by Lis Wiehl
“Not at all.” Sally sighed. “People were already on high alert because of the terrorist attack last month. You give folks clues like fire alarms and ambulances and emergency crews giving people oxygen right in front of them, and you throw them into a state of hypervigilance. It’s the power of suggestion. The same thing happened in Tennessee a few years back. A teacher thought she smelled gasoline. She got dizzy, short of breath, and nauseated. They evacuated the classroom and eventually the whole school. The more ambulances they sent, the more they had to send. More than a hundred people ended up in the emergency room, and dozens were admitted.”
“And?” Allison prompted.
Sally shrugged. “They tested and tested—but nothing. Most people who got sick said they smelled something, but they all reported something different—it was bitter; it was sweet; it smelled like something burning. Same thing happened today. People saw the hazmat team, heard there had been some kind of chemical spill, decided this was another sarin gas attack, and began to monitor themselves for symptoms. The air downtown doesn’t smell or taste that good anyway, especially not when you add hundreds of idling cars when everyone tried to follow the mayor’s order to evacuate. It’s called mass hysteria. Otherwise healthy people convince themselves something is wrong.”
Allison was still having trouble believing it. “But I was there, Sally. I was there. Something awful happened.”
“Something awful did happen—it just didn’t affect that many people. The hazmat people tell us there was a small release of some kind of gas at KNWS. Small and contained. One fatality. They’re treating a couple of other people who were on scene, but only as a precaution.”
KNWS. That rang a bell. “Who was the fatality?”
“They said Jim Fate.”
“Jim Fate?” His name sparked the last bit of adrenaline Allison had left. “I was going to meet with him tomorrow. He’d been getting some kind of threats.”
Sally raised her eyebrows. “They must have been more than threats. I’m hearing we were lucky that, for whatever reason, he chose to stay in his studio, and it was nearly airtight. It kept this scene”—she swept her arm out to the hundreds of people—“from being a real disaster.”
Allison looked closer at the would-be patients. Sally was right. No one seemed in dire straits. “Why do you have all these people in the parking lot—why aren’t they inside?”
“It started when we thought they really were contaminated. We couldn’t risk it spreading to the entire hospital. Now they’re out here simply because we don’t have room for them in there. And a lot of them won’t go away—they don’t believe us when we tell them they’re okay. But not one of the people we’re seeing has reddened eyes, irritated mucous membranes, or labored breathing. If this had been a real poison gas attack, we would have seen that, at a minimum. And we would be in a world of hurt. We don’t have enough protective gear— chemical goggles, face shields, and respirators—even for our staff. We don’t have enough nerve antidote kits for all these people. We don’t have enough anything. Nobody does.”
“If it had been real, what would you have done?” Allison asked, shifting Estella’s weight. Her panic was slowly ebbing.
“Triage,” Sally said bluntly. “You simply don’t treat the weakest and the sickest, the ones who will probably die. You concentrate on the ones you can save, and you say a prayer for the rest.”
CHAPTER 10
Good Samaritan Medical Center
Allison had taken a child. She had taken a child. At the time, she had thought she was saving Estella’s life. But now that she knew there had been no danger, she felt sick when she thought of Estella’s family. Somewhere in the chaos, they must be frantically searching for their missing girl.
“What do you think I should do, Sally?” she asked her friend. “This child’s poor family must be going crazy trying to find her. Should I try to take her back downtown?”
Sally blew air through pursed lips. “You can’t go back there. They’re still clearing the area, just to be safe. Even if you did manage to get back downtown, chances are whoever was with her has been moved—either forced to evacuate or taken to a hospital. You might walk her around the parking lot, see if there’s anyone she recognizes. But if not, I’d take her home and call Child Protective Services. I’ll make a note that you have her in case anyone asks for her. What did you say her name was again?”
“I think it’s Estella.”
At the word, the toddler lifted her head, and both women smiled.
