FORTY-EIGHT
For two hours Ben had been sitting at his desk, looking over the accident report from his crash. Years ago he’d had every photo taken of the Ford Pinto—before and after the accident—blown up to eight-by-tens.
After the wreck was towed up the hill, it was placed on a flatbed. The windshield was broken—a large, gaping hole. If Sophie had been driving, and if she had not been wearing a seat belt, she could have easily been propelled forward into the night, before the car burned and rolled.
He thought of his last trip to the place where the accident occurred. In his mind’s eye, he saw the ravine made up of a mixed species of woodland, dead trees, shrubs, and an uninterrupted patch of thorny blackberry bush that would be difficult if not impossible to traverse.
Why hadn’t he seen it before?
Because he’d never once thought anyone else was in the car with him. His heart quickened as he looked at the time. Moving quietly through his bedroom, he made his way into the walk-in closet, where he dressed quickly. Ten minutes later, his wife found him in the garage piling tools into the back of the van.
“It’s late, Ben. What are you doing?”
He kept working. “It’s about Sophie Cole. I think I know what might have happened to her on the night she disappeared.”
“She’s been missing for ten years. It can’t wait until morning?”
He slid the side door shut, then came around the van to where his wife stood and placed both hands on her shoulders. “This is important to me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have time to explain. But I promise I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”
“Does this have anything to do with you, Ben?”
He dropped his hands from her shoulders and raked his fingers through his hair. “This has everything to do with me.”
“So, no matter what you find out there, this isn’t the end—is it, Ben?”
“What do you mean?”
“For ten years you’ve been telling me that the past is the past and you were fine with not knowing who you used to be, but that’s not true any longer. Is it?”
He said nothing.
“I’m worried about you—about us—because you haven’t been yourself. You’ve become secretive and obsessive. You wanted better ratings for your newspaper, and after finding yourself face-to-face with a serial killer, that’s exactly what you got. But I can see it in your eyes—it’s not enough.” She sighed. “If everything you’ve been doing lately, disappearing into the night at odd hours and failing to call home, is the beginning of some fantastical journey into your past, I’m not sure how much more I can handle.”
This time he placed the palm of his hand on her cheek and said, “I love you, Melony—more than ever, and I promise to do whatever I must to make our marriage work because I don’t ever want to lose you. But I also find myself yearning to know who I once was. Bits and pieces of my memory are beginning to return. You said yourself that the doctors knew that was not only a possibility but a probability. Tell me how to bury it all, and I will do everything in my power to do exactly that.”
She frowned, and he gently brushed his lips against her forehead. “Go,” she said. “Do what you have to do. We’ll figure this all out tomorrow.”
By the time he climbed behind the wheel and opened the garage door, Melony had disappeared back into the house.
It took Jessie much longer than she thought it would to find the area where the car had crashed into a tree and then rolled down the embankment before hitting another tree. Her Jeep was pointed down the hill and into the ravine beyond, two headlights shedding beams of bright light, giving her a path to follow.
She stood there for a moment, staring, wondering if she’d gone completely mad. Being out here at this time of night seemed like a fool’s errand. The sun would rise soon, but it hadn’t yet, and the creatures that used the dark as cover could see her, but she couldn’t see them. She could hear them, though. A chirp. A strange intermittent cawing. A rustling and skittering of tiny feet. The croak of a frog in the distance.
A light breeze rustled the branches of trees, and for the first time in forever, she felt as if her sister was talking to her. She listened closely, her gaze focused on the terrain. Sophie was here.
Jessie pulled the hood of her coat over her head and slipped on the only pair of gloves she could find before leaving the house. They were thin with a flower print. Garden gloves. They would have to do. She didn’t bother using the flashlight. The headlights were enough.
Taking one step at a time, she made her way down the hill to the tree that had stopped the car from rolling into the abyss.
The abyss.
The thought that Sophie might have been thrown from the wreckage and left to die among brambles and overgrown brush made her insides churn. If she was down there somewhere, hidden in the overgrown brush and weeds, would there be anything left? Would wild animals have carried her off?
The sound of a car approaching pulled her from her thoughts. She looked back to the road and saw a vehicle approaching. The tree she was standing next to wasn’t wide enough to hide behind, so she quickly but carefully stepped over the edge, where the hill met the ravine, and held tight to a shrub so she wouldn’t slide too far. She hoped the car would pass by. It could be hikers getting an early start, or maybe people lived farther down the road. She wasn’t sure.
But the car stopped and the engine was shut off. A door opened and then closed, and then opened and closed again. Whoever it was walked to the edge of the embankment. She couldn’t look into the bright lights, but she could make out a silhouette. It was Ben. He stood perfectly still. He held something at his side—a tool—maybe a shovel or a rake. No. It was a sickle.
“Jessie?” he called.
The moment she heard his voice, she saw his face clearly in her mind as he squeezed the life from Forrest Bloom. Twitching jaw, pulsing veins, nostrils flared as he tightened his grasp around another man’s neck, easily taking his life. No one else had seen the look on his face. No one else had seen what he was capable of. And after the dead man crumpled to the ground at his feet, Ben had looked her way. In that instant their gazes had locked as if in a strange secret knowing of what lurked within him.
For the first time since she’d met Ben Morrison, she realized he wasn’t the only one who wanted to know who or what he’d been before the accident, before his memories stripped his past from him, before he married and had kids and became a family man.
He was trudging down the hill now, moving much faster than her snail-like pace. As she had done, he stopped at the tree with its bent trunk and arthritic branches.
He was close. Too close.
