Remember Me (4 page)

“I went by your house before I came here,” she said.

Clay thought nothing of it. His mother had been coming and going there for months now without his permission.

“And?” he asked.

“I thought Frankie might need a few things. I forgot that her clothes were all packed away. It took me a while to find them.”

“Thanks,” Clay said.

“You're welcome. But that's not what I came to tell you.”

Something in his mother's voice wasn't right. He turned away from Frankie to stare his mother in the face.

“What aren't you saying?”

Betty put her hand in the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a wad of money.

“This was in the dryer, along with a pair of designer slacks and a blouse that were not meant to be tumble-dried. I'm afraid the clothes were ruined. However, except for a few wrinkles, I think these came through quite nicely.”

Clay's mouth dropped, and when his mother put the roll of bills in his hand, he felt like throwing up.

“My God,” he muttered, fingering the hundred-dollar bills as if they were covered in filth. “How much is there?”

“One thousand, five hundred and fifty dollars.”

He looked down in disbelief, his fingers curling spasmodically around the money.

“In the dryer?”

Betty nodded. “Two of the bills were still in the pocket of Frankie's slacks. They probably fell out of a pocket when the dryer began to tumble.”

He dropped into a chair, still staring at the money. When he spoke, the sarcasm in his voice was impossible to miss.

“So. One of my nightmares about her was definitely false.”

“What nightmare would that be, son?”

“The one about her being brutalized and starving to death.”

“I'm sorry, Clay. I know this only adds to the confusion, but I think we shouldn't jump to any more conclusions. The best thing to do is just wait and see what Frankie has to say for herself when she wakes up.”

Clay looked up. “It's not what she says that's the issue. It's if I decide to believe her.”

Southern California

More than a day after the quake, the earth was still belching aftershocks, which hampered the efforts of the search and rescue teams. Going through the rubble of collapsed freeways and buildings was still the order of the day. Unfortunately, it was becoming easier to find the dead than the living. They were beginning to smell.

The more exclusive homes were often also the more isolated, and even though many reports had come in, searching them had taken a back seat to the mass devastation of the heavily populated areas. Rescue crews were relying on reports from police helicopters regarding areas to search. And when a helicopter pilot had seen half of a house in one of the canyons below, they'd radioed for help.

Pete Daley had been part of the San Francisco search and rescue team for more than ten years. He was an old hand at disasters and thought he'd seen everything, yet when the driver of their van took a sudden right into a heavily wooded area, he frowned.

“Are you sure this is the right road?” Pete asked.

His partner, Charlie Swan, shrugged. “No, but it's the only one here.”

Pete rolled his eyes. “Then why are we—”

Charlie pointed through the windshield of the ambulance to the hovering chopper just visible in the distance.

“He isn't exactly leaving bread crumbs, but he's been circling for more than five minutes now. I figure he's over the spot.”

Pete looked a little abashed and then sighed. “I haven't been paying attention, have I?” he asked.

“You do when it counts,” Charlie said. “Now grab your gear. We're almost there.”

A few minutes later they arrived at what was left of a great mansion, parking well out of the way of any walls that might still be prone to collapse. They grabbed their bags as the searchers began unloading their dogs. A few minutes later, some of the team entered the house, while the others made their way down the canyon to the wing of the house that had shattered below.

Almost immediately, one of the dogs began to whine, then it moved toward a huge pile of rubble at the foot of the stairs.

“We've got something,” the handler yelled.

Searchers began clearing away debris and, moments later, uncovered a foot.

“Damn,” Pete muttered, then knelt, expecting to touch cold, lifeless skin. Although he was wearing surgical gloves, when his fingers encircled the man's ankle, he felt warm, supple flesh.

“We got a live one!” he yelled. “Get this stuff off him fast.”

Piece by piece, the debris was removed, each time the searchers making certain that something else didn't come crashing down upon him and finish the job.

“Look at that,” Charlie said, pointing to the fallen beams and a piece of the wall that had formed a small alcove above the injured man. “That's what kept him alive.”

Pete began taking vitals, while Charlie applied a neck brace and checked for broken bones. Everything about the victim was faint, even the intermittent whisper of breath slipping from between his bloody lips.

“See if that television chopper is still around. We've got a hot one, and he's not going to wait for Lifeflight!”

Within minutes, the injured man had been stabilized and strapped to a stretcher. A couple of workers began carrying him out to the lawn toward the waiting helicopter.

“I'll fly in with the news crew and be back as soon as possible,” Pete said. “You go with the search dogs. There could be more survivors.”