“Okay. Estella. A healthy two-and-a-half-year-old, by the looks of her. Give me your address and phone numbers in case someone comes looking for her. By this evening, they should have some kind of clearinghouse set up for information.”
Allison picked her way through the people sitting and lying on the sidewalk, the flower beds, the parking lot. Now that she knew they were okay, the scene was not nearly as frightening. She saw a few people with bandages and casts, but certainly no one who seemed to be dying.
“Do you see anyone? Anyone you recognize?” she asked, but Estella didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to be paying attention. More than likely, she only spoke Spanish. Or maybe it was the tone of voice Allison was using. She realized she was talking to the toddler as if she were an adult. Every mother in the world naturally used a singsong, baby-talk delivery, but Allison couldn’t even think of how to begin. How was she going to be able to be a mother to the baby she was carrying? Maybe she would just have to fake it and hope that no one caught on.
Finding no one that Estella seemed to recognize or who recognized her, Allison started walking the thirty blocks home. Along the way she tried calling the office, Marshall, and Nicole and Cassidy, but the cell service was still overwhelmed. So instead she prayed, her lips moving silently. Prayed for Estella and her family. Prayed for the people in the parking lot and the people downtown. For Nicole and the juror she was helping, and Cassidy. For the safety of all the first responders. For all the investigators, that they would be able to get to the bottom of this. And for the friends and family Jim Fate had left behind.
She was plodding along with her head down, her mind someplace else, the sleeping Estella a deadweight on her hip, when she heard a shout.
“Allison! Allison!” The voice was ragged, as if it had been shouting over and over.
She looked up. Two blocks away, Marshall began sprinting toward her. She had never seen him run so fast, at least not wearing dress shoes and a suit. He skidded to a stop as he saw Estella, then threw his arms around Allison anyway, an awkward sideways hug. Estella, jolted out of her sleep, let out a faint protesting wail.
Marshall’s breath came in gulps. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He pulled back to look at her. His jaw was set, his eyes determined, but Allison heard the faintest tremble in his voice.
“I’ve been trying and trying to call you. I went downtown, but the cops wouldn’t let me past the barricades. But it was such a madhouse, I finally slipped in. Only I couldn’t find you.” He ran one hand through his black hair, which was already sticking up as if he had made the same gesture a dozen times that day. “Oh, Allison, I couldn’t find you anyplace.”
Tears filled her eyes, the tears she hadn’t let herself shed all day. “Marshall, I . . .”
He pulled her close, at least as close as he could, given Estella, and she sobbed against his chest.
His words ruffled her hair. “Let’s drive to the hospital, or at least as close as we can get, and then we’ll have to walk. I heard they’re overrun. We need to get you checked out. You and the baby and . . . who is this, anyway?”
Allison stepped back. “Actually, I’ve just been to Good Sam. They said I was fine, the baby was fine, and”—she patted the girl’s shoulder—“ so is Estella.”
He bent toward the girl. She offered him a shy smile before turning her head and burying it against Allison’s chest.
“I found her outside the courthouse when they were evacuating downtown. Sh
e must have been with someone, but I couldn’t see them, just this poor little girl crying all by herself. At that time we still thought the air was poisoned, so I picked her up and took her to Good Sam with me.”
Marshall cocked his head. “What do you mean, ‘still thought the air was poisoned’? Isn’t it?”
Allison quickly told him what she had learned from Sally.
Some of the tension went out of his shoulders. “Thank God. Even if it did bring the city to its knees, it could have been so much worse.” He held out his arms. “Here, let me carry her the rest of the way.”
Estella’s eyes widened. She clutched Allison so hard that her little fingers went white.
“I guess she’s not ready for that,” Allison observed. The three of them started for home.
When Marshall unlocked the front door, Allison’s eyes fell on a note scrawled with a Sharpie and taped on the entryway wall. Allison, stay here. Looking for you. I love you.
