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The car settled on the first floor and as the door opened onto a hallway, Kara tore off the gauze on her head and pulled her hair down so that it covered the injured side of her forehead. She stepped out of the car, one eye on the other elevator door and the staircase beyond, just in case either of the two nurses had decided to follow her.
But the reception area was mayhem: loud conversation, shouts and footsteps and some kind of chanting. About Jonas. Oh. God. She caught a glimpse of the reception area, where a crowd had gathered, a crowd composed mainly of women—mostly under forty, some with babies, others with handmade signs, all about freeing Jonas.
Wesley Tate’s distraction.
Security guards and cops were trying to keep the throng at bay while a tall man in a dark suit—probably an administrator of some kind—was speaking with a red-jacketed female reporter, hair wet with melting snow, cameraman at her side. As the cops were trying to herd people out a side door, she took advantage and slipped between a tall woman in heeled boots, wool coat and an updo, and a shorter, rounder woman wearing a ponytail, jeans and sneakers.
Heart drumming, Kara avoided eye contact with the guard as he shepherded their group through the open door to the exterior.
She was almost free.
As she stepped outside, a blast of bitter air slapped her cheeks, but she kept walking along a concrete path where snow had been trampled. She circumvented the crowd congregated outside the wide front doors where women carrying picket signs had gathered. Denied access to the interior, they were chanting.
About Jonas.
It was nuts. A circus sideshow.
Television news crews had set up in the perimeter of the hospital, several white vans emblazoned with logos from stations in Washington and Oregon were parked, and she spied a couple of freelancers who worked for rival papers trying to gain entrance and getting nowhere with the security guard, who was obviously on crowd-control duty as the front entrance was roped off.
Kara scanned the crowd.
So many faces.
A few men scattered in the throng of women, many clustered in knots of two or three.
What the hell were they all doing here?
And then she saw her: a woman standing alone near a bank of tall windows. Her streaked blond hair was visible only at her nape as it was twisted upward into a red stocking cap decorated with white snowflakes. One of her hands was in the pocket of a black ankle-length coat, while a red scarf was wrapped loosely around her neck and tinted glasses shaded her eyes. Nonetheless, Kara recognized the arch of her cheekbones and the sharp slant of her jaw. Even her chin had that hint of a dimple that Kara remembered pressing her tiny finger into a lifetime before. But there was something else, something a bit off, probably the fact that her face was covered in a thick coat of makeup, visible even from a distance.
“Marlie,” Kara whispered, her stomach dropping, her breath catching. Could it really be? After all this time?
Kara stopped dead in her tracks.
A female voice shouted “Hey!” just before a woman behind her plowed into her back and together they were skidding on the slick concrete, nearly falling into a redhead pushing a stroller.
“What the—?” the young mother demanded, whirling, just as Kara got her feet under her and the baby started crying.
“Sorry,” Kara said quickly, and scrambled around the mother.
“Watch where you’re going!” The redhead leaned over the stroller. “It’s going to be all right,” she cooed, picking up her child.
Kara didn’t pay any attention, her gaze scanning the crowd, searching for a red stocking cap, but there were dozens of them in the mass of people, and the woman she’d seen had vanished.
The woman you thought you saw.
Ignoring the doubts in her mind, she eased around several clusters of people, keeping her head averted from any of the cameras or cops until she reached the spot where the woman had stood. It was now occupied by two teenage girls in pink sweatshirts and earmuffs who were posing in front of the hospital, smiling upward as they held their phones aloft and took a series of selfies.
Teenagers? Here?
They couldn’t even have been alive when Jonas had been thrust into infamy. But no Marlie. No blonde in a red and white stocking cap hurrying away.
“Crap.” Wending her way through one shouting, agitated cluster to another, she searched frantically for the woman who looked so much like her missing sister.
You’re imagining things.
All because you got a weird text and phone call and Jonas is out of prison. It’s your mind playing tricks on you, Kara, the weird power of suggestion. Nothing more.
But she wasn’t convinced and did a slow three-sixty, searching faces, her eyes narrowing.