A Forever Christmas

Chapter Eight

“So it’s all right with you?”

Gabe looked at Miss Joan closely as he asked the question an hour later.

He and Angel were in the diner, standing off to the side of the counter and trying to keep out of the way of a steady stream of breakfast “regulars.” The latter group were coming in to jump-start their day with Miss Joan’s famous coffee and one of Eduardo’s special breakfast platters.

“Yes.” Miss Joan gave him a look that said he should know better than to think that she wouldn’t agree to this. “Even if you weren’t my brand-new granddaughter’s brother,” she added with a smile.

Having married Harry Monroe, she now had the family she’d been denied for so long. And with Harry’s grandson marrying Alma, that made Alma’s five brothers part of her family, as well. It filled a need within her that had gone begging far too long.

Miss Joan glanced around Gabe’s shoulder at the young woman he’d first brought in with him yesterday. “With Eduardo running out on me, I’ve got to find someone to take his place.”

“I am not running out on you, old woman,” the cook spoke up from the kitchen where he was furiously working to keep up with the incoming flood of orders. “I am retiring,” he declared, stressing every single letter of the word. “Before I fall on the floor, dead, because you have worked me to that state. A man has a right to live and enjoy himself in his last few years.”

Speculation went that Eduardo was actually younger than Miss Joan, but no one really knew for sure and, in the interest of peace, no one was about to bring that matter up with Miss Joan.

“Huh.” Miss Joan blew out a breath, exasperated. “You’re going to live to be over a hundred, Eduardo, and we all know it, so stop trying to paint yourself as some kind of a victim. You go through with this, and you’ll go stir-crazy before your first month of ‘retirement’ is up,” she predicted. Miss Joan leveled her gaze at Angel, then nodded toward the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. “Go in and get yourself an apron and show me what you’ve got, girl. And don’t let that old man scare you,” she added, raising her voice so that Eduardo heard. “He’s all bark and no bite.”

“Ha! You should talk,” Eduardo retorted. “You yap enough to give a man a headache forever!”

Gabe looked from the narrow space above the counter, where all the orders were placed once they were filled, to Miss Joan. He lowered his voice and said, “You’re really going to miss that old man, aren’t you?”

Miss Joan shook her head, not in denial but in sad anticipation of what was to come in a far too close future if Eduardo actually did retire.

“More than words can say,” she whispered back. “But don’t let him know,” she warned, slanting a look over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

Gabe grinned. “I’ve got a feeling that he already knows, Miss Joan.”

But Miss Joan wasn’t all that convinced. “If he thought that, he’d say it, believe me. Hell, he’d crow it. Not one to stay silent, that one.”

Still, it didn’t change the situation. Unless something happened, Eduardo was leaving right after Christmas. She dreaded the thought. She and Eduardo had struck up a rhythm of friendly antagonism and it always made the eighteen-hour day go by faster.

“Now, you be nice to this little girl,” Miss Joan instructed, raising her voice so that the cook could hear her. “Don’t be scaring her off. With you deserting me, I’m going to be needing someone to do the cooking. She can probably cook rings around you without even half trying,” she predicted.

“She had better do much more than that if she is to survive here with you, old woman.”

For a moment, as the swinging doors closed behind her, Angel thought of turning right around and vacating the relatively small, utilitarian kitchen. But something held her fast and wouldn’t allow her to flee.

Was that “something” a basic part of her real makeup, or…

Or what? a voice in her head asked.

She had no answer for that, any more than she had an answer for any of the other dozen and a half questions that had assaulted her this past day and a half.

Eduardo’s dark brown eyes looked her up and down slowly, his shaggy graying eyebrows drawing together little by little.

“So,” he finally said, “you are here to take my place?”

“No, sir,” Angel replied quietly and respectfully. “I’m just here to see if I can help out.”

A small, almost nonexistent smile settled on Eduardo’s thin lips and he nodded his approval at her choice of words.

“All right, then, come and help,” he instructed. “You will find an apron in there,” he added, nodding toward the small closet where towels, aprons and a host of other kitchen-oriented things coexisted in a jumbled heap.

Angel went to help herself to an apron. There was no denying that there were colliding butterflies in her stomach, but all the same, she did have a good feeling about this.

“Don’t look so worried,” Miss Joan chided Gabe as he watched the kitchen’s swinging doors close behind Angel. “She’ll be just fine. Eduardo hasn’t required a human sacrifice since his third wife had the good sense to leave him.”

“I heard that, old woman!” Eduardo called out. “And it is I who left her, not she who left me,” the cook corrected.

“Whatever helps you get through the night,” Miss Joan allowed with a dismissive shrug. “She left him,” the older woman whispered to Gabe just before she accompanied him to the diner’s exit. “Eduardo makes a lot of noise, but your little friend’s going to be just fine,” she reassured the new deputy.

