скачать книгу бесплатно
He could hear Beethoven’s Fifth playing in the background. It always played in the background.
“I was thinking you could come see me this weekend,” she said, her voice more like a child’s than a mother’s now. “Maybe stay a little longer, even.”
His shoulders tensed. “I have a lot of work, Ma. Besides, you have an appointment with Dr. Calvin.”
“You’re a doctor. You can look after me.”
His free hand fisted in the pocket of his coat. He struggled to keep his voice steady. “I’m a resident, Ma. You know what that means? It means I have no life. No time. It means if I don’t keep my mind one-hundred-percent on the job, I might never be a doctor for real. Do you understand?”
“I could cook for you.” Her voice took on a dreamy tone. “I bet you haven’t had a decent meal in months. Do you remember when we used to make cookies together? I’d mix the batter and you’d lick the bowl?”
Ty bit his tongue. She’d never baked cookies for him in his life. Much less fixed him a decent meal. But she didn’t know that. She thought all her little imaginings were fact.
For a moment, he almost wished it were true—that his childhood had been idyllic. That he’d been her golden child and she’d been his storybook-perfect mother.
Only for a moment, though. If his mom hadn’t been the way she was when he was a kid, he wouldn’t have become the man he was now. What better motivation was there for becoming a psychiatrist than growing up in the clutches of a crazy mother?
Intellectually, he knew that her psychosis was a disease, an illness she hadn’t asked for and couldn’t prevent, but as a kid he’d only known the effect, not the cause. He’d known her mood swings, her temper. His mother had been sick, but too often, he’d been the one to suffer.
And yet, she was still his mother. He’d never been able to turn his back on her. Not completely. He closed his eyes. “Sure, we can do it again sometime,” he said softly. “But not right now, okay? I just don’t have time to b—”
He stopped himself just short of saying babysit.
“—to be with you. I should have a break around the end of the month. I’ll drive out for the day.”
“Only for a day? But I miss you, My Ty.”
He reached his car and ratcheted the door open with numb fingers. His stomach tightened. The assisted-living complex she lived in was only about ten miles from here. She was his mother, and she was lonely.
He was a doctor and he had responsibilities. He had patients to see and a whole caseload of patient files to update before 8:00 a.m.
“Look, Ma, I gotta go,” he said, ashamed to feel grateful for the Kaiser’s last-minute assignment, but grateful all the same. He just didn’t have the time, or the mental energy. Not right now. “I’ll try to get out there next week.”
He hung up without waiting for her acknowledgment. He folded himself into his car, blew on his hands and rubbed them together, wishing he could warm the cold knot of guilt in his chest as easily as he could warm his frozen fingers.
He started the car.
He’d give her a call and have a long chat when he got a break tomorrow, he promised himself.
Day after that, at the latest.
Mia jogged along the trail at the top of the bluff, her muscles burning, blood singing, breath puffing in front of her face. The view was beautiful from up here. The snow on the trees, the roads winding toward the valley, the village—
A hand hit her in the back. She felt the impression of the palm distinctly. Five fingers.
Falling. Pounding against rocks. Grating against frozen earth. Pavement—
Mia lurched to wakefulness, her heart pounding.
But she wasn’t on Shilling’s Bluff. Wasn’t falling into the road with a pickup truck bearing down on her.
She was in her hospital room. In the dark.
Her mouth was dry, so she sat up to search the bedside table for water. She could make out a chair beside the bed and a monitor—not active, thank goodness—on a cart across the room. A slice of light angled in through a narrow window on the door.
Her heart stalled, then raced as she stared at the door. She couldn’t see the handle.
She had to know.
Silently she slipped out of bed and padded into the light. Holding her breath she reached for the doorknob and turned it.
Not locked.
Her breath exploded in relief. For a minute she’d thought…
But, no. Thankfully, she’d been wrong. It wasn’t locked.
