After She's Gone

by Lisa Jackson

  In the meantime, she made calls and did research, studied the skyline of the west side of the river, where skyscrapers rose against a backdrop of forested hills. After an hour, her irritation growing with each passing minute, she finally gave up. One more time a promising source had turned out to be a dud and she was stood up, once again.

  She walked back to her car and flopped inside. As she twisted on the ignition, she decided that she would do whatever was necessary to nail this story and if she had to be . . . uh, creative? . . . so be it. She wasn’t above bending the truth a little, or even staging a little drama.

  Within reason.

  There were lines she wouldn’t cross, of course. She had her ethics. But she also had a story to tell, a story that promised her a new echelon of fame.

  And she deserved it, by God.

  Life hadn’t been fair to her, and this time she wasn’t going to let the brass ring slip through her fingers. Not when it was sooo close.

  Licking her lips, she plotted her next move.

  How far would she go to get what she wanted?

  Again, her lips twitched.

  Pretty damned far.

  “But you’re not well, not strong enough to leave,” Dr. Sherling said to Cassie after breakfast. She was a kind woman, who never wore makeup, her white hair a cloud, her cheeks naturally rosy, her skin unlined though she had to be in her seventies. Slim and fit, Virginia Sherling had been a competitive skier in her day, according to the nurses’ gossip. Beneath her bright, toothy smile and soft-spoken, easygoing demeanor lay a will of iron. Cassie knew. She’d tested the psychiatrist several times during her stay here and had witnessed the color rise in the older woman’s face and her slight English accent become more pronounced. Now, however, upon walking into Cassie’s room and finding her packing, Dr. Sherling was calm. At least outwardly as she stood next to the rocker in the room.

  “I’ll be okay,” Cassie assured her.

  “Have you talked to your family? Your mother?”

  Cassie threw her a glance. “Have you?” she asked, double-checking that her phone and charger were tucked inside with her clothes and makeup bag. Everything was where it should be. Except for the bottles of meds that were tucked into a side pocket. No need for those. She grabbed the three bottles, read the labels, then threw them all into a nearby trash can.

  The doctor’s lips tightened. “You can’t just stop those,” she said. “You need to taper off. Seriously, Cassie, I strongly advise you wean yourself carefully.” She walked to the trash, scooped up all three bottles, and dropped them into Cassie’s open bag. “These are strong drugs.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Please. Be responsible.” The doctor’s eyes behind her glasses were serious and steady. “You don’t want to come back here on a stretcher.”

  Cassie’s jaw tightened.

  “Have you talked to your mother?” she asked again.

  The answer was “no,” of course, and Cassie suspected Dr. Sherling knew it and was just making a point.

  When the older woman spoke, her voice was softer, more conspiratorial, as if they shared something personal. “Jenna’s concerned.”

  For a second Cassie flashed on her mother. Petite. Black hair. Wide green eyes. A once-upon-a-time Hollywood beauty, Jenna Hughes had been a household name years before either of her daughters had tried to follow in her famous footsteps, before a monster, a deranged serial killer, had tried to destroy them all. Cassie shuddered, knew that the terror from all those years before had chased after her, unrelenting. Those memories, the horror, fear, and gore, were the dark well from where her blood-chilling nightmares sprang. For years she’d kept the terror at bay. Until the near-murder on the set and Allie’s disappearance. Now they’d come back again, with a vengeance.

  “You entered the hospital voluntarily,” the doctor reminded her softly, as if she could read Cassie’s thoughts. That much was true, though she’d felt pressured into the decision. “You know you have unresolved issues.” A slight rise of the doctor’s white eyebrows punctuated her thought. “Night terrors. Hallucinations. Blackouts.”

  “They’re better.” Cassie zipped her bag. Thought about the nurse she’d seen in her room. Not a hallucination; she had the earring to prove it. Still, she’d decided not to mention the visitor; nor would she rat out Rinko. There was no reason to make more trouble.

  “Are they?” the doctor asked, her eyes narrowing behind her rimless glasses.

  “Mmm.” A bit of a lie. Well, maybe more than a bit, but she nodded, pushing aside her doubts. “I was freaked out after the near-murder on the set. You know that. It’s why I came here. Voluntarily. To sort things out and get my head right.” She stared the doctor squarely in the eyes. “I’m still convinced someone was gunning for Allie.”

