Identity (Eyes Wide Open) (5 page)

“No, I’m good.” She started forward.

“You sure?” The nurse, Linda Roper by the brass badge on her red blouse, took in Christy’s jeans.

“I was just leaving.”

“Leaving?”

“I was just visiting.” Christy looked down the hall. “That way, right? I got a bit turned around.”

The nurse smiled. “Don’t we all? We don’t have visiting hours in here, dear. That’s what the lounge is for, Britney.”

Christy glanced down at the name tag on her blue smock. How was she going to explain this without looking like a fool? She was busted, pure and simple.

She smiled apologetically. “It’s not mine. I…” What was she supposed to say? She couldn’t think of anything but the truth. Kind of.

“I got lost and ended up in the basement. My shirt ripped and I found this shirt down in the laundry.”

The nurse studied her as if trying to decide if she would buy such an unlikely story.

“Crazy, I know, but I’m not stealing it. I swear, if you have anything else I could wear… I just didn’t know what else to do.”

“It’s okay, dear. Crazy things happen to the best of us.” She stepped forward, gently rested her hand on Christy’s elbow, and turned her back the way she’d come. “Come with me.”

Christy turned with the woman. “Can I just bring it back? I don’t live far, I swear I’ll bring it right back.”

“Of course. But it’s property of Saint Matthew’s psychiatric ward. I wish I could let you leave with it, but I can’t. We’ll find you something more appropriate.”

“You have something?”

“I think we can find something.”

Good. It was all going to work out. She’d left the storage room unlocked. What was the chance that some bum would get in there before she could retrieve her locket? Her mind spun through the possibilities as they headed down the hall.

The nurse led her into the administrator’s office and nodded at the receptionist, who sat filing her nails behind a desk.

“Can you pull up a file for me, Beverly?”

The receptionist glanced at Christy’s smock. “Sure.”

“Status of Britney Hunt?”

The receptionist set her file down, brought her long nails to the keyboard, and clacked away.

“That’s not me,” Christy said. “I’m just wearing the shirt.”

“We just need to check on her status, dear,” the nurse said. “Protocol. Patients tend to misplace themselves, you understand.”

She didn’t, not really. She was in a psychiatric ward. Images of the two patients she’d seen earlier now made more sense. They also quickened her need to put this all behind her.

“Britney Hunt is in 405.” She picked up her phone. “I’ll have the station attendant check her room.”

“Thanks, Bev.” To Christy: “What’s your name again?”

“Christy,” she said. “Snow.”

“Driver’s license?”

Christy blinked. She’d left her purse at home.

“Not on me.”

“No?” Linda nodded at the receptionist. “Anything on a Christy Snow?”

Clack, clack, clack.

“No Christy Snow.”

“Of course not,” Christy said. “Do you have anything else I can wear? I feel a bit stupid in this shirt now.” She felt her face flush.

“As soon as we check. I’m sure it’ll all be fine but we simply need to run some checks. If you had your license this would be quicker. Any other identification?”

Her cell phone. It had her name on it.

“My cell phone?”

“Might help.”

Christy brought her hand to her back pocket. No phone. Her heart spiked. She’d left it in the space under the foundation.

“I…” She hesitated, thinking she should just tell them the whole story. But she would also have to explain why and how she’d broken into the storage room.

“No?”

“Well… I, no. I must have lost it when I…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to betray Austin’s secret.

“That’s okay,” the nurse said. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you just explain this to the administrator.” She addressed the receptionist. “Is Kern available?”

The receptionist made a quick call, then hung up the phone.

“Go on in.”

Christy’s mind was reeling as she followed the nurse around the receptionist’s desk into an office with a golden placard that read ADMINISTRATOR. They way she saw it, she had no choice but to tell all now. And there was no reason why she had to bring Austin into it. They would probably lock the storage room up tight, but she saw no other way.

The administrator sat behind a large, shiny wooden desk, scanning the contents of a file through narrow reading glasses. His eyes glanced over the wire frames for a moment, then back down to his file.

“I’ll be right with you.”

Dressed in a dark blue suit with white shirt and red tie. His finger traced what he was reading as Christy sat in one of the two stuffed chairs facing his desk. Books lined the case behind him, most of them psychology journals and textbooks. A family portrait, which showed him with his wife and a young adolescent boy, sat on the desk.

Kern Lawson, Administrator. She looked up from the nameplate at the edge of the desk and met his light blue eyes as he set the file down and sat up.

“So. What seems to be the problem”—his eyes darted to her smock—“Britney?”

“Apparently she’s not Britney,” the nurse said. “We’re checking now.”

The administrator’s phone rang and he scooped it up. He listened for a moment before thanking his receptionist and hanging up.

“And apparently she’s right,” Lawson said with a kind smile. “Britney Hunt is in her room. So that would make you…?”

“Christy Snow,” she said.

“I have to get back to my rounds,” the nurse said.

“Thank you, Linda.” The administrator dismissed her with a nod and folded his hands under his chin.

“Christy Snow. You’re new here?”

“No, I’m not here at all!”

