But Sam’s voice was cut off, as the neighbor grabbed him by the collar and yanked him backward.
Viola didn’t wait to hear Sam try to explain himself. He was a good person. She wasn’t. The outcome seemed obvious. He’d be free in a moment. Free to come after her, to make her go back.
So she ran. Down the stairs. Out the front entrance, and onto the sidewalk. For a few precious seconds, she stood, panting.
Sam’s car was parked on the street in front of a meter, but she didn’t have the keys. She started walking as quickly as she could without attracting too much attention. When she reached the corner, she turned and crossed the street, then walked four more blocks and crossed another. Until Sam’s apartment building was nowhere in sight.
Now what? Viola’s last remaining shred of logical thought nudged at her. Where was she going to go? What was her plan?
The problem was, Viola’s plan had been dependent on a lot of things. On finding the proof in her father’s medical file. On getting Sam to trust her, to side with her in case Jacques tried to tell people she was crazy. On Jacques being guilty of trying to have her killed, of having her parents killed. On being right. There were so many things she’d needed to fall into place, and they all seemed to be crumbling away beneath her. It was like a nightmare, but much, much worse.
Because now, Viola was awake.
Now, everything she did had permanent consequences. If she fell from a great enough height, she would die. If she stabbed someone to death with a fireplace poker, she would go to jail. And if she was wrong—if she truly was hallucinating, or going crazy, or both? Then, she’d managed to push away the very last person in the world who might have cared about her, who might have stood by her. Now, there was no one. She was finally and completely alone.
Eyes filling with tears, Viola looked around, at all the strangers who seemed to be watching her. Wondering about her. Judging her.
She had an urgent need to be somewhere safe. Somewhere less exposed. Somewhere she could sit down and think, until she figured out what was real and what wasn’t.
Flagging down the first taxi she saw, Viola practically threw herself into the backseat.
“Where you going, lady?” The driver asked, eyeing her suspiciously through the rear-view mirror. He also seemed to be wondering what was wrong with her. Maybe he thought she was crazy. No, Viola told herself, she was just being paranoid. He was just waiting for her to answer a simple question.
“I’d like to go home, please,” she said, in her sanest possible voice. Then she laughed nervously, realizing what she’d just said. “I mean, I’d like you to take me to my house.”
Very calmly, Viola told him the address of the vineyard house in Seneca Lake.
“Are you crazy?” The driver actually turned around in his seat to ask. “I’m a New York City cab, lady. I’ll barely go to the Bronx, let alone frigging Seneca Lake.”
Viola fought the urge to jump out of the car and run down the street. If she did that, he would definitely think she was crazy, he might even call the police. The police would come to take her, and she would end up back in Psych. She forced herself to laugh, like she wasn’t offended. Like the idea of her being crazy was both ridiculous and remote.
“If it makes a difference… I can pay you a lot of money.”
She reached into her purse, pulling out a stack of crisp one-hundred dollar bills.
The driver raised an eyebrow at her. “Honey, I don’t know how many cabs you’ve taken in your life, or how many movies you’ve seen, but I’m not going to take an eight-hour drive just because some rich girl offers me a big tip.”
“Oh.” Feeling her panic start to rise again, this time in the form of anger, Viola cast around for an acceptable alternative. Where was the last place she’d felt truly safe? The answer to that was easy: Sam’s house. Sam’s apartment. But she couldn’t go to either of those places, and she couldn’t go home. She tried to think of the last place she’d been happy, safe, content. Suddenly, her mind landed on a memory. The week before the accident, her father had surprised Viola and her mother with a spa retreat and a trip to the city. The three of them had seen a show, and spent a few nights at a hotel. It was the last time Viola had been alone with her entire family, together. “Can you take me to the Waldorf Astoria?”
The cab driver shook his head.
“Yeah, lady,” he said. “That, I can do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.” –Sigmund Freud
Even as Sam tried to reason with his neighbor, he knew it would be no use.
Mr. Sanchez in 4B—also known as Officer Sanchez, of the NYPD—already had a reputation for being a bit of a hothead. Add the fact that Sam had a habit of coming home at weird hours, and keeping to himself, the odds that the cop would assume he was an attempted rapist—especially when there was a well-dressed young girl practically screaming it at him—were extremely high.
That was why, when Sam felt himself being pulled away from Viola, he didn’t fight back. Instead, he let the shorter man shove him against the wall, his hands raised in surrender as both men watched Viola take off down the hallway and disappear from sight. When she was gone, Sanchez turned back to him with a question on his face.
“What the hell just happened, 4C?”
Apparently, Sam was the only creepy loner on the floor who bothered to learn his fellow tenants’ names.
“That was my girlfriend,” he explained, in a surprisingly calm voice. “She was just involved in a terrible car accident, and I think she might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I say that because I was one of the doctors who treated her after the accident. I’d show you my credentials, but she stole them earlier today and used them to break into hospital records to steal confidential patient files.”
At the end of his speech, Sam dropped his hands with a defeated sigh.
“Are you going to arrest me?”
