Cast a Pale Shadow (30 page)

Without invitation, he sat in the chair by the window. His expression was more smirk than smile. "I assume, since she's been hanging around here, all love-struck and pining, that you have given your little wife the service we discussed at our last meeting."

The doctor's snide tone left no doubt that his comment was intended to be as crude as it sounded. Cole's distaste for the man was sudden and intense, like a kick in the teeth. Still, he curbed the impulse to lash back. The girl was nothing to him.

God, his head ached too much to be sparring like this. "Assume what you want. Though why the hell it is any of your business, I have a hard time knowing."

"It isn't," said a soft but assertive voice.

 "Trissa," said Cole, and his pain seemed to fizzle away like beer foam in a salted glass.

"Good morning, Nicholas," she said as she gave him that kiss he'd expected. Better than he'd expected, actually. He hadn't imagined that her freshly washed hair would have the scent of roses as it fell forward to brush his cheek. Or that the tip of her tongue would tease the corners of his lips for a brief, sweet instant. Or that she would stop on her way up from his lips to kiss the tip of his nose and the very spot behind his ear where it hurt the most. She confused him mightily. She made it very hard to think of her as debris or nuisance.

The doctor cleared his throat impatiently, and when Cole looked up, his smirk had turned to scowl. "Excuse the intrusion, Mr. and Mrs. Brewer."

Trissa perched on the edge of the bed and fluttered her lashes at Cole saucily, then tossed her hair over her shoulder to glance back at the doctor. "Oh, Dr. Edmonds, I thought you'd gone."

"Shortly. I do have a bit of news, though perhaps you'd want to wait to hear it from Dr. Cummings."

The teasing smile melted from her face instantly. "What is it?"

"Good news, I guess. I was telling Brewer how lucky he was to have such a thick skull and a cast iron gut. The last tests came back. They're letting him go tomorrow."

Trissa yielded to the light push of Cole's fingertips on her forearm and slid off the bed away from him. It might have been the subtle but unmistakable distancing of himself away from her that tempered the enthusiasm of her response. "Thank you for telling us. I'm very pleased."

Edmonds studied her with a wry half-smile, his arms folded across his chest. "From the way the police have been hanging around here, it should be just in time for the arrest. I may be forced to admit, Brewer, that I was wrong when I assessed your various abilities. One of them, anyway. Fighting may be a strong suit after all. As to the other, well, some women settle for less than others, I suppose."

"Come out in the hall! I want a word with you, Doctor!" Trissa snapped and wheeled to stalk out. Edmonds chuckled and ambled after her. Cole could only hear the hissing anger of her whisper but not the words as she gave him the piece of her mind that nettled her. He could imagine her jabbing her tiny finger into his massive chest as she made her point.

His low rumble of a voice was clearly audible, however. "I never trusted Brewer. You're best rid of him. He's a killer." There was a slight pause in which neither spoke. "Unless, of course, that's what you wanted out of him all along. Tell me, what's the going rate for patricide? And what does he accept for legal tender?" There was a resounding crack which could only have been her palm connecting with his cheek.

Cole heaved himself painfully out of the bed to go to her aid, but she was in the door before he'd managed two steps. Her face was beet red with fury and her fists were tight, white-knuckled balls. "Ooh! What an arrogant, insufferable bastard!" She jammed a fist to her mouth as if to stifle a pending scream.

Awkwardly, Cole put an arm around her shoulder and patted her. "Really, I'm not worth the trouble. For all we know, he may be right. About me, I mean."

"No," she said adamantly. "Don't say that. Don't even think it. I talked to the police this morning. They don't have anything. It seems they suspect me as much as they do you. So for all his arrogance, Edmonds shares his perceptions with the cops." She shivered, then seemed to force the tension out of herself. "But, I don't want to worry about that now. I came here to get reacquainted with my multifaceted husband."

"Multifaceted? That's a rather benign term, don't you think? Did Fitapaldi give you that one? It sounds like him."

"No," she said, "I thought of it myself. Anyway, it fits." She stepped away from him, shrugged off her sweater and tossed it across the foot of the bed. "Wait here a second. I have a present for you. I left it out in the hall." She disappeared for a moment and returned with a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.

