Blind Spot (20 page)

As she passed by the morning room she saw Cat sitting quietly in a chair, so she turned toward her, making a mental note to get Cat some maternity clothes as she was still in a hospital gown, though she was at least wearing her own shoes.

“I was just coming to see you,” Claire said. “I think maybe we need to get you some more clothes.”

The girl’s eyes shot to Claire’s, filled with what looked like panic.

It was a surprise, but a heartening one. She really was coming out of it. “Not the clothes you were wearing,” Claire assured. “Some new ones. It’ll be all right.”

Cat went back to staring vacantly straight ahead. Claire tried to engage her some more but she’d lost contact, and after about ten minutes of a running monologue that Cat didn’t seem to hear, she told her she’d see her again later and headed out for lunch.

Tasha surreptitiously watched the doctor leave, sliding a look from the corner of her eyes.

I think maybe we need to get you some more clothes.

Fear had stabbed an icy dagger in her heart.

Not because of the clothes. She wanted clothes. Needed clothes. What she couldn’t bear was thinking it was something for her distant future! They believed she was going to be there forever! They thought she was sick. Here she was, in this place with all these lunatics. Trapped. She’d spent her entire life trapped inside her aunt’s austere prison, and now this. She had to get out. Had to live.

And she couldn’t wait for someone to bestow a wardrobe upon her. She had to leave
now.
Like she’d tried to leave with Rafe.

Rafe…she thought despairingly, closing her eyes, remembering.

She heard Gibby drop into the chair next to hers, shifting around. He couldn’t sit still. If Catherine were there, she would lash him down, tie his feet and hands, castigate his behavior.

She reopened her eyes and Gibby was leaning toward her, his face right in front of her, like a bobbing clown. “Hey!” he said loudly. “There you are!”

Across the room that weird Thomas was staring at her as if he wanted to do something to her. Tasha pretended to stare back blankly, like she’d been doing for days, keeping her awakening to herself, as all the staff members remarked whenever she even fluttered her lashes. She didn’t want to talk to them. Didn’t want them to know who she was until she figured out how to escape, find some transportation away from here and to freedom!

She looked down at her hospital gown. It was a smock that tied in the front and touched just below her knees. A kind of dress, but it wasn’t good enough. She needed more clothes, and she couldn’t wait for the good doctor to get her some. Her shoes were fine, but the clothes she’d been wearing were gone. Covered in blood, no doubt. Shivering, she covered the mound of her abdomen protectively with both hands and thought hard.

Beyond clothes, she needed help. Some way to get past the guarded door. The girl at the desk opened the doors by a remote mechanism, and the staff members had plastic cards that they slid into slots and then punched numbered buttons. She’d watched it all. Taken notes. She didn’t have much experience with their world, but she sure wanted to join it.

She’d picked up some interesting language while she’d been here. That Maribel used words that made everyone react with displeasure. And Thomas McAvoy. Borderline personality, whatever that meant. He wanted something.
Wanted
it. They gave him a lot of pills but he tried not to take them. He surreptitiously stuffed them in his pants pockets, then later he took them out and put them inside a small brass pitcher that was used as a bookend on one of the built-in shelves at the end of the room. He was pretty good at being sly, but Tasha knew his game.

She didn’t know what those pills did, but they were always handed out when McAvoy started getting tense. He would fight them, pretend to swallow the tablets, stealthily transfer them to his pocket, then later, maybe hours later, maybe a full day, he would wander over to the pitcher and plunk them in. Once he’d caught her staring at him and she pretended to be blank. He’d glared and glared, and then, right before dinner, he came by her chair and whispered in her ear, “You fucking fake,” then cruised away.

The two older women inmates who were never more than four feet from each other gazed across the room at Tasha as if she’d done something wrong. Mrs. Merle and Mrs. Tanaway. No one ever called them by their first names. And there was Lester, mumbling and looking outside. And that Donald with his incessant diagnosing.

It was all too much for Tasha. She would never belong there. She needed a plan to get away.

