In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (34 page)

Kyle stared at her, not understanding. Her face was chalk-white, twin red spots of heat high on her cheeks. Her lips were trembling. He was beginning to think she was having a seizure of some sort when her next words stunned him to complete immobility and breathlessness.

“He stares at us all the time. All the time! He knew us. He recognized us, but we didn’t recognize him.” Her eyes closed. “How could we?” When her eyes opened, she looked into Kyle’s. “They’ve changed his face.”

Kyle let out a long breath. The poor old lady was grasping at straws, going as around the bend as the patients at The Chancel. He put sympathy and firmness in his voice.

“Miss Edna, if you’re thinking Jamie is Gabe, you’re wrong. Even if they had given him a new face, you can’t change a person’s eye color.”

“Norma Collins had cataract surgery on her eyes and she got brown lenses instead of the clear ones her doctor advised. Turned her eyes an entirely different color!” She snorted. “Ugly color at that.”

Kyle winced. She had him there. “But the voice isn’t the same, Miss Edna. When he was talking to me yesterday, don’t you think I’d have recognized Gabe’s voice?”

Edna Mae looked away from him. “They could have changed that, too. It makes sense, Kyle! Just in case he ever tried to call Annie and tried to reach her. She’d have thought it was a hoax.”

“You’re letting mere supposition, wishful thinking—”

“There’s one way to tell for sure,” she snapped, standing. Her eyes were set, militant.

He got up and took her arm as she started to stomp off. “How you going to do that? You can’t just go up to him and—”

Edna Mae raked him with her angry eyes. “Just watch!”

Jamie glanced up
from his game as Edna Mae and Kyle came back into the day room. From the way Kyle’s eyes jerked to his then away, from the look he’d seen in Kyle’s eyes, he knew his old friend had told Edna Mae about the wheelcover. He wasn’t the least surprised when she headed his way, her eyes steady on him.

“Are you winning?” she asked, placing herself between him and the rest of the room. She put her hands on the card table, leaning down to see the spread of playing cards. Her eyes lifted up to his and held.

“I’m trying to,” he managed to answer.

Edna Mae smiled at him and was rewarded with a hesitant smile. “I’m a solitaire player myself.” Her fingers edged toward one of the aces at the top of the table. “Do you win often, Jamie?”

Jamie glanced down, saw her hand covering the ace of diamonds, though not touching its surface. He looked at her and felt rather than saw her pick up the card carefully between her thumbnail and ring finger nail and slide it toward the edge of the table. His eyes shifted, saw no one watching them, then lifted to hers.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “I win most of the time.”

“That’s nice.” She straightened up, slid her hands into the pockets of her wool coat, the ace of diamonds disappearing from sight. She smiled at him, took her hands from her pockets and turned away. As she did, her handbag slid from her shoulder and fell to the floor.

Jamie picked up the bag and handed it to her, his eyes never leaving hers.

“Why, thank you, sir.” She batted her lashes. “I always rely on the kindness of strangers.”

Jamie blinked.

“If you were thirty years older...” She let the statement hang in the air.

“It’s not nice to make fun of folks, Missus Boudreaux.” His eyes filled with moisture.

Edna Mae let out a breath. Her lips twitched once, then went still as she turned rapidly away.

Jamie’s eyes followed her as she made her way to the door, motioning for Delbert to follow. A part of him wanted to cry out to her, to beg her to stay, to talk to him, to touch him, to take him in her arms and tell him everything was going to be all right. Even as the door closed, shutting him off from her, Jamie could feel the old woman’s love like the crackling flames of a comforting fire in winter.

From his office
doorway, Bruce Lassiter had followed the exchange with growing certainty. His eyes slid to David Boudreaux, saw him trying not to look at Jamie, came back to rest on Jamie, who was smiling, then leapt back to Boudreaux. There was a tension in the Georgia man that hadn’t been there until today.

Bruce Lassiter knew he had a problem.

Thais sprinkled the
powder over the playing card, careful not to touch the surface. He didn’t think he could get a good print. The cards were well-worn, the edges curled and split. If he got anything, it was likely to be a partial, and that of Edna Mae Menke’s. He’d never been that good at forensics.

“You want me to do it, Thais?” Galen asked.

“Just let him do his job,” Edna Mae snapped, waiting for Thais to finish.

“There’s a good thumb print here,” Thais finally said. He looked up at Edna Mae. “Did you put your thumb on this?”

Edna Mae shook her head. “Compare them with Gabe’s fingerprints you got from Sadler,” she insisted. Her annoyance mounted as Thais looked at Galen. “Will you hurry?”

Thais unfolded the sheet containing James Gabriel Tremayne’s military service fingerprints and slid the playing card with its coating of pencil lead shavings beside the thumb print the Air Force had used on Tremayne’s ID card. He squinted his eyes, comparing the two prints.

The wait seemed eternal for Edna Mae. “Well?”

Thais Dupree looked at her. “It’s Jamie Tremayne’s print.”

She repeated the name. “Jamie.” Up until that moment, she hadn’t connected Jamie Sinclair to James Gabriel Tremayne—Jamie Tremayne.

“Are you okay, Miss Edna?” Galen asked, worry rampant in his gravelly voice. As she looked up at him, tears in her eyes, he put his hand out to her.

“Give me the phone,” she ordered, almost completely unaware of Delbert’s and Mary Bernice’s eyes on her as well as Thais’ and Galen’s. As Galen gave her the phone, she let out a calming breath and dialed.

Nora Mueller answered
the phone on the third ring.

“Nora, it’s Edna Mae. Let me speak to her.”

Something in her friend’s voice told Nora not to hesitate. She ran to the screen door, yelling to Annie who was walking back from the mailbox.

“Annie! It’s Edna Mae!”