Charlie nodded and headed back to the mansion at a jog.

Pete shaded his eyes as he hurried beside the stretcher. Suddenly the man began to moan.

“You're okay, buddy,” Pete told him. “We're going to take real good care of you.”

“Woman…find my woman.”

Pete frowned, then reached for his two-way. It crackled as he pressed the send button.

“Daley here,” he said. “The victim is asking about a woman. Be on the lookout for another body nearby.”

“Roger that,” a voice said, and the connection was broken.

The man's eyelids fluttered, then he sighed and slipped into unconsciousness.

The
whap-whap
of the spinning helicopter blades soon made talking impossible, yet Pete felt obligated to give the man a last bit of hope.

“Hang on, buddy,” Pete yelled as they began loading him inside. “As soon as we get you to a hospital, they'll fix you up real good.”

Then he crawled in, directing the position of the stretcher inside the chopper, before settling down on the floor beside him.

“Take her up!” Pete yelled, and grabbed on to the back of a seat as the chopper suddenly rocked.

“Sorry,” the pilot yelled. “Crosswinds.”

Pete rolled his eyes and said a quick prayer. Moments later, they were airborne. Aside from a periodic check of the IV they'd started, there was little he could do except study the injured man's face.

He looked foreign, that much he could tell, but in L.A., that meant nothing. Black-winged eyebrows arched above deep-socketed eyes. The jut of his nose and the cut of his cheekbones bespoke what appeared to Pete to be a Middle Eastern heritage. Even though his skin was ashen and dust-covered, the even, toast-colored cast looked natural, rather than artificially tanned. Pete glanced back at the mansion, stunned by the sight of the devastation from the air, then shook his head in disbelief, amazed that the man was still alive.

“I'll bet you're one tough son of a bitch, aren't you, buddy?” But the man didn't answer.

A few minutes later, they began to descend. As they landed on the hospital roof, Pete made last-minute checks on the man's vitals, making sure the nurses would have all the information they would need. Moments later, a trauma team met them at the door. Pete jumped out, helping as they transferred the stretcher to a gurney.

Pete began relating vitals as they scooted the stretcher in place. As he stepped aside, one of the nurses got a clear view of his face.

“Oh my gosh! That's Pharaoh Carn!”

There was a moment of stunned silence as everyone stared at their patient's face; then they began to run, pulling the stretcher as they went. Saving his life was uppermost in their minds. It didn't matter what he did for a living, but in L.A., Pharaoh Carn's ties to the mob were well-known.

Pete went as far as the door, then watched as the trauma team disappeared with the victim.

All the way back to the site of the search, he kept wondering about the woman Pharaoh Carn had lost. She must have been important to the man. He'd asked about her with his last conscious breaths. He wondered if they had found her. He wondered if she was dead.

D
uring the last day and a half, Clay had gone home only once, for a shower and a change of clothes. His parents had offered to take turns sitting with Frankie while he got some rest, but he'd refused. He was afraid. Afraid that if he left her, even for a minute, she would disappear again. So he slept in fits and snatches in a chair by her bed, and during the times that he was awake, he hadn't been able to take his eyes from her face.

She looked the same—and yet there were differences that ate at him. Her hair was shorter than it had been. He tried to picture her going about her life without him. Shopping for clothes and food. Getting haircuts and watching movies that made her cry. It seemed obscene that she had remained the same while he'd died inside.

But there were other differences besides the obvious. Her face was slimmer, her skin paler. There was a set to her mouth that hadn't been there before, as well as faint frown lines between her eyebrows. She had the look of a woman who had suffered.

And besides the mystery of the money, there was now the tattoo.

They hadn't found it until yesterday morning, when the nurses were changing the linens on Frankie's bed. As they'd rolled her onto her side to remove the dirty sheets, her hair had fallen forward around her face, revealing a small, gold-colored tattoo just below the hairline at the back of her neck.

“Well, now,” one of the nurses said. “Would you look at that.”

At their bidding, Clay had stepped forward, but when he saw the strange mark, his heart skipped a beat. He traced the shape with his fingers, trying to imagine her choosing to have this done, but the image wouldn't come. Frankie was deathly afraid of needles.

“It's sort of like a cross, but it's not,” the nurse said. “I've seen them before but I forget what they're called.”

“It's an ankh,” Clay muttered. “An Egyptian symbol for eternity…I think.”

