“Wish I could tell you, Doc, but I honestly don’t remember.”
“Hmm, so I’m told.” Noble continued to leaf through the chart. “How’s your memory been the past few days?”
“I can’t remember,” Payne said with a smile.
Noble sat there staring at him, his face a piece of rough-hewn stone.
Payne cleared his throat. The man obviously didn’t have a sense of humor. “I’ve been getting some very vivid images. They seem to be from my more recent life. Nothing but fragments. A woman, a house, what I think is my car, and... well, some emotions, too. It’s hard to describe, but I sort of feel a sense of yearning for the woman I keep seeing in my mind. I think she’s my wife, but I don’t really remember much about her. I just feel drawn to her for some reason.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I got an e-mail from her, so now I know a little bit about my life after I left the Bureau. But I’m torn, because I want to talk to her, have her fill in the blanks. At the same time, I
don’t
want to know more about my recent past because it’d mean having to choose between my Bureau life and my life back home in some small town called Placerville. I made a mistake leaving the Bureau. Regardless of the risk, I shouldn’t have run from it.”
Noble looked at him, his face a blank. “Do you need something from me?”
“Need?”
“Counseling. I don’t practice that area of medicine, but I can call in a colleague.” Noble reached for the telephone on the wall.
“I was just making some observations. I didn’t say there was anything wrong. I just thought... no, everything’s fine.” Payne felt like a fool. This man obviously did not care about what he was going through; all Noble was concerned about was the clinical examination. What’s on paper, and what’s in the body. The black and white. Diagnosis and treatment. Refer him to someone else to deal with the esoteric, emotional baggage. It’s not my job.
“Let me check that thigh of yours,” Noble said, having Payne lie on his left side. After slipping on a pair of latex gloves, Noble prodded the wound, nodded, and then sat down to make some notes. “It’s not my specialty, but it looks good, healing nicely. If you don’t get too gung ho with all that macho FBI stuff you people do, it’ll heal fine, with no residuals.”
Payne sat up. “No macho FBI stuff, got it.”
“Anything else bothering you?”
“Sleep. I can’t remember the last good night’s sleep I had. And I don’t mean that as a joke. I think it’s probably related to the dreams, or fragments of memories, I’m having. I toss around until I finally wake up, and then I spend the next few hours lying there trying to make sense of what they mean.”
Noble pulled his prescription pad from a pocket and scribbled a few lines of chicken scratch. “Valium, ten milligrams. One before bed. Should knock you out pretty good.” He handed Payne the slip and clicked his pen shut. “Any other problems?”
Payne shook his head. “I think that’s enough.”
For the next twenty minutes, Noble performed a comprehensive neurologic examination. Payne stood and hopped on one foot, smelled coffee grounds and cinnamon, smiled and frowned, and had his face poked with a needle. After that pleasant experience, he was taken through a mental-status examination. He counted by threes and fives, forward and backward, answered questions of general knowledge having to do with time and place, and ended with his recollection of the first thing that Noble had asked him during the examination.
Finally, Noble had Payne lie back so he could perform a general physical exam. All the while, he was questioning his patient on a variety of topics with health-related implications: Any problems moving your bowels? Any unexplained night pain? Does the room ever spin? And so on.
Noble jotted some notes in the chart, then placed an ice-cold stethoscope on Payne’s chest. He listened, moved it around, and listened some more. “Hmm,” he said, crinkling his brow and then thumbing through his patient’s chart, beginning in the front with the earliest entry.
“Anything wrong? Did you find something?”
The doctor shook his head. “No, nothing’s wrong,” he said in a voice devoid of inflection as he continued to read. A few moments later, he returned to the exam table and listened again to Payne’s chest for what seemed like several minutes. Payne was instructed to stand up, sit down, hold his breath, lie down, and jump on one leg.
Noble made a few more notes, rose from his stool, then pressed a button on the wall. “Please send Jan in with a cart.” He released the intercom and turned to Payne. “Okay, I’m going to have a nurse draw some blood and take an ECG tracing of your heart. Radiology will then take you downstairs for an MRI of your brain, and after that you’ll be free to go.”
