Sudden Recall Read online

  And all the way out of the library, beneath her need to know about Nathanial, Eden was miserable. Their research had been successful. It had released his memory. And she was miserable.

  My Beth.

  Shane had called her his Beth. There had been a tenderness in his voice when he said it, the kind of tone you used when someone mattered a great deal. When they meant everything to you. Eden had lost him, and the only way she could deal with it was to think about her son. He was the only real urgency now.

  By this time she was aware of her surroundings again. She found herself in an unexpected setting. Shane had led them through the iron gates of a cemetery across the street from the library.

  Like the rest of Savannah, the old graveyard had an exotic flavor with its moldering tombs and mossy, crooked headstones. In the absence of a park, Eden supposed it was as good a place as any to exercise both your body and your mind.

  Shane had slowed his walk by now, as if he had reached a vital destination and could breathe again. They paced among the grave markers under a canopy of live oaks.

  “Nathanial,” she reminded him.

  “Give me time. They’re still coming in.”

  His memories, she thought. He’s talking about his memories. She restrained herself, trying to be patient while he pieced them together. Nothing had ever been so difficult for her. But then this had to be equally tough for him.

  Minutes passed. He finally stopped on the path and turned to her. “I know who I am now. I’m Michael Reardon.”

  Reardon. She stared at him, her heart breaking. But it wasn’t right for her to be anything but happy for him now that he had regained his identity. She made herself smile, made herself say to him softly, “Hello, Michael.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “I may be Michael to myself and the rest of the world, but to you—”

  “You’ll always be Shane.”

  “Yeah. Let’s keep it that way. I like it.”

  “And what about the other Reardon? Lissie?”

  “Beth,” he corrected her. “She was never anything but Beth to me. Think about it, Eden. Lissie, Beth. They’re both forms of Elisabeth, and that was her given name.”

  “Only somewhere along the way she started calling herself Lissie.”

  He frowned. “I’m not surprised. Beth would have been too old-fashioned for her, too ordinary. She liked to be hip about everything, always ran with that kind of crowd.”

  “Harriet Krause said she was a free spirit.”

  “Yeah, that was Beth all right.”

  There was a little smile on his mouth now. It was the smile of a man remembering someone who mattered to him a great deal. Eden was suddenly afraid to hear what Shane would tell her. And even more afraid of what he might be unable to tell her.

  He must have noticed her fear. Cupping her chin in his hand, he gently stroked her jaw with his thumb. “You look unhappy. I like it that you look unhappy. It must mean that you’re worried about Beth and me.”

  “You lost her. That was what you told Atlanta and me under hypnosis.” He had actually told them he had twice lost Beth, which had yet to make any sense.

  “And you think now I’ve found her again. That I was wrong about the wife I was so sure I didn’t have.”

  “You share the same name. You called her my Beth.”

  “She was my Beth.”

  Was. She was aware of it now. How he had been referring to Beth in the past tense.

  “And we share the same name, Eden, because she was my sister.” His hand fell away from her chin. “Let’s walk,” he said.

  She fell into step beside him. All she could feel as they strolled aimlessly again under the oaks was a guilty relief. She knew she ought to be experiencing other deep emotions, but for the moment there was nothing but this sweet relief. His sister. Not his wife or his lover, but his sister.

  He began to tell her about Beth. “I loved her, but we never had much in common. Different interests, and I was much older. She was always a little wild, and I didn’t have much patience with that either.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Richmond. That’s where we grew up. Richmond, Virginia. Beth and I were all each other had after our parents died when I was in my late twenties. We should have been closer, but we’d already drifted apart by then. She had her own life, and I was totally focused on my career.”

  Eden caught a note of bitterness in his voice when he referred to his career, but she didn’t remark on it. She let him go on.

  “The service was all I ever wanted. Or thought I wanted. I was an officer, a major in the Army Rangers.”

  And that explained his alertness, his ability to deal with difficult situations. Being a member of a Special Forces unit, he would have been trained in such skills.

  “It’s easy to become a loner when you live with danger as I did, when you’re always moving on to the next operation. I used to tell myself there was never any time for a permanent relationship. I think that must be why I was so certain I had no woman waiting for me. And to be honest about it, I never wanted that kind of attachment.”

  Until now. Eden waited for him to add those two precious words, hoped for it. But she was disappointed he failed to do that.

  “I was out of the country on assignments so much of the time that I didn’t know where Beth was living or what was happening with her. I realize now what a poor excuse that was.”

  He had lost track of his sister, which was what he must have meant under hypnosis by losing Beth. That would account, anyway, for his first loss of her. And the second? Eden was eager to hear about that, praying it would provide her with all that she desperately needed to know about Nathanial. But she didn’t want to rush Shane. Not when she could see he was looking even more troubled than he had a moment ago.

  “Out of the country,” he repeated softly, a faraway expression on his face.

  “What is it?” she prodded him gently. “Something more you’ve remembered?”

