The Mud Sisters Read online

  Teagan grinned. “Still obsessed with your appearance, I see.” She dropped into the thinly padded recliner that was the only other piece of furniture in the room.

  Jamie grinned back. “Some people try not to gross out the general public.” Her expression turned suddenly antsy, and she sat up. “I want out of here, Teag,” she commanded. “They can’t make me stay here any longer, can they? I can walk out whenever I want. Right?”

  Teagan let out a breath. Jamie had always been both smart and practical. Much more practical than Teagan herself. But in this case she was denying reality.

  “I just talked to the police,” Teagan began, deciding not to sugarcoat her message. “You were right; Knight isn’t your name. So they still haven’t been able to identify you. Nor has anyone come forward to file a missing persons report.”

  Jamie’s eyes swam with a flood of unreadable emotions, and Teagan’s heart ached as she searched for something—anything—uplifting to add. But for all intents and purposes, Jamie remained a “Jane Doe,” which meant that she was homeless, penniless, unemployed, and uninsured.

  The first problem Teagan hoped to remedy, at least temporarily. The last was proving more difficult. Jamie’s fracture had been stabilized. Her rebound from the blood loss and hypothermia had been amazingly quick, and her memory deficits alone—serious as they were—didn’t justify further treatment as an inpatient. Homeless or not, whole or not, Jamie would be discharged first thing in the morning.

  “If you were to leave,” Teagan asked quietly, “where would you go?”

  Jamie’s cheeks slowly reddened. Her gaze moved to the floor.

  “It’s my job as your social worker to make sure you’re released to a safe situation,” Teagan said after a moment. “Ordinarily, for an assault victim, that would be a women’s shelter.”

  Jamie’s chin jerked up. “I am not going to any shelter. Nobody is going to make me stay anywhere I don’t want to be!” Her eyes blazed with determination, but her voice betrayed the cry of a former foster child, still smarting over her own powerlessness.

  Teagan squelched a sympathetic sigh and walked to the window. Its view of the north side of the city—all concrete, brick, and dirty snow—was bleak. The women’s shelter would be bleak, too. There was no way Jamie would stay there.

  “Then where would you like to go?” she continued. “It would only be for a few days. The neurologist seemed pretty sure that’s all it would take—until you remember enough for us to get you home, I mean.”

  When no answer came, Teagan stole a glance over her shoulder. Jamie was looking at the floor again. Her limbs had begun to tremble.

  Teagan steeled herself and pressed on. “Well, you can’t live on the streets in the middle of winter. We have an apartment over our garage that’s empty, but as your social worker I’m not sure it would be kosher for me to offer it. You might look into one of the charities that helps—”

  “You have an apartment?” Jamie interrupted.

  Still facing away, Teagan allowed herself a smile. She might be a poor liar, but she wasn’t bad at more subtle manipulation. Jamie wouldn’t want her charity any more than anyone else’s. She had to proceed carefully. “Yes, but that would be against the rules,” she lamented.

  “So who’s going to know?” Jamie argued.

  Teagan hesitated, laying on the fake reluctance a bit thicker. But when she turned to see Jamie’s face reddened with embarrassment, she realized she had gone too far.

  “I guess you’ve already done enough for me, haven’t you?” Jamie conceded. “Seeing as how you saved my life that time—”

  Jamie’s voice broke off. She looked toward where Teagan stood at the window, and her golden eyes widened.

  She was remembering something again.

  In one motion Jamie drew in a breath, puffed out her chest, and grabbed at the box of tissues that sat on her nightstand. In the next second the same tissue box came speeding through the air aimed directly at Teagan’s ducking head, missing her by a good twelve inches but striking the window blinds with an impressive thwack.

  “You wench!” Jamie shouted playfully. “I pulled your butt out of that stinking lake! How dare you take the credit?”

  Teagan removed the hands that shielded her face. “No need to get testy about it,” she responded smugly. “And you said I was a lousy liar. Ha!”

  “You couldn’t stand it!” Jamie continued, her face alive with delight. “You absolutely hated that anyone had to save you, particularly a girlie-girl like me. You were so arrogant!”

