A Horse with No Name Pt. 02

I wrote the number on a slip of paper, handed it to Mr. Wilson and he asked his secretary to come into the office. He looked at me and said, "How does your day look? Will you be available to go meet with Mr. Stanley today if we can get an appointment?"

"Yea, my whole day is open."

Mr. Wilson handed the secretary the paper with the phone number for SA on it and said, "Betty, please call Stanley Applications at that number and see if you can get us in to see Mr. Stanley today." Then to me, he said, 'We will need to get an appointment with the IRS to arrange for you to file your taxes without penalty.

Betty was back ten minutes later and said that we could see Mr. Stanley at one o'clock.

"I can't believe how fast you are moving on this," I said. How is it that you can spend so much time on my case right off the bat?"

"I am semi-retired, and I don't take many cases anymore. Your situation interested me, so I decided to help you. Why don't we go out now and I will let you buy my lunch?" Mr. Wilson said with a wink and a smile.

At one o'clock, Mr. Wilson and I were shown into a conference room at SA where Mr. Stanley joined us. I introduced Mr. Wilson to Mr. Stanley and said that he is representing me.

"I don't see why you felt the need to get a lawyers involved," Mr. Stanley said.

"We are here to make sure that Mr. Sullivan's rights and employee benefits are protected," Mr. Wilson said.

"But Mr. Sullivan is no longer an employee of SA. His benefits were all canceled when I got his resignation email."

"It is my understanding that Mr. Sullivan did not resign and that it was established that Mr. Sullivan did not write or send the email of which you speak. Therefore he is still an employee of this company."

"Well, I don't know what you expect me to do about it. We believed that Mike resigned and we acted in good faith when we severed his employment and terminated his benefits."

"That is why Mr. Sullivan hired me to represent him. You need to get someone from your HR department up here so we can get started. Mr. Sullivan must be reinstated as an employee with all his benefits and no gap in his service. We have to get your health insurance carrier to process Mr. Sullivan's claims for the medical care he received after he was injured. Also, Mr. Sullivan will be entitled to back pay and sick pay. Also, if the stolen Interapp program turns up, I would assume that Mr. Sullivan would be getting a bonus for the work he did on that project."

I think Mr. Stanley was impressed by my lawyer, I know I was.

"Let me get my Human Resource Manager up here, and I think I should have our company lawyer here, too," Mr. Stanley said. "This kind of situation isn't something we have ever run into before."

A half hour later there were at least ten people in the conference room working on my problems. Four hours later, when Mr. Wilson and I left the meeting, we had assurances that everything that we discussed would be resolved.

When I dropped Mr. Wilson off back at his office, he pulled out a business card and wrote his home number on the back of the card. "If you have any problems with SA or if you need my help with anything else call me. As I told you before, I am semi-retired, so I don't always keep regular office hours. Since you are my only client right now, you can call me at home if I am not in my office."

My call to Kate that evening was a bit more upbeat than our previous calls. I told Kate how I ended up with an eighty-year-old lawyer and how he had Mr. Stanley and his staff jumping through hoops to resolve the issues caused by the phony resignation email that someone sent in my name.

"When we walked into the conference room at SA I think Mr. Stanley thought that instead of a lawyer I brought my grandfather with me," I said. "Mr. Wilson was a pleasant surprise to me and a shock to SA's legal team. He managed to make the SA lawyer believe that I might sue the company without ever threatening them."

Kate told me about the excitement in Brodricksburg caused by the FBI raid on the First Bank of Brodricksburg. "The news on television is that the bank's president and vice president are suspected of using the bank to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel. This is the biggest thing to hit Brodricksburg since the commissioner of works was murdered, and the mayor was arrested along with several city dignitaries for a conspiracy to defraud the city in a land scam."

None of that meant much to me as I didn't know much about Brodricksburg, but I enjoyed listening to the excitement in Kate's voice. She went on tell me a couple of stories about Megan and her activities.

