by Isla Bennet
And nearly every guy in the vicinity watched her walk away.
Lucy took a vicious bite of the caramel apple. Women like Eliza Bishop and girls like Minnie Hawthorne turned guys’ heads. Minnie remained nowhere in sight, and so did Owen. He seemed different now. Taller. Tougher. More mature—for a guy, anyway. Even his voice was starting to sound more like a man and less like the boy she’d known in middle school. He was probably thinking like a man now, too, and wanting the sort of things men want.
In her ogre getup, Lucy so wasn’t what any guy would want.
No surprise there. She didn’t fit in anywhere. More like the wrong puzzle piece that someone had jammed into place and just forgotten about. Her friends all had normal families, normal memories, normal lives. Not her. She had a twin who’d died, a stranger for a dad and a mom who couldn’t understand her even if she tried. How much more un-normal could she get?
Lucy dumped her treat, lifted the hem of her long, dark green velvet dress and started to search for Sarah. A girl dressed as a pink-haired retro cartoon rock star shouldn’t be that hard to find, right?
After scanning the orchard twice without venturing forth into the maze again, she had worked up a sweat in the heavy dress and finally approached Rowena Bruin, who had remained in the exact same spot as if time had frozen her there. This was probably a prime vantage point that would allow her to survey everyone’s activities and tsk-tsk over anything that appeared questionable.
“Ma’am, have you seen Sarah Carew? She’s dressed up like Jem from Jem and the Holograms. Big pink hair, crazy makeup …”
“Oh, I’ve seen that one, all right,” the woman remarked in no-holds-barred distaste. She paused as a group of teenage cowgirls in identical bedazzled hats and Western shirts hurried past and, unable to pinpoint impropriety or immorality right away, said to Lucy, “Although where she’s run off to now, I don’t know. Now dear, do you sing? Our choir—”
“Gotta go.” Yup, her mother would get an earful about Lucy’s rudeness the next time she ran into any of the Old Faithfuls, but her habit of sticking it to authority really shouldn’t come as a surprise. She was rude and wild, a schemer and a kid who talked too much for her own good. She hadn’t planned to turn out to be such a pain but after her sister died, she figured out there was no point in trying so hard to be well behaved. She’d never be as good as Anna, never become the daughter her mother deserved. Sometimes it was even comforting to be a troublemaker. Having people in this town dislike her was better than having them feel sorry for her because she’d lost her twin and part of her hearing and had grown up without a father.
At the maze’s entrance, she muttered a word guaranteed to get her grounded, and forged on. Night Sky didn’t have the best horror actors, so things like this didn’t frighten her. But tonight she’d felt as if some invisible prankster was on her heels … as if she were being watched.
“Saaaarahhh!” she called.
No response except a burst of laughter and a guy’s frustrated shout of “Wrong way, bro! I told you. Let’s go this way.”
As she moved deeper into the maze, the music—now in the hands of a DJ who was playing Johnny Cash—began to grow softer.
“Sarah!” she tried again.
“The young lady with the pink wig?” asked someone to her left, behind a row of stalks.
Lucy parted the stalks to see a woman in a standard department-store witch’s costume. “Know where she is?”
“Not in the maze. I heard she’d gotten hurt.” The woman smiled but the exaggerated plastic witch nose concealed most of her mouth. “Come, I’ll show you the way out.”
This old man, he played nine. He played knick-knack on my spine … The nursery rhyme lyrics came to Lucy as another kooky chill traveled over her. “No thanks.” She turned and rushed off the same way she’d come, not caring whether it was against the rules to exit through the entrance. “I know the way out.”
She found Sarah in the orchard barn surrounded by her mother and five-year-old sister, Megan, and a handful of onlookers.
“Your arm doesn’t look broken,” Megan the ladybug said around the slobbery lump of Tootsie Roll in her mouth. “Lemme see.”
“It’s broken, I know it is,” Sarah wailed as her mother led her out of the barn with her bruised arm tucked close to her chest. Her enormous wig slipped off and Lucy quickly scooped it up and plopped it crookedly on Sarah’s head.
