"I haven't been stringing her along," objected Mitch.
"Yes you have. You gonna marry her, Mitch?"
"I can't," said Mitch automatically.
"Well I can, Mitch. I love her, Mitch. I've always loved her. I just never got a chance with her, 'cause you went off to the academy."
"You could have made a move while I was gone," said Mitch.
"She wouldn't even talk to me," said Tim. "She was waiting for you."
"I don't know, Tim," said Mitch doubtfully.
"That's my price, Mitch," said Tim stubbornly. "You needed a favor and I did it. You owe me."
"I don't owe you my girlfriend!" barked Mitch.
"Just tell her she can go out with me," said Tim. "Just one date. Let me tell her how I feel about her. After that ... it's up to her."
Mitch felt like his stomach was suddenly empty and craving food. Yet the smells in the Roach coach weren't attractive at all. The problem was that he and Carla weren't really getting along all that well right now. It had happened before and she'd walked out on him a couple of times. But she always came back. He didn't make promises ... but he let her believe what she wanted to believe about what he'd do. She was fun to be around. He liked her a lot and the sex was great. But his conscience bothered him sometimes, because he knew he'd never marry her. That just wasn't in his plans. Not for years more, at least.
He frowned. Now he had this case ... a
real
case. Somebody had shot at a famous author ... well an author who'd sold a lot of books, anyway ... and if he could come up with the right information, he might be able to parlay that into a job offer from a bigger jurisdiction. Carla would never go with him ... not if he didn't marry her first. And that would tie him down. He looked at Tim. Tim hadn't dated anybody since high school. He ran his little store and minded his own business. He wasn't going anywhere. It was hard, but he said the words.
"Okay. Ask her. If she says anything to me, I'll tell her I agreed."
He expected Tim to look happy, but his face didn't change.
"I appreciate it," said Tim. Then he stood up, pushed past Mitch and said, "I'm ready to go."
Finding Kris was easy. It was five in the evening by the time he got back to town and Mitch drove straight to Lulu's. The car Butch had loaned Kris was there. He got out of the patrol car and took the briefcase out of the back seat, where he'd left it so it wouldn't stain the front seat covers. It still felt like it weighed fifty pounds as he carried it to Lulu's front door and knocked.
"I can't believe it," said Kris, staring at the open briefcase. "Ron Stevens? It doesn't mean anything to me."
"Well, you're him," said Mitch. "You have to be, with that in your car and what we know about you so far. It all matches up. I've even read one of your books." He frowned. "There's something else, too."
"What?" Lulu and Kris asked at the same time.
"There are bullet holes in the car."
"What?"
gasped Lulu.
"Shit," said Kris softly. His eyes went glazed.
Lulu looked at his expression, and her jaw closed, only to fall open again. Then it closed as she spoke. "You knew about this?"
"Not exactly," said Kris, his eyes clearing. "I had this vague memory that might have been a man, pointing a gun at me and shooting, but I wasn't sure."
"There's damage to the right front fender too," said Mitch.
"Oh shit," moaned Kris.
"What's going
on
here?" yelled Lulu. Mitch looked uncomfortable.
"I have to look into this, Kris," he said. "Officially," he added.
"I know," said Kris softly.
"Will somebody please tell me what the fuck is going on here?"
squealed Lulu.
Ambrose's voice cried out from his bedroom. Lulu looked stricken and started toward her son's room. She turned.
"Nobody leaves here until I know what the fuck is happening. Is that clear?"
"I have to go," said Mitch, almost, but not quite wincing.
"I'll tell you about it," said Kris. "Go take care of him. He's probably scared because you yelled."
"Because I yelled." Lulu's voice sounded disgusted. "Don't you move an inch," she said, staring at Kris.
"I won't," he said.
Mitch got to the door and stopped. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key ring. "Oh, by the way," he said. "Here are the keys that were in the car. I had to keep the ignition key, but you can have the rest back."
Communication is the key to any relationship. When there is not enough, or it is of poor quality, each person in the relationship is left to make assumptions. Sometimes we make those assumptions on the basis of body language, and sometimes what is said, or even not said. Good communication doesn't just happen, usually. It has to be worked at and the people involved have to make themselves vulnerable to each other, to allow whatever is on the mind to be said. When that doesn't happen, and the communication is poor, the relationship suffers.
He was sitting, waiting, when she got back. He knew she was agitated because she paced.
"You've been keeping secrets from me," she said, stopping and looking at him. What she actually meant was that she thought he'd been confiding in her. She didn't think they had any secrets.
"I didn't want you to worry," he said. He didn't tell her he was afraid they'd be torn apart by the knowledge that he had committed such an atrocious act.
"So now you just drop all this in my lap." She sounded disgusted again, but it was really just frustration that he hadn't trusted her enough to share his troubles.
"I'm sorry." He felt like he had hurt her.
"I'm very disappointed in you," she said. If she'd been thinking more clearly, she might have phrased that differently. She might have said she was sad that she hadn't been able to participate in finding out what his memories meant ... that the partnership they'd started might have been strengthened by the teamwork of working through a problem together.
To Kris, her attitude meant that her love for him had diminished. He had brought her pain, even though he had tried not to. He felt like a failure.