Gabe started to issue a disclaimer that Angel wasn’t “his little friend,” but the truth of it was, he was stuck for an alternate label to apply to the woman he’d rescued yesterday. If Angel wasn’t his “little friend”—and she was petite—how did he refer to her? As his project? As his work in progress? Or maybe just a lost woman?

Stumped, Gabe opted to leave the initial label alone until he could come up with a better one to take its place.

He supposed he should be grateful that Miss Joan hadn’t referred to Angel as his new “girlfriend.” Aside from that being totally inaccurate, it would have also been awkward for both of them if Angel had heard Miss Joan calling her that.

Weighing the two options, he came to the conclusion that “little friend” was definitely the lesser problematic of the two.

* * *

HEARING HIM ENTER, Alma glanced up from her computer.

“Where’s your friend?” she asked. Craning her neck, Alma looked to see if he was indeed alone. “Her memory come back?” she asked.

“I left her with Miss Joan.” He saw Alma’s eyebrows rise in a silent question. “Turns out she knows how to cook really well.”

“You made her cook for you?” Alma asked in amazement.

Gabe took exception to the implication. “I didn’t make her do anything. When I woke up this morning, she was making breakfast in the kitchen.”

“In the kitchen,” Alma repeated, the full impact of what he was saying finally hitting her.

“Yes,” he answered, bracing himself for what he assumed was going to be another round of interrogation.

“And just what did she ‘make’ in your house last night?” Alma asked.

He knew exactly what she was asking and he wasn’t about to get caught up in being defensive. He’d played that game before.

“We’ve already gone through this last night, remember? Get your mind out of the gutter, little sister, and make yourself useful,” he told her. Nodding toward Alma’s computer screen, he asked pointedly, “Did you find anything on her yet?”

She’d told him that she was going to go through the missing-persons reports. “So far, no,” she answered. “Nobody’s filed a missing-persons report looking for anyone who even vaguely matches Angel’s description. But that’s just in this county,” she added. She spared a dark look toward her computer. “I’m going to widen the search as soon as the computer comes back to life.”

Puzzled, Gabe looked at the screen. “Back to life?” he echoed. “What do you mean? The computer looks all right to me.”

“Look closer,” she urged, moving her chair to the side to allow her brother better access to her computer. “Try moving the cursor,” she suggested.

When Gabe took possession of the mouse and moved it around on the desk, nothing happened. He had the exact same results hitting various keys on the keyboard. The last couple of keys he all but sank into the keyboard. Still nothing.

Alma physically removed his hands from her keyboard and pushed them to the side. “I think you get the picture,” she told him.

Gabe’s frown went down to the bone. “How long has it been like this?” he asked.

“For approximately the past ninety minutes. I actually came in early to get to work on finding our mystery woman’s identity. What a waste that was,” she complained.

“What did you do to it?” he asked.

“I didn’t do anything to it,” she retorted. “And for your information, the other computers have the same problem. As near as I can figure it, the system’s been hacked into and infected with a virus.”

Unlike the men in the office, Alma knew her way around computers and was, in effect, the one everyone turned to whenever they had any sort of a computer problem or question. But this seemed to require specialized expertise, not hit-and-miss tactics.

“So what are you doing?” he asked, gesturing at the immobile computer screen. “Just waiting for it to come back to life?”

“I’ve got a call in to the software tech support people, but I have a feeling it might be a while before they get back to us. In the meantime—” she shifted her chair around and reached for a thick folder on her desk “—I’m resorting to the old-fashioned method of looking through old reports manually to see if I can come up with any sort of a lead.” With a smile, she added, “That comes under the ‘no stone left unturned’ heading.”

Turning away from the confounding computer, she looked at her brother. “You didn’t answer my question. Did Angel remember anything?”

He recalled the way the woman had worded it. “That cooking relaxes her.”

“Let me rephrase that. Did she remember anything useful?”

“Like her name, rank and serial number?” Gabe guessed, clearly frustrated by the negative answer he had to give her. “No.”

“You know, when this thing finally comes back from the dead—” she delivered less than a gentle tap to the side of the computer “—we could try taking Angel’s fingerprints and see if we can come up with a name that way.”

He was less than pleased about the implication behind his sister’s suggestion. “You mean see if she has a criminal record?”

Alma looked more closely at her brother as she said, “No, I was thinking more along the lines of a driver’s license, but hey, if you think there’s a criminal record out there with her picture on it—”

“I don’t,” he snapped, cutting her off before she could continue down this path.