"What are you going to do now?" Kate asked.

"It's time to start learning who I was," I said. "I have a phone number for a Patrick Murray in New York State. I am going to call him and see if we are related and what he can tell me about my previous life. After that, I am going to start digging through the files in my office to see what I can learn from them."

The end of the call felt awkward. We didn't seem to know what to say to each other. I couldn't tell Kate I loved her until I dealt with Lisa Spenser. What was I supposed to do with a fianceé I don't know and who might now be involved with my best friend whom I also don't know? How would Lisa react when she found out the true story of what happened to me? I would have to talk to her, if for no other reason than to learn what I could from her about my past, but that would have to wait for a few days. It was time to call Patrick Murray.

I pulled up the number for Patrick Murray on my cell phone and placed the call. The phone rang three times before someone answered.

"Hi, can I speak with Patrick Murray please?"

"This is Patrick, who's this?"

I said, "it's Mike Sullivan."

"Hell, Mike. It's about time you gave your old uncle a call," Patrick said. "Where have you been?"

"This is going to be difficult to explain," I said. Then I told Patrick about my head injury and the amnesia. I told him that I found his number on my phone and wanted to find out if we were related and see what he could tell me about my previous life.

"Mike, are you serious? I mean about the amnesia?"

I told him it was true and then told him the whole story from the beginning up to where the police investigation stood.

"I am hoping that you can help me piece together my life before the head injury."

"How much do you remember?" Patrick asked.

"Before my injury, nothing."

"Oh shit, Mike where do I begin?" Patrick was quiet for a minute and then started giving me a history of my life.

"You are my sister's boy. Your mother's name was Susan, and your father was John Sullivan. You were born in Oswego, New York, in 1987. Your dad died in a construction accident in 1999. In school, you were a good student and a good athlete. In early 2004 your mother had a stroke. Because of your mother's health, you decided to put off going to college for a year so you could help take care of her. She died the following summer, just days after she attended your high school graduation. After your mother died, you moved in with your Aunt Helen and me. In the fall of 2005, you started college at Rochester Institute of Technology. After you graduated in 2009, you moved to North Carolina for a job. The house you live in down there belonged to your grandmother on your fathers side. She left you the house with a good deal of money."

"What did I do that year before I started college?" I said.

"Same thing you did every summer since you were about fifteen years old. Whenever you weren't playing baseball you were working for me," Patrick said.

"What kind of work did I do for you?"

"I own a small home improvement company. You liked to come around to job sites and ask me if I had any work you could do. Any little job I gave you was done to perfection. You did painting, plastering, hanging drywall and some carpentry. That year before you started college you worked for me full time. I thought for a while that you might stay here and become my partner, but you had other plans."

We talked for nearly two hours and ended with me promising to visit him and Aunt Helen in Fair Haven, New York, when I had time.

After talking with my Uncle, I went out and found a grocery store and bought a week's worth of groceries. When I got back home, I ate a ham and cheese sandwich and potato chips and washed it down with a beer. With dinner out the way, I headed up to my office to begin my research into the life and times of Michael John Sullivan.

Chapter 15 Surprise Visitors

I was up late Friday cleaning up the mess in my office. I picked papers and files off the floor and sorted them by subject matter. When I finished that project I went to bed.

I was up early Saturday morning filling out my income tax forms in preparation for meeting with an IRS auditor. I finished my taxes around noon, so I took a lunch break and headed back upstairs. I was sitting at my desk reviewing what I had accomplished since coming home Friday evening. My taxes were complete, and I had finished cleaning up sorting out the mess on the floor and filed everything in my desk. I sat looking around the office wondering what to do next when I saw the closet door. The closet had appeared to be empty when we looked around the room on Wednesday, but I got up to take a closer look anyway.

