Picture Perfect (3 page)

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She swallowed and ran her hand over her hair, smoothing it away from her face. “I think so,” she said. “Have you been waiting long?”

She spoke as if she had known him all her life, which made Will grin. “No,” he said. “I just happened to be passing by.” He stared at her for a moment. “Listen,” he said, “if you're waiting for someone, I can wait with you until they get here.”

The woman froze. “You don't know me?” Will shook his head. “Oh God.” She rubbed her eyes. “God.” She looked up at him through tears. “Well, that makes two of us.”

Will wondered what he had gotten himself into, sitting in his own truck with a woman who was crazy, or so high she couldn't think clearly. He smiled hesitantly, waiting for her to fall back to reality. “You mean you don't know me either.”

“I mean I don't know
me
,” the woman whispered.

Will looked carefully at her clear eyes, at the clotted cut on her temple.
Amnesia
, he thought. “You don't know your name?” He switched automatically into the questioning he'd learned as a tribal police officer in South Dakota. “Do you remember what happened to you? What brought you to the church?”

The woman glanced away. “I don't remember any of that,” she said flatly. “I suppose I should turn myself in to the police.”

The way she said it, like she'd committed a capital crime, made Will smile. He thought of driving her downtown to the Academy, the headquarters of the LAPD. Even if he wasn't officially on the roster, he surely could pull some strings and check the APBs, see if in fact anyone had been looking for her. He shifted slightly, wincing at the pain that shot over his eye. He remembered the blond cop in Beverly Hills, and he wondered if they all would be like that come Monday.

“
I'm
the police,” he said quietly, and even as the words were forming Will knew he would not take this woman to the LAPD, not after what had happened to him, not right away.

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you have a badge?”

Will shook his head slowly. “I just moved here. I live in Reseda. I start work tomorrow.” He caught her eye. “I'll take care of you,” he said. “Do you trust me?”

She looked at the sharp angles of his face, at the light shifting over his black hair. Nobody else had come. Yet when he had appeared, she'd run to him without any hesitation. Surely for someone who was not thinking with reason, but only with gut instinct, that had to count for something. She nodded.

He held out his hand. “I'm William Flying Horse. Will.”

She smiled. “Jane Doe.” She placed her fingertips against his palm, and with her touch this strange city fell into place. Will thought about the song of the owl, and this gift that had literally dropped into his arms, and as he glanced at her he knew that in some way she was now his.

S
HE
kept skipping October. She was supposed to be reciting the names of the months in reverse order, as per instructions of the emergency room doctor, but she kept jumping from November to September. Her face flushed, and she looked up at the man who had been examining her. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Let me try that again.”

From across the room where he'd been watching for ten minutes, Will exploded. “Jesus,” he said, moving closer. “I'm perfectly fine, and I wouldn't be able to do that without messing up.” He glared at the doctor. He'd brought the woman to the emergency room because it was correct police procedure, at least in South Dakota, but now he was having second thoughts. As far as Will could tell, these stupid exercises had done nothing but make her more frazzled.

“She's lost consciousness at least twice in the past few hours,” the doctor said dispassionately. He held up a pen, inches from her face. “What is this?”

She rolled her eyes. Already she'd answered questions about where she was, what day it was, who the President was. She'd counted forward and backward by threes and memorized a short list of fruits and vegetables. “It's a pen.”

“And this?”

“A pen cap.” She glanced at Will and grinned. “Or is it a cow?” As the doctor's eyes snapped up to hers, she laughed. “I'm
kidding
,” she said. “Just a little joke.”

“See?” Will said. “She can make jokes. She's fine.” He crossed his arms, uneasy. Hospitals made him nervous; they had ever since he was nine years old and had watched his father die in one. Three days after the car accident, his mother already buried, Will had sat with his grandfather waiting for his father to regain consciousness. He had stared for hours at his father's lax brown hand contrasting against the white sheets, the white lights, and the white walls, and he knew it was only a matter of time before his father left to go somewhere he belonged.

“All right.” At the sound of the doctor's voice, both Jane and Will stood straighter. “You appear to have a mild concussion, but you seem to be on the mend. Chances are you'll recover your more distant memories before you recover the recent ones. There may be a few minutes surrounding the actual blow to the head that you never recall.” He turned to Will. “And you are…?”

“Officer William Flying Horse, LAPD.”

The doctor nodded. “Tell whoever comes to get her that she should be observed overnight. They need to wake her every few hours and just check her level of alertness; you know, ask her who she is, and how she's feeling, things like that.”

“Wait,” Jane said. “How long until I remember who I am?”

