Hidden Truths Read online

  “What happened?”

  “The first time they tried to show me a supposed live video.”

  Nils snorted.

  “Maybe it was live, but it was too far away and too fuzzy to identify her. The second time—”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yeah, tonight—she was behind a thick glass. I couldn’t make an identification like that.” Telling Nils this stuff made Max more aware, more certain of the inherent wrongness of this place and these people.

  “I’ll bet that didn’t go well for them.”

  “No.” Max stowed the tire iron in his bag, hoisted it on his shoulder and shut the trunk. He made sure the car was locked, too, but now he was also sure a lock would make no difference. This place lived on the edge of a cesspool.

  “Sounds like they’re hiding something,” Nils said.

  “Doesn’t it?” Max headed into his room. “Tomorrow I’m going back to see her, face-to-face, in a cell.”

  “What time?”

  “Ten a.m.” Before Max stepped through the door, he looked around the parking lot. He felt as if he was being watched.

  “Let me see what I can do to help.”

  “You do that.” Max shut the door behind him and locked it. He shoved the desk chair under the handle, then stared at the old, never-used second door in the back wall, figured there was no such thing as too much caution and moved the cheap desk to block it,. He hefted the tire iron in his hand and hoped it was enough.

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, Max woke with a start.

  He’d heard something at the back door; a clawing at the wood.

  Quietly he pulled his tire iron from under the bed and pushed the blankets back, prepared for action.

  In the alley, a man shouted a drunken raucous obscenity.

  Someone else slammed the side of the building hard enough to make the cheap pictures shudder.

  Maybe the Aloha Motel was merely living down to its reputation.

  Max stayed on the bed. But he didn’t release the tire iron, and he didn’t go back to sleep until the first glimmers of dawn lit the sky.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN NEXT KELLEN bounded out of her body, the sun was shining through the windows and she could hear calls from the people she was supposed to visit. Someone or something had set a schedule for her, and she looked forward to the time out and about.

  Truth to tell, she was enjoying her role as buttinsky-for-good. She was racking up the points, making it easier for herself on the other side.

  True, it was the equivalent to cramming for the final, but she didn’t have much time left to do the right thing. She had to do it now.

  As she did every time she rose, she looked down at her hands: paler than before. The closer she got to death, the paler she was. But it didn’t seem to affect the way she felt, which was fine. She had seen Rae and been reassured her daughter would face life with all the support and care she would ever need. And somehow, while she rested, a trickle of reassurance had reached her; Max, too, would have a full and happy life, and soon they would meet again.

  She supposed soon was a relative term when compared to eternity.

  She slipped into the hallway, into the stream of emotions, and rode it toward the infant nursery. She wanted to check on Baby Joy.

  But this time her route took her a different way, through the children’s ward. As she traveled, she felt no tugs on her…until she saw murky gray smoke that curled through one door.

  Kellen frowned. A fire? She pushed her way inside and found a thin, wide-eyed and frightened four-year-old girl patient prone on the bed. A woman in scrubs stood beside her reading the chart of her symptoms and treatment. A technician was on a ladder, changing a light in the ceiling.

  In walked the father. He had drops of water around his hairline, and he used a paper towel to dry his weary-looking face. At the sight of the woman, his face grew lively and intense. “Dr. Parkhurst! I was hoping to catch you. Why does Molly keep having episodes where she can’t breathe? Every time she goes to sleep, she wakes up screaming. She has asthma, but you said if we admitted her, you could try other medicines that would make her better.”

  “We don’t understand what’s happening with Molly, either.” Dr. Parkhurst glanced up at the technician, who nodded and descended the ladder.

  “But you have to know.” The father walked toward her. “I lost my wife from exactly this kind of horror. I can’t lose Molly, too!”

  The doctor shied away from him. “Mr. Quinby, we admitted her just a few hours ago. We have to give the medications time to work.”

  “She’s already had another episode!”