Tears closed Allison’s throat. Marshall had charged out to find her, not knowing if he himself might be struck down. Again the experiences of the past hours washed over her, the terror and fear she hadn’t allowed herself to feel. She was home; she was healthy; she wasn’t dead or even sick. She and Marshall and the baby—and Estella—all of them safe.
CHAPTER 11
Riverside Condominiums
Cassidy walked in the door of her condo and went straight to her bedroom. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, she thought as she fell more than lay across the unmade bed. It was all she could do to muster the energy to kick off her shoes. Well, Jim’s shoes, really, but he wasn’t in any position to ask for them back. She had never bothered to change, knowing that Andy would frame the shot so that it didn’t show her feet.
All day, as she reported on the chaos downtown, Cassidy had longed to be home, to be by herself, to have nothing around her but silence. And the Riverside Condominiums were quiet. The builders had broken ground at the height of the real estate mania, when property was appreciating 15 percent every year. Everyone wanted in. They held lotteries to choose who was allowed to buy, and Cassidy had felt very lucky when her number came up. She hollowed out her retirement fund, already imagining the kind of return she would get. Only suckers would hold on to conservative stocks when there was so much money to be made in real estate.
Six months later, the bottom fell out of the market. Roughly half the units in her building remained unoccupied, bought by speculators who had thought they could flip them for a fast profit. A lot of investors had ended up walking away from the debt, giving their units back to the bank. As a result, the building was often eerily silent.
Now that she was finally by herself, Cassidy realized there was a big problem with being alone. There was nothing to distract her from what had happened earlier in the day.
When she closed her eyes, she saw people running past her, heard the screams and the sirens. It was almost like hallucinating, she could see the people so vividly. An old man in a black fedora clutched his throat and fell to his knees. A young woman with a half-dozen silver piercings begged Cassidy to tell her if they were all dying. A boy carrying a skateboard ran out into the street, and before she could even call out a warning, he was hit by a huge blue boat of an Oldsmobile.
Her eyes flew open. They’re not real, she told herself. Forget them and go to sleep. But when she tried, she saw fresh horrors. It was like her overtaxed brain was coming up with new problems to keep the adrenaline flowing.
Even as exhausted as she was, there was no way she was going to be able to sleep tonight. Not without some help. With a sigh, she got up and padded out to her purse. Without turning on the light, she found Jim’s bottle of Somulex and shook a tablet into her hand. In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of wine to wash it down.
“Here’s to you, Jim,” she whispered, lifting the glass a few inches in the air. “May you rest in peace.” And then, with a practiced gesture, she tossed the Somulex into her mouth and swallowed it with a single mouthful of the sharp and oaky red wine.
Cassidy had never been a good sleeper, but events of the past few months had ramped up her problem to the point where she sometimes went an entire night without sleep. It had started when her old boyfriend, Rick, turned jealous and then abusive. After a while, it hadn’t felt safe to sleep beside him. And even when he wasn’t with her, she worried that he might jolt her awake with a drunken, threatening phone call, or even come creeping into her condo in the middle of the night. Things only got worse when she, Allison, and Nicole had confronted a murder suspect—a confrontation that had ended with the killer dead on the floor and Nic with a bullet through her shoulder. When Cassidy closed her eyes at night, she still saw the blood.
After the shooting, she turned into an ultramarathon insomniac, awake for as long as forty-five hours at a stretch. Nights became endless. She paced her condo, watched TV, flipped through magazines, listened to talk radio, and surfed the Internet. Whenever she tried to sleep, her thoughts raced. She thought about Rick, about how he had hurt her. About her parents and how they had always found her lacking. She thought about stories she wanted to cover, and hadn’t. She also thought about Jenna, who was everything Cassidy had once been. Now Cassidy was ten years older than the station’s intern—and she was sure that it showed.
And always, always, Cassidy did the math. If she went to sleep in the next ten minutes, then she would get five hours of sleep. But it wouldn’t be long until she had to recalculate. The most she would get would be four hours, or three. Worrying about not sleeping kept her from sleeping. By the time it got down to two hours, she would be whimpering, beating her pillow, begging the universe for relief.
