Chapter 3
her
The painkillers made me fuzzy, and I developed a fever, which told the doctors that an infection had set in. According to them, I was malnourished, severely underweight, hypo-thermic, and unconscious when I’d been brought in.
I’d also heard one nurse tell another that I’d shown signs of long-term abuse, but specifically how and specifically by whom they weren’t telling me.
I think they were waiting for me to remember. Everyone seemed to be waiting for that—most especially me.
Nobody knew what to call me, and one of the nurses had simply defaulted to referring to me as Jane Doe.
That’d gotten me upset. It’s humiliating not to be able to remember my own damn name.
I didn’t need it broadcast to the world that I was one of those people.
So traumatized by whatever the fuck happened to me that my brain had scrambled my sanity and banished all memories.
So, they were letting me pick something. In between the rounds of antibiotics and lectures about how I needed to put on some weight so I should eat their tasteless, disgusting hospital food, I’d been picking through a baby-name book given to me by someone in maternity.
Before perusing the “girl” names, I’d decided to skip the A’s altogether, figuring I might be tempted to just come to the first name that didn’t sound terrible and adopt it for my own. Something like Anne or Amy. Yawn. So, I started in the middle with the M’s.
Something triggered a slight response when I read the name Maddy. I liked it, but I didn’t like Madeline. I wrote it down on my lengthening list of names that felt like they could work. So far, I had Maddy, Parker, Reese, Sadie, Taylor, Violet, and Yvonne, but my eye kept going back to Maddy.
“Hey, lady,” Cash said from the doorway, knocking at the same time.
I smiled. The sheriff was here for his daily check-in.
“Sheriff Penton,” I said with a nod. My head still throbbed, and I felt weak and a little sleepy, but I was so sick of feeling weak and sleepy that I was forcing myself to stay awake long enough to, for once, have a decent conversation with the man.
He came into the room twirling that Stetson—a habit that he never seemed quite conscious of. Taking a seat in the same chair I’d first seen him in, he motioned to the open book on the tray table in front of me. “Anything jump out at you?”
The sheriff thought the baby-name book was a brilliant idea.
He had it in his mind that I’d stumble on my real name, which would open the floodgates, but so far, the only name that’d really stood out to me was Maddy—not in a truly memory-trigging way, but in a way that felt familiar when I said it out loud.
“My eyes keep going back to Maddy,” I said, showing him the list on the notepad I’d been given.
He nodded and wore the ghost of a smile. “That’s a start.”
“I think I want it.”
“You want it?”
“Yeah. I think I want to wear it, take it out for a spin, and see how I like it.”
The ghost of a smile bloomed into an authentic one. “It suits you.”
I closed the book. “Then it’s official. I’m Maddy. At least for now.”
Cash got up, came over to the bed, and sticking out his hand, he said, “Hi, Maddy. Nice to meet you. I’m Cash Penton. The sheriff in this here town.”
That made me laugh. I shook his hand, and that small spark of chemistry that I’d often thought was my own imagination flickered between us.
I didn’t try to convince myself that I wasn’t attracted to him—I was. And I had this visceral feeling that he was attracted to me too. But we hadn’t even flirted, and as attractive as I found him, doing even that felt…wrong. Like I’d be betraying someone else.
Which, frankly, was really fucked up, because someone had abused me, then dumped me in the cold to die—so how I could betray that person by simply flirting with a good-looking lawman wasn’t anything a rational person could argue.
And yet…
There were moments when I’d first wake up where I could feel myself reaching for someone.
Someone I loved. Someone I trusted. I couldn’t put a name to him.
Hell, I couldn’t even describe him, but it just felt like I belonged to him.
And with him. And the profound sadness, loneliness, and loss I felt when I realized there was no one in the bed next to me was a feeling without a place or a memory to back it up, and yet it existed.
“Anything else come to mind?” Cash asked me, just like he’d asked me every day since I’d woken up two weeks ago.
