Until Spring (20 page)

"Duncan?"

He hurriedly drank the last of his coffee. "Do whatever you want," he said and fled the house, feeling her reproachful gaze on his back.

He was ashamed of himself for acting unfeeling, but he needed time to get used to the idea of her leaving even briefly. And he didn't want to talk about it with her. Thinking about it was hard enough.

Then he came up with the idea that Jane might be able to find out the things she needed to know about her past without ever leaving the ranch. He didn't mention this to her. In fact, he spoke to her very little during the next few days. He was aware that she was waiting for him to mention her proposed trip, but he didn't. If she was making plans to go, he didn't want to know.

Behind the scenes, online in his barn office, he spent the next few days googling missing persons and accident reports and anything else that occurred to him. He spoke with the owner of an internet company famed for locating missing persons but was told that they couldn't work on Jane's case for another couple of months due to their heavy workload.

Duncan called the sheriff's department that had handled the investigation in Tyree County, Illinois, and was told that the investigating officer was long departed from the department. A new employee answered the phone, and to Duncan's surprise, the fellow told him that he had stumbled upon this unsolved case during his first week there and had been curious about it ever since.

"It's like this," said the detective, a guy named Bill Schmidt. "A woman appears in a ditch near one of the locals' cornfields, and nobody knows where she came from. Afterward, nobody knows where she went, either. I mean, I can't figure it, you know what I'm saying?"

"As it happens, she's here with me. What we still don't know is where she came from. Are there any leads?"

"Leads? You got to be kidding. The case isn't closed, but it might as well be. We're overworked and underpaid around this place, you know? We don't have time to pursue old cases."

"What if I brought her to Tyree so she could see the records of her case? Or can you email them?"

"You'd have to ask my supervisor about the email, but she'll probably say no. There's not much to see, although your friend is welcome to go through our file. The guy who investigated told some of the fellows around here that he figured that her boyfriend got mad at her and dumped her out of the car. Or something like that."

"Something like that," Duncan repeated. Various scenarios flashed through his mind, and inwardly he shuddered.

"You could talk to Jones, the farmer who found her. He has a kid who was with him that day. Practically fell over her where she was lying in the ditch, I hear. It's not something you'd forget easily, you know what I mean?"

Duncan hung up, wondering if he had made any progress. He decided that he had at least made a contact with someone who was chatty enough to convey whatever information he knew, and at least this Schmidt fellow sounded interested and energetic. That was something.

He placed his next call to the administrator of Tyree Hospital, who was polite but could not provide any information at all due to patient privacy laws. "I'm sorry we can't help you," she said.

Discouraged by all the dead ends, Duncan hung up the phone when the conversation was over, shrugged into his coat, left his warm office and trudged toward the house, which was lighted from within by the lamps Jane always turned on in the evening. He recalled all too well what it was like to come home to an empty house. He'd done that every evening since Sigrid left, until Jane came.

A chill wind nipped at his cheeks. The night was clear, and in the pen beside the barn, the llamas shuffled and hummed to one another. The pungent scent of wood smoke drifted toward him, and he realized that Jane had lighted a fire in the fireplace. It was good to be going home to Jane.

Under the shelter of the porch, welcoming light beamed from the windows, casting a mellow glow over the snow. As he drew closer he could see Jane's blond head bent over her spinning wheel, and he smiled to himself. She had taken to that thing and made it her own, and he was pleased that she had shown this new interest. New interest? It must be an old interest, otherwise she wouldn't know how to do it. He wished he understood more about how her memory worked. Or didn't work.

And if her memory did improve, where would that leave him? Especially if there were, as she had pointed out, a husband and children somewhere, anxiously awaiting the return of a wife and mother. The thought of Jane as someone else's wife was like a wound to the heart.

He had fallen for her, and she thought of him as a brother. Someday she would pick herself up and move away, and that would signal the end of warm welcomes in his house, the end of companionable evenings sitting beside her as she spun, the end of the connectedness that he had begun to feel for another human being.

He supposed Jane never thought of that. She was too all-fired eager to start a new life in California, of all places.

Well, let her go if she wanted. He wouldn't stop her. He would even help if that was what it took to keep her happy. He had given his word about that, and he'd keep it even if it broke his heart.

It hadn't been hard to be kind to her when she needed kindness, nor had he had a hard time forgiving her for stealing from him, and he hadn't found it difficult to bear with her in those early days when she still didn't trust him. No, with Jane everything was easy, including falling head over heels in love with her.

The hard part was going to be saying goodbye.

* * *

He thought about it for a long time before he reluctantly told her about calling the Tyree County sheriff's department and the Tyree hospital. The main reason that he didn't want her to discover later that he had been there first without telling her.

The opportunity to divulge this information came at dinner one night when she told him with quiet pride that she had sold her entire store of llama yarn to a hand knitter in Vermont.

"I didn't make a lot of money, but it's a start," she said. "As soon as I can afford it, I'm going back to Illinois and try to retrace the path that led to that ditch in Carlton Jones's field."

Duncan felt his mouth go dry but could no longer keep from telling her what he knew. "Jane, I have news," he said.

She stopped chewing and swallowed. She gave him a questioning look.

"I called the Tyree sheriff's department the other day. I talked to the detective on the case, Bill Schmidt was his name. He's not the officer you talked with after they found you. He's a new guy who took over after the other one left. Anyway, he says he'll let you look at the records if you want to."

