The Memory Closet: A Novel (18 page)

Dusty patted my knee softly. “You don’t have to look at this if you don’t want to.” He tapped the folder. “If this is too much for you, I’ll take it back down to the station. But you said you wanted to remember. I thought this might help.”

He paused, gave me time to think about it. “Do you want to see it?”

I nodded; I couldn’t speak.

“I’m sorry, Anne. Seems like all I do is bring you bad news, tell you things you don’t want to hear or show you ugliness you don’t want to see. I’d love to make you smile sometime.”

His face suddenly lit up. “I don’t suppose you remember the day you and I were in the chicken house … well, of course you don’t remember.”

Dusty looked a little flustered, then noticed the color that was now scalding the inside of my face. Probably felt the heat from it.

“You do remember?”

“Well, I … sort of. I remember some of what … if you mean the time you and I, the two of us were …”

Please feel free anywhere along in here to jump in and rescue me before my face pops like a blood blister.

“The two of us were in the chicken house because you asked me to meet you there to kiss you,” Dusty said.

“I did not!”

Dusty grinned. “How would you know?”

I couldn’t help smiling, too.

“You don’t remember that part, do you? Asking me if I wanted to kiss you?” Silence was answer enough. “When I said I did, you told me to come over after supper, that you’d be waiting for me in the chicken house.”

“I just remember you calling out, ‘Annie, Annie.’ It was gloomy and you couldn’t tell if I was there or not.”

“You answered, and I could see you standing near the back, the light caught your blonde hair, and I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”

“You didn’t get out much, did you.”

“Nobody got out much in Goshen, Texas.” His laugh was easy and relaxed. And I felt the color draining back down out of my face. “So I made my way to where you were standing. You always stood so tall and straight, a source of much angst for a short, prepubescent boy.”

“You said it was hot in there and I told you to stop complaining. I was a bossy little brat, wasn’t I.”

“Not bossy, but you were usually in charge. And the kiss was
your
idea, not mine. Not to say I hadn’t thought about it.”

I started to laugh. “I told you to hurry, didn’t I? That it was hot in there and it stunk.”

“You just closed your eyes and stood there.”

“Like a cigar store Indian.”

He was laughing now. “You were a lot prettier than any wooden Indian I ever saw. So I got up on my tiptoes, vertically challenged as I was at the time, and kissed you. I was aiming for your cheek, I think, but at the last second I just went for it.”

“And then you stepped on a chicken.”

“Yeah, when I floated back down to earth from my tiptoes, my heel landed on a chicken’s claw! And it started squawking and that set the rest of them off, and Bobo caught us before we could get out of the chicken yard. We told her we’d been looking for eggs but she didn’t buy that for a minute.”

“Not much got past Bobo.”

The chuckles wound down.

“That was my first kiss,” Dusty said.

“Mine, too, I guess.”

The required beat of silence.

“But how would I/you know?” We spoke together in a sing-song rhythm so perfect it sounded rehearsed.

Dusty smiled. “Have you had any luck remembering? Things coming back to you?”

He could tell by the look on my face that he’d put his foot down in the wrong place again. Not on a chicken’s foot this time, on an emotional land mine.

“This accident report could trigger some awful stuff. Are you sure you’re up to it?”

“I am absolutely, positively
not
up to it. Won’t ever be up to it. But this may be the Boogie Man, and it’s either him or me.”

“Well, I’m not sure what this accident report will tell you. I’m certainly not sure what it tells me!”

“Huh?”

He sighed.

“An accident report is supposed to describe
in detail
how an accident happened. This one does a really lousy job. The investigating officer should have taken particular pains to get it right because it was a fatality. But what it says—and doesn’t say— makes no sense, it doesn’t add up.”

“I’m not following you.”

He reached into the folder and pulled out a paper, a form with fill-in-the-blank spaces on the front and paragraphs of handwriting on the front and back.

“Says here the car went over an embankment into a gulley and burst into flames. Two people survived, one died.”

He pointed to a paragraph of handwriting.