“Okay, then we’ll look through the state’s DMV records,” she said, keeping her voice low-keyed. “Or maybe we’ll get lucky and find out that our mystery woman works for the government, or that she served in the armed forces or the reserves at one point.” She flashed her brother an encouraging smile. “It’s going to take a while,” she predicted. “But we’ll find out who she is.”

“She may not want us to find out who she is.”

The latter speculation had come from Joe Lone Wolf. The deputy had apparently slipped soundlessly into the seat behind his desk while she and Gabe were discussing the best way to find out Angel’s real name.

Caught off guard, Alma’s hand instantly covered her heart as if to keep it from jumping out of her chest. “You know, you could try making a little noise once in a while, Joe,” Alma complained. “Let people know that you’re there.”

His expression remained exactly the same as he said, “I thought I just was.”

“I think I’m going to tie a bell around your neck,” Alma threatened.

But Gabe’s mind was on what Joe had said last. “Why wouldn’t she want us to know who she was?” Gabe asked.

“A lot of reasons to try to lose yourself,” the deputy answered matter-of-factly. In the world he came from—the reservation where he’d spent the formative years of his life—there’d been a lot of people who preferred making their way through life unnoticed. “Maybe she did something and she’s on the run.”

“I don’t think—” Gabe began, ready to defend the woman.

“Not exactly hard, faking amnesia,” Joe pointed out, cutting Gabe off. “There’re no scientific tests around to use in order to prove that a person does, or doesn’t, have amnesia.”

“She’s not faking it,” Gabe insisted.

“And you know this how?” Joe challenged, willing to be convinced.

To back up his point, Gabe told them what happened last night. “She had a nightmare and she woke up screaming. There was this terrified look in her eyes.” Gabe paused, knowing that he couldn’t find the right words to express the feeling he’d had when he’d looked into her eyes. He knew she was on the level. Nothing could convince him that she wasn’t.

“You had to have been there,” he finally conceded with a sigh. “But I’d bet a month’s salary that she’s on the level.”

“Last of the big-time spenders,” Alma quipped affectionately. When her brother rose to his feet, Alma put her hand out to keep him where he was. “Relax, Gabe, I believe you.” She looked at Joe pointedly. “So does Joe.”

“Yeah,” Joe chimed in after a beat. He’d sounded more convincing this time, but then there was never a great deal of feeling infused in Joe’s tone, so Gabe let it slide. He didn’t feel like getting into an extended, heated argument about that now.

“So what are you going to do if Angel doesn’t remember anything more than how to deftly handle a frying pan?” Alma asked her brother.

He looked surprised at the question. “Me?” he asked. “Why me?”

Alma looked at him. “Because you seem to have appointed yourself her guardian angel, taking her under your wing so to speak.” Light chocolate-colored eyes met dark. “Taking her home,” Alma added, lowering her voice but keeping just the tiniest hint of emphasis evident in her tone.

Gabe knew damn well where his sister was trying to go with this. She thought he saw a substitute for Erica in Angel. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

“The house has got three bedrooms, Alma,” he reminded her.

“Yes, but only one bed,” she countered.

“Which I let her have,” Gabe immediately retorted pointedly.

“Ah, always the gentleman,” Alma rhapsodized. “Relax, big brother, I’m just teasing you. Personally, I’m glad you’ve taken such an interest in her.”

“I’ve taken an interest in her case,” he emphasized. “An interest in helping her find her identity. I’m not interested in her personally,” Gabe insisted.

“So, you can separate the two just like that, can you?” Joe asked. He sounded skeptical.

Gabe turned around to look at the man. Wrapped up in bringing his point home with Alma, he’d forgotten that Joe was even there. “I liked you better when you weren’t making a sound.”

A smattering of a smile creased Joe’s lips for a moment. “Just asking the obvious.”

Most of the time, Rick left his office door open. In part as an invitation to his deputies, letting them know that they were free to enter at any time if they needed to ask him or share something with him. As a consequence, he could hear everything that was going on—whether he wanted to or not.

In his opinion, this back-and-forth thing about a young woman with no memory who fate had dropped on their doorstep had to stop. It wasn’t leading anywhere but to a huge headache for him.

Rick stuck his head out of his office. “Isn’t it about time one of you went on patrol so the good citizens of Forever can go on believing that they have an actual sheriff’s department looking out for their well-being?”

Gabe didn’t have to be told twice. He was immediately on his feet. He could use a break from Alma’s inquisition and Joe’s knowing look.

“I’ll go,” he volunteered, grabbing the hat he hardly ever wore. For form’s sake, he always kept the hat close by just in case he ever needed to put it on for some reason. Most of the time, the tan Stetson just rode on the seat next to him.

“Say hi to Angel for us,” Alma called after her brother as he walked out the door.

Gabe made no answer, he just kept walking. He figured it was better that way all around.