Kara thought about coming up with a quick lie but knew she would be found out. “I’m leaving now.”
A soft ding announced the arrival of the elevator car. Thank God!
“What were you doing up here?” the nurse asked as another nurse, a tall male with a wrestler’s physique and concerned expression, appeared from a patient’s room.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
“I was just trying to visit my brother.”
The woman said, “But it looks like you’re a patient.”
Her bandages! Kara had forgotten the gauze covering her stitches. Crap!
“Your brother? And who is that?” The nurse glanced down the hallway to the empty chair at the door to Jonas’s room just as the elevator door opened and Kara, heart thumping, slipped inside. “Wait a sec—”
Too late. Kara slapped the button for the first floor, then punched the door closed as the nurse approached, already speaking into her phone.
Thankfully the doors closed and with a clunk the car started to descend. But she’d seen the nurse calling someone, maybe because of her, maybe not, but she didn’t want to deal with anyone. Not a doctor, not a hospital administrator and certainly not anyone from security, or the police for that matter. She thought about trying to stop the elevator on the second floor and using the stairs, but it was too late. Maybe she had enough time to—
The car settled on the first floor and as the doors 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 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.