Marcy half sat up in the bed, then fell back weakly. She was in a hospital bed, so not only did she wreck the car, but she was running up a hospital bill, too? She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears that stung them. Jake was going to be so angry with her.
"Well, looky who's decided to join the land of the living."
Marcy opened her eyes to see an elderly man wearing a blue smock peering down at her. He held an armful of newspapers.
"I'm sorry, do I know you?" she asked. Her throat was dry, her voice so raspy, she barely recognized it as her own.
He grinned, showing perfect white teeth. The man had to be eighty if he was a day. "Don't reckon you do. Name's Parker and I deliver papers 'round here. But I know you, missy." He shuffled away. "Let me go get that lazy nurse of yours for you." He shook his head. "I told that girl you were wakin' up. Told her two days ago."
Marcy watched the old man disappear through the doorway. A moment later, a perky brunette in a bright purple scrub top hurried into the room. "Marcy, you're awake!" She rushed to the bedside and grabbed Marcy's hand.
Marcy wondered if... Nancy... she read it on her name badge... was going to shake her hand, but instead she checked her pulse.
"I can't tell you how happy I am to see you awake, Marcy."
Marcy was beginning to feel a little weird. She was light-headed, but it wasn't just that. She didn't know how she had gotten there or who these people were, though they all seemed to know her. Was this how Alice had felt when she tumbled down the rabbit hole? "Do I know you?" she asked the nurse.
"We got to know each other pretty well these last few months." Big smile. "So I suppose you could say we're acquainted."
Marcy rested her head back on the pillow, feeling slightly nauseated. "I was in a car accident," she said softly.
"You remember?" Nancy the Nurse was now hovering, making Marcy nervous.
"Is Jake here?" She picked her head up off the pillow. "My husband, Jake Edmond?"
"You remember your husband's name? Excellent. And how about yours, sweetie?"
Nancy the Nurse was talking to her as if she was a child or maybe just at nitwit. "Of course I know who I am. I'm Marcy Edmond. I live at 223 Seahorse Drive in Albany Beach, and I want to speak with my husband this minute." Her voice trembled with her last words.
"It's all right, Marcy." Nancy patted her shoulder. "Don't get upset. I'll call your him at work, and Dr. Larson should be here any minute. I had him paged the minute I heard you were awake."
Marcy closed her eyes. She had been in a car accident, and Jake was still at work? Why did that not surprise her? Ever since he'd made partner in the CPA firm, he'd lived, eaten, and breathed the place. She just hoped someone had picked Katie up at school.
After school? Her eyes flew open. The soap opera on TV came on at three. She hadn't even left the office until four. She hoped to God she hadn't been here all night. She needed to get those reports in.
"Marcy?"
She opened her eyes to see her family doctor standing over her, and she pushed up on her elbows, her heart fluttering in her chest again. "Dr. Larson, what's going on? How long have I been here?"
That was when she looked down at herself in the bed and realized it was her, but not her. Her body, but not her body. She must have been sixty pounds lighter....
* * *
"Six months," Marcy murmured, still in disbelief.
Dr. Larson had broken the news to her of the accident and subsequent coma hours ago, but it was still sinking in. He hadn't given a lot of details because he'd said she didn't need all the information at once. All she knew now was that it was the first of June, and she had been in a coma since December twelfth. She'd lost all the weight because she'd had to be hooked up to a feeding tube.
She kept patting the sheets, feeling her new body beneath them. No one had brought her a mirror yet, so she hadn't seen what her face looked like, but she knew she had to have lost some of that pudge. She was so excited she could barely think straight. All those years of cabbage soup and grapefruit diets, and one silly accident and coma had been the answer to her prayers. Why hadn't she thought of it sooner?
"I know it must be hard for you to believe," Jake said. "Pretty scary, I would think."
Her whole family was there. Jake, the kids, Katie and Ben, even her twin sister, Phoebe, who was downstairs getting coffee and having a smoke right now. After the initial round of hugs, Katie had settled down out in the hallway to do her homework, her ever-present headphones covering her ears. Ben was seated on the floor in the corner of the hospital room with a video game clasped tightly between his hands.