  “I know. Believe me, I know,” Dr. Parkhurst said. “We’ll continue to do our best. In the meantime, why don’t you go home and get some rest?”

  He pushed his hand through his hair. “I can’t leave her. Not like this.”

  Kellen switched her attention to the child on the bed. She was a pretty little girl who clutched the covers in panicked hands, and only her eyes moved as she watched her father and the doctor.

  She looked as if her nightmares walked in the daylight.

  Meanwhile, gray smoke swirled on the floor, climbed the walls, slid across the sheets.

  Something was dreadfully wrong here.

  Dr. Parkhurst kept her gaze on Mr. Quinby as she slid out the door.

  The technician smiled affably. “If you spot any more lights out, just call. I’m Frank. You let me know.”

  “I didn’t spot that one,” Mr. Quinby snapped.

  “Oh. Must have been one of the medical types that are in and out all the time.” He punched his way through the door, leaving Mr. Quinby alone with his daughter…and Kellen, who drifted to the far side of the bed. She had a better view from here, and somehow she knew she needed to see everything.

  Mr. Quinby waited, head turned as if he was listening. Turning back to his daughter, he pulled a pillow out from under the child’s head.

  “Please, Daddy.” Molly’s eyes looked at her father, but Kellen saw what she saw—a monster. “Please, don’t.”

  “It’s okay. Daddy won’t hurt you.” His eyes gleamed with a kind of pleasure. “You know that.”

  “This does hurt me.” Tears trickled down Molly’s cheeks. “Please, Daddy, don’t make me.”

  “It’s okay,” he crooned. “You’ll only feel it for a little bit. Then you won’t know anything more.” He pressed the pillow over Molly’s face.

  The child screamed into the pillow, pushed against his weight, kicked her feet.

  He pressed harder.

  He was suffocating little Molly. He’d done it before. This time, he meant to finish the job.

  Kellen shrieked, “No!” and lunged at him. She passed through the bed, through Molly’s panic, through Mr. Quinby’s twisted excitement, and found herself on the other side.

  She was a ghost. She could do nothing.

  Yet when she stumbled, wild with fury and out of balance by her charge, her shoulder hit Molly’s IV pole. She felt the impact reverberate all the way to the tips of her nonexistent fingers. The pole hit the floor with the clang so loud it sounded like the knell of a large bell. The fluid bottle shattered. Saline and nutrients spread across the floor.

  Mr. Quinby swung around, pillow in hand, faced the door, looked around wildly.

  Molly took a breath, and her panic erupted in a scream, another scream, another. She screamed shrilly, loudly, like a siren call of distress.

  Medical personnel and security people boiled through the door. Nurses and doctors raced to Molly’s side, placed an oxygen mask over her face, held her and reassured her. The security men, led by the technician who had changed the light, grabbed Mr. Quinby’s arms and removed the pillow from his grasp.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said. “I didn’t knock
it over. I don’t know why it fell, but I didn’t knock it over!”

  The technician pointed up toward the ceiling. “That wasn’t a light I changed. I installed a camera. We saw what you did. We recorded what you did! To your child. To that little girl! You dirty—” Frank wanted to hit Quinby. He shook with the need. His fist rose.

  “Don’t do it!” Kellen lunged for his arm, desperate to stop him.

  She slid right through him. Whatever had happened before, didn’t happen again.

  One of the women in uniform must have had the same reaction; she grabbed Frank’s arm to stop him. “Don’t. Don’t give him any reason to claim abuse and get this thrown out of court.”

  Quinby struggled against the cuffs the security guards placed on his wrists. “I’m a respectable businessman. I mean nothing but good for Molly. I’m her father!”

  The medical professionals threw around phrases like Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

  The security men talked about a long stretch of prison time.

  Molly cried and gasped, sucking in all the oxygen she could.

  “Makes you wonder what really happened to his wife,” Kellen heard Dr. Parkhurst say to Frank.

