by Lynne Hinton
Eve waited, unsure of exactly how to answer.
The woman glanced up. “What’s wrong with you?”
Eve shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong with me,” she answered. “I’m here to visit someone who is a patient in the Intensive Care Unit.” Eve knew she was there after the visiting hours for that floor, but she hoped the woman would still allow her through.
“Are you family?” the attendant asked, having returned to her computer work. She was not watching Eve for an answer.
Eve nodded, somehow thinking that the nonverbal lie was not as damaging as a verbal one.
The woman looked up.
Eve was still nodding, a stupid grin plastered on her face.
The attendant seemed to be studying her. She eyed Eve from above the top of her reading glasses. “Visits to patients in Intensive Care are for family members only, and not even they get in at this hour,” she reported. “You can visit at seven in the morning. They’re real strict about letting the patients get their rest at night.”
Eve took in a breath. There was a bit of commotion in the waiting room beside the desk. A child started to cry and Eve watched as a young man, probably the father, picked the little boy up and held him. The child whimpered and then quieted.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, turning back to the woman at the desk, not sure why this was anything she needed to be sharing, not sure why this information might help her get to Pauline’s room.
“So take a pill, drink some hot tea, count sheep.” She went back to the computer data entry she was working on.
Eve remained at the desk. She thought about telling the woman that she was a nun, thinking that perhaps playing the religious order card might have some leverage with hospital desk clerks. She waited. “My cab just left,” she explained, deciding to try for pity.
There was a long, drawn-out sigh from the woman at the desk. “What’s the name?” she asked while she typed a few commands on the keyboard.
“Pauline,” Eve answered, and then realized she didn’t even know her last name. She suddenly felt as if she had surely blown her chances at that point to be allowed into the hospital. “She came in yesterday, through the emergency room. Pauline . . .”
“You got an address?” the woman asked, not waiting for the last name.
Eve thought. “Desert Home Place,” she answered, recalling the name of the complex.
“Pauline Evans?”
“Yes, that’s her, exactly. Pauline Evans,” she answered, relieved to hear the last name.
The woman looked again at Eve. “She’s not in Intensive Care,” she reported. “They moved her to a regular bed a couple of hours ago.”
“Oh, then where is she?” Eve asked eagerly, glad to hear she was no longer in critical condition.
“Room 515,” the woman replied. “Bed B.” She paused for a second and then leaned over and picked up a small sheet of paper and wrote the room number down. She handed it to Eve. “You’ll need to tell the security guard at the elevator where you’re going and that I let you through.”
Eve took the small piece of paper. “Thank you so much,” she said.
“Don’t go making any noise up there,” the woman responded. “They hate it when people come in the middle of the night and make noise. I’m not even supposed to let you in, but since you’re family and all . . .” She smiled slightly at Eve and went back to her computer work.
Eve walked around the desk and made her way to the bank of elevators, passing several doors marking various departments. When she got to the elevators, she noticed that there was no security guard around, so she hit the button, and when the elevator door opened in front of her, she walked in. She pressed the number 5 and felt the elevator start to rise.
The door opened and she was standing in front of a long, narrow desk filled with files and computer screens, several chairs pushed beneath the flat top. The station seemed deserted, so she waited a few minutes, thinking she should probably let somebody know she was on the floor. She finally decided to find the room on her own and followed a sign on the wall pointing her in the right direction. She turned the corner, hearing the elevator door close behind her.
When she arrived at number 515, she tapped lightly on the door and then pushed it open. In the bed by the door, a patient was tucked under blankets and clearly asleep. Eve didn’t think it was Pauline, but she wasn’t certain. She stared at the back of the patient’s head, could make out it was a woman, but her hair was short and black, not Pauline’s long blond tresses. The woman was snoring, and Eve thought of the Captain and how she could hear him making the same kind of noises through the walls and two closed doors. She wondered if Pauline was able to sleep with such a noisy roommate.
She stood at the door for a few minutes, concerned that she might wake the patient in bed A and noticed that there was a pulled curtain separating the room. She walked in as quietly as she could, assuming that bed B was behind the curtain and that would be where she would find Pauline sleeping.
Eve headed through the door and to the other side of the curtain. She stood at the edge of the bed, surprised to find it empty.
She looked around. The sheets on the bed were tangled and strewn about, and Eve suddenly wondered if she had entered the right room, if she was at the right bed. She wondered if Pauline had been taken down for some test or, worse, returned to the Intensive Care Unit. She checked the bathroom behind her and saw that the door was cracked and no one was in there. She walked past the sleeping patient in bed A and back out into the hallway.
As she glanced down the hall, she saw Pauline being helped through the exit door of a stairway by another woman who was just about the same size. Eve’s eyes grew wide, and she had a hard time believing what she was seeing.
“Dorisanne,” Eve called out, but before she could make her way to the exit, a nurse had rounded the corner and was standing right in front of her.
