Forget to Remember (18 page)

He quickly went to the window of Tina’s car
and looked in. Carol was glad she hadn’t obeyed her first impulse
to get into the car. She simultaneously pressed the garage remote
again and skittered around to the other side of the car, staying
opposite him. The deafening beeping drowned out her movements, but
she heard somebody yell from the yard, between beeps. It must be
Rigo.

If the man continued around the front of the
car she was prepared to race out of the garage. She could stop the
door’s descent since she controlled the remote. Just as she was
considering doing this, the man’s feet headed back toward the
entrance as the door descended. He dove under the door and
disappeared. The door started up again. Carol, who was moving back
toward the front of the car, clicked the remote and watched with
trepidation for his return as the door came down one more time.

Just before it closed, she saw someone
else’s feet run past the garage. Rigo was chasing him
.
A new
fear assailed her. The man would shoot Rigo. She pressed the remote
to open the garage door. She had to help him.

***

Rigo was home from the restaurant and
drinking a glass of milk while he waited for Carol to return from
her dinner. He felt like an anxious father waiting for his daughter
to come home from a date. He shouldn’t feel like this; she was an
adult. He had a hard time admitting to himself there might be a
twinge of jealousy involved.

His first clue Carol had arrived was the
sound of the garage door opening. He could hear it because a
kitchen window was ajar. The nights were still balmy. He had a
desire to meet her at the front door but repressed it. Instead, he
put his feet up on a chair at the breakfast table and tried to look
casual. She would see the light in the kitchen and come find
him.

He was in this position when he heard a shot
from the front of the house. He wasn’t quite sure it was a shot,
but after a brief hesitation, he jerked his feet off the chair and
stood up. While he was doing that, he heard a second shot. Now
there was no question what it was. Someone was shooting at Carol.
Rigo raced through the house to the front door and opened it.

Here he hesitated, not wanting to run into
the line of fire. The garage door was going down. The panic horn on
Tina’s car started beeping. Carol must have triggered it. He felt
momentary relief she was able to do that. A man appeared in the
garage doorway and tripped the laser beam, causing the door to head
upward. He went back inside. The door immediately started down
again.

Rigo followed, but he’d be a sitting duck if
he went under the door and entered the garage, silhouetted by the
outside lights. He yelled “We’re going in” at the top of his voice,
hoping to distract the gunman, and then moved sideways toward the
bushes fronting the house so he wouldn’t be a clear target.

The man dove under the door, out of the
garage, and ran along the driveway. Rigo hesitated and then ran
after him. The man had a lead of fifty feet, and it was increasing.
The problem was Rigo had taken off his shoes and was only wearing
socks. He stepped on a small stone and broke stride as pain surged
through his foot. By the time he recovered, the man had reached the
street and was headed toward a car parked a hundred feet downhill
from the driveway.

The car’s lights flashed as the man clicked
a remote. Rigo had no chance of stopping him, but he needed to get
close enough to identify the car. The man climbed in, and the
engine roared to life as Rigo approached. It started down the short
street and made a right turn, away from Hawthorne Boulevard, the
direction sheriff’s cars would probably be coming from. Somebody
must have called 911 by now.

The car was a compact, but Rigo couldn’t
tell the make or read the license plate by the glow of the
infrequent street lights. He couldn’t even be sure what color it
was. A dark compact. There were only a few million of them in L.A.
So common that he hadn’t noticed it when he passed it driving home
from the restaurant.

“Rigo.”

Rigo turned as Carol came racing up behind
him. She ran into his arms and clung to him. They hugged for a few
seconds, panting, and then spoke simultaneously. “Are you all
right?”

They both laughed laughs of relief. They
separated and Rigo saw a dark splotch on Carol’s arm. “You’re
bleeding.”

***

Carol was dizzy, not from her wound, but
from all the things that had happened in the last few hours.
Thinking back, as she and Rigo approached the house, the horn
activated by the panic button shut itself off. They heard Ernie and
Tina calling for them and saw the two fearfully searching the yard
and garage with a flashlight.