Cassidy tried all the remedies in the women’s magazines. Go to bed at the same time each night. People who suggested that obviously didn’t work in the 24/7 world of the news business. Try a glass of warm milk. It tasted gross and had no effect. Melatonin, valerian, kava kava, Tylenol PM. She still lay staring at the ceiling. Sometimes a glass or two of wine helped for a short while, but she would wake up after an hour and not be able to get back to sleep.
One evening she complained to Jim over dinner. “I can’t sleep anymore. Sometimes I’m awake all night.”
“You need to get your doctor to prescribe you some of these.” Jim took a bottle from his pants pocket.
“What is it?”
“Somulex.” He shook a white, oval pill into her palm. “Here. Take this tonight and see if it helps.”
Did it ever.
That night, as soon as Cassidy’s head hit the pillow, her breathing slowed and softened. It was a deep, nearly dreamless sleep. She couldn’t remember sleeping like that since she was a kid.
And people noticed even after a single night.
“You look different,” Jenna said the next day, giving her a long, considering look. “Did you change your hair?”
That afternoon, Cassidy called her doctor and got her own prescription. “I can’t sleep,” she told him. “I’m very stressed-out after everything that’s happened. Please, please can you give me a prescription for Somulex?”
It wasn’t any harder than that. Cassidy got twenty pills. The label said they were for “occasional sleeplessness.” At first, she broke the pills in half and only took them on Sunday nights, the hardest ones.
But if it looked like a big story might break the next day, or she had an important meeting or an event after work and needed to look good—well, there were the pills to help. Over the phone, the doctor had mumbled something about how they could be addictive, but Cassidy decided it was better to have a little addiction and be well rested and alert. Better to be attractive than ugly and exhausted.
It wasn’t long before she needed to take a pill every night. If she tried to skip one, she found herself wide-awake. She would lie and watch the glowing green numbers on her alarm clock slowly move forward— 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m. Finally she would break down and take a pill, even if she only got an hour
or two of sleep before her alarm sounded. And some nights she needed more than one.
What was supposed to be a monthly supply of Somulex was gone in under three weeks. When her doctor wouldn’t renew her prescription early, Cassidy found a second doctor and had him call in her prescription to a different pharmacy.
The one thing her doctor had lectured her about was the danger of mixing Somulex with alcohol. “If you combine the two, they can depress the nervous system. Maybe even to the point of your body forgetting to breathe.”
Cassidy had heeded his warning for a while. But she was working so hard. She needed to unwind. And only a glass or two of red wine allowed her to do that.
Someday she would quit. When her life calmed down.
Now Cassidy stood in the kitchen and felt herself shaking. She had defied death today, but she had also stood in a dead man’s apartment and walked home in a dead man’s shoes. Five minutes ago she had swallowed a dead man’s pill.
And it was doing nothing for her. If only there were an off switch on the back of her head. She would reach around and flip it down and be wonderfully blank.
Instead she took another pill.
Cassidy had never been one to like baths. She was too type A to be anything but a shower girl. But now she remembered the candles Rick had bought her back when he was first wooing her, the expensive bubble bath. In the bathroom, Cassidy ran the water until it nearly reached the edge of the tub, lit the candles, grabbed her glass of wine, and lowered herself into the water. A few minutes later, she began to feel the familiar melting sensation in her arms and legs. The Somulex was finally kicking in.
CHAPTER 12
Pierce Residence
Allison picked up the phone to call Child Protective Services, but instead of a dial tone, all she got was a fast busy signal. Again. The phone lines were still overwhelmed, even though the radio and TV stations were urging everyone to stay off the phone unless it was an emergency. She held Estella on her lap, the useless phone loose in her hand. “I guess she’s ours to take care of, at least for now,” she told Marshall.