There were no clothes in the closet, and there was nothing on the floor, but then I saw something we missed on Wednesday. Above the door was a shelf that you could not see unless you went into the closet and turned to face the door and looked up. On the shelf were several shoeboxes and one big box. I pulled down one of the shoe boxes and looked inside. It was half full of photographs. On the lid of the box someone had written 'Summer 93.' There were a lot of pictures of a young boy that I guessed was me at six years old. There was an attractive, women with me in a lot of the pictures and I wondered if she was my mother. If she was my mother, who was taking the pictures, my father? None of the photos triggered any memories.

I got the rest of the boxes out of the closet and began to look through them. All of the shoe boxes had labels with a year and some other information. There were birthday parties, picnics, Christmas, school plays and pictures of me over the years wearing different baseball uniforms. In the big box, I found a scrapbook that contained bits and pieces of my life as I grew up. It started with a copy of my birth certificate and continued with pictures of me getting my first haircut, my first day of school and all of my report cards from elementary school all the way through high school. There were also newspaper clippings from my time playing baseball. One newspaper headline, in particular, caught my attention. The headline read "Sullivan Pitches One-Hitter to win the Section III title game."

According to the article, I was a pretty good pitcher. The story said that several of my fastballs were clocked at over 90 miles an hour. It went on to say many very positive things about me which made me very sad. To be responsible for winning the big game and become a local sports hero. To have your local newspaper write about you like you are the second coming of Nolan Ryan, all heady stuff, but when you don't remember anything about that time of your life, it's hard to relive the thrill of it. That's when it hit me, all of the pictures of my childhood, all of the notices in the newspaper about me, none of it meant anything to me because I couldn't remember any of it. I couldn't look at any more of it so I set everything aside to peruse later.

It was a little after seven o'clock that evening when my doorbell rang. When I opened the door, I was shocked to find Lisa Spenser and Sonja Anderson along with another man I didn't recognize. Before I could say anything, Sonja asked if they could come in. The man with them shook my hand and said, "It's good to see you again, Mike."

I just gave him a blank look.

"It's me, John Anderson, Sonya's husband. You don't remember me?"

"Sorry, I don't remember anyone from before my injury."

"We're sorry to burst in on you like this, but I need to talk to you," Lisa said. "I should have come by myself, but I felt uncomfortable coming after the way I treated you the other night."

"You don't need to apologize for that. Besides you didn't say much of anything," I said.

"But I should have. I let George speak for me, and that wasn't right," Lisa said.

"Why isn't George here with you tonight?"

"He said that he couldn't face you after the way he acted," Lisa said.

"When you see him, tell him I forgive him," I said. I am glad you're here. Maybe the three of you can help me learn about who I was before this happened."

I led the group into my living room and opened a bottle of wine.

John was the first to speak. "So, what have the police found out so far?"

I told them everything I knew about the investigation except the part about believing that the person that stole the Interapp software was an employee of SA. I still didn't know who I could trust, so I kept that information to myself. After that, I asked all the questions.

"How did Lisa and I meet and how long were we together?"

"We met at John and Sonja's house about two and a half years ago and have been together ever since," Lisa said.

To Sonja, I said, "How long have you and John known me?"

"When you first started working at SA we had you over for dinner, and we have been to each other's houses for dinners and parties dozens of times over the last six years," Sonja said.

"What kind of person was I?"

"You are a good person," Lisa said. "You have a good sense of humor, and you treat everyone like they're good friends of yours. You may not remember it yet, but you have a lot of friends who were very upset when they thought that you dumped me and took off with the Interapp product. Now they are all upset that they didn't have more faith in you and they are all praying for you to recover your memory."

"Well, that's not going to happen. The doctors have told me that the memories I lost are gone forever. The only thing I can do is learn as much about my past as I can to create an artificial memory based on real events in my life."

"So, what activities did I get involve in outside of work?" I said.

"Played softball on the company team and subbed on the bowling team," Lisa said. "You liked to run in the mornings when the weather wasn't too bad."

"That reminds me," I said. "I found out earlier today that I was a pretty good baseball player when I was in high school, but I didn't see anything to indicate if I played after high school. Do you know anything about that?" I asked Lisa.

