What Toy remembered next were white, blazing lights. They were so bright and harsh that she opened her eyes and then quickly closed them. She heard beeping and ticking, and she was cold, terribly cold. Sharp pains pricked her arms. Forcing her eyes open again, she saw bars and for a brief moment thought she was in jail.
"Welcome back," a woman in a starched white nurse's uniform said.
"Where am I?" Toy said, her eyes darting around the room frantically. "What happened?"
"You're in Roosevelt Hospital. You were brought here by ambulance from Central Park. You've been unconscious for some time now."
"Where's the little girl? Is she okay? Did you find her parents?"
"What little girl?" the nurse said, her eyes wide with interest now. "No one was with you when they brought you in. What are you talking about?"
"What happened to me?"
"The charge nurse called your physician, Dr. Esteban," the woman said. "I'll see if he's arrived yet. You were just here the other day, weren't you? I remember you."
The nurse disappeared, but Toy could see her through the glass. She could also see a counter and several nurses sitting behind it talking while they monitored a wall of blinking, flashing screens. Needles attached to tubes were running from both Toy's arms into bottles on stems. She brought a hand to her chest and touched the electrodes for the EKG. She was in intensive care again. She wanted
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to scream. She was hooked up to these awful machines, and she had to find the child, find out what had happened to her, find out if she was okay.
The door to the room banged open, and Dr. Esteban entered. "Mrs. Johnson," he said, peering down at her, his dark eyes full of compassion, 'Tm glad to see you're awake. How are you feeling?"
"Tm cold," Toy said. "And I need to get out of here."
"I'll get the nurse to bring a blanket. Your blood pressure is still quite low." He paused and then continued, his voice serious and concerned. "Your heart arrested again. I'm sorry. From what we were told, you were in a carriage in Central Park and passed out. When the driver noticed, he tried to revive you. When he couldn't, he called the paramedics. Just as they began CPR, your heart spontaneously started beating again. Luckily, you had the receipt from admitting in your purse, so they returned you here, and the staff called me at home."
"There was a little girl with me. She had been kidnapped. Can you please try to find out what happened to her?"
Dr. Esteban looked deep in Toy's eyes. Then he let down the bed rail and sat on the edge of the bed. "Mrs. Johnson, listen to me, there was no little girl. You were riding alone in a carriage. The police were fearful something criminal had occurred and interrogated the driver quite carefully. He said he saw you walking alone in the park and solicited you for a ride in his carriage. You got in and after a few moments he heard a noise. When he looked back, your head had fallen forward and at first he thought you were asleep. He continued on since apparently this isn't unusual. Many people fall asleep. Then he heard another loud noise and looked back again. This time you had slipped out of the seat and were unconscious on the floorboard of the carriage."
Toy shook her head from side to side. She recalled being in the carriage, but she also knew she had been with the child. It had to be the same as before. When her heart stopped, she had been somehow dispatched to help the child. "I have to leave. I have to see if the girl is all right. I promised her."
"'Please," he said, "don't do this again. I've already called your husband. He's deeply concerned."
Sure, Toy thought bitterly. He probably had a room reserved for her in a mental institution. "I'm fine, Dr. Esteban," Toy said. "And I'm checking out, so you can get these tubes out of my arm and these electrodes off my chest. If you don't, I'll remove them myself."
Toy tried to sit up. Dr. Esteban gently tried to push her back. "We could keep you here," he said, a veiled threat in his eyes. "Please don't make us go to court and obtain legal sanction just to save your life."
Toy was livid. She knew what he was talking about. With Stephen's cooperation they could drag her into court and declare her mentally incompetent. Then they could do anything to her they wanted. They could use her like a laboratory rat, poking, probing, examining her to their hearts' content.
Esteban saw her distress. He also saw the fierce look of determination in her eyes. "We're getting close to the answers," he told her. "If you leave now and don't allow us to treat you, you'll most certainly die. It's only a matter of time."
