Found: His Perfect Wife

Chapter Three

“You can’t remember anything?”

Kevin thought of all the things that were crowded into his life, all the treasured memories he had of precious moments. The idea of suddenly losing his grasp on all of them was devastating. Sympathy flooded through him for the young man sitting on the guest side of his small, cluttered desk.

“No.” The single word echoed, dark and lonely, in Luc’s brain. Drawing nothing into the light in its wake except frustration.

Blowing out a breath, Kevin passed his hand over his hair.

“Man, that has got to be awful for you.” At a loss as to what to say, Kevin looked toward his sister. “How long do these kind of things last?”

Alison hesitated, then purposely kept her voice upbeat for Luc’s sake. “Jimmy said it might clear up in a day or two.”

Or longer, she added silently. There was just no telling. Even though she’d asked the same question of Jimmy, Alison knew that there was no blueprint for amnesia to follow. It varied from person to person, a product of cause and effect. It could be gone by tomorrow, or last forever. There was just no telling.

For Luc’s sake, she crossed her fingers and hoped for the first.

“Day or two, huh?” Kevin was a dyed-in-the-wool optimist. He shifted his eyes to look at Luc. “Sure he can stay over the garage,” he told Alison. “You can stay for as long as it takes. Nothing’s too good for the man who saved my little sister.” As if to underscore his sentiment, Kevin threw an arm around Alison, hugging her to him.

Embarrassed, Alison tried not to flush. “We’re a very close family,” she told Luc.

Luc noticed that she subtly shrugged her brother’s arm off and then stepped back. It reminded him of something. Small spaces and claustrophobia. Cave-ins. What did all that mean?

Behind him, he heard the door being opened. “Hey, Kevin, can I see you a sec?” Turning in his chair, he saw a man in stained, zipped-up coveralls peering into the office.

Kevin waved the mechanic back out. “In a minute, Matt. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

Grunting, Matt retreated. “It’ll keep.”

An idea suddenly hit Kevin. Perching on the corner of his desk, he looked down at Luc. “Have you been to the police station?”

“No, but I called 911,” Alison told him. “The police came to take down the information about the robbery.”

“Yeah, that.” He dismissed the robbery as unimportant. What mattered was that Alison wasn’t hurt. Money was replaceable, she wasn’t. “No, I mean about Luc here. They’ve got a Missing Persons Bureau, maybe they’ve got something like a Found Persons Bureau.” It made perfect sense to him. There had to be more people wandering around with amnesia than just Luc.

Alison pressed her lips together, holding back a smile. She didn’t want Kevin to think she was laughing at him. There were times when she envied her brother, the simplicity of his soul.

“He’s only had amnesia for less than half a day. That means if he’s ‘missing,’ he’s only been so for that amount of time. If he’s supposed to meet someone, they probably think he’s just been delayed.”

“Meeting someone.” Kevin rolled the idea over in his head. There had to be possibilities they weren’t seeing or tapping into. “Were you on your way to a meeting?”

“Well, he was on his way to a hotel,” Alison told him. Told both of them, she realized. Luc was listening to her as intently as her brother was. She had to remind herself that this was news to him, as well. She wished he had talked more to her when he’d gotten into the cab. Some fares never stopped talking from the moment they got in until she brought them to their destination. But after the exchange of names, Luc had been fairly quiet.

“I picked him up at the airport.”

The information felt like a depth charge aimed at a submarine. Kevin felt disappointment wash over him. “So you don’t even live around here?”

Luc considered the question, turning it over in his mind. Trying to find a bit of information that might begin to answer the query. But not even a glimmer pushed forward.

He sighed. “Not that I know of.”

“There has to be something you remember.” Kevin saw Alison opening her mouth, undoubtedly ready to launch into some sort of medical terminology. He was going with common sense. “People don’t lose their total memory when they get amnesia. I mean, you still speak English and you know how to walk, right?” Eagerness built in his voice. “There’s got to be something else rattling around in your head. You just don’t know, you know.”

There was that simplicity again, cutting to the heart of things. Alison looked at her brother with affection. “Sometimes, Kevin, I think you should have been a Rhodes scholar.”

He had no time for compliments, though it was nice to be appreciated once in a while. “I know all the roads I need to, right here in Seattle.” In his enthusiasm, Kevin leaned in closer to Luc. “Think. Is there anything? Anything at all?”

There was no harm in giving Kevin’s theory a whirl, Alison thought. “Maybe if you closed your eyes, it might make you focus better.”

