Remember Me (12 page)

All he’d learned was her name. Lucy Cameron. Not a common name, but not so rare it was easy to find her. On top of everything else, he’d been so out of it following the crash he didn’t even remember her from its aftermath. Tall and blond with haunted gray eyes. He would dream of the expression in those eyes when he was able to sleep at night, but whenever he tried to reach out to her in his dreams, she vanished, no more than a puff of smoke from a magician’s trick. And somehow, Brandon was sure he needed to remember her, was positive she held the key to what he was missing.

His father had tried to get him into the office, but Brandon had skirted the none-too-subtle hints until Alexander had lost his temper. “This is about that woman, isn’t it?”

“Why didn’t you find her? Why is there no mention of her?” Brandon had raked his hand through his hair as he’d confronted his father. “She saved my life. Couldn’t you have at least
thanked
her?”

For once, his father had seemed almost embarrassed. He fiddled with the antique brass sextant on the desk in his study. “We tried. She was already gone.”

Brandon had sighed in exasperation. “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“She’d left the resort, and your friend…”

“Matt. His name’s Matt.”

“He refused to divulge any information.”

“Well, I’m going out there.”

“You cannot be serious!” Alex’s face had flushed an unbecoming red. “Brandon, it’s time to put this behind you and move on. You’re alive. That’s all that matters!”

“Not to me. I’ve lost more than four days from my life. I want to know what happened. I want to know what I was doing on the plane. I want to know why Lucy Cameron was a passenger.” He hadn’t added that every night an aching sense of loneliness almost brought him to his knees. On some level, his life had stopped the day of the crash, some part of him dying as surely as the plane’s pilot. “I want to see the crash site again.”

His father had slapped the smooth, polished surface of his desk. “Then go, but I want a promise from you. I want you to promise you’ll get this nonsense out of your system, and when you return you’ll be ready to go back to work. Barrett Newspapers needs you, Brandon.” His father had paused, the telltale tic in his temple revealing the clenching and unclenching of his jaw. “I need you.”

They had stared at each other, eyes narrowed, for several seconds.

“I promise.”

So now, with the helicopter tilting forward before lifting clear of the pad at the base of Falcon’s Summit’s parking lot, Brandon hoped something would trigger his memory. Matt’s tinny voice crackled through the headset.

“When we come around this ridge, you’ll be able to see Haven Lake. We’ll be coming at the site backward. I figured we’d do an overview, fly beyond it, then turn around and approach along a similar path to what Hanson would have flown while you were going down. Can you handle that, bro?”

“Yeah.” Brandon spotted the two cabins sitting at the edge of the woods not too far from the lake’s shore. “Which one were we in?”

“The one farther away. According to her reports and the tracks investigators found, she turned you into a kind of human travois and hauled you out.”

They were over woods now.

“Where was the wreckage?”

“At the north end, a couple hundred yards in.”

Brandon took in the scene with the eye of an experienced pilot. “Hanson was attempting the impossible, wasn’t he?”

Matt’s sunglass covered gaze met his. “Yeah. He almost succeeded too. One person walked away. Two people lived. That was a freaking miracle.” Matt took the chopper up and out in a wide arc. “They brought Hanson’s mechanic up on charges. He’s in jail awaiting trial.”

“I guess there’s some justice.”

“They may ask you to testify, especially with your own pilot experience.”

Brandon’s laugh held a bitterness he couldn’t conceal. “A witness who can’t remember shit about what happened won’t do the prosecutor any good.”

“We’re coming around now. I’ll go in lower and slower so you can get a good look.”

“Are those sheared off trees from the crash or from investigators?”

“Bit of both, I think. When we arrived the following morning, I don’t remember it being quite this open.”

Brandon stared at the raw, scarred trunks of pines. He kept waiting for some memory to surface, like a submerged ball bouncing to the top of a tub of water. But it didn’t happen. He had read the NTSB reports, the details of which must have been supplied to them by Lucy. From those, he knew he had been on the radio broadcasting a mayday over and over. The plane’s engine had already seized and they were gliding in. There would have been only the sound of the wind and their voices. Then Hanson probably attempted to lift the Cessna’s nose. The transcripts had described what could only have been the little plane’s stall horn sounding right before impact.