"A present?"

"Sit down and I'll give it to you." She guided him to a chair and held his elbow as he eased himself into it. "It's not brand new. I mean, Jack found it for me. I told him what I had in mind, and he got this. I hope you like it."

He untied the string and folded back the paper slowly, prolonging the anticipation. He could not remember the last time anybody had given him a present. When the package lay open in his lap, he stroked his hand over the smooth, dark jacket of the book inside. "Ansel Adams."

"It's what he does with the light, the way the light shines through. I see that in your pictures. The ones at the lake. And the still lifes."

"
My Camera in Yosemite Valley
. You flatter me. Thank you. It's the nicest gift anybody ever gave me."

She smiled, then watched him as he turned the pages of the book. He glanced up now and again, enjoying her pleasure as much as the book, sorry he had pushed her away from him earlier, sorry he had caused her even that momentary pain. But, he reminded himself and forced his eyes down again, that must be his purpose with her, to push her away. He mustn't let himself get sidetracked from that.

"Nicholas," she said softly after a while. "You won't remember this, but not so long ago, you made me promise something. I want the same promise from you now."

"Don't, Trissa."

"It's not a very big promise, and I don't think the keeping of it will be too great a chore."

"I can't."

"All you have to say is that you promise you will never leave me. It's not so much to ask, is it?"

He looked past her to a spot on the wall, a chip in the green paint, trying to focus on it to shutter out the flashed afterimage of her sincere, eager hope. "The one you wish to bind with a promise like that is already gone. The promise is broken before it is made."

"No, the one I wish to bind is right here before me," she slipped to her knees on the floor by his chair.

"Trissa, please don't..."

"He's the one who took the pictures as magic with light as the ones in this book. He is
you
, Nicholas.
You, Cole
. One and the same."

"There will be no promises. I'm no good at promises."

"We'll see," she sighed, unknowingly echoing his words from yesterday. "Anyway, I have the law on my side. This morning, they cautioned me not to leave town. I suspect they'll expect the same from you. I will have you under house arrest."

    *****

For the first few days of his return to the home he did not remember, Cole slept in the old cook's room off the kitchen. Augusta had thoughtfully made it up for him, thinking the stairs would be difficult for him to manage for a while. Cole was grateful for it. It had a narrow bed he was expected to share with no one, unlike the one he knew he'd find when wellness forced him back to his own room. It was close to the kitchen, the center of most of the activity in the house, and easy to escape to when the pressure of remembering faces and names became too much for him.

No one thought it strange when he slipped off for naps. They encouraged him to take it easy, take his time. No one knew that he seldom slept at all. Trissa, Fitapaldi, and Augusta had laid the groundwork for his forgetfulness by magnifying the extent of his head injuries. If he lost his train of thought in mid-sentence, or mistook May for Beverly, or forgot Maurice's name all together, they blamed it on the beating, patted him on the shoulder, and prompted him patiently.

Nobody seemed worried that they might harbor a homicidal maniac in their midst. They simply refused to believe that possibility. No one knew that that was one of the worries that kept him awake at night.

Trissa, more than Fitapaldi, seemed to be in charge of his recuperation and therapy. Though Fitapaldi would walk with him each evening in the garden and talk about the old days as if they were old chums and not psycho and head shrink. But Trissa was the one who sat and talked with him hour upon hour, kissing and touching him as if he were Nicholas and nothing had changed. She would bring down his portfolio of photographs and use them like flashcards, drilling him on memories. After three or four times through she began marking them with tiny pencil scratches on the back corners. He saw later that the marks were N's or C's according to his response.

When he tired of the game or had nothing to say, she would read to him, newspapers and folktales. The newspapers included not only the current one but others she had somehow collected from days that were gaps in his memory, of plane crashes and elections, of the Viet Nam War and the War on Poverty and the roller coaster stock market, of overthrown governments, baseball games, celebrity marriages, divorces, and deaths.

"Ladd? Alan Ladd died?"

She nodded solemnly, "Of undisclosed cause, January twenty-ninth. I saw him in
Shane
on the Late Show once. Was he a favorite of yours?"

"I liked him well enough. He had a struggle growing up, I heard. Like me. In
This Gun for Hire
, he acted madness better than most of us can live it."