  “Was not,” Teagan argued. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “It was when you were pretending to be the hero!” Jamie replied.

  Teagan felt an urge to change the subject. “So I owe you, okay? Are you happy? What am I supposed to do about it?”

  Jamie studied her thoughtfully. “You said ‘we’ earlier. As in ‘we have an apartment.’ Who’s we?”

  Teagan smiled and dropped back into her chair. “My husband Eric and me. It used to be his grandparents' house. Now it’s ours.”

  Jamie’s eyebrows rose. “You have a husband?”

  “Yes, I have a husband! You didn’t think any man in his right mind would ever marry me, did you?”

  “I didn’t think that,” Jamie said quickly.

  But that was exactly what she did think. Under other circumstances, Teagan might have been offended. All she could think now was how much fun it was going to be to introduce Jamie to Eric.

  Her inner devil frolicked. “He may not look like much, but he’s mine,” she said defensively. “He’s a corporate attorney. Works in employment law.”

  “That’s nice,” Jamie said, all interest gone.

  “The apartment isn’t part of the house; it’s over the garage, which is a separate building. Eric’s grandparents used to rent it out to college students. We haven’t wanted to mess with that, so we’ve just let it sit. Cleaning it up now would be a real pain—”

  “Look,” Jamie interrupted, “is it available or not? I don’t care what kind of shape it’s in as long as it’s heated. Where else am I going to go? I saved your life once; can’t you at least let me crash at your place for a couple days?”

  Hook, line, and sinker!

  Teagan couldn’t resist. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you messy?”

  “Not as messy as you!”

  “Touché.”

  “I have handwriting a person can actually read, too.”

  Teagan paused and looked up. Had she missed something?

  “You wrote me a letter once,” Jamie explained, her voice quiet. “After that summer. I was just remembering it.”

  Unexpectedly, Teagan’s eyes grew moist. They had promised each other they would write. They had sworn it—sworn it in mud. It was the way they swore everything. Teagan had dutifully kept her promise. Jamie had never responded.

  “I loved getting that letter, even though I could barely read the thing,” Jamie continued. “I kept it under my pillow. I was going to write you back, but—” Her voice became strained. “Before I got around to it, I lost it. For a while it seemed like I was changing foster homes every couple months. It was chaos; every place had lots of kids. I remember when I realized I’d lost your address.” She paused briefly. “I was really upset.”

  Teagan blinked back tears. Failing to hear from Jamie after they parted that summer had hurt. It had hurt her far more than she had ever admitted—to anyone. She had sent her first letter right away, to the Renicks, but by the time she tried again with a second one, Jamie had moved on. Resending the letter in care of social services had obviously not worked either, and no wonder, if Teagan had the wrong surname. Yet in all the scenarios Teagan had run through her adolescent head explaining why her best friend had dumped her, she had never considered the possibility of a lost address. Not until she became an adult herself, and understood what the life of a foster child was like, had she been able to reassure herself with that explanation.

  With
an effort, Teagan shrugged off the old wound’s pang. “Well then,” she said cheerfully, “since you’re the one who broke the letter oath, I won’t feel so guilty about the apartment smelling like rotten pizza.”

  For a moment, Jamie smiled. Then a shadow crossed her face. “But wait—didn’t you say I can’t go to your house as long as you’re my social worker?”

  Teagan hesitated. It was a bit unorthodox, but technically speaking, Jamie would cease to be Teagan’s charge as soon as she was released from the hospital. She only brought it up as part of the ploy—to let Jamie know about the apartment without seeming overanxious to offer it.

  Jamie’s smile returned. “No matter. I can just say what I’ve always wanted to say to every fake, lazy, lying social worker who’s ever gotten assigned to me.”

  Teagan tried not to bristle. “And what’s that?”

  Jamie grinned. “Your ass is fired!”

  Chapter Seven

  Jamie climbed up the slatted wooden steps a few hours later, clutching the railing with her good hand. Teagan walked close behind her.

  “If you get light-headed at all, just stop,” Teagan suggested. “You’ve got to be weak as a kitten still.”

