to focus on her face. It was probably not the most beautiful face he’d ever seen, but he’d clung to the image, because he’d desperately needed to cling to something.
“Give me a minute,” he gasped. Seated on the porch floor, both hands gripping his swollen knee, he focused on riding over the pain. Breathe in, breathe out, slowly and deeply. Count off, count off, count off….
A glimpse of something vaguely familiar slipped in and out of his mind—a mind that admittedly wasn’t working too well at the moment. Uniforms…semi-automatic weapons…?
His head felt as if it had been shot out of a mortar.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” the woman said.
Squinting through narrowed eyes, he sized her up when she came and knelt in front of him. She was soaking wet, dirty, but had all the right curves in all the right places. Oh, yeah—he’d have to be dead to miss that much. Green eyes, brown hair—nice, but nothing fancy. The kind of woman a man might have given a second look, but probably no more. And yet…
“Do I know you?” he asked cautiously. He felt the need to reach out and hold on to something—someone—familiar. At the same time he felt an unsettling need for caution.
Why?
Who knew?
“I don’t think so. I’m Ellen Wagner. The boy you saved is my son, Pete. I’ll never be able to repay you, Mr….?”
There was something at once earthy and ethereal about her. Thin face, hollow cheeks, haunting eyes—or maybe he meant haunted. Without being actually pretty, she was beautiful. She was obviously waiting for him to introduce himself. He ran a quick mental check before the walls slammed down.
It’ll come, he thought with growing desperation. This kind of thing happened in books and movies, not in real life. At least, not to him.
Whoever the hell he was.
By the time he woke up again, it was pitch-dark. There was a night-light on, one of those small, fake-candle things. He waited for his eyes to adjust. Nothing looked familiar. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but nothing about the room rang any bells. Evidently he wasn’t at home. He couldn’t quite remember what home looked like, but he’d lay odds this wasn’t it.
Cautiously sitting up, he began to swing his legs over the side of the bed. Pain slammed through him as it all came back.
Correction. The immediate past came back. For all he knew he could’ve been born in a ditch with a pale-faced angel for a midwife and a skinny wet kid for an assistant.
Hell of a thing. He was used to—
What? He didn’t know what he was used to; he only knew this wasn’t it.
“How long have I been out of it?” he asked as the woman came silently into the bedroom. Any minute now, he assured himself, things would begin to click into place.
She was barefoot. White robe, no halo, no wings. Avid for information, he latched onto the smallest detail. She glanced at her watch. A man’s watch, he noted, on a delicate wrist.
“It’s just past eleven now—p.m. They say the tornado struck at seven minutes to one this afternoon. I woke you up several times just to be sure you were all right, the way you’re supposed to with a head injury. Don’t you remember?”
“Lady, I don’t remember shi—anything.” Evidently he did remember how to talk to a lady.
“We’ll have to call you something. What comes to mind?”
“Bathroom. And no, I don’t want to be called John, but if you’ll point me in the right direction, I’d be much obliged.”
Seeing the smile that trembled on her lips, he’d have given anything to have met her under better circumstances.
She indicated a door across the hall and mentally he measured the distance. If he could grab a chair he could probably use it to lurch across the room.
“You really need to keep your left leg elevated as much as possible,” she told him.
“I can handle it.” He could handle the pain better than he could handle asking her to help with his more intimate needs.
“There was a crutch—I think I put it in the attic. If you’ll wait right here a minute, I’ll run see.”
“Take your time,” he said through a clenched jaw.
Evidently she recognized his most pressing problem at the moment. She was gone and back before he could decide whether to risk falling on his face or an even worse indignity.
“Here, I don’t know if it’s the right height. It was in the attic when we moved in. Thank goodness I never got around to clearing things out.”
She eased into position under his arm to help him up, and even in his battered condition, he recognized the smell of a woman fresh from her bath. At any other time he had a feeling he’d have responded to it.
She handed him the crutch and helped him position it before he embarrassed himself. It was short, but at least it allowed him some mobility. He thanked her and hobbled off to tend to nature’s call. And incidentally, to look in the mirror to see who the hell he was.
The face that stared back at him moments later would have looked right at home on any Wanted poster. A jaw that redefined the word stubborn. A largish nose that canted slightly to the southwest. High forehead, distorted at the moment by the large, discolored lump above his left temple. Nothing rang any bells, including the stubble, the mud-stiffened brown hair and the suspicious dark eyes. After staring for long moments at the mirror image, he felt like crying. Howling like a lovesick coyote.
If he’d ever before come face-to-face with the man in the mirror, he didn’t remember it.
He managed to wash up, even doused his head in the basin a few times to remove some of the mud. The rest he left behind on one of her pretty pink towels.
She was still there when he made it back to the room. Ms. Wagner. Mrs. Wagner. She had a son.
Think, man! Get it together!
How the devil could he get it together when his head felt like a filing cabinet that had been bludgeoned with a sledgehammer? The image of a silver-gray metal filing cabinet flickered in and out so fast he didn’t have time to latch on to any details.
“Are you hungry? We had supper hours ago, but I could heat you some soup. What about chicken noodle?”
“Coffee. Strong, black and sweet. I don’t usually take sugar, but I need the…” His voice trailed off as it occurred to him that things were starting to come back. Any minute now he’d remember who he was, and where he was supposed to be. According to the boy, he’d been in a hell of a hurry, but then, with a tornado bearing down on them, that was understandable.
Was anyone looking for him? A family? A wife? Chances were that whatever transportation had brought him this far was no longer available. Picturing the scene when he’d first looked around that ditch, he didn’t recall seeing anything resembling wheels. Not even the kid’s bike.