Tina said, “Oh, thank God,” when she saw
them, but followed that exclamation with a concerned, “You’re
hurt,” as she saw Rigo holding a reddening handkerchief against
Carol’s arm to stop the bleeding.

In rapid succession, sheriff’s deputies,
paramedics, and an ambulance arrived. Although she protested her
wound wasn’t that serious, Carol was taken to Torrance Hospital
where she had spent several days after Rigo found her in the
Dumpster. Rigo followed in his car. While she was being treated in
the emergency room, sheriff’s deputies questioned both of them.

Her flesh wound was cleaned, sewed up, and
bandaged. She talked the doctor out of giving her a tetanus shot by
pointing out she had received one when she was found. She was
released within a couple of hours because of the efficiency of the
hospital staff. Rigo drove her home. Now, feeling better and
resting on the couch, she noted it was after two in the morning.
They should all be in bed.

In addition to Rigo, Ernie and Tina were
still up, looking much relieved. Rigo repeated something for their
benefit he had said to the sheriff’s deputy.

“This isn’t a random act. The man was lying
in wait for her. He must have been there when I came home. He even
followed her into the garage but left when he realized he might get
trapped in there. I’ll bet this is the same man who left her in the
Dumpster. He probably thought she was dead, but, somehow found out
she’s still alive.”

That sounded reasonable to Carol, but who
would want her dead? How did he know where she was staying? One
thing she was sure of: the man wasn’t big enough to be Beard. She
was thankful for Rigo’s help. “Rigo scared him away by
yelling.”

Rigo eschewed the role of hero. “Carol was
fantastic. She not only managed to press the panic button on the
car remote, she also kept closing the garage door in spite of the
danger to herself.”

“I was going to open it and run out if he
came around to my side of the car.”

Carol felt frustrated, not being able to
remember what had happened to her before she was found in the
Dumpster. Who was this man, and how were they connected? What had
she done to deserve having him trying to kill her?

The other thing bothering her was the
expense of the emergency room. She told Ernie and Tina she had some
money—not mentioning how she obtained it—and offered to pay. They
declined, saying she paid them by helping with their financial
analysis and getting Rigo involved with their business.

Then she remembered the problem she had
encountered getting admitted to the emergency room because she
didn’t have a Social Security number. She wasn’t willing to use the
fake one Paul had obtained for her. When she said she was the
amnesiac they had treated before, they let her in. However, she
couldn’t continue to live like this. She had to get answers.

CHAPTER 23

The next morning Carol slept in. When she
awoke, the first thing she noticed was the bandage on her arm. A
nurse at the hospital had told her how to change it. She would do
that after she got something to eat. Her wound didn’t hurt, but she
was hungry. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard the
Ramirez phone ring.

She knew Tina and Ernie had left for their
office some time ago, in spite of being awake much of the night.
Rigo was still sleeping off the effects of working the Sunday night
shift at the restaurant and chasing the attacker. Carol’s arm began
to throb as she sped up and went into the kitchen to answer the
phone. She picked up the receiver and said hello.

“Hello, Carol? It’s Frances.”

It didn’t sound like Frances. She was almost
whispering. “Hi. Do you have a cold?”

“No. Listen; Victoria Brody is here.”

“Who? Oh, the woman who might be my mother.
She’s at your house?”

“Yes. She showed up on my doorstep this
morning. She drove all the way from Fresno. Farmers must get up in
the middle of the night. She found my address through the Internet.
Nobody’s safe anymore. Anyway, she wants to meet you.”

Carol repressed a desire to say that since
Frances used the Internet to find people, she should expect others
to do the same. “Let me see if I can get myself to your house.
Tina’s car is probably here. I’ll call and ask her if I can use
it.”

“You know you don’t have to do this. I can
get rid of her.”

“I want to meet her. I’ll call you back in a
minute.”

Carol hung up the phone. Excitement was
growing inside her. She had to meet this woman who might be her
mother.

“Did I hear the phone ring?”

Carol jumped, and then turned to face a
bedraggled Rigo who had obviously just gotten out of bed.

“How would you like to take a little drive
this morning?

***

“That pickup truck must belong to
Victoria.”