Her gaze swung to the other side of the room. The kitchen was through a swinging door that was locked when they weren’t bringing out the swill they fed to the inmates. Twice Tasha had planted herself in a chair near the door and stared out the window to the laurel hedge and razor wire beyond like Lester, her senses attuned to the room around her, and, when no one was looking, had peeked into the kitchen. Kitchens had knives. As careful as Catherine was, they all worked to put meals on the table, even Tasha, when she wasn’t in trouble, and that’s how Tasha had found a way to steal her knife, the one she’d had in her pocket when she and Rafe made their escape.

The baby kicked and Tasha inhaled sharply. She didn’t know much about pregnancy; it was a taboo subject, though all the girls wanted to know every last detail. They’d learned it took sex with a male to get the job done, but this changing of her body was kind of frightening. How much further? How much bigger?

She’d learned that there was a time after dinner that she could sneak into the kitchen if she needed to. It might not be a bad thing to have another knife. Especially the way McAvoy looked at her.

“Hey, hey,” Gibby said now, waving his hand in front of her face.

“I need help,” she told him.

“I know. I wants to help you!”

She and Gibby shared conversations; she’d spoken aloud to him on more than one occasion. Gibby wasn’t lying about that. But she needed this deception to keep her safe, to fashion an escape, and she was always fighting the dark curtain that was both a blessing and a curse. Her gift, such as it was. A double-edged one. Not nearly as useful as Cassandra’s powers of seeing into the future. Or even dim Lillibeth’s crystal clarity that popped out at the oddest times.

Tasha would have liked something better. Her sisters were blessed with deeper gifts. The ability to see someone’s intentions. Future calamity. The darkness of the human heart. A man’s devotion.

But instead, she had this darkness that crept around her consciousness. She didn’t really understand it, didn’t want it half the time, but there it was.

She was still silently lamenting her lack of special gifts when the air pressure changed, someone coming up behind her.

“Hello, Cat,” a female voice purred in her ear.

With an effort Tasha stayed staring straight ahead. She wanted to twist around and see who’d spoken.

And then the dark-haired nurse walked into her line of vision, and Tasha’s pulse rocketed. She’d seen her upon occasion the last couple of weeks, had thought she recognized her, had hoped, prayed, that it was her imagination.

But it wasn’t.

Rita!

Now the witch gazed down at her hard. It was all Tasha could do to keep up her act. Rita the nurse. Rafe’s Rita. Rita, who’d chased them down to the rest stop. Tasha had thought that’s who it was, but she hadn’t believed her bad luck. It couldn’t be. Just couldn’t be! But it was. Rita had been hovering around for days, but this was the first time she’d actually spoken to Tasha directly.

“She doan talk ’cept to me,” Gibby said, smiling widely at Tasha.

Rita gazed at him hard. “What does she say?”

“Oh, she needs help. Lots of help.”

“What kind of help?”

“She needs to get away.”

Tasha wanted to kick Gibby but remained frozen, staying put in her distant twilight.

Then Rita’s gaze dropped to Tasha’s protruding belly and Tasha felt an inner horror and a need to squirm away as the woman placed her hand atop the mound and said, “My baby.”

She was ready to throw off her deception and attack her, but then Rita let her hand slide possessively along Tasha’s rounded belly before walking away. Tasha automatically touched the stab wounds at her shoulders. Rita had stabbed her hard. Deep.

She needed clothes now!

“I doan like her,” Gibby said.

“She wants to hurt me,” Tasha said.

His eyes rounded. “She does?”

“I don’t have any clothes. Can you get me some of yours? Pants. And a shirt?” They wouldn’t fit well. Gibby was shorter and rounder than Tasha, but it was better than these gowns the hospital supplied. Tasha had never worn a pair of pants. She hoped she could anchor the waistline somehow beneath her baby.

“You has no clothes?”

“No. And you have to bring them to me in secret. I have to make sure she doesn’t find out.” Tasha’s voice was a harsh whisper.

“That bad nurse woman?”

“That bad nurse woman.”

“Okay….”

“Tonight. After dinner.”

“Okay!” He was growing excited, bouncing in his chair.

“Shhh,” she warned. “Settle down. Don’t let them know or they could take you back to your room.”

He glanced around, his head swiveling hard from side to side. “No!”

“Let’s watch TV,” she said to distract him.