Why the fuck couldn’t he remember? He’d read the cause of death for Tom Hanson. The guy had been gored by a pine limb that came through the plane’s window. A few feet one way or the other, and it could have been him rather than Hanson. And the woman? What had Lucy thought and felt and heard in those last few seconds? What had she thought in the immediate aftermath? He could imagine how quiet it must have been. She had described having to crawl out the rear window of the aircraft. According to the investigator’s notes, she had worked on freeing him first. Why? Why hadn’t she gone after the pilot? Had she already known he was dead? Or was there some other reason?

The unending circle of questions with no answers haunted him.

“Is any of this helping?” Matt’s voice interrupted Brandon’s tortured round of thoughts.

“Not yet.”

“I can set down near the cabin. You want to get out and look around?”

“Yeah.” Brandon followed the line of trees to the lakeshore with his gaze. “How far is it from the crash site to the cabin?”

“Nearly a mile.”

She had splinted his ankle, wrapped him up and then dragged him and herself to shelter.

Matt set the chopper down and cut the engines. “Take a look around. I’m going to inventory the two cabins so I can make plans to restock them.”

Brandon stripped off his headset and put a restraining hand on Matt’s arm. “You and I have been friends for a long time, Matt. We’ve been through a lot together. I appreciate what you’re doing for me today.”

Matt dropped his gaze to Brandon’s hand and swallowed. He slipped off his sunglasses and met Brandon’s gaze. “You saved my life years ago. I don’t know if you realized how close I was to ending it. When I thought I wouldn’t walk again? That was a dark time. I owe you for that…” When Brandon started to interrupt him, Matt shook his head. “No, let me finish. I do owe you, but I also owe Lucy because if it hadn’t been for her, you would have died here. I made a promise to her. She asked me to destroy the records of her stay at Falcon’s Summit. I did what she asked in repayment. I won’t tell you where she works or what her address is. I promised her.”

“But you are going to tell me something, aren’t you?” Brandon’s gut clenched. Somehow he knew already his world was about to be rocked.

“The two of you?” Matt’s voice choked. “You were inseparable for those three days before the crash. You taught her to ski. You’d gone to Coyote Creek together. She wasn’t just some random female along for an afternoon jaunt. You were together in every sense of the word.”

Brandon’s throat tightened. He’d suspected it. Late at night, he’d even experienced some of those snippets of passion. When he’d unpacked his belongings, he’d pulled out his Nationals sweatshirt and inhaled the scent of her. He had never let anyone wear that sweatshirt. God, that was such a guy thing, like letting other people drive his car or relinquishing control of the television remote. She had worn his sweatshirt…and he had let her because they were together.

“Why didn’t she stay?” The question was wrenched out of him with a world of pain trailing in its wake.

“I don’t know the answer.”

“Then how the fuck do I find her so she can tell me?”

Matt let his head fall back against the seat and expelled his breath on a loud sigh. “She lives somewhere around DC, man. That’s all I can or will tell you.” Matt climbed out of the chopper. “The museum owner in Coyote Creek sent me a handmade pot a few weeks ago. According to her, you bought it for Lucy and were supposed to get back to her with a shipping address. I have it at the lodge.”

Brandon nodded. With the use of his cane, this time for real, he walked from the chopper to the cabin, studying the surrounding terrain. The snow was melting now. It had thinned in some spots to the point where rocks and tufts of tough grass were showing. Six weeks ago, it would have been coated in deep snow. She had brought him through that. Such perseverance had to mean something. He wished he knew what. Most of all, he wished he could remember. There had to be some reason she’d walked away.