"I can't believe they found your manuscript," said Lulu, changing the subject. She was excited about learning something about the man she loved by reading something he'd written before he'd lost his memory. "I'm going to go get the hair dryer and see if we can save it."
Kris felt conflicted. She was more interested in a wet pile of paper than trying to work through this problem. At the same time, he was interested in seeing what his mind had created before his life had been turned upside down. At last he had the chance to find out what kind of things he usually wrote about.
Lulu approached most things with a single mindedness that was born of the desire to do something well, and as efficiently as possible. For that reason, her attention was on each page as it was peeled off the pile, dried with the hair dryer, and then read. It would have been better to just dry all the pages, and then read them in order, because the stop and go process robbed the pages that were fully written of some of their impact. But she was impatient to explore and so she did it that way.
From Kris' viewpoint, the words on the paper were just that ... words. He had a hard time claiming ownership of them because, even as he read them, they seemed flat and unfamiliar.
As a result, the gap between them widened even more as the pages were processed. Neither of them wanted that gap to widen, but neither recognized what was actually happening. All they felt was the vaguely uncomfortable rift between them, a rift that wasn't actually meant to be there, but which had been created through imperfect communication of what each was feeling.
That lingering dissatisfaction with the way things were going, and the errors each had made that night, had one more huge impact on the relationship. The manuscript was a draft and unfinished. All the thought and editing that would eventually go into it had not yet been done. Kris, who knew he had written it, was disappointed. Lulu, unaware that her involvement in the romance novel had biased her towards it, and because the page drying marathon had left her tired, simply said, "You've done lots better work."
Lulu expected him to kiss her good night, as a display of his repentance for not confiding in her.
Kris expected Lulu to kiss him good night, as a display of the fact that, despite the obvious flaws in his personality, she forgave him.
In the end, that good night kiss didn't happen, because neither felt positive enough about the situation to initiate it.
It was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
Chapter Twenty-nine
When Kris left, he felt like the world was closing in on him and he had nowhere to turn for sanctuary. He believed Lulu was disgusted with him because he was a bad person. Mitch was going to continue investigating, find out that he'd committed a crime and probably arrest him. Even if he could find a way to patch things up with Lulu, his life would still be down the crapper, sooner or later. Eventually ... he was going to have to pay the piper, and he didn't need his memory to tell him how difficult it would be to carry on a relationship if he was in jail.
He imagined what it would be like. He'd be at the Early Girl, eating pancakes with hash browns and flirting with Lulu, while other people in town looked on and wondered what was really going on between them. Mitch would come in, draw his gun and shout for Kris to get down on the floor, or something like that, and then drag him out in handcuffs. Or, worse, it would happen at Lulu's house ... with Ambrose looking on.
Tears spilled down his cheeks as he blinked rapidly, trying to keep his vision clear as he drove through the streets of the little town that had somehow become home for him. It wasn't fair. While he couldn't remember his previous life, he somehow knew that what he'd stumbled into in Pembroke was better than anything he'd ever had before. Now that he had carved a niche for himself, it was all going to come undone.
It was as he thought of these things, on his way home, that emotion overrode common sense.
He decided to just get it over with. He decided to pack up, that very night, and go back to New York City. He'd find his apartment, find his publisher, and sell the book he'd written, if that was possible. He'd probably have to use that money for a lawyer, but he'd turn himself in, like Mitch had talked about. Mitch had said that might help a little bit. That he didn't know exactly
where
to turn himself in was a minor issue, as far as he was concerned. It must have happened in the city, so any NYPD station house would do.
He knew he should tell Lulu what he was going to do, but he couldn't face her. She was already disappointed in him. It was better to just make a clean break. When he got to the city, he'd call Mitch and tell him he was going to turn himself in and that he just needed to wrap up a few things first.
Packing was easy. He hadn't bought much since arriving in Pembroke. What people had donated to him would be left behind, so they could reclaim it, or somebody else could use it. A piece of his forwarded mail provided the address of his apartment. The rental was paid for for another two months, but he'd just forfeit that. He could mail the key back to Rudy, along with an explanation. He didn't know what to do about the radio station. He'd think of something when he got back home.
Lulu kept popping into his head. He could picture her easily, walking up and down the aisle of the diner, a coffee pot in one hand, and a smile on her face. He told himself over and over that it would be less painful for both of them if he just drove away.
So that's what he did.
It was two in the morning when he finally found his address. It had taken so long mostly because of the people there had been to ask for directions. Most of them were either high, drunk, or didn't look like the kind of person who would entertain a request for directions with much humor.
One of the keys Mitch had given him fit and he walked into what should have been the comfortable feeling of home.
Except that it wasn't.
He spent half an hour just looking around, trying to remember something, but nothing came to him. He found the stuffed frog riding the motorcycle and examined it. Next to it was what looked like a big plastic, red and black lady bug. When he picked that up, he discovered it was a telephone.
He almost dropped it as the memory of it came back into his mind, like a rushing wind. His sister's face popped into his mind. Her name, June, popped in with it and so did the face and name of Tanya, her daughter. He had a niece! And she had sent him this phone for his birthday! He even remembered how hard he'd laughed when he'd opened the package it came in.