Chapter 5
her
I felt someone squeeze my shoulder and jolted awake with a gasp.
“Whoa, sorry, Maddy. You okay?”
I blinked and rubbed my eyes. For a second, I didn’t remember where I was. And then I took in the dim lighting, the hospital sheets, the closed curtains on the window, and Cash’s concerned expression as he hovered over me.
“What’s happening?” I asked. I was so groggy and fuzzy-brained. The painkillers they had me on were dulling my mind.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
I turned onto my back, but I moved too fast for the three ribs that were almost healed but not quite yet. “Ow, shit!”
Cash widened his eyes, like he’d never heard somebody swear before.
“Sorry,” I muttered, shifting under the blankets to try to find a comfortable position, which was right around the time I noticed that someone else was in the room.
A uniformed deputy stood against the back wall, looking warily at me. No. Not warily. Squinting at him, I could see he appeared genuinely afraid of me. And something about that had a sense of familiarity to it. As if I’d seen that exact expression a lot in my life.
“You were yelling, ‘I’m alive!’” Cash said, his eyes now pinched with worry. “You were repeating it again and again.”
I rubbed my forehead and mentally searched for the dream I’d been having, but it slipped away like smoke through my fingers. “Well, I am alive,” I reasoned.
Cash reached out and gently raised my right wrist, exposing the skin on the underside. Amid the red circular scars of wounds barely healed, there were fresh scratches. They were deep enough to break the skin and allow tiny droplets of blood to form.
I winced when he brought the fresh wounds to my attention.
“You were scratching the hell out of your arm,” he said.
I stared at the marks for a solid ten seconds, then shook my head. “I don’t…remember.”
Cash laid my arm back onto the bed. “It’s okay. Don’t try to push it. It’ll come when it comes.”
I pointed to the deputy. “You guys out on patrol together?”
Cash glanced over his shoulder. “That’s Deputy Joel Buchanon. He was on duty tonight.”
I nodded. “Joel. Good to meet you.”
Joel didn’t respond. Or do much of anything except continue to stare warily at me.
It was frankly annoying. “What’s his beef with me?” I whispered to Cash.
The sheriff glanced over his shoulder again. “He’s a little freaked out.” He didn’t elaborate further.
“Aaaaaaand?” I asked, impatiently.
Cash twirled his Stetson. “I told him what you’d said to me yesterday afternoon.”
I sighed. It was like everybody expected me to remember shit when I was in the goddamn hospital for amnesia. “What’d I say?”
“About the white truck with the red and blue stripes. Remember?”
I stared at Cash with hard eyes. If I heard one more person ask me if I remembered something, I’d lose it. “No.”
“You told me to tell my deputy not to chase the white truck with the stripes.”
Brightness blossomed in my mind’s eye as, finally, a memory came back to me. “Oh, yeah. That.” Looking pointedly at the deputy, I added, “Don’t chase the white truck with red and blue stripes. Just let it speed on by and catch up to it later.”
The deputy simply stared at me.
Cash twirled his Stetson. “See, the thing is, Maddy, tonight Joel was working highway patrol, and he clocked a white Chevy Silverado going ninety in a sixty-five. The driver was weaving erratically—probably drunk off his ass.”
“Oh! So, it already happened?”
Cash didn’t answer me directly. Instead, he said, “Protocol was for Joel to give chase. But he remembered what you’d told me, so he called it in to me to ask what he should do. I told him to follow at a safe distance, and me and my other deputy would join him as soon as we could.”
“And then all hell broke loose,” Joel said, finally speaking, but that wary expression had now turned haunted.
“What?”
Cash explained: “The pickup crossed an intersection where a semi was blowing through a stop sign. The two collided, and there’s not much left of either driver, the pickup, or the cab of the semi. They caught fire, and county fire had a helluva time putting it out.”
It was then that I noticed the distinct smell of smoke wafting off Cash.
I looked at the deputy. “You’re all right then?”
He nodded. “If I’d’ve followed protocol, I would’ve hit the truck too.”
“Ah,” I said. I didn’t really know what else to say. I finally added, “Lucky break, huh?”
Joel stepped toward my bed but didn’t come forward all the way. “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“Know about the truck? Know that I shouldn’t chase it?”
My brow furrowed. “I dunno. Gut feeling, I guess.”
Cash and Joel exchanged a look.
It was annoying to be left out of whatever conversation was happening silently between them. “What?”
Cash turned back to me. “A gut feeling’s more like, ‘I have a bad feeling about you out on patrol tonight,’ not ‘Don’t chase the white truck with the red and blue stripes.’”
