Time Thieves

been twelve days, though she said that it had seemed like a great deal longer. He had gone up to the cabin to do some painting. When he had not returned by midnight, she had taken the other car, the VW, up the winding road that eventually reached the summit of Old Cannon, to see if anything had happened to him. When she had not found him there, she had thought they must have passed each other on the main highway between Old Cannon and home. When she returned home, however, he was still not there. And when she had no word of him by four in the morning, she called the police.
        
        “Who's the girl staying with you?” he asked. They sat on the living room floor drinking coffee, waiting for the doctor whom she insisted he must see.
        
        “My sister Barbara moved in the day after you were missing.”
        
        He set his cup down. “Why did you attack me out there? You should try out for Golden Gloves.”
        
        Both his shoulders were lightly bruised.
        
        She blushed a little. “You disappeared for almost two weeks. No sign or message. I worried about a car accident, half a hundred other dreadful things. Then I walk in here, on the edge of a breakdown, and you're standing there smiling as if nothing happened. I guess-well, I guess I thought you'd been with some other woman. The thought passed through my head more than once, actually.”
        
        He reassured her, with hands and lips, and then he reassured her some more. But before anyone could be too assured, Dr. Billings had the gall to interrupt as he peered through the front screendoor, chuckling. “If it's free, you're losing a good chance of making a fortune from admissions.”
        
        They pulled apart and looked up at the familiar, gray-haired, rotund physician who had delivered Pete into this world and had saved Della from leaving it a year ago when her appendix had burst.
        
        “We couldn't get much of an audience if we tried,” Della said. “There just aren't enough of you dirty old men left around these days.”
        
        Billings came inside. “True enough. And isn't the world less colorful without them?”
        
        “Just because you saved her life doesn't mean you have a perpetual license to seduce my wife,” Pete said, assuming a tone of mock anger.
        
        “Seduce her?” Billings asked, as if taken aback by such a suggestion. “Good God, man, even if I managed to seduce her, the most I could accomplish at my age would be some very innocent hand-holding!” He winked at Della who winked back and went to get them some coffee.
        
        “You seem cheerful enough,” Billings said, turning to Pete and placing his black bag on the floor. He sat down next to his patient, not without some grumbling.
        
        “I'd be a deal more cheerful if I knew what I've been up to these last twelve days.”
        
        “Della calls it amnesia,” Billings said.
        
        “Della isn't a doctor. But it looks that way.” Briefly, he explained his return home and all that he could remember before the blackout.
        
        “Nothing else?” Billings asked.
        
        “Just before I woke up, in the garage, I had a-nightmare. I was being watched by someone without eyes.”
        
        It sounded absurd and beside the point. Yet Billings said, “Can you remember more of the dream?”
        
        “I was floating in blackness on a white bed. Someone was trying to touch me, and I didn't want them to. That's it.”
        
        At that moment, Della returned with coffee and chocolate chip cookies.
        
        “I rang Chief Langstrom,” she said. “They thought someone had spotted the Thunderbird abandoned in the northern part of the state. Says he's glad you're back and hopes things work out.”
        
        “Will things work out?” Pete asked Billings.
        
        “Maybe-maybe not.” Billings blew on his coffee to cool it. “Amnesia is a strange illness, a great deal more common than most people think. In a moment, I'll check you over for bumps. But I doubt it was caused by a fall of any sort. More than likely, it was mental or emotional pressure that sprang it on you.”
        
        “Our marriage is fine,” Pete said. “Business is going great guns, though not so much it keeps me overly busy. On top of that, I'm just not the worrying