Airtight Case (2 page)

Chapter 42: A Barrel Of Laughs

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PART I

APRIL 2

Chapter 1

A Stranger In The Mirror

THE SUN SHINING through the window onto the mirror made her reflection faint and ghostly. She stepped closer, examining the face, the hair, the eyes. A stranger. She took a strand of long chestnut brown hair in her fingers, observing with detachment how the sunlight brought out deep reddish undertones. She looked back at the face, the stitches on her forehead, the bruise on her cheek—black, blue, just a hint of yellow. She reached out and touched the mirror, as if the image were not of her, but some other suffering woman standing before her, disappearing under the light. The woman in the mirror was flat and cold under her fingers. That was her. That’s how she felt. She turned at the sound of footsteps on the clay tiles of the sunroom.

“Miss, I have some good news.”

The nurse, the dark-haired one with a pronounced overbite, stood with her hand grasping the elbow of a man. Both grinned at her. Silly grins, she thought with fleeting unkindness.

“We know who you are,” continued the nurse. “You’re Lisa Christian. This is your fiancé, Mark Smith.”

The fiancé was a few inches shorter than she with dark receding hair and sparkling dark eyes. His white-and-gray-striped shirt was open at the throat, revealing a gold chain resting among black chest hairs.

She turned the name that was supposed to be hers over in her mind. Lisa Christian. The name was as much a stranger to her as the reflection in the mirror, as the man standing before her—as everything. She stepped back as he tried to embrace her.

“Lisa, it’s me—Mark. I’ve been looking for you for two days. We’ve all been worried and looking for you.”

This man, this Mark Smith, held out a hand and took hers, turning it over, examining her fingers. “You’ve lost your ring. It don’t matter. I’ve found you. That’s what matters.”

“He’s here to take you home, Miss Christian,” said the nurse.

“I don’t know him.”

“Of course.” The nurse patted her arm. “Your memory’ll come back. Being at home’ll help. You’ll see.”

“I’m not going anywhere with someone I don’t know.”

“Well, honey . . .” The nurse smiled at her as if she had made a joke. “Right now you don’t know nobody.”

She willed herself to stay and not run. She wanted so much to run back to someplace safe. But that would make her look foolish. And she couldn’t afford to look foolish, not if she wanted to be taken seriously. They already talked to her as if she were a child.

Odd. There were so many things she knew, like how the Indian actors on the TV western last evening were really Italians and not Indians—that the horse in
The Black Stallion
, which came on afterward, was indeed Arabian, as advertised. Strange that she knew these things but didn’t have a clue about the important things—like who she was.

She looked down at her tanned hand that this stranger calling himself Mark Smith, her fiancé, had released, and she wondered why there wasn’t a white, untanned band around her finger.

“Here, Lisa.” He handed her a small framed photograph of himself and the stranger named Lisa she had just been observing in the mirror. In the picture she was looking at the camera, smiling, her arm threaded through his. It wasn’t a particularly good photo of the two of them. He was looking off to the side, frowning at something out of camera range.

“Isn’t that nice, Miss Christian?” asked the nurse, looking at the photograph.

“I brought you some clothes, Lisa.” He handed her a short lavender wisp of a dress.

She didn’t like the way the name Lisa sounded when he said it. She didn’t like the dress. She handed it back. “One of the nurses loaned me some jeans and a shirt.”

Mark tossed the dress into a plastic bag. “I’d like to leave soon. It’s a long drive home.”

“I’m not going with you,” she said.

He gave a short laugh. “Of course you are, honey. You need to be home, in your own apartment.”

“No.”

“You’re being discharged,” the nurse said. “You’ve got to go somewhere.”

“If there was no one to claim me, where would you send me? Would you put me out on the street?”

The nurse looked flustered. “Well, no. But this is a very small hospital . . .”

“Of course she’s coming with me.” Mark Smith took her hand again, and she pulled it away again. “I just need to talk to her.”

“He’s paying your bill,” offered the nurse.