Payne sat up. “Wait a minute—you found something. Something’s wrong.”
“Did I say that?”
“No, but—”
“Everything’s fine, Agent Payne. Don’t worry.”
Payne looked hard at Noble, who broke eye contact. He doubted the doctor was telling him the truth. “At least tell me what you think of this amnesia, how long I might have it.”
Noble clasped the file in front of his chest and folded his arms. “All right, I’ll tell you what I think. I’ve never heard of the type of memory loss you’re claiming to have. I’ve never seen such a case either in practice or in the journals. When someone has a head injury like what you’re describing, if it’s substantial enough to cause such considerable memory loss, it usually causes other neurological disturbances.”
“In English, Doc.”
“You’d probably be brain-dead or damn near a mental vegetable.”
“Probably?”
“I can only tell you what I know, Agent Payne. But, I can also tell you that it seems like every day I see something I haven’t seen before. There was a case I heard about on TV, of all places, that dealt with a man who would disappear for weeks at a time. Whenever he returned home to his wife and children, he’d claim that he didn’t even know he’d been gone. This went on for years. This neuropsychiatrist from Stanford they interviewed went on about episodic memory and procedural memory, and how you can retain one and lose the other. I’d never heard of that. I called him up, we chatted, and he quoted a dozen references for the condition. So, Agent Payne, just because I haven’t come across something in the journals I read doesn’t mean it wasn’t written up in one of the dozens of others I don’t read.”
Payne sat there, staring at the doctor, his eyebrows bunched together.
“Medicine isn’t as much of a science as we’d like to think,” Noble continued. “Sometimes we’re just guessing, is all. Follow me?”
Payne nodded. “Then the answer to my question is, you don’t know.”
The door opened and a heavyset, middle-aged nurse stepped in, pushing a stainless steel cart that was supporting an electrocardiograph. “That’s right, son. I don’t.” With that, Noble walked out of the room.
“Go on and lie back,” the nurse said with all the enthusiasm of a patient about to receive a tetanus shot.
Arthur Noble sat down in his private office and poked out a phone number with his index finger. He leaned back in his leather chair and rubbed at his eyes with his left hand while the call connected.
“Douglas, this is Arthur. I’ve taken a look at that package you sent over.” He slipped his reading glasses on, leaned forward, and opened Payne’s medical file. “We need to talk.”
The chill was still in the morning air when Lauren walked outside her motel room to take a breath and clear her mind.
Bradley was standing out there, too, sucking a See’s chocolate lollipop. “A little raw, but a beautiful morning.”
Lauren had a sweater on, but still felt the need to wrap her hands across her chest. “Sitting in a cabin in the Sierra wearing pajamas is raw. This is refreshing.”
Bradley pulled the pop out of his mouth. “Guess it’s all a matter of perspective.”
Lauren had spent the night trying to decide whether she could continue to trust him. She told herself she had not had any reason to distrust him until the message from Cablecast had upended his credibility. But he did have a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy. And Carla Mae, who had known him for almost two years, more than personally vouched for him—she damn near raved about the man.
Lauren had hoped that with a good night’s rest would come a fresh perspective. After lying in bed for an hour and a half, she had finally fallen asleep. Her thoughts had quickly turned to her father, and in a dream she recalled a long-forgotten conversation she had once had with him.
The roses were in full bloom, and their garden was awash with a full bouquet of sweet scents. Her father sat in his wheelchair at the edge of the concrete path that wound through the garden. He watched over Lauren’s shoulder as she carefully troweled the dirt around the plants.
“Every living thing needs someone to care for it,” he said. Lauren continued to work with the dirt, gently patting it around the base of a rosebush, seemingly oblivious to what her father was saying.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a bush or a tree or a dog or a person,” he said. “We all need someone to care about us.”
Lauren looked over at her father, the dirt-encrusted tool in her hand. “I know, Dad. You’ve got me and Mom.”