* * * *

“Sugar, you need to add a little more blusher,” Tiffany told Lucy when she stopped behind her and peered at her reflection in the lighted makeup mirror backstage. “We got a big bachelor party coming in tonight. They gonna spend plenty of time staring at your tits and your ass, but if you don’t brighten up your face some, they might be tossing dollars on the stage instead of tens and twenties.”

Lucy picked up a blusher brush and dusted her high cheekbones once more. She’d had to take another couple weeks off once she’d returned so her bruises could fade. Roberto hadn’t been happy to have his best dancer sidelined, but once she’d come back to work, he’d been all smiles. She’d taken to working an extra night a week in order to make up for some of her lost revenue, and she was sure it had helped make up some revenue for Roberto too. Lucy wasn’t conceited, but she knew her acts brought in crowds and helped attract groups like the bachelor party making an evening of it at Flamingo Road. This next routine was one she had put together as a joke before going on vacation. While Jasmine LeFleur was her stage name–and that’s who she’d be in her last dance of the night–this routine she called “Snow Bunny Baby,” complete with some strategically placed pom-pons and a long ski scarf she used to tease her audience. After this, she would have a break and then finish for the evening with Jasmine’s erotic strip tease. When a bachelor party came in, she made sure to stage most of it right in front of the poor groom.

Tiffany massaged Lucy’s shoulders. “You okay, sugar?”

“Yeah.” She patted Tiffany’s hand.

“I worry about you. You just never seemed to bounce back since that vacation of yours.”

Lucy added bright pink lipstick, glad to see her hand was rock steady. This was work. She could fall apart on her own time, and very often did. “I’m okay, Tiff. Really. Maybe I am working a little too hard.”

“Two minutes, Jasmine!” the stage manager called, knocking as he passed.

Lucy smiled at her friend. Tiffany had started as a dancer and taught Lucy everything she knew. Most of her time now was spent overseeing the waitresses and checking on the dancers. She looked like she wanted to say something else, but shook her head instead. “Break a leg, sugar. You know where I am if you need me.”

Their eyes met in the mirror. “Thanks.”

She stood behind the curtain a minute later, waiting for her introduction, then bounced out onto the stage to a rousing round of applause and whistles. The smile she turned on for the crowed was designed for effect. She was no longer Lucy Cameron, aspiring artist. She was Jasmine LeFleur. With a jaunty smile and a cock of her bare hip, she waited for the heavy thumping beat of her music to begin, then launched into a routine physically challenging enough to get her mind off Brandon. As she slithered along the pole, holding it with her thighs, she arched her body almost horizontal to the ground. The eyes of the men in her audience traced the curves of her body so revealingly displayed. When she pumped her hips from a low crouch near the flushed faces of the wedding party and the rest of their buddies, the first of the money was tossed at her feet.

It was a game, a very profitable game, but one Lucy no longer had the heart to play. The fun-loving part of her had disappeared in a few minutes along the edge of a mountain in Colorado, and she didn’t know how to resurrect it.

When she put on the silky lingerie for Jasmine LeFleur’s final act of the evening, Lucy let herself drift into the persona she always thought suited this final dance. It was a departure from the strident, hip pumping beats of her earlier routines. This last dance of the evening was one long, slow seduction. If there was a man in the audience who didn’t have a hard-on when she was finished, then he was either dead or women weren’t his thing. The props she used were one chair and one subdued spotlight. The music was jazzy, silky and sexy. She never allowed herself to get close enough to any of the patrons in this routine for them to tuck money in her costume. It would have ruined the effect, cheapened what was meant to live in each man’s mind as his own personal seduction.

Tonight she played to the groom to be, seducing him with her eyes and her body. When she trailed off the stage with her long hair teasing the taut globes of her golden ass, tens, twenties and even a few hundred dollar bills littered the stage. Men sat with their jaws agape and Lucy put her hands over her face and cried.

Tiffany shooed Roberto and the stage manager away, wrapped an arm around Lucy’s shoulders and guided her into the dressing room. Most of the other girls were in the showers, so they had the area in front of the mirrors to themselves.