The thinnest sliver of sun reached out to reveal her hiding place. He left his sickle leaning against the tree and came to the edge where he could plainly see her and she could see him.
Had he killed Sophie? The thought hit her without warning.
Bent over slightly, he offered his hand to help bring her up from her precarious holding. But she didn’t take the lifeline he offered. Instead she released her grasp on a handful of brittle branches and found herself sliding, unable to get a foothold. She grasped for underbrush, felt the weeds and dead branches slide between her thinly gloved hands as she fell farther and farther until she was rolling into thorny brambles that clawed at her face, forcing her to shut her eyes, afraid she might be blinded.
She hit something solid, the smack to her body taking her breath away. A dead tree had blocked her descent and kept her from rolling farther into the ravine.
For a few seconds, she merely lay there breathing. Another moment passed before she tested her arms and legs to see if anything was broken. Still in one piece, she thought.
She sat up, the tangled vines hanging tight, tearing her lightweight jacket when she pushed herself to her feet. And it was then, out of the corner of her eye, that she saw a scrap of red fabric.
And she knew even before she took a closer look that after all this time, she’d found Sophie.
Walking that way, stepping through thorns and brush, she stopped just a few feet away from Sophie’s final resting place. Her sister lay faceup in the deepest part of the thicket, protected by a blanket of thorny vines, her red dress faded by time, her skeleton intact. Jessie’s next breath caught in her throat. For a moment she stood there unable to come to terms with what she was seeing. Her insides twisted and turned.
After all this time, she’d found her sister.
“Oh, Sophie.” Tears slid down both sides of her face as she looked up toward the morning sky, now brushed lightly with orange and pink.
“Jessie,” she heard Ben shout in the distance.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood over her sister’s bones before Ben found her. Disbelief and despair had settled over her shoulders, weighing them down. Loneliness pricked her skin. She wanted to scream out at the top of her lungs, release some of the emotions she was feeling. Instead she stood quietly, trying to accept the moment fully.
“You’re okay,” Ben said, his relief palpable, before his gaze followed the direction she was looking.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.”
“You found Sophie.”
A long moment passed before Jessie found the energy to look away from her sister and focus her attention on him. “What made you come here tonight?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I did what I’ve done nearly every night since the accident. I went over the files and reports. But this time it was different. This time I knew that there was a possibility that Vernon wasn’t driving. If he wasn’t driving, then who was?” He shook his head. “Investigators at the time had no reason to think anyone else had been in the car, let alone search the ravine.”
“What now?” she asked.
His brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
She said nothing.
“When I reached for you, did you let go on purpose?”
She wasn’t ready to answer him because she didn’t know the answer.
“You’re afraid of me—aren’t you?”
“I don’t know you,” she said in her defense, still unsure. Still cautious. His expression was unreadable, and she wondered if he was angry. Frustrated? Confused? She had no idea.
Sirens sounded.
“Did you call the police?” she asked.
“Why wouldn’t I? I didn’t know if you’d broken your neck on the way down. I was thinking the worst and hoping for the best.”
Maybe he truly was a blank slate. Maybe she could trust him, after all. He’d saved her life. Without his help, she never would have found Sophie. She smiled at him, a subtle twist of the corner of her mouth.
He released a ponderous sigh, obviously not happy to know she’d chosen to risk her life rather than trust him enough to take hold of his hand.
“What?” he asked when he saw the smile playing on her lips.
“Looks like we’ve solved another case. Twice in a matter of weeks,” she added. “They’re going to think we’re some sort of bizarre investigative team.”
“Bizarre?” he questioned. “The Cautious and the Circumspect.”
“Or maybe the Young and the Restless,” she murmured sadly, her gaze back on her sister.
“I guess that would make you the ‘Restless,’” he said, but their few seconds of camaraderie were over and done with.
She looked toward the flashing lights above and stiffened. She didn’t want people to think the worst of Sophie. What good would it do for the public and, more important, for Olivia to know the truth about her mother? “I’m hoping nobody ever finds out about Leanne Baxter’s account of what happened on Sophie’s last day. People would talk, and we both know it would all be meaningless. Unless you regain your memory, we’ll never really know what happened outside the Wild West. It would all be speculation, and I wouldn’t want Olivia to think less of Sophie . . . her mother.”
“Leanne who?” he asked.
Again Jessie met his gaze, and for whatever reason she knew then that he’d come there to get answers for himself, but also for her and Olivia.
He took a step back and then turned to her and said, “Are you coming, or are you going to stay here with Sophie while I show them the way so we can get her up the hill?”
“I’ll stay.”
He nodded.
“She had a lot of good qualities, too,” she told him.
“I’m sure she did,” Ben said, waiting.
“Sophie had the most amazing singing voice. The sort of voice that brought tears to anyone who was lucky enough to hear her sing. And she could do wonderful impressions of famous people. She wasn’t always easy to live with, but she sure could make me laugh.”
“I wish I could have met her.”
“Apparently you did.”
It was his turn to smile. “I’ll be right back,” she heard him say as she turned back toward her sister, ignoring the sting of prickly thorns as she walked closer, removing the thickest brambles until she was at Sophie’s side. She kneeled down and took Sophie’s brittle fingers in hers as she remembered all the things they used to do together. Making clothes from scraps of fabric for their dolls, running around the backyard hunting for Easter eggs, putting on lipstick and their mother’s heels and playing dress-up. They rode bikes and pushed each other on the swing set. They loved playing Monopoly. They laughed often, and mostly they loved each other.
None of it had been a figment of her imagination.
Her mother, father, Jessie, and Sophie.
The memories were real, and for a moment in time, they had all been happy.