Luc was game to try anything to jar at least a few thoughts loose. He did as she suggested. After a moment he opened his eyes again.

“Anything?” she pressed, eager. There was something there, she thought. In his eyes. He’d remembered something.

“Snow.”

Alison stared at him, confused. “Excuse me?”

“I had an image of snow.” But even as he said it, the image was fading into oblivion. “Or maybe just a huge expanse of nothingness.” Brought on by wishful thinking, he added silently. “I can’t tell.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder, leaving it there for a single beat before realizing what she was doing. Alison let her hand drop to her side. “It’ll come to you. You’re probably just trying too hard. Maybe after a good night’s sleep—”

“It’s only five o’clock in the afternoon,” Kevin pointed out.

Maybe, but Luc had been through a lot and he was undoubtedly exhausted. Some of his color was returning, which was a good sign, but she didn’t want to push it. Noticing his color, she realized that it looked as if he was tanned. Did he live on the coast? Near a beach? His way of speaking was relaxed, laid-back. Did that make him a Californian?

God, but she was lousy at playing detective. Where was Sherlock Holmes when you needed him?

“He can still get some rest, Kevin. C’mon, I’ll take you home.” Walking out of the office, she stopped abruptly. The space where she’d parked her car this morning was empty. She turned around to look at her brother. Kevin, she noticed, was walking slow, as if he expected the man beside him to collapse at any second. “Where’s my car?”

“Oh.” In all the excitement, he’d forgotten. “Matt parked it over by number 2. I had him do an oil change for you.”

She’d purchased the secondhand car with money she’d earned doing odd jobs since she was sixteen years old. She treated the car as if it were a beloved pet. “I can do my own oil change.”

“Yeah, I know.” It was an old story. She always balked whenever he tried to do something for her, acting as if he was impinging on her independence. She was that way with everyone. “But I enjoy doing little things for you.” He glanced at Luc. “She likes to act feisty.”

“No, just my age,” she countered. And then she sighed, looking at Luc. She’d been over this ground before, more times than she could count. “Being the youngest, they all think they have to take care of me.”

“We do,” Kevin confided to Luc, winking broadly for Alison’s benefit. “You know how it is.”

“No,” Luc replied, a wave of regret washing over him. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, right. Sorry.” Embarrassed at his blunder, Kevin looked away. He dug into his pocket, extracting his wallet and handed two twenties to Luc. “You gotta be hungry. Get yourself something to eat—on me.”

Alison gave up. There was no point in saying that she was perfectly capable of paying for both of them. Who was Kevin going to baby once she was gone? She’d put in her application to several medically depressed areas in the country and gotten back favorable responses. At this point she was just trying to decide which to accept. Kevin was going to have a lot of adjusting to do.

But for now she humored him. “We’ll pick up something on the way.”

Maybe you can pick up a wife on the way.

Almost in a trance, Luc stopped walking. “A wife.”

Alison and Kevin turned in unison to look at Luc, both stunned.

Maybe she’d heard wrong. “What?”

Luc looked at them, just as surprised as they were by what had just come out of his mouth. Very carefully he examined the words that had flashed through his head. But even now they were fading away.

“Someone said that to me…I think. Something about…looking for a wife, picking up a wife on the way. Something like that.” It made less and less sense the more he said it.

Alison laughed shortly. “I didn’t know they were holding a wife special at the mall.” At best, it was an odd clue to the man’s identity. Did he mean picking up his wife, she wondered. Could that be it? He was married and meeting his wife?

Luc tried to hear a voice, attach a face to the speaker, but it was like dropping cotton candy into the water. The words, the memory was dissolving before he could reach it.

“It had something to do with my coming here. Or maybe not,” he added with a helpless shrug of his shoulders. None of it was getting any clearer. If anything, it was becoming murkier.

For all he knew, the line that had echoed in his mind might have been something he’d heard in a movie or a television program.

He looked as if he was getting exasperated. She couldn’t blame him. Wanting to distract Luc, she said, “Let’s go get you settled in.”

To Kevin, it seemed like an odd way to put it. “What’s there to settle? The man has nothing but the clothes on his back.”

Kevin was right. Luc was going to need something else to wear. She scrutinized Luc closely. “Jimmy’s about the same size,” she judged.

“Better check with Jimmy first,” Kevin cautioned. In all likelihood, Jimmy would be generous, but you never knew. “You know how he is about his clothes.”

She laughed, remembering the one time she’d needed a tailored shirt and had to pilfer it out of Jimmy’s closet. The tirade when he discovered the loss had been unbelievable. Especially after he’d seen the wine stains. “Beau Brummell was probably more willing to give his clothes away.”