  “It was an accident,” Dr. Sherling reminded her, a theory Cassie didn’t buy. There was an ongoing investigation after the “incident,” of course; the actor who’d pulled the trigger more shocked than anyone, the prop gun having been tampered with. So how was that an accident? This was the kind of thing that was never supposed to happen. Never. There were fail-safes in place.

  And yet, Lucinda Rinaldi, who had miraculously survived after nearly two weeks in a coma, was recovering. She was now out of the hospital and, according to a mutual acquaintance, had graduated into a rehabilitation center on the other side of the river, where she was putting her life back together, all the while contemplating a lawsuit against the production company and anyone attached to Dead Heat.

  An accident?

  Cassie didn’t think so, but then she’d always been one to buy into conspiracy theories. She would keep her thought to herself for now. What she needed to do was get out of the hospital. She’d admitted herself voluntarily, she was going out the same way.

  “Thanks,” she said to the doctor, swinging the strap of her bag over her shoulder.

  “Seriously, Cassie, I think you should reconsider. Hallucinations? Blackouts? These are very serious issues.”

  “Duly noted.” And then she walked out of the room. She wasn’t coming back. Period.

  “Remember our appointment next week,” the doctor called after her.

  Right. Cassie hurried past the information and admittance desks. Through an atrium with a soaring glass ceiling, she made her way outside where she felt the cooling mist against her face. She then hastened down wide marble stairs to the waiting cab, where the cabbie was smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. At the sight of her, he abandoned both activities and climbed out of the car to toss her bag into the trunk of a dented cab that was definitely in need of a wash.

  She caught sight of Steven Rinko on the front lawn. “Just a sec.” Rinko was a few steps away from a group of young men playing ring-toss.

  “Meter’s runnin’,” the cabbie muttered.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Cassie cut across the dewy grass to the spot where Steven stood in jeans and a white T-shirt and used a bathrobe as a coat. “You’re leaving,” he said sadly, his gaze traveling to the idling cab.

  “That’s right.”

  “Will you be back?”

  Never. “I’m not sure. And so I need to know where you got the earring,” she said.

  “The nurse.”

  “Last night? The nurse you saw?” She caught one of the other teenage boys holding a plastic ring staring at her. He was tall and reed-thin, an African-American with haunted eyes and a sorrowful expression. Jerome.

  “Yeah.” Rinko was nodding.

  “She was in blue scrubs?” Cassie said, testing him.

  He shook his head. “White.”

  Her knees nearly buckled. Rinko had seen the same vision she had? Then it definitely wasn’t all in her mind! “Do you know her? Her name? Does she work here?”

  “Hey, Butt-Wipe, you playin’ or what?” a third player, with skin that matched his bad attitude, yelled at Rinko. He was scrawny, with a sunken chest and hate-filled eyes, his baseball cap turned
backward. “You’re up, Romeo.”

  “Shut up, Fart Face,” Rinko said to the kid, then to Cassie, “Look, I gotta go.”

  “Do you know her?” Cassie wanted to shake the answer from him.

  “Nurse Santa Fe?” He shook his head and shrugged. “No one does.”

  “Her name is Santa Fe? Like Santa Claus? Or saint in Spanish? She works here?”

  “1972.”

  “Hey, Stinko Rinko! You forfeit,” his opponent called just as the cab driver honked his horn impatiently, and Rinko stormed back to argue about the game.

  “I do not forfeit, you idiot!”

  “Steven! The nurse worked here in 1972? How do you know that?” Rinko wasn’t born in ’72. Nor, for that matter, was she. But the nurse’s outfit could have been from that era.

  Another impatient beep of the cab’s horn. “Lady, I don’t have all day,” the driver called.

  She returned to the cab and gave him the address before settling into the well-worn seat. As she pulled the door shut, she hazarded one last glance over her shoulder to spy Mercy Hospital, a blend of old brick and new glass, perched on its hill. Good riddance, she thought, her gaze drifting up to the fourth floor and the older part of the building where she’d spent the last few weeks. She thought she spied her room, saw a shadow within, and for just a second imagined she spied the taciturn nurse from another generation in the window. Before she could really focus, the cab turned and headed downhill, passing trees that blocked her view of the brick edifice.