“You’re not?”

“I mean I’m not supposed to be here.”

“And where are you supposed to be?”

“At home, where I was this morning, on Blanard Drive. I came in this morning, trying to find my locket and I got stuck…”

The look in his eyes said he’d heard a thousand similar stories from patients looking for a way out. She had to tell him everything. He would check the basement, find that she was telling the truth, and that would be that.

“Look,” he said before she could speak. “This isn’t rocket science. If you are Christy Snow and we have no record of your admission, then you can be home within the hour. But we have to know, I’m sure you can appreciate that. Many of our patients have very deep imaginations.”

“There’s no record of a Christy Snow in admissions. They already checked. Please, this is a bit ridiculous.”

“Yes, of course. Still, you have no identification, I take it?”

“Not on me, no. But you’ll find my cell phone in the basement.”

“All right. Do you mind telling me how you came to be in the basement?”

She swallowed, nodding. So here it went.

“I lost my locket last night.”

“Your locket?” he made a note of it on a scratch pad. “Where?”

“In the storage room. Off the alley.”

Lawson peered at her. He set his pen down and sat back, crossing his legs.

“Go on.”

She told him everything, from the time she woke up until the time she entered the main corridor, sparing no detail.

“So, yes, I probably broke the law by breaking into the storage room, but I can assure you that I’m not a patient here. I just want my cell phone and locket, and if you want to report my crime to the police, that’s fine. Either way, I don’t belong here.”

He nodded, jotting down more notes. “Don’t worry, I have no interest in your breaking in. I wasn’t aware there was a trapdoor under those caskets. We’ll have to take care of it.”

She exhaled, letting her anxiousness fall away. “Someone could get hurt. I could probably sue the hospital.” She thought better of it. “Course, I won’t. I just want my locket back. That’s all.”

“I understand. I’ll have to check this out, naturally. You can see how this could look differently.”

“Not really, no. How?”

He shrugged. “For all I know, you’re a recent admission whose name is Jane Doe and you found a clever way to attempt an escape. Failing, you returned with a clever story—it’s not unheard of. This is, after all, the psychiatric ward. All kinds come to us and many are quite intelligent.”

She thought about it and saw his point.

“Then check it out. You’ll find the entrance I told you about, and inside, my phone. Christy Snow, home number 435-7897. I live at 456 Blanard Drive. Trust me, that’s me.”

“I’m sure it is. Procedure requires that I account for all patients to make sure no one is missing. When that comes up whole and we check out the basement, you’ll be free to go. Shouldn’t take too long. Fair enough?”

She thought about it and again saw the reason in his being thorough.

“I suppose. Can you please have them bring me my locket as well?”

“Sure. Can you describe it?”

“A silver heart.”

“Photograph inside?”

“Yes.”

“Of? Boyfriend? Parents? Maybe they could help us out here.”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Then what?” he asked. “It would help us identify the locket as yours.”

She hesitated. The standard picture had the small words
Sample Only
printed on the side of the image.

“It’s just the picture the locket came with. I don’t have any parents.”

Dr. Lawson looked at her with kind eyes for a few seconds.

“I see. Not knowing who your parents are can mess with your identity. An all too common phenomenon these days, but in reality, most people have no idea who they really are. Do you know who you are, Christy?”

The question threw her into a momentary tailspin. A part of her wanted to tell him everything about herself—maybe he could help her. But she put the compulsion aside and took a calming breath.

“I’m Christy Snow. I live at 456 Blanard Drive, and I need to get home to feed my cat.”

He smiled. “All right. I’ll get you home. You can wait in our lounge while we run a quick inventory and check out your story.”

AUSTIN HESITATED as he approached the alleyway. Glanced at his watch.
Thirty-two minutes.
It’d taken longer than he hoped to get here, but there was time.

He’d decided to check the storage room because it was, one, on his way to his doctor’s office in the hospital and, two, a logical context for her urgent call.

He’d eliminated his apartment quickly. Or hers for that matter. It was possible she’d hurt herself and couldn’t reach a landline or cry out for a passerby’s attention, but highly unlikely.

Given the fact that they’d been at the storage room last night, and its relative isolation, he would at least check. That her message had been cut off midsentence concerned him the most. Probably a dead battery, but what if someone had taken the phone from her?

If there was one person that he identified with, it was Christy. They were about as similar as fish and fowl, but they were both loners and they shared a similar history.

Truth was, he found her emotional approach to life more interesting than annoying. She was one person he honestly felt he could help. The fact that she was attractive didn’t hurt. The thought of harm coming to her unnerved him as much as the thought of the tumor in his head. Assuming he had a tumor.

He looked down the street.

Saint Matthew’s Hospital was in sight, just two blocks away. The sprawling complex rose above the madness of city life. The austerity of its modern steel-and-glass exterior was simple but impressive, an architectural citadel of reason that gazed upon the world with detached indifference. Inside, the finest minds in medical science relentlessly pursued empirical facts.

Like Austin, they valued data above all else—radically impersonal and objective answers, however harsh they turned out to be.