wearing any rings, only a no-nonsense multifunctional black watch. The emergency room wasn’t a zoo yet, but everyone was preparing for the worst. Dix sat himself in the nearly empty waiting room after they had wheeled her away, and prepared to read his way through a National Geographic magazine dated 1997.
He heard her cry out. He rose automatically, took a step toward the curtained-off cubicle.
“Sheriff, we need to do some paperwork here.”
He did his best, but since he had no clue who she was or what her medical history was, there were mostly blank lines left on the forms after her name, Jane Doe.
Dix pulled out his cell and called Emory Cox for a status report. “This is weird, Sheriff, we’ve only had one call. It was a wrong number if you can believe that.”
“No, I don’t believe that. It was probably an abuse call, and chances are the wife will show up tomorrow with a broken nose and bruises everywhere. We’ll see.”
“So far everyone seems to be staying in tonight, not being stupid.”
“Let’s hope our luck holds up, Emory. I’m at the hospital. I do have something of a situation here.” He detailed to Emory how he’d found the woman, knowing of course that Amalee had probably already told half the people in town all about it. “I want you to send two of our disaster deputies—Claus and B.B. Claus can drive his four-wheeler out to my property. They need to find the woman’s car—No, I don’t know what kind of car she was driving because, as I said, she can’t seem to remember anything right now. I want you to check around the county for any reports of missing young women. If she can’t tell us who she is by tomorrow morning, we’ll run her fingerprints through IAFIS; maybe we’ll get lucky. Tomorrow, if necessary, you can take a photo of her, and we’ll send it out. Check all the local B-and-Bs, hotels, and motels within a fifteen-mile radius of Maestro. All I can say is that she’s in her mid-thirties, dark hair, light complexion, really green eyes. She’s on the lean side, a runner maybe. Her arms and legs felt strong when I checked her for broken bones. She’s tall, maybe five-foot-nine, -ten. Of course, the car would tell us everything we need to know. Her ID’s probably in there, or we can identify her from the plates, so emphasize to Claus and B.B. that the car’s the priority.”
Thirty minutes later, Dr. Mason Crocker came over to him in the waiting room. “She seems to be all right, Sheriff, at least physically. The CT scan was clear. There is no evidence of any anatomic injury other than that head wound. She may have suffered a concussion, but I think she’s also got some drugs on board. Her eyes don’t seem right to me; they’re dilated and glassy. She’s restless and her heart rate is up. I can’t quite place it—it’s not one of the usual drug effects we see. We’ve sent off a toxicology screen on her.”
“Do you think she was drugged? Poisoned?”
Dr. Crocker shrugged. “I wouldn’t discount it. She seems to be coming out of it. We’ll need to keep her for a while, though.”
“Yeah, check it out, that’s good.”
“You said you found her in your woods.”
“Yeah. Brewster did, actually.”
“No ID?”
“There could be a purse out there somewhere but she told me she never took a purse out—to do what, she didn’t remember. I’ll send my boys out to look tomorrow.”
Dr. Crocker said, “She says she can’t remember who she is, how she was hurt, or how she ended up unconscious in your woods.”
“Do you think she’s faking it?”
Dr. Crocker shook his head. “No, I don’t. It could be what we call hysterical amnesia. Her memory loss relates to particular memories, and is sharply bounded. For example, she can tell me who the president is, she can talk about the pitiable state of the Redskins. Sometimes when people are badly hurt or terrorized, they need to forget for a while, to protect themselves. Hey, I hope she’s not an escapee from Dobb’s Women’s Prison.”
“I hope not, too. Tell you what, I’ll give them a call, have them do a bed check. That was a joke, Doc.”
“Maybe she was out camping, something like that.”
“In this weather?”
“Hey, maybe she’s from California. You know, Sheriff, if someone struck her on the head to rob her, they could have taken her ID.”
Eyebrow up, Dix said, “Yeah, that occurred to me.”
“So what are we going to do with her? If she does okay tonight, she can be out of here, medically, in the morning.”
“I’ll have to think about that. Hope you stay bored tonight, Doc.”
CHAPTER 5
“THANKS FOR THE lift, Penny,” Dix said to his thirty-year-old deputy, who knew how to box and was married to the local funeral home director, as she pulled into his driveway. “Hope you got a lot of hot coffee.”
“Tommy wouldn’t let me out the front door unless I filled his super-giant-size thermos to the brim with the sludge he calls coffee. I’ll be fine, Sheriff.”
Brewster and both boys were waiting for him and wanted every gory detail. It wasn’t until well after one in the morning that Dix, Brewster curled up against his back, finally got himself to sleep. The snow was back to a light powder the following morning, with about a new foot on the ground. Dix made breakfast while the boys shoveled the driveway and looked in the woods where he had found the woman. Brewster supervised, which meant he ran around them in circles until he was exhausted. Rob brought him back into the house and left him in the kitchen, next to the warm stove. “He nearly bought it in a deep patch of snow, Dad. I think he’s had enough. We didn’t find the lady’s wallet, or a purse, or anything. There’s too much snow.”
“I appreciate your looking. Come and sit down now, breakfast is ready.”
If there was something Dix considered himself good at, it was breakfast. The house smelled of fried bacon, eggs over easy, brown sugar on oatmeal, and blueberry muffins. By ten o’clock, the boys were off with their sleds slung over their shoulders to Breaker’s Hill, where most of Maestro’s teenagers would be congregated along with some of the hardier parents. Dix finished shoveling the driveway and drove to the hospital. On the way, he checked in with his deputies, who, thankfully, had nothing dire to report, no six-car pileups or downed electrical wires. Nor had anyone found an abandoned car. Nor were there any local missing persons reported. And not a single woman of her description had registered at any B-and-B or motel in the immediate area. Dix supposed he’d expected her to be registered at Bud Bailey’s Bed & Breakfast, where most people stayed if they visited Maestro. Someone had obviously hit her. Had they left her unconscious in his woods, or had she managed somehow to get away from them, and then collapsed in the woods? All he needed was her car. Could the people who whacked her over the head have driven it off? Hidden it somewhere?
Maybe she’d come here for a specific reason, a reason someone didn’t like. Or maybe that someone had moved her a good distance away from where she’d been brought down. The main roads were already plowed and the light snow falling wasn’t going to be much of a problem. The forecast was for more snow, though, becoming heavy in the late afternoon. Emory called to check in.
Dix said, “Someone’s got to have seen her, sold her gas, supplies, something.”
“Maybe she’s here with someone.”
“If that were the case, they surely would have called us when she went missing.”
Emory sighed. “Maybe her old man is the one who tried to off her.”
“She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring,” Dix said.
“I don’t either, Sheriff, and I’m so married Marty can finish my sentences.”
“It’s odd, but she didn’t seem married to me.”
Emory wondered what that meant, but he let it go.
Dix found Dr. Crocker, more rumpled than he’d been the night before, a stethoscope nearly falling off his neck, at the nurses’ station on the second floor.
“You ever go home last night, Doc?”
“Nah, I haven’t left the hospital for six weeks now. Just kidding, Sheriff. Now, our girl is trying really hard not to show it, but she’s scared—understandable since she had a pretty rough night of it and still can
’t remember who she is or how she came to be in your woods. The head wound’s okay. Since it’s the weekend, most of the toxicology screen won’t be ready until sometime Monday.”
Dix asked Dr. Crocker a few more questions, then he found room 214. It was a double room, but she was the