"You said you were close to the answers," Toy said sharply. "How close?"
"I think it's a combination of several problems," he said. "This is one of the reasons your condition has been so hard to identify. When you suffered the attack of pericarditis, the muscle in your heart was more than likely weakened. It wasn't enough to be detectible right after the incident, but as time went on, this weakness became more and more pronounced." He stopped and stared at Toy. "Are you following me? It's important that you understand the severity of your condition."
"Go on," Toy said.
"I'm almost positive you have a rare neurological disorder. It falls somewhere between sleep apnea and narcolepsy. Have you ever heard of sleep apnea?"
Toy shook her head.
"Well," Esteban explained, "it's an illness that causes a person's respiration to stop spontaneously while they are sleeping. The incidents last only seconds, but the condition can be quite dangerous. Now, in narcolepsy a person does not stop breathing. Instead they fall asleep inappropriately, sometimes many, many times during the course of a day. In most instances they have no advance warning and when they awaken, they are seldom aware that they have been sleeping. Meaning, they nod off in the middle of conversations, meetings, whatever."
"What does this have to do with me?"
"I was just going to explain that," he said. "Somehow your brain is sending electrical impulses to your heart that cause it to abruptly shut down. Then a short time later, these same electrical impulses
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spark your heart into beating again. But the part we are still uncertain of is with what kind of frequency these episodes occur and whether or not these episodes always follow the same exact pattern. Even though your heart apparently resumed beating on its own this evening, we have no idea if this will continue to happen. If we don't intervene, the next time this occurs . . ." He looked away. "Need I say more?"
"You're saying I could die."
"Yes, Mrs. Johnson, that's exactly what I'm saying. But I've been conferring with other specialists, and I think we have arrived at a solution. What we would like to do is to install a pacemaker. It's a fairly simple procedure, and I'm almost positive it will circumvent the problem."
"Then my heart won't stop again, right?" Toy asked.
"Exactly," Esteban said, smiling at her.
Without hesitation Toy said, "I don't want it."
Esteban tensed. "Please, Mrs. Johnson, I just tried to explain to you how serious this condition is. Why would you want to risk your life over a simple, surgical procedure?"
"I can't explain it," she said. "Besides, you wouldn't believe me. Just tell me one thing. Is Stephen coming?"
He skirted her question. "Would you like me to get him on the phone for you, speak to him yourself?"
"No," Toy said, certain now that her husband was on his way. She had to get out of the hospital before he got here. He would insist that she undergo the procedure and then the dreams would stop. She couldn't let it happen. She knew it had to be this way. If it meant she was risking her life to save just one more child, then she had to think it was well worth the risk. "I'd like to leave now."
Esteban scowled, his patience growing thin. "I've already scheduled you for surgery tomorrow. In addition, I assured your husband—"
Toy sat up in the bed and promptly ripped the electrodes off her chest. Then she faced the doctor. "Dr. Esteban, my husband and I are separated, and I'm a mature adult, able to make my own decisions. I'll ne
ver sign a consent for surgery, so you're just wasting your time."
Dr. Esteban was both frustrated and determined to reason with her. "Your husband is a physician. I'm sure you know how a pacemaker works. It will regulate your heartbeat. Once it's in place, you should never encounter this problem again. You can lead a normal
life. And it's a very simple procedure. You'll be out of here in less than a week."
Toy let his words run through her mind and then turned to him again. "No," she said loudly, almost shouting. She felt a driving, urgent need to get out of the hospital, out of this room, out of the reach of her husband and Dr. Esteban. Whatever had happened in the park, she had to know, had to find the child, had to verify that she was safe as she had promised. The last thing Toy remembered was placing her in the back of the long black car. She had no idea who the driver was, where he had taken the child. He could have even been one of the kidnappers and Toy had merely handed him the child like a fool.
"If this is your final decision," Dr. Esteban said, "then I have no choice but to honor it. But I'm telling you you're making a mistake, the worst mistake of your life. You're a beautiful young woman with many productive years ahead, turning your back on a simple surgical procedure for absolutely no valid reason."