FORTY-TWO
“What are you doing here?” The nurse stood between Eve and the direction she needed to go to chase after her sister and the patient she was helping to escape.
“I have to follow . . .” Eve was trying to step aside and head for the stairs, but the heavyset nurse stood in her way.
“How did you get up here, anyway?” the nurse asked before she could finish her sentence. She had a cell phone in her hand as if she intended to place a call. “Nobody is supposed to be visiting at this time of night.”
“I came in through the emergency department. The attendant let me come up,” she explained. Eve tried to see around the nurse, but she was too big. She heard the exit door close and assumed that Pauline and Dorisanne were already moving down the stairs.
“I never heard from security that a visitor was coming up here; the guard always alerts me so I’ll know who to look for.” She seemed to be watching Eve’s every move. “Peter never called, and I’ve had the phone with me the whole time.” She held up the cell phone she had in her hand.
“Because Peter wasn’t there! Nobody was there. There was no security guard at the elevators. I came up on my own. Now, I really have to—”
The nurse moved closer to Eve, acting as if she was trying to smell her breath or check out her pupils. “Who are you looking for? Who is it you’re trying to see?”
“Pauline,” Eve answered, stepping back. “Pauline Evans. She was moved from Intensive Care sometime this evening. I was told she was in this room.” She pointed at the door behind her. “Bed B, but she’s not there!”
“What?” the nurse asked, stepping into the room, yanking Eve by the arm. “You’re not going anywhere,” she announced, closing the door behind her, pulling Eve with her as she walked around the curtain. “She’s gone!”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Eve responded, unable to break away.
“Where is she?” the nurse asked. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. I only just got here, but I think I saw her heading down the stairs. I need to follow her. I
think she’s in trouble and my sister is with her.”
Still holding Eve by the sleeve of her shirt. The nurse held the phone closer to her and dialed a number. She placed it to her mouth. “I need some help up here,” she said to whoever answered her call. “It’s Patsy from the fifth floor, room 515,” she added and then clicked the phone off.
“Do you think you could take this somewhere else?” The patient in bed A had awakened. She sat up. “I’m trying to sleep. Isn’t that what you tell me I need to do? Get some sleep?” She paused. “What is going on?”
The nurse looked over at the patient. “I’m sorry, Mrs. White. We just have an after-hours visitor situation that I’m trying to handle.” And she pulled Eve back out into the hall and closed the door to the room.
“Are you the patient’s family?”
Eve shook her head. “I’m a friend,” she answered. “I was worried about her and came to check on her.”
“Why were you worried about her?” she asked.
The elevator bell sounded, indicating it was stopping on that floor, and Patsy, still holding on to Eve, glanced in that direction. “Now I can get some help,” she said, but then she seemed surprised when the door opened and it apparently wasn’t the person she’d expected. “Wait a minute.” She let go of Eve’s sleeve. “That’s not Peter.”
Eve looked down the hall and saw the person coming off the elevator. He was no security guard. He was the man on the motorcycle she had seen at the apartments earlier that day, the same man she had seen at Caesar’s the night before. He looked taller standing than he did sitting, but he wore his hair in the same slicked-back fashion and was still sporting the dark mustache.
She wanted to say something, but she couldn’t find the words.
“Who are you?” the nurse asked as the man headed in their direction.
He grinned. “Not who you thought,” he said, then he reached up and quickly and calmly placed a cloth over the nurse’s mouth and nose. She dropped to her knees before she could respond. The phone fell beside her.
Eve watched in shock as the nurse slumped to the floor.
“Hey, who’s out there?” Mrs. White called from inside room 515, and as the man turned to see where the voice asking the question had come from, Eve took off in the direction of the exit stairs.
She could hear the footsteps following her as she hurried through the door and down the steps. She jumped down two stairs at a time, as fast as she could, but she could hear the motorcycle man gaining on her, and she suddenly became concerned that he would catch up with a frail Pauline and Dorisanne, who she assumed couldn’t be that far ahead of her.
She made a quick decision and opened the next door she came to, the one to the third floor, and sped down the hall. As she moved away from the stairwell, she tried several of the doors on her left and on her right, pushing and pulling, but soon stopped when she saw that there was a keypad next to every set of doors. She knew that she was going to have to keep running down the hall until she could find either an unlocked door that led to someone who could help or another stairwell or bank of elevators so she could get to another floor.
She heard the exit door open and close behind her. Two more sets of double doors were on her left, and as she hurried past them she pushed. One of the doors opened, and she ran inside and slid down behind it, landing on her heels. She looked above her head, saw the lock, and turned it, just before she felt the door being pushed from the other side. She sat for a moment, her heart pounding. And as she closed her eyes and waited, she smelled a dank and familiar smell.
The door was struck and kicked a few times, and then the attempts to gain entry stopped. She could hear voices from farther down the hallway.
“I must have taken a wrong turn,” she heard the man just on the other side of the door saying.
