Without a Past (11 page)

Her pulse was charged, nerves primed. She hadn't been climbing in months, and she had to admit it was fun to show off for a nonclimber. With a jaunty wave, she hopped out and back, dropping a quick three feet over the precipice. Her boots landed cleanly, knees bent to absorb the impact. Once she made certain her lines were clear of debris, she slowly eased downward. Her boots sank into layers of decayed leaves, sending up a moldy smell that reminded her of the bordello's basement. A cluster of bristly, grayish-green bushes grabbed at the long-sleeved, heavy canvas shirt she'd pulled on to protect her arms. The bright-orange garment was left over from her Search-and-Rescue days. She'd dug it out of the closet at Ida Jane's.

“What do you see?” Harley called from above.

She knew he was embarrassed about his acrophobia, but it was a common fear. Jenny and Josh had been avid hikers, but Josh had hated heights. When the three of them hiked to the top of Half Dome, Andi had walked right to the edge
of Yosemite's famous landmark. The nearly-five-thousand-foot drop to the valley floor was scary but exhilarating, too. Jenny and Josh had snapped pictures from the safety of the football field–size center plateau.

“Lots of broken branches,” she called. “Tons of poison oak. Stay put.”

Andi heard a noise above her. A river of shale rained downward. “And keep away from the edge.”

“Sorry,” he called out, his chagrin obvious.

She liked him way more than was smart. Too bad the future looked even less stable than the ground under her feet.

Almost simultaneous with that thought, the earth gave way and she had to hop, skip and jump the remaining thirty feet to avoid twisting an ankle. Breathless, with adrenaline pumping, Andi took a moment to calm her nerves. As she did, she glanced around.

A debris field—twenty feet ahead and about the same distance in diameter—reminded Andi of a hastily abandoned picnic. Scraps of faded and torn cloth adorned bushes. Small piles of paper and personal items created pockets in the bright-green grass. She tilted her chin and looked skyward at the source of the refuse.

The picture seemed even more impossible from this angle. The massive bull pine consisted of two trees that had grown together at the base and parted at a point about twenty-five feet in the air forming a Y. The branches crisscrossed like a net. A net that had snagged the motorcycle.

“The bike looks like a giant Christmas-tree ornament,” she called out.

Harley's reply came a moment later. “Is it new?”

Andi moved closer. Dusty, streaked with grime and pine tar, the bike seemed in amazing shape, given its precarious position. “Brand spankin'—give or take a wrecked fender,
two flat tires and a nasty dent in the gas tank. Looks like it's deep burgundy, but it's hard to tell with all the shadows. Gonna take a helluva winch to get it out.”

“Can you see the license plate?” They'd discussed the possibility of tracing the bike, if moving it was problematic.

“Not yet.” She shook out more line and stepped clear of her ropes. “I need to get right under it.”

“Be careful,” Harley shouted. “Don't risk it.”

“Don't worry,” she called out. “This baby isn't coming down without help. Looks like you had a couple of leather saddlebags on the back. There's stuff all over the ground.”

Andi walked with care amongst the remains of Harley's past. She felt like a crime scene investigator—although thankfully, she could report that no body was in view. She looked upward. “A second helmet is still attached to the bike, Harley. You couldn't have had a passenger.”

She didn't hear his response, but she felt his relief. As she moved directly under the bike, she spotted a small brown hunk of leather.
A wallet.

Kneeling, she picked it up. Stiff and discolored from the weather, it was fairly well preserved. Her hands shook as she flipped it open. The tiny photo on the Missouri driver's license made her breath catch in her throat. She told herself she was being silly. Foolish. Of course this was Harley's bike. Harley's wallet.

She used her thumb to clean off the condensation on the plastic frame that held the license. Same face, different name.

“Find anything?” Harley called.

Andi heard the edge of worry in his voice. Stifling her inner disquiet, she stuffed the billfold in a pocket in the leg of her pants and buttoned it for safekeeping.

“There's a mangled laptop,” she said, moving on. Water seeped from its insides. “It's toast.”

Keeping a running commentary, she shouted out her finds. “Clothes are everywhere.” She used a stick to poke at a mound of mildew-splotched briefs. “All rags now.” She picked up a long-sleeved blue oxford button-down, faded and torn, but serviceable for her purpose. “Pretty ritzy labels. You didn't buy this at a thrift store.”

“What?” Harley called. “I can't hear you.”

She quickly scanned the area for anything personal. Under a clump of soaproot shoots, she found a leather-bound book. A journal, she thought. Without peeking inside, she tossed it on top of the shirt.