  She didn’t have much of a plan, just knew that she was getting better in the hospital and that the cops’ search for Allie hadn’t turned up anything so far. Cassie chewed on her lower lip and tapped her fingers against the window of the cab. Where was her sister? What had happened? How had she disappeared? And how would Nurse Santa Fe, or whoever she was, know that she was alive? It seemed unlikely and yet Rinko had produced the earring. God, it was all so bizarre and surreal.

  Her mother was frantic with fear for her younger daughter. Robert, too, was worried about Allie. Cassie knew because she’d talked to both of her parents at length. And she knew how they felt. She, too, was obsessed with finding her sister.

  A headache formed behind her eyes as she considered her splintered family. Her mother and stepfather, a sheriff, no less, resided in Oregon, while her much-married father lived in LA with his current wife, Felicia, twenty years his junior and, of course, a gorgeous would-be actress. As they all had been.

  Not that it mattered.

  Closing her eyes, Cassie tried to place her thoughts in some kind of order. For months she’d been a zombie. A patient in a hospital, who’d been told what to do, when to do it, and where to be. Now, she was on her own. No more hiding away and licking wounds and feeling bad. No more coddling herself. It was time for action and answers.

  First order—she needed a place to crash. She didn’t know for how long. A car would help. Also, she had to get her cell phone up and running. Right now the battery life was nil.

  You need some kind of plan, she told herself as the cab driver negotiated the narrow street that wound down this section of the West Hills. Fir, maple, and oak trees canopied over the pavement where a walking path was cut along the roadway. Intrepid joggers and bikers vied for space along the steep asphalt trail. Every once in a while, through gaps in the forest, she caught peekaboo views of Portland sprawled along the banks of the Willamette.

  She was no longer an actress. She’d given up that dream once her younger sister had come onto the scene and literally upstaged her. Cassie didn’t need harsh reviews to remind her of the fact, and Allie had been a natural while she’d struggled. The camera loved Allie and she shined bright, whatever residual shyness from her youth disappearing as she lost herself in a role. The irony of it all was that it had been Cassie who had lured her younger sister to the bright lights of Hollywood. Cassie who’d suggested she move out of Falls Crossing, Oregon, as soon as Allie graduated from high school.

  So all of this was, in some way, her fault.

  Get over it. Wallowing in guilt and self-pity won’t help anything, now, will it?

  The cab reached the bottom of the hill and found the freeway, a wide swath of concrete that ran the length of the westernmost states and beyond. Here in Portland I-5 was often a snarl, the traffic not a whole lot better than the loaded freeways of LA, but today they lucked out and the cab was able to sail across the wide span of the Marquam Bridge to the east side of the river.

  Fifteen minutes later she was filling out paperwork for a rental car, a compact that turned out to be a white Nissan. Tonight, she’d stay in a hotel. Tomorrow, worry about something more permanent.

  And then she was going to find out what the hell had happened to her sister.

  CHAPTER 3

  The hotel room was basic—two beds with matching quilts, a couple of pictures, a TV, desk, and chair with an ottoman. The bathroom was fitted with a tub/shower and toilet and sink, all squeezed into an impossibly small space. The “suite” would do. For now. Cassie eyed the phone on the bedside table, thought about calling her mother, then shoved aside the jab of guilt that cut through her heart. She’d wait to tell Jenna where she’d landed, otherwise she’d be sucked into that maternal vortex that didn’t seem to let go. It wasn’t that Jenna played the guilt card, or at least not very often, it was that Cassie couldn’t really deal with her mother and stepfather and their ranch sprawling along the banks of the Columbia River. It was all too bucolic or rustic or Podunk for her, and the place brought back a never-ending tidal wave of memories she’d rather keep buried—the bloody, brutal images that were better off forgotten, or at the very least tamped down, until they reared up in horrific, ugly Technicolor in her nightmares.

  “Head case,” she muttered, grabbing up her cell phone. It was barely alive after being charged for less than fifteen minutes, but it was all the time she could afford. Ever since leaving the hospital she felt that time was slipping through her fingers. She’d been cooped up for what seemed like forever but had only actually been a few weeks, and now she needed to get moving.