Six whole months of her life gone in a blink of her eye. The kids had grown so much...
Her gaze settled on Jake. He was being incredibly nice to her. Attentive. He'd brought her a sandwich from her favorite deli off the boardwalk. She'd only been able to nibble a corner of the bread. After all these months of a liquid diet, her stomach had rejected the very suggestion of solid food, but it had been thoughtful of him all the same. Now he was just sitting beside her on the edge of the bed, clasping her hand so tightly that he was cutting off her circulation... and staring down at her. His eyes kept clouding with tears.
She guessed he was relieved he wouldn't have to empty the dishwasher anymore, something he always hated to do. All that housecleaning and running the kids here and there all these months alone must have been tough on him.
Phoebe waltzed into the room, smelling of menthol cigarettes and peppermint. She was as beautiful as she had ever been in her size-eight designer jeans, with her blond hair halfway down her back, and those cheekbones women paid thousands of dollars to have plastic surgeons create. Marcy had always been jealous of her twin sister. Their mother had used to say that Phoebe got all the looks, while Marcy got the brains. Marcy couldn't count how many times in her life she would have been willing to give up a few brain cells just to have those sensuous lips or that pert nose.
"You tell her?" Phoebe spoke to Jake as if Marcy wasn't even in the room.
"Tell me what?" Marcy looked to Jake, her breath catching in her throat. All she could think of was that someone else had been involved in the accident. She didn't remember another vehicle, but she hoped to God no one else had been hurt. She didn't know if she could live with herself, knowing she had injured or killed another human being.
Jake didn't answer either of the sisters.
Marcy looked to Phoebe. Phoebe could be brutally honest—when she wanted to be.
"Tell me what, Phebes? Whatever it is, I want you to give it to me straight. I don't want either of you protecting me."
Jake's and Phoebe's gazes met. There was a flicker of something between them. Something Marcy couldn't identify. Then it was gone.
"I'm going to raise my voice here in a second," Marcy warned them.
Phoebe reached into the fashionable sack purse that hung on her slender shoulder.
Jake nodded, then turned back. He spoke softly, which scared Marcy even more. "Dr. Larson thought it wise not to tell you everything at once. The accident was bad, hon."
What was he trying to tell her? She knew she wasn't paralyzed. She could still feel her feet and wiggle her toes. Everything was still intact. She'd just been gazing at her skinny calves in wondrous awe a minute ago.
Phoebe drew a small compact from her purse and offered it to Jake.
Marcy trembled, looking from her husband to her sister. Her stomach twisted in knots.
Her face.
That hadn't occurred to her. She'd been thrown from the car, into the trees. Jake had already told her that much. But she hadn't thought that her face might have been damaged. She might be scarred.
She recalled the young woman she had known her freshman year in college who had been gruesomely burned in an automobile accident. The girl had committed suicide the following year, leaving a note behind saying she could stand the pain, but not the ugliness. Not the pity of others.
Marcy gripped the sheet
s and stared into Jake's eyes. Good old Jake and his trusty brown eyes. "Tell me," she whispered. "It's bad, isn't it?" She wanted to reach up and touch her face, feel the hideous scars, but she was afraid. She had never been beautiful like Phoebe in the first place. Plain was the word her mother had used to describe her, but at least her face had never been scary—like the teenager with the burn scars.
"It's not what you think." Jake held her gaze, and for a moment it seemed as if there was no one in the room but the two of them. He took the gold compact from Phoebe without taking his attention off Marcy.
He opened it, and the click of the tiny gold clasp seemed thunderous.
Marcy reached for the mirror. How bad could it be? Katie and Ben had kissed her cheek and never reacted. But then, they had had months to get used to seeing her, hadn't they? All these months she'd lain there, maybe the whole family had practiced what they would say if she ever woke up. They had rehearsed how they would not look away, no matter how frightening her face was.
Marcy's fingers curled around the cold metal of the compact, and she closed her eyes as she drew it in front of her face. She tried to breathe through her mouth the way she'd been taught years ago in childbirth classes.
Jake rested his hand on her thigh. It was trembling.
Marcy counted silently to three and then opened her eyes.
