Forgotten Pieces

“Anyone else have the code?”

“Only Larissa but she has classes until two today.”

Matt gave one curt nod followed by an equally curt order.

“Stay here.”

“Yes, sir.”

She moved to the side of the doorway as Matt held out his gun and went inside. Despite his order and her common sense, Maggie wanted to follow him. She wasn’t a stranger to taking risks, though admittedly she had taken a good deal less of them since Cody had arrived, but leaving the door unlocked and the alarm off? That didn’t sound like her. Not even memory-less her. Something must have made her leave in a hurry.

Or someone.

That thought was the glue that kept her feet in place while the detective spent the next few minutes going through the house. During that time she revolved through question after question in her head. No matter which mystery popped up about her blank yesterday, she never reached any memories. No leads. No answers.

“No one’s in here,” Matt said, reappearing in the doorway. His eyes found hers with a notable amount of suspicion. If it was directed at her she didn’t know. “Nothing jumped out at me that might shed some light on everything but then again, this isn’t my place. I don’t know what to look for.”

They walked into the house, both uneasy. Maggie felt her defenses—and sarcasm—rising. In the past few years her social life had declined. The people who frequented her house were few and far between. Not that she was unhappy with her life. She just wondered what conclusions the man had drawn from his pass-through.

He followed her as she went clockwise through the house, starting at the kitchen and ending in the living room. It was the heart of their home and most lived-in. Stranded toys mingled with books and blankets and other odds and ends that never seemed to get sorted to their rightful places outside the room.

The detective stood sentry next to one of the large windows at the front of the house. His gun was back in its holster but his hands hung at his sides, ready to do whatever was necessary.

Maggie took a moment to watch the man. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about him off and on throughout the years. Mostly when a case he was working crossed over the media airwaves. She might have switched from a reporter to a magazine writer but that didn’t mean she’d stopped reading the paper. But there had been moments, quiet moments, where the detective had crossed her mind without her conscious volition.

He’d just be there. Like he was now.

A man she barely knew.

A man who loathed her.

A man seemingly always in sync with the world.

Except when it came to her.

Maggie cleared her throat. She wasn’t about to give herself permission to think about the detective as anything but a pain in her side. No. She wasn’t allowed.

“Okay, so as far as I can tell the house is how I would normally leave it.”

“Other than the unlocked door and the disabled alarm,” Matt supplied.

“Yeah, except those. Everything else, though, looks like it did before the memory loss.” To prove her point further, she turned to the couch. “See, my pillow from the other night is still there—”

Maggie’s eyes caught on to a few details she’d missed. The strangeness of what she was seeing must have shown in her expression. The detective’s body language became more open. He faced her with a look split between curiosity and concern.

“What is it?”

Maggie walked to the coffee table and paused. She pointed to the contents on its wooden top.

“Those are my keys,” she said, thoroughly confused. “My house and car keys.” She started to pick them up as if the physical contact would somehow answer the questions starting to spring up in her head when she noticed something else between the table and the couch. “And this is my purse.”

“What?”

Maggie picked up her bag. She pulled out her wallet and flipped it open. Her ID, credit cards and money were inside. The same as she remembered it from before her memory blanked out.

“Everything’s here.”

It was a statement but even to her ears, her confusion was still running rampant. The half-filled cup of coffee with lipstick marks on its edge didn’t help.

“You may think I’m a lot of things but let me tell you, messy isn’t one of them.”

“But you and your car were at Dwayne’s,” Matt added. “How did the keys end up back here?”

Like someone had flipped a switch, a new theory blazed across Maggie’s mind. She turned around and walked straight to the kitchen. Matt’s boots were heavy against the hardwood as he followed.

“Do you remember something?”

Maggie rounded the breakfast bar and made a beeline for the three metal canisters on the counter next to the sink. The one labeled Flour was open, its lid next to it. She was sure of what she wouldn’t find within it but still had to look. After she did she turned, confused.

“It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

“The spare key to my car.” She motioned to the canister. “I kept it in there.”

Matt looked between her and the tin for a moment.

“So let’s assume you used your spare car key to drive your car to Dwayne’s,” he said. “Why would you need it when your original car key is in the other room? And why not take your purse?”

“Why leave a half-filled cup of coffee out? Why leave the back door unlocked and not the front? And why not set the alarm?”

Matt’s eyes widened. Like her, his switch had flipped.

“Because you needed to leave in a hurry,” he guessed. “But why not grab your things?”

Maggie walked to the door that opened into the kitchen. From where she stood she couldn’t see the living room. But she could see the back door.

“I’m not one to make baseless guesses, despite your personal opinion of me, but I think someone was with me here yesterday,” she started. A knot of cold began to form in her stomach. “And whoever they were must have said or done something I really didn’t like.”

Chapter Five (#u8fa25e4c-ec79-5818-8fd1-6c1d0da32fbf)

“It’s a theory,” Matt reminded the sheriff. He was standing in the living room, phone to his ear, and looking down at Maggie’s key ring. After she’d become convinced of what had happened, he’d had to reel her in a bit. She’d excused herself to shower, not that he blamed her with dried blood caked on her head and a hospital stay that had extended through the night. Now he was bringing Billy up to speed. “But I have to agree it may be right on the money. I mean it looks like she just got up and got out. It’s not adding up.”

“Then we must not have the right numbers,” Billy said. The background noise of the department filtered through the phone. It reminded Matt that he hadn’t been home since he left for work yesterday. “I’ll keep things going on my end while Ansler runs point on the investigation.”

“You’re giving lead to Ryan?” Matt asked, surprised. He was head detective in the sheriff’s department and had been employed with them for four years longer than Ryan Ansler. Not to say that Matt didn’t like the man. He was just more invested in figuring out what had happened thanks to his friendship with Dwayne. Which, he realized two seconds too late, might have been the problem.

“You need to figure out Ms. Carson’s part in all of this,” Billy said. “Whether or not she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, at the right place at the wrong time, or did exactly what she wanted to do. Finding out what happened with her is the key to solving this case. Trying to juggle everything at the same time won’t help Dwayne. Getting answers about what happened at that house might. Let Ansler and me cover the other details and questions. You focus on Carson.”