Conard County Marine (17 page)

“Kylie?”

She turned her gaze to Coop. “Yeah?”

“You feeling spooked?”

“I was for a moment.”

He frowned faintly. “Then what happened? You were fixated there.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I was watching the coffee pour, and it was like...like I was on the cliff edge of remembering something. But I can’t imagine what. Maybe just some other time when coffee poured into cups.”

“Maybe so.” But he continued to look faintly troubled as he scanned their surroundings.

Coffee pouring into a mug. Now that was a weird thing to get hung up on, she thought. But she couldn’t let go of it. It clung to her mind like cold, wet leaves, unwilling to just vanish. But how many times in her life had she watched coffee pour? A million?

The image of the dark brown liquid pouring into the cup remained throughout lunch, and when Maude refilled their mugs she watched again, but her reaction was nowhere near as strong. It remained, but didn’t seem subtly threatening. Interesting.

During lunch they talked casually about Connie, Ethan and their kids, about what she remembered from her textbooks and how she felt about it.

“It was good,” she admitted. “I definitely didn’t feel as if I were looking at them for the first time. Familiarity, and some I remembered clearly. I guess I didn’t lose it all.”

He smiled. “That’s great news.”

“Maybe. And perhaps I should continue reading them. The neurologist said I’d start rebuilding connections with time. Maybe that’ll help.”

He nodded. “I’d vote for that.”

She smiled. “It won’t rebuild the trust, though.”

His expression sobered a bit. “You know what I think about that. We trust our memories entirely too much to begin with. We can pack a lot of factual information in, and given the right stimulus, I suppose we can recall a lot of it. You depend on that as a nurse, right?”

“A lot,” she admitted.

“I depend on it a lot, too. But then there’s this other thing called muscle memory. You’d have no way of parsing it, but I bet you do a lot of things as a nurse that your body simply remembers how to do and doesn’t have to appeal to your memory at all.”

That gave her some food for thought. Of course a lot of what she did had to be automatic. She didn’t have to think about it every time she gave an injection or applied a dressing. That would have been crazily time-consuming. Which made her wonder how much of that kind of memory was still available to her. How often had she looked at something and known exactly what to do about it without pausing to think? Plenty. Pressure to a wound, a tourniquet, the time she’d had to perform a tracheotomy in an emergency... It was like CPR. If you had to think too much about it, you might not do it right. Or you’d waste too much time.

“Thanks, Coop. I hadn’t thought about that before.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Autopilot is often a great thing.”

They were just finishing up, pushing their plates to the side, Coop asking if she wanted a dessert, when the coffee hit her again as Maude refilled them.

Coffee pouring into mugs. A white plastic tabletop. Someone sitting across from her. Not here. There.

Then.

*

Coop saw her face go cold as stone, as if her soul had just abandoned her body. He recognized the signs, and he knew he had to get her out of there now. He waved for Maude. She stopped over and he handed her a couple of bills. “Kylie needs to go.”

For once Maude didn’t grump or argue. “Then git,” was all she said, taking the bills.

Coop slid out of the booth and urged Kylie to slide out, too. She was stiff, almost as if rigor had seized her. People were staring, but he didn’t care. He had to get her to some place where she’d feel safe.

With an arm around her waist, he practically dragged her to the car and stuffed her in.

“Kylie.”

She didn’t answer. Cussing under his breath, he headed back to her and Glenda’s place, hoping the familiarity of home would help pull her out of the hell she was visiting.

At least he didn’t have that sensation of being watched. Whatever had caused it had moved on. Good. He had enough to handle right now, trying to bring Kylie back to the present.

What had she remembered?

And when it was over, would she make up her mind that she was too crippled to return to her career? God, he hoped not. This woman had lost enough.

*

Glenda was still soundly sleeping, so he led Kylie into the living room. When he gently urged her to sit on the couch, she didn’t resist. She was coming back. He just hoped she could tell him from what.