A little more poking turned up a platinum-encased TAG Heuer watch. A ruined cell phone and a couple of electronic gizmos Andi couldn't identify. “He's not as poor as he thinks he is,” she mumbled under her breath. “Unless the bike was stolen, of course.”

When she kicked over a clump of mushy newsprint, she unearthed what at one time had been an elegant black velvet jeweler's box. Her fingers were trembling—
from the dampness
—as she pried open the rusted hinge. An engagement ring. A big, flashy diamond surrounded by six smaller jewels. While obviously expensive, the rock didn't appeal to Andi's taste, but she knew women who'd swoon at the sight of it.

“Oh, great,” she muttered. “He was on his way to propose to some woman.”

She made the snarling noise her sisters called the
bad
sound, then tossed the rest of her discoveries onto the blue shirt and tied the arms together to form a knapsack. With a spare clip, she hooked it to her belt.

“Coming up,” she said after snapping a few pictures of the bike and the scene below it.

Instead of the thrill of victory she'd been expecting, Andi felt let down. She'd accomplished her mission, but now
what? Like so many other times in her life, she'd leaped without looking. Actually, she had looked ahead—just not far enough. She'd done the smart thing, the right thing, but now she was going to lose a man she'd come to care about.

And he
would
go—just as soon as he remembered the beautiful blonde and the two adorable kids in the photo in his wallet.

S
NAPPING BRANCHES
and several muttered curses heralded Andi's ascent, but Harley kept his distance. Just peeking over the top of the ridge was enough to make the pressure build behind his eyes. He chose to pretend that sitting beneath the pine tree watching the tension on her rope amounted to helping her.

A minute later she scrambled over the hump of loose gravel at the side of the road, dusting off leaves, bark and dirt from her pants and shirt. “Made it,” she said with a grin. “And I've got a present for you.”

He barely heard her words because he was trying to talk himself out of kissing her.

She stepped free of the ropes, then peeled off her gloves, dropping them to the pile of gear. “Look at this,” she said, handing him an object from the top pocket near her thigh. A wallet.

Harley's stomach turned over. “Mine?” he croaked. The weight of possibilities pressed on his chest, making it hard to draw a breath. That little leather square in his hand might tell him everything. Was he ready?

“It was lying near some clothes and books and a mangled laptop. Most of the stuff was beyond saving, but I brought up what I could carry,” she said, unclipping a funny-shaped cloth bag suspended from her belt. “Animals got everything, I suppose. And weather. This whole area probably spent a couple of months under snow.”

She shrugged off her heavy shirt, folding it inside out, then used the hem of her T-shirt to wipe the sweat from her face. Harley caught a tantalizing glimpse of her belly.

Even though the timing was undoubtedly terrible—and the action foolish—he reached out and put his free hand on her shoulder.

She didn't resist when he pulled her to him, although her eyes were wide with surprise. But her lips parted before he lowered his head, and she seemed to welcome his kiss. Harley hadn't kissed a woman since his accident. Whom he'd kissed last and when that might have been were pure guesses, but Harley was willing to bet he'd never experienced anything sweeter and more intoxicating than kissing Andi Sullivan.

Her lips were soft—a little salty. Her tongue wasn't the least bit shy, which didn't surprise him. The way she closed her eyes and the small sound she made were so feminine, so irresistible, he felt a surge of desire rock him.

He wrapped his arms around her and tilted his head to taste her more fully. With eyes closed, he entered a world of lush texture, beautiful colors and scintillating music.

She put her arms around his neck; and the stiff leather object fell from his fingers. He was instantly reminded of why they were standing in the hot sun in the middle of nowhere. Even as her body melted against him, and his body responded, Harley felt the cruel slap of reality.

He dropped his arms and stepped back, breaking her hold around his neck. “I'm sorry, Andi. That was out of line.”

She blinked twice. “Was that hazard pay?”

A great comeback, but the little tremor in her voice robbed it of any flippancy. “No. That was me being an idiot. I'm a stranger—a nobody—and my past is
this
close to catching up with me,” he said, bending to pick up the billfold.

She sighed. Her expression showed a range of emotions, none he could easily interpret.

He blew the dust from it, then studied the weather-damaged exterior, whitened by moisture and brittle around the edges.

“You'd probably like some time alone to look at this stuff,” Andi said, shouldering the coil of rope. As she passed by him, she handed him a red cotton bandanna. “Tie this to a limb before you leave. We'll need help to recover the bike.”

