Without a Past Read online

  Andi would have groaned but she didn’t want her sister to get the wrong idea. Jenny had been known to play match-maker a time or two—usually with disastrous consequences. “Great. Maybe I can challenge Harley to a bench-press competition.”

  “My money’s on you, sis,” Jenny said, her tone ripe with humor.

  “Gee, thanks.” Andi sighed. “Well, I’d better go air out her room. I’ve been storing coffee-shop supplies in there. She won’t be happy. She’s gotten a little irritable lately.” At least where I’m concerned.

  “Make sure you place her bed by the window. She insists she can’t sleep without fresh air,” Jenny advised.

  Andi wedged the phone under one ear and started to climb down the skinny rungs of metal tubing. “Whatever.”

  “Oh, wait,” Jenny cried with such volume Andi almost lost her footing.

  “What?” Her knuckles whitened as she regained her balance.

  “I wanted to ask your advice about birth control,” Jenny said with a hushed whisper.

  Andi looped her arm under the rung for better leverage then moved the phone to the opposite ear. “It’s not a problem for me. I don’t have a sex life. And anyway, Jen, aren’t you getting into the birth control game a little late?”

  “I told you, Andi, Sam and I decided not to make love before the wedding. He’s got it in his head that he wants to be able to tell the kids that we didn’t sleep together before we were married.”

  The only reason Andi believed that was because she knew Sam O’Neal. He was truly an honorable man.

  “Whatever,” Andi returned. “I just meant that you should have started on the Pill a month ago to be safe.”

  Jenny groaned. “I don’t like taking anything when I’m nursing.”

  “So, stop nursing. The twins are six months old. You did good, Jenny Perfect.” Jenny hated her childhood nickname. “By the way, why are you whispering?”

  “The twins are watching me. Tucker can almost pull himself up. He’s going to be walking long before his first birthday.”

  Andi grinned for real. She loved her niece and nephew. But they made her all too aware of what she lacked in her own life—a husband, children and a home with her name on the deed. Andi felt as though her whole life had been spent in transition, but transition to what? She didn’t have a clue.

  “Gotta run, sis. Thanks for the heads-up. Maybe if I’m lucky, she won’t notice the scaffolding.”

  “The roof has to be replaced, Andi. We’ve all tried to explain that to her. Nothing stays the same, even though she wants to believe otherwise.”

  Andi dropped to the ground and let out a deep sigh. Too true, sister dear. Change is coming.

  Andi had been selected to fill Ida’s seat on the Chamber of Commerce Board, and rumors were flying about big development companies with big plans for her little town. Who knew what kind of changes were coming to Gold Creek?

  “LET’S TAKE the long way back to town,” the woman to Harley’s right suggested.

  He might have taken the hint to mean something else if his passenger wasn’t in her eighties. He cranked the steering wheel of the rattletrap flatbed to the left. “Sure thing, Miss Ida. My pleasure.”

  Harley was happy at the chance to escort Ida Jane Montgomery back to the town of Gold Creek. He liked spending time with the talkative old woman. Of all the people he’d met, Ida Jane seemed to understand him best. Of course, her forgetfulness was a result of age and very different from the huge gap in his memory caused by the accident. Still, Harley felt very comfortable around her.

  “Tell me more about the triplets when they were growing up,” he said as the truck started to climb. At the summit, a turnout provided a vista of the Rocking M, the ranch where he worked and where Ida Jane had been living with her great-niece, Jenny Sullivan O’Neal for the past six months.

  Ida shifted on the dusty bench seat. The morning sun streaming through the window made her thin bonnet of silver hair glow like a halo. “Believe you me, there’s nothing easy about triplets, but my three were treasures. Each one an individual from the very beginning.” Her smile was poignantly sweet, and Harley felt nostalgic for something he didn’t understand. Did he have family somewhere thinking kind thoughts about him?

  He brushed aside the disturbing thought as the old woman continued. “Jenny was the little mother. People called her Jenny Perfect growing up. Andi was the worrier. And Kristin…” Her look turned wistful. “She used to be happy-go-lucky and carefree, but she isn’t anymore. People change, you know.”