Once he had made his speech, he turned to leave the room. At the door, he glanced back at Toy. "The next time I see you, Mrs. Johnson, you may not be able to leave."
"Why? Because my husband will have me locked up?"
"No, because you will be dead." With that, he quietly slipped through the door.
Toy watched him step up to the nurses' station, shake his head, and wait until the nurse handed him her chart. After scribbling a few lines in it, he slapped it on the counter and disappeared down the corridor.
It was an unseasonably warm fall in Atlanta, but inside the air-conditioned newsroom, it was actually quite chilly. Thirty-five-year-old Jeff McDonald, a recent recruit of CNN's from the Los Angeles Times, was pulling an evening shift in the newsroom when his supervisor, Stan Fielder, stopped at his desk. Stan was a seasoned journalist in his fifties. An African American, he was short and balding. He favored suspenders with his white dress shirts, and frequently rolled up his sleeves when working. McDonald had left the Times because he wanted to shift gears, move into television.
"Take a look at this, Mac," Fielder said. "Am I crazy, or have we seen this lady? And I mean, recently, maybe in the past few days."
McDonald slipped on his glasses and glanced at the papers. "Where'd this come from, the New York bureau?"
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"You got it. Looks like she stepped right out of a Botticelli, huh? Can't simply look at the drawing and get the full impact. Got to read the description. Red hair, green eyes, skin like milk."
McDonald realized he was looking at a composite drawing of a woman. The face was eerily haunting, the delicate features, the fine bone structure, the perfectly shaped lips. "You know what," McDonald said, "I think you might be right, Stan. She does look familiar. Has sort of a startled look about her, don't you think?" He was intrigued by the hair, the way it seemed to move back from her face. It was almost as if she was moving too fast to be captured, stepping right out of the drawing. "What else do you have?"
"Eight-year-old girl kidnapped from a church playground by two men in Manhattan early this morning, but located a short time ago. They evidently tried to rape her and then left her in a drainage ditch. State Senator Robert Weisbarth and his driver stopped when they saw this woman running out of Central Park carrying the kid. The girl suffers from chronic asthma." Fielder paused. His son was asthmatic. At twelve, he was finally coming out of it, but it had been a long, hard haul. More nights than he wanted to remember, he had awakened to the sound of labored, raspy breathing. "The trauma caused her to have a severe asthma attack. Little one already had a cold, so she was in pretty bad shape. Guess if this woman hadn't found her, she could have easily died." Fielder knew all about it. Every time his son caught a cold, it would escalate to pneumonia. Asthma caused the bronchial tubes to become inflamed and swollen, dangerously trapping fluids in the lungs.
Fielder continued, "After this lady placed the kid in the limo, she disappeared. Makes it kind of a mystery. Good story, don't you think? Good Samaritan. Doesn't want any credit. Does the deed and then splits. I like the feel of it."
"Wait," McDonald said, holding up his hand and rummaging through all the papers on his desk like a madman. "Kid. Pretty lady hero that vanished. There was another story just like that a few days ago. Came out of Kansas. We ran a clip." Finally he found what he was looking for: the UPI story on the schoolhouse fire. "Got it," he said, waving the copy in the air.
""What you got?" Fielder said, peering down over McDonald's shoulder.
"Nope," McDonald said jokingly, covering the paper with his hands. "If I put this together, it's mine, right? You have to promise
you won't take it and give it to someone else. All I've been getting lately is the dregs."
Fielder issued a belly laugh, slapping the other man on the back. "You skinny little white boys think you can come down here to Atlanta and move right on in. You got to earn your way here, boy."
McDonald really liked Fielder. Not only did he like him, he respected him. He was one hell of a journalist. "Don't call me boy," he said, trying to keep a serious face. "Don't you ever call a white person boy. I'll report you, man. That's discrimination."
