Then she heard a movement. Someone was in the room, close to her. She nearly stopped breathing.
She whispered around that miserable tube down her throat, “Who’s there?”
A man, she knew it was a man, and his breathing was close to her, too close.
“Nicola.”
Thank God, it was John. Why had she thought it could be Elliott Benson? There was no reason for him to be here.
She started crying, she couldn’t help it.
She felt his hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Nicola. You’ll be fine. You must stop crying.”
But she couldn’t.
He rang the bell. In just a moment, the door opened, flooding the hospital room with light from the hallway. Then the overhead light in the room went on.
“What’s the problem, Senator?”
“She’s crying and she’ll choke if you don’t get that tube out of her throat.”
“Yes, we have an order for that, once she is awake.” She was standing over Nicola now, saying, “This isn’t fun, is it? Okay, this won’t be pleasant, Nicola, but it’s quick.”
After the tube came out, her throat felt like it was burning inside.
The nurse said, “Don’t be alarmed about the pain in your throat. After all that’s happened, it’ll be sore for a couple more days.” The nurse took a Kleenex and wiped her eyes, her face. “You’ll be just fine now, I promise.”
She got the tears under control. She took a dozen good-sized breaths, calmed her heartbeat. “What happened?”
“Probably food poisoning,” John said. “You ate something bad, but we got you to the emergency room in time.”
“But what about you? Albia? Are you ill?”
“No, we’re fine. So is Elliott.”
“It appears,” the nurse said as she took Nicola’s pulse, “that only you ate whatever was bad.” She eased Nicola’s arm back under the covers. “The senator believes it might have been a raspberry vinaigrette. You’ve got to sleep now. Senator Rothman will see to everything.”
And she wondered, why hadn’t John or Albia or Elliott gotten ill from the food?
John kissed her forehead, not her mouth, and she didn’t blame him a bit for that. She wished she could have something to get rid of the dreadful taste, but she was so tired, so empty of words and feelings, that she just closed her eyes.
She heard John say to the nurse, “I’ll be back in the morning to speak with the doctor, see that she’s discharged. Oh, no, I can’t. I have a meeting with the mayor. I’ll send one of my people to see to things.”
They continued speaking, in low voices, into the hallway. The overhead light clicked off. The door closed.
She was shut into the blackness again. But she knew this time she was alone and it was warm here, nothing to disturb her except that small nagging voice in her head: food poisoning from vinaigrette dressing? What nonsense. She’d eaten so little of everything because she was excited about Albia’s birthday, the gift she’d given her, and she wanted desperately for Albia to be her friend, to accept her. She wondered as she fell back into sleep if she would have died if she’d eaten more.
She’d had food poisoning before, on a hunting trip with her dad, when she’d eaten bad meat. It hadn’t been like this.
The next morning, the doctors couldn’t say exactly what had made her sick. They’d taken blood tests, said they would analyze what was in her stomach, and tested both the senator and his sister, but nothing was found.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Beasley, John’s cook and housekeeper, had already thrown all the food away, washed all the dishes. No way to know, the doctors said. Finally they’d let her go.
She’d nearly died. For the second time in a week and a half.
Nick touched her fingertips to her throat, remembering how it had hurt for a good two days after she’d left the hospital in Chicago. She turned on her side, saw Dane’s outline on that wretched too-short sofa not more than twelve feet from her, sighed, and finally fell asleep in her bed at the Bennington Hotel. She was afraid, afraid those mad, dark eyes would come gleaming out of the darkness at her, just over her head, hovering just out of reach. She prayed she wouldn’t have any more nightmares.
Dane, sprawled on the sofa across the room, never stirred. He awoke with a start at 7 a.m. to see Nick Jones dressed in the blue jeans and white shirt he’d bought her, feet bare, pacing back and forth in front of him. He realized he’d slept hard, which was unexpected since the damned sofa was too short and hard as the floor. The TV was on, he could see the reflection of the colors in the mirror over the vanity table, but there was no sound.
“Thank God you’re awake.”
For as long as he could remember, when Dane woke up, he was instantly alert, and he was now. “What’s the matter, Nick?”
She blew out her breath, splayed her hands in front of her. She took a step closer to him and said, “I know what’s going on. I know.”
ELEVEN
Dane swung his legs over the side of the sofa and stood quickly, the blankets falling to the floor at his feet. “You know what?” His sweatpants were low on his belly, and he quickly pulled them back up. He grabbed her hands, covered them. “What, Nick? What do you know?”
“Yes, okay. Listen, you were out like a light last night. I woke up, then couldn’t go back to sleep and so I watched TV, turned down really low. It’s a show, Dane, a TV show on the Premier Channel, a new one, just started probably a couple of weeks ago. It came on at eleven o’clock, called The Consultant. It was about these murders in Chicago and how this special Federal consultant comes in and solves them. It was kind of X-Files-y, you know, unexplained stuff that gives you goose bumps and makes you look toward the window if it’s really dark outside. I wasn’t really paying too much attention until there was this creepy guy in a confessional, and I realized he was talking to a priest about what he’d done, taunting him about the people he’d killed, and then when the priest was pleading with him to stop, he laughed and shot him through the forehead. Dane, it wasn’t about murders in Chicago, it was like the murders right here, in San Francisco.”
Dane rubbed his forehead, dashed his fingers through his hair. He couldn’t get his brain around what she’d just said. It didn’t seem possible. He said finally, “You’re telling me that some asshole murdered my brother because he was following the script of some idiotic TV show?”
“Yes. When the show was over, I watched all the credits and wrote down everything I could.”
Dane dragged his fingers through his hair again, drew a deep breath, and said, “I’m going to order some coffee, then you’re going to tell me everything, every little detail. Oh damn, let me call Delion. You’re pretty sure about this?”
“I’m positive. I just couldn’t believe it. I nearly woke you up, but realized that there wasn’t much of anything you could do at midnight. And you were so tired.”
“It’s okay.”
After arriving at LAX on the 9 a.m. Southwest shuttle from Oakland airport, where Nick was allowed through despite having no ID after Delion filled out papers in triplicate and spoke to two supervisors, Inspector Delion, Special Agent Carver, and the woman they introduced as Ms. Nick Jones, with no designation at all, stepped into Executive Producer Frank Pauley’s corner office with its big glass windows that looked across Pico toward the ocean. You couldn’t see it because the smog was sitting heavy and gray over the city, but you could see the golf course.
Mr. Pauley was slightly built, tall, pleasant looking, and very pale. Surely that shouldn’t be right, Nick thought. Wasn’t everyone in LA supposed to be tanned from head to toe? He looked to be somewhere in his forties, and had a nice smile, albeit a nervous one when he met them. She couldn’t blame him for that.