  “Yeah, something more. My last mission as an Army Ranger.” He began to tell her about it in a mechanical voice. “The U.S. was working with the Colombian government to take down this drug lord. Only he couldn’t be eliminated until he’d been disarmed.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Something more powerful than that. Human hostages. He’d grabbed four American tourists and was holding them. He threatened to kill them if his compound was attacked. I was in command of a force sent to rescue the hostages.”

  “And it all went wrong,” Eden said, remembering the scene he’d relived so painfully under hypnosis.

  “There was this informer our people were using. It had been arranged for us to meet him at a rendezvous in the jungle. He was supposed to show us a way to sneak inside the compound. I didn’t trust the little bastard. I’d heard rumors about him, but our people in charge insisted he was okay, and orders were orders.”

  “So you went to the rendezvous.”

  “It wasn’t a rendezvous. It was an ambush. It was bad, but it could have been a lot worse if I hadn’t been alert for trouble. As it was, I lost two of my men before we got out of there with our wounded.”

  “Among them yourself,” Eden said. “That is right, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s how I ended up with this leg and an end to my career in the Rangers. Well, I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with was the knowledge that I’d led my men into a trap.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault,” she defended him. “You were obeying orders, and if you hadn’t been the leader you were, your whole force would have been wiped out.”

  “That’s what I’ve tried to tell myself all these months, Eden. That it even came out all right in the end. The hostages were eventually freed, the compound raided, the drug lord and his gang defeated.”

  But he still suffered from the torment of what he perceived as his failure to save two of his men. She could hear that in his voice, unemotional though it had been throughout his account.

  He
was silent now, and that’s when she realized they were no longer strolling through the cemetery. At some point she didn’t remember, they had settled side by side on a sun-dappled stone bench under one of the ancient oaks.

  Head turned to gaze at him, she wished she could heal his anguish. But she feared not even all the power of her love for him was capable of that. That in the end it was something he must do for himself.

  There was a wry smile on his mouth when he turned his own head to meet her gaze. “I may not have relieved myself of that guilt,” he said, “but at least I don’t have to live anymore with the fear that I might have harmed your son.”

  “Yes—Nathanial. Please tell me you know now what happened to him.”

  “Beth brought him to me about five weeks ago. I was on extended medical leave with this leg and living in Arizona. Holed up in a small house out in desert country that I’d bought as a retreat years ago.”

  Which explained his bronzed look and the western-style garb he had been wearing the night he’d collapsed on her piazza.

  “It was a good place to be while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life when the army officially let me go. And not being in any state for even my own company, much less a sister’s I hadn’t laid eyes on in years, I wasn’t exactly happy when Beth turned up at my door out of nowhere.”

  “How did she know you were there?”

  “She’d managed to contact one of my army buddies, a guy she’d dated in the old days back in Richmond. He told her where she could find me.”

  “So you took her in.”

  “She was family. What else could I do? Besides, there was the boy with her, Patrick. Sorry—Nathanial. It’s a little hard to think of him now as—”

  “My son and not hers?” Eden challenged him, unable to help the sharp edge of anger in her voice.

  “Eden, I swear I didn’t know he was anything but her own kid. And if it’s of any comfort to you at all, she was devoted to him. Maybe because she was no longer the old Beth, all spunk and defiance. I figured motherhood must have changed her. Only it was a lot more than that. She was thin and worn out. I wanted her to see a doctor. She wouldn’t.”

  “Ill? Is that why she came to you?”

  “It was more than that. She was scared.”

  “For herself?”

  “For Patrick. He was safe when his grandfather was alive, she said. But now that Sebastian was dead, she didn’t trust the Jamisons.”

  “Why?”

  “According to Beth, the old man had made Patrick his chief heir. She was afraid the other Jamisons meant to see to it Patrick didn’t live long enough to collect the fortune that was supposed to have been theirs. ‘Then you should have gone to the police,’ I told her. ‘Not taken him and disappeared without a word.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ she kept insisting. ‘The Jamisons are a powerful family in Savannah. The police would never listen to me. I had to turn to you, Michael. There was no one else.’”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not now. I think there may have been something else going on, something she refused to discuss. I tried asking Patrick about it, but he clammed up. I think he was scared, too. That, whatever it was, Beth had warned him never to talk about it to anyone.”

  “But, Shane, if she came to you for help, what on earth did she expect you to do?”

  “I was family, remember? And when you’re in trouble or need, it’s instinctive to turn first to family. Also, she figured with my training I would be able to protect Patrick if the Jamisons learned where she had taken him and tried to get their hands on him.”

  It was hard for Eden to hear Shane still calling her son Patrick. But that was who Nathanial had been for him, so she didn’t bother to correct him.

  “And that was all Beth wanted from you?”

  “I thought so, until—”

  “What?”