The nurse gave him a curious glance but held her tongue. The whole floor was well aware of this couple's history. After all, this man's face had been on local television almost as often as the quarterback of the city's beloved football team, the Denver Broncos.

She smiled at Clay, then gave the sheets on Frankie's bed one last pat. “There you go. She's all fixed up. I'll be back later to change her IV.”

Clay hated the pity he was getting almost as much as he'd resented the anonymous judgment of being a suspected murderer. He was glad when the nurses left. And while the discovery of the tattoo was strange, it offered no answers to the mystery of where she'd been. All he could do was wait for her to wake up. Hopefully, the rest could come later.

 

After thirty-three hours of steady rainfall, the Denver skies finally cleared. The streets glistened with a just-washed look as the last remnants of runoff flowed through the gutters. The early-morning air was sharp with the scents of autumn. Leaves had turned weeks ago, and the snowcaps on the Rockies were constant reminders of the coming winter.

She awoke to find Clay asleep in a chair beside her bed. She frowned, vaguely remembering a dream about palm trees that didn't make sense, then winced as the glare of new sun hit her eyes.

“Ooh,” she moaned.

Within her next breath, Clay was awake.

“Francesca?”

She swallowed. Her tongue felt thick. “What happened?”

“You're in a hospital,” he said. “Lie still. I'm going to get a nurse.”

“Wait.”

He was already gone. She sighed, then glanced around the room, trying to piece together the bits of her memory. It had been raining, and she'd been waiting for Clay to come home. She'd fallen asleep and…

At that point, everything stopped. She started over, replaying the memory a bit farther back.

She'd been out in the rain. But where, and why? She closed her eyes, willing her mind to go blank. Suddenly she saw herself running from a building. She could remember the water splashing up the backs of her legs and into her shoes. Remembered hailing a cab and feeling a sense of relief when she gave the cabby her address. But then her memory started to fuzz. She could remember them driving through traffic, but there was always traffic in Denver.

What next? She frowned. A bus? She flinched as it careened around a corner of her mind. Had there been an accident? Was that why she was here? She remembered hurting and then getting very wet. After that, the need to get home to Clay seemed to overwhelm anything else she might have remembered.

Someone began paging a doctor over the hospital intercom, interrupting her concentration. She tried to refocus, but all she could remember was taking the extra key from under the pot of dead geraniums on the front porch and going into the house.

She inhaled again, this time picturing the inside of her house. What had she done after she'd gone inside? Oh yes. The utility room. Her clothes were soaked, and she'd gone to the laundry and tossed them in the dryer. On the way through the kitchen, she'd taken a painkiller for the headache, then she'd filched one of Clay's T-shirts for a nightgown and crawled into bed.

Unconsciously, her fingers doubled into fists as she clutched at the sheets, trying to find her way through the maze of images flashing through her mind.

Suddenly something crashed in the hall outside her room. Before she could assimilate the noise, the door opened to her room. She gasped. A man stood silhouetted against the light. Even though her heart was telling her that the man had to be Clay, her mind was telling her different. The need to run overrode caution as she began kicking at her covers and yanking herself free from the machines they'd hooked up to her body.

Clay bolted, catching her just as she tried to crawl out of bed.

“Frankie, don't.”

“Let me go!” she begged, and started to cry. “Please let me go. I don't want to die.”

A shudder ripped through him. The wild, blank look on her face was terrifying—even more terrifying than the needle tracks had been. He didn't know this woman. When she drew back her hand and slapped at his face, he took the blow open-mouthed and staring. Before he could react, blood spurted everywhere as the needle from her IV went flying to the floor.

It was the color of red staining the pristine white of her sheets that broke his shock.

He grabbed her arms and started yelling for a nurse.

Her face was etched in fear as she kicked at both him and the covers over her legs. Moments later, the room was full of hospital staff and Clay was shuffled into the hall.

He dropped into a nearby chair and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His hands were shaking. His shirt was splattered with her blood. From where he was sitting, he could still hear her crying. A muscle jerked in the side of his jaw as he drew a deep, shuddering breath. The urge to cry along with her was strong. This was hell.

A short while later, her doctor emerged. Clay stood.

“Is she okay?”

The doctor nodded.

“What was that?” Clay asked.

“I'm not sure, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say she suffered some sort of traumatic flashback. We gave her something to calm her down. When she's better physically, you might consider some therapy.”

A psychiatrist? Hell, what next? Clay exhaled slowly, then shoved a hand through his hair.

“Is she having a nervous breakdown?”

The doctor smiled. “No, Mr. LeGrand, nothing like that. As soon as she recovers, we'll see how much she remembers and then go from there.”