“They gots the controller.” But he was already signaling one of the apelike orderlies. It was Greg who came to see what he wanted. He threw a glance at Tasha, who blinked slowly and dully, and soon the television was softly squawking away and Gibby settled into his chair. She would have to remind him again, just before dinner, but if all went well she could be out by tonight.

She just needed a distraction to get past the woman manning the front door. A distraction and a keycard. Maybe she could steal one, somehow. She needed to escape. Today.

Rita had quickly grown accustomed to her job at Halo Valley. She’d been there for over a week and had seamlessly fit herself in with the staff, though it was with an effort, as Rita wasn’t one to warm up to people. Normally careful and spare in her words around women, she’d gone out of her way to be friendly to the staff, especially Lori at the front desk and Darlene, one of the floor nurses. She was working on Maria, one of the night nurses, though she wasn’t sure she’d had as much success with her yet.

It was all an acting job for Rita. Her emotions were only engaged around babies and certain men. Paolo Avanti definitely engaged her, though not in the same way as Rafe.

But now she was here. She’d managed it, with the help of Dr. Avanti’s good word—reluctantly given as it had been, the bastard. He’d been nervous about having his lover on staff, but she’d managed to convince him it would be to the benefit of both of them.

And then there had been a bit of stickiness when she’d put in her resignation at Ocean Park. Nurse Perez, superior busybody that she was, had been appalled that she’d given such short notice.

“What is it, Rita?” she asked. “Has something happened?”

Rita hadn’t told them she was moving to Halo Valley when she quit. She hadn’t been officially hired at the time she tendered her resignation, and she wouldn’t have cared to let them know anyway. None of them were her friends, though when Jake strolled by she felt a pang of loneliness for Rafe that left her momentarily choked up. That’s what Nina Perez saw and misunderstood.

“Does this have to do with Dr. Loman?” she’d asked quietly, a hand on Rita’s arm, gently steering her away from listening ears in the hallway, guiding her to the employee room. The nosy bitch then looked around, and seeing they were alone, gazed at Rita with fake concern and added, “He was pretty negative about your care for Teresa Warnock.”

Teresa Warnock. The snotty lawyer’s wife who lived in that fancy house where she’d slipped on her marble floors and broken her wrist in two places, coming under Rita’s care at Ocean Park. Teresa Warnock was a friend of Dr. Loman’s, the hospital’s osteopath, who was old, old, old—too old to perform surgery anymore. Teresa had taken offense to the way Rita simply tuned the withered hag out when she blabbered on and on and on about her wrist. The bitch had then complained to Loman, who was basically retired and out of it, but who’d had the nerve to dress Rita down anyway! Rita really hadn’t taken him seriously. He was too ancient. Tall and lean, with a neatly clipped ring of white hair, he’d scowled down at her with what she suspected was his mean look and told her her attitude was unacceptable. Rita had simply listened and thought that he’d probably been handsome as the devil in his youth, though those days were long behind him. And his mind wasn’t what it once was, though nobody at Ocean Park was saying it. She figured he would never remember later whom he’d dressed down anyway, and though she’d seethed about the injustice at the time, Loman really wasn’t worth the energy.

Still, when Perez suggested this was the reason she was leaving, Rita seized on it like a lifeline. “He hurt my feelings, Nina. Mrs. Warnock lied to him about me, but Dr. Loman was good friends with her and he wasn’t about to listen to someone as low as Rita Feather Hawkings.”

“Rita, you know that’s not true.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I can work here anymore.”

“Dr. Loman is retiring soon. Don’t let this dictate how you feel about Ocean Park Hospital. It’s a good place to work. We need nurses like you.”

Rita was almost swayed. Almost. Even though Nina Perez was a liar and was just trying to get what she wanted. But Rita had a different life for herself in mind, an alternate future.

Carlita had chosen that moment to push into the employee room. She stared hard at Rita and Nurse Perez. “You guys got some kind of powwow going on here?”

“Carlita!” Perez took instant offense to what she believed was Carlita taking a swipe at Rita through her Native American heritage. Rita knew that was just how Carlita talked; she didn’t mean anything by it. But Rita pretended affront as well, glaring hard at her.

“What?” Carlita demanded.

“I gotta go,” Rita said, and walked out. It was a good way to leave things. Clean. Over. No unanswered questions.