“Jericho’s statement to the officer was that when he swerved to dodge an armadillo in the road, he lost control of the car, couldn’t hit the brake hard enough to stop it because he had stitches in his foot, and it went over an embankment and instantly burst into flames.

“He said Windy was in the back of the station wagon and the accident knocked her unconscious, that he got you away from the car because he was afraid it was about to explode, but when he started back to get Windy, the gas tank blew up.”

There was an absolute black hole in my mind. Not a single image formed there. I not only couldn’t remember the event, I couldn’t even manage to imagine what it must have looked like from the description of it Jericho had given the police.

Dusty waited for me to say something. He must have expected his account to upset me because he seemed a little surprised at how well I was dealing with what he’d said. He didn’t understand that there was nothing for me to deal with.

“Nothing” was the key word here. There was a profound
nothing
in my head. An emptiness. A vacuum. I had no emotional reaction because there was nothing for me to react to. It was the difference between getting stabbed, feeling the pain of the knife slicing into your chest, and reading the annual report on the violent crime rate in your neighborhood. What Dusty had told me was just information.

I didn’t even try to describe to Dusty what was happening to me.

“I can’t remember a thing—not a thing. I’m sorry.”

He tried not to look disappointed.

“I was hoping to get some questions answered today. Hear what really happened from an eyewitness.”

“What questions?”

“There’s just a lot about this that doesn’t add up.”

“Like what?”

He began to tick off one thing after another, rapid-fire. He’d obviously invested considerable time and energy into trying to make the pieces fit.

“Like the gulley the car ran off into was the only one for 50 miles in every direction. It was a bright, sunshiny day and the road was dry, yet Jericho lost control of the car"--he paused, and said the rest incredulously--“…
dodging an armadillo?”

I didn’t connect.

“Anne, who dodges armadillos? Come on, the roadside’s littered with armadillo carcasses. Nobody cares about rabbits in body armor. The drivers who don’t plow them down accidentally are
aiming
at them. But Jericho loses control of his car trying to
miss
one?

“And what was he doing on that road anyway? It’s 15 miles out of town and there’s nothing out there but ranchland—snakes, lizards and armadillos. And that one gulley. Where was he going? A guy comes home with”--he scanned the report looking for a fact--“Yeah, it says here he’d been in the emergency room getting 19 stitches in the sole of his foot, stepped on something that sliced it wide open to the bone. So he just got his foot sewn up, and what’s the first thing he does when he gets home from the hospital? He grabs his two little girls and takes them for a ride out in the middle of nowhere—why?”

He shook his head.

“I’ve been out there, looked at the wreck site. He should have had plenty of time to stop, and there’s no evidence anywhere on this report that indicates he even tried.”

“It says there weren’t any skid marks?”

“No, it doesn’t say that. It just doesn’t say there
were
skid marks.” 
He rolled his eyes. 
“The guy who worked this wreck couldn’t have found his butt with both hands and a flashlight. I don’t know how he made it out of the academy. But if there had been something as important as skid marks, I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t have noted it here and measured them. He drew in all sorts of other things—where the car left the road, the path it took to the rim of the gulley, where the two of you were standing when the gas tank blew.”

“Jericho didn’t try to stop? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It also doesn’t make sense that this report says Jericho was on crutches when the officer arrived.”

“Why is that odd? I thought you just said he had stitches in his foot.”

“His car’s about to explode, and he has time to get his crutches out of it but not his little girl?”

Dusty was totally in police officer mode, asking the questions he’d have asked if he’d worked the wreck, the questions the other officer should have asked, but didn’t.

“Jericho said the car
instantly
burst into flames. A car fire starts from leaking gasoline. It usually takes several minutes for leaking gas to hit a heat source and ignite. Unless the gas tank’s ruptured on impact, in which case flames would have enveloped the car so fast you and Jericho would have been lucky to get out at all. But he didn’t have so much as a broken fingernail; you had a bruised cheek and a black eye, and neither one of you was burned.”

He tapped the report. 
“Assuming the officer took his statement down correctly, and with this idiot that’s a major assumption, Jericho’s description of the accident—I don’t see how it could have happened that way.”

