“What the hell is going on here? Where are you?”
“In a hotel. This is my wedding night.”
“Listen to me,” Forrest said in his most authoritative tone, “I need to talk to you.”
“We can talk at the board meeting. Right now I’d like you to meet my husband.”
Ethan took the phone from her a second time.
“This is Truax,” he said. “I just spoke with Ian Harper at Candle Lake Manor and gave him the same message. It’s real simple. Touch a hair on my wife’s head, and I will take you apart.”
He ended the call and put the phone down on the bedside table.
“That’s that,” he said. “Your insurance policy is now in effect.”
She sat in her chair and looked at him. “I can’t believe you did this for me.”
He gave her his slow, sexy smile. “You will when you get the bill.”
Chapter Twenty-four
She awoke to sunlight and the glint of gold on her finger. She could feel the heavy weight of Ethan’s arm draped snugly around her waist. Mercifully, she had not dreamed last night. She wondered if that was a good omen.
She looked out through the window at the Las Vegas dawn and thought about another daybreak she had witnessed a year earlier. The memories of the escape from Candle Lake Manor rose to the surface.
“Shit,” Ernie muttered. “What the hell’s the matter with her? She was supposed to get an extra dose tonight.”
“Maybe she didn’t get enough of it.” Ron’s voice was low but there was no mistaking the sick lust that reverberated in it. “Don’t worry, the restraints will hold her. I brought a needle full of the stuff with me, just in case.”
There was another thud followed by a muffled groan. A fist rapped twice, quick, frantic little taps against her door, but she recognized the signal.
She sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding, a cold sweat chilling her skin.
“Use the damned needle,” Ernie growled outside in the corridor. “She’s too strong.”
“It’s no fun when they’re too doped up to know what’s happening. Come on, we can handle her.”
She climbed out of bed and grabbed the light cotton robe with the words CANDLE LAKE MANOR stitched on the left breast pocket. Every patient got an identical robe and pair of slippers. There was no belt on the robe and no laces in the footwear.
She went to the door and pressed her ear to the panel. The orderlies had managed to drag their victim to the end of the hallway.
She waited until she was sure they had turned the corner before she went back to the bed and removed the stolen key card from the tiny slit in the bottom of the mattress.
She had obtained the card after weeks of careful observation and plotting. As she had explained to her friend, the plan hinged on the fact that the new orderly who worked the weekend nightshift on this ward had developed a drug habit that he fed by stealing patient meds. The stuff he didn’t want to risk taking himself, he presumably sold on the street.
She had done such a good job of looking sedated whenever he showed up with her midnight pills that the orderly had been encouraged to steal some of the new pills that Dr. McAlistair had prescribed. The drugs were intended to induce a cheerful, trusting, euphoric state that McAlistair had hoped would overcome her patient’s stubborn refusal to discuss screaming walls and crying rooms.
She had faked swallowing the first few doses and had been only too happy to watch through her lashes when the orderly began to pocket the pills.
She had bided her time. Finally, after five weekends of successful theft, the orderly had grown careless. One Saturday night, after helping himself to the contents of the little paper cup on her tray, he had hurried out of the room in response to a ringing call button and had forgotten to lock her door.
She had given him forty minutes and then she had crept out of the room and made her way down the hall. She had found the orderly smiling blissfully in front of a small television set inside the glass-walled nursing station.
She had pulled the fire alarm just outside the restroom. The orderly, enveloped in a drug-induced haze, had responded to the clanging bells like a confused bull confronted with a striped cape. In the ensuing chaos, it had been no trick at all to grab the spare master key kept in a desk drawer.
The next day she had told her new friend about the acquisition of the key, and they had begun to make detailed plans.
They had decided to make the break on a Sunday night because the weekend orderlies were inevitably more lax than the regular weekday staff.
But this was Thursday night. Ron and Ernie were on duty together. And they had her new friend, the woman with the silvery blue eyes.
She knew where they would take her: the examination room with the medical table fitted with metal stirrups, the room with the screaming walls.
So much for their plan to leave Sunday night, she thought. It would have to be tonight.
She took one last look around the space that had been her prison cell for the past few months. There was nothing worth taking. The personal effects and identification that had been with her when she had been brought to the Manor were locked up in a small room on the first floor.
She used the stolen card key to open her door very carefully. She stood listening for a few seconds. Silence echoed. The hall was empty.
She stepped out into the corridor. The lights were turned down at night but not off. She made her way quickly toward the corner, turned, and went down another intersecting hallway.
At the next junction, she paused again to listen. This section of the hospital did not house any patients, just offices and examination rooms that were supposed to be empty at night.
Muffled noises came from the screaming room. Ron and Ernie were already inside with her friend.
For an instant the fear was so thick that she thought she might succumb to nausea.
Then she moved, hitting the bank of switches at the end of the hall with both hands. The passage went dark but light still glowed beneath the door of the screaming room.
