The Prettiest One: A Thriller (9 page)

He squinted at her. “Just what the hell is this? I don’t get what you’re up to here, Katie. Is this some kind of scam you and this guy are pulling? Is that what this is? Some kind of weird setup? Because I just don’t see the angle.”

Caitlin thought he looked hurt but was too manly to let it show.

“How long did she live here?” Josh asked.

“None of your business, brother,” the man said.

“The hell it’s not,
brother
,” Josh said. “So answer the damn question.”

The man gave Josh a hard glare that reminded Caitlin of a sharp-edged weapon.

“Listen,” she said, jumping in, “would you please humor me? I’ll explain everything. I promise. Okay?”

The man shifted his gaze over to Caitlin, and the edge on it dulled a bit. He shrugged.

“Okay,” Caitlin said. “First of all, what’s your name?”

“You gotta be shitting me,” the guy said.

“Please, just tell me your name. I promise we’ll explain everything.”

The man let loose a soft chuckle that was clearly meant to say,
This is bullshit, but I’ll go along for now.
“Bixby. Desmond Bixby. Parents call me Dez, nearly everyone else calls me Bix. But you usually call me baby.”

She wasn’t about to call him baby. “Mr. Bixby . . . Bix . . . this is going to sound crazy, but I don’t remember you.”

The man, Bix, blinked once, then again. “Bullshit,” he said.

“No, it’s true,” Caitlin said. “It sounds strange, I know, but I can’t remember anything about the last seven months.”

Bix looked from her to Josh, then back to her. “What the hell are you two up to? What are you trying to tell me?”

“The truth,” Josh said.

“The truth,” Bix repeated. “She can’t remember anything?”

“Not about the past seven months.”

“What are we talking about here?” Bix asked. “Amnesia? Like in the movies?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but . . . yes,” Caitlin said. “We came here today to try to figure out what happened to me. How I ended up here. Why I . . .” She trailed off. She had almost said,
Why I woke up with a gun and a bag of fake hands, covered with blood
. “What I did here,” she added.

Bix squinted his gray eyes at her again. Then a little light twinkled in them. “Are you messing with me, Katie? Is this some kind of weird joke?” He smiled as if acknowledging that she’d almost had him.

She shook her head sadly. “I really wish it were.” Bix’s smile disappeared. “But you have to believe me when I tell you that I don’t remember you at all. I’m truly sorry if that hurts your feelings,” and at that she saw him smile, as though such a thing couldn’t hurt him, though she thought she could see that it did. “But it’s true, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t remember you. Or this house. Or this town. The last thing I remember, before essentially waking up across town last night, happened seven months ago.”

Bix looked at her . . . no, not at her, but into her eyes, and he held his gaze there.

“I’m lost here, Bix,” she added. “I’m lost, and you might be the only person who can save me.”

Caitlin couldn’t stop herself from stealing a glance at Josh, who was looking down now. She knew that probably hurt him, but she had spoken the truth. Bix might be able to tell her almost everything she’d done over the past seven months, everything she needed to know to patch the gaping hole in her mind.

“Seriously, Katie?” Bix said. “No bullshit?”

Caitlin shook her head. “No bullshit.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

BIX BELIEVED KATIE . . . THAT IS, Caitlin, as she was calling herself now. So much about her had changed. She looked the same as she had when she’d left the house yesterday, but her manner was different. She spoke in a softer voice than his Katie did. She seemed a little less sure of herself. She didn’t maintain eye contact for as long, while the Katie he knew grabbed your eyes with hers and wouldn’t let go. Tractor beams, he’d thought of them the first time they had locked onto his own eyes over a pool table in the back of a pub seven months ago.