  Harley tried to imagine what it must have been like for a single woman in her fifties to take on three orphaned infants. “You must have had your hands full,” he said.

  She shrugged elaborately. “Everybody in Gold Creek pitched in, from the minister to the school-bus driver. It wasn’t so bad. For the first few months, we worked in shifts.”

  The rutted pavement, which had returned to gravel in some spots, meandered around Carson Peak, a minor pinnacle in the Central Sierras. The Rocking M occupied six hundred acres of scrub bush, bull pines and grassy meadows on the mountain’s shoulder. Harley couldn’t say for certain whether or not he’d ever seen a more peaceful setting, but the foothills in spring were something to behold. The lush green that covered the hillsides was dotted with patches of a tiny white wildflower the locals called popcorn. California poppies and blue dicks swayed in the morning breeze.

  He eased the creaky old truck to the side of the road. “Isn’t this view something? I can’t imagine wanting to live anyplace else.”

  Ida Jane’s fluttery sigh sounded sad. “I grew up here, you know. Too many years ago to count.”

  “On the Rocking M?” Harley asked, wondering for a second if she was confused about the facts.

  “Where do you suppose the M came from?” she asked with a gamine wink. “My daddy. Penrod Montgomery.”

  Harley had heard a slew of family sagas since arriving at the ranch. Cowboys were great storytellers, but he had no way of discerning truth from fabrication.

  “I must have missed that tale. Wanna tell me about it while we drive?”

  Ida Jane folded her hands in her lap. “My mother and father took over the ranch after her folks passed in a bad flu epidemic. Daddy wasn’t much of a rancher. When he knew he was going to come up short paying the taxes, he threw the deed on the line in a game of poker. And lost.”

  Harley couldn’t help but flinch. That sounded like a pretty risky proposition. Would he be that adventurous? He doubted it. Maybe before he lost his memory. Now, he was content to follow Hank’s directives and collect a regular paycheck.

  Occasionally he questioned this lack of ambition, but not often. Questions brought worries, worries brought dreams. Bad dreams.

  “Daddy never forgave the fella who won it. A neighbor named Bill Scott.” She made a soft snickering sound. “Made things pretty uncomfortable when my younger sister, Suzy, married the man.”

  The connection didn’t surprise Harley. After listening to bunkhouse gossip, he decided everyone in Gold Creek was either related to or had close ties with nearly everyone else in town. Except him.

  “One night the house burned down with Bill in it. Just an awful tragedy. Suzy sold the place pretty soon after that. She took Lorena—her little girl—and went traveling.” Ida sighed. “I didn’t see either one for nearly ten years. When they finally came back, my sister was sick. She died just after Lori graduated from high school. Tragedy seems overly fond of my family, I fear. You heard about Lori’s accident, right?”

  Harley nodded. The first night he’d spent in the bunkhouse, in fact. He’d casually asked about Andi Sullivan, the pretty girl he’d met when Lars Gunderson, the old miner who’d saved Harley’s life, dropped him off at the ranch. Petey, a sixtyish ranch hand, had related the tragic tale of the Sullivan triplets’ birth.

  A monumental blizzard combined with a car accident, heroic rescue and the sad deaths of two young parents was dramatic enough even without adding the m
iraculous birth of three tiny baby girls. As far as Harley could tell, Jenny, Andi and Kristin Sullivan had been the center of talk around Gold Creek for every one of their twenty-nine years.

  And they still are. He glanced at the newspaper on the seat beside him. Under a column labeled “Glory’s World” was the headline: Sullivan Triplet At It Again.

  For some reason, Harley was tempted to snatch it up and read the story. Instead, he made himself ask, “So who owned the ranch before Sam bought it?”

  Ida hoisted a fabric carryall to her lap and started digging in it. “A couple from back East. Reno, I believe. They were going to raise those funny-looking sheep with long hair. Can’t remember what they’re called.”

  “Alpaca?”

  She looked at him sharply, her eyes narrowing. “Sounds right.” Her thin lips pursed. “You don’t talk like any cowboy I ever knew.”

  Feeling uncomfortable under her scrutiny, Harley stepped on the gas. The old truck sputtered for a second then surged forward.