  Teagan’s voice had an edge to it, but Jamie knew that her friend’s simmering ire was directed elsewhere. What had—and was still—infuriating Teagan was how the hospital had used her own competence as an employee against her, booting Jamie’s uninsured butt out the door the second the social worker had unveiled her cleverly crafted discharge plan.

  For her part, Jamie was thrilled.

  “I’m sorry about these steps,” Teagan apologized. “I wasn’t planning on making you tackle them until you’d had another night’s rest and were feeling stronger.”

  Jamie put extra effort into climbing the remainder. They were a little slippery, having been buried—until five minutes ago—under several inches of snow. But the main problem was that, to Jamie’s quivering leg muscles, they appeared to extend several hundred feet into the air.

  She was exhausted and more than a little dizzy, but she couldn’t bear the thought of looking weak. “Oh, I’m all right,” she assured, struggling to catch her breath. “Don’t worry about me. Having an apartment all to myself sounds like sheer bliss right now. I’d run a marathon to get to it if I had to.”

  Reaching the landing at last, she turned around and threw Teagan a playful grin. “Any place where no one wakes me up at three AM to ask me if I remember my name is heaven. So if you were planning on doing that yourself, I’m warning you—from now on I’m keeping a blunt instrument under my pillow.”

  Teagan laughed. “No worries there.” She mounted the landing, pulled a ring of keys from her pocket, and inserted one in the door lock.

  Jamie turned aside to sneak a few more deep breaths, cursing her feebleness. She was sure that she had been healthy before, always able to rely on her own strengths, mental and physical. Having both impaired now was beyond disturbing—it was maddening.

  She leaned heavily on the railing, ostensibly to take in the view, but mainly to rest her limbs. They were somewhere in the suburbs north of Pittsburgh, in a countrified residential area hosting a hodgepodge of old and brand new houses. Teagan’s home was an unpretentious wooden two-story, with a small and ancient-looking front section deepened by what had probably been a long series of modest additions. The separate garage and apartment building was much newer, with aluminum siding and a modular appearance. Most impressive to Jamie was the yard behind, an empty area of undisturbed snow large enough to be called a field. Large, flat spaces in Pittsburgh were hard to come by, and the sight struck her as novel. She drank in the peaceful expanse with a sense of awe, recalling how well she and nature had become acquainted that summer on Indian Lake. She had a feeling they’d been strangers ever since.

  “Here it is,” Teagan announced, holding open the apartment door. “Sorry it isn’t ready yet. I was going to do everything tonight…”

  As Teagan launched into another tirade against her employer, Jamie stepped inside and looked around with a smile. From her hostess’s cautions, she had expected to see piles of dirty dishes and discarded pizza boxes. But the room, though simply furnished and without any sense of style, appeared both tidy and comfortable. It was a studio apartment, with a small kitchen by the door, a bathroom tucked to the side, and a great room with a double bed and couch. Large windows adorned every wall. There were no linens on the bed, and the room was cold. But it was also refreshingly bright, and the air was free of must, instead smelling faintly of fresh paint.

  Teagan stepped over to adjust the thermostat, and within seconds, the whoosh of a furnace kicked in. “Don’t worry about the heat,” she offered, her voice chipper again. “This place really cooks up fast. Eric’s grandfather insulated it like it was in the arctic. He used to spend half the winter in the workshop downstairs because it was warmer than the house.”

  Jamie walked toward the bed. She was so tired she could easily collapse flat onto the bare mattress, but she settled for sitting on its edge. “It looks perfect,” she exclaimed. “Calm and peaceful. Just what I need. Thank you.” Her hands were cold. She tried to stuff them into the pockets of the shaggy coat she was wearing, but her cast made that only half possible.

  “When I get the sheets and blankets, I’ll bring you some decent clothes, too,” Teagan offered.

  There had been no clothes in Jamie's hospital room. When she asked about whatever she had been wearing when she arrived, she was told that none of it was in any condition to be worn again. Whether that meant it was torn, covered with blood stains, or simply in bad taste, Jamie didn’t know. The only reason she wasn’t naked now was because Teagan kept a bin of clothes in her office for use by homeless patients. The best it had to offer today had been a baggy pair of sweatpants, a scratchy button-down sweater, and a man’s coat that looked like it had been donated by a homeless person. Black plastic boots, on loan from a friend of Teagan’s in security, topped off the ensemble, and though Jamie appreciated the effort, the ill-fitting duds, on top of nearly forty-eight hours with no shower or shampoo, made her feel beyond hideous.