Even though he believed that Katie—uh, Caitlin—wasn’t who he thought she was, that she didn’t remember him, he found it hard to believe . . . no, hard to
accept
. . . that their life together was over. But it had to be, right? If she were telling the truth, then the woman he had planned to spend the rest of his life with was as gone to him as if she’d never shown up at his door, either today or seven months ago. One minute he was waiting for her to come home, hoping she had maybe flopped at her friend Janie’s house after work last night rather than having run off on him—like he figured she must have run off on somebody before him. Then the next minute, she was standing on the porch with a new name and an old husband. And just like that, Bix had lost the only thing he loved about his life. And it wasn’t even like Bix could ask her to choose between him and her husband, because how could she choose Bix if she didn’t even remember him? How could she choose a life she couldn’t recall?

He had to try to accept that she no longer loved him, if she ever truly had. The problem was, he couldn’t just forget her the way she had forgotten him. Their life may not have been real to her, but it had been to him. And while she might never remember the past seven months, he’d always think of them as the best of his life. With sadness, he realized that he still loved her. So if she needed something from him before she disappeared forever with some other guy, if she needed answers, he’d give her what he could.

“Okay, then,” Bix said to Katie—no, Caitlin. “Guess we need to talk. First, though, I know it’s early, but I could use a beer.” He went into the kitchen, grabbed three Buds from the fridge, and returned to the living room. “I didn’t have any Perrier,” he said to Josh, handing him a beer.

“This is just fine, thanks,” Josh said with what Bix considered the appropriate level of attitude.

Next, Bix handed a beer to Caitlin.

“She doesn’t like beer,” Josh said.

“Since when?” Bix asked.

Caitlin looked at the beer in her hand.

“She’s never liked the taste,” Josh added.

“Sure she does,” Bix replied.

“I’m telling you, she’s not a beer girl. She’s more of a red-wine woman.”

“Well, she sure did a damn fine impression of a beer girl with me,” Bix said, smiling. “Never saw her drink wine, though.”

He looked over at Caitlin. She lifted the mouth of the bottle to her nose, took a sniff, then followed that with a small sip. Josh watched with a frown. Bix watched, smiling. Caitlin took another sip, a longer one, and swallowed.

“Looks like a beer girl to me,” Bix said. “Guess you don’t know her as well as you think you do, pal,” he said to Josh.

“It’s not that I never liked the taste,” she explained, turning to Josh. “I drank it when I first went to college. It’s just that you always prefer wine, and I like wine just fine, so that’s what we’ve always had together. I never really missed beer, but I never disliked it. And I have to admit, this tastes pretty good.”

Josh nodded and said nothing.

“Well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” Bix said. “What else do you need to know?”

“Well,” Caitlin began, “I guess . . . uh . . . everything.”

Bix talked and Caitlin listened. She also watched his mouth when he spoke, the way his lips formed words. She couldn’t help but think about the fact that she and Bix had lived together, right in this very apartment. According to him, they were even planning to get married in a few days. She wondered if they had talked about saving for a house of their own somewhere with its own yard and without a scary guard dog next door. She watched him speak, knowing that those lips must have kissed hers. How many times? Hundreds? A thousand? What else had they done to her? And his hands. She looked at them resting on the chair back in front of him. Big, strong hands. Her face felt warm. Was she blushing again? Was he looking at her lips now, thinking about them kissing his? About other things she had done with them? That, and her—

She tilted her bottle up, downed the last of her beer, and felt some go down the wrong way. She coughed.

“You okay?” Josh asked.

She coughed again, then nodded. “I’m fine. Sorry.”

“Where was I?” Bix asked.

“The bar,” Josh offered in a tone that left no doubt that he wanted Bix to spit out his story already so Josh could get Caitlin the hell away from there.

“Right. So she comes in. I’d never seen her there before—and this is one of my regular hangouts, understand—and she struts in like she owns the place.”

“Really?” Caitlin said. She didn’t think that sounded anything like her.

“Hell, yeah,” Bix said. “And I loved it. When I saw you walk in, it was like the air had been sucked from the room. It was like something very cool . . . something
special
. . . had happened, and everyone could feel it, only nobody else knew what it was yet. But I knew right away what it was. It was you.”