The doctor smiled for the first time in the hour he'd been with her. “I can't say. It could be hours; it could be weeks. But I'm sure your husband will be waiting for you downtown.” He slipped his pen into his jacket pocket and patted her shoulder. “He'll be filling you in on the details in no time.”

The doctor swung open the door of the examination room and left, his white coat flying behind him.

“Husband?” she said. She stared down at her left hand, watching the diamonds on the simple band catch the fluorescent light. She glanced up at Will. “How could I have missed this?”

Will shrugged. He had not noticed it himself. “Can you remember him?”

Jane closed her eyes and tried to conjure a face, a gesture, even the pitch of a voice. She shook her head. “I don't
feel
married.”

Will laughed. “Well, then half the wives in America would probably kill for your kind of blow to the head.” He walked to the door and held it open for her. “Come on.”

He could feel her one step behind him the entire way to the parking lot. When they reached the truck, he unlocked her door first and helped her into the seat. He turned the ignition and fastened his seat belt before he spoke. “Look,” he said. “If your husband's looking for you, he can't file a missing persons report until twenty-four hours go by. We can go down to the station now if you want, or we can go first thing in the morning.”

She stared at him. “Why don't you want to take me there?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You're hedging,” Jane said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

Will faced straight ahead and put the truck into reverse. “Well, then you're not listening too well.” A muscle jumped along the side of his jaw. “It's up to you.”

She stared at his profile, a chiseled silhouette. She wondered what she had said to make him so angry. For right now, at least, he was her only friend. “Maybe if I get some rest,” she said carefully, “I'll remember everything when I wake up. Maybe everything will look different.”

Will turned to her, taking in the tremor of her voice and the hope she was holding out to him. This woman he knew nothing about, this woman who knew nothing about
him
, was putting herself in his hands. It was the most he'd ever been given. “Maybe,” he said.

 

J
ANE WAS ASLEEP BY THE TIME THEY REACHED THE HOUSE IN
R
ESEDA
. Will carried her back to the bedroom, settling her on the naked mattress and covering her with the only blanket he'd unpacked. He took off her shoes, but that was as far as he'd go. She was another man's wife.

At Oglala Community College, in some culture class he'd been forced to take to graduate, Will had learned the punishment the Sioux meted out for a woman's adultery in the days of the buffalo. It had completely shocked him: If his wife had run away with another man, the husband had the right to cut off the tip of her nose, so she'd be marked for life. To Will, it seemed to contradict everything else he knew about the Sioux. After all, they did not understand ownership of the land. They believed in giving away money, food, and clothing to friends down on their luck, even if it meant that they'd become poor as well. Yet they branded a wife as property, a husband as an owner.

He watched Jane sleep. In a way, he envied her. She'd managed to discard her past so easily, when Will had to work so hard to put his own history out of his mind.

Will touched the edge of Jane's collar where blood had dried. He would get some cold water and soak that. He brushed her hair away from her forehead and looked over her features. She had ordinary brown hair, a small nose, a stubborn chin. Freckles. She was not the blond bombshell of his adolescent dreams, but she was pretty in a simple way. Someone must have been frantic to find her missing.

He lifted his palm from her neck, planning to get a washcloth, but was stopped when her hand shot up from her side, her fingers closing around his wrist with lightning speed.
Jesus
, he thought,
the reflexes of a cougar
. Her eyes opened, and she glanced around wildly as if she'd been trapped. “Shh,” Will soothed, and as he gently tugged to free himself, Jane let go, frowning as if she wasn't really sure why she'd grabbed him at all.

“Who
are
you?” she asked.

Will walked to the door and turned off the light. He looked away so that she would not be able to see his face.

“You don't want to know,” he said.

 

W
ILL
'
S FIRST MEMORY INVOLVED BAILING HIS FATHER OUT FROM JAIL
.

He was three, and he remembered the way his mother looked standing in front of the sheriff. She was tall and proud and even in the dim lighting she looked very, very pale. “There's been a mistake,” she said. “Mr. Flying Horse is one of my employees.”

Will did not understand why his mother would say his father worked for her, when she knew that he worked for Mr. Lundt on the ranch. He did not understand the word “assault” although he thought “battery” had something to do with making Christmas toys work. The sheriff, a man with a florid cauliflower face, stared closely at Will and then spat not an inch away from his foot. “Ain't no mistake, ma'am,” the sheriff said. “You know these goddamned Indians.”

His mother's face had pinched closed, and she pulled out her wallet to pay the fines his father had been charged. “Release him,” she hissed, and the sheriff turned to walk down a corridor. Will watched him grow smaller and smaller, the pistol at his hip winking each time he passed a window.

