Kiss (19 page)

Shauna stepped across the threshold onto a throw rug. “Corbin?” Wayne followed her in.

As if to confirm that the scent of smoke indeed belonged to the photographer, Shauna spotted his battered army jacket dangling from the back of a dining room chair.

“That’s his,” she said. Shauna shivered.

How could a freelance photographer afford such a place? More than that, how could she possibly be so intimately connected to a man she did not know, a man who followed her moves without being seen, who wouldn’t speak to her except on his terms, who believed both their lives were at stake?

Who was Corbin Smith?

“No one’s here,” Wayne said. “We should go.”

“Wait a minute,” Shauna said. She scanned the apartment for something, anything, that would give her the information she was hoping for.

“Why?”

“I want to know what this guy is about.”

“Looks to me like he’s about cigarettes and Gatorade.” Wayne toed a plastic bottle standing empty by a wrinkled and sunken leather recliner. Shauna counted four other bottles in the room, and several quarts of the stuff on the kitchen counter.

She moved to the coffee table: ashtrays, newspapers, TV remote, dirty socks. Music, under the television—hundreds of CDs lined up on their sides, organized as if someone cared more about them than the real estate. A tripod stood in the corner of the room without its camera. Maybe he had rushed out to cover some breaking story.

On the kitchen counter: a cordless phone, a scrap of paper bearing a hastily scrawled address, unopened mail, the remains of a microwave dinner.

Everything was so ordinary, so expected.

So disconnected from her. No note explaining his absence. She checked the answering machine. No messages.

What was she doing here? She couldn’t decide if she felt disappointed or angry.

She turned in a slow circle and caught sight of the bed behind the partitioned area. And feet, protruding from the untucked blankets at the end of the bed.

“Corbin?” She moved toward the bedroom.

The shock of what she saw as she rounded the doorway forced her back-ward. She doubled over. Wayne was right behind her. He caught her around the waist.

The feet were attached to a body that lay on blood-soaked sheets. A clean horizontal cut across Corbin Smith’s windpipe was partially covered by his bloody hand, raised there as if stunned to wake and find he couldn’t breathe. His wide eyes took their last photograph of the wood-beamed ceiling.

He hadn’t even had time to get up.

Shauna heard Wayne talking as he pulled her away from the scene, but she wasn’t sure what he said. She caught only, “. . . here while I call the police.”

Then she found herself standing in the outer hall, back to the wall opposite the door, sliding down to squat on her heels while Wayne talked calmly into his cell phone.

A bulky detective named Beeson took Shauna aside and spoke to her in a silky bass voice. Large enough to be mistaken for Emmit Smith, he nevertheless moved like he was on a dance floor, guiding Shauna by the elbow away from the apartment. Her body obeyed his direction.

She answered Beeson’s questions like an automaton. Corbin asked me to meet him here. He gave me a note; here it is. Yes, I used to live here. No, we’ve met only twice.

And on and on. Her mind numbed to the questions. I walked through the rooms, over there, and over there. I touched the answering machine.

Another detective questioned Wayne separately. Protocol, Beeson said. The detective’s round cheeks and pudgy hands prevented Shauna from prejudging him as sharp edged. His tone promised not to judge her, and Shauna thought that even if she were guilty of Corbin’s death, Detective Beeson might be as patient with her. She guessed him to be a rookie, not on the force long enough to have become jaded.

Maybe she didn’t believe in the basic kindness of human beings anymore.

Shauna hoped she was thinking clearly enough to be giving the same true story as Wayne.

No, she didn’t know what Corbin wanted to discuss. No, he wasn’t con-nected—so far as she knew—to her pending case. See, she had this memory gap. Yes, amnesia of a kind. Her doctor was Siders, at Hill Country Medical Center.

Shauna’s despair grew as each long minute finally passed. After a half hour of questioning and another half hour of paperwork, Beeson left her alone, and Shauna felt the full weight of this murder settling on her. Corbin’s promise to connect her to her past had been broken, and the jagged edges of the break tore open the cage of her worst fears.

She would never remember.

Within the next five minutes, Shauna decided she never wanted to remember.

From the corner of her eye, she noted an investigator talking to Detective Beeson, bodies leaning unnaturally close together, the way parents consult when they don’t want their children to hear. The investigator handed some-thing to the detective. A slip of paper the size of a fortune from a cookie, sealed in a plastic bag.

Beeson brought it to Shauna, reading as he came.

“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked, holding the bag out to her so she could read its contents.

The paper appeared to have been taken from a book; she could see through the page to the printing on the back. It was thin paper, the onion-skin sort of literary anthologies. She’d had one as a text once. Two lines of a poem had been neatly cut from such a book. The slip of paper was spotted by something damp.

She didn’t want to read the words.

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

“We found this in the victim’s mouth. It’s possible the killer left this as a message for someone—do you have any idea who?”

For the first time in her interrogation, Shauna lied.

She turned away from the lines. “No,” she said. “It could be anyone.”

17

Wayne drove Shauna back to the guesthouse, where she climbed into bed and did not emerge from her room for the remainder of the day. The lamp in front of the window became a shadowy sundial, casting its form across the room.

Better by far you should forget.

At this point, she thought she should.

She had told Wayne on the way home about the poetry fragment.

“The text message—this mess . . . I’m worried about your safety,” he had said. “Maybe it would be best to give up this quest you’re on. Please. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Things were what they were. Corbin Smith had understood that her life was in danger but offered a different kind of advice: you must find it within yourself to remember, he seemed to say in their brief encounters.

