Modean Moon - Forgotten Vows

“Yes,” Edward told him, without waiting for the man to ask. “Yes,” he said, sighing, expelling a little of his own pain. “Jennie is that Allison Long.”

Jennie leaned back in the chaise longue in her room, her knees faintly smarting from the antiseptic Matilda had applied, her ego faintly smarting from being sent to her room.

Her life was being discussed downstairs. She had a right to be there. She had a right to have a voice in any decision made.

She smiled ruefully. Sheriff Lambert was probably right to exclude her. Apparently, she hadn’t done such a bang-up job of running her own life until now.

Her finger ached. Absently, she rubbed it, as she found herself doing often when she tried to put order to the puzzle of her life. The doctors told her they could fix it—a simple surgical procedure—rebreak the bone, set it properly. Jennie shivered. She’d had enough pain to last a lifetime. Too much pain, she acknowledged, remembering how it had been when she first woke up in the Avalon hospital.

She closed her eyes, and the field behind her closed lids grew dark. It wasn’t always dark; it was—it was more like walking into a dense fog just after twilight. Interesting, she thought. A new analogy. Before, she had compared her lack of sight to trying to look through layer upon layer of vaporous gray scarves.

When she slept, she had vision: color—vibrating, shimmering color—if not always shape. And sometimes her dreams were peopled. One person appeared repeatedly—a tall, stern man. In her dreams, she teased him, sensing it might somehow be similar to baiting a tiger. And although she never clearly saw his face, on rare occasions she found her efforts rewarded by a rusty, little-used smile.

Was he the one who had come for her?

She had been so afraid—When? Jennie couldn’t consciously remember feeling the soul-shriveling depth of fear she now knew had once gripped her. When?

“Here you go, love,” Matilda said as she entered the room. “Blackberry tea and some of Mrs. Winthrop’s wonderful chicken salad.”

Jennie looked up, not distracted by Matilda’s loving offering. The man who had come for her was tall. Was he… dark? Was he… stern?

“Matilda,” Jennie asked. “The man who—the man downstairs—what does he look like?”

“Ah, Jennie, Jennie,” the older woman said softly, sitting beside her on the chaise and placing the tray across Jennie’s lap. “I suppose he’s a fine-looking man, healthy, strong of will and body, but, child, he doesn’t look like he’s ever in his life smiled.”

Sheriff Lucas Lambert’s office was in keeping with the affluence of the town: state-of-the-art computers and communications equipment shared spacious, carpeted quarters with high-tech filing and retrieval systems, welldesigned furniture and cubicle dividers and professionally uniformed employees.

The office was distinctly out of keeping with the rugged, world-weary man who seated himself behind his oversize mahogany desk and glanced quickly through a file a deputy had handed him as he and Edward had entered the building.

Lambert tossed the folder onto his desk, glanced at it, glanced at Edward, opened a desk drawer and brought out a much fatter folder and placed it beside the first one. He took the pen and small notebook from his jacket and aligned them with the folders. He picked up the pen, rolling it between his fingers as he studied Edward. Then, apparently reaching a decision, he dropped the pen to the desktop. “Your identity checks out.”

Seated in a chair in front of the desk, Edward only nodded. He was unaccustomed to being doubted, surprised there had ever been any question of his truthfulness.

“You didn’t report your wife missing.”

“There didn’t seem much point in reporting anything,” Edward said tightly. “I had a—a farewell note from her telling me how much better her life would be without me in it.”

“Didn’t you find it a little strange that your wife of— what?—eight hours or so just up and took off?”

“Hell, yes, I found it strange,” Edward said with quiet fury. “As strange as the fact that our airline reservations for our trip to Hawaii had unexplainably been rescheduled for a later flight, as strange as the fact that my private office was burglarized that afternoon requiring me to go down there. As strange as the fact that when I returned to my home, my brand-new wife, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bonds and several other reasonably valuable items were missing. As strange as the fact that when I went to Jennie’s studio, trying to make sense of what had happened, I found it stripped of any sign of her, including all of her unsold work.

“Yes, Lambert. I found it damned strange. But I had a note from her. A note, damn it man, that stripped me as bare as that studio. A note taunting me with the wonderful new life she was going to lead once she broke free from me.”

Lambert leaned back in his chair, once again sliding his pen through his fingers, once again seeming to come to a decision. He stood and nudged the fatter of the two folders across the desk toward Edward. “Take a look at this while I change clothes. Then we’ll both go take a look at the place where your new bride spent two, maybe three days of that wonderful new life.”

Edward was feeling sick, physically ill, when Lambert returned to the office wearing jeans and climbing boots and carrying a lightweight jacket. He dropped another pair of boots at Edward’s feet.

“You’ll need these,” Lambert said. “I think they’ll fit you.”

Edward closed the file, but he couldn’t close away the memory of the police photographs or the medical reports. He couldn’t close away the rage that he felt growing inside him—the need to hit—to hurt. He held his hand flat on the cover of the folder as if by doing so he could hold all its horrible contents away from him, away from Jennie. God, no wonder she didn’t remember. Thank God she didn’t remember.

“What did this to her?”

Lambert took the folder from him and put it back in the desk drawer before he answered. “For a while, I entertained the thought that maybe you did this to her.”

They took the sheriff’s Land Rover. They’d driven for over an hour, most of it on narrow dirt roads, the last fifteen or twenty minutes uphill on a rutted, hole-pocked narrow trail. They’d long before left the green surrounding Avalon and had entered what Edward had always thought typical of eastern New Mexico—harsh, rocky land, barren except for scattered cactus, which now, but only for a few short days, blazed with color, outcroppings of rock, the badlands of hundreds of B-grade western movies, and mountains—harsh and unforgiving.

Lambert eased his vehicle across a boulder-strewn dry gully, left the track and pulled to a stop at the edge of the precipice that overlooked the dry bed of some ancient ocean.

“Watch your step,” Lambert told him and felt his way over the edge and onto a barely visible animal trail. With only one quick glance toward the valley floor, Edward followed, feeling rocks sliding beneath his sturdy boots.

Finally, they reached an outcropping of rock that formed a narrow ledge and an overhang that created a sort of cave. The animal trail continued downward, but Lambert stopped.

“There are two ways to get here,” Lambert told him. “Up from the valley floor, or down from the ridge.” He pointed to a shallow depression beneath the overhang. “Two high-school boys cutting class and out exploring for outlaw gold found Jennie there.

“We don’t know when she lost her sight, but even sighted, there’s no way she got here by herself. She either fell or was pushed from about where we parked,”

In the last few hours, Edward had been hit with almost more than he could stand. For his sanity, for Jennie’s sake, he had to emotionally separate Jennie from this anonymous broken woman who had been discarded on a New Mexico mountainside. He had to get his protective armor in place, had to stop acting like a terrified ten-year-old. Never again, he’d promised himself years ago, would he give in to the nameless, numbing horror he had once experienced. And he hadn’t. Until now. But not until Jennie had he let himself be vulnerable again.