"You told me about that. You had a scholarship offer to play at Georgia, but during your senior year in high school your mother had a stroke. You took a year off before college to take care of her. She passed away the following summer. There were no more scholarship offers, so you decided to go to RIT and study engineering."

That fit with what I had learned from my Uncle Patrick, although he never mentioned the scholarship to Georgia that I gave up. He just told me that I stayed home for a year after high school and worked for him during the day and helped take care of my mother at night after her nurse left.

"About once every other week we would all stop at 42nd Street Oyster Bar after work for drinks and dinner," Lisa said. "You and George often stopped there for a drink after work. You used to tell me you only went there to have a few oysters before coming to my apartment. We spent four or five nights together every week, and I stayed at your house most weekends.

It was awkward for me to listen to Lisa talk about us as a couple. I knew nothing about her. She had been wiped from my memory, but I was still important in her life. This situation wasn't fair to either of us.

After three hours and three bottles of wine, my guests decided it was time to leave. At the door, I didn't know what to do. Would Lisa expect some acknowledgement of our relationship? Should I hug Lisa or kiss her? I didn't feel comfortable with either of those options, so I just thank them all for coming over and suggested that we should do it again soon.

I heard a lot of positive things about who I was, but it seemed the more I learned the worse I felt about what I had lost. Alone again, I felt lost and depressed. Where did I belong? In Raleigh with Lisa, trying to reconnect to my past, or in Brodricksburg with Kate and Megan trying to build a whole new life?

The problem was that my history with Kate and Megan was only a few months long, but I didn't know anything else, and I was happy with them. Whereas my history with Lisa was much longer, and it was evident from the way Lisa talked about us that she did love me, but I didn't remember any of that life. I briefly thought that it might have been better for everyone if I had died in that snow-covered field.

I didn't like the way I was feeling or the way I was thinking, so I went to bed and hoped to sleep without dreaming.

Chapter 16 - Unsettling News

Sunday morning my mind was a jumble of thoughts about all the information I had received about my previous life from my conversations on Saturday. I decided to write everything down, while it was still fresh in my mind, so that I could build a chronological history of the life I had lost. I sat down at my desk ready to get started but my thoughts were so random that I did not know where to begin.

I mulled things over for several minutes and then the idea that having a computer would be helpful came to me. With a computer I could input anything that I could remember from the conversations I had with my uncle and with Lisa and the Andersons. Once I had everything I could remember recorded, I could go back and begin putting things in chronological order. That would also help me devise a list of follow up questions to help fill in more of the blanks. I remembered seeing a Best Buy store near the Fairfield Inn where I stayed Tuesday and Wednesday night, so I headed over there.

When one of the associates in the computer department at Best Buy asked if he could help me, without even stopping to think about it I was able to tell him exactly what I wanted. I guess it must have been some unconscious connection to my working with computers in my previous life. I purchase the most powerful laptop they had along with MS Office. I don't think I was in the store more than twenty minutes, total.

Back at the house I fired up my new laptop, went through the setup process and loaded the MS office. I attempted to get online to register my computer and the MS Office for warrantee purposes and so I could get software updates, but I could not get online.

My computer was able to find my wireless modem, but when it asked me for the password I was sunk. I searched my office, but could not find the password. I didn't know who to call for help because I didn't know who my internet provider was.

I checked with the local phone company and the cable TV company and while both were more than willing to provide internet services, neither of them had any record of me having a current internet account with them. I was stymied, so for the time being I gave up on trying to connect to the internet and instead started to put all of the information I had gathered so far into a word document.

Around five o'clock that afternoon I heard a door open and close downstairs. I was just getting up to go check to see who had come into the house when I heard a woman's voice call out. "Mike, where are you?"

It sounded like Lisa. "I'm upstairs in my office."

I met Lisa at the top of the stairs. She gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek and said, "What have you been up to today?"