He leaned forward, trying to let the seriousness of what he was telling her penetrate her gaze. “When you get older, and I’m no longer around, you’ll have to choose who cares for you. It’s important you make a good choice.”
She turned back to her garden and moved to the next row of plants. “Do you think these need watering? The soil looks a little dry.”
“I think a little water would be good.” He wheeled a few feet forward as Lauren moved to her right. “Do you know how to choose? A companion has to be someone you can always trust to do the right thing for you. Someone who’d help you no matter what, even if it meant doing something that could hurt him.” He stopped, looked at her, and waited for an indication she was paying attention. “Lauren Rose, are you listening to me?”
“I always listen to you, Daddy.” She dug the trowel into the hard ground. “Definitely needs water. This spot is even worse.”
Her father sighed and wheeled backward to grab the nozzle end of the garden hose. “I just want to make sure you’re taken care of, that’s all.”
She let the water run into the irrigation canal she had made between the aisles of roses. She patted down the moistened dirt around each bush, her head tilted in thought. Finally, while still fiddling with the soil, she said, “You’ll take care of me, like you always do.”
Her father shook his head. “I may not always be around, pumpkin. But you’ll learn to trust your heart. That’s how I’ll be there for you. I’ll be there in your heart.”
When Lauren had awoken, she remembered the dream instantly. Her mind had fallen back on what it trusted—her father’s wisdom—for a solution to her current predicament.
In the morning, as she had pulled on her sweater, she realized that, in view of the cold send-off she had given Bradley the night before, he might already have returned to Sacramento. But now, when she walked out of the room, he was standing there sucking on his See’s lollipop as if nothing had happened. And, she had to admit, seeing him standing there made her feel secure, comfortable in that she was not alone. Her father’s advice echoed in her head:
you’ll learn to trust your heart.
She decided to listen to her father... to go with her instincts and let last night’s incident pass without further discussion.
“I wonder how far away he is,” Lauren said. She swallowed a lungful of cool air and thought of Michael. This was the longest she had been away from him since he took the job at Cablecast. She tried to think of it as his having gone on vacation, but she could not get past its being nothing like that. When someone goes on vacation, they are expected back on a certain date. Though Michael could physically be somewhere nearby, she had to acknowledge the reality of the situation: he was actually further away from her now than he had ever been since they had first met.
“So are we all right?”
Bradley’s voice yanked her from her thoughts. She kept her gaze straight ahead and shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Good, because we’ve got some work to do.”
Lauren took one last look at the brightening sky, and then walked back into the motel room. Bradley followed her in, picked up the phone, and dialed a number.
He turned to Lauren and cupped the phone. “They have some coffee and Danish in the lobby for breakfast if you want. Coffee’s like mud, but—” He quickly removed his hand and brought the handset to his mouth. “Yes, you sure can. Can you connect me to your emergency-room administrator, please?”
While Bradley waited on hold, Lauren sat down on the edge of the bed, removed Michael’s photo from her wallet, and stared at it for a few moments.
Where are you? ... Who are you? ... I’m trying
to
find you.
She touched his lips with her fingertips. “I’m trying,” she said aloud.
“Trying what?” Bradley asked, hanging up the phone.
“Nothing. What did you find out?”
“We have an appointment with the Virginia Presbyterian ER administrator in half an hour. She was out sick till yesterday. I convinced her we needed to see her this morning.”
“Then what?”
“I figured you’d return to the mall and I’d continue to beat a path around town, showing Michael’s photo, talking to law enforcement. Someone’s bound to have seen him.”
Lauren shoved the snapshot of Michael back into her purse and nodded. “I guess.” She rose from the bed and slung her purse over a shoulder. “I walk around malls and you ask strangers if they’ve seen my husband.”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” she said, heading for the door, “we’ve got to do something. Let’s go.”
Harper Payne slammed his fist down on the desk. “Damn it.” He stared at the screen, which defiantly displayed an error message: “Internet Explorer cannot locate a networking device. Check your settings and try logging on again. If unsuccessful, contact your network administrator or try restarting your computer.”