Sanchez let go of Sam’s shirt and took a step back. He stared at Sam for a long moment, as if daring him to change his story into something less absurd. Finally, he shook his head.
“Damn, and I thought my job was stressful.”
With a polite nod, Sam went back into his apartment and slammed the door. Standing alone in his living room, he tried to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do now. For the first time in his life, he didn’t have a single idea about where to start. Usually, the kinds of problems he faced could only be solved by consulting facts. The answers weren’t subjective, and there was a precedent for almost any given situation. If there wasn’t a precedent, then there was a rule. A protocol. A logical procedure he was supposed to follow.
When it came to Viola, though, Sam realized he’d left the world of logic a long time ago.
So what else was there to do but behave illogically, and hope to God that Viola would do the same?
Sam grabbed his mom’s car keys—because searching for his own car would be a logical, albeit time-sucking pursuit—and headed for the door. His first stop would be the hospital—logically, it was the absolute last place she would go.
But his hopes weren’t high, because Viola had been right when she first opened the door to his apartment: chasing blindly around the city looking for her did not sound like a very good plan. In fact, it was probably the worst plan imaginable. But other than calling out the National Guard, what choice did Sam have?
Almost as an afterthought, he backtracked into his bedroom and scooped up Étienne Bellerose’s medical file. Logically, he should call the hospital and report that his badge had been stolen, and tell them that he was still in Syracuse, so they’d know he couldn’t possibly have stolen anything. Then he really ought to burn the file, and destroy all evidence that it had ever been in his possession.
Instead, he was going to return it to the hospital and confess, since he was in the neighborhood.
Twenty-five minutes later, Sam entered the hospital through the hallway of doom, and follow
ed it down through the labyrinth to Medical Records. Julia, the erotica writer-slash-secretary, was still sitting at her desk, even though the night shift was long over. When she saw him, she dropped the book she was holding and scowled.
“Well, it’s about goddamned time you brought that back,” she groused. But then her eyes took in Sam’s appearance, and her scowl evaporated. “Whoa, what happened to you? No offense, Dr. Philips, but this whole homeless track star thing you’re rocking? Not your best look.”
Sam wasn’t sure which statement to address first, so he ignored all of them.
“Hey Julia, when was the last time you saw Viola?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Viola? I thought she was discharged a while ago. I haven’t seen her since before she was in that special place with the…well, I think we both know where she was last week. But not since before that.”
“Really.” Sam looked down at the file he was holding. “So how did you know I had this?”
The secretary’s scowl returned.
“Um, don’t you mean ‘How did I not know?’” She snorted. “It’s my job, man. I saw that your badge had been scanned on my log, so I stayed late and did an inventory. When I realized which file was missing, I decided you were holed up somewhere in the hospital, obsessing over some medical mystery having to do with,” she coughed delicately, “that patient. Anyway, I probably should’ve reported it, but since everyone knows how much of a boy scout you are, I knew that there was no way in hell you could ever…” she coughed again, this time with even less sincerity, “possibly be stupid enough to take a file off the premises. So I waited for you to bring it back, before anyone else came in and noticed it was missing. Because…well, I am just that fucking awesome, Dr. Philips.”
In spite of his decision to throw caution to the wind and take his chances on the mercy of the hospital board, Sam felt incredibly relieved.
“Well, thank you,” he said, reaching to hand the file back to her. “I really appreciate your… staying late.”
“Oh, no,” she said, holding her hand back. “I might be awesome, but I am not touching that file. If anything illegal happens, I don’t want them to find my fingerprints on it. You can march your fine ass in there and put it back all by your damn self.”
With that, Julia stood and scanned the door to medical records, holding it open for him with an impatient expression. “Go on, and make sure you don’t fuck up my alphabetization.”
Feeling like he’d just been chastised by a Goth Kewpie Doll, Sam walked through the door and into the filing room. In front of him, there was a huge wall full of vertical slots, each stuffed with folder after folder of comprehensive patient data. He flinched as the door slammed shut behind him, turning to see that Julia had not followed him inside. Scanning the racks for where the alphabet began, he quickly located the B section and followed the progression from BA to BE. When he found the right slot, he spider-walked his fingers through the files until he thought he could safely get away with just shoving the file back in and walking away, the only consequence being a potential miniature tirade—pun intended—from the irate secretary, because he would have very slightly ‘fucked up’ her perfect alphabetization.
But when his finger landed on the file marked ‘Bellerose, Viola,’ Sam couldn’t help himself.
A few minutes after Viola had first come into the ER, someone had called her parents and asked them to provide a verbal medical history. Instead, Viola’s father had simply called and woken up their primary care doctor who lived upstate, who had faxed down the record immediately. Email would’ve been a faster and more accurate option, but his office had yet to switch to electronic records.
Because of that, the only history of Viola’s medical life was contained in a small paper file, which held a combination of records from several different countries. Her parents had an apparent obsession with what other people might find out about them—or think of them—and the file had been marked ‘VIP’ before it had even reached the doctors’ hands. Meaning that Sam had never gotten a chance to see whether or not she had a pre-existing condition—a heart murmur, asthma, diabetes—anything that he might have missed during his preliminary exam.