The folktales she chose at random, letting the thick, old book from Augusta's library fall open in her lap where it might and delving into it backwards and forwards from the page she'd found. Why folktales, he never asked. It was enough to listen to the lilting cadence of the words in her sweet, soft voice, to laugh with her at the humorous ones like
Lazy Jack
or
The Pig-Headed Wife,
to hear her sigh at the romantic ones like
Beauty and the Beast
, to see secret tears sneak from her eyes when the stories told of estranged fathers and daughters, or lost loves never found again.

"I know it's silly. I'll read something else tomorrow, something more manly. Ernest Hemingway? Ian Fleming? Non-fiction maybe?"

He took the book from her lap and leafed through it. "Actually, I'd prefer
Finn MacCoul and the Fenians of Erin,
followed by
The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body
, if we have time." He closed the book and winked at her, not knowing that it recalled Nicholas to her so sharply that she had to look away for a moment. "Trissa, you could read the telephone book and I would enjoy it. I like the sound of your voice."

"Do you?
Finn MacCoul
it is then. By special request. Good night, Nicholas I mean, Cole." She kissed him as she always did before they parted for the night, then left him behind in dizzy shambles to lie awake all night, or if he slept, to dream of her in ways that went beyond kisses. It couldn't be that he was falling in love with her. That was something that Cole just could not do.

Chapter Eighteen

Augusta lifted the black linen pillbox from Trissa's head and tried the felt cloche. She pursed her lips and frowned at the hat's reflection in the mirror. It had a large onyx and rhinestone hatpin and rhinestone-clustered netting that was all wrong for someone so young. "Are you sure you won't listen to reason and stay home?"

"Augusta, I'm not going to miss my father's funeral just because we can't find the right hat." Trissa angled the cloche forward making the net dip past her chin. She grimaced and removed the hat and handed it back. "Maybe no hat at all would be okay. Or I could just wear a scarf."

"There has to be something here that's appropriate. But why in the world..." Her voice grew muffled as she burrowed through the hatboxes in the deep recesses of her closet. She emerged in a moment with three more boxes balanced precariously in her arms and two hats perched atop her own head. "A mother who would abandon her own daughter is beyond me."

"Please, I've already explained. My mother and I were both victims." In the long, dark hours while they waited at Nicholas' bedside, Trissa had confided a bit of her own story to Augusta, a condensed version that did not include the truth about how she and Nicholas met, nor the fact that they were not really married. Now that Nicholas, himself, did not remember this little detail, Trissa was the only one in the world who knew for sure. She intended to keep it that way.

"Hmmmph, if you ask me I'd say she was more accomplice than victim. What does Nicholas say about you going?"

"He doesn't know. He's meeting with Dr. Fitapaldi this morning. I thought I'd just go and not bother them."

"I bet he won't like it. Not one bit. Lorenzo wouldn't either, if he knew." She brushed Trissa's hair behind her ears and tried a beaded French beret. It gave her a Continental look that was interesting but inappropriate for a funeral. "At least, let me go with you."

"You know Roger needs you this morning. He's more worried than he lets on about those heart tests"

"Yes, poor Roger pretends to be brave, but underneath he's such a softy." Augusta flicked her fingers distractedly through Trissa's hair, smoothing it for the next hat. She was worried too and trying to hide it.

"Anyway, Beverly is going to drive me. I'll be all right."

"Beverly? Well, I guess she does have the experience being she's a whatchamacallit."

"Grief consultant." Trissa opened one of the boxes and discovered a broad-brimmed black straw sailor with a stiff grosgrain bow in the back. Augusta nodded enthusiastically as she lifted it out and placed it on her head.

"Perfect. I knew we'd find something." She opened her closet door wide and steered Trissa toward it. There in the full length mirror was a portrait in black that Trissa had difficulty recognizing as herself. Augusta had outfitted her in a prim, black challis dress with a crocheted ecru collar. She had lightly brushed a bit of color on Trissa's cheeks and lips to relieve the starkness of her fair skin against the black. The effect added a dewy look that drew attention to her eyes, which sparkled a deep ultramarine blue today below the brim of the hat.