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Rain had to admit she did feel better. The gnawing in her stomach had eased and her headache didn’t feel nearly as bad. “I didn’t even know I was hungry.”
“Maybe not,” the nurse said, handing her the robe. “But your body knew it needed some nutrition.” She pulled the covers on the bed back. “Now put that robe around you and let’s get you going.”
Rain looked down at the faded robe, then back up to the nurse. “Is there a mirror in here?”
The nurse hesitated for a moment, then something softened in her eyes.
“Right here,” she said, flipping back a plastic disk from a panel beside the bed, revealing a small lighted mirror on the other side. “And maybe I can scrounge up a hairbrush, too.”
Rain slowly leaned forward, almost reluctant to see who would look back at her. What if she didn’t recognize that face? She was surrounded by a world of strangers. What if she was a stranger to herself?
“It’s…it’s me,” she whispered, watching the reflection of her own lips move in the mirror. Leaning closer, she brought a hand to her lips, her cheek, and through her hair, feeling a wave of relief wash over her. She wasn’t sure when the last time was that she had seen the face in the mirror, but it was a familiar face to her—gloriously and gratefully familiar. For the first time since she’d awakened in the desert, she was looking at something familiar.
“This isn’t much,” the nurse conceded, pulling a small, plastic-wrapped comb from another drawer in the bed stand. “But it might work until we can get you some decent toiletries. Run it through your hair while I get one of the student nurses to take you down to the lab.” She glanced down at the oversize watch on her wrist. “X rays aren’t scheduled for about an hour but the way those techs in the lab poke around, it’ll take them about that long to draw a couple cc’s of blood from you.”
Rain glanced up, feeling another moment of uneasiness. “You—you won’t be coming with me?”
The nurse smiled. “Oh, don’t you worry—you haven’t seen the last of me yet. We’ve got a bunch of things planned for you.” She helped Rain into the wheelchair and pushed her out of the room and into the corridor where a young woman stood waiting. “This is Terri and she’s going to take you for your tests and then in to see Dr. Martinez.”
“Will he have the results then?” Rain asked, fear creeping into her voice. What if the doctor’s tests reveal that she’d never get better, what if they reveal she never would remember? “When will I know?”
The nurse bent close, covering Rain’s hand with hers. There was such kindness in her weathered face, such compassion, Rain couldn’t help herself from responding. The woman understood what she was feeling, understood just how frightened she was.
“Don’t you worry,” she assured Rain in a quiet voice. “We’re going to take good care of you, you can be sure of that. And don’t forget, there’s Sheriff Mountain…he’ll figure out what happened out there in the desert, he’ll find out where you belong and he’ll get you back there—you’ll see.”
Rain felt a lump of emotion form in her throat and she struggled to swallow. She wanted to believe the nurse, wanted to believe the nightmare could end and that she would find her life again.
“Thank you,” she whispered, feeling the sting of tears burn her eyes and her throat.
“And by the way, I’m Carrie,” the nurse called after her as Rain was wheeled down the hallway. “If anybody gives you any trouble, you just tell them they’ll have me to contend with.”
“Was she raped?”
The words slipped out of his mouth as though he were asking about the weather or the score of a ball game. Being Navajo and being a lawman, Joe Mountain had long ago learned the importance of keeping any emotion out of his voice. It never paid to let anyone know how you really felt. It may have played havoc in his private life, but professionally, it was the only way to survive.
Cruz tossed the chart on to his cluttered desktop and drew in a deep breath. Leaning back in his chair, he glanced up at Joe Mountain and shook his head. “I told you—no evidence of sexual assault. No evidence of drugs or alcohol.”
Joe made a notation in his notebook and tried to ignore the rush of relief that pulsed through his veins. Acknowledging relief would have been admitting that it mattered and it didn’t—it couldn’t. As a lawman it was his job to dig out the facts—cold, hard facts. Not react to them.
“Is there a possibility she could have been struck by lightning?”
Cruz snorted at the suggestion and shook his head again. “Lightning strike would cause severe tissue damage—point of entry, point of exit—that sort of thing and there’s not a mark on her. No burns, no trauma at least. Just a bump on the head.”
Joe made another notation in the tablet. “So that would pretty much leave out an animal attack?”
“Mountain lion, or something like that?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty much,” Cruz said with a wry smile. “Not many declawed mountain cats out there. Unless, of course, you meet up with one of those club-carrying cats who prefer whacking their victims over the top of the head.” He breathed out a laugh. “You know, caveman style.”
Joe glanced up, shooting Cruz a dark look. “No sign of animal attack,” he said deliberately, writing as he spoke and enunciating each word carefully.
“Safe to say that,” Cruz mumbled, doing his best to look appropriately chastised. They were two men who worked in professions that saw too much human misery and adversity and the dark humor they shared from time to time was a way they helped one another cope. “And just for the record, your lady had no scratch marks on her. No scratches, no scrapes, no bruises—not even a bug bite.”
Joe walked to the chair in front of Cruz’s desk and sat down. “So you can’t come up with any explanation as to what happened to her.”
