I’m pretty good with voices. To the careful ear, voices are as distinct as a walk, a form of handwriting, a style of dress. Still, it surprised me-was it really that small a town? There was something familiar in those voices.
Everyone has heard the research into pheromones that sync us up with mates. I sincerely doubt that’s all the lizard brain can detect. I think we smell all sorts of crap, like lies and wickedness and trouble ahead. Maybe that explains why a person might freeze and listen to a conversation that makes very little sense at first.
Or maybe I’m just nosey.
“…tired of it, do you hear me?”
“I hear you. I’m trying-”
“I don’t want to hear how hard you are trying. You’ve turned something very simple into something complicated. Am I going to have to find someone else to help me?”
“No. No.”
“I hope not. I’ll call you.”
“Um, yeah, listen I have a new number. Old phone’s gone.”
Hello! The light went on. That was Pat talking. Fireman Pat, Tom Jost’s partner, a.k.a. Mr. Vegas. Couldn’t place the other voice. I slipped back two steps as a nurse came barging full-steam around my curtain wall.
“Whoops-sorry,” she said automatically. She followed it with a more hostile, “What are you doing here?”
“Lost.” I grimaced and backed through the curtain into the open hall area. “Cafeteria?”
“That way.” She pointed with a finger-gun toward the far end of the hall.
“Thanks.”
I caught a glimpse of someone rounding the corner at a good clip, the reflectors on his uniform jacket flashing as he passed beneath the yellow-green light of each fluorescent ceiling fixture. I looked back the other way, no sign of the second man. The only door nearby that didn’t seem to lead to a patient’s room read Restricted.
“Hey Pat!” I hollered, taking a chance that he was the man disappearing around the corner. “Wait up!” On four hours sleep, subtle Miss Nancy Drew I’m not.
Lucky for me, Mr. Vegas had a lot of friends in the hospital.
“Looking for something?” a guy in scrubs asked.
“EMS guy named Pat?” I tried.
That brought an eye roll. “Figures. Never the ugly ones. Toward the cafeteria.”
“Thanks.”
Couple of nurses pointed me, “That way.”
“Right. Thanks.”
I turned a corner into an empty hall. Quiet. No sign of anyone. My heart was pumping with adrenaline and the sudden change of pace. I’d been race-walking the halls, trying to catch up. Mounted on the wall near a frosted glass door was a small, brass plaque.
Chapel. Open 24 Hours.
It felt like a trick. I pulled the door and peeked inside.
My breathing made a surf-roar in my ears. “Hello?”
No answer. I made myself quiet-hiding quiet-and entered.
The room was shoebox small, only a dozen chairs, and a solid table with glass votives at the front. The walls were bare, the wood trim spare and nothing but a pair of dim uplights shining on the curtained wall behind the altar table. I smelled hospital cleaner and the burning sweetness of beeswax candles.
I circled the room. It was empty and then some, as non-denominational as a place of worship could be. In the Amish world, simplicity came from sameness. Funny how in our world, it was diversity that bred simplicity.
Could anyone sink low enough to hide behind an altar table? I looked and realized there was a door behind the curtained wall.
Cold rushed through my blood. Calm took effort.
Ready-I opened the door as carefully, quietly, as possible. It swung inward.
Absolute dark. I slipped my hand past the door jamb, feeling for a light switch.
Click!
The overhead blinked on. Room empty. It was a walk-in closet-cum-sacristy. A rack of vestments hung on the back wall, a small bookcase to one side. Nothing but a room.
I slipped all the way inside-
Boom!
The light snapped off as the door slammed, the sound mixing with what happened next. My face hit the wall, cheekbone first. The sudden reversal of light blinded me. My hand covered the switch, but his larger hand-sweaty and strong-pressed my palm into the toggle, biting into my skin.
Caught.
“Don’t move.”
There was nothing to move. I couldn’t even twist my head. His jaw and neck locked the threat of his body right beneath my ear. His chin dug into the top of my scalp. We were both panting, strangely synchronized with each movement of chest, and that was the most coldly frightening thing of all.
“You,” he whispered. “You smell like her.”
“Who? Pat, what the hell-?”
“Shut up.” He crushed his body against me. I stopped inhaling. “Questions don’t help. Knowing won’t help. It only makes things worse. Don’t you get that?”
“No. I don’t believe that.”
“What’s it take to teach you? They both died! Leave it alone.”
“Both?” I said.
“Tom and Gina.”
“Gina?” You smell like her. Confusion was all that kept me calm. Once again, my lizard brain jumped ahead to a place where logic feared to go. “Angelina? Do you mean my sister?” My internal temperature dropped twenty degrees. It’s a miracle my next breath didn’t fog the air.
“You are making everything worse,” he said. “You have to stop.”
Resistance bubbled up, hot and sharp. I bucked and twisted. “Get off me.”
He was as mad as I was, but a whole lot bigger. He slammed himself against me again, smashing us into the wall. All the body parts you never see, never think about, suddenly appeared on my mental map, tracing a line of vulnerability from the top of my spine, down the slope of my back, to the curve of my ass.
Nobody moved for a heavy second.
He seemed to lose track of the moment, anger suspended by a surge of hormones, or confusion, or something else. His body took over. He inhaled deeply, chest swelling, and I felt the barest suggestion of motion forward and back with his pelvis, a reaching out. His cock was big enough to make an impression. I kept very still.
“Stop,” he repeated. “Just stop.”
Too slowly, he withdrew contact with his lower body. The pressure of his hand over mine increased. It hurt.
Before I realized what he meant to do, he grabbed the back of my collar and bent my arm behind my back. With a twist, he shoved me hard from the center of my back toward the middle of the room.
I flew forward and face-planted, hands too slow to catch myself. My head re-bounded off the industrial carpet.
Pat was already out the door.
Over the sound of my ears ringing, I heard the bad news, loud and clear.
He’d jammed a chair against the outside of the door. I was locked in.
“What took you so long? Where’d you go this time?” Tonya said, in the usual way. Then she took a good look at me. “Oh Lord, what now?”
I stood in the doorway of Jenny’s hospital room, not completely in my body, or my right mind. The urge to scream, hit something, throw something, had stiffened every muscle.
Jenny sat right up in the center of the bed with the rolling table pulled across her lap. There was a bunch of balloons tied to the water pitcher and a curly haired teddy bear leaning on her pillow. A “Get Well” card from some of the hospital people her mother had known was on the bedside table.
“Did you bring us food?” Jenny asked. She was concentrating hard, trying to bridge-shuffle a deck of playing cards.
“No food.”
“Darn.”
“What’s wrong?” Tonya leaned toward me, her body alert. She’d pulled her braids behind her back and tied them with a piece of silver curling ribbon cut from the balloon streamers. Jenny wore a head band of the same ribbon. It looked like they were having a little party.