My brow furrowed a little deeper. I couldn’t really make sense of what they were asking me. Or telling me. This whole conversation was confusing as hell.
Joel said, “The Silverado had an American flag on it, but the white just blended into the color of the truck, so mostly what stood out was the red and the blue in the flag.”
I sighed. It was like they were suspicious that I’d somehow arranged for the accident to happen. “Guys, I’ve been in here for the past five weeks. I didn’t have anything to do with that pickup or what happened.”
“We know,” Cash said quickly. “It’s just…Maddy, that was freaky.”
I started to nod, but deep down, I had this feeling like it wasn’t that weird.
It felt…familiar. I couldn’t explain it to myself any more than picking up on what terrible thing was going to happen to Joel if he chased a white pickup truck with red and blue stripes.
It simply felt like what I’d seen in my mind’s eye was a normal reflex.
I put a hand to my head where I’d sustained the skull fracture that’d put me in a coma for three weeks.
“Maybe the bump on my head is making me psychic.”
Cash chuckled, and Joel did too, but there was a nervous edge to the sound.
Finally, though, Joel said, “Whatever it was, thank you, ma’am. And I mean it. I got a wife and two little kiddos at home. Next week my church is doing its big, annual Easter egg hunt, and my kids look forward to that almost as much as they look forward to Christmas.
“My dad died when I was twelve. He took his life on Christmas Eve, so I know what losing someone near a holiday is like. I started looking forward to Christmas again only once my kids were born.”
For a moment, Joel’s face had turned so boyish—and heartbroken. It moved me, and I felt tears prick my eyes.
“You’re welcome, Deputy. Glad I could help,” I said after swallowing past the lump in my throat.
He nodded to me, then to Cash, and left the room.
“What time is it?” I asked the sheriff after his deputy left.
“Six a.m. Joel, me, and my other deputy worked the crash site all night. Joel wanted to come here and thank you before he clocked off duty.”
“You about to clock off too then?”
He grinned. “Not quite yet. I got one more thing to take care of today, but we gotta wait until after the breakfast rush.”
“I’m not following.”
“I found you a place to stay, Maddy. The hospital is ready to discharge you, and I know you’ve got nowhere to go right now. Until we find out who you are, I don’t think it’s safe for you to be turned out onto the streets.”
“The mean streets of Evansville that rough, eh?”
He chuckled. “No, nothing like that.” He didn’t elaborate for a long minute, and I knew he was getting ready to tell me something that’d be hard for me to hear.
I didn’t know what could be worse than overhearing that resident doctor and his intern discuss my injuries, but I braced myself all the same.
“The clothes you were brought in wearing five weeks ago,” he began, “they were covered in blood. Like, a lot of blood.”
“I heard the doctors talking about what kind of condition I was in when I was admitted. I was beaten up pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah. Yeah, you were. But the thing is, there was more blood on your clothes than your injuries could account for. While you were definitely a pint low, it wasn’t enough to account for all the blood on your clothing. So, we ran a blood test on the shirt you were wearing,
and two different blood types were found. Yours and someone else’s. We think you might’ve been with someone who didn’t make it.”
My eyes widened and my jaw fell open. “Oh my God,” I whispered. This new development was horrifying. “Who? Who didn’t make it?” I asked, even though I knew that Cash didn’t know.
He shook his head and shrugged. “We’re still looking. You were found on Bear Creek Road, barely alive. You looked like you’d been in a boxing match—someone had beat you to a pulp. The bruise on your rib cage where three of your ribs were cracked was literally shaped like the toe box on a man’s boot.
”
I shuddered. There was a shadow in the back of my mind, like a swirling, menacing, predatory thing. It was the memory of what’d happened to me, bound in a cage that threatened to burst open if I picked at the lock too much.
I pulled my focus from it, switching to my surroundings. For the moment, I was safe, warm, and well fed, and I didn’t feel like I was under threat, but I understood what Cash was saying.
Even if I didn’t remember who I was, someone out there knew. Someone who could be hunting me right now to finish the job he’d started.
Cash continued, “There’s only me and two deputies to patrol the area, and we know everybody in this town, but nobody seems to know you. That tells me you either walked here or were dumped nearby. My money’s on you being dumped. Whoever you were with, though…I don’t think they made it.”
I felt the color drain from my face. Whoever’s blood was on my clothes could’ve been someone I loved.
It could’ve been my kid, husband, boyfriend, or a family member.
As much as I tried, though, I couldn’t remember who I’d been with before waking up in the hospital.
I had literally no inkling to their identity.
Or mine.