by Lis Wiehl
It didn’t really answer the question, but Allison could tell it was the only answer she was going to get. “Are you sure you don’t want one of us at the hospital with you?”
“I’m sure.”
“Cassidy and I both love you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” Lifting her head, Nicole gave her a smile that was equal parts joy and sadness. “I know.”
CHAPTER 56
Portland General Hospital
As she lay on the gurney being pushed down the hospital corridor, Nic realized she did not expect to wake up from the surgery.
This was not a logical conclusion based on research. It was a gut reaction, so deep and primal that reasoning with it did no good. No matter how many times Nic told herself that all signs pointed to the cancer being in an early stage, or that she trusted Dr. Adler’s expertise, she was still convinced that she was going to die during surgery. It didn’t matter how much reading she had done on the Internet, how many pamphlets she had perused, or that no one else seemed to think that her heart would stop right on the table.
She still believed she was going to die.
As she watched the ceiling tiles slide by, Nic realized she had lied to everyone, including herself, about how terrified she was. Even fighting with Elizabeth in the pool hadn’t been as bad as this. Then, Nic had been all action. Now she was forced to wait. Forced to wait for what a secret part of her was convinced would be her end.
But still she had persisted in lying, telling Cassidy and Allison and her parents that she was fine, and that she did not need or want anyone at the hospital for what was just the first step on a long journey. Now she doubted she had fooled anyone.
Least of all herself.
She had lied in an attempt to turn her bravado into the real thing. She was like one of those alchemists in the Middle Ages that Makayla had studied, the ones who believed they could turn lead into gold.
During the admissions process, Nic had still managed to act calm and composed, an act she maintained as she was prepped for surgery. But as the anesthesiologist’s assistant pressed the button to open the double doors leading to the surgery suite, she began to cry.
It wasn’t fear that she would wake up without her breast, or that she would wake up to hear that the cancer had spread far more than Dr. Adler had thought. It was the idea that she wouldn’t wake up at all. That it would all end here, today.
A team of gowned and masked people lifted her from the gurney to the operating room table. The last thing Nic saw were the blindingly white lights of the two large operating room lamps. What a cliché, she thought, as the anesthesiologist put the mask over her face and asked her to count backward from 100. Her last sight on Earth—or anywhere else for that matter—was going to be the same lamps she had seen in every movie or TV show about someone going under the knife.
Then Nic slid down into a dreamless hole.
Nic swam to the surface. Opened her eyes. The light was too bright and her eyelids too heavy. She let them fall closed.
A minute or an hour later, Nic woke up again. She didn’t know what time it was or even, for a moment, where she was. She had no sense that time had passed, no memory of anything. Her stomach was roiling, and her breast and underarm throbbed. Her breast! She brought her fingers up to her left breast, ignoring the pain of the IV needle stuck in the back of her right hand.
Still there. With a three-inch-long incision in it, and another in her underarm, but her breast was still attached to her.
She let her eyelids flutter open.
An old Korean lady with two long braids was sitting next to Nic’s hospital bed. She smiled at Nic, and the skin at the corners of her eyes pleated like fans.
“Hello,” Nic said. She wasn’t surprised. She wasn’t anything. She was in a kind of limbo, one filled with dull marvels like not losing her breast and finding a stranger sitting in her room.
The older woman held a finger to her lips, then took Nic’s hand. Her own hand was dry and warm.
At her touch, Nic came a little more awake. She was really and truly alive. Alive! She hadn’t died.
She didn’t realize that she was talking out loud until she heard herself. “I didn’t die,” she said hoarsely.
The older woman just smiled and gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
Nic wanted to say something more, but her throat wouldn’t let her.
It hurt to swallow. She felt like she had been punched in the throat. Like she hadn’t kept her guard up in boxing and had caught an elbow or a fist.
“Thirsty,” Nic managed, and the older woman let go of her hand, stood up, and got the white plastic water bottle, emblazoned with the hospital’s logo. She bent the flexible straw and put it between Nic’s lips.
“Thank you,” Nic said after several long swallows, and the woman set the bottle back down. Nic felt like she knew her, but she didn’t know from where.
“A friend of yours sent me,” the older woman said, as if Nic had asked a question. Her soft voice was oddly reassuring.
Nic could have asked what friend, but she was too tired to do more than nod. The fear was gone. She realized how much space it had taken up inside her head.
“I am here to pray for you.”
Nic should have protested, but no words came to her lips.
The older woman raised one eyebrow. “Is that all right?”
“Sure,” Nic said in a rough whisper. It still hurt to talk.
The old woman took Nic’s hand in her own, bowed her head, and began to murmur. The words were so soft that Nic couldn’t make them out. So soft they almost sounded like music.
Peace spread through Nic, as if she had been lowered into a warm bath. Her throat eased, and the two incisions stopped throbbing.
After an amount of time that might have been ten minutes or a hundred, the older woman got to her feet. She gently placed Nic’s hand on top of her belly. Then she smoothed out the covers and tucked the blanket under her chin. Nobody had tucked Nic into bed in decades, but it felt good. With a smile, the older woman leaned over and said softly, “Nicole, you are going to be okay.”
