The Stranger and Tessa Jones

The man in the trees knew he shouldn’t be hearing all this. He should show himself or go. But he did neither. He held on to a tree trunk to keep from passing out, as the big blonde in the clearing continued to rail at a guy who wasn’t there.

“Tell me, Bill. How does a skinny tour bus driver with a space between his teeth, a guy too shy to string more than two sentences together in the presence of a woman, end up married to a showgirl? You tell me, Bill Toomey. How does that happen?” She fired three bread plates—white, black and orange—in swift succession.

As soon as the last one hit, she went on, “Especially when last September you swore, Bill, you swore with all your heart that you loved me.” She threw a pink serving bowl. “Me, Bill.” The snow swirled around her and the pom-pom on her hat bounced in sympathetic fury. The hair that curled along her cheeks blew across her eyes. She swiped it away and bent to grab more ammunition. “You swore you loved me and wanted to spend your life only at my side…” A cardinal-red dish met a crashing fate.

The man in the trees was frowning. He muttered, “Another damn drama queen,” and wondered a second later why he’d said that.

And then he stepped forward, although some remnant of a survival instinct within him cautioned that it was unwise to approach a furious woman with a box full of dinnerware and an excellent throwing arm. She might choose him as her next target.

He walked toward her anyway, slowly at first and then faster, as the snow came down harder and the wind whistled in the branches of the tall, green trees. In seconds, as dishes continued to shatter and the big blonde with the bobbing pom-pom went on telling off some guy named Bill, he emerged from the shelter of the pines.

She’d just tossed a serving platter when she spotted him. A yelp of surprise escaped her. “What the…?” She reached into the box and came out with a second big platter. She waved it, a threat. “Stop. Don’t come one step closer.”

He kept coming. The platter was big and heavy-looking. If she hit him with it, it would probably make his headache a whole lot worse. But somehow, he couldn’t stop moving toward her. “I need…I…Please…”

She raised the platter higher. “Final warning. Stop right there.”

He croaked, “Don’t…” as in his head a thousand bells began to ring. “Don’t…” He put his hands over his ears, a move he knew to be pointless. There was no protecting his ears from the ringing. It was coming from inside his head. And the ice pick was stabbing in there again. He groaned as he felt himself slowly dropping to the ground.

It took forever to get there. It seemed to him that as the ice pick stabbed and stabbed again and the thousand bells kept pealing, he drifted downward—floating, like a leaf or maybe a feather.

Then, after forever, he found himself on his back in a thick drift of snow. He stared up at the gray sky, or tried to. But the snow was falling so hard by then, it was difficult to see more than a few feet above his face. The cold white flakes caught on his eyelashes. He blinked them away. The bells had gone silent. The ice pick had stopped its stabbing. A sigh of sweet relief escaped him.

Someone was beside him in the snow. The blonde. She was on her knees, looking down at him, bending closer. Her nose was as red as her cheeks with the cold. She smelled good. Fresh. Clean. Her breath, across his face, was warm and sweet.

As if it had happened long ago, he recalled her fury and the shattering dishes, the way she’d told off that tour bus driver named Bill. Now she wasn’t angry, though. Now she just looked worried.

Worried and…kind. He thought, She’s good. A good woman. I could use a good woman in my life.

Whatever his life was…

A hell of a mess he was in here, on his back in a blizzard, without a name, without any idea of who he was or where he’d come from, dressed for a much warmer place than the Sierras in a snowstorm.

She touched him, laying her mittened hand on the side of his face. He felt the warmth of her through the wool. “I’m sorry…”

He frowned at her. “Sorry?”

“For threatening you with that platter.”

“Oh, that. ‘S nothing.”

“I should have seen you were hurt. But you came out of nowhere…”

“Didn’t mean…scare you…” His lips felt strange and thick. They didn’t want to talk.

“I’ll call and get help.” She started to rise.

He grabbed her arm to hold her with him. “No. Stay.”

“You need a doctor.”

“Stay.”

She sighed and touched his face again. “Oh, you poor thing.”

“I look…bad, huh?”

Her soft eyes, gold-flecked green, grew softer still. She asked in a gentle whisper, “What’s happened to you?”

“I wish I knew,” he heard himself mutter, with effort. “Tell me. Your…name?” His tongue wasn’t working any better than his lips. Each word took form with tremendous difficulty.

“Tessa. Tessa Jones.”

He repeated, “Tessa. Nice. Like it…”

The woman said something else. But he didn’t hear her. He shut his eyes and let the strange white world and the big, kind-eyed clean-smelling woman drift away from him.

Chapter Two

The stranger’s strong grip on Tessa’s arm loosened and then dropped away.

A low cry of distress escaped her. Oh dear Lord, was he dead?

She ripped off a mitten and touched the side of his throat. The skin was cool beneath her fingers. His face had a grayish cast. But there was a pulse. She felt it beating, steady and true, against the pads of her first and middle fingers. And when she bent her head so her cheek was near his mouth, she felt his breath. Slow. Warm.

Alive.

His breath was sweet. But his jacket reeked of alcohol. Strange. But not the issue.

Help. Getting the man help. That was the issue.

She jumped to her feet. Thick snow whirled around her. She longed for a cell phone. But she rarely carried hers with her in town. No point in it. In North Magdalene, the mountains messed with the signals and a cell worked intermittently, at best.

She stared down at the man again. It seemed wrong to leave him alone in the snow, but what else could she do? Try and move him to the warmth of the house?

No. They always said it wasn’t safe to move the badly injured, that you should wait for the EMTs.

Swiftly, she struggled out of her heavy jacket. Kneeling again, she settled it over the top of him, tucking it close. “I promise,” she whispered, smoothing his snow-dusted black hair off his forehead, careful not to touch the angry-looking gash there. “I’ll be right back…”

Again, she jumped up. That time, she made for the house, racing as fast as she could through the deepening snow. Inside, Mona Lou, her aging, deaf bulldog, and Gigi, her skinny, white, shorthaired cat, were sitting side by side in the front hall.

“Woof,” said Mona Lou.

“Reow?” asked Gigi.

She dodged around them, headed for the wall phone in the kitchen, pulling off her mittens as she went.

Silence greeted her when she put the phone to her ear. She jiggled the hook. Nothing. A snow-laden tree branch had probably taken down a line somewhere. And judging by the look of the storm out there, the PG&E crews would be a while getting to it. She couldn’t count on it coming back on any time soon.