For a moment she thought she had fallen down that rabbit hole again. Or maybe this wasn't real at all. Maybe it was all just a dream.
Staring back at her in the tiny compact mirror was Phoebe. It was her sister's beautiful face she saw, not her own.
Yet when she blinked, the Phoebe in the mirror blinked back. When she pressed her lips together, Phoebe pressed hers together. Marcy could feel her own facial muscles responding to the signals she sent from her brain to her body.
Holding the compact with one hand, she raised her other hand to the face still looking back at her. "Jake, I don't understand," she breathed. Her fingertips found the soft skin of her cheek, the tip of her delicate nose. Only it wasn't her rough, blotchy skin, it wasn't her too-long, too-chubby nose.
"When you were thrown from the car," Jake said carefully. "There... there was—"
"Oh, JC on a mountaintop, Jake, tell her." Phoebe walked up to the bed, hand planted on her slender hip. She was obviously irritated, but then, any conversation that did not relate directly to her irritated her.
"You weren't wearing your stupid seatbelt," Phoebe said. "You went through the windshield, Marcy. Your face was all screwed up. Nose gone. Lip over your eyebrow. No one thought you were going to live, but Jake wouldn't hear it. You were flown by helicopter to Shock Trauma in Baltimore, not to save your life, but because Jake insisted plastic surgeons repair your face. He said his Marcy deserved the best there was."
Marcy had been staring at her sister, but she looked in the mirror again, still trying to comprehend. "But... but this isn't my face, it's yours."
Phoebe pressed her pink lips together. Though it was only June, she already had a nice tan. "They had to have something to go by." She didn't meet Marcy's gaze this time. "Jake gave them a picture of me instead of you because apparently he couldn't find any pictures of you."
Because she never allowed anyone to take her photograph. Because, ashamed of her weight, she always destroyed the few photographs there were.
Marcy couldn't take her hand off the smooth skin of her face. She was beautiful. Not just pretty, but beautiful. Gorgeous. Six months ago, she had driven off that bridge fat and ugly, and this afternoon she had opened her eyes to find that she was thin and gorgeous.
If this was a rabbit hole, she was staying down here. If it was a dream, she prayed she didn't wake up.
Jake rubbed her thigh. She could feel the warmth of his skin even through the sheet. "You're beautiful, Marcy," he murmured. "Just beautiful."
Phoebe walked away.
Marcy dragged her gaze from the mirror to Jake's face. It wasn't until she saw the tears in his eyes that she began to cry.
* * *
"There you go. All done." A nice-looking man in his early thirties, wearing a white lab coat, placed a Band-Aid in the crook of her elbow. "Good luck, Marcy."
His name tag said Alan. She watched as he tucked her vial of blood into his tray and headed out of her room and down the hall for his next patient. She was amazed how many people in the hospital knew her. And they were all being so nice. But as Nurse Nancy had pointed out, she had been here six months. "Thanks, Alan," she called after him.
Dr. Larson passed the phlebotomist on his way into Marcy's room. "I understand you're ready to go home," the gray-haired man said, smiling pleasantly.
She slid off the edge of the hospital bed and sat on a chair to tie her sneakers. She was amazed at how far she could lean over without the spare tire she once had around her middle. "I can't wait to get out of here."
He flipped open her thick medical chart. "I'm not thrilled about letting you go so quickly. It's only been two days since you woke." He hesitated, "But—"
"But I promise to take it easy, and I'll be back weekly for the blood tests and the CT scans you've ordered." She patted the overnight bag Jake had brought her this morning. "I've already got the paperwork right here."
Finishing his notes, he tucked his pen into his lab coat pocket and held her records to his chest to look down at her. "You really do look amazing, Marcy." He shook his head. "I have to confess, I always thought your sister was a knockout, but I swear, I think you're prettier. It's astonishing what these plastic surgeons can do these days."