Caitlin heard Josh make some sort of derisive little sound, a species of snort. Caitlin, though, was surprised at the way Bix expressed his feelings.

“Soon enough, though,” Bix continued, “others noticed you. I had to elbow my way past a few local meatheads to buy you your first beer, but I made sure nobody but me bought you a drink that night.”

“That’s beautiful,” Josh said. “I’m getting teary.”

Keeping his eyes on Caitlin, Bix said, “You want to hear this or not, buddy?”

“No,
buddy
, I don’t. But Caitlin does, so lead on, MacDuff.”

“I don’t even give a shit what that’s supposed to mean,” Bix said. “So there you were, Katie”—not wanting to stop the flow of the story, Caitlin didn’t correct him—“wearing an attitude that didn’t match your conservative clothes. I bought you that beer, which you drained in three sips, by the way,” he added with a smile. “You told me your name was Katherine, and when I asked if you went by Katie, you said, ‘Sure.’ We hit it off, I bought you another beer, and before I could buy you a third, we left together. Came back here.”

Caitlin had a pretty good idea what happened next, at least if the story so far was true. “Bix, would you mind if we skipped ahead a little?”

“What’s that?” Then he smiled. “Yeah, sure. I just have to say, though . . . you may not remember that night, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t memorable.”

“Jesus, Caitlin,” Josh said. “Do you really want to hear this?”

“No,” she said, looking pointedly at Bix, “but there are things I do want to hear. That I need to hear. Bix, would you
please
not do that?”

He shrugged.

“How about just skipping to the parts we actually need to hear?” Josh said.

Bix thought for a moment. “Okay, but before I go on, I think we need to get something on the record. I hate to break it to you two, but Katie and I lived together for more than half a year. You think we never made it past first base?” He looked directly at Josh. “So do what you have to do to come to grips with that, or we’re gonna keep getting sidetracked.”

Caitlin gave Josh a sympathetic look. At first he scowled, then he shook his head and nodded, resigned.

“We all okay here, kids?” Bix asked.

“Let’s just move on,” Josh said.

“Okay,” Bix said. “So I start asking a few questions . . . you know, where are you from, what do you do for fun, your last name, things like that.”

“And I said my last name was Southard?” Caitlin asked.

He nodded. “I’m guessing it’s not.”

“No, it’s not. It’s Sommers.”

“Katherine Southard,” Josh said, looking at her, very deliberately avoiding looking Bix’s way. “Why would you use that name? Does it mean anything to you, hon?”

She thought about it. She ran through all the Katherines she could remember in her life. A few in grade school, two in high school, three in college, one to whom she sold a house last year. None of them had Southard for a surname. And Josh had already Googled the name on the Internet. It wasn’t somebody famous. Maybe she’d heard the name one time, possibly right before she disappeared, and adopted it as her own. Or maybe she’d simply made it up.

“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said.

“It sounds a lot like Caitlin Sommers, doesn’t it?” Josh asked. “You obviously weren’t in your right mind for whatever reason. Maybe you just scrambled your name a bit and it came out sounding like Katherine Southard.”

“Maybe,” Caitlin said.

“Anyway,” Bix said, “you weren’t really answering my questions that night. I told you everything you wanted to know about me, but it didn’t take me long to realize that you just didn’t want to talk about your past. And that was okay with me. A lot of women I meet in bars—hell, men, too—are living different lives than they’re letting on. Even after a day or two, when you hadn’t left my apartment yet and didn’t seem inclined to do so anytime soon, you weren’t exactly overly sharing. After three days, we both knew you weren’t going anywhere. We never talked about it, never agreed to it. You just didn’t leave and I didn’t want you to.”

“And the fact that I didn’t seem to want to tell you anything about myself didn’t bother you?” Caitlin asked.