  Once behind the Nissan’s steering wheel, she Googled the name of the rehabilitation center were Lucinda Rinaldi was recovering. Allie’s body double had pulled through several surgeries, which included removing part of her spleen, and some liver damage, along with spinal injuries, all of which were on the mend, thank God.

  She negotiated the grid of streets that were East Portland and found Meadow Brook Rehabilitation Center, where there seemed to be no meadow, nor brook, anywhere nearby. The long, low, tan building just off Fifty-Second had been constructed in the fifties or sixties from the looks of it, a bank of glass windows facing the street, the reception area under a jutting peak in the otherwise unbroken roofline. An asphalt parking lot in need of resurfacing flanked one side of the sidewalk, a rose garden gone to seed on the other.

  Cassie was met by a hefty receptionist with a gravelly voice and easy smile who checked a computer screen and asked, “You’re a relative?”

  “Friend.”

  “Don’t see your name on the visitor list.”

  “I’ve been out of town.”

  “She’s in physical therapy now.”

  “I’ll wait,” Cassie said brightly. Before the woman could argue her phone rang, her concentration broken as whoever was on the other end of the connection commanded all of her attention.

  “Now, hold on,” she said into the phone. “Who is this? What kind of emergency?” Her brow knitted and she started typing on her keyboard, so Cassie pretended to be taking a seat on one of the worn chairs near the window. As soon as the receptionist’s back was turned, she hurried down a short hallway and followed the signs to physical therapy. If the receptionist figured out that she’d been thwarted and chased Cassie down, or called security, Cassie would deal with it then.

  For now, she stepped quickly through the doorway into a large room that smelled of sweat, plastic, and antiseptic.

 
; Lucinda, dressed in sweats, was working at walking between two parallel bars, a therapist at her side. Her hair was scraped back with a headband, unkempt curls showing dark roots. She was concentrating hard as she inched her way down the length of the apparatus. Her face was flushed, sweat making her skin sheen under the fluorescent lighting.

  As if sensing someone’s presence, Lucinda looked into the mirrors lining one wall and caught sight of Cassie’s reflection. She stumbled, but the aide who was with her was quick to grab her as Lucinda caught her balance again, her lips flattened with unrepressed fury.

  “Get her out of here,” she gritted.

  “Lucinda, wait.” Cassie stepped farther into the room as Lucinda made it to the far end of the bars and with the aide’s help nearly fell into a waiting wheelchair.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Really?” Cassie was flummoxed and tried to skirt the thin woman in nurse’s scrubs who was attempting to block her access.

  “I think you should leave,” the woman said firmly. Her name tag read Louise-Marie and she was tough-looking, her expression brooking no argument.

  Ignoring her, Cassie said to Lucinda, “I just wanted to see how you were doing, that you were okay.”

  Lucinda shot her an oh-sure glare. “I was nearly killed, all because your stupid sister didn’t show up on the set again, and they thought they could get away with shooting the film without her, meaning using me. Shooting around her,” she stressed, her lips curling as if she’d just tasted something foul. “And I get shot in the process. Ironic, don’t you think?” She caught a glimpse of herself and frowned. “God, where’s Laura Merrick when you need her?” she muttered, mentioning the makeup person who’d been on the set of Dead Heat. Another glance in the mirror and she blinked quickly as if fighting a sudden spate of tears. “How could anyone do this?”

  “It was an accident.”

  Again, the dark glare. “I was almost murdered, but I think they meant to shoot Allie. Or maybe even you. Not me, for God’s sake!” Reading the protest forming on Cassie’s lips, Lucinda held up a hand. “I’m not talking about that Neanderthal Sig,” she said, meaning Sig Masters, the actor who had fired the prop gun on the set. “He was just a pawn. Like me. In the wrong place at the wrong damned time.” She yanked the headband from her hair and mopped her forehead. “Y’know he actually sent me flowers. They came with some kind of sympathy note that said ‘Sorry.’ Can you believe that?” She rolled her eyes. “I mean who does that? Almost kills someone and sends them roses and carnations and shit?”