She felt the heat of her embarrassment in her cheeks, but it was a pleasant embarrassment. It still all seemed too good to be true. "It is amazing. I still don't recognize myself in the mirror." She gave a laugh as she stood. Her legs were a little wobbly. Dr. Larson said it would be months before she regained all her muscle strength, but she felt good. She couldn't wait to get out and go shopping, a task she had once dreaded. But for now, she was content to wear Phoebe's sweat pants and T-shirt. She'd even had to borrow a bra and panties. Right now, the only thing she was wearing of her own were a pair of socks and sneakers.
Marcy pushed a lock of blond hair behind her ear, hair that had grown inches in the six months she'd been unconscious. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine and I'm ready to go home."
"So home you go." He offered his hand, and she shook it. "Good luck, Marcy, and remember—"
"Call you if I have any problems." She laughed. "I promise I'll call."
Nancy the Nurse rolled a wheelchair into the room, passing Dr. Larson on his way out. "Your chariot awaits, madame."
Marcy grabbed her overnight bag and sat in the wheelchair, allowing Nancy to put the foot rest down for her. "I know it's a waste of time to tell you this," she told the nurse, "but I really can walk."
"Come on, you've seen the movies," Nancy teased.
"Hospital policy," they finished in unison.
Marcy shifted her bag on her lap and they rolled down the hall. Suddenly she felt a little self-conscious. The hallway was busy, not just with medical personnel who already knew her, but patients, too. People were smiling at her. People who hadn't known her before. "Jake went to get the car," she said hesitantly, "so we can just meet him at the entrance."
"You got it."
A familiar face in Marcy's hometown came striding up the hallway toward them, her long legs pumping, blond ponytail swinging. Police Chief Claire Drummond was lost in thought, her pretty mouth taut. But as Nancy wheeled Marcy by, Claire spotted her and halted.
"Marcy, it's so great to see you. Welcome home."
Marcy smiled hesitantly, looking up at Claire in her smart green-and-tan police officer's uniform. She had known Claire Drummond her whole life. They were both Albany Beach natives and had attended the same high school. But Marcy had always found Claire intimidating; maybe it was her six-foot stature or her beautiful face, or maybe it was that unwavering confidence she seemed to exude.
Claire hadn't retur
ned to Albany Beach after college, but five years ago, after what everyone said was an ugly divorce, she had moved back to her own hometown. A little more than a year ago, her father had retired after more than thirty years as the town's police chief. She'd been hired to replace him, and she was not only Albany Beach's first female police chief, but the county's. Marcy bumped into her once in a while, at the diner, the post office, but they had never exchanged more than a few words in years.
"It... it's good to be back," Marcy managed. "Though, honestly, I don't feel as if more than a few days have passed since I ran the van off the bridge." She grimaced. "I am really sorry about the bridge. I hope the city sent my insurance company a bill."
Claire patted Marcy on the shoulder. "Don't be silly. We're just all glad you survived. It was a heck of an incident." She glanced up to see one of her officers waiting for her in a doorway. McCormick. Marcy had always thought he was cute; he just looked like a cop. "Listen, I better run." Claire pressed her lips together. "I guess you heard that we found the missing Lome girl."
Marcy nodded. In this small town, word of anything traveled fast. She already knew Patti Lome had been missing; she'd read it in the local paper the day before. Jake had heard about the waitress's death this morning when he stopped to grab a cup of coffee at the local diner before coming to the hospital to pick Marcy up. It was a shame. Patti had seemed like a nice girl. A little mixed up. Maybe drank a little too much, went out with the wrong kinds of guys, but none of that was a crime. Certainly not one punishable by death.
"They say it's our first murder in the town in sixty-some years," Marcy mused.
Claire offered a quick smile. "Well, Patti's death hasn't been ruled a homicide yet, but if it is, she'll be the first in a long time, not since old man Potter killed his brother for sleeping with his carnie wife."
Nancy and Marcy both smiled. Everyone in the town knew the story. Two bachelor brothers had lived together in one of the many farms that dotted the countryside west of Albany Beach. Noah Potter had gone to a county fair and brought home a bride, one who was said to have had a tattoo—pretty scandalous for the forties. Less than a month later, poor Noah caught his wife in bed with his brother. He shot Jessup. Noah went to jail, and Sylvia went back to the carnival, never to be seen again.
She'll Never Tell Page 2