"Look at the records?"

"The report of the detective who came to your hospital room."

"Detective Sid Reedy," Jane said slowly. "I remember that day."

"If you'd like to talk to this Schmidt, why don't you call him? And you could phone Carlton Jones tonight, if you'd like."

"I want to go there, Duncan. To see if standing in that ditch outside Tyree brings back memories of anything that happened to me. To ride along the highway and try to figure out why I was there and where I was going." Her gaze was steady.

"Are you sure, Jane, that this is what you want to do?"

"Absolutely sure."

Duncan decided from the set of her chin that Jane was going to go on the trip whether he liked the idea or not. He heaved a big sigh. "Well, if you're so set on going, I'll lend you the money," he said. "It'll take a while to make enough money from selling your wool, and you should probably go as soon as possible so your tracks won't get any colder than they already are." He surprised himself by offering this; he still didn't want her to leave.

"I've already imposed on you too much," she said reluctantly.

Why was it so difficult to convince Jane to accept help? "You'll pay me back," he pointed out.

Suddenly she seemed thoughtful. She went very quiet.

"Is anything wrong?" he asked.

"I'm scared, Duncan," she said. She turned wide eyes upon him, and he saw the panic in them.

"You said you wanted to go."

"You have to admit that taking off by myself on a search like this is pretty intimidating," she said.

He considered this. True, Jane had gained a lot of self-confidence here at Placid Valley Ranch, but then again, this was a place where she felt comfortable.

"I could go with you," he said. He hardly dared to hope that she would agree to this, but he was rewarded by a leap of interest.

"You could? Really?" She seemed dazed by his offer.

"If you want me to."

"It's another imposition," she said slowly.

He regarded it as an opportunity, but he didn't say that. "Say the word and I'll go online tonight and make the plane reservations," he said, expecting an argument or at least a long discussion, but she surprised him.

"The word," she said, smiling the brilliant smile that always made his heart turn over, and so he went to do it right away.

* * *

"You and Jane are going to do
what
?" Rooney asked when Duncan told him that they would be leaving.

"Search for her past," Duncan said.

Rooney scratched his head. "What for?"

"She's afraid she left loose ends that might need tying up," Duncan told him.

Rooney considered this. "Well, she might have. You never can tell," he agreed after a while.

"So we're going to fly to Chicago, rent a car and head for southern Illinois."

"One question for you, Duncan," Rooney said. "Why the hell do you care?"

"Hey, you know I like to read mysteries. Why not try to solve one?" Duncan managed a crooked grin, but he was well aware that he couldn't admit how much he cared for Jane even to Rooney, who was like a father to him.

"I sure hope you won't be gone long. Jane neither. Mary Kate is going to miss her like crazy."

"You and Mary Kate will have to hold down the fort around here, Rooney. You think you two can manage it without Mary Kate demolishing the whole place?"

"Jeez, Duncan, I don't know. Just to make sure, why don't you take Mary Kate with you?"

Duncan laughed. "I don't have anything against southern Illinois, that's why. Anyway, she's been behaving herself pretty well since she drove your pickup into that snow bank, hasn't she?"

"Yeah, but the truck ain't never going to be the same. She burned up the emergency brake."

"It could have been a lot worse."

"A lot of things could be worse. Which brings us back to our original subject. Why don't Jane leave well enough alone?"

"Because she can't, Rooney. And if she can't, I can't, either." With that, Duncan jammed his hat on top of his head and walked out of Rooney's house into the cold night air. Let Rooney make anything he wanted out of that statement. Being in love with a woman who had no intention of staying with him was hard enough, and not talking about it was even harder. Maybe Rooney would get the hint and understand how it was between them.

* * *

"But I thought you were staying until spring!" Mary Kate cried accusingly.

"I am, Mary Kate. In fact, I should be back before then," Jane said.

Mary Kate tossed the wool she had been carding for Jane onto the floor and jumped up from her seat at the kitchen table. "I want to go with you," she said.

"That's impossible, you know. You have to go to school."

"I hate school. I hate everything," Mary Kate said.

"That's not true—you love Dearling," Jane reminded her.

Mary Kate stuck out her bottom lip. "Uh-huh, I love Dearling," she agreed. Her expression darkened. "You said you were going to teach me to spin."

"I can show you how to spin with a simple drop spindle before I go," Jane said soothingly. "And I'm hoping you'll take care of Amos for me while I'm gone."

Mary Kate considered this. "He does like me," she conceded. Then she frowned again. "Do you have to go, Jane? Absolutely have to?"

"Yes, Mary Kate, I do. It's really important to me to find out my real name and where I came from. I've decided that I can't go on with my life until I know."

"Why?"

"Because I keep remembering fragments of it, and I'm curious about them."

"Why?"

"You would be, too, wouldn't you? Think how you would feel if you didn't know where you came from or where you belonged."

"Why?"

Jane was growing impatient. "Stop playing this silly 'Why?' game with me, Mary Kate. I'm trying to talk to you the way I'd talk to another adult."

This seemed to sober Mary Kate. "You are?"

"Sure. You're my friend. I'll miss you when I'm in Illinois."

"You'll miss me? Really? "

"Really. And I'll bring you a present."

"A present!"

"What would you like?"

Mary Kate considered this. "A frilly dress. With ruffles and petticoats and sleeves that you can see through."

"A frilly dress?" Jane was stunned. Mary Kate wasn't the type for party dresses.