Then he held up one finger.

“For starters, Jericho said he wasn’t able to hit the brake hard enough to stop the car because his foot was cut.” Dusty made a
humph
sound in his throat. “Listen, you’re in a car with your two little girls headed for a drop-off, the adrenaline dump into your system would turn off all your pain sensors so you couldn’t feel it if somebody sliced your foot off with a chainsaw.”

He held up two fingers.

“He said he got you safely out of the gulley before he went back for Windy. Why on earth did he haul you up to the road? And how did he manage
that
on crutches? If you’re trying to get away from something about to explode, why climb an embankment? The bottom of the gulley was flat. You could have gotten a long way down that gulley in the time it took to climb out of it.”

He held up a third finger.

“And why ‘get you to safety’ at all? You weren’t hurt. Why not just yell, ‘Annie, run!’ Then get his other little girl—who
is
hurt— out of the car before it explodes?”

“Dusty, what are you saying?”

“I don’t have any idea what I’m saying. I wish I did. I was hoping you could help me, that you’d remember what really happened out there that day.”

He stopped. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Anne, but you don’t look too good.”

So much for smoothing my hair down.

“All these memories surfacing. It’s getting to you, isn’t it?”

I just nodded my head, chewed in the inside of my lip and didn’t meet his gaze.

“I’m worried about you, Anne.” He put his hand on my shoulder, and I resisted the urge to pull away. “The mind can only take so much.” He paused again. “I told you I’d speak to Karen, get her to recommend someone for you to talk to. She put me in touch with a doctor, a psychiatrist in Amarillo. Dr. Grace Kendrick has had really good results with regression therapy.”

“And regression therapy is … ?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what it
isn’t.
It’s
not
taking a person back to a past life, so they remember when they were a standard-bearer for Charlemagne or a yak herder in Tibet!”

Dusty had obviously done some research on the subject--I suspected a lot of research.

“In layman’s terms, a psychiatrist uses hypnosis to move you backward in time.” When he saw me begin to retreat emotionally, he reached out and actually took my hand. “Annie, you don’t have to do this alone. You need someone to be there with you when all the awful stuff surfaces, somebody who can help you deal with it.”

I don’t want to see a shrink! No way. I don’t want to spill my guts about all this to anybody! No, I won’t talk to her!

“OK, I’ll talk to her.”

Did I say that out loud?

“Great.” He was a little surprised; he’d expected me to put up more of a fight. So had I. And he’d come armed. “I’ve already set up an appointment with her for nine o’clock Friday morning.”

Before I could protest, he squeezed my hand. “I’ll come by here at six, and we’ll stop at the steakhouse and have a cup of coffee with Amy before we head out. And after your appointment, I’ll take you to lunch in Amarillo, to a restaurant that serves something besides tacos.”

I didn’t agree, but I didn’t argue either. He took that as a yes. Then he shifted gears, let go of my hand and picked up the other folder in his lap.

“I dug up some other information besides the accident report. Some information that might shed some light on who was abusing you and Windy.”

Bam!

The emotional sucker punch hit me so hard in the belly I almost groaned out loud. Dusty was looking at the report and didn’t see me flinch. I didn’t need a police report to tell me who was abusing us. I knew:
my mother.

“I ran an NCIC check on your stepfather. Jericho’s been a busy boy. Petty crimes—scams, bad checks, even shoplifting. And there’s lots of violence in his jacket—assaults, fights, domestic abuse. The police were called to Little Dove’s half a dozen times when Jericho lived with her in Socorro. He was beating the crap out of her but she refused to press charges.”

You’re not scared? Well, you better get scared.
Piped through the heat register intercom.

“Did you know the police found Windy wandering down the road beside the trailer park the morning of the accident? They took her home, but her mother wasn’t there so they brought her to your house. Apparently, Little Dove ran off and left her. Nobody was surprised. Yellow Moon said she was stunningly beautiful, way too pretty to spend her life in a town like Goshen. He said she wouldn’t even come back home for Windy’s funeral.”