Page 85 of Dead Girl Running

The laughter came from the nurses’ station at one end of the corridor. A dozen people in scrubs: the staff in this wing of a medical center. A man in dark blue scrubs knelt on one knee before a woman in pink patterned scrubs, and as Cecilia watched, the woman wiped a tear off her cheek, smiled and nodded.

More laughter, swiftly muffled.

A tired-looking man in a distinguished business suit walked toward the group, frowning.

Cecilia turned the other way, taking one careful step after another toward the exit sign. She passed two patients, one making the rounds on her walker, one seated in a wheelchair. They looked curiously at her, her IV stand and the dangling tubes, but made no comment.

She pushed on the exit door, stepped onto the landing.

A flight of stairs went up and down.

She looked at the number on the wall. She was on the second floor.

She could do this.

She pushed the IV pole into the corner, grasped the handrail and, taking her time, descended to street level. The exit door warned, “Security alarm will sound if door is opened.”

She stopped, took several long breaths, gave the door a push and sprinted outside—onto a sidewalk beside a busy city street. Thank God. Thank God. She could quickly vanish. Straightening her shoulders, she joined the stream of people and disappeared into the city.

She would never be Cecilia again.

* * *

In her cottage kitchen, Kellen assembled her salad on her plate and sat down at the eating bar. She picked up her fork, put it down and rubbed the scar on her forehead.

Ceecee. Ceecee. Where are you? Come back to me…

Max Di Luca reminded her of the man in the corridor. The suit. The size. He didn’t look tired anymore. And she wasn’t sure, anyway. She’d been intent on escape. She’d only glanced.

But if that was the truth, she had known him before.

In Philadelphia.

31

That day, Kellen didn’t return to the resort. If they had needed her, she would have gone, of course. But with a skeleton crew and few guests, she was able to handle the couple of crises from her phone. She wasn’t avoiding Max; she was taking some much needed downtime.

Besides, a new memory was nudging itself up from the depths of her brain…

A park, trees bare of leaves, openmouthed pedestrians running. A man with a thin, familiar face who spoke with an Italian accent. He held a Beretta Pico to her forehead…

In the background, a man raced toward them and…

And nothing. Whatever happened then…was gone.

But that explained her scar, and why she woke up in the hospital that was maybe a mental ward and maybe not, and why when she woke, she was afraid someone was trying to hurt her. Maybe she wasn’t crazy. Maybe if she knew all the facts, she would at least understand what had happened.

Maybe Max could tell her.

She should ask him.

Instead, Kellen pulled up her laptop and went to work, approving menus, viewing the employee roster with an eye to who might be the biggest baddest importer/murderer in the world, studying the resort’s blueprints and wondering where Priscilla could have stashed the tomb art. The architect had designed the resort for visual impact, not working efficiency. Storage closets hid in absurdly inconvenient locations, narrow maids’ stairways twisted and turned behind the walls, old-fashioned dumbwaiters that had once lifted and lowered linens and plates from level to level… Even if Priscilla Carter had hidden the tomb art somewhere in the resort, one of the housekeepers could have found that gross figure of a man with his massive penis, shrieked in horror and tossed it all in the garbage.

Kellen sighed.

The phone rang.

It was Annie. Her warm voice asked, “How are things going?”