But the killer left her a clear message: Leave the past behind you. Don’t look back. Forget, and smile.

And live. Avoid Corbin’s fate.

What would it cost her to forget, really? Shauna thought of her father, her stepmother, her brother. How did she fit into this life of theirs anymore? They were no family to her.

She had few friends, casualties of her own withdrawal into the anonymous life she preferred but could not get as a McAllister. She had no job.

She had no past to explain her present condition.

Did she have a future?

She could pack up, slip away, and start a new life. How hard would it be to change her name? She might even leave Texas, go somewhere with less heat and more water. Oregon maybe, or Washington State.

She could forget all this if it didn’t mean becoming a fugitive.

A noise at the door startled Shauna. She rolled over on the bed and saw Khai coming into the room with a tray of tea. Early evening light spilled across her smooth face.

“Wayne asked me to speak with you,” she said, setting the tray on the dresser. “He thinks a woman’s view might be more persuasive than his. He wants you to drop this searching you’re doing.” Her eyebrows went up, and her chin dipped as if she thought the idea was foolish and wondered if Shauna felt the same way. Shauna gave no indication of her feelings.

“He wants you to let your memory recover in its own time,” Khai said. “Wayne thinks you will be better off this way.”

“I might be.”

Khai shook her head and handed a hot cup of tea to Shauna, then took a seat at the window. “My daughter turns fifteen today, if she is still alive,” Khai said. “Sometimes I wonder if I would know her if I saw her. I wonder who she looks like, and what her voice sounds like. I wonder if she remembers any impressions of me.”

Shauna closed her eyes. She was not in the frame of mind to engage Khai on such an intense topic.

“In a way,” Khai said, “she and I don’t know each other at all. But there is a part of me that senses we have never stopped knowing each other, that we have never forgotten each other.” She nodded, contemplative. “Yes, I’m pretty sure I would know her.”

“That’s nice.”

“Can I tell you a story?”

Shauna let her eyes say yes even though her mind said no.

“When my husband, Chuan, took our daughter away, people told me to forget her. I must get on with my life, they said, there was nothing I could do. Chuan returned to our little home with his dirty money and said we would have more children. He more than anyone wanted me to forget. Forget, forget!

“For a while I considered this. The pain was so deep and so raw. There were days I would have died just to forget. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out how to get her out of my mind. How do you kill that kind of pain?”

“If you’re going to tell me that my amnesia is a mercy—”

Khai held up her hand. “No. Wait. I had heard of a missionary in our village who was said to help people forget the darkness of their past. Some said he was a miracle worker who knew how to cover up everything terrible that followed you like a shadow. His God could cut it off and replace it with hope. I went to this man thinking he could help me to separate from my shadow.”

“Peter Pan magic,” Shauna observed.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why that boy always wanted his shadow reattached?”

This conversation was baffling Shauna.

“But the missionary was no magician,” Khai said. “When I told him and his wife what I wanted, they should have laughed at me, but they didn’t. Instead they told me that my past was not something God wanted to amputate. He wanted to cast a new light on it so that my life could have new meaning. He wanted to restore it so that it would become useful to him and to others. If I tried to deny that shadow in my life, the truth of it would be useful to no one.”

“I’m thinking some truths are best forgotten—suffering, for example.”

“Have you ever read the Old Testament, Shauna?”

The old sadness over having lost her mother, lost her mother’s faith, washed over Shauna’s heart. “Parts of it. A very long time ago.”

“When God’s people were rescued from great suffering, he commanded them to remember it. He asked them to make altars and feast days and memo-rials so that they would not forget—not only their rescue, but what they were rescued from. And who rescued them.”

“I take it you swallowed this man’s philosophy, then?” She didn’t mean to sound cruel, but this kind of God-talk had not served her own life so well as an adult.

“It is so much more than philosophy, Shauna. I will try to explain more to you at the right time. But I took a completely new point of view. I prayed to God that I would never forget my baby, never. I prayed that the pain of remembering would make me a better mother.”

“And did God answer your prayers?” Shauna could not avoid the cynicism.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have more children.”

“True, but listen: I never forgot my daughter. I am, in fact, more than a little upset that you seem to have stripped me of a memory concerning her.”

Khai’s accusation shocked Shauna. She looked into Khai’s eyes and saw the pain of her theft there. It was a fair enough claim, but Shauna had not anticipated that Khai would so quickly pinpoint Shauna’s own suspicions—she was stealing memories.

“I’m so sorry if I hurt you in any way.”

Khai’s eyes glistened. “I forgive you.” The memory in question presented itself to Shauna in full color, surprising her with deep, personal agony as if the memory were her own.

She supposed it was her own, now.

“You can’t possibly miss that kind of pain.”

“Even our worst memories are valuable.”

“I would need to be convinced.”

“The month after Chuan sold our daughter for two hundred fifty dollars, he died of the liquor he bought with it,” Khai said. “Two months later the missionary introduced me to a human-rights organization that was affiliated with his church. Their goal is to recover trafficked children, especially babies sold into the black market. I went to work for them, and we recovered and returned twenty in the next three years. For these babies, I was able to be the mother I have not yet been able to be to my daughter—the mother who will go to the ends of the earth to find her and bring her home.”

“You don’t really hope to find her?”

“That is not for me to decide. But Areya will be my daughter even if I never find her.”

“Areya is a pretty name.”