“Am I still going the right direction?” Will asked.
“Turn on Beverly Way,” Gemma directed. “Go almost to the end. My house is down the lane to the right. The fields back up to the quarry for which the town’s named.”
“You have acreage?”
“Farmland…ranchland…my father dabbled in both.” She gazed out the window and thought about Peter LaPorte. She could scarcely visualize him. He’d blended in with the surroundings, a quiet man who seemed content to let his wife run the show. Jean LaPorte had been fiery and intense and opinionated. She’d been the one who’d insisted they adopt Gemma.
Adoption…
And suddenly Gemma was hit by a memory so sharp she was surprised she wasn’t cut and left bleeding. She wasn’t even sure the memory was true, or if it had been fed to her so well and so often that she believed it to be real. It didn’t matter. It was part of her history either way.
She’d been found on a Washington State ferry when she was five or six years old, alone, shivering, freezing cold. She’d been wearing several layers of clothing—one of them being a leather shift that was reminiscent of Native American dress, specifically from the Chinook Indian tribe. The note pinned to her outer jacket said simply, I am Gemma. Take care of me. It was scrawled in a spidery hand, and the law enforcement officials believed she’d been raised by an elderly person from one of the tribes living on the Olympic Peninsula. These tribes were modern-day Native Americans, yet the chemise was very traditional. The authorities believed that Gemma had been deliberately placed on the ferry and abandoned, and though they questioned various groups of people—and also the people on the ferry—all they learned was that a very stooped woman with iron-gray hair in braids, was seen with a girl, maybe Gemma, when they were boarding the ferry. Some felt the elderly woman got off the boat before it sailed. No one was sure. All that was for certain was that Gemma was sitting quietly on a bench when it docked and complaining of a headache.
And in truth she’d had crippling headaches as long as she could remember. The LaPortes, her adoptive parents, had taken her to doctors who prescribed pain medication, and Gemma had taken this medication most of her life.
Now, she lifted a hand to the injured side of her face. Yes, there was pain, but it was the pain from physical force. It was not from something inside her head.
“What?” Will asked, throwing her a look as he turned onto Beverly Way.
“I just remembered something I’d forgotten.”
“About the accident?”
“No.”
Her adoption had been messy. She had no papers. No record of birth. The process went on for years before she was given proper credentials and therefore a social security number, the one she’d recalled at the hospital. She knew that sometimes she felt like she could almost remember the old woman who’d left her on the ferry. She could smell charred firewood and taste a cornmeal patty of some kind. There were words, too, but they were singsong, like a chant, for her young ears. A nursery tale. Indian lore.
But where did she fit into all that? There was nothing about her that said Native American. Her eyes were greenish/hazel. Her hair was medium brown. Her skin was white and burned like a son of a gun when she spent too much time in the sun. Will Tanninger’s was far darker than hers. If any part of her was Native American, then its percentage was small for she sported no latent features.
And why had she been left on the ferry? Why had she been rejected? Was there something about her parentage that had spurned her from their group? Some reason she was tossed out?
Maybe because she possessed extra unwanted abilities?
She shivered, then tried to reach back into her consciousness as far as she could. The effort made her head hurt like hell and all she recalled was a plastic hospital mask descending on her face and a sickly, chemical scent. She gagged at the memory.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said flatly, thinking now—as she had many other times, she realized—that she was extremely lucky Peter and Jean LaPorte had adopted her. They’d taken care of her, loved her the best way they knew how. Peter had been a tad removed, but it was more because he didn’t know how to show affection rather than any aversion to Gemma in particular. Jean had loved her fiercely. Had wanted Gemma to be just like her. Had fashioned her in a way that spoke more of what Jean was made of than anything to do with Gemma herself. Jean bullied, pushed and fought her way through life.
And she’d lied…about…something…
“This turn,” Gemma said, surfacing with difficulty. Will eased onto the rutted lane and they drove down an oak-lined drive and then across an open grassy area. Ahead, the two-story, white house with the wraparound porch looked like a prototype for “Early Twentieth Century American Farmhouse.” Gemma recalled her father working constantly on the house’s upkeep. Now, several years after his death, the neglect was starting to show in the dry rot on the edges of the siding, the missing shingles on the roof, the streak of rust at the edge of the gate latch.
“You having trouble remembering?” Will asked as he pulled to a stop.
Gemma realized he saw much more than was comfortable for her. Her first instinct was to lie. Just like her mother did. That thought caused her to hold her tongue, and she simply said, “It’s not likely I’m going to forget my whole life for long.”
He walked her to the front door, both of their heads bent against the stiff breeze. She hesitated a moment. “I can get in through the back,” she said. They walked across the porch, down a few steps and along a dirt track. The rear porch was basically a couple of long, wide steps, the paint chipped away from use. Gemma reached around the sill of the door but found nothing. She hesitated a moment, willing her brain to think while Tanninger looked on. He shifted position and she heard the rustle of his uniform, the squeak of his shoes. It sounded vaguely sexual to her and for a moment she wondered who the hell she was. Why did she think these thoughts? What of her own history was she not recalling?
And then another memory surfaced. “We moved the key to under the bench,” she said, and reached beneath the seat of the back-porch bench, finding the key wedged in a niche between thin slats of wood.
Threading the key in the lock, she murmured, “So this is what Alzheimer’s people must feel.”
“Memory coming and going?” Tanninger did not follow her inside and Gemma turned back to him.
“Pretty much.”
“It’s only been a few days since your accident.”
“Yeah.”
Gemma nodded and worried there was something else, something more, at work here. She wondered whether she was obligated to ask him in, but he took the decision away from her by pressing a card in her hand and telling her to call him if she remembered anything. He glanced at the battered white truck parked near the outbuilding, then said good-bye and headed back around the front of the house to his car.
She hurried through the house to the windows, looking out past the front porch to see him climb into the vehicle, turn it nose-out, and then leave splattered mud as he drove up the gravel drive.
Alone, Gemma slowly turned around and exhaled. She was glad Detective Tanninger was gone so she could think. Absorb. Plan.
She examined the decor in the living room/parlor. Her mother’s. Lots of quilts and florals and stuff. She felt suddenly claustrophobic. Jean had been a hoarder. Keeping items way past their pull date, in Gemma’s opinion.
“How long ago did you die?” Gemma asked her, her voice