“The doctor said my memory will return in a few days. Surely, I can stay until then.”

“Why don’t you get changed and we’ll talk about it.” Mark smiled as he spoke. She noticed that his molars had gold fillings.

She walked back to her room, trailing the two of them behind her. “I’ll only be a moment,” she said, turning to stop Mark inside the doorway.

“It’s nothing I’ve not seen before.” He grinned again.

“You must understand, I don’t know you.”

“Why don’t you wait out in the hallway, Mr. Smith?” the nurse said. “We’ll be out in a minute.”

He raised his hands as if giving up, and backed out the door. “Sure, I’m a sensitive kind of guy.”

When the door was closed, she took the donated clothes out of the metal bureau drawer and removed her robe. She slipped the jeans on under her hospital gown.

“Mark is a real good-looking guy, Miss Christian. If you don’t want him, I’ll take him.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal.” She pulled the T-shirt over her head and slipped on the shoes that had been loaned to her but didn’t fit just right.

“I’m going to get you a wheelchair,” the nurse said.

“A wheelchair?”

“You have to leave the hospital in a wheelchair. It’s hospital regulations. I’ll be right back.”

Lisa stared hard at the face in the mirror.
Remember, remember
, she silently yelled at herself.

“You look great.” Mark had reentered her room. She hadn’t heard him.

“You didn’t knock.” She didn’t look at him, but at the strange face in the mirror.

“Sorry, force of habit.” His little laugh was annoying.

“I’m not going with you.”

Abruptly, he was by her side, gripping her arm hard. “Don’t be stupid. You’re coming with me, and that’s that.”

“Let go of me.”

“Come on, dammit.”

“Let go of me. I have to go to the bathroom.”

“All right then. I’ll be right here. Three minutes and we’re out of here.”

He let go of her arm and she ducked into the bathroom and locked the door. Her bathroom was shared by the next room. She didn’t think he knew that. She turned on the water and flushed the toilet and opened the connecting door. The elderly woman in the adjoining room was asleep, making a wheezing sound with each breath, while a monitor sounded the regular beep of her heart rate. Lisa tiptoed across the room to the door, looked out briefly into the hallway, and sprinted across the hall to the exit door. She ran without stopping down the two flights of stairs and out the door, onto the sidewalk. She stopped outside the two-story hospital to catch her breath.

She was in the small Tennessee town of Mac’s Crossing. Two days earlier a trucker had found her bruised, covered in mud, and walking down the highway. He had been kind, lucky for her. Since then, she had spent two days in the hospital, not knowing who she was or what had happened. Two days of constant fear churning acid in her stomach.

Running down the stairs had felt good. She wanted to run some more, but where could she go? She forced herself to walk down the sidewalk from the hospital as if she knew where she was going. She passed a man standing at the curb smoking a cigarette. He grabbed her arm.

“Now where do you think you’re going?”

Chapter 2

Make A Pretty Face

“LET GO OF me!” She tried to pull the stranger’s bony hand off her arm.

He was as tall as she was, perhaps about her age. He was thin and sinewy, with cornflower blue squinting eyes and dirty blond thinning hair. He scowled and gave her arm a hard shake.

“Get in the car!”

She pulled and twisted, trying to get away, but the more she pulled against his grasp, the tighter he dug his fingers into her upper arm. He threw his burning cigarette to the ground. She saw his free hand rising toward her. She had to get loose. Reflexively, without thinking, she hit him under the point of his nose with the heel of her hand, hard enough to make blood flow down his face.

“Damn you, bitch!” He jerked his head back, wiped his nose, and panicked at the sight of his own blood.

“You need help, miss?” A large woman in a silver Cadillac stuck her head out of her automobile window.

“Call the police and tell them a man is molesting people coming out of the hospital,” she shouted.

Trying to feign innocence, the stranger relaxed his posture. She felt his grip on her arm loosen. She stomped the top of his foot nearest her, pulled away from him and ran, not stopping until she was out of sight between two buildings.

