Amnesia by G. H. Ephron Page B

with a clean
dishcloth, opened it, and let the wine breathe. Then I poured myself a glass. I closed my eyes and inhaled gingerly. I felt the sharp smell make its way up my nose and come to rest somewhere between my eyes. I took a sip. I felt the bite but not much more. I swirled the wine in the glass and took another sip. Better. Sharp in the front of the mouth, mellow at the back. But it still felt like seeing a color photograph in tints of sepia. No rich purples. No acetic greens. I knocked back the remaining wine, corked the bottle, and left it on the kitchen counter. Then I put up a pot of coffee and left it to drip.
    I shuffled into the living room, collapsed into the chair, and shucked my shoes. I wiggled my toes and noticed my big toe poking through a hole that I was sure hadn’t been there this morning.
    Three hours later, I was still there, surrounded by police reports and hospital records.
    The crime scene reports told me that Sylvia Jackson was found in the Mount Auburn Cemetery, facedown near the base of the stone tower. There were tire tracks beside her body. They found her car a few blocks away, halfway between the cemetery and her house. The red paint on the right front fender was scratched. The car had a single, unidentified thumbprint on the wheel.
    After the EMTs took her to the hospital, the police went to her home. There they discovered Tony Ruggiero dead in the living room. The reports described him as six-foot-one, two hundred forty pounds. The file contained grim photographs of his body. In death, he was a large middle-aged man, running to paunch. His teeth were clenched, lips parted in a rictus of pain. He wasn’t tied up but there were rope burns on his wrists. His body was severely bruised and small amounts of coagulated blood surrounded innocuous-looking slits in his upper back and chest. He must have bled profusely from a single gunshot wound to the stomach.
    Two kitchen knives, fireplace tongs, and a brass bookend were
identified as weapons. All had been wiped clean of prints. The police didn’t find a gun.
    The attack must have taken time. Time to tie him up, time to go into the kitchen for knives, time to get the fireplace tongs, time to beat him, stab him, then shoot him. I couldn’t imagine a big guy like Tony Ruggiero rolling over and submitting to a beating, leaving his attacker unbruised, as Stuart had apparently been unbruised a day later.
    Sylvia Jackson was admitted to the Mount Auburn Hospital on the morning of March 9. The admitting form listed her as Jane Doe, address unknown, date of birth unknown, everything unknown except the type of accident — gunshot wound. The description made me stop and ponder. “Twenty-five-year-old female with bullet wound to the head.” Twenty-five? That didn’t sound right.
    The hospital records described her wound exactly as Stuart Jackson had described it to me: a fronto-temporal penetrating bullet wound. She’d been shot above the right temple. The report said they performed “a bilateral craniectomy with craniotomy with debridement of the wound.” They opened up her head, sucked the blood from the bullet wound, and picked out the bullet fragments. The MRI didn’t paint a pretty picture. The bullet had tracked across the brain and ended up somewhere near the top of her left ear. That meant it first hit the right frontal lobe, then it tracked across the midline and across her left motor strip, probably affecting movement on her right side. Memory would probably be affected as well.
    She had surgery to remove bone fragments, but bits of bone remained in the areas of the brain that control executive functions — I wondered if she might be having difficulty controlling her emotions and impulses as a result.
    Her recovery had been slow and painful.
    The notes quoted her. “I want to spend fifteen hours a day in bed. But when I try to sleep, I wake up all the time. And the only time I feel calm is when