Too overwhelmed to express what he was feeling, Harley could only nod.

“I'll wait for you at the car.” She turned to leave, but paused. “Harley, I did a little reading about amnesia, and it probably doesn't pay to get your hopes up. Maybe this stuff will trigger a whole flood of memories, but it might not. That doesn't mean you'll never remember.”

Her concern touched him. And he knew she was right, but he couldn't quell the double-edged thrill of anticipation coursing through him. Harley waited until the sound of her footsteps was nothing more than a soft whisper, then he dropped to his haunches and opened the wallet.

The first thing he spotted was a driver's license protected by opaque plastic. Fingers trembling, he worked the laminated card free. A state emblem he didn't recognize was his first clue this wasn't going to be the miracle cure.

I'm from Missouri?
The question produced a humming in his head. A dangerous sound. One he usually shied away from. But he rose, holding the object to the sunlight.

The photograph was definitely the same face he saw in the mirror each morning—a bit younger, perhaps. The statistics fit: blue eyes/brown hair, six-foot, one-hundred-eighty pounds. It took him a few seconds to calculate his age. Thirty-two. He would turn thirty-three in August.

A Leo,
he thought, recalling his conversation with Ida Jane.

Dropping to his haunches, he gave a cursory glance at the items Andi had recovered. Intellectually, he knew that each article was a clue—and he should be dancing with joy, but it was difficult to get excited about the possibilities this find offered when his head was pounding.

He massaged his temple. The faces matched, but what did that mean? Was he Harley Forester? Or Jonathan Jackson Newhall?

 

A
NDI WAS TWIDDLING
her thumbs to the sound of Huey Lewis and the News when she spotted Harley slowly trudging down the road. She'd become a master at thumb twiddling during her years in the military; she'd also become adept at reading a man's body language. The man approaching her great-aunt's beloved Cadillac was hurting. Big time.

Andi opened the door and got out. “No bells or whistles?” she guessed.

His head swiveled from side to side, but his gaze seemed fixed on the car's grille. Andi's heart went out to him. If Jenny or Kristin were here, they'd know what to do. Andi would probably blow this, but she'd have to try.

She motioned to the passenger side. “Come on. I'll buy you a beer.”

He moved like a sleepwalker. She could tell by the squint around his eyes that he was in pain. Once he was seated, she took a plastic bottle of Extra Strength Motrin from the glove compartment and offered him two gel caps. He swallowed them without water, even though Andi had a water bottle handy.

“I'll be fine,” he said, his voice strained.

The wallet and the blue-shirt satchel rested on the seat between them.

Andi started the car and carefully backed the beast into a three-point turn. Rosemarie hadn't been new when Ida Jane bought her twelve years earlier, but after her christening, she'd become a member of the family.

“Can you talk about it?” Andi asked once they were headed back toward the main highway. “Even if there was no instant recall, there must be stuff in the wallet that can help you find out about your past. Credit cards, photos.”

Andi didn't want to think about the photo she'd spotted during her quick perusal of the wallet. Unfortunately, she'd been able to think of little else. So far, she'd come up with a dozen scenarios to explain both the engagement ring and the beauty with two kids at her side. None made her feel any better.

Harley let out a sigh. “I didn't look beyond the driver's license. What was the point? I didn't recognize the name on it.”

“You're sure it's your wallet?”

“Actually, it belongs to a guy named Jonathan Newhall. But he looks a lot like me.”

The frustration in his voice was tinged with dismay. She tapped the signal lever and stepped on the gas. A few miles later she pulled onto a gravel road leading up a sharp driveway to a rustic conclave of bungalows scattered on the steep hillside and connected by decks and wooden walkways.

She parked in front of one set of buildings then grabbed her purse. “Come on,” she said. “And bring the booty. I'm good at puzzles.”

The Yosemite Bug Hostel's Recovery Bistro was housed in what had originally served as a mess hall for young men who'd stepped outside the boundaries of the law. A pair of Bay Area entrepreneurs had converted the forty-year-old dormitories to a youth hostel, and eventually the swell of business had necessitated building new suites to cater to a
more moneyed clientele. Weekend barbecues now attracted diners from all over, locals and tourists alike.

Since Harley seemed immersed in an introspective fog, Andi ordered two Bug Brews and carried both to a little table overlooking a wooded gully not unlike the one she'd just scaled. “Sit. Drink,” she ordered.

He pitched the wallet on to the table then sat down, placing the blue carryall on the extra chair. He sighed weightily before picking up his glass. “I guess at some level I expected this to open the door to my past. Just like magic.”

