To the Edge (24 page)

On many levels, that now shamed her. She'd always known who she was and what she wanted, and she'd gone after it with unflagging tenacity. She'd been aggressive, competitive, and focused on the brass ring. Her news stories had been a means to an end, platforms to elevate her to the next level in her career.

With John—well, somewhere along the line things had changed. It was no longer about her career. It was about— and God help her if anyone heard her put voice to her Pollyanna thoughts—helping him. It was about making a difference in a life other than her own, for a reason other than her own advancement. It was about a level of integrity she'd never realized was part and parcel of what made a good person as well as a good TV reporter.

But when he opened the door to her knock and his ghost gray eyes met hers with unrelenting nothingness, she honestly wondered if she was fooling herself into believing she was helping him more than she was hurting him.

"How does that make you feel, John? When someone turns you down for a job because you don't have a Social Security number and because you have no ID you can't acquire one?"

Nolan stood quietly in the background, watching the interplay between Jillian and her Forgotten Man, John Smith. He'd been trying for the better part of an hour to get a solid read on Smith's reaction to Jillian's questions. The poor SOB was spooky as hell. Not so much in appearance. There was nothing remarkable about him; he was paper-bag plain as a matter of fact, except for those eyes. Whoever said that the eyes were the windows to a man's soul had never met this man. His eyes gave little away in that department. His lack of emotion was chilling.

So far, Nolan had learned more about Jillian than he had about Smith. And his respect for her professionalism had hiked up another notch.

She was very careful with Smith. Careful of his feelings and gentle with her questions. Her concern for his comfort was real even as she probed. She cared about him, Nolan had realized early on. Not just as an interesting subject but as a person who had suffered and endured. She approached him not only as a journalist but also as a fellow human being who was concerned for his well-being. She wanted to help him.

"John?" Jillian prodded gently when several moments had passed and he hadn't reacted to her question. "How does it make you feel?"

Smith seemed to come out of his semitrance. "How do you want me to feel?" he asked, staring not at Jillian but at the wail behind her head. "Angry? Defeated?" He lifted a shoulder, more apathy than reaction. "What's the point? It is the law. I can't fight it. I no longer wish to try."

They were the most words Smith had strung together since they'd arrived for the interview. Nolan could see the excitement warring with patience in Jillian's eyes. She was hoping it might be the beginning of a breakthrough.

Her gaze steady on Smith, she inched forward on the wooden chair, leaning closer to him where he sat on the edge of an unmade bed, feet flat on the floor, hands gripping his knees.

"I understand your frustration—"

"No," Smith interrupted with a sharp shift of his gaze to Elian. In that instant his mask of indifference melted away in an inferno of rage—a rage he attempted and failed to extinguish with a long, deep breath. "No one can understand, Ms. Kincaid. Do not presume to think anyone—-even you—could understand."

Bitterness. Anger. Resentment.

Nolan felt them full bore—directed at his circumstances? Or at Jillian for reminding him of them?

"Then help me understand, John," she said after a long silence. "Share with me what it does to you."

"Share what it does to hear someone call me John and know it's not my name?" His voice rose. "Share what it does to see my reflection in a window when I walk by and see only the face of a stranger?" The hands resting on his knees clenched into fists. "Tell me what you want me to say? I'll say it. Then you can leave."

Adrenaline shot through Nolan's blood like a bullet. He moved to Jillian's side as a silence, heavy with acid rage, hung in the aftermath of Smith's words.

From apathy to activist in one easy step. Smith was pissed. His ghost gray eyes fairly burned with anger.

"This is over," Smith announced abruptly.

"I've upset you."

Nothing.

"John—you do realize I'm trying to help you?"

Christ Why didn't she just give up on him? Everyone in the room, including Smith, knew the man was a lost cause. Except her.

"You need to go now;"

Jillian's shoulders sagged in defeat. "All right," she said. "When can we schedule another time?"

The venom welling up in Smith's eyes when he connected with hers had Nolan moving between them. Fast.

"We're done." Smith glanced at Nolan, then Jillian. "Don't come back."

Smith rose and walked to the door. Where he stood after swinging it wide open and waited for them to leave.

"I'd let you think about it for a while, OK?" Jillian asked in one final attempt to change his mind. "Just think about it. I'll be back in touch."

Garrett sat on the sofa in her penthouse, rolling a bottle of root beer between his palms while she stared out the windows overlooking Lake Worth. They'd returned to the station hours ago and Jillian had done her evening newscast. And all she could think about was John Smith.

"He hates me, doesn't he?"

Garrett was quiet for a while before responding.

"Smith? Probably," he said, and for some reason she was grateful he was there, understanding instinctively that she was talking about John Smith, not Wellington, who had been an ass again before and during tonight's live newscast. "Most of all, he hates his life. Hates his circumstances. The void."

"I remind him of everything he's lost."

"Yes," Garrett agreed. "Which places you firmly in the kill-the-messenger category."

She crossed her arms, cupped her elbows in her palms, and shuddered. "I hate what I do, sometimes."

"Because he's started to matter to you more than the piece?"

She looked over her shoulder, regarded him with renewed interest. He didn't miss much, this man who didn't want to engage with her on any level but professional.

"I think it's possible he's harboring some underlying hostility where you're concerned."

He was right, but he was wrong where he was going with this. "John isn't the one threatening me," she said wearily.