“Beau Brummell. Nineteenth-century figure, known for his penchant for finery. Friend of the prince of Wales.”

She and Kevin exchanged looks, then turned to look at Luc, who appeared a little amazed himself. He had no idea where that had come from.

“Maybe you’re an encyclopedia salesman,” Kevin suggested, only half kidding.

Luc shrugged. “Right now, that sounds as right as anything.”

Like a child on his first trip away from home, he watched the scenery go by outside the car window. Trying to absorb everything. Feeling a little lost, a little uncertain.

Except in his case, Luc hadn’t a clue where home actually was. All he knew, and not even with any amount of certainty, was that it wasn’t here.

“You’re trying too hard.”

Her voice, soft, understanding, drew his attention back to the car he was in. And to her. “What?”

She’d noted his reflection in the window when they’d stopped at the last traffic light. Alison could have sworn she could see his eyes getting tread worn. Though she’d never experienced anything remotely like amnesia, she could well imagine how frustrating it had to be for him. To think and not remember. To exist and have absolutely no memory of it.

“You’re trying too hard. To remember,” she added after a moment. “Sometimes, things come when you least expect them.”

Luc turned around to face her. Something she’d said was nudging a piece of a thought in his mind. Setting it off.

But it was shimmering just out of reach, just out of focus. For all he knew, it could be animal, vegetable or mineral. For the time being, he left it alone. Not that he had much choice in the matter.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Maybe if he allowed his mind to remain a blank, the pieces would eventually turn up.

He saw her grin and felt something stir inside him in response. The grin was sensual, but innocent at the same time. More questions came to mind, but this time they had to do with her.

“I usually am.” And then Alison laughed. “Not that anyone in my family likes to admit it.”

Family. The word created ripples of a feeling that passed over him. Again it defied capture. He couldn’t quite make it his. Maybe if he kept her talking, the feeling would crystallize into something he could identify.

“How many are there in your family?”

“Four, counting me.” It had been four for a very long time. Her mother had died when she was eight, her father three years after that. For all intents and purposes, Kevin was as much her parent as he was her brother. “You met Kevin and Jimmy. Among the missing, but only for the moment, is Lily.” She grinned again. They were as different as night and day, she and her sister. Lily was the sophisticate. “Lily recently moved out to live over the restaurant she bought into.”

Lily had finally managed to buy out the other owners and rechristen the restaurant. There was no doubt in her mind that within the year, Lily’s would become the trendy place to go in Seattle. Lily wouldn’t have it any other way.

Alison glanced at Luc as she took a side street. It wasn’t far now. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re all eager little beavers in my family.”

“I noticed.” Except that he would have used the word enterprising, he thought, then wondered where the word had come from. “And you’re the youngest.”

She laughed and nodded. At times, it was more of a condition than a chronological position. “And they never let me forget it.” She hesitated, then decided to prod a little. Who knew? It might actually help. “Do you think you have any family?”

He’d been asking himself the same thing. With no results. “I don’t know, but I don’t think so, at least not in the traditional way.” He tried to make sense of it for himself as well as her. “There’s this vague feeling that there’s someone, but…not really.”

That didn’t make a hell of a whole lot of sense, did it, he thought. And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been someone, someone important, who wasn’t there anymore. Had they died? A hollow feeling took hold of him as the realization sank in. Someone important to him could have died recently and he didn’t even know.

Without thinking, she slipped her hand over his in mute comfort, then replaced it on the steering wheel. “Sounds like a ghost.”

“That,” he agreed. “Or something that wasn’t.” The words drifted from his lips slowly, just as the thought had drifted in. It wasn’t the death of a person that he was feeling, but of something. What did that mean?

“I don’t follow you.”

That made two of them, he thought ruefully. “Sorry, it’s just something that seemed to pop into my head and then out again.” And he couldn’t make a damn bit of sense out of it.

She didn’t want him getting too frustrated, not when she thought he was still weak.

“Well, when it pops back in, try to hang on to it. Something tells me those missing pieces of your puzzle are doing their damnedest to try to show up again.” Pulling up to a compact, two-story house, she parked at the curb. They took turns using the garage. This week, Kevin’s car and Jimmy’s motorcycle got to stay out of Seattle’s daily mist. “In the meantime, this is where you can crash.”

“Crash?”

She shut off the engine and got out. “Set up your tent.” Walking ahead of him, she led the way to the detached garage. There was a wooden staircase on the side closer to the house. “Park your body. You know, stay.”