“No. Sorry,” I replied, just like I’d said every day since I’d woken up two weeks ago.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Maybe.”
He pointed to my belly. “Did you eat?”
“The swill they serve here? It’s not even suitable for the rats.”
He grinned. “We got three restaurants here in Evansville. What’re you in the mood for?”
I brightened and sat up straighter before grimacing because that still hurt like hell. “Thai?”
He cocked his head. “Thai? Like food from Thailand?”
I blinked. There was this momentary confusion where I didn’t understand how I knew that Thai food was my favorite fare and why in this town there were no Thai restaurants.
“What’re the restaurants?” I asked, switching to something that didn’t invite a flurry of questions I wouldn’t be able to answer.
Cash seemed to check himself, then he began to tick off the names of the town’s eateries on his fingers. “We got Poor Hank’s Bar and Grill, Wanda’s Diner, and KFC. The KFC is new,” he added, with a bounce of his brow.
“First, I’ll pass on the KFC, second, why is Hank poor? Is he broke?”
Cash laughed. “Naw. He married Wanda, but she works mornings and afternoons, and he works afternoons to midnight, so they never see each other. His place used to just be called Hank’s, but when he got married, he changed it.”
I was kinda crushin’ on Hank and his sentimental gesture. “What’s the best thing on Poor Hank’s menu?”
“The address to Wanda’s.”
That made me laugh. “Come on, Cash, what’s he make that’s edible?”
Cash stopped twirling his Stetson long enough to scratch his head. “Well, he makes a decent burger. And fries.”
“Oh, man, I could go for a burger.”
“You got it, Maddy.”
My eyes widened in surprise. I liked the sound of that name coming out of someone else’s mouth even more than I liked it coming out of my own. “Medium-rare. Extra ketchup.”
“Can do,” he said. “How ’bout I come back in half an hour, and we can sit together and talk.”
Cash was really the nicest man, but I also understood there was an ulterior motive here.
I’d been the victim of a crime—maybe just assault, but it could’ve just as easily been attempted murder given my injuries and where I was found.
Cash was thinking that the more I engaged in conversation, the more I might reveal about myself without necessarily trying to remember.
It was a clever technique, and one I was all too ready to engage in. “That’d be great.”
He turned to leave, and when he got to the doorway, he turned to point a finger gun at me, click his tongue, and wink. “Back in a jiff.”
After he left, I curled up in a fetal position and turned away from the door to doze off for a bit, but I came to when I overheard the hospital’s resident talking in low tones just outside my room.
He must’ve been talking to his new intern because he said, “Jane Doe. Late thirties to early forties, female, five-four, fifty-two kilos.
“When she was brought in, she was hypothermic, bradycardic, hypotensive, and hypoventilating. Pulse was fifty-eight; BP—eighty-seven over forty; pulse-ox—ninety-four; and temp at ninety-one.”
“Jesus, how was she even alive?” the intern asked.
“Trust me, she almost wasn’t. On arrival, she was unconscious, pupils reactive but slow, and her skin was cold to the touch.
We put her on a warm IV drip, warm irrigation to her superior and inferior thoracic aperture, heated her trachea and bronchial tubes with warm O2, and used every warming blanket we had on hand.
“Once her vitals could support the transfer to imaging, we ran X-rays and CT scans. Scans showed no intracranial hemorrhaging, but given the deep laceration to her temple, she’s likely got a TBI. X-rays showed other trauma, mostly healed, including a fractured radius,
both fresh and semi-healed extremity lacerations around both carpus and both talocrural joints, multiple ecchymosis on the interior abductors, vaginal tears and bleeding, and scarring indicating significant traumas that, at some point, included a GSW to the superior right thorax,
and a sharp-force wound to the left ulna.”
“Fuck,” the intern said. “I’ll repeat: How is she even alive?”
“Honestly? I have no idea. Imaging makes it look like she spent her life getting the shit kicked out of her.”
