Distant Memory (31 page)

“Your arm,” she said wearily.

“Don’t you worry about my arm,” Nick said.

The attendant said, “Let me see that, sir.”

“I’ll be fine,” Nick said.

“It’s my job, sir,” the attendant replied firmly. Removing a pair of medical scissors from one of the many compartments that lined the inside of the ambulance, he cut away the bandage and removed the dressing. “That’s going to need stitches,” he said flatly. “How did you get that?”

“An unhappy houseguest,” Nick said cryptically. “How much longer before we reach the hospital?”

“Another fifteen minutes or so,” the attendant replied.

Lisa wondered what would happen next. It wasn’t the hospital that concerned her, but the detective sitting in the front. He was sure to have many questions, few of which she could answer. Still, that seemed a small thing with all that she had been through. At least for the moment she was out of danger.

The ambulance rocked as it drove down the road, exacerbating the exhaustion Lisa felt. The relief of having escaped Massey numbed the pain that had been so acute minutes before.

Closing her eyes, she let her mind drift, searching for some pleasant memory, some captivating vision in which to project herself. She longed to be somewhere away, somewhere peaceful.

The image of the rolling surf as seen from Nick’s rear deck painted the canvas of her mind. She smiled.

L
isa had been given a mild pain reliever that was just beginning to take the edge off the soreness she felt. The ambulance had brought her, Nick, and Hobbs to the single-story hospital at the edge of town. Although the facility was small, it didn’t lack for equipment or personnel. For the last ninety minutes, two doctors had poked, prodded, x-rayed, and examined Lisa. Her blood pressure had been recorded and temperature taken. Her cuts had been cleaned and dressed, the dirt removed from her hands and face.

Of all the procedures she had endured since arriving at the emergency room, the verbal exam hurt the most. Question after question was asked, and she had answers for none of them. All she could offer was the name she had learned earlier that evening, Robin Lisa Keller, and a few fragments of recollection.

Hobbs insisted on interrogating her, but the doctors made him wait in the lobby. Nick was escorted to an ER bed and examined. He was waiting for the results of the x-rays on his knee when a technician moved Lisa to a small private room. In the pale glow of the single fluorescent light over her bed, she studied the shadows on the ceiling. They looked ghostly to her, specters of gloom that hovered above her, waiting for their opportunity to swoop down the moment she slipped off to sleep. Fear,
irrational and reasonable, valid and imagined, descended on her like a fog.

“All things work together for good to them that love God.” God. Had He been involved in her life? Had it been He who had kept her alive and free of serious, life-threatening injury? Was there something more here, something she had yet to see? The peace she had felt when she read the Gideon Bible in the hotel began to return, dispelling hours of anxiety. The ghostly shadows seemed to retreat from before her eyes.

Closing her eyes, Lisa thought of God. The passages she had read about Jesus were calming, and she called them back to mind. She began to pray. It was a simple prayer, like a child speaking to her father, and it was comfortable as only an action that had been repeated many times before could be. There was no pretense in her unspoken words, no formality, just a sharing of very real needs. She found God a willing and patient listener.

“Lisa?”

Lisa opened her eyes, her peace disturbed and her heart suddenly thundering again. Nick stood in the door, a crutch under one arm. He wore a green surgical shirt and his knee was wrapped in an elastic bandage. His pant leg had been cut away. Behind Nick stood a stern looking Detective Hobbs.

“I’m sorry to wake you,” Nick said.

“I wasn’t asleep,” Lisa said. “Just … praying.”

“Well, feel free to include me in those prayers,” he commented with a broad smile. He ambled in, struggling with the crutch. He grunted slightly as he moved. Hobbs was close behind. Once inside, Hobbs pulled a red plastic chair over for Nick to sit in.

“I know it’s late, Ms. Keller,” Hobbs said, “but I have a few questions.”

Lisa offered a wan smile. “I imagine you have a great many questions.”

“Yes ma’am. I certainly do.”

“How is your partner?” Lisa asked.

“He’s doing well,” Hobbs said. “The shot went straight through his thigh, but it missed the bone. He is resting a few rooms down.”

“Will he be in long?” Lisa inquired.

“They’re cutting him loose tomorrow. His wife is coming down to get him.”

“It must have been horrible for her to get that call.” Lisa realized that she had no one to call. If she had been killed, she would have died in obscurity, unknown, perhaps even unmissed. “Maybe I’ll have time to thank him before he goes. You and he saved my life.”

“Mine, too, Hobbs,” Nick added.

Hobbs just nodded, and then said, “I have a lot of holes to fill about you two. I think it’s time you brought me up to speed.”

“I know very little,” Lisa said. “I know I was in an accident and that Nick came to my aid.” She went on to explain the day’s events from her awakening in the Pretty Penny Motel to the moment she was loaded into the ambulance.

“You know, Ms. Keller,” Hobbs began, “I’m normally a very trusting person, even for a cop, but I’m having trouble buying this amnesia thing. It sounds too Hollywood to be real.”

“It’s not Hollywood,” a firm voice said from the doorway. A thin, bleary-eyed, bald man stood in the doorway. He wore a pale blue polo shirt, white slacks, and slip-on loafers. He held a file folder in his hand.

“Who are you?” Hobbs asked.

“I’m Dr. Brice. I’m the consulting neurologist, and you couldn’t be more wrong.” Brice stepped into the room, walking directly to Lisa’s bedside. “How are you feeling, Ms. Keller?”

“Beat.”