She hurried forward, moving carefully so as to make no sound. The slippers helped. When she reached the fire extinguisher locker, she opened it and grasped the canister in both hands.
She went to the door of the screaming room and banged the extinguisher against it.
“What the hell?” Ernie sounded alarmed.
“Must be one of the loonies,” Ron said. “I’ll take care of it.”
The door of the screaming room opened. Ron took one step out into the hall.
It was at that moment that it occurred to her that her long run of abysmally lousy luck might have finally changed course.
Ron looked first to the left, not the right. He did not see her standing there with the heavy canister raised on high.
“Shit,” Ron muttered. “Some crazy turned off the damned lights.”
Ron was much taller than she was. She had to swing the extinguisher at an awkward angle, not straight down as she would have much preferred to do. Nevertheless, the heavy canister struck the back of Ron’s skull with a satisfying thunk.
He dropped to the floor without a sound.
“What’s going on?”
Ernie appeared in the doorway, mouth agape. “What the fuck?”
She pulled the trigger on the fire extinguisher, releasing a gusher of white foam. The stuff caught Ernie full in the face.
He yelped and staggered backward, clawing at his eyes. The fact that he had already unfastened his pants in preparation for rape created a real problem for him.
His feet got tangled in his sagging trousers, and he went down hard. He opened his mouth to yell, and she filled it with foam. Choking, Ernie struggled to breathe.
Sensations stormed through her when she moved into the examination room. She struggled to ignore the psychic noise and raised the canister a second time, preparing to bring it down on Ernie’s head.
Her friend was struggling frantically with the restraints. She had man
aged to rip off her gag. “Help me.”
She rushed to the table and unbuckled the leather ties that bound her feet into the stirrups.
Ernie reached out, trying to grab a chair. She turned back, hoisting the extinguisher.
“Wait.”
Her friend grabbed a syringe off the desk and plunged the needle into Ernie’s arm. The orderly moaned, gasped, and sagged.
“I gave him the full dose. He won’t wake up for a while. Let’s get out of here.”
They took the time to drag Ron back into the screaming room and locate his car keys. Then they closed and locked the door. They fled to the first floor using the key card to access the emergency stairwells.
The lockers containing the patients’ personal effects were located in Leon Grady’s office. The magic card key did not work on that lock but it opened the door labeled HOUSEKEEPING AND JANITORIAL SERVICES across the hall. The key to Grady’s office was hanging on a hook in the janitorial supply cabinet.
Once inside Security, they found the lockers. The little padlocks that secured them were so flimsy they could have been broken with one of the tools in the janitorial closet, but in the end there was no need to go to the trouble. The keys to the lockers were in one of Grady’s desk drawers.
The locker with her name on it opened easily enough. Inside was the handbag she had been carrying the night she had been brought into Candle Lake Manor. To her enormous relief, her wallet, containing her driver’s license and some other miscellaneous pieces of identification were still inside. The cash and credit cards had been removed. Those, she knew, had been turned over to Forrest the day she had been admitted. It was standard procedure. But occasionally there was need for a patient’s ID, so such documents were retained.
“The credit cards wouldn’t do you any good, anyway,” her friend reminded her. “You couldn’t use them. Too easy to trace.”
Outside in the chill of a moonless night, they had climbed into Ron’s car. They had driven it to a small house on the outskirts of a tiny mountain town.
“Who owns this place?” she asked her friend.
“I do. Under another name. By the way, from now on you can call me Arcadia.”
“Nice name.”
“Thanks. I found it in a name-the-baby book.”
Arcadia pried up a loose board on the porch and removed a key. She used it to open the door of the house.
Inside the postage-stamp-sized living room, she removed a wall panel to reveal a safe. After working the combination, she took out a packet of documents.
“What’s that?”
“A new ID,” Arcadia said.
“I’m impressed. You had this all planned before you were sent to Xanadu, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“It’s a long story.” Arcadia started toward the front door. “I’ll tell it to you after we change cars.”
“You’ve got another car hidden somewhere?”
“In the garage.”
The following morning, Arcadia had accessed an offshore account.
“We need a little time to set up a new background for you,” she said. “What do you say we take a little vacation?”
“I’ve heard that travel is broadening. . . .”
Ethan raised himself up off the pillows and bent his head to kiss her bare shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yes.” She turned onto her back and looked up at him.
Her husband.
He smiled. She felt the tingle all the way to her toes. His face was shadowed with his morning beard, and his hair was rumpled. He was just as compelling in the light of day as he was at midnight. And he was all hers. For a while.
“What were you thinking about?” he asked.
“The escape from Xanadu.”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
He already knew most of it. He had a right to the rest.
She told him the whole story.
His eyes went cold. “Did those two orderlies ever drag you into that examination room?”