“Human trafficking?”
“It’s what Sheriff Penton thinks, and I agree. That, or she’s been living with a sadistically sick son of a bitch.”
“You said she had a GSW to the thorax—any hospital record on her? She couldn’t have survived that without surgery, right?”
“Right. But we’ve been checking every hospital in the state and haven’t found a hit matching a woman of her description. We figure the GSW is from at least a decade ago, and she could’ve been anywhere other than the state of Idaho when she got that.”
“Is she saying what happened to her?”
“She claims she doesn’t remember, and I think it’s legit. My working theory is that the trauma of all that abuse and the TBI combined is causing retrograde or dissociative amnesia.
“We did a rape kit when she first came in, but the state backlog for processing kits is so bad that Sheriff Penton probably won’t be able to get anything from it for a year. Maybe two. He’s hoping she’ll remember something before then, so it’s a waiting game.”
“How long are we keeping her?” the intern asked next.
“I’m ready to discharge her tomorrow, but Penton is asking us to hold off until he finds somewhere to put her while he investigates who did this to her. We’ve got the funds to cover her care for another day or two, and her head trauma justifies it,
but as soon as she’s not showing a risk of syncope due to her malnourishment, anemia, and the TBI, the brass upstairs wants her discharged and off the books.”
“Poor woman. Maybe it’s not a bad thing she doesn’t remember that kind of a life.”
“Agreed.”
The pair of doctors moved on down the hall, and I felt hot tears slide down to the pillow.
I wasn’t fluent in a lot of the medical terminology, but I believed I knew enough to understand that I’d been caught up in a brutal, violent, sexual assault–filled world—for at least a decade.
What horrible things had I witnessed? What horrible things had been done to me?
As much as I wanted to remember my name, who I was related to, where I’d been born and raised, and if there was anybody out there looking for me, I didn’t want to remember how I’d lived—survived—under such conditions. I didn’t know how to divest myself from one while keeping hold of the other.
My choices were either to remember all of it or none of it, and I couldn’t decide which one I preferred.
“Maddy?” I heard Cash’s soft voice ask.
I didn’t turn toward him, I simply kept crying, covering my face with my hands. I felt shame and couldn’t understand why. All these emotions were overwhelming me. They felt so real, but I didn’t know why they felt real.
“Hey, hey,” Cash said, and I heard him come around the bed. Then I felt him lay a hand on my shoulder. “You in pain?”
I tried to hold back the tears, but they wouldn’t stop flowing. I continued to hide my face and curled myself into a ball. I wanted to shut out the world. I wanted to fall asleep and wake up in a different body with a clear head and a past that didn’t involve such violence and violation.
The bed dipped a little with Cash’s weight as he sat down. “Maddy,” he said again. “Did you remember something?”
A sob escaped me. I didn’t know if I could talk, but I wanted to. So, I reached out with my casted hand and laid my fingers on Cash’s arm. I just needed a moment to get some composure.
As I was sucking in some oxygen, however, the weirdest thing entered my mind. It wasn’t a memory; it was like watching a movie inside my head, the imagery as clear as day.
Immediately, my tears stopped and I turned to face Cash. He looked tired.
“Tell your deputy not to chase the white pickup.”
He blinked at me, then his mouth opened as if he were going to speak but closed it again. He didn’t know how to respond. But I had more to tell him.
“The kid in the white pickup with the red and blue stripes on the side. Tell your deputy not to chase him. Tell him to let him go.”
Cash studied me for a long moment, his expression sad. “Maddy, do you know where you are right now?”
It was my turn to blink. He didn’t believe me. He thought I was talking crazy.
He was right, of course, but it didn’t feel crazy.
It felt urgent, and I needed him to believe me.
“I’m in the hospital in Evansville, Idaho. Room three-ten. It’s Tuesday. I don’t remember my name or what happened to me, but I do know that if your deputy gives chase to the guy in the white pickup with painted stripes…he’ll die.”