Then she turned and walked out of the room.
At first Nic couldn’t move or speak. It was like she was paralyzed. In the places where she had hurt—her throat, the back of her hand, the two surgical incisions—there was warmth where the pain had been.
Finally she pressed the button for the nurse.
“Who was that lady?” she said when the nurse came in. She wore blue scrubs and was carrying a short clear plastic cup with two pills in it.
“Who was who?”
“That older woman who was sitting with me when I woke up.” Nic cleared her throat. “Was she a chaplain or something?”
The nurse’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“The woman who was here. Sitting with me. She was maybe Korean? She had two long braids, and she was wearing a red sweater. She just left.”
“Now?” The nurse’s voice was amused. “Honey, it’s the middle of the night. No visitors are allowed after eight.”
“Then it must have been someone who works here. Maybe a housekeeper? Somebody. Or a volunteer?”
“No volunteers come in at night either. It’s just us nurses, and there aren’t enough of us to do what needs to be done, let alone sit with someone.” She laid a cool hand on Nic’s forehead, as if checking for a fever. “Some people have really vivid dreams as they come up out of the anesthesia.”
“It wasn’t a dream. She was here. She was real. She held my hand.” Nic remembered the warmth of her grasp, the rasp of the woman’s dry skin.
“I’ll call security.” The nurse reached for the phone.
“No.” Nic put her hand over the receiver. “It’s fine.”
And she realized it was.
CHAPTER 57
Firehouse
A week after her surgery, Nic sat with Cassidy and Allison at a wooden table in the Firehouse. The weather was warm enough that the garage doo
r—left over from when the restaurant had really been a firehouse—was rolled up over their heads.
“I feel like a fool for having liked Elizabeth,” Cassidy said, not meeting their eyes. She picked up a cherry pepper stuffed with fresh mozzarella and anchovies from the plate of appetizers.
Nic knew how upset Cassidy was when, instead of eating it, she began to toy with it.
“Can you guys forgive me for dragging her into our lives?”
“How were you supposed to know she was a sociopath?” Allison patted the back of Cassidy’s free hand. “Elizabeth had years and years to perfect her lying.”
“She was like the plastic fruit my grandmother used to keep in a basket on her dining room table,” Nic said. She popped a fried olive into her mouth. “More perfect than the real thing.”
Sure, Cassidy had introduced them to Elizabeth, but Nic was the one who had chosen to hand her daughter over to a child-killer. Obviously, her antennae hadn’t been up either.
“Even Lindsay feels guilty that she didn’t recognize Elizabeth from her photo at the gym,” Allison said.
“Hey, the only people I can recognize anymore that I went to school with are you guys,” Nic said. Allison’s comment about Lindsay made her curious. “How is your sister doing, anyway?”
“Lindsay? I guess she’s holding her own. She’s staying sober. She’s not seeing Chris. At least I’m pretty sure she’s not.” Allison puffed air out of her lips. “She’s not actually doing much more than baking cookies and trying to help around the house. But I’m slowly realizing I can’t make her live the life I think she should. And just staying away from her old life is a pretty big achievement.”
Allison sounded like she was trying to convince herself, Nic thought. She had high standards, which was what happened when your dad died when you were young, your mom started drinking, and it turned out to be up to you to hold the family together.
The waitress set down their drinks.
“To the Triple Threat Club!” Cassidy said, raising her glass of red wine. Nic tapped her water glass against it and then against Allison’s glass of white.
“I didn’t used to belong to any clubs,” Nic said. “Now I guess I’m in two. But people pay their dues to get out of the Cancer Club, not in.”
“How are you doing?” Cassidy asked.
Nic picked up another olive. “I’ve gotten almost all my tests back. Stage 1 cancer, the tumor was under two centimeters with clear margins, and the lymph node they took out was negative, so that means it hadn’t spread.”
“That’s all good, isn’t it?” Cassidy asked, a little anxiously.
“It’s about as good as it can be.” Nic hoped that what she said was true. The only way to know for sure that you’d survived breast cancer was to die from something else. “Good news, that is, if you set aside the fact that I had something growing inside me that didn’t want to stop and didn’t care if it killed me in the process.”
The thought still shook Nic. She had been close to death before, but her opponent had always been a person she could see, touch, hurt back. It was hard to grasp that this killer had arisen from deep within herself. That she had grown it. Birthed her own monster. As if she were her own worst enemy.
Nic still didn’t know what to think about the Korean woman who had been in the room after she woke up from surgery. Had there even been a woman? Had she dreamed her up? All she knew was that the woman’s prayer had brought her an unexpected peace. She had only told the night nurse about the woman and her visit. And no one but Nic knew about the older woman’s pronouncement that she would be okay.
“I still need to do radiation,” she continued, “but I guess the side effects from that are usually pretty mild. But before I start that, there’s one more test we need the results from. It tells you whether or not it would help to have chemo to make sure the cancer never, ever comes back.” She attempted a smile. “If I do have to do chemo, will you guys go wig shopping with me before I lose all my hair?”
“You could be a redhead,” Cassidy joked.
Then her expression faltered, and Nic knew she was remembering Elizabeth’s red hair.
