One Night Standoff

It such a simple question, but it caused relief to flood through Lenora. Clayton wasn’t just conscious, he was talking.

“You were shot,” Harlan answered. The words didn’t come easily. His voice was clogged with emotion. “We’ll be at the hospital soon. You’ll be okay.”

Clayton stayed quiet a few seconds, shook his head and then tried to get off the gurney. The medics quickly stopped him from doing that.

“I have to go,” Clayton insisted. Definitely no slurred words now. He seemed like the determined, focused lawman that she knew. “I have a witness to protect.”

Well, focused except for that last part. Maybe he didn’t realize he’d been shot.

“Jill Lang,” Clayton added and tried to get up again. “I have to protect her.”

Lenora froze. Why would Clayton mention Jill’s name? Obviously he wasn’t as coherent as she’d thought, because Jill had been dead for two months.

“I have to protect her friend, too,” Clayton insisted while the medics held him down. “I have to protect Lenora Whitaker.”

Clayton certainly didn’t say her name as he had earlier. It sounded foreign on his lips.

As if he’d spoken the name of a stranger.

“Lenora’s here,” Harlan said, inching her closer so that Clayton could see her face. “She’s okay. She wasn’t hurt in the shooting.”

Clayton stared at her, and even though his eyes were indeed clear, something was missing. He shook his head, his stare aimed right at her.

“You,” Clayton said. He winced, took a deep breath.

“Yes,” Lenora answered. “It’s me.”

But he only shook his head again. “Who are you?” Clayton asked.

Lenora froze.

Oh, mercy. He hadn’t just said her name as if they’d never met—the look he was giving her certainly wasn’t a familiar one, either.

It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger.

“Who are you?” Clayton repeated with his attention fastened to Lenora. “And why are you here?”

Chapter Three

Three Months Later

Clayton spotted the woman on the stepladder perched in front of the stained-glass window inside the country church. She was about five-six. Dark brown hair. Average build. Well, average build from what he could tell. She wore a drab green lab-style coat over her jeans.

He stayed back behind the last row of pews so that she wouldn’t see him, but he could see her.

The light in the church was dim, thank goodness, so Clayton was able to remove his sunglasses, but he was careful to dodge the lines of sunlight piercing through the beveled glass around the window panels. The last thing he needed was a migraine. Even the mild ones were a bear, and something he’d had to deal with since the shooting. Today he didn’t want to deal with the pain.

He wanted to deal with this woman who might have answers.

Clayton waited, watched until she finally put her soldering iron aside and pulled off the mask that’d covered her nose and mouth.

It was Lenora Whitaker, all right.

Keeping a firm grip on the sides of the ladder, she stepped down to the floor, propped her hands on her hips and looked up at the glass angel’s wing that she’d just repaired. She must have been pleased with the results, because she nodded, smiled. Turned.

The color drained from her face. The smile, too. Almost as if she’d seen a ghost.

“Clayton,” she said in a rough whisper.

Well, at least she remembered him. Clayton wished he could say the same about her. Yeah, he knew those features because of the surveillance footage he’d studied, but he didn’t recognize her.

Still, there was something familiar about her that went beyond recorded images. Maybe because she’d once been in his protective custody.

Something else he couldn’t remember.

She didn’t come closer, but pulled a rag from her coat pocket and wiped her hands. She also dodged his gaze. “How are you?”

“Better than the last time you saw me.”

That brought her gaze back to his. “You got your memory back?”

He lifted his shoulder. “Some of it.” Including all of his childhood, even the rotten parts. Most of adulthood, too. “Not about you, though.”

Clayton paused, studied her expression. Her forehead was bunched up, and while there was concern in her eyes, there was also discomfort.

Probably because he’d found her.

“According to Harlan’s account,” Clayton said, “you didn’t hang around long after I was shot.”

She nodded, swallowed hard. “But I called, to find out that you’d made it out of surgery.”

Yeah. Harlan had told him that, too. But what was missing were the details.

“How’d you find me?” She turned away from him and started to gather her supplies, which she stuffed into a metal toolbox.

“It wasn’t easy.” In fact, it’d been downright hard. Clayton tipped his head to the stained-glass panel. “Not many people do the kind of work you do, so I kept calling churches and other places that have this sort of thing.”

And he’d finally located her through a supplier who was billing a minister in the small town of Sadler’s Falls for repairs to an antique stained-glass window. Lenora’s area of expertise.

“I called the minister,” Clayton explained. “And I posed as someone interested in a getting a referral for some stained-glass repairs needed on a house I’m restoring. He told me about this woman he’d just hired, but I didn’t know it was you until I saw you just now.” He paused. “You’re using a fake name.”

“Yes. After what happened, I thought it was the safe thing to do.”

Probably. But Clayton still needed answers that he hadn’t been able to get from anyone else.

She glanced at the scar on his forehead. It had faded considerably since his surgery three months earlier, but it was a reminder of just how close he’d come to dying.

“I’ve been looking for updates about the shooting,” she said, “but the marshals still haven’t found the person that hired the gunman who put a bullet in you.”