Ryanne Corey - The Sheriff and The Amnesiac

Once outside, he stopped short. Jenny was nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t figure out how she’d vanished so quickly. She hadn’t had time to cross the street and make it back inside the Cotton Tree. So where was she?

He started jogging again, going back and forth along the rows of parked cars, even stopping once to flop down on his belly and look underneath the parked cars. This woman seemed to have a talent for pulling off disappearing acts.

And then he saw her.

The picture she made took him completely by surprise. She was sitting on the rear bumper of a Ford pickup at the far corner of the parking lot. Her shoulders were slumped, her hands dangled in her lap. Flickering light from the neon Ritz Classic sign colored her small figure with a ghostly rainbow of changing colors. As he stared at the unutterably weary angle of her neck and head, the realization came to him that she was fighting tears. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did.

She looked so small from this distance, like a porcelain doll overwhelmed by the bleak silhouettes of cars and trucks. And oddly exhausted. She was barely fifty feet from the highway; a tanker truck passed and her hair snarled around her head in a wild, wind-whipped cloud. It looked to Tyler as if she had intended to cross the road to the motel, only to make it this far before she ran out of energy.

His throat dry with a sudden anxiety, he started slowly walking toward her. She didn’t hear him coming until he was practically at her side, then her head whipped up and she pushed herself off the bumper in a quick movement. Surprisingly, her eyes were dry, glittering and immediately defensive. No tracks of tears on her pale face, as he’d half expected. Tyler was momentarily off balance. He could have sworn she was crying.

“Don’t tell me,” Jenny said, her voice a bit huskier than usual. “Let me guess. I’m being arrested for leaving a bowling alley in a rude and abrupt manner. Don’t shoot me, Sheriff. I’ll go quietly.”

Tyler smiled faintly. “That’ll be the day.”

“So I’m not breaking any laws?”

“Not if you don’t count disturbing the peace of the sheriff.”

“What a relief. For a minute, there, I thought you were going to revert to Stone-Cold-Steve-Austin mode and toss me over your shoulder again. Just so you know, traveling upside down makes me sick to my stomach.”

Tyler was quiet for a long moment, his thoughtful gaze never leaving hers. “You never take a breather, do you?” he asked finally. “It’s just one wisecrack after another. Why did you run out of the bowling alley like that? Rosie was just speaking her mind, she’s that way with everybody. Her blunt honesty terrifies the men in this town, which explains why she spends Friday nights at the bowling alley with her brother.”

Jenny leaned back against the Ford’s tailgate for support, her arms folded over her chest. Closed, locked away and guarded. “Whatever. I promise I won’t lose any sleep over it. Actually, your sister seemed like a nice person. Kind of hard to believe you two are related.”

“You must have been a porcupine in a past life. Why do you bristle every time I try to make polite conversation? I’m a nice guy, Trouble. No threat at all.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, mocking him with her wide brown eyes and innocent voice. “I’m like that, completely gullible. Willing to believe anything. Just another empty-headed little woman for you to—”

“Give it a rest, kiddo,” Tyler said quietly. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. You’re okay.”

Any other sort of comment she could have handled easily. But the unexpected sympathetic comment unnerved her. She avoided his eyes, looping her thumbs in her jeans pockets and staring intently at the black asphalt. She counted four flattened wads of bubble gum in one square yard. “Of course I’m okay. I’m always okay.”

Tyler sighed like a man heavily burdened with a puzzle he couldn’t solve. “There you go again, getting all thorny and defensive on me. I’m not here to torture you, believe it or not.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were all right.” He paused, picking his words carefully. “You looked…lonely.”

Jenny stared at him. Blunt honesty—she hadn’t expected that. It must run in his family. The physical pain that constantly lived in her chest breathed with new fire, ragged heartbeats filling her throat.

Lonely?

Truth be told, she could hardly remember back to a time when she had been anything but lonely. But she was acutely uncomfortable that he suspected it, that he had recognized it in her. When she had stalked out of the bowling alley, she had been propelled by righteous indignation and an all-too-familiar urge to leave everyone and everything behind. Once outside, however, and without any warning at all, the starless sky had suddenly become too dark and the night too cold and the motel across the street too far away. Too many hurdles to jump. She had sat down on the bumper of the nearest truck and closed her eyes, concentrating on suppressing the cold sickness inside of her. She just needed a little time, like a wounded animal who crawled in a cave to heal. But he had come along and pulled her back to reality before she was prepared to face it again.

“I want you to stay away from me,” she said. “Please.”

And then she pushed past him, her eyes on the neon vacancy sign of the Cotton Tree Motel. Sanctuary. That was where she needed to be right now, holed up in her room with the chain on the door and the curtains drawn. And tomorrow she would be gone from this place, on the road to somewhere new and blessedly unfamiliar.

Afterward she didn’t remember seeing the oncoming car. One second she was furiously walking, thinking and planning, the next she was blinded by headlights, frozen in place like a startled deer trying to cross the road. There was a terrible roaring in her ears: it may have been herself screaming or Tyler shouting or the deafening screech of brakes.

Light and sound, then…nothing.

Tyler never let her out of his arms until they kicked him out of the emergency room at the county hospital. And then he stood immediately outside the little white curtain that was pulled around Jenny’s bed and shouted at the nurses who came and went, feeling as if he was dying by inches. His limited medical training told him Jenny wasn’t seriously injured. Her vital signs were strong, and he’d detected no sign of broken bones. But she hadn’t regained consciousness since the car grazed her, tossing her like a limp rag doll in a sickening somersault onto the soft shoulder of the road.

At that moment Tyler discovered what terror was. He’d faced wild broncos and crazed Brahma bulls, he’d been stomped on, tossed head-over-heels and dragged through the dirt…but never had he been afraid.

Until tonight.

He scarcely drew another breath until nearly an hour later, when Dr. Grady Hansen came out from the curtained cubicle and told him Jenny would be just fine.

“Fine?” Tyler barely recognized the strained sound of his own voice. Grady’s professional opinion was less than reassuring. It was hard to look at someone you’d gotten drunk with in high school and think of him as a qualified doctor. “What do you mean, she’s fine? What about all the blood on her face and hair? She wasn’t even conscious. Did you see her knees, Grady? Her jeans were shredded. And her ankle was swollen. Did you see that?”

“I noticed it, yes.”

“Then what do you mean fine? There was a knot on her head as big as a softball. You’re not very observant, Grady. We need a second opinion—”

“Yell a little louder,” Grady snapped, snagging a fistful of Tyler’s shirt and dragging him out to the waiting room. “There are probably a few ladies in the maternity wing who didn’t hear you.”