“No, I insist.” Then wondered if I could make good on my words. I didn’t know how much money I had with me, much less why the hell I’d traveled here in the first place. “Where is my purse?”
“You did not have one. Just your passport, credit card, and some cash you were carrying in your pocket—” Roberto gestured to the bedside table where the items he had mentioned were laid out. “—and a knife.”
“A knife?” That was a surprise. The knife, I noticed, wasn’t with my other things. “Are you sure it was mine? I don’t carry a knife.”
“You had it strapped in a sheath around your waist.”
“I did? How odd. I wonder why.”
My reply had him studying me more closely and no wonder. He was probably wondering if the strange woman he had played Good Samaritan to was crazy or violent. I was wondering that, too. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what had happened to me, or make any sense of where I was or what the hell I was doing in Mexico.
I eased my way carefully over to the bedside table to look over my stuff. The passport was familiar, but I didn’t recognize the credit card. My uneasiness grew. It had my name printed on it, but it was as unknown to me as the knife they claimed to have been strapped to my waist, and was issued by a bank I didn’t recognize.
I counted out a little over two hundred dollars in cash, American money, nothing converted to local currency yet. I held out two hundred dollars to Roberto. “I know it’s probably not enough—”
“Keep it,” he said in that smoothly accented voice. “I insist.”
It felt oddly vulnerable to be here, among all these strange people.
“Are they your bodyguards?” I asked, glancing nervously at the men standing by the door.
“Sí.”
“Why do you have bodyguards?”
“I am a wealthy businessman, and as such am a target,” Roberto said. “Kidnapping and ransom, unfortunately, is common here in my country.”
“Oh, for a moment I thought they were here to protect you against me,” I said with a weak grin, inviting him to share in the humor of the ridiculous thought. But Roberto didn’t smile. Just gazed at me with careful, probing intentness.
“Why would you think that, querida?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because they’re staring at me so suspiciously.” That and the fact that their guns were drawn, if not pointed.
The reassuring smile he gave me made him even more attractive. “Forgive their diligence. They are paid to be suspicious, and you are, after all, a strange woman that I have brought into my house.” He murmured something in Spanish and his men holstered their weapons. And some tension I hadn’t known I felt eased within me.
“Can I use your telephone to call my work?”
“Of course,” Roberto said graciously. He stood up, and I noted that he wasn’t just handsome but tall as well, an inch, perhaps, shy of six feet. “I have a phone in the other room. I will get it for you.”
It was only when he left the room that I noticed something I hadn’t noticed earlier, in those first confused moments after waking up with that dreadful headache. I felt him. Was aware of him in a way I wasn’t aware of the other two men in the room. When Roberto returned a few seconds later with a cordless telephone in hand, that sparking awareness shimmered between us again, growing stronger with each step he took closer to me, something I’d never felt before. A connection, for lack of a better word.
My heart kicked up its rhythm with a few hard beats and my hand trembled, faint but visible, as I held it out for the phone.
“Allow me,” Roberto said. “It’s a bit complicated to call out of the country. If you will be kind enough to give me the numbers, I can place the call for you.”
He punched in a set of numbers then entered in the area code and phone number of the hospital I gave him. I heard the call go through, and he handed the phone to me. Four rings later I got an automatic recording that said, “This number has been disconnected or is no longer in service . . .”
I hung up. “I’m sorry, I got an out-of-service recording,” I said, thinking that he must have dialed it wrong. “Can we try again?”
I waited until he had entered in the country code. “Can I try dialing the rest of it, please?”
“Of course.” He handed me the phone.
“Do I need to dial 1?”
“No, just the area code and phone number.”
I entered the numbers and got the same recording. “That’s odd.” I frowned. “I know for sure that’s the correct number. We must be doing something wrong.”
“I have placed many calls to the United States and have had no trouble before,” Roberto said. “Is there someone else you can call?”
Only one other number came to mind, a nearby restaurant where I frequently ordered takeout. Roberto entered the first string of numbers and allowed me to input the rest.
“White Elephant,” answered a familiar voice. “How can I help you?”
“Hi, Joey. It’s me, Lisa.”
“Hey, Lisa. Long time no hear,” Joey said cheerfully. His strong Brooklyn accent made me feel almost homesick, though his words puzzled me. I didn’t think a day or two constituted a long time, even though I practically ate there every day. “Listen, Joey, I tried calling St. Vincent’s Hospital and got this no-longer-in-service recording. Did they change their number or something?”
“What number did you call?” Joey asked. I could hear sounds of the small, busy restaurant in the background.
I repeated the telephone number.
“That’s the old number, honey.”
“The old number?”
“Yeah, before they moved to the new location on Twelfth and Seventh.”
“The hospital moved?” I said, feeling as if the whole world instead of just the hospital had shifted.
“Yeah, but they might as well not have. They went bankrupt shortly after you left and shut down, a couple of weeks ago, actually.”
“I left?”
“Yup, you quit and left New York.”
I unconsciously gripped the phone tightly enough to make the plastic casing protest. Lightening my hold, I asked, “Do you know where I went?”
Joey laughed. “What is this? You pulling my leg?”
“No, I, um . . . I hit my head and have a concussion. I honestly don’t remember. I thought I still worked at St. Vincent’s.”
There was silence at the other end for ten long seconds with nothing but the distant sound of customers and cooking drifting faintly over the line. When I heard Joey’s voice again, it sounded gruff and concerned. “Lisa, honey. You quit your job here almost six months ago. I haven’t seen or heard from you since then. Sorry, honey, I don’t know anything more than that.”
After saying thanks, I numbly hung up, feeling dazed by more than just the blow to my head. “I think I asked the wrong question,” I said, looking up at Roberto. “What date is it?”
When he told me, I felt a slight roaring in my head—a silent rush of feeling, of panic.
I had lost more than half a year of memory!
I had made a new life somewhere . . . and couldn’t remember a single moment of it!
There are movies about people who lose their memory—total amnesia. It makes for a great story, with lots of drama and stuff. Having it happen to you, however, was not as much fun as watching it being enacted by talented actors. Granted, I only had partial amnesia. I knew who I was, knew my name—Lisa Hamilton—and where I used to live. I hadn’t lost myself completely. Just a significant chunk of time.
I spent the next half hour trying to hunt up more clues of where I had moved to and what sort of new life I had built for myself. St. Vincent’s was completely shut down, as Joey had said, with no one in administration to talk to at all. What the landlord of my old apartment had to tell me was more helpful, and highly disturbing.
There had been four men with me when I had moved out of my apartment and turned in my key.