Now though, he could finally appease his curiosity, and maybe even his guilt, but only if he acted fast and didn’t get caught. The decision was easy.
Pulling out Viola’s file, Sam replaced it with her father’s. He quickly leafed through it, passing over the general stuff like vital information and birth certificate, only stopping when he reached the summary of her medical history.
Chakrabarti’s working theory had been that Viola had suffered a reaction to anesthesia during her surgery. It would’ve made sense, if Viola had never gone under the knife before, because most people didn’t know they were allergic until the first time. But according to the record, Viola had undergone multiple elective surgeries at the age of fourteen—a nose job, for fuck’s sake, Sam thought angrily, wondering which one of her parents had been stupid or shallow enough to agree to that. During those surgeries, she had been given the same anesthetic, with no reaction.
So maybe it hadn’t been a reaction, Sam thought, not for the first time. Maybe it had been an interaction. What if Viola had been taking a prescription, or something else that had caused her to go into arrest during the surgery? And, oh God, he realized—they hadn’t had her history at that point. What if Sam had forgotten to order a tox screen on her blood work when she came in through the ER?
Frantically, he flipped through the pages, looking for Viola’s lab results from that day. But no, there they were: he’d remembered to order them, but they were marked as inconclusive. Which meant that the attending, or at least the surgeon, should’ve re-ordered another blood test, STAT. Apparently, no one had. Apprehension growing, Sam rifled through the rest of the file, looking for a follow-up tox screen. There wasn’t one. Not anywhere. Which meant Sam had been right all along. Someone had screwed up, just not him.
The last piece of paper in the file—also the most recent—was a one-page letter from Viola’s psychologist, Dr. Horace. Sam found himself skimming through it, wondering what he had to say about his patient’s mental state. Had Dr. Horace—her so-called family psychiatrist—thought Viola was likely to suffer from PTSD, or something more severe, like schizophrenia? The letter didn’t mention any specific diagnosis. Instead, it threw around a lot of terms like ‘criminally insane,’ and ‘inability to function in any legal or financial capacity.’ The letter had also been notarized.
What the…. Viola might be freaking out at the moment, but there was no way in hell that she was criminally insane. A diagnosis like that would’ve taken years to arrive at, not to mention a patient usually had to have some criminal precedent—like a history of kleptomania, or homicidal behavior—to merit such harsh terminology. On top of that, from what Sam could tell, there was no other record of Viola ever having been treated by a psychologist. Until now, after her accident. After she’d accused Jacques Gosselin of plotting to kill her family, in front of witnesses.
Reading the letter should’ve made Sam doubt Viola’s mental state. After all, that was what it was meant to do. But instead, he found himself doubting the doctor who’d written it. He folded up and pocketed the letter, just as the door creaked open behind him.
“What are you doing in there?” Julia’s voice made her sound like she was at the end of her patience.
“Sorry,” Sam said, quickly blocking the file with his body. “I haven’t slept in a while. Does B-E-L come before or after B-E-H?”
“After, you moron,” she said. He could practically hear her rolling her eyes behind him. “And to think, you’ve had four times as much education as I’ve had. Pathetic!”
Sam quickly moved some files aside and slid Viola’s file back into its slot. “Okay, got it.”
He turned and smiled his most innocent smile. “Thanks again for being awesome.”
Julia rolled her eyes. “I know, right? Sometimes I can’t eve
n stand it.”
After escaping the file room without further incident, Sam jogged down to the end of the hallway and out into the parking lot.
Once he was in the clear, he pulled out the letter and his cell phone. An idea had suddenly occurred to him, and even though it was massively illegal, he had to give it a try. Dialing the number at the top of Dr. Horace’s letter, Sam waited, holding his breath.
Almost instantly, there was an obnoxious beeping noise, followed by a familiar recording of a woman’s voice. “We’re sorry, the number you’re trying to reach has been disconnected, or is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again.”
Frowning, Sam hung up and looked down at the letter. He double-checked the number he’d just dialed, matching it against the number printed in bold along the top. It was the same number.
A tingle started to form at the back of his neck, but he shrugged it away.
Okay, he told himself, that didn’t mean anything. Maybe the letterhead was old. Or maybe it was a typo. There were any number of good excuses out there.
Clearing his phone, he dialed the hospital switchboard from memory. When the operator answered, he identified himself as an Our Lady of Mercy staff member, then asked her if she could please look up Dr. Horace’s office number.
When she rattled it off, Sam repeated it back, trying to hold the number in his head.
The operator laughed. “I can just connect you, if that would be easier.”
“Thanks,” Sam told her, feeling stupid. “That would be great.”
After a click and a few rings, another pleasantly voiced woman answered. “Geneva Medical Center, after-hours answering service. How may I help you?”
“Hello,” Sam said, in his most official voice. “I’m a physician at Our Lady of Mercy in Brooklyn, and I’m looking for Dr. Horace. He recently did a consult on one of my patients, and I have a few more questions for him.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, very pleasantly. “Which doctor did you say?”
Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) Page 26