“No. I think they decided that I was too unpredictable in my craziness. They never knew how I would react to the meds.”
His smile was coldly approving. “You fostered that impression of unpredictability, I take it?”
“Oh, sure, every chance I got.” She stroked her fingers through his hair. “I got rather good at playing the madwoman of Room 232. The orderlies avoided me.”
He brushed his mouth across her lips. “I am very happy to hear that. Otherwise, I would have had to add two more items to my to-do list.”
She shivered at the expression that came and went in his eyes.
“I can’t take all of the credit for scaring off Ron and Ernie,” she said. “They also knew that Dr. McAlistair was particularly interested in my case. They couldn’t be sure what I might tell her in a therapy session or what she would choose to believe. She could have easily gotten them both fired.”
“McAlistair. That name rings a bell.”
“She was the doctor who supervised my so-called treatment plan.”
“Right.” He looked thoughtful. “According to Singleton, McAlistair is the only real doctor at Candle Lake. She must have her hands full. Why did she take a special interest in you?”
“Officially, I landed in Xanadu because Forrest told everyone that I heard voices in the walls at the cabin telling me that he was the person who had murdered Preston.”
“Any of that true?” Ethan asked neutrally.
“Of course not. I don’t hear voices.” Just feelings and emotions. But he wouldn’t like that explanation any better, she figured. “I think Dr. McAlistair wanted to believe that I could somehow walk into a room and sense things, though.”
“Why?”
“One day during a session, I noticed some paperwork on her desk. It was from the police chief of a small town not far from Candle Lake. The letter thanked her for her consulting services on a recent murder case and said that a check was enclosed.”
“What kind of consulting did she do for them?”
“McAlistair saw me looking at the letter and told me that she occasionally did psychological profiles for small police departments.”
“Well, hell. She figured that if you really did hear voices in the walls, you might be useful to her, is that it?”
“I think she understood that I didn’t hear voices,” Zoe said, choosing her words carefully. “But she has a professional interest in the biological basis of human intuition. She’s even written some papers on the subject. I think she wondered very seriously if perhaps I might have some sort of extremely sensitive intuition that might be useful at crime scenes. It was nonsense, naturally, but she’s really into that kind of thing.”
“You think she figured maybe she could use you as an assistant?”
“Either that, or she was simply curious in the academic sense. All I know for sure is that she was constantly testing me. She was always asking me to write down my impressions of a room. She used to experiment with some of my meds, trying to see if certain drugs could boost my sensitivity.”
“Sounds like she should have been a patient at the Manor, not the doctor in charge.”
“I pretended to swallow the pills.” Most of the time.
But there had been those two occasions when the meds had been ground up and slipped into her food. Old panic sleeted through her veins. She remembered how she had come to her senses both times in a screaming room with McAlistair standing nearby, urging her to report what she felt.
She pushed the memories aside and saw that Ethan was watching her with a disturbingly intent expression.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “Worried that you might actually be married to a crazy woman?”
“No,” he said. “But it does occur to me that Ian Harper and Forrest Cleland might not be the only ones who had a good reason to keep you locked up at Candle Lake Manor.”
A chill ran down her spine. “You ma
y be right. But it doesn’t matter now.”
“No.” He lowered his mouth to hers. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Chapter Twenty-five
They arrived back in Whispering Springs shortly after three that afternoon. Ethan drove straight to the motel where Leon Grady had rented a room. The phone call he had made as soon as the plane touched down had set off alarm bells. According to Stagg, all was well on this end, but Grady was still registered under a phony name at the Sunrise Suites.
That didn’t make sense. He knew Grady’s kind. The blackmailer should have cut his losses and been long gone by now.
Zoe sat tensely in the seat beside him. “I can’t believe he had the gall to stick around after you told him that there was no way I would pay blackmail. Do you think he came up with another plan? Something to do with Arcadia?”
“He hasn’t made any move to contact her according to Stagg, so I think we can assume he isn’t aware that she’s here in Whispering Springs.” Ethan pulled into the motel parking lot.
“Maybe he decided to wait and see if we actually went through with the marriage.”
“I didn’t think I’d left him in any doubt.” He switched off the engine. “But if that’s the case, our shiny new license should convince him.”
Zoe unclasped her seatbelt. “You know something? I’m glad he stuck around. I’m looking forward to confronting that slimy little worm face-to-face. I’ve got a few things I want to say to him.”
“Might be better if you let me handle this—”
But it was too late. She was already out of the car.
Resigned, he climbed out from behind the wheel and caught up with her just as she started up the steps to the upper level. They reached the landing and walked toward 210. The drapes in 208 fluttered a little. Ethan heard the muffled chatter of a television commercial inside the room.
Zoe glanced back over her shoulder. “Room 210, you said?”
“Yeah.” He saw the privacy sign dangling from the doorknob. “Looks like he isn’t in the mood to receive visitors.”