She should go back to bed. There was no reason to worry. She wasn’t a prisoner here, she hadn’t been involuntarily committed. She’d agreed—albeit with little real choice in the matter—to stay for observation of her own accord. In the morning, she’d make nice with Dr. Handsome and be on her way. She had to be calm. Composed.
Rational.
Unfortunately there was nothing rational about the fear skittering up her spinal column like a monkey on a vine. Or about her growing certainty that her fall hadn’t been an accident, despite what anyone else thought.
She hadn’t slipped; she’d been pushed.
Was she losing it again? Going crazy?
She couldn’t. Wouldn’t let herself.
She glanced at the bed, but the restlessness inside her wouldn’t let her sleep. What was the point of lying there and worrying?
She raised up on her toes and looked out the narrow window in the door. The nurses’ station down the hall sat abandoned. Silently she pushed the door open and padded toward the desk. Maybe her medical chart would hold some clue as to what had really happened. At the very least it would tell her what the doctors—Ty Hansen, in particular—were thinking about her.
Tightening the drawstring on her yellow flannel pajamas, she shuffled over to the cluttered workstation. On the upper level of the desk area, coffee rings topped untidy stacks of folders. Yellow sticky notes and phone message slips papered the lower tier.
Mia fingered the files until she found what she was looking for. She scanned the pages quickly. History of depression. Prior commitment to a mental-health facility. Mother-in-law concerned about her current state of mind.
What?
Oh, Nana…
Before she had a chance to read exactly what Nana had told the doctor, a shuffling sound around the corner caught her attention.
Footsteps.
Fear paralyzed her until it was too late to scurry back to her room unseen. She wouldn’t have worried about being caught by a nurse or orderly, but these footsteps didn’t sound as if they belonged to a hospital employee. They were too slow, too measured.
It seemed almost as if the person around the corner was sneaking down the hallway. Toward her.
Maybe she really was paranoid. She debated standing her ground, but gave in to fear, the memory of this morning’s shove firm in her mind—and on her back.
Out of time, she ducked behind the nurses’ counter. The footsteps shuffled slowly closer, but didn’t turn at the intersection of the two hallways. Instead they moved forward.
Toward the door to her room.
Heart thundering so loudly she thought surely whoever was out there would hear it, she raised up high enough to peek over the counter.
A slight man in baggy black sweatpants and an oversized black jacket stood outside her door. He looked over his shoulder as if to check whether he’d been seen. The hooded jacket hid his face, but Mia saw menace in the stoop of his shoulders, his careful step.
She held her breath as he pulled a vial out of his pocket. He uncapped a syringe with his mouth, drew the contents from the vial and tapped the bubbles to the top of the syringe. When he turned to check over his shoulder one more time, Mia ducked again.
That was no doctor. Even if it was, Dr. Hansen said she wasn’t to be medicated.
A feeling that something was very, very wrong crept over her. The intruder turned his back to her and flattened a hand on the door to her room, easing it open.
She hugged the wall with her back, then slid sideways, away from her room. Away from that man.
She was just about to turn the corner when her foot connected with the ball on a rolling chair. The chair clattered and crashed into the desk.
The intruder turned.
Mia gave in to panic and ran. Her bare feet slapped the cold tile, her footsteps in synch with the squeak of the intruder’s sneakers as he followed her. She banged open the door to an emergency stairway and launched herself toward the ground floor.
Even as she ran she realized she should scream. Find someone to help her. But the sound froze in her throat.
She’d screamed before. No one had heard her. Or if they had, they hadn’t cared.
The Eternal Emergency Care Clinic operated overnight with a skeleton staff. Most patients in need of extended treatment transferred to larger hospitals in Belier or Kyacy. Rarely did a patient stay overnight.
The building was virtually empty, except for her and a man with a syringe.
Mia ran faster.
The door to the stairwell clacked open behind her. Footsteps matched her hurried descent. She stopped at the ground floor and pushed through the exit.