  Kellen felt a satisfaction and a wonder; how had her so unsubstantial spirit hit the pole and had an effect? She didn’t understand it; maybe it wasn’t her spirit so much as her passions…

  Yes. That was it. Her anger and indignation had blown the pole over, dashed it hard against the floor, created a distraction that pulled Mr. Quinby away from Molly, and gave the security team extra seconds to get in here.

  She wanted to spend a moment to revel in her success in helping to save little Molly and put her father in prison.

  But she had to hurry.

  CHAPTER TEN

  KELLEN SLIPPED UNNOTICED through the turmoil to her next assignment, drawn to the nursery where she had first visited Baby Joy.

  It was, she realized, early afternoon. Nurse Bernice at her desk, working on charts and reports, half-consciously listening for any alarms.

  Baby Joy was out of her incubator, strapped to Mrs. Hibbert’s chest, resting quietly. Kellen could tell the baby had been given a kind of peace by the old lady, the rocking chair, maybe by her new name.

  Kellen crept forward, not wanting to disturb the child or the woman who rocked the baby.

  Little Joy opened her eyes and looked at Kellen…and Kellen knew.

  The chair wasn’t rocking. Mrs. Hibbert wasn’t moving.

  She was gone. She was dead. Her spirit had not lingered.

  Why not? Why had she gone so quickly, so completely?

  Because she had died in a state of grace, doing good. She had saved Baby Joy. That little girl would survive to fight for her life.

  Dr. Davis didn’t know, not yet. When he entered the room, he spoke to Nurse Bernice. “Did you hear about the security video they got of that monster of a father who was smothering his daughter so he could get attention?”

  “Did they get him?”

  “They sure did. The little girl’s in protective custody and he’s under arrest. But that’s not the great part about the video.”

  Nurse Bernice looked up from her charts. “What?”

  “He’s got the poor little girl under the pillow, leaning all his weight on her. Everyone thinks this time he was going to kill her. The kid is fighting like crazy—and all over a sudden the IV pole goes flying.” Dr. Davis grinned in fiendish delight.

  “What do you mean, it goes flying?” Nurse Bernice was listening, but not paying attention.

  “It looks like something knocked into it, knocked it over. It hit the floor. The bottle shattered. It was a mess, but it distracted him before he could do worse.”

  Nurse Bernice looked up. “So he bumped it with his foot?”

  “You watch the video. There’s no one anywhere near that IV pole.”

  Nurse Bernice got what he was not saying. “Oh, come on.”

  “Watch the video, you pagan. It’ll make you a believer.”

  “In ghosts?”

  “What better place than a hospital?”

  Kellen gloated. She might be a ghost, but she had made a difference. “You might want to speak to Mrs. Hibbert,” she told them.

  Nurse Bernice raised her voice. “Mrs. Hibbert? How’s it going over there? Ready to be relieved?” She frowned, stood and walked over to the rocking chair. “Mrs. Hibbert?”

  The old lady had died, having lived her life well. Her final gift was to Baby Joy, who would survive and thrive.

  How lovely.

  Kellen left the nursery, rode on the ribbons of emotion and found herself by the busy nurses’ station near her room. Her surgeon, Dr. Clift, was there, cursing the paperwork as he filled it out.

  A silence fell that had him lifting his head.

  Harrison Benchley was approaching, returning from physical therapy to his room.

  Everyone watched him, but most of all, the woman at the corner of the broad counter watched him, as she always did. She wore the same surgical scrubs she had before, wore the same mask over her face. She disguised herself so she could observe Harrison as he made his daily trek.

  But why did she bother? He never looked. He never noticed.

  “Who is she? Why is she doing this?” Kellen had no real voice.

  But Dr. Clift was more than willing to ask Kellen’s question. He must have been wondering himself. He laid a hand on the woman’s arm. “Megan, why? It’s been months now. He never looks around. He doesn’t care about anybody or anything. The man you married died in that wreck, and this Harrison was born. He rejected you. Why do you keep doing this day after day?”