Clay accepted the explanation, but there was something at the back of his mind that wouldn't let go. She'd been gone for two years. Her reappearance was as sudden and inexplicable as her disappearance had been. He hated to ask. It seemed like a betrayal of his feelings for Frankie. But for his own peace of mind, he had to know.

“Hey, Doc.”

“Yes?”

“Could she be faking a loss of memory?”

The doctor paused, seriously considering the question, then shrugged. “She could be, but in my opinion, I doubt it.”

Clay nodded. It wasn't exactly what he wanted to hear, but it helped alleviate some of his doubts.

“Mr. LeGrand, I know this is frustrating, but look at it from your wife's point of view, too. If there
was
something sinister about her disappearance two years ago, then she's the one who has the most to lose, right?”

The doctor patted Clay's arm and walked away.

Clay dropped into a nearby chair and leaned forward, staring at a spot on the floor. He felt as if he were going crazy. He didn't know who to trust or who to believe. He needed answers desperately, but until Frankie got well, that wasn't going to happen.

“Mr. LeGrand.”

Clay looked up. It was one of the nurses.

“Yes?”

“Your wife is asking for you,” she said.

Clay stood, but his hesitancy did not go unnoticed.

“It will be all right,” the nurse said. “Head injuries are tricky, you know. I think she was just confused before. Don't take it personally. Oddly enough, she thought we were having an earthquake.”

Earthquake? He vaguely remembered hearing about one somewhere on a news broadcast.

“She's been medicated, so she'll probably be groggy,” the nurse added. “If you need us, just press the call button. Someone will be right there.”

Clay moved across the hall toward Frankie's room as the nurse walked away.

Earthquake. He couldn't get the thought out of his mind. This was the third clue to add to the mystery of finding out where she'd been. First the money, then the tattoo, now this. He pushed the door open and walked inside. Her bloody gown and bedclothes had been replaced. The IV was back in her hand. Her eyes were closed, her face almost as pale as the sheets beneath her chin. Afraid to touch her for fear of setting off another panic attack, he stood, waiting for her permission to move.

Sensing his presence, Frankie opened her eyes.

“Clay?”

He sighed, then started toward her, stopping near the foot of the bed. “Yes, it's me.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I'm so sorry. I don't know why I did that to you. I know this sounds stupid, but I thought it was an earthquake.” She looked away. “I think I thought you were someone else.”

His heart leaped. “Who, Frankie? Who did you think I was?”

A long moment passed as a frown creased her forehead. Finally, she shook her head and sighed. “I can't remember.”

A chill ran up the back of Clay's spine. Could he believe her? He exhaled softly. What the hell could he do? Hold a grudge? What would that prove?

“It's okay,” he said.

Frankie shook her head slowly. “No, it's not all right. None of this is all right.” She held out her hand. “Come sit by me. I need to explain.”

He pulled a chair up beside her bed. “I don't think you should be talking,” he muttered.

“Sit by me…please,” she begged.

He stood and scooted onto the edge of the bed.

Struggling with tears, Frankie bit her lower lip, using the pain to focus. His body language was obvious, and she didn't blame him for being defensive. But she had to make him understand. And then she sighed. Make him understand what? She was the one in the dark. How could she explain what was going through her mind when they were claiming she'd just lost the last two years of her life?

“Clay.”

“What?”

“Have I really been gone all that time?”

His eyes narrowed angrily. “Oh yes.”

Unaware that her chin was quivering, she bit her lip to keep from crying. She was scared. So scared. And Clay seemed so distant—even angry. Two years.
My God. Where would I go? And why don't I remember?

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you hate me?”

Clay's belly knotted. “No, Francesca, I don't hate you.”

She glanced at his face. That dear, familiar face. Even though he was right beside her, the distance was obvious. Gripping the sheets with both fists, she stared at him until he looked away. As he did, tears filled her eyes.

Oh God. Please don't take him away from me.

Though she was almost afraid to ask, there was something she still had to know. She cleared her throat, trying to swallow her emotions, but it did little good.

“Clay?”

He looked up at her. “What?”

“Do you still love me?”

A shudder visibly shook him as he suddenly stood. “I have loved you since the day I saw you.”

Her fingers clenched the sheets even tighter. “Why do I sense there's a ‘but' in that answer?”

He hesitated briefly, but when he answered, his gaze never wavered.

“There's a difference between love and trust, Francesca. I still love you, but I guess I don't trust you anymore.”