Will's mother knelt down beside him. “Don't you believe a word he says,” she told him. “Your father was trying to help.”

What he learned, years later, was that Zachary Flying Horse had been in a bar when there was an incident. A woman was being hassled by two rednecks, and when he'd stepped in to intervene, a fight had broken out. The woman had run out of the bar, so when the police came it was Zack's word against that of two white locals.

Zachary stepped out of the corridor in the jail behind the sheriff. He did not touch his wife. “Missus,” he said solemnly. “Will.” He lifted his boy up onto his shoulders and carried him into the hot Dakota sun.

They walked halfway down the block before Will's father swung him off his shoulders and caught his wife up in a tight embrace. “Oh, Anne,” he sighed against her hair. “I'm sorry to put you through that.”

Will pulled on the edge of his father's plaid shirt. “What did you
do
, Pa?”

Zack grabbed Will's hand and started down the street again. “I was born,” he said.

 

I
T WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPOSSIBLE FOR HER TO MISS THE NOTE
W
ILL
had left her, sitting as it was on the toilet lid with a fresh towel, toothpaste, a twenty-dollar bill, and a key.
Jane
, Will had written,
I've gone to work. I'll ask around about your husband, and I'll try to call later today with some answers. I don't have anything in the refrigerator so if you get hungry, go down to the market (3 blocks east). Hope you're feeling better. Will.

She brushed her teeth with her finger and looked at the note again. He hadn't said anything about what she should do if she awakened with a perfect understanding of her name and address—not that it really mattered, since she still couldn't remember. At least she was lucky. Her chances of running into a drug addict or a pimp on Sunset Boulevard had been much greater than running into someone from out of town, someone who'd leave a perfect stranger his house key and twenty dollars without asking any questions or expecting something in return.

A light came into her eyes. She
could
do something in return; she could unpack for him. Her taste in decorating might not be like his—in fact, she had no idea what her own taste was like—but surely having the pots and pans in the cabinets and the towels in the linen closet would be a nice thing to come home to.

Jane threw herself into the task of putting Will's house in order. She organized the kitchen and the bathroom and the broom closet, but she didn't really have to get creative until she got to the living room. There, in two boxes, carefully layered in newspaper, was a series of Native American relics. She unwrapped beautiful quilled moccasins and a long tanned hide painted with the image of a hunt. There was an intricate quilt and a fan made of feathers and a circular beaded medallion. At the bottom of the box was a small leather pouch trimmed with beads and bright feathers, on which was drawn a running horse. It was closed tight with a sinew thong, and although she tried, she could not open the bag to see its contents.

She did not know what most of these objects were but she handled them as gently as she could, and she began to piece together more about Will. She looked around the bare walls and thought,
If I were in a strange place, I'd want something that reminds me of home.

 

N
O ONE HAD COME BY THE
A
CADEMY LOOKING FOR A MISSING
woman. Will spent the day being introduced by the captain to other people in the LAPD, getting his badge and his assignment. When he registered for his gun, the officer who took down the information asked if he'd rather have a tomahawk; his new partner got a great kick out of calling him Crazy Horse. But these were things he'd faced before. He did not see the officer who'd blackened his eye; however, Beverly Hills was a separate precinct. When giggling secretaries asked about the bruise, he shrugged and said someone had gotten in his way.

It was after four o'clock before he got up the nerve to knock on his new captain's door and tell him about Jane. “Come over here,” Watkins said, waving Will inside. “You think you got the hang of things yet?”

Will shook his head. “It's different.”

Watkins grinned. “South Dakota it's not,” he said. “A couple of celebrity traffic violations, a drug bust, and it'll be old hat.”

Will shifted in his seat. “I wanted to speak to you about a missing persons case,” he said. “Actually, I want to know if—” He stopped, and smoothed his palms against his thighs to gain his composure. There was no right way to go about saying he'd skirted procedure; Jane should have been brought into the precinct and photographed by now. “I found a woman last night who's got amnesia. We went to the hospital, but since it was late, I didn't bring her in right away.” Will looked up at the captain. “Have you heard anything?”

The older man shook his head slowly. “Since you weren't on duty yet,” he said, “I'm not going to count this against you. But she needs to be brought in for questioning.” Watkins looked up at Will, and at that moment Will knew that in spite of the captain's absolution, he would start out with a strike against him. “Could be her memory loss is related to a crime.” Watkins fixed Will with a sharp glance. “I assume you still know her whereabouts. I'd suggest you bring her down as soon as possible,” he said.

Will nodded, and started toward the door. “And Officer,” Watkins called after him, “from here on, you play by the rules.”