“Not really,” Cruz admitted. “The woman sustained a blow to the back of the head which rendered her unconscious. For how long, though, I don’t know and whether or not it caused the memory loss she’s experiencing, I can’t say.”
“But you could venture a guess.”
Cruz shrugged. “My guess is no—the trauma just doesn’t appear to me to be that severe.”
“Even though it rendered her unconscious?”
“People get knocked out all the time and they don’t lose their memory,” Cruz pointed out. “Amnesia is very rare.”
Joe tried hard not to let his frustration show in his tone, but it wasn’t easy. He wanted answers—needed them in order to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but they just weren’t there.
“Serious now,” Joe said, himself serious. “What do you think has caused it?”
Cruz’s expression changed, all signs of humor gone now. “It’s really hard to say,” he confessed. “But the fact that the woman has not only forgotten what happened to her, she’s forgotten everything else—her name, where she comes from—makes me think whatever it was that happened was so traumatic to her, she’s blocked everything out.”
“So you think she doesn’t want to remember?”
“Not that she doesn’t want to remember. More like she can’t bring herself to,” he explained. “I think whatever happened—whether it was actually something that happened to her or something she witnessed, something she participated in—it was so distressing, so disturbing her mind simply won’t let her remember it.” Cruz sat up, leaning his elbows on the cluttered desktop. “Now you tell me. What would you think happened to the lady?”
Joe flipped his tablet closed and tossed it down on to the desk atop the medical chart. Joe and Cruz had been friends a long time, long enough that Joe felt comfortable sharing ideas and knowing they would go no further.
“Honestly? It beats the hell out of me.” Slipping his pencil into the pocket of his shirt, he walked to a chair in front of Cruz’s desk and slowly lowered himself into it. “I’m just guessing at this point, trying not to overlook anything—no matter how off the wall it may sound.”
“Sort of going on the theory that if you don’t have anything to go on,” Cruz concluded, “then anything’s possible?”
“Something like that,” Joe admitted. “At this point I don’t know if she’s the victim or the perpetrator, if I should be checking out the missing persons lists or the wanted posters, if a crime has been committed or if an accident has happened. Maybe she just ran out of gasoline, or lost control of her car and something snapped, making her forget everything.” He rolled his shoulders back, easing hard, tense muscles. “Maybe she fell, or slid down a mountain—hell! She could’ve dropped from the sky—from a UFO for all the evidence there is,” he said, stifling a yawn and giving his scratchy eyes a rub. “There isn’t a lot out there to go on to point me in any one direction, so I’m running around in circles. When I was out there this morning—”
“This morning?” Cruz exclaimed, cutting him off. “Geez, man, it isn’t even noon yet. You’ve been out there and back already?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Joe said, not wanting to think of the long hours he’d spent twisting and turning before striking out on the highway just before dawn. “Besides, I wanted to catch first light, but I could have slept in for all the good it did. I drove a five-mile circle from where I found her—I even walked a good mile of it on foot and came up with nothing.” He leaned forward, pointing his finger to emphasize the point. “Zilch, zip, nada! Not a tire track, a skid mark or a footprint. There was no sign of wreckage, no nothing.”
Frustrated, he sank back in the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him and tilting his cowboy hat back on his forehead with the tip of his thumb. “Granted, that was one hell of a rainstorm last night and it’s not like I went out there expecting to find a big sign pointing me in the right direction, but damn, if there’d been an accident or she’d broken down or had a flat tire, there was no sign of it—and no car.”
“Maybe she just had a fight with her boyfriend?” Cruz said, snapping his fingers as the idea came to him. “She got out of the car and he drove off, left her there and by the time he got back, she was gone!”
“Possibly,” Joe nodded, arching a brow. “But it doesn’t explain the head injury.”
Cruz sank back. “Oh, yeah.”
“And it’s not likely she gave herself a club on the head.”
“Not very.”
“Besides, why hasn’t the guy reported her missing then?”
“Good point,” Cruz acquiesced good-naturedly. “What about a robbery then? She could have been accosted, robbed—that would explain her injury, maybe even the memory loss.”
“I thought of that—or a carjacking,” Joe said, yawning again. “At least, that would be my bet at this point. But we’re trying not to overlook anything—grand theft auto, kidnapping, missing persons but as of about thirty minutes ago, there have been no stolen vehicles reported and no one has reported her missing. So until that happens, or we find a car or some other piece of evidence, we wait.”
“Well one thing’s for certain,” Cruz pointed out. “She sure as hell didn’t walk out there—at least not in the shoes she was wearing. They may have been water soaked, but they were practically new.”
“So that means somebody had to have taken her out there and purposely left her,” Joe concluded, folding his arms across his chest. The thought had his frown deepening.
“Left her for dead,” Cruz added quietly.
The sober thought rendered them both quiet for a moment. Joe remembered the terror he had seen in her eyes. It took more than an accident to put that kind of fear in a person’s eyes.
“I guess that means you’re looking at an attempted murder,” Cruz stated.
Joe glanced up. Having someone trying to kill you would have you looking pretty damn scared. “Sorta looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Signs seem to be there,” Cruz continued. “And it would explain the head injury, the lack of any evidence, any clues.”