He took a long gulp then looked at Andi. “Thanks.”

Andi sipped her beer. She preferred iced tea, but this beer was a prop. She knew from experience guys opened up when they had a brewsky in hand. “I'd be disappointed, too. That's only human. But it doesn't mean the key isn't here.” She tapped the wallet. “It just hasn't made it to the lock in your brain. Mind if I take a look?”

Harley shrugged then polished off the rest of his beer. “I need another. How 'bout you?”

“Not yet.” She waited until he left the table before snatching up the billfold. She gave the outside a cursory scan—
not cheap
—then opened it. She removed the driver's license and looked at the signature. She'd read somewhere that even people with the kind of amnesia that wiped out all past memories—retrograde amnesia, she thought it was called—often retained the same handwriting.

Jonathan signed his name with a flourish that rendered it almost illegible.

“Jon,” Harley muttered, sitting down a moment later. “Could I possibly have a more ordinary name?”

“It's not J-O-H-N,” she said, smiling. “It's Jonathan. That's not so common.”

“Hmmph. You have a beautiful name. Andrea.”

He said it with a lover's lilt.

She felt herself blush. “Only problem is I've been Andi ever since the fourth grade when I told the school secretary I wouldn't come back if anyone called me that sissy name again.”

“I like that sissy name.”

“You would…Jonny.” Her teasing earned her a smile, but it disappeared when she turned the wallet sideways to open an accordion file of photos. These hadn't fared as well as the laminated driver's license and half-dozen credit cards. Most of them had gotten wet and were a smeary mess sticking to the plastic. A couple in the center had fared better. She looked for the one she'd seen earlier.

“This could be your family,” she said in a small voice. She ran her finger over the plastic rectangle. The image of a woman with long blond hair flanked by two towheaded little girls was clearly visible. Andi guessed the children to be about six and four.

Harley anchored his elbows on the table and sat forward. She spun the wallet around to give him a clearer view. “You're right,” he said dispassionately. “Those could be my kids. Which would mean that for some reason I abandoned them in Missouri—if the address on the driver's license is legit—and they don't know if I'm living or dead.”

Andi's heart ached for him. He was a good man, despite how damaging the scenario he'd just described might sound. “Let's call information in Bainbridge, Missouri, and find out,” she said, leaning down to dig the cellular phone out of her purse.

She thought Harley was going to stop her, but he sank back in the chair and took a big gulp of beer. Andi gave the operator the name and address on the license. “Nothing?” she exclaimed at the news. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Maybe she gave up and moved away,” he suggested.

Andi rolled her neck. “Oh, pul…lease,” she said, taking
a drink of beer. “If this woman loved you enough to give you two adorable children, she sure as heck wouldn't just take off. Not if there was any hope at all that you might show up. I know I wouldn't,” she added without meaning to.

Her words made him smile, and some of the anxiety left his eyes. “There could be another explanation,” he said. “She might be my sister. Or a friend.”

Andi thought about that diamond ring she'd found. “Have you looked at the other stuff yet?”

“Nope.” He eyed the bag as though it held snakes and scorpions. After a full minute, he picked up the knapsack and dropped it on the table. “What's inside it?”

“Guy stuff. Rusted electric shaver. A book of some sort. An expensive-looking watch.”

That made his eyebrow shoot up. “Really?”

He took another drink of beer before drawing the bag closer to his side of the table. Andi held her breath as he opened it. The damaged material made a ripping sound as his masculine fingers manipulated the knotted sleeves. “This shirt has seen better days,” he said.

“It was handy.”

The first thing to fall out of the bag was the jeweler's case. Harley blinked in surprise. “What's this?” He popped it open. “Wow. That's a nice ring, isn't it?”

Andi tried to ignore the weird emotions racing through her. “I'd say most women would swoon if somebody gave it to them.”

He plucked the small sparkling symbol of love out of its protective bed and held it between his fingers. He lifted it to the light as if looking for engravings.

White gold or platinum—she couldn't tell which. A full carat at least. It sparkled like fire. “It's…pretty.”

He returned it to the box, snapped the lid closed and
tossed it aside. “I wonder what I'm doing with it. I suppose it could be stolen.”

Andi stifled her reprimand. “I sincerely doubt that.”

He didn't appear to hear her. He'd opened the leather-bound volume next. “Look at this,” he said, turning the open leaf so she could read an inscription. Although the ink had been muddied by moisture, the text was still legible.
From Dad, with love. Christmas 1998.