In the parking lot, Lucy hung back as Sarah’s mother wrangled her daughters into their car. Then Sarah lowered the window and poked her head out. “You’re coming with us to the hospital, right?”
Oh, hell, no. Lucy detested spending time in the hospital. But Sarah was crying, her wig was all messed up, her arm was probably broken and her little sister had consumed too much sugar and was throwing a hissy fit in the car.
“Of course I’m coming with.” Lucy climbed into the backseat beside Megan, who promptly socked her on the arm for crushing a Ziploc bag full of animal crackers.
At Memorial, once a nurse had whisked Sarah and her mother off to an emergency-room cubicle, Lucy looked at Megan, who stuck out her tongue to reveal a chewed-up red Lifesaver. “That’s gross.”
“You look weird. I don’t like you green.”
And I don’t like ladybugs. “C’mon, let’s sit down,” she said instead, pointing to a row of chairs in the nearby waiting room. The second she dropped into a chair she realized Megan wasn’t with her.
“Oh. Freaking. Crap.” She shot out of the waiting room. Everywhere there were people, all of them faceless, indistinct. She kept the image of an annoying red-haired ladybug in her head as she took off down the hall calling, “Megan!”
Just when she considered reporting the mishap to security, she spotted a pair of antennae floating in the air at the end of the noisy hallway just in front of a wide pair of sliding doors. The ambulance entrance. Paramedics and nurses scattered about, hovering over bleeding patients. There was a trail of broken glass on the floor.
Car crash, probably, Lucy guessed, suppressing a little shudder. Maybe somebody who’d been at the orchard? It was creepy to be this close to the action.
The antennae moved, bobbed as Megan rushed off. Lucy followed, but lost her once she dared to blink. Then she found her again, standing on tiptoe with her nose against one of the trauma room windows.
“Gotcha,” Lucy said, catching the little girl’s shoulders. “Why’d you run away?”
Megan was distracted by whatever was going on in the trauma room. “Is he gonna die?”
Lucy followed her gaze to the man stretched across the gurney. Doctors and nurses surrounded the bed, one with a pair of paddles in her hands.
“Don’t look, Megan,” she whispered, covering the girl’s eyes but unable to stop herself from staring. It seemed to go on forever. Doctors shouting, the paddles making the man’s body jerk on the gurney. More shouting, more shocking … then nothing.
Had it been like this with her sister? Anna had been just a little kid, like Megan.
Lucy dropped to her knees and hugged the girl for all of two seconds before Megan shoved her and growled, “I said I don’t like you green. Can you take me to Sarah now?”
The door swung open and a doctor swore as he slammed out of the trauma room, causing Megan to flinch. Frozen like a gargoyle, Lucy stared at him. The smock he shoved into a biohazard waste container was blood-smeared; his face was sweaty and his shoulders tense with almost palpable anger. As if he felt her watching him, the doctor whipped around.
Dad. No—Peyton. Doctor Turner. “Uh, hi.”
“Lucy.” His eyes flashed and his frown deepened, and for a second he looked as scary as any Halloween mask. “Are you all right?”
“It’s my friend. She hurt her arm, that’s all.”
“Then go be with her. You, and especially you—” he pointed at Megan “—shouldn’t be here.” Then he turned and kept walking, shrugging off the consoling pat on the shoulder one of the other doctors tried to off
er.
“That man said a bad word,” Megan whispered conspiratorially, resting her head against Lucy, either plummeting from a sugar high or suddenly deciding not to care that she was green.
“I know.” Lucy took her hand and began to lead her away.
“Is he a bad man?”
“I don’t know.”
AT THE SINK in the on-call room Peyton twisted the faucet marked with the blue sticker, cupped his hands under the pounding stream of cold water and splashed it over his face. He repeated the motion twice, then shut off the water and braced his hands on the edge of the sink as rivulets of water traveled down his face.
