In Medias Res

In Medias Res

Sometimes you have to forget who you were to remember who you are.

For Sydney Stanton, nothing could be closer to the truth. Suffering from amnesia, Sydney finds herself alone in the middle of O’Hare Airport with no idea how she got there, where she’s headed, or even who she is. Her only clues to her identity are the ticket to Key West in her hand and the items in the backpack slung over her left shoulder.

Halfway around the world, Dr. Jennifer Rekowski, Sydney’s best friend and longtime confidante, holds the key to unlocking Sydney’s memory. But Jennifer, nursing a broken heart and trapped in the middle of a civil war, remains agonizingly out of reach.

Can two women united by love and divided by circumstance find each other—and themselves—before time runs out?

In Medias Res

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In Medias Res

by

Yolanda Wallace

2010

In Medias Res

© 2010
Yolanda Wallace. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN
10: 1-60282-142-2E

ISBN
13: 978-1-60282-142-9E

This  Electronic Book is published by

Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

P.O. Box
249

Valley Falls, New York
12185

First Edition: March 2010

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Credits

Editor: Cindy Cresap

Production Design: Stacia Seaman

Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

A wise woman once told me that a writer should be a person on whom nothing is lost. With that in mind, I am fully aware of the tremendous opportunity I have been afforded by Bold Strokes Books to make my dream of becoming a writer a reality. Thank you to Radclyffe and the Bold Strokes family for making my dreams come true. Thank you also to my patient partner, who loves me even when I’m suffering through the throes of writer’s block.

To Dita.

Thank you for choosing me.

• Acknowledgements
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-one
  
• Chapter Twenty-two
  
• About the Author
  
• Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
  

I was in the middle of the airport when it happened.

I was running as fast as I could, dodging one startled person after another, when I realized I didn’t know where I was running or why. I couldn’t even remember my own name. I know it sounds clichéd—like the opening lines of a bad film noir—but it was true.

I hazarded a glance over my left shoulder to make sure no one was chasing me. When I turned around, I nearly collided with an elderly woman pulling a rolling carry-on bag behind her. The bag—Louis Vuitton or a very good knockoff—was bigger than she was. She brushed my cooties off her crisp linen suit and muttered something I couldn’t hear. Biting back a more colorful response, I apologized to her, then stepped aside to catch my breath. With my heart pounding the way it was, that wasn’t easy.

My first reaction was abject panic. It’s one thing not to know where you are. To not know
who
you are? That’s something else altogether.

Standing with my hands on my knees, I sucked air into my burning lungs. I looked like a track athlete after an especially grueling race. Only I didn’t have a medal to show for it.

A couple of people looked at me with concern on their faces as they passed by me. Most kept walking as if they had seen it all before. No one stopped and, more importantly, no one seemed to recognize me.

Security personnel wandered the concourse, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask any of them for help. I felt vaguely ashamed. As if what was happening to me—or had already happened—was somehow my fault.

My mind raced as fast as my heart beat. I had signs to tell me where I was—
Welcome to O’Hare
, they blared—but I had nothing to tell me who I was. Or did I?

In my left hand was a ticket to Key West. Coach, with a connecting flight in Miami. I was on my way to Florida and I wasn’t rolling in dough. Two things I could now be sure of.

I dove headfirst into the steady flow of foot traffic, allowing myself to drift with the current until it led me to the nearest board that displayed the list of departing and arriving flights. The flight that corresponded to the ticket in my hand was taking off in ten minutes. That explained why I had been running. Another mystery solved.

I was standing in gate seventeen. The one I needed was fourteen gates away. After shifting into top speed again, I made it to the gate just as the attendants were preparing to close the doors. I thrust my ticket toward the nearest attendant, who flashed me an irritated smile.

“We’ve been paging you all over the airport,” she said as she ran my ticket through the scanner. “Running a little late, are we, Mrs. Stanton?”

“That’s the least of my problems.”

Through the window, I could see the ground crew deicing the plane. I wanted to be out there with them. I needed a nice blast of cold air to cool me down—and to dry the semicircular sweat stains that darkened my T-shirt.

I was dressed in layers—a long-sleeved compression shirt under a Rolling Stones concert T-shirt topped off by a wool peacoat. My jeans weren’t lined, but my boots certainly were. I could feel the faux fur rubbing against my wool socks.

Stress, embarrassment, and my mad dash from whatever had been my starting point combined to ratchet my body temperature up a good ten degrees. I pulled off my coat and draped it over my left arm. I used the other arm to wipe perspiration off my forehead.

The attendants, crisp and cool in their airline-issue uniforms, looked like they wanted nothing to do with me. I couldn’t blame them. God knows how I must have looked. The window behind them didn’t act as a very good mirror. In it, I could see a faint reflection of myself. I was tall and angular with shoulder-length blond hair and haunted brown eyes. I wasn’t covered in blood and I wasn’t in pain, so whatever trauma I had experienced to deprive me of my memory must have been mental instead of physical.

I was filled with questions, but I didn’t know where to find any of the answers. Were they in Miami, Key West, or Chicago? What did I have to lose?

I had come to the airport for a reason and that reason was obviously to go to Florida, so I kept going in that direction.

I retrieved my boarding pass then headed down the corridor and stepped onto the waiting plane.

“Welcome aboard,” one of the flight attendants chirped. I mumbled a thank you and began making my way to the back of the aircraft. The other passengers threw daggers at me with their eyes as if the flight crew had held up the flight for me. The proud owner of a seat in the tail section, I doubted I was that important.

I collapsed into my seat and quickly fastened my seat belt. I wanted to get settled in so I could examine the contents of the backpack slung over my left shoulder.

A black leather clutch inside the main compartment of the backpack housed $500 in cash, a driver’s license, a couple of gold credit cards, a debit card, a medical insurance card, and what I guessed were family photos. A checkbook register indicated I had just shy of $14,000 in the bank, supplemented monthly by $6,000 deposits noted in the register as “allowance.” Nice work if you could get it.

The driver’s license was issued by the state of Illinois on July 16, 2007, and was due for renewal on August 24, 2011. The accompanying photo looked more like a mug shot, but I was more interested in the information the tiny piece of plastic imparted than in whether the picture was a good likeness of me.

According to my license, my name was Sydney P. Stanton. I lived on Waveland Avenue. I was five foot eleven, weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds, and I was an organ donor. That last part was good to know. I was in desperate need of a brain transplant. The one I had wasn’t working. Sputtering along, it hadn’t shut down completely. I still knew with relative certainty that two plus two equaled four, but processing more complex thoughts took a concerted effort. It felt a bit like walking through mud. I got where I was going, but it took me a while to get there. And I got awful dirty on the way.

The passenger across the aisle from me was reading what I assumed was a current copy of the
Chicago Tribune
. The headline on the front page announced “Subway Slasher Gets 10 Years.” I looked at the date above the forty-eight point type. January 12, 2010. I compared the date on the newspaper to the one listed on my license as my date of birth. In seven months, I would be thirty-two years old.