For the first time since he’d opened his eyes, amusement materialized. “Do you always use this many words?”

She took the wooden stairs two at a time. “I love the sound of words.” Reaching the landing, she unlocked the door. She turned around and waited for him to join her. “I was going to become an English teacher, but then I thought that wouldn’t make enough of a difference.” She let him walk in first.

The room was small, made smaller by the presence of a queen-size bed and a massive chest of drawers that had once occupied the master bedroom. “Does that mean a lot to you, making a difference?”

There was no way she could put into words just how much it did mean. No one really knew or understood. Sometimes, the feeling even left her a little mystified.

“When you’re the littlest and the youngest, you have a tendency to want to be the loudest just to be noticed. I want to make a difference, to know that because of me, someone feels better. Is better.” That’s why nursing had seemed so right to her. It allowed her the time to hold a patient’s hand, to offer comfort. In order to heal, the spirit had to be helped along as well as the body. Hearing herself, Alison stopped abruptly. “I’m talking too much.”

He didn’t want her to stop. “No, please, talk. Listening to you helps fill up the empty spaces in my head.”

For some reason, there wasn’t enough air in the room. She’d never noticed how small the room was. How tight the space around the bed seemed. There was no place to back up and suddenly she felt as if she needed to.

“You should be filling them up with your own thoughts.”

He smiled at the irony of her words. “I seem to have misplaced them. Temporarily I hope.”

“Do you think you’re married?” She had no idea where the question came from. Or why she wanted to know. Her curiosity didn’t feel idle, but active. It made her uneasy. Trying to move around Luc, Alison maneuvered toward the door and opened it.

“I don’t know.” He searched, recalled nothing. “What does being married feel like?”

It took effort not to shiver as she remembered her own short, disastrous venture. Buried two years in her past, the mark it had left behind was still vivid. “Like you can’t breathe.”

“Then I’m not married.”

He probably thought she was strange, if not crazy. Needing something to do, she crossed to the window, opening it. The room hadn’t been aired out since their cousin had come to spend the holidays with them last Christmas. “Sorry, that was harsh. I shouldn’t have said that.”

She needed to be moving all the time. Was that because she had so much energy to spare, or was she trying to outdistance something? There’d been a note in her voice he couldn’t quite recognize. Not that, he thought, he’d recognize a hell of a whole lot right now.

“Why not?”

“Because I just shouldn’t have.” Why couldn’t he leave it at that? It was his mind they needed to explore, not hers. “Besides, you’re a stranger.”

“And your husband wouldn’t like you talking to strangers,” he guessed.

“I’m not married.” He probably didn’t make the connection, or remember at any rate. “I live here, remember?”

Luc watched her fuss with the bedspread. “Yes, it’s just that I thought maybe you lived here with your husband. You sounded so adamant just now, about marriage.”

She had, too. Probably too adamant. Alison ran her hand along her neck, trying to lighten the moment. “It’s been a rough day. I was almost mugged.”

His eyes met hers. Humor glinted in them. “Yeah, I know.”

It felt as if his eyes were touching her. Air became thick in her throat, almost solidifying. She turned away, unsettled by the pull she felt. “There’s a tiny bathroom in the back. No shower, but you can wash your hands. I know it’s not much, but—”

“I don’t need much,” he assured her. There was no need to apologize. She and her brother were being more than kind, taking in a stranger. “And I appreciate you and your brothers letting me stay here.”

The image of a small room, dark but warm, flashed through his brain, remaining in less time than it took to identify it.

Alison touched his arm, drawing his attention back into the room above the garage. “What is it?”

He blinked, trying to focus. Aware only of the fact that she was standing very close to him again. And that she wore a fragrance that reminded him of—what? “Hmm?”

“You just had a very strange look on your face. Did you just remember something?”

“A half of something,” he allowed. “A room.” He turned around slowly, taking in the details of the room for the first time. The room in his mind had been cheerier. “Kind of like this. It was dark. Outside,” he realized, “it was dark.”

“Nighttime,” she guessed.

He was about to agree, then stopped. “No, it wasn’t. It was daytime.”

Then why was it dark? “A storm?” Or maybe his mind was playing tricks on him.

It sounded like a logical guess, but he couldn’t really say for sure. “I don’t know.”

Her heart went out to him. In his place, she wouldn’t have known if she could stand it as calmly as he was. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be plying you with questions. It’s just that I keep thinking if I ask the right one, suddenly everything’ll come back to you.”