  “How come Jenny didn’t give you a ride into town this morning?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “Oh…she has her hands full taking care of Josh.”

  Josh? Although Harley hadn’t been living at the ranch at the time, he’d heard the whole sad story of Josh O’Neal’s death. Josh, Sam’s younger brother and Jenny’s husband, had died of cancer the day after Jenny gave birth to the twins. “You mean she’s busy with Tucker and Lara, right?”

  Ida Jane looked momentarily baffled then frowned. “That’s what I said.”

  Harley let it go. He knew how unnerving it was when your memory betrayed you. “How are the wedding plans coming?” he asked, more to be polite than out of curiosity.

  Of the seven-member crew that shared Sam’s bunkhouse, two felt it was wrong for Sam to marry his deceased brother’s wife. Three thought it was noble of Sam to want to provide for Jenny and the twins. One—an itinerant rodeo hound looking for a stake—didn’t give a damn one way or the other. And Harley had no opinion.

  The trouble with amnesia, he thought, is that you have no history upon which to base an opinion. From his observations, he believed that Sam and Jenny were genuinely kind to each other and seemed happiest when they were together. Was that enough to make a good marriage? Something told him not to bet on it.

  “Oh, fine. I think. They don’t tell me much.”

  Harley found that odd. Jenny didn’t seem the type to exclude her aunt. “Why is that?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Because my mind is going to hell in a handbasket.”

  Harley had overheard Sam and Jenny discussing Ida’s increasing forgetfulness, but she seemed pretty sharp to him most of the time.

  “Maybe they don’t want you to overdo,” he suggested. “Is that why you’re moving back to town? To rest up for the festivities?”

  “Maybe.”

  Her answer—instead of coming off coy—sounded confused. Harley’s heart went out to her. He didn’t always understand why he did certain things, either. Starting with why he’d been on a remote mountain road in the middle of a storm. All he knew for sure was that he’d woken up in a miner’s shack with a raging headache. His only possession—a scuffed leather Harley-Davidson jacket. He’d taken the name Harley from that emblem. But not a single memory of his life before that moment survived what both Lars, the miner who’d found him, and Donnie Grimaldo, the sheriff’s deputy who’d filed the report, figured had been a motorcycle accident.

  The bike he’d presumably been riding had disappeared, perhaps into one of the many steeply walled ravines near Lars’s Blue Lupine mine.

  “The twins are getting big,” Ida said, apropos of nothing.

  She opened her canvas bag and poked around a minute. “I have the article. About the birth. Quite the event, you know.” She pulled a crinkled clipping from the bag. “See here? ‘Jenny Sullivan O’Neal won’t be returning to town anytime soon. Caring for twin babies and an aging aunt—’” Ida Jane snorted indignantly. “Big Mouth Gloria Hughes. Who’s she calling aged? She’s no spring chicken herself.”

  Harley bit down on a smile.

  She cleared her throat and started reading again. “‘…aging aunt must be a handful. But Glory’s pleased to see a smile on sweet Jenny’s face the past couple of months, and we hope she’s found a bit of happiness after her grievous loss. We know she misses Josh—just like the rest of us, but life does march on.’”

  “Grievous,” Ida muttered. “Pretentious old biddy.”

  Harley swallowed his chuckle. “Jenny and Sam do seem to get along well,” he said sincerely. “What does Andi think about the wedding?”

  Harley didn’t doubt for a minute that the real reason he’d volunteered to give Ida Jane a ride home was the likelihood of seeing feisty Andi Sullivan. Which was both a good thing and bad.

  Good because a little verbal sparring stimulated his mind; bad because stimulation of any kind kept him awake at night with a sickening headache caused by dreams he couldn’t remember in the morning.

  He’d bumped into Andi the night before last when he’d joined two of the younger ranch hands in town for a beer. Andi had been at the Slowpoke Saloon with a group of friends when Harley arrived. To his surprise, she’d asked him to dance when the jukebox played a mellow tune. He’d enjoyed every moment of holding her in his arms, but later—alone in his bunk—he’d had to claw his way past blistering pain. He’d awoken in a pool of sweat and had barely made it to the bathroom before losing the contents of his stomach.