He sat beside her, cradling her, wishing he could carry her to bed and shelter her entire body in his, but that could be a big mistake, not knowing what she remembered. The last thing he wanted to do was push her farther over the edge.

It probably wouldn’t take much right now.

*

The kids were getting out of school and the area all around was crawling with city cops and sheriff deputies. Plenty of parents had arrived to pick up their own children.

So all the resources were directed around the schools. Too bad Kylie wasn’t alone.

But Todd had another goal in mind and Kylie could wait for now. First he needed to stir the pot of a fear that might soon start to wane.

And he knew exactly how to do it.

For all the cops were so smart, and for all the caring parents who were now afraid to let their kids walk home alone, there were always some strays.

Some had parents who were tied to jobs and trusted the police. Some had parents who didn’t care. And some kids, for whatever reasons, preferred not to be watched and shepherded by police, usually because Daddy or Mommy had had some trouble with the law.

So if Todd circled far enough out from the immediate zone of threat, he knew he’d find his target. It took nearly a half hour. The cordon was beginning to loosen as kids disappeared from the streets without any alarm being raised.

Then he saw her just ahead of him. Walking alone, a ragamuffin of a child with a battered backpack, pausing occasionally to kick at a stone on the broken sidewalk. Every town had neighborhoods like this where the forgotten and poor lived as best they could. A plantation of potential victims, he sometimes thought. Problem was, none of them had anything worth taking. But they had something worth scaring.

The streets were deserted. The child was probably going home to an empty house. The only question was how far he wanted to take this. He had no particular interest in children except as tools. This little redhead with her dirty Orphan Annie curls would be a perfect tool.

He swung the car around and came back across the street before stopping.

Immediately he could tell she had heard the warnings in school. As soon as he braked, she moved to the far side of the walk and began to move faster.

“Say, little girl,” he called from the far side of the street. She hesitated. “I just want to ask you a question.”

When she didn’t move, he took the opportunity to swing around and come closer, this time with the driver’s side near the sidewalk. Her eyes grew huge and she backed up, watching him warily, clearly ready to run. “I just want to know which way to the grocery store.” He smiled. “I’m new here.” He leaned over, holding a candy bar out the window. “You can have this if you’ll tell me...”

The candy bar did it.
Never take candy from strangers.
The girl’s hesitation vanished, and she took off down the street and across the grass, screaming.

Todd hit the gas and cleared the street before any doors started flying open.

Job well done. Distraction accomplished.

Now to figure out how to separate Kylie from that damn marine. Or take him out so Todd could get to Kylie. Either one would work.

Whistling, Todd drove out of town, past his own place, planning to come back after dark when no one would be likely to see him park in his barn.

A plan. He was one step away from success. He just needed the final plan.

*

Kylie came back slowly, but she came back. He felt the softening in her body, then a ripple of tremors.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“What triggered it?”

“Pouring coffee.”

Pouring coffee? That sounded weird, all right, but not beyond the realm of what he’d seen grab some of his comrades. “What about it?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like I haven’t seen coffee poured a gazillion times.”

He gave her a little squeeze and risked dropping a kiss on the top of her head. He didn’t know if she was completely back yet, and everything he did chanced sending her back to that place.

“How are you feeling now?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Strange. But I’m not locked in it anymore.”

“One memory or more?”

“First it was just the coffee. That was so strange I managed to push it aside, mostly. But then I remembered more. A tabletop. Someone sitting across from me. Coffee being poured.”

“Could you see who was there? Or where it was?”

“Not really. I think it was a cheap restaurant near the hospital. I remember a white plastic tabletop. And that someone else was there. Not a medical person.”

“How can you know that?”

“No scrubs,” she answered simply.

“A friend, maybe,” he suggested tentatively.

