“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.