  “She did something funny a few weeks after she arrived. She had me drive her and the boy into town where she had the local photographer make a portrait of Patrick. One wallet-size picture. That’s all she wanted.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “That’s what I wondered. But she wouldn’t tell me. Not until a few days ago. I said she didn’t look well, and it turns out she was ill.”

  “How ill?”

  “Much sicker than I imagined. She’d been functioning on sheer will. That’s what the doctors told me after she finally let me take her to the hospital a couple of weeks back. By then it was too late for her. It was probably already too late for her when she first came to me, though Beth would have refused to accept that.”

  Shane was silent for a moment. There was a vault in front of the bench where they sat. Mounted on it was the marble sculpture of an angel with bowed head and folded wings. He stared at it, while Eden, her insides churning with conflicted emotions, waited for him to go on.

  “Cancer,” he said. “Beth admitted to the doctors that she was being treated for it back in Savannah. She’d left a hospital bed there without anyone’s knowledge to flee with Patrick. Since then the cancer had accelerated. There was nothing they could do for her but make her as comfortable as possible.”

  Shane turned his head, gazing at her solemnly. “She was responsible for a mother’s worst nightmare. She stole your son, Eden, left you with the anguish of not knowing whether he was dead or alive. You’re entitled to hate her. But there’s one thing you should know. At the end there was no mercenary motive, only her love for Patrick. She’d sacrificed her own survival for his. All she cared about was his safety.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “No. In those first days in the hospital all she wanted to do was remember her life with Patrick’s father. I don’t know, maybe because that was the happiest time for her. She’d talk to me about Charleston, what it was like and the scenes there that Simon had painted. I think now it’s why Charleston seemed familiar to me when I came to you that night, why I knew what a single house and a piazza were. Things like that.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Until the end when she understood there was no longer a hope for her. That’s when she gave me the photograph of Patrick and your business card. As dog-eared as it was, she must have had it from the beginning. ‘Put them in a secure place, Michael,’ she said. ‘Don’t let anyone see them but the woman on that card.’”

  “She told you about me? That I was Nathanial’s actual mother?”

  Shane shook his head. “My promise. That’s all she would talk about then, nothing else. My promise to her that after she was gone, I would take Patrick to you in Charleston. ‘Don’t let them get him, Michael,’ she kept saying. ‘Just take him to Eden Hawke. Eden Hawke will know what to do.’”

  Eden was astonished. “And you never understood she was sending him home to his mother? You made that promise without—”

  “What else could I do? She was dying. I figured you would explain it all to me. The card said you were a private investigator, and maybe that had a lot to do with why Beth trusted you.”

  “But Nathanial wasn’t with you when those two gorillas grabbed you, which means you weren’t bringing him to me.”

  “Don’t look at me like that. Do you think after all of Beth’s fears I was going to just hand Patrick over to you? Believe me, I had every intention of checking you out thoroughly before I let you get anywhere near him. Beth knew that. That’s why she gave me his photograph to show you. If you hadn’t connected with that picture, I wouldn’t have trusted you.”

  “So you—”

  “Buried a sister in Arizona before I could do anything else.”

  Even though they hadn’t been close, that couldn’t have been easy for him. Just as it couldn’t have been easy for Beth to finally admit to herself she was dying. To have made the monumental decision then to return Nathanial to me, not just because I was a P.I. who would know about security but because I would safeguard him against all threat with th
e ferocity only a mother could possess. At least, that’s what I imagine must have been Beth’s conclusion.

  She wouldn’t have supposed she could ever feel any sympathy for the woman who had taken her son away from her, hadn’t thought it would be possible to forgive her. Now she wasn’t so certain. In any case, all that mattered at this point was recovering Nathanial.

  “And after you buried Beth, what then?”

  “I took Patrick—Nathanial, that is—and boarded a plane for Charleston.”

  She leaned toward him eagerly. “So where is he, Shane? Where did you hide him until you could check me out?”

  He gazed at her in a long, abject silence. The look in his eyes made Eden feel as though a fist had closed around her heart.

  “I don’t know,” he finally muttered.

  She stared at him in dismay. “What do you mean you don’t know? You must know.”

  “I wish I did. But there’s this gap between the time the plane landed and I was forced off the road.” His voice was gruff with the effort it cost him to admit that his memory suffered this last, agonizing blank.

  “But how is that possible when you’ve remembered all the rest?”

  “I wish I could explain it to you. I can’t. Maybe it’s a kind of defense mechanism, a corner of my brain guarding Nathanial by refusing to give him up to anyone. Maybe this subconscious instinct is even the explanation for why I’ve had a need all along to avoid the cops. Whatever it is, it’s not talking to me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this at the start? Why did you let me assume—”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” he apologized, the haunted expression still in his eyes. “I should have warned you, but I thought if I held off while I told you all the rest that this last blank would fill in. It hasn’t.”

  Eden fought a rising despair. To be this close to finding Nathanial, and have him still out of her reach, was worse than maddening. “But what could you have possibly done with him before you drove off alone in that rental car?”