Again Fielder's deep laughter rang out. Then it suddenly stopped. "You got five seconds, McDonald."
The younger journalist spun around in his chair and promptly handed the article to Fielder. Then he sat back again with a smug expression on his face and placed his arms behind his neck. "Sound like your Botticelli?"
"Well, yes, it does," Fielder said, licking his lips. "There's no photograph, huh?"
"Nada, my man. But like I said, I think we have some footage of her." McDonald felt acid churning and popping in his stomach. He had duped the tape and sold it to a New York station. Right now he felt like he'd shot off his own foot. If the two people were the same and Fielder felt inclined to put together a half-hour news special on this vanishing hero, Jeff might get his first chance at producing. But he wouldn't get anything if the New York station had somehow managed to scoop them.
"Good," Fielder said calmly. Even though he didn't show it, Stan Fielder was excited. And he was a man who seldom got excited. Too many years had gone by and too many stories had passed his desk to do more than raise an eyebrow. But a lady hero as pretty as this one who suddenly appeared and rescued children and then vanished into thin air. Well, he told himself, that might just be something worth getting excited about. "Pull it out and let's run it," he told McDonald, turning to head back to his office. "What are we waiting for?"
Francis Hillburn had suddenly appeared at the loft with another artist in tow, insisting that Raymond had to vacate the premises within a matter of days or he would legally evict him. Sarah pleaded with him to no avail. Already she had begun packing up Raymond's things to move them to her house in Queens, but she was doubtful that her female roommates would tolerate her bringing a man to live in the house. Especially a man as troubled and strange as this one.
But she had no choice. Sarah had fallen hopelessly in love with Raymond Gonzales, so much so that she had already sacrificed her job and was living on her meager savings, money she had diligently set aside in order to return to school in the fall. She didn't care. Being alone with him in the loft since they had walked out of the hospital, surrounded by his visions of winged angels, she had found something in herself that she had never known existed. While Raymond had slept or stared blankly into space, Sarah had prayed for the first time since she was a child. And she had prayed reverently and passionately, begging God to save this man, to restore him to normalcy so he could continue to paint and one day be her husband.
As he pathetically reached across with another color, Sarah tenderly stroked his hand and felt an
instant jolt of electricity. "One day you're going to be the most famous artist in the world," she said prophetically, the words appearing in her mind the second before they were spoken. "Your paintings will hang in all the museums, and everyone will want to meet you."
Raymond raised his head and mumbled a word under his breath, "Michelangelo."
"Yes, Raymond," Sarah said, smiling over at him, "just like Michelangelo."
The newsroom at CNN headquarters in Atlanta was buzzing with activity. Banks of color monitors decorated an entire wall while printers spilled out copy and telephones jangled. They had a remote crew down in Wyoming, where a religious cult had been holed up for over a month; someone had called in a bomb threat for the Empire State Building; and there was some maniac in Los Angeles cutting up young women and leaving their body parts on people's lawns.
Business as usual.
Jeff McDonald was poring over his notes, trying to decide which way he wanted to proceed with the Good Samaritan story. The story had tremendous potential, but only if they struck the right nerve. Jeff
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knew true-crime shows were extremely popular, but Fielder wanted to make it strictly human interest.
New developments on the Kansas case had given Jeff two distinct options. Arson investigators had determined that the fire was purposely set and not by a kid playing with matches. Someone had soaked a rag in gasoline and tossed it into the basement where other flammable liquids had been stored by the janitor. Now they had to consider that the mysterious woman was their arsonist. Why would she save the boy and then vanish if she didn't have something to hide? Everyone liked to be a hero, get that big pat on the back. And arsonists frequently loitered around at the crime scene, watching their own handiwork. Just because she saved the boy meant nothing. Most arsonists didn't want people to die. They were nut cases. They got high on the flames themselves, the excitement.
The Topeka Fire Department and their arson investigators wanted to have a few words with this mystery woman, and they weren't contemplating a medal.
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