“Somebody took her out there,” Joe said in a quiet voice, closing his eyes and seeing her panicked face in the darkness. “Somebody who wanted her dead.”
“Have you been thoroughly poked and prodded?”
Rain looked up at the sound of Carrie’s voice and smiled. The portly nurse had been nowhere in sight when she’d returned to her room earlier after an exhausting series of tests and an examination by the doctor.
“Thoroughly,” she said, pushing away her empty lunch tray. She wasn’t sure about the rest of her, but her appetite certainly appeared to be healthy.
“Good,” Carrie said, pushing her solid frame through the open doorway and floating quietly across the worn linoleum floor. “We don’t feel people are doing their jobs around here unless they make our patients feel like pincushions.”
Rain held out her arm, looking down at the row of bandages left from the various blood samples that had been drawn. “Then I think it’s safe to say you’ve got hardworking people on your staff.”
“And your examination with Dr. Martinez? That went okay?”
Rain thought of the tall, good-looking doctor and his kind, compassionate nature. “Yeah, it went all right. He took a lot of time, explained a lot of the things to me about my head injury and the memory loss. And he talked about possible prognosis and told me not to try to force myself to remember, that if things were going to come back, they’d come back in their own time.”
“That’s true. You can’t push these kinds of things.”
“But he also admitted there was a possibility I’d never recover my memory, or only bits and pieces of it.”
“There’s always that possibility,” Carrie admitted. “But then, every prognosis has a worst-case scenario.”
Rain smiled. “You sound just like the doctor.”
“Oh, Lord, don’t tell me that!” Carrie said with a cackle. Reaching out, she patted Rain on the arm. “You feeling a little better about things now?”
Rain laughed. “I’m not sure if I feel better or if I’m just tired of thinking about it. But the doctor was very kind—you’ve all been.”
“Well, Cruz—he’s the best. We may not have a lot to brag about here in Mesa Ridge, but we can brag about him,” Carrie said, reaching for the lunch tray. “Why don’t you try to take another little nap now. I’ll get this out of the way—” She stopped as she glanced down at the empty tray. “Well, will you look at this—another clean plate. You know, if you aren’t careful, those people in the kitchen are going to start thinking you like the food around here. Then we’ll all have to suffer for it.”
Rain smiled, liking the feeling and liking the sturdily built nurse and her no-nonsense manner. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I can’t seem to get enough.”
“Well, darlin’, there’s nothing the matter. This is exactly what you need,” Carrie said, pulling a thermometer out of the cabinet beside the bed and giving it a violent shake. “Some regular meals and a whole lot of rest.” She popped the thermometer into Rain’s mouth. “I understand you managed to get in a short nap before lunch, too.”
Unable to speak with the thermometer in her mouth, Rain nodded. There had been just enough time after she’d returned to her room after her appointment with the doctor for a catnap before they brought her lunch. It hadn’t been a very long nap, just long enough for her mind and body to rest and her subconscious to dream and conjure up images of a man—tall, dark and mysterious. He had been reaching out to her with strong, powerful arms and she’d felt warm and secure in his embrace.
She had awakened from her nap feeling strangely comforted and calmed by the dream. Did she know the man? Was he someone from the life she’d forgotten, someone who would be looking for her?
“Then I’d say that’s just what the doctor ordered,” Carrie was saying in response to her nod. “A little rest and relaxation and you’ll be as good as new.” She pulled the thermometer from Rain’s mouth and squinted to read it. “How’s your head feeling?”
Rain touched the tender spot on the top of her head and winced. “Oh, it’s still there.”
Carrie’s smile faded as she peered through her bifocals to take a look. “It certainly is.” Shifting her gaze to Rain, her eyes narrowed. “How’s the headache?”
“Still there, too,” she admitted, sinking back against the pillows. “But better.”
“Feel up to a little company?”
Rain sat up straight. Had someone come for her? Was she going to find out who she was and where she belonged?
“C-company? You mean someone—”
“The sheriff, sweetheart,” Carrie added quickly. “Sheriff Mountain.”
“The sheriff,” Rain said in a small voice. Feeling the sting of tears, she quickly looked away. “I thought…”
“I’m sorry, dear, I—” Carrie reached out, giving her hand a squeeze. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay,” Rain assured her even though a large tear spilled onto her cheek.
Carrie squeezed her hand again. “Why don’t I tell him to come back a little later? Maybe this isn’t the best time….”
“No, that’s okay,” she insisted, swiping at the tear. “Tell the sheriff to come in. I’d like to see him. I’d at least like to thank him.”
Carrie regarded her for a moment. “You sure you’re up to this?”
Rain nodded, giving her a small smile. “Absolutely.”
Carrie looked unconvinced. “Okay, if you’re sure.”
“Carrie,” Rain said, stopping her as she started toward the door. “Sheriff Mountain—he’s the one who gave me my name, isn’t he?”
Carrie nodded. “Yes, he did. You going to give him a hard time about that?”
Rain smiled and shook her head. “No, I like my name.”
Carrie smiled, too, and turned back toward the door. “You talk to the sheriff and I’ll see what I can do about finding you a little something sweet to tide you over until dinner. Okay?”