He’d lost a patient tonight. It was a team effort, one of the other doctors had tried to tell him. If the man had survived, the glory would have been for the team of EMTs, nurses and doctors who’d pitched in to help save his life. But he’d died before they’d even had the chance to get him to the operating room, and Peyton had taken it as a personal blow. He had looked straight into the patient’s eyes before he’d slipped out of consciousness … had sworn that the man would recover.
Internal injuries. A steering wheel to the chest.
Recover? It seemed foolish as hell in retrospect to think that, let alone assure that patient of it. He’d been blinded by the memories of all the lives he’d saved in the past, too cocky for his own good, flying too high to be realistic.
Reality hurt like a bitch.
“Turner, you gonna rip that sink away from the wall, or what?”
Peyton uncurled his fingers from the porcelain, blinking away the water that lingered on his eyelashes. He dragged a hand across his face, avoiding the mirror. “Are you gonna get off your ass and work tonight, or what, Reed?”
Sawyer Reed, a new resident, sat up on the top bunk, plucked the sucker from his mouth and pointed it at Peyton. “Been here since eleven this morning. Off the clock, technically.”
“But technically you don’t have anywhere better to be?”
“Guess I don’t.”
Peyton grunted, not wanting to analyze someone else’s problems, not wanting to think at all. The construction paper Halloween decorations of ghosts and witches and goblins mocked him as he made his way to the row of lockers to change out of his scrubs and into street clothes.
The door swung open and Marlon Greer strode in. He had been a part of the “team”—the team that had just lost a patient. “Peyton, I need to ask you something. Get pissed if you want, but answer me.”
Peyton waited, swinging open the locker and pulling out a black button-down shirt.
“Do you want to be assigned to another department? Is the ER—”
“I can handle a damn ER, Greer.”
“Can you? Without going ballistic? I don’t think emergency surgery …”
Peyton yanked his shirt off over his head and stuffed it into a plastic bag. “Emergency surgery is why I was brought on board, Greer. Take it up with Chief if you don’t like it.” Working his fingers over the buttons of the fresh shirt fast, he added, “Let me ask you something. Do you think that patient died because I screwed up?”
“Of course not!” Marlon snapped. “Do you?”
Sawyer sprung off the bunk and moved to the candy bowl sitting in the middle of a crumb-littered table. He didn’t utter a word.
“I don’t,” Peyton admitted, reaching into the locker for his jeans. He could still smell the odor of antiseptic on his skin. Ordinarily it didn’t bother him, but tonight he wanted to scrub away the smell until his skin was raw. Tonight was about more than ego, more than disappointment, more than even a patient’s death.
Lucy had seen it unravel. His daughter had watched him let a life slip through his hands. She’d seen him fail.
Marlon sighed, scratched his salt-and-pepper mustache. “Get home, Turner. Come back in the morning and talk to Cartwright or Fish or somebody.”
“From the mental health department? To hell with that.”
“Learn to listen to somebody else, because obviously some part of you is trying to talk but the rest of you won’t hear it.” The doctor twisted his mouth in a sympathizing way. “If talking it out confidentially—”
“Confidentiality’s barely more than a pipe dream in this town, Greer.”
Sawyer snorted in agreement and reached for a fun-size box of Nerds.
“Get a hobby, then. Hell, take up smoking, like Reed.”
“Pack a day makes the demons go away,” the fresh-out-of-med-school doctor chimed in, his voice flat and void of emotion.
“Point is,” Marlon went on, “there’s no room in the ER for rage. Get it together—fast.”
Peyton’s brain filled with the memory of his daughter kneeling under the trauma room window covered in green goop and wearing that ridiculous dress. In her eyes were surprise … and the same shade of pity that he’d seen on Valerie’s face when they’d visited the cemetery.
As he quickly finished dressing, his colleagues left the on-call room.
How long had Lucy been at Memorial tonight? Who was the little girl he’d seen with her? And were they still inside the building somewhere?
He found her in an emergency-room cubicle, sitting on a gurney with another girl who looked about the same age and was outfitted in a rock star costume and an arm sling. The ladybug he’d seen earlier now wore a huge pink wig and was perched on a chair beside the bed fiddling with a remote control.