  Teagan, bless her, seemed to know that.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” the social worker began with her typical, take-charge attitude. “First, I’ll bring up some towels and a plastic wrap to cover up that cast. Then as soon as it heats up in here, you can take a shower. I’ll bring a hair dryer and some makeup and some clothes of mine that might fit, and I’ll get the bed made up. Then when you’re ready, you can come to the house and have dinner with us.” She paused, her lips twisting ruefully. “And don’t worry about imposing, because my mother already did that. If I have to cook for three, one extra is no problem, believe me.”

  Something warmly humorous passed through Jamie’s brain, and she felt herself smiling. She could see herself and her own mother cuddled up on a couch together, watching a movie. A funny movie about mothers and daughters. When she thought of Teagan’s mother, she thought of that movie—and of a dark-haired actress whose name she couldn’t remember.

  “Mermaids,” she announced, feeling a jolt of pleasure that her stymied brain had finally produced the name of something, even if it was something as useless as a movie title. “You said that was your favorite movie, because that mother was just like yours.”

  Teagan’s eyes widened, then she laughed out loud. “Wow. Of all the things to remember! Yes, I adored that movie. Winona Ryder was my hero for years. The Cher character was my mother. Except for one minor difference, of course… Mrs. Flax liked to attract men, but wouldn’t marry them. My mother’s into both.” She sat down on the mattress next to Jamie. “You’ll get to meet her tonight. She remembers how much I used to talk about you. I think you even met each other at the end of that summer. Can you remember her?”

  Jamie concentrated. She pictured a shapely blond woman in bright, expensive-looking clothing, standing on the deck at Teagan’s grandparents’ cabin. Jamie had found her f
ascinating— sophisticated and worldly. She had been surprised that Teagan, in contrast, could be such a tomboy.

  “Yes, I did meet her,” Jamie answered.

  “Well, she’s a character,” Teagan continued. “And you’ll love Eric. He’s a great guy.”

  Jamie smiled politely. She was happy that Teagan seemed content, but since she couldn’t look at the woman without seeing the ball-cap wearing, gum-chewing girl, she had a hard time picturing what sort of man she could have ended up with. Teagan had such a dominating personality—her husband would have to be a recessive type. Some quiet, meek intellectual, no doubt. A.k.a., a nerd.

  Jamie felt slightly guilty at the analysis. After all, Teagan herself was hardly boring—she was smart, creative, enthusiastic, wicked brave, and generally fun to be around. But men didn’t go for that sort of thing. They wanted super-sexy, low-maintenance women, not winning personalities. “I’m glad you’re happy,” she said offhandedly, wondering where her attitudes about men and relationships were coming from, given that she couldn’t consciously remember a thing past puberty.

  Her brain seemed to be teasing her.

  “Jamie,” Teagan asked, her voice cautious. “Are you sure you can’t remember a man? Can you at least feel whether there was someone, a boyfriend, even a male friend you were close to? It could be really important for your safety. Do you understand?”

  Jamie blew out a breath, then closed her eyes. Of course she understood. She wasn’t deaf; she had overheard countless people in the hospital describing her to each other as “a domestic,” and they hadn’t meant a housekeeper. She also wasn’t stupid; if the police thought she had been assaulted by a random stranger, she wouldn’t have been asked a hundred times if she could remember the last significant other she had been involved with. Nor would Teagan have hustled her out of the hospital via the staff entrance with the hood of her coat pulled up and a security guard standing by the car door.

  Didn’t they think she would remember if she could?

  She was tired. Tired of being frustrated, tired of trying to remember all the important bits and pieces to which her brain refused her access. Her memories were like screwed up DVDs—some skipping randomly forward and backward, others pixelating in mid scene, most all with the audio garbled. She couldn’t even control which show was playing. But one thing was for sure. Everything onscreen so far had been strictly G-rated.