  Megan never took her gaze from Harrison, and she whispered so he couldn’t hear her voice. “He’s the best man I ever met.”

  One of the nurses snorted. “He’s rude. He’s indifferent. He’s worked with Diane every day for almost a year. She’s out sick, he got a different physical therapist, and he never even asked about her.” She gripped the pen hard enough to hurt her own fingers.

  Harrison went into his room.

  The door shut behind him.

  Megan pushed the mask down to reveal a pretty face, worn by worry and grief. “You don’t understand what he’s really like. I was a cleaning lady in his office. I was doomed to be a cleaning lady. My mother had never been more than that. My father was… I don’t know who my father was. All my life everyone told me I was never going to amount to anything. I believed them. I worked for Harrison Industries. He was always there late, in his office, and he saw me. He talked to me. He asked me what I was doing, how old I was, what I wanted from life. I was twenty-three and no one had ever asked me that. But I knew the answer. I knew. I said I wanted to be a nurse. He said, ‘Not a doctor?’ and I said no. When my mother was dying—lung cancer, she smoked—I remember the hospice nurses. Mom wasn’t ever a nice lady and when she was suffering…” Megan exhaled. “But the nurses never judged. They never reproached. When she died, no one from our family was there, but they were.”

  The immensity of the tragedy she hinted at made the nurses and Dr. Clift exchange glances, and broke Kellen’s heart.

  “Before I knew it, Harrison had me taking tests, working with a tutor so I could get into school. He said… He said his success had been him, fighting, with never a hand out to help him, but I didn’t need to do it that way. He had a reputation as a tough man, but I couldn’t help falling in love with him.” Megan touched the ring finger on her left hand. She was a nurse—she wore no jewelry—but a tan line encircled the finger.

  She exuded misery, love, hope.

  Harrison really was a bastard.

  “He loved me. At least, he said he did. I didn’t think he’d want to marry me. He was so rich and handsome, and I was training to be a nurse.” Hastily Megan added, “Which I was proud of, but I had ne
ver worn designer clothes or real jewels or dined in five-star restaurants. I didn’t want to marry him, but he convinced me it would work.” As she remembered and reminisced, she smiled. “And it has. Ten years. The occasional fight over what show to watch or where to go on vacation. But, you know, a good marriage. Then this, and he won’t even…” She swallowed. “I tried to talk to him, to explain I don’t care, that his arms aren’t who he is, that he can learn to use the prostheses and we would go on. I told him I loved him. He told me to leave. He told me… He took all the things he knows about me and my past, and mocked me. He hurt me. I never wanted to see him again. And I didn’t. Not for months.”

  “What changed?” Kellen asked.

  “What changed?” Dr. Clift asked.

  Megan said, “I realized that whether he loves me or not, I love him.”

  Dr. Clift exhaled in exasperation. Kellen heard his thoughts clearly; he’d just gone through a third bitter divorce. He didn’t believe in love, but he could hardly argue with Megan’s devotion.

  Yet the simplicity of Megan’s declaration caught at Kellen’s heart, made her think of Max, made her hope she could do something for this woman before it was too late.

  She looked down at her pale fingers.

  It had better be soon. “I have to sleep now,” she told the medical staff, and returned to her body.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OF COURSE, MAX OVERSLEPT. Cursing viciously, he barely showered, flung on his clothes and headed out into the already blazing desert morning. He could see Warden Arbuckle and Korthauer telling him he couldn’t see Mara Philippi because he was too late.

  He parked in the prison parking lot. The guards at the gate half-heartedly checked his identification and searched him for weapons; they’d now seen him often enough to be bored with him.

  He went through all the checkpoints at a good pace, and only somewhat listened to the directions to the warden’s office. He knew how to get there.

  He approached the outer office and looked in. A short middle-aged woman with huge breasts and that McFarrellville family look to her sat at Assistant Warden Korthauer’s desk. She looked up at Max. “Mr. Di Luca?”