Carol looked at the older model Ford parked
in front of Frances’ house. It could use a wash, but maybe the dirt
was what held it together. Rigo parked behind it, and they walked
up the short driveway to the house.

Frances opened the door in response to their
ring with a little smile on her face. She hugged them both. “Carol,
what happened to your arm?”

“Oh, I got shot, but I’m okay. We’ll explain
later. Where’s Victoria?”

Frances obviously had a lot of questions,
but she suppressed them and led the pair through the kitchen to the
back room. A woman in jeans and a flannel shirt was just rising
from a sofa. Her hair was short and the color of iron. She wore
glasses over a tanned face. She wasn’t as tall as Carol and quite a
bit bulkier. She stuck out a calloused hand and smiled a
wide-mouthed smile.

“Carol, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Carol shook Victoria’s hand. Her grip was as
strong as that of a man trying to make an impression. Rigo gave his
first name and also shook her hand. They had agreed he wouldn’t
give his last name at the moment, although she could find it out
simply by reading the newspaper accounts of how Carol had been
discovered.

Carol felt awkward, especially after Frances
asked whether they wanted iced tea or coffee to drink and went into
the kitchen, followed by Rigo. She sat on the sofa, some distance
from Victoria, who exuded what Carol suspected was a farm odor, and
noticed she was already drinking coffee.

“I understand you have a farm.”

“Yeah, my brother and I own a pretty good
spread together. It’s a lot of work, but it keeps body and soul
together.” Victoria laughed a distinctive, cackling laugh.

“Why did you decide to look for your
daughter?”

“Well, it’s like this. Pete—that’s my
brother—never married. I never married. It’s just the two of us
living there. We aren’t getting any younger. We began wondering
who’s going to take over the place when we go.”

“You’re still young yet.”

“Yeah, but you gotta think about the future.
Besides, whoever takes over has gotta learn the ropes. That’ll take
a while.”

“I see. Have you had any luck finding the
adoptive parents?”

“When I had my baby, I was young and scared.
My boyfriend had taken off, probably back to Mexico. I didn’t have
any money; I couldn’t keep her. I agreed to the adoption with the
condition that I wouldn’t know who the parents were or try to look
for them—or her. I was good with that then. Now that I want to find
them, the doors are closed to me. That’s why I went to this DNA
stuff.”

Carol wanted to keep her at arm’s length.
“Other than the DNA match, do you have any reason to believe I’m
your daughter?”

The question seemed to take Victoria by
surprise. She looked at Carol for a few seconds before replying.
“Well, I guess I don’t have an answer for that. As I said, I
haven’t seen her since just after she was born. But whether you’re
my daughter or not, you could be. I mean, you’re about the right
age, and you might have got your coloring from your dad. I have a
proposition for you. Come and live with me and Pete. Learn about
the farm. We’ll write you into our wills. That way you won’t have
to sponge off people. You’re a little thin, but you’ll flesh out.
Farm life will make a woman out of you.”

“I can’t legally work until I find out who I
am.”

“No, no, it wouldn’t be like that. You’d be
family. We share everything. Pete loves girls. He’d have made a
good father. We had a girl living with us—not a relative. Pretty
little thing. We gave her room and board and paid her as well. Pete
doted on her. It was a fantastic deal for her. Then she ran off in
the middle of the night. Just up and disappeared. Pete was
heartbroken. Strangest thing. I assume you wouldn’t do that.”

Living with them wouldn’t help her find her
identity. She doubted she could be named in anybody’s will. Carol
looked at the woman, knowing that even though there was a slim
possibility they might be related, she had to stay out of her
clutches. And Pete’s. She wouldn’t be subservient to anyone. There
was a name for what her status would be. It was called slavery.

***

“Let’s review. You were a majorette in your
former life. You’re good at math; perhaps you were a teacher.
You’ve probably spent time in the United Kingdom, based on some of
your knowledge and mannerisms. You’ve apparently done some
modeling, at least under an assumed name, and you have a gift for
attracting men.” Frances glanced at Rigo as she said this. His
expression gave away his feelings for Carol. She hoped he didn’t
play poker.