  Do all amnesiacs have bad dreams? Or just me? Maybe my past is so bad that I’m afraid to remember it. Unconsciously, Harley reached up to run his fingers over the irregular scar at his temple.

  “That still bothering you?” Ida Jane asked.

  He glanced sideways. Ida Jane appeared the quintessential grandmother—silver hair cut short and functional, her glossy skin marred with irregular brown age spots. Harley wondered, not for the first time, whether or not he might have a grandmother somewhere in the world. He hoped not. He didn’t want to think he might be worrying an old lady by having dropped out of her life so suddenly.

  “No, ma’am. Itched like heck for a while. Now I rub it out of habit.”

  “I’ve always felt a scar lends a person character. It seems to say you weren’t afraid to take risks.” He could feel her staring at his profile. “You have a nice, handsome face, but that scar will keep it from being too…perfect.”

  Harley had spent a good deal of time the past three months staring at his face in the mirror trying to find some clue to who he was, and although he was satisfied that his looks weren’t going to frighten young children, he wouldn’t classify himself as handsome. His nose was…pugnacious, and the line of his jaw was too short. His eyes were blue, and his hair—probably his best feature—was thick and wavy. A medium brown now laced with gold—thanks to his recent stint at mending fences in the California sunshine.

  “No worry there, Miss Ida. I’m a long way from perfect. Especially when it comes to fixing fences. Look at these cuts.” He held up his right hand to prove it. Three bandage strips adorned his thumb and index finger; two more were on the heel of his hand.

  “Could be you’re in the wrong trade. You have a fine way with words. Maybe you were a teacher,” she suggested.

  Ida Jane wasn’t the first person to comment on his less-than-impressive performance as a cowboy. At his doctor’s suggestion, Harley had pored over lists of other professions to see if anything jumped out at him. So far, nothing had.

  “I don’t think I have the patience to work with kids,” Harley told her. “But I do like to write. The doctor I saw at the Gold Creek Clinic when Lars first brought me into town suggested I keep a journal. She said sometimes the mind heals so slowly we can overlook signs because we become comfortable with the way our lives are—not what they could be.”

  “My, my,” Ida Jane said. “A local doctor told you that? Most of the ones I’ve known couldn’t prescribe their way
out of a paper bag without directions.”

  Harley chuckled. Dr. Franklin had been gentle and kind, but in the end there wasn’t much she could do. She was a general practitioner who said her lone brush with amnesia had come on a psych rotation in medical school some twenty years earlier. Although curious and concerned, the best she could say was that he was in overall good health, and there was a chance his memory would return.

  “Dr. Franklin wanted to run some tests and consult a specialist, but I don’t have the cash,” Harley admitted.

  “Doesn’t Sam give you health insurance?”

  He nodded. “It works if you break a leg. But the lady at the clinic said most plans would consider this a preexisting condition and would probably deny coverage.”

  Ida Jane was silent for a few miles then said, “Like I said, you don’t talk like any cowboy I’ve ever known.”

  Harley remembered that her grandniece had expressed the same opinion the day they met.

  “He’s no cowboy,” Andi had said moments after being introduced to him. She’d looked at Jenny and Sam as if waiting for the punch line to a joke.

  When Sam confirmed that Harley was indeed his newest employee, Andi had remained unconvinced. “No offense, Harley, but you walk like an accountant, talk like a politician and smell like a pothead,” she’d told him.

  Harley had been offended. At first. But then he realized her observation was amazingly accurate. He hadn’t taken the job at the Rocking M out of any sense of familiarity. He didn’t know a halter from a heifer, but he’d felt even less affinity with mining. Closed spaces made him uncomfortable, and he’d been almost sick to his stomach the first time Lars tried to get him to climb down a twenty-foot ladder.

  When the old miner suggested ranch work as a possible source of employment, Harley had jumped at the chance.

  His peculiar body odor could be attributed to his recuperation period in a tiny cabin shared with the pot-smoking loner named Lars Gunderson. Brusque. Isolationist. A renegade from society, Lars smoked ten to twelve joints a day and still managed to work his gold mine by hand.