“Or a blonde.” She ruffled her fingers through her own hair. “We blondes have more fun, after all.”
“I would love to see the guys at work if I showed up in a blonde wig.” Nic grinned as she imagined it. “Half of them would fall all over themselves pretending not to notice. The other half would either love it or mock it. And a tiny percentage might want to wear it themselves.”
“Have you told anyone at work yet?” Allison said as the waitress set down their entrees.
She looked innocent, but Nic knew she really meant Have you told Leif ?
Nic answered by not answering. “Right now, I don’t want everyone up in my business. I’m keeping it on a strictly need-to-know basis.” She took a bite of her hanger steak. “My incisions are healing, and I finally have clearance to shave my left underarm. But my breast is never going to look the same.” She pretended to pout. “I guess my secret dream of becoming a topless dancer is over.”
The other two women laughed, and Nic joined them. It felt good to laugh. Good to feel that there was more in the world than fear.
“We got you this,” Allison said. She handed over an ivory-colored envelope.
Inside was a card with a photograph of wildflowers on the front. Nic was touched. She had told Allison once that wildflowers were more beautiful than your standard roses and daisies. She admired them for their beauty and strength, for the way they grew even though they hadn’t been planted.
Nic opened the card. Inside was a quote from Maya Angelou: “I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.”
Blinking back tears, Nic unfolded the coupon that had been tucked inside the card. It was a gift certificate for spa services.
“You can get a massage, a pedicure, a facial—anything you want,” Cassidy said. She took a bite of her gnocchi. “We figured you could use a little bit of relaxation.”
Nic looked from Cassidy to Allison. “Thanks, you guys.”
“After all you’ve been through, you deserve it.” Cassidy’s voice roughened with emotion.
Nic’s eyes suddenly felt wet. She had cried more in the past two weeks than she had in the previous ten years. She raised a cautioning hand. “Stop that! We’re here to celebrate. We’re all alive. And Cass, you saved my daughter. You have no idea what that means to me. Makayla is more important to me than my own life. But thanks to you—to all of us, really—we solved the crimes and caught the bad gal. And I hope she rots in prison.”
Even without being able to bring up Elizabeth’s two earlier murders in court, they still had more than enough to make sure she got sent to prison for the rest of her life. They had the video of her shooting Jenna Banks, as well as of her ordering the murder of Sara McCloud and her son. A half dozen people had witnessed her attack on Makayla.
Joey Decicco was the one death it would be difficult, if not impossible, to pin on her. Even though everyone was sure she was responsible, at the time of the shooting Elizabeth had been leading two-dozen women—Cassidy among them—in a boot camp class.
But Allison had told Nic that she intended to try to prosecute Elizabeth for Clark Smith’s death. The FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team had managed to find a single print of Elizabeth’s on the bed rail. And in the same sketchbook in which Clark had written out what was meant to look like a suicide note, they had found a pencil drawing of a nude woman. A woman, everyone who saw it agreed, who looked a lot like Elizabeth.
Taking a bite of her salmon, Allison said, “For someone like Elizabeth, I think prison might be worse than the death penalty. She’s not a very patient person. And she likes to control everything.”
“I hope she hates it,” Nic said, so forcefully that a woman at the next table looked over her shoulder. She lowered her voice a tad. “I hope she loathes it. I want her to think every day about how if she hadn’t made the cho
ices she did, she could be enjoying the sunshine and”—Nic lifted her fork—“hanger steak, and instead she’s got fluorescent lights and mystery meat.”
“Her and Foley,” Allison said. “They’ll both hate prison.”
“Do you think he’ll be convicted?” Cassidy asked.
“Nic and I will make sure of it,” Allison said. “Because if we don’t, he’ll just do it again. Someone like that, they’ll never stop.”
When they finished their meal, they made a show of looking at the dessert menu. But there was really only one choice that met the informal rule of the Triple Threat Club: the Bittersweet Deep Chocolate Torte with Cocoa Nib Chantilly.
“What’s chantilly?” Cassidy stage-whispered.
“I think it’s like whipped cream,” Allison whispered back. “And even if it’s not, I’ll bet whatever it is, is good.”
And when the waitress set it down, along with three forks, and Nic took a bite, she decided it was very good.
And so was life.
EYES OF JUSTICE
Leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written:
“It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.
—Romans 12:19
CHAPTER 1
When the authorities questioned Channel Four’s receptionist later about the phone call, Marcy King couldn’t recall a single distinguishing characteristic about the voice of the person who had made it. Age, accent, attitude—all she could remember was that it belonged to a man. A man insisting that he had to speak to Cassidy Shaw, the TV station’s crime reporter.
Cazdeshaw,” Cassidy said into her headpiece, fast enough that her name ran into a single blurred word. Her hands never stilled on her keyboard. She was finishing a piece for the evening news, a terrible story about a man who had killed his two children rather than see his ex-wife get full custody.
“Is this Cassidy Shaw?” A man’s voice, so soft it was nearly a whisper.
“Yes.” She lifted her fingers, straining to hear. That sixth sense she had, the sixth sense that had never steered her wrong, told Cassidy it would be worth her while to listen.
