After She's Gone (West Coast 3)
Cassie didn’t think so, but then she’d always been one to buy into conspiracy theories. She would keep her thought to herself for now. What she needed to do was get out of the hospital. She’d admitted herself voluntarily, she was going out the same way.
“Thanks,” she said to the doctor, swinging the strap of her bag over her shoulder.
“Seriously, Cassie, I think you should reconsider. Hallucinations? Blackouts? These are very serious issues.”
“Duly noted.” And then she walked out of the room. She wasn’t coming back. Period.
“Remember our appointment next week,” the doctor called after her.
Right. Cassie hurried past the information and admittance desks. Through an atrium with a soaring glass ceiling, she made her way outside where she felt the cooling mist against her face. She then hastened down wide marble stairs to the waiting cab, where the cabbie was smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. At the sight of her, he abandoned both activities and climbed out of the car to toss her bag into the trunk of a dented cab that was definitely in need of a wash.
She caught sight of Steven Rinko on the front lawn. “Just a sec.” Rinko was a few steps away from a group of young men playing ring-toss.
“Meter’s runnin’,” the cabbie muttered.
“I’ll be right back.”
Cassie cut across the dewy grass to the spot where Steven stood in jeans and a white T-shirt and used a bathrobe as a coat. “You’re leaving,” he said sadly, his gaze traveling to the idling cab.
“That’s right.”
“Will you be back?”
Never. “I’m not sure. And so I need to know where you got the earring,” she said.
“The nurse.”
“Last night? The nurse you saw?” She caught one of the other teenage boys holding a plastic ring staring at her. He was tall and reed-thin, an African-American with haunted eyes and a sorrowful expression. Jerome.
“Yeah.” Rinko was nodding.
“She was in blue scrubs?” Cassie said, testing him.
He shook his head. “White.”
Her knees nearly buckled. Rinko had seen the same vision she had? Then it definitely wasn’t all in her mind! “Do you know her? Her name? Does she work here?”
“Hey, Butt-Wipe, you playin’ or what?” a third player, with skin that matched his bad attitude, yelled at Rinko. He was scrawny, with a sunken chest and hate-filled eyes, his baseball cap turned
backward. “You’re up, Romeo.”
“Shut up, Fart Face,” Rinko said to the kid, then to Cassie, “Look, I gotta go.”
“Do you know her?” Cassie wanted to shake the answer from him.
“Nurse Santa Fe?” He shook his head and shrugged. “No one does.”
“Her name is Santa Fe? Like Santa Claus? Or saint in Spanish? She works here?”
“1972.”
“Hey, Stinko Rinko! You forfeit,” his opponent called just as the cab driver honked his horn impatiently, and Rinko stormed back to argue about the game.
“I do not forfeit, you idiot!”
“Steven! The nurse worked here in 1972? How do you know that?” Rinko wasn’t born in ’72. Nor, for that matter, was she. But the nurse’s outfit could have been from that era.
Another impatient beep of the cab’s horn. “Lady, I don’t have all day,” the driver called.