She ducked into a door and leaned against the wall, trying to compose herself, taking deep breaths. The gray-green walls and tile floor looked like another hospital, perhaps a doctors’ building. To her left she saw a men’s room. The women’s room should be just beyond it, she reasoned, and forced herself to walk slowly down the corridor to the door marked WOMEN.

She examined her bruised and swollen face in the restroom mirror. It was still a stranger’s face. The adrenaline running through her veins, causing her heart to pump like a jackhammer, did nothing to clear out the fog in her brain. “I need help,” she whispered to the stranger in the mirror.

She turned on the faucet and splashed cool water on her face.
Think
, she told herself.
How can I find help when I can’t tell my enemies from my friends? If I just had a place to stay for a few days—until my memory returns.

That’s it. Find a safe place. Where? Where can I go? A person with no money and no memory has no credibility. If I show up someplace looking like this, people will call the police and I’ll be back in the same predicament.
She combed her fingers through her hair to make it look less disheveled.

Think, think, think.
She hammered the sides of the porcelain sink with the same ferocity her heart hammered in her chest.
Stop, be still, and think.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she smiled into the mirror, trying on faces that looked confident. She heard the door to the restroom opening. They were looking for her. Why didn’t she think of that?

She ducked inside a stall. A woman and a little boy walked past. It wasn’t the men. But the damage was done. Her heart was racing again. Her ears rang from the rush of adrenaline. She stayed in the stall, breathing slowly, until some measure of calm returned. She wondered if she could stay here—dodging the custodian—and sleeping . . . where?

She left the stall and went to the door, where she stood for several moments, summoning the courage to open it. She pulled the door toward her just enough to see, and peeped out into the hallway. Neither Mark Smith nor the skinny cigarette-smoking man was there. Only a woman walking toward the bathroom. She might be one of them.
Don’t panic. She’s probably a patient. No, she’s not carrying a purse. Perhaps she works here. Good
, she thought. Her brain was working—not well, but maybe it was coming around.

She walked past the woman and smiled, almost leaning into the wall with relief when the woman didn’t reach out and grab her. She walked to the front of the building, stopping in the lobby to read the index. It was a doctors’ building, but there was nothing here to help her, only pediatrics, ear-nose-and-throat, gynecology, and urology. She didn’t have any of those problems.

Outside again, the sun was bright on her face, traffic moved back and forth, people came and went. She understood what it all meant, but it was as if it were the first time she had ever seen it. She put on the confident face she had practiced and walked with purpose down the sidewalk in the direction of the business district looking for sanctuary.

She passed people, glancing at each face, hoping for one she recognized, praying with every encounter that they weren’t enemies. Sometimes they nodded back at her. Mostly, they showed alarm at her stitched and bruised face, but all were aliens. Or, she was the alien with nothing that made her a part of them—no shared history, no remembered events, none of the cement that holds a people together. She was adrift, detached from the world, looking at all of them through a glass barrier.

The business district was a parallel row of buildings on each side of a main two-lane street. There was a shoe store, a clothing store, a drugstore, a department store, a hardware store. She stopped in front of the hardware store and stared at the window display: tools, shovels, hoes, rakes. They leaned against a bale of hay and looked like weapons. The shovel was pointed.

Couldn’t shave with that
.

Why had that odd thought popped into her head? It didn’t even make sense. You don’t shave with a shovel, you shave with a razor. She shivered and left the window, heading for the department store.

She walked up the steps and in through shiny glass doors. A cool breeze hit her face, smelling like good perfume. She stopped to think, pretending to examine a blouse hanging on a rack. She had to do something about her appearance—couldn’t go around looking like a vagrant. If she found someone to ask for help it would be best to look more like she didn’t need it.

She had to have a name. People always ask for a name. The men were hunting for Lisa Christian. She would make up another one. Linda. Linda Chambers. That was as good a name as any. And a story—she needed a story.

Linda Chambers walked into the cosmetic department where two women were working the counter. One was fiftyish, and one looked barely out of her teens. She chose the younger one to approach.