Annie James looked up, her breath catching in her throat, the mail falling from her hands. For a second she didn’t move, then her legs began pumping on the driveway, carrying her faster than they ever had before. She slammed through the opened door Nora held for her, grabbed up the phone.

“Miss Edna?” she breathed, heart racing.

“We’ve found him, dear,” Edna Mae said in a calm voice. “We’ve found Gabe and I’ve talked to him. Annie?”

There was a slight hesitation, a fear racing along the phone line from Iowa to Louisiana.

“Yes?”

“He’s all right, dear. He’s all right.”

He was going
to be all right. All right.

Jamie took in a long, wavering breath and sat back in the chair.

Kyle had gone to his room, a look passing between the two men that said more than words ever could have.

You’re not sure who I am,
Jamie thought, but Edna Mae knows.

He looked down at the fifty-one cards on his table and smiled. A snatch the Statler Brothers’ “playing solitaire ‘til dawn with a deck of fifty-one,” flitted through his mind and he nearly chuckled. She’d take the card to someone she trusted—maybe Virgil, if he was here—and they’d somehow check his fingerprints. They’d find out it was him.

And they would be back.

They would get him out of this place.

They would take him back to Iowa.

Back to Annie.

A deep unease slid the smile from his face and he looked around needing to see who might be watching him, taking note, keeping an eye on Liam Tremayne’s ‘problem.’ No one was looking his way. No one spying on him. He relaxed.

“Be careful,” he heard a faint childlike voice warning him. “Watch your step. Don’t give yourself away.”

He scooped the cards into a pile and stood, gathering them to him. He pushed back from the table and was about to return to his room when Dr. Lassiter called to him.

“Jamie?”

He flinched, wary as he turned to face the man. “Yes, sir?” He could feel his body quivering.

Lassiter stared at him. “May I see you, please?” He walked into his office as if expecting Jamie to follow.

There was something chilly about the way the man had looked at him, Jamie thought as he dropped the cards in the pocket of his robe. He glanced around and saw Cobb looking at him with curiosity. He shrugged.

Lassiter was standing at the window, his back to the door when Jamie came in. “Close the door behind you, Jamie.”

A vague trill of unease fluttered down Jamie’s spine as he shut the door and waited for the doctor to speak. He was more than aware of his clammy hands and too-rapid breath. When Lassiter turned around and held out his hand, Jamie felt like running.

“Give me the cards, Jamie.”

He stalled for time to think, something he had, up until that morning, been incapable of doing in a rational manner. For months he had been lost in a fog he hoped never to enter again.

“I don’t understand, Dr. Lassiter,” he mumbled.

An immediate frown appeared on the doctor’s face. “Yes, you do.” He stepped from around the desk. “Give me the cards in your pocket.”

The vague trill of unease became a shudder of fear. “Why?” The fog was hovering just at the edge of his vision.

Lassiter smiled. He reached into his own pocket and pulled out a brand new deck of playing cards, the cellophane wrapper intact, and extended it toward Jamie.

“Because Mrs. Boudreaux wanted me to give you these.” He held out the cards. “She sent them to you.”

Jamie’s heart missed a beat as he took the cards. He glanced down at them, then up at the doctor. The lie came easily.

“My old deck is missing a card.” He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew the battered deck. He held them out to Lassiter the way a small child would have, a nervous smile twitching at his lips.

Bruce Lassiter nodded. “I expect that’s why she sent you a new one, don’t you?”

There was something strange in the doctor’s eyes, but Jamie couldn’t read it. He put the new deck of playing cards in his pocket.

“May I go now?” He wanted desperately to get out of the room before the fog chose to roll closer to him.

Lassiter smiled. “Certainly.”

Jamie was almost out the door when Lassiter spoke again. He turned.

“You’re a lucky man, Jamie.”

“Sir?” The fog slipped closer.

“To have such good friends.” He dropped the battered playing cards into his metal wastebasket, took a box of kitchen matches from his desk drawer and slid one wooden match from the red box. He struck it and dropped the blazing torchlet into the wastebasket. As flames leapt from the wastebasket, Lassiter tossed the match box back into his drawer. “We wouldn’t want anyone to come across that deck with a card missing, now, would we?”

Alarm shot through Jamie like summer heat lightning stepping down through the heavens. It jolted him, staggered him, and he clutched at the door. His heart thudded once, heavily and painfully in his chest, and he caught in his breath, not daring to breathe as he stared at the doctor.

He knows.
He knows Edna Mae took the card!

“That’ll be all, Jamie,” Lassiter said, turning around, facing the window.

“Dr. Lassiter...” he began, but the man held up a hand.

“Close the door behind you, will you?” He looked over his shoulder. “No one needs to know our business now, do they?” His smile was filled compassion before he turned away again.

“Dick? Thais.
Move it out!”

“Mrs. Carol Cean’s
room, please.” Mary Bernice Merrill wiped her eyes. Sweat dripped down her forehead as she stood in the telephone booth. “Mrs. Cean?” she asked as Ellen Vittetoe answered on the first ring. “This is Mrs. Snow from the Hawkeye Agency. Your apartment will be ready this Friday.”

“Jake? This is
Del. Let her roll.”

Jake Mueller slammed down the phone and hurried to the bathroom door. He opened it and stuck his head in, squinting against the steam wafting around him.

“Hey, Mel! We got the call. Gotta be there by Thursday. We move the shipment Friday night.”

Doc Remington hung
up the phone at the motel and looked around at Edna Mae. “The ball is rolling.”

“Dr. Tremayne?
This is Dr. Lassiter. May I have a word with you?”

Patrick threw down the article he’d been reading. He sat forward over his desk, clutching the receiver. “What’s happened to him now?”