The Interpreter

He looked from first one to the other. “What? Why are you looking at me?”

“Finders keepers.”

Despite the fact that Daniel was one of his oldest friends, Mason wondered if punching him would wipe that grin off his face.

“That’s fine for pennies you pick up outside the hardware store,” he muttered, “but not so appropriate when it’s a strange woman you’re talking about.”

“She has to stay somewhere. I can’t put her in jail since she hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“Perhaps there’s a hotel I could check into somewhere close by.” Jane’s features suddenly clouded over. “Though I suppose without a purse, I have nothing to pay them with, do I?”

Lauren shook her head. “Even if we had a hotel in town, I wouldn’t be able to recommend that. You’ve had a head injury and while you don’t need hospitalization at this point, you do need someone close by the next few days to keep an eye on you. I would take you to my house but I’m heading to a conference in Ogden for the weekend.”

“And I’m working double shifts all week,” Daniel added.

In desperation, Mason turned to Coralee, who had been eavesdropping shamelessly on the whole conversation. The receptionist shook her head firmly. “Sorry. No can do. Bruce and I are spending the weekend in Vegas for our thirty-fifth anniversary.”

Damn. He was stuck with the woman. As if he needed a headache like this in his life right now.

“I’m sorry to be such a bother,” she whispered again. To his dismay, her chin started to wobble a little and tears welled up in the depths of those blue eyes.

Mason frowned, horrified that all he seemed to want to do was wrap his arms around this small, fragile creature and pull her against him. Anything to keep those tears away.

He wasn’t sure where all these protective impulses were coming from but he’d better do his best to get rid of them.

“I guess she can stay at the ranch for a few days.” His voice came out gruff but he was still rewarded with a pleased nod from Lauren, a measuring look from Daniel and a watery smile from Jane Doe herself.

At least at the ranch, he could keep an eye on the woman, he thought. He was a highly trained intelligence operative for the United States government. If she was up to something, he would do everything in his power to find out what.

The children were thrilled to have the woman they considered their own personal discovery riding home with them.

Charlie bounced in his seat and chattered a mile a minute to her in his native language and even Miriam consented to give a few hesitant smiles to their guest.

Those smiles made his gray mood even darker. It was all he could do to get the little girl to look at him, forget about smiling. This strange woman waltzes in and suddenly she becomes the children’s best friend without even lifting a finger.

“We were going to catch a fish today but we found you instead,” Charlie said in Tagalog.

“English,” Mason said, a little more curtly than he intended. His reminder earned him long-suffering looks from Charlie and Miriam and a decidedly annoyed look from his mystery guest.

“What harm can it do for them to speak their native language?” she asked him quietly.

Mind your own damn business, he wanted to say. He wasn’t about to get into this with her in front of the children—especially since Miriam, at least, understood a great deal more English than she let on.

He could smile, too, when the occasion called for it so he pasted a polite one on his face.

“Despite the fact that Tagalog speakers suddenly seem to be dropping out of the sky today,” he said dryly, “for the most part no one around here will understand them if they don’t learn English. They won’t have friends and they won’t be able to keep up in school. I’ve told them they can speak Tagalog to each other all they want but I want them practicing English with me and with others as much as possible before school starts.”

She opened her mouth and he saw arguments brewing in her eyes. Don’t do it, he thought.

He was in no kind of mood for a lecture and the last thing he needed was parenting advice from a stranger who claimed she didn’t even know her own name. He felt inadequate enough about this whole fatherhood gig. He didn’t need her making it worse.

Instead, she surprised him. “Yes, I can see the wisdom in your approach,” she murmured, her expression thoughtful. “I’m sure they will learn English more quickly and efficiently if it’s spoken to them often. Being a child in a new country where one doesn’t know the language can be quite lonely.”

“How would you know that? The voice of experience?” Maybe this was a clue to her past, one he should mention to Daniel.

Her brow furrowed and he could almost see her trying to concentrate. “I don’t know, precisely. Just an impression.”

Mason seemed content to let the matter drop, to her vast relief. Trying to probe around in her mind only made her head throb with tension. Still, she couldn’t seem to keep from it. Without a past, she had nothing. She was nothing.

She forced her mind away from those kinds of grim thoughts and turned her gaze out the window, letting Charlie’s aimless, cheerful chatter soothe her spirit.

They drove through a raw-looking landscape of foothills covered in little more than a silvery-green brush—sage? she wondered—and dust. The landscape seemed huge here, wild and almost savage. If not for the occasional vehicle passing in the other direction, she would have thought they were alone out here save for the cattle; huge dark beasts contained by rusty barbed-wire fences.

This all seemed so alien to her, vaguely frightening in its vastness and isolation. She had to wonder if the strangeness of it was due to her memory loss or whether she would have found it disconcerting even if she remembered everything.

It was wild and harsh-looking, she thought after a few more moments of gazing out the window, but there was a raw and almost painful beauty to the landscape.

“Can you tell me where we are?” she asked after a moment. “I seem to remember something you said earlier about Utah, but would you mind perhaps being a little more specific?”

The look Mason sent her was full of suspicion. What made him so mistrustful? she wondered. Was it something about her or did he behave that way with everyone? It seemed a dreadful way to live, if the latter was the case.

“The town you just left is Moose Springs, population about three hundred, give or take a few,” he said after a moment. “We’re about an hour northeast of Salt Lake City.”

Useful information, she thought. If only she knew anything about Salt Lake City.

“The ski resort community of Park City is just over those mountains as the crow flies but more like a half-hour if you’re in a car,” he went on. “The road we found you on was inside the Uinta Mountain Range, in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest, a vast tract of land that includes a wilderness area of about half a million acres.”

For some reason, her stomach clenched at that. She had a feeling she wasn’t particularly enamored of anything with the word wilderness in its descriptor.

“And where are we going now?” she asked.

“My family’s ranch, the Bittercreek. It’s about three miles out of town. We should be there in a minute.”

She had the sudden disquieting thought that she was traveling with a man she’d known less than a few hours to stay with him at his ranch, out in the middle of nowhere. She knew nothing at all about him. Perhaps she might have been better to throw herself on the mercy of the law officer back at the clinic.

“Mr. Mason, he has many of the horses and cows,” Charlie Betran said in his careful English.

“They are very big,” Miriam added.

“You’ll get used to them,” Mason said to the girl with a surprising gentleness. “Like I’ve told you, once you’ve been here awhile you won’t be so nervous around them. I know you’ll like the horses once you let me take you for a ride. Charlie likes them, don’t you, bud?”

The boy nodded his head vigorously, beaming at Mason.

What was the story here, she wondered. Why did this strong, masculine cowboy have custody of these two children who seemed so far from home? They seemed such an odd mix for a family.

At least they had each other.

She had no one, she thought. At least no one she remembered. What a demoralizing thought. Could she have a child somewhere? A husband who might be looking for her?