He considered her, his face expressionless. "I want to see every note, every piece of tape that's been shot, since you started this."

Of course he did. "Is there any point in fighting you?"

He didn't bother to reply.

She turned back to the window. It had felt so good in the beginning, when she'd first contacted John. It had felt like she'd been helping. And now... now she just felt tired.

"You know, you have messages," Garrett said, his voice soft.

She glanced at him and then at her phone. Yeah. She knew. Just like she somehow knew even before she listened to them what she would find.

"Go ahead " she said, then waited in tense silence as he rose, walked to the answering machine, and pressed the
play
button.

"Delete it," she said dispassionately when Steven Fowler identified himself on the first voice mail.

The second wasn't as easy to dismiss.

It was the same childlike, genderless voice that had delivered the first threat. And the chill it sent through her blood felt like arctic ice.

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty thought he would fall.

He pushed Jillian instead.

Now Jillian is dead.

And the king's men gave her father a call.

Soon, Jillian. He'll be crying over you."

Jillian closed her eyes, pressed her forehead against the plate glass, and listened through a numbing mist as Garrett dialed the police department, then asked for Detective Laurens.

John watched Mary ease carefully out of bed and limp toward the bathroom. He rubbed his eyes. His head hurt. Jillian Kincaid's interviews cut worse than rusty knives. Abraided like coarse sandpaper rubbing against third-degree burns.

"Do you need an aspirin?"

He didn't bother to look at her. Look at her standing there with blood on her lip and in pain that he'd caused and ask if he needed an aspirin.

He rolled to his side away from her—not knowing if she was savior or Satan. Not caring.

"How did the job go today?" Her voice reached him from die bathroom over the sound of running tap water.

His job. The one she'd gotten for him. Washing dishes on the night shift in a hotel restaurant was demeaning, but it was a job, the first steady job anyone had given him in three months. Thanks to Mary.

He heard her walk back to the bed. Felt her slight weight as she eased down on the mattress beside him and held out two tablets.

"Why do you do this? Why do you come here?"

"Because you need me," she said, stroking her hand over ins hair. "Because I need you."

What he needed was to be left alone. To fade back into the void he'd created to escape the pain of reality. The reality— he didn't know who he was and he was beginning to care. The void had protected him from facing it.

"It's OK, baby," she whispered with a tenderness that made his eyes sting.

He rolled to his back again, crossed his arms behind his bead, and closed his eyes. Lonely men had hope.

Had he ever felt this lonely?

Mary made him face the despair when she came to him. She made him feel—she and Jillian Kincaid, whose endless questions reminded him how many answers he lacked.

He truly didn't know who he hated more. Himself, for being so weak, Mary, for making him feel both guilty and cruel far using her, or Jillian Kincaid for poking at his wounds with a machette.

Mary said she wanted to share his life. Yet because of her, he felt more disconnected and conflicted than ever. How could he share a life that had evolved less than two years when he awoke in a hospital bed with no memory? And how, after the physical intimacies he and Mary had shared, could he feel more emotion toward Jillian Kincaid?

He hated Jillian Kincaid for her endless questions.

And he had to do something to stop her.

Mary turned off the tap, ran cold water on the washcloth, then pressed it to her face. In the other room, John slept. Tormented but spent. She understood torment. Had lived it, begged to be released from it as only a child, helpless and confused, could beg.

She was no longer a child. But she wore the child's scars, inside and out.

Harsh light from the bare fluorescent bulb over the bathroom sink cast garish shadows over eyes red and swollen from crying. She was ashamed. Ashamed of the weakness that had made her give in to the tears. Pain had been a staple in her life for as long as she had memories. So now she asked for it. Expected it. How else could she know she existed?

With John, it wasn't all pain. He could be gentle at times. Giving. It was the gentleness she didn't trust.

But that wasn't why she had come to him. And that wasn't why she stayed.

She dabbed the cloth to a small cut at the corner of her mouth and thought of exactly why she'd sought him out. Why she'd arranged for their first meeting last week to appear to be by chance.

She smiled.
Clever girl.
Then she sobered. It saddened her to use him. She knew his pain just as she knew her own. She, too, had been nothing. She, too, had been no one but not because she'd lost her memory as John had.

Staring at her pale reflection in the cracked mirror, she remembered all too well the loneliness of the little girl who had grown up with nothing.

"Both Jillian and Darin Kincaid will pay for what was done to me," she whispered.

Soon. She sensed the time must be soon. The bodyguard had become an issue. And John, instead of becoming more malleable, was growing more remote. A few more days. She just needed a few more days and Daddy's little darling would be Daddy's little dead darling.

16

MlDAFTERNOON THE NEXT DAY, NOLAN headed east on Okeechobee and away from the station.

"I need to check in at E.D.E.N," he'd said.

Despite his machinelike demeanor and Jillian's conflicted emotions, they'd finally reached an unspoken and tentative ceasefire of some sort. Oh yeah, and they'd played a little kissie face in one of her major moments of weakness, Let's not forget that.

As a matter of fact, if it weren't for the elevated concern of the Palm Beach PD over the latest threatening message. Jillian would have spent the bulk of her time thinking about Garrett and the unsettling effect he had on her.

Maybe she was scared stupid.

She pressed her fingers to her temples, thought of the voice message on her machine last night.
Soon, Jillian. He'll be crying over you.

Yeah. Maybe she was scared stupid. For sure, she was scared.