A blast of frigid air hit her like a slap in the face. She had no way of knowing what time it was, but it was still dark. In the distance, a single streetlight lit the empty parking area. Drifting snow danced in its glow.
Mia backed inside the building and let the door close. She couldn’t go out there. She had no coat, no shoes. The parking lot was empty, the street deserted. Who knew how far she would have to run before she found help in a sleepy little village like Eternal?
A hysterical laugh bubbled out of her. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t stupid.
Hugging herself, she hurried down the final flight of stairs to what appeared to be the basement. There was no sign of the man chasing her, but he was coming. She could feel it. Gooseflesh bubbled on her skin.
Maybe she had imagined it, the way she had imagined someone pushing her on the bluff.
Somewhere above her, a door creaked open.
Giving in to her dread, she raced through a door marked Cafeteria. She yanked open drawers in the empty kitchen until she found a knife and then settled herself between a huge stainless-steel double sink and a stand of metal shelves.
She didn’t know who was after her, or why. If he really even existed or if he was a figment of her imagination, a bump on the head and medication.
But real or not, she was going to be ready.
Chapter 4
About the time he pulled into the parking lot of the Eternal Emergency Care Clinic, Ty could have used a couple of toothpicks to hold his eyelids up. With the help of two pots of coffee and a Red Bull, he’d managed to land his updated patient-care charts in the Kaiser’s inbox just shy of 6:00 a.m. The winds had died down since last night and the snowplows had cleared the roads, so he’d made good time from Belier. Now all he had to do was give the good Ms. Serrat the once-over—professionally speaking, of course—and send her on her way, and with any luck her uncle Karl would have no cause to send his career down in flames.
This week.
Maybe he’d even get in a little catnap before his shift at the hospital.
A sheriff’s cruiser sat cockeyed in front of the employee entrance. Funny. He’d noticed another out front.
His guard was up a little, and the difference in atmosphere struck him like a slap when he walked into the corridor. Groups of orderlies huddled in the hall, their eyes darting back and forth as they whispered. A couple of pale-faced nurses tapped anxiously on each door as they moved away from Ty, opening and entering each room before coming back out and shaking their heads. A uniformed deputy strolled along behind, a hint of boredom barely showing beneath his stone-faced expression.
Ty tapped a nurse he recognized from last night on the shoulder. “What’s going on?”
She grabbed him by the elbows. “Oh, thank God you’re here. We’ve lost your patient.”
“What do you mean, lost her?”
“I mean she’s gone. Her bed was empty when the floor nurse went in for morning rounds.”
The blood drained from Ty’s head. “Have you called her family? Maybe she skipped out and went home.”
“We checked. They haven’t seen her. Her mother-in-law and uncle are on their way here.”
Great. Maybe he’d been premature in his prediction that his career would last another week.
“She can’t have gone far,” the nurse continued. “Her clothes and shoes are still in the closet in her room. She has to be in the building somewhere.”
Reflexively, Ty stole a glance out the glass door at the snow beyond and shivered. The mentally ill sometimes didn’t feel physical discomfort until it was too late. If she had left the building…
He threw his coat over the nurses’ counter and raked a hand through his uncombed hair. “All right. What areas have you searched so far?”
“Her whole floor. The common areas on other floors, waiting rooms, doctors’ lounges and such. The main lobby and the second-floor patient rooms.”
“So that leaves intensive care—I doubt she’s there, there are enough staff around someone would have noticed—the first-floor patient rooms and the basement.”
“We just sent a group to the first floor to look. The graveyard shift stayed over to search, and the morning crew is helping out, too. Everyone we can spare. They’ve got all the main floors covered.”
“Guess that leaves us with the basement, then.”
He gestured toward the stairwell and strode off after her. At least he wasn’t sleepy any longer. Amazing what a jolt of adrenaline could do to the human body.
The high he was riding didn’t subside, even after twenty minutes of searching for his wayward patient.
There was only one area left to search down here—the kitchen. Ahead a faint gruelish smell filtered around a stainless-steel swinging door.
