she still clutched her handbag, still looked as if she might take off at a moment’s notice. Is that what had happened last time? She’d gotten scared? Scared of what he was going to find out about her? Or had she just planned to rip him off the whole time? And all these months he’d been telling himself that she’d just gotten cold feet about what was happening between the two of them.
“I think someone stole my baby.”
He stared at her. She had a child? “Wouldn’t you know if someone had taken your child?”
“I know it sounds…crazy, but, you see, that’s just it, I’m not sure.”
Déjà vu. This would have been a good time to tell her he couldn’t help her. Wasn’t about to get involved in her life again. But he had to know who she was and where she’d been all this time. And why. Why she’d conned him. Why she’d stolen from him. Mostly, how much of it had been a lie.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” he suggested. “Like with your name.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said with obvious embarrassment. She kneaded nervously at her purse and he could tell she was having more than second thoughts about coming here.
He gave her a smile. “Take your time.”
Her answering smile was like bright sunlight on snow. Dazzling. And it had the same effect on him it had had a year ago.
“My name is Holly Barrows. I’m an artist. I live in Pinedale.”
Pinedale? Just fifty miles over a mountain pass from here. Had she really been that close all these months? “How long have you lived there?” he had to ask.
“All my life.”
So is that what had happened? Her memory had returned last year and she’d just gone home? It seemed a little too simple given that she’d been so convinced someone was trying to kill her. Not to mention that she’d stolen his money and case files—then apparently forgotten him. And Christmas past.
“Please go on,” he encouraged.
“When I gave birth….” she said, the words seeming to come hard. “…I have little memory of the delivery. I think I was drugged.”
“You gave birth in Pinedale?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know where it was, just that it wasn’t a normal hospital. I think the room was soundproofed and the doctors…” She looked away. Her hands trembled. “When I woke, I was in County Hospital. I was told that my baby was stillborn. I don’t know how I got there. But I keep remembering hearing my baby cry. When I asked to see my baby at the hospital—” She stopped, seeming to be fighting to compose herself. “—I knew the infant they gave me wasn’t mine.”
He stared at her in shock. “The hospital let you see your stillborn baby?”
“See it, hold it, name it,” she said in that same blank, distant voice. “So the mother knows it’s really gone.”
Sweet heaven. He couldn’t imagine. “What made you think the baby wasn’t yours if you never saw it right after the birth?”
She shook her head. “A mother knows her own baby.”
He wondered if that was true. “What is it you think happened to your baby, presuming you’re right and the baby was born alive at this other place?” Then replaced with a dead one? How plausible was that?
“I know how insane it sounds, but I keep having these flashes of memory. My baby was alive. Someone stole it.”
Someone? The same someone she’d thought was trying to kill her a year ago?
She was wasting his time. It was obvious he wasn’t going to get his money—or his case files—back. Nor any explanation, let alone satisfaction, for the heartache she’d caused him. She was a nutcase. A beautiful, desirable nutcase.
She fumbled to open her purse.
The movement should have concerned him. She might be going for a weapon. As crazy as she was, she might shoot him. But the way her hands shook, she wouldn’t have been able to hit the broad side of a barn even if she pulled a howitzer from the bag.
She tugged out a tissue and wiped her eyes.
He’d heard enough, but still, he had to ask. “Why would someone want to take your baby?”
She glanced up, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know. I just have this feeling that this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. That there have been other babies they’ve stolen.”
She was worse than he’d thought.
He rubbed a hand over his face, remembering something she’d said. “During the delivery, you mentioned the doctors. You saw them then?”
She shook her head, one glistening tear making a path down her perfectly rounded cheek. “Not their faces.” She seemed to hesitate as if what she was about to say could be any worse than what she’d already told him. “They wore masks.”
“Masks? You mean surgical masks?”
“Halloween masks with hideous monster faces.” She avoided his gaze as she rooted around in her purse again. “I will pay you whatever you want to prove that I’m not crazy and to get my baby back.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. And to think he used to fantasize about finding her. “When was this anyway?”
“Five weeks ago.”
He nodded distractedly, wondering why it had taken her five weeks.
When he opened his eyes, she had the checkbook in her hand, her expression filled with hopefulness as she looked up at him again.
Sweet heaven. He couldn’t believe that a part of him would gladly leap on his noble steed and ride off to battle evil for this damsel in distress yet again. Except that she’d punctured a hell of a hole in his armor the last time around. She’d gone straight for his heart, and he wasn’t apt to forget it, no matter how desirable, how beautiful or how crazy and in need of help she was this time around.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said, getting to his feet.
Slowly, she lowered her gaze to her lap. He watched her put the checkbook back into her purse and rise from the chair.
“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” she said without looking at him.
He watched her walk to the door and thought he should at least suggest she seek medical help. Did she know a good psychiatrist?
But he let her go. She was either a crackpot, or a con artist. Her name probably wasn’t even Holly Barrows.
He listened as her boot heels tapped down the stairs, and he waited for the sound of the door closing on the street below, before he picked up his beer bottle and went to the window again.
It had stopped snowing, the sky dark, the air cold against the glass. He watched her hurry to a newer SUV parked at the curb. Out of habit, he jotted down her license-plate number when her brake lights flashed on.
Why had she come to him with this latest ludicrous story? Hadn’t she gotten what she’d come for the last time?
She pulled out into the street, and he had to fight the urge to run after her.
As he started to turn from the window, he caught a movement on the sidewalk below and looked down. The Santa bell-ringer no longer had his pot. Or his bell. He was looking after the retreating Holly Barrows and talking hurriedly into a cell phone.
Slade felt a jolt as the Santa glanced up toward his office window. The look was brief, but enough. Slade swore and scrambled around his desk and out of the office. He launched himself down the stairs, nearly falling on the wet steps, his mind racing faster than his feet, and burst through the door to the sidewalk.
The Santa was gone—except for his red hat and white fake beard lying on the pavement.
The quiet snowy darkness settled over Slade as he stared down the now-empty street. He’d seen the Santa’s alarmed expression when he’d looked up and spotted Slade at the window, recalled the agitated way the man had been talking into the cell phone.
Worry clutched at him the way Holly Barrows had clutched at her purse. Sweet heaven, could she have been telling the truth this time? More important, had she been telling the truth a year ago when she’d thought someone was trying to kill her?
Suddenly a thought lodged like a stake in his heart. If she wasn’t crazy, if Holly Barrows really had been pregnant and had delivered a baby five weeks ago, then— If nothing else, he’d always been good at math.