She waited.
“The cafeteria,” she heard him say in answer to a question.
And then there was silence. She heard what sounded like a muffled conversation, then silence again. She suddenly worried that another hospital employee might have been harmed, rendered unconscious like Patsy on the fifth floor, but then she could make out some more conversation, directions being given to the cafeteria, she thought, and then footsteps leading away from where she was hiding.
She stayed where she was, sliding all the way down until she was sitting, her back against the door, her legs stretched out in front of her. She held her hands to her chest, thinking that might somehow slow her heart rate, heard nothing else, and finally looked around at the room where she was hiding. Suddenly, she remembered that smell from being in the hospital in Santa Fe when she was looking for the girlfriend of the dead Hollywood director.
Eve had landed in the morgue.
FORTY-THREE
Eve closed her eyes and remembered her unexpected visit to a hospital morgue when she was following Megan Flint, the Captain’s client and Hollywood star, and the hospital security guards as they hurried along the hospital corridors and down the exit stairs. She had been nosy and meddlesome then and gotten into a bit of trouble for her curiosity, and here she was again. Maybe not as nosy and meddlesome as concerned and involved—it was her sister’s well-being, after all, she told herself—but still, once again she was stuck in the room of the dead. She glanced around. There was a dim light that gave her some sense of what was around her. She could see a wall of small doors to her left, and in front of her and to her right a steel table, on which two folded sheets had been placed. It felt cold, even though she was sure the room was no cooler than the other places in the hospital. She shook her head.
“That was Dorisanne,” she whispered to herself, recalling what she had just witnessed, whom she had seen, and she dropped her elbows to her knees and her chin into her hands. She found herself completely grateful that even though a man was chasing her and also very likely chasing her sister and Pauline, and even though she still didn’t understand what kind of trouble Dorisanne was in and wanted desperately to talk to her, she had seen her, laid eyes on her, and at least from the distance that was between them and by the way she was assisting Pauline, she seemed okay. She was unharmed, at least for that second.
Eve said a prayer of thanks, offered another petition for divine assistance for her sister, and then began to reassess where she was and what she needed to do. She could stay hidden for a while longer. She could try to find another way out of the room. She could take her chances and step out through the door she had entered, the one that was locked and secure behind her. Or . . .
She reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out her cell phone. Why hadn’t she thought of that in the first place? She dialed Daniel’s number. There was no answer. She left a message: “I’m at the hospital. I need your help. Call me when you get this.” And she hit the End button. And suddenly without giving her action much thought, she punched in another number, the number she was most familiar with. There was just one ring.
“Hello,” came the response. His voice sounded startled and sleepy.
And suddenly, Eve felt the tears forming in her eyes. “It’s me,” was what she said.
There was a hesitation and then a barrage of questions. “Are you okay? Where are you? Did you find your sister? What time is it?”
Eve cleared her throat and looked down at her watch. She could barely make out the time. “It’s five in the morning here.” She thought for a second. “Six there.” She paused. “I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I was awake.”
She knew he was lying.
“Where are you? What’s wrong?”
“I saw her. I saw Dorisanne. I’m at a hospital here in Vegas.”
“A hospital? Is she hurt? What’s happening?”
“No, no, she’s not a patient here. Her neighbor is . . . was a patient . . . and I got here and saw Dorisanne helping her leave. I couldn’t get to them because some man is chasing me or maybe them. I don’t know.”
“Evangeline, where is Daniel?”
She shook her head, then realized he could not see her response. “I don’t know.”
She heard labored breathing and figured he was trying to get out of bed. “Are you safe right now?” he asked. “Are you in a secure place?”
“Yes, I think so,” she replied. “I think I’m in the morgue. The door is locked and I think he left.”
“Okay, I want you to hang up, call 911, tell them exactly where you are and what has happened. And then you wait until somebody comes, a police officer or a hospital employee. Don’t leave that room until you are sure you’re not in jeopardy.”
Eve nodded.
“Evangeline, do you hear me? Are you able to do that?”
There was a ragged cough from his end.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Allergies,” he said. “Just allergies.” He coughed again. “Did you hear what I said, Eve? Can you do what I said?”
“Yes. I will hang up and call 911 and tell them where I am and what has happened.”
“And then you’ll call me right back and let me know you’re safe.”
It was not a question. Eve nodded.
“I’m sorry I called and worried you,” she said. “I know it’s late . . . or . . . early, and I know it’s not helpful when you’re so far away. I shouldn’t have called. I’m fine now.”
“Evangeline, I’m your father. Who else should you call?”
“I know,” she said softly.
“Before you hang up and call the police, tell me about the man who is chasing you. Have you seen him before?”
“He’s been in a couple of places where Daniel and I have been. He was at the hotel where Dorisanne’s neighbor works. That was last night. And then this morning he was at the apartments when we were there to meet with her, to get a key and search Dorisanne’s place.”