“From what I hear, you have good reason to feel that way,” Brice said. He was a humorless man who spoke in quick clips. “I have reviewed your file and want to give you a once-over.”

“Not another exam,” Lisa complained wearily.

“It won’t be bad,” Brice stated. “A neurological exam is 80 percent questions and 20 percent physical exam.”

“Maybe we should leave,” Nick said.

“No need,” Brice said. “Not unless Ms. Keller wishes you to.”

Lisa looked at Nick and then said, “After all we’ve been through, I think you can stay.”

The exam was quick. Brice peered into Lisa’s eyes and ears, studied her bruised head, checked her reflexes, and asked what seemed to Lisa to be a thousand questions.

“What do you remember of your accident, Ms. Keller?”

“Please call me Lisa.” The name Keller still seemed foreign to her. “Just snippets. I remember headlights coming up from behind. I remember being rammed and losing control. Everything else is dim.”

“Is there a way to prove that the amnesia is real?” Hobbs asked, not unkindly.

Brice looked at Hobbs as if studying him. “Who are you?”

“Detective Bill Hobbs.” He flashed his badge.

“Well, Detective, the short answer is no, if by proof you mean a physical test that yields an amnesia/no-amnesia result. However, amnesia is not that uncommon.”

“Really?” Lisa said with surprise. Hearing Brice’s words gave her some comfort. Her experience was not unique.

“There are many types of amnesia and many causes,” Brice said. “For example, there is childhood amnesia where the patient has little or no memory of events in their lives from when they were ages five to seven. There is visual amnesia, which is a loss of memory of things seen; verbal amnesia, which is the inability to recall words. The most confusing is Broca’s amnesia, in which the subject cannot understand language in its written or spoken form. Words just no longer make sense.”

“Amazing,” Nick said.

Lisa felt a rush of gratitude. Things could have been worse. “You
said there were many things that could cause people to lose their memory.”

“That’s right,” Brice responded. “For example, there is hysterical amnesia. A person sees something so horrible, so traumatic, that the brain simply shuts out the event. The patient disassociates from the incident. Disease can also cause memory loss: cerebral malaria, collagen diseases, diabetes, amyloidosis, sarcoidosis, and so on. Toxic agents like alcohol, barbiturate abuse, and carbon monoxide poisoning can short-circuit memory. And then, of course, there is TBI.”

“TBI?” Lisa said.

“Traumatic brain injury,” Brice answered. “That is most likely the cause of your amnesia. The x-rays show no serious damage to the brain and no lesions or edema, which is good, but you did take a nasty knock to the head. The amnesia that comes from an event such as yours is called posttraumatic retrograde amnesia.”

“What I don’t understand, Doctor,” Lisa began, “is how I can forget my past but still remember how to talk and walk and speak.”

“Let me explain,” Brice said. “If you imagine the human brain as an orange, then the outer layer, the peel, would be the cerebral cortex. Injury to the cerebral cortex results in bruising, which in turn inhibits memory retrieval. Less personal memories, like language skills, are stored in a different part of the brain. Do you have any memories of your past at all?”

Lisa thought for a moment. “Some very nebulous ones. They’re more like sensations than memories.”

“Those are known as island memories. There are parts of the cortex that have not been affected by the accident.”

Lisa took a deep breath and asked the question that had been haunting her. “Will I ever get my memory back?”

For the first time since entering the room, Brice smiled. “Your trauma is not too severe. Most cases like yours clear up within seventy-two hours. As the brain recovers from the trauma, those islands of memory
get bigger. I think you’ll be fine in a few days. Just take it easy, avoid exertion, and rest as much as possible.”

Avoid exertion? Lisa almost laughed. The last twenty-four hours had been as stressful as she could imagine. She had endured three murder attempts. It was a wonder that she hadn’t lost her mind as well as her memory.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Brice started to leave, but Hobbs stopped him with a question. “Is it all right if I ask Ms. Keller a few more questions?”

“Just don’t upset her,” Brice said sharply and then left.

Moyer swore at his computer monitor. He swore at the dead Carson McCullers, and he cursed Raymond Massey. The image on his screen had not changed in nearly an hour. He was still looking at the dark orchard. On the street that ran by the orchard, he could see the red-and-blue lights of the police. Occasionally a helicopter would fly across the screen. The satellite had not moved because it was locked onto Massey’s car, which it had lost when he turned into the dense orchard. It no longer had anything to acquire.

Moyer had watched the shootout, the arrival of the police, and the coming and going of the ambulance. Now with time to second-guess himself, Moyer wished he had followed the ambulance. Then he could have directed Massey to whatever hospital they had taken the woman—assuming that Massey was still in commission. If he wasn’t …

Massey’s fastidiousness had been harmed, and it ate at him. The last ninety minutes had been grueling. Most men would have been happy simply to escape capture, but it had never occurred to Massey that his
arrest was even possible. He was too smart, too clever. He had never failed at anything that he had attempted.

Sitting in the dim light of the electronics room, Massey cleaned the mud from his shoes with a screwdriver he had found in a tool kit. The motion caused him pain, but the pain made him all the more determined. The woman was scrappy, fighting back in a manner he would never have expected. He paused, looked down at his arms again, and glowered. When he had first arrived at the radio shack, he had removed his suit coat and examined himself. There was a gash and a bruise the size of a lemon covering the forearm where she had stabbed him with the tree branch. When she had slammed the car door on him, the door had hit his head and arms. He was amazed that nothing had been broken. The egg-size knot on the side of his head and his swollen nose reminded him that he may have been fortunate not to have received more severe injuries, but he had not got off scot-free.