From what he could tell, they were talking about llamas and goats.
A redheaded woman wearing a tired expression appeared around the corner. “What’s going on?” She peered into the cubicle then stared warily at Peyton.
He pointed at Lucy, who looked unblinkingly at him. “I’m her father. I want to see her.”
The bewigged kid in the chair frowned. “He’s the man who said a bad word!”
“That’s your dad?” the girl next to Lucy hissed loudly, her voice high and laced with accusation. “You found your dad? You didn’t say—Ooowww!”
In her haste to scramble off the gurney, Lucy had nudged the other girl’s injured arm accidentally. Or had it been intentional?
The redhead moved in front of Lucy, shielding her. “Valerie didn’t say—”
Lucy produced a cell phone from a well-hidden pocket on her dress. “Call her. Tell her my father’s driving me home.”
THE DRIVE TO Battle Creek was so eerily quiet that more than once Peyton had looked to his right expecting to find Lucy asleep against the seat. But each time she flicked a furrowed-browed glance at him and continued staring out the window as headlights and taillights flashed through the night.
At the house she led the way to the porch and directed him to the bench that was now cluttered with several hardcover books. Pushing them to one side, he sat down and then waited for her to park herself on the porch railing a couple of feet away.
He glanced around at his surroundings, noticing that a harvest wreath complete with pinecones hung on the front door.
“Are you trying to prove something?”
Peyton leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. “Prove what?”
Lucy shrugged. “That you’re doing right by being a father to a kid you didn’t ask for. Am I something to add to your good deed list?”
“The things I did before I left weren’t good deeds.”
Avid with curiosity, she urged, “Like what? Would somebody tell me already? Coop said people won’t forget what you did. Pastor Bruin’s wife was talking about you. I know you used to get into fights and stuff, and then you got my mom pregnant. But there’s more, right?”
At his unbending look, she relented, and he continued, “I’m not trying to cancel out all the bad things by being in your life now, Lucy.” Maybe I want to be your dad, except I don’t think I know how, he almost said, but left the unspoken thought tucked in the reserves of his mind. “Valerie and I talked about visitation.”
“How come?” The girl seemed genuinely confused. “I snooped around in your stuff at Gramps’
s place. I ditched school. I lied—a lot.”
“Not news to me.”
“But I’m … bad. Why would you want to hang out with me?”
Peyton figured he was pushing his luck, but he stood and crossed the porch to her. She didn’t cringe or flip him the bird, which he hoped was a good sign. Then he curled his hand into a fist and slowly brought it forward until it was just his fist hanging in the air between them. “Badness loves company.”
Lucy’s blue-gray eyes lit with laughter, though her mouth tipped up only a hair at one corner. She balled up her green fist and bumped his. “Okay.”
“Got a question for you.” He indicated her costume. “What, exactly, are you supposed to be?”
“Princess Fiona from the movie Shrek.” Lucy politely left off the “Duh!” at the end of the sentence, apparently deciding to give him a break. “You don’t watch movies, do you?”
“Not often.”
Abruptly she asked, “Are you still mad about that guy dying at the hospital?”
He couldn’t have hidden his anger if he’d tried. “Losing a patient screws with your head … It’s tough.”
“Are you mad that I saw?”
“Not mad,” he said, trying to fit what he felt into words. “Regretful. Ashamed. Hell, Lucy, I just wish you hadn’t seen that.”
“Death happens. I know that already.”
“Anna.” The word was out of his mouth before he even realized it. And once he did, he also realized that whatever wall Lucy had been hiding behind that had been momentarily lowered was back up again—stronger than before.
The girl hopped off the rail and rushed to the bench to gather her books. “Mom hates when I leave books outside. She gets all freaked out about the cold air ruining the pages.” With the short stack braced in the crook of one elbow, she rapped hard on the door with her free hand and jabbed the doorbell twice for good measure.
“Where’re your keys?” Peyton asked.
“I forgot to bring them when I went to the Carews’ last night.” Three more jabs.
