Free Until Spring by Pamela Browning Page A

he asked.
    She shook her head.
    He sat down beside the bed. "Try to remember what you were doing the day of your accident. Who you might have been with, where you went," he urged quietly.
    Jane tried, but there was nothing. No associations, no fragments of conversation, no faces.
    "It's just—blank," she said unhappily.
    "I've had the police run a missing persons check. There's no one who matches your description. No accidents have been reported along that particular stretch of highway, either. You seem to have appeared out of nowhere."
    She swallowed and stared at him. "What's going to happen to me?" she ventured.
    He stood up and shook his head. "I hope you're going to remember something," he said grimly before he left.
    But she didn't remember anything. As far as she was concerned, she was nobody.
    It was extremely frustrating not to be able to identify anything about her past life. At night when she was alone she would stare up at the stained ceiling above her hospital bed and wonder, Who am I? The more she tried to figure it out, the more defeated she felt. There seemed to be no clues.
    Her clothing was ordinary, the kind that could have been bought in any Wal-Mart anywhere in the United States. When a search was conducted in the area where she had been found, someone turned up a purse that might have been hers. It was handmade of a coarsely woven wool fabric, but there was nothing in it to prove that it belonged to her—no money, no personal effects, and most importantly, no identification. Someone put it in the closet along with the salvageable clothing she was wearing when Carlton Jones and his son found her. She would take it with her when she left, she supposed.
    Dr. Bergstrom brought her a United States atlas, and she sat for hours poring over it, hoping that one of the town names or river names or highways might seem familiar. Because Chicago was the nearest big city, the sympathetic little nurse, whose name was Rosemary Sanchez, brought photos of some of the places there—O'Hare Airport, Lincoln Park, a five-story Picasso sculpture. None of them jogged her memory.
    She watched television, hoping that she would see clues to her background on the local news. She didn't.
    Following a feature story about her plight in the local newspaper, Rosemary began to call her Jane Doe, first as a kind of joke, then more seriously. By the time she left the hospital, it was the only name she knew. The hospital staff had grown so fond of her that they took up a collection to pay her bill, because as far as anyone knew, she had no insurance, and she certainly had no money.
    A welter of good wishes accompanied her discharge. Rosemary tied helium balloons to the wheelchair that they insisted she ride to the door, and an aide settled a bouquet of flowers in her arms. Besides the hand-woven purse, she carried a small donated suitcase that was too big for the meager change of clothes someone had given her.
    Dr. Bergstrom had, with great difficulty, found a place for her to stay in the nearby medium-sized town of Apollonia, Illinois, where the department of social services had agreed to help her find a job. But her assigned social worker, a Ms. Bird, whose task it was to pick her up at the hospital and install her at the shelter for battered women where she was to stay, turned out to be a malcontent who was miffed because she would have rather been out shopping for her trousseau.
    When they got to the big converted house in Apollonia, Ms. Bird all but pushed Jane out of the car and would have driven away before Jane retrieved her suitcase from the back seat if Jane had not yelped in protest. There wasn't time to grab the bouquet of flowers or Rosemary's balloons. Jane was abandoned at the curbside and left to introduce herself to the shelter's administrator, who stated with some irritation that Jane didn't really fall into the category of women that the shelter was supposed to help but would be allowed to stay anyway, since they had an