“I don’t know!” The words burst out of her. An instant later she’d left his embrace and started pacing. “Coffee. Just some damn coffee and an ordinary table and absolutely no reason to react that way! None. God, it just froze me up inside. Not when I first saw Maude pour the coffee, although that grabbed me. But when it happened again. The second memory. That was real, Coop.
Real!
”

“I believe you.” Much as he wanted to rise and give her a huge comforting hug, he feared that touching her right now might be more than she could stand. Let her pace, let her deal, make sure that nothing upset her more. Damn, he hated being helpless to do anything. It grated on him; it always had, and this time seemed worse because it was Kylie, a woman who’d been totally victimized for no reason at all. Or maybe because it was Kylie and she had become important to him.

The thought drew him up short. He was well aware that for many years now he’d been very careful where he committed his emotions. Caring was dangerous. He’d cared about too many people in the early days of his service only to lose them. Situations like that made it reasonable to harden the heart. Everything about what he did had made that a sensible choice.

Reaching out to Connie after all this time had been a risky move. A few letters, a few phone calls—they didn’t create strong emotional ties. But then something had started pushing at him until finally he’d decided to deepen his connection with his cousin and her family.

Which had brought him here, and now he found an injured woman worming her way past all his defenses. Something bad could happen to Kylie. That was obvious since the rose, but he was breaking his own self-imposed protective measures with each passing moment. Taking the biggest risk of all: giving a damn.

None of this was wise. Kylie was leaning on him because she was afraid. He was caring about her in defiance of everything he’d learned. Bad situation for both of them.

He didn’t want to hurt her. But what if that self-protective carapace slammed into place again? She’d feel it. And what if he allowed himself to care about a woman who wouldn’t need him at all once they caught her attacker?

He could smell trouble from kilometers away, days away, and he smelled trouble now.

The hell of it was, he had no idea what to do about any of it. He couldn’t just walk away, not in this situation. He couldn’t protect Kylie if he wasn’t here, and if he stayed, apparently he couldn’t protect himself.

Great job, Coop
, he thought sourly.
Great job.

Then he gave up his internal argument and looked at the agitated woman pacing the living room. She was all that mattered. Whatever the cost, he had to keep her safe.

Period.

*

As she paced, Kylie battered at her memory, trying to add detail to the memory of the coffee and table. Useless. How could she trust herself if she filled in parts of the picture? Coop was absolutely right about the malleability of memory. In the end, all she did was give herself another headache.

And a serious case of frustration. A knife. Coffee. Not nearly enough to figure out who was after her. Useless bits. Why couldn’t something useful have struck her?

Instead she’d reacted all out of proportion to the sight of coffee being poured.

“You must think I’m crazy,” she said tautly.

“Who, me? I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” Coop said.

“Really? A woman who panics because someone pours coffee?”

“The coffee wasn’t the reason for your panic. Whatever it’s associated with was.”

She stopped pacing, planted her feet and stared at him. “How are you always so calm? Don’t you have memories like this?”

“Of course I do.” Now he wished he could stand up and pace, too, but given his size and the smallness of the room he figured he might intimidate her, and he didn’t want to do that. “I’ve got plenty of those memories.”

“Then how do you handle them?”

“I told you. And with time...” He hesitated. “Finally you get to the point where you just plain don’t let yourself care anymore. But that’s me, that’s my situation, and yours is very different.”

Her expression changed subtly. “What do you mean you don’t care anymore?”

He hesitated. “That’s not exactly what I mean. I try to avoid forging strong bonds with people I might lose. That’s all. Doesn’t exactly always work.”

“Your cemetery.”

“Exactly.”

No, it didn’t always work. He’d tried to deaden himself, but he knew all the times he’d failed. Just as he was failing with Kylie.

She left the room. He followed.

“Just a headache,” she said, opening the kitchen cabinet. “Every single time I push my memory, my head starts throbbing.” This was more than some broken neural connections, she thought. This was a whole big mental block. Whatever memories she might actually have lost through the injury to her head, she seemed to have lost a whole lot more to her mind’s unwillingness to remember.