Hidden Falls (61 page)

One eye twitched when he met her gaze. “Dark blue is the uniform of our well-trained patient support staff.”

Dani didn’t need this guy. If she had to, she would ask every employee on duty in the hospital. Someone would have noticed a patient support employee who wore green tennis shoes.

It was a daring touch, those green shoes.
Catch me if you can,
they said.

Well, she would.

In a hospital, green shoes would pass for a statement of quirky personality. In the woods outside Dani’s lake cabin, they would pass for camouflage—especially in the dark.

She stood up. “I commend you. You’ve done your job well and have been only the most minimal help to me. Perhaps you would like me to write that on a form.”

Dani gave the door an extra tug on her way out to make sure it slammed.

When Green Shoes nearly knocked Nicole over and stole the elevator, Dani had raced up the stairwell. But she was too late. Both elevators were idle and the hall around them empty. Ignoring signs about where she was and was not permitted to enter, Dani strode through the corridors glancing into rooms and under desks. She loitered in the cafeteria watching people come and go and made another round of the hallways. Eventually she made inquiries that sent her to the fruitless session in the hospital’s administrative offices.

Dani hadn’t gotten a good look at Green Shoes’s face, but she had an idea what it looked like. She paused in the hall to take out her phone and scroll through a set of photos she had transferred to it two days ago. They came originally from Ethan’s camera, but Dani had cropped and enhanced small pieces of the images. Clothing, height, body shape, face—she had tried to capture it all. But she hadn’t thought about the feet. Now nothing on her phone looked like it would hint at footwear.

But she had the side of a face, with one eye peering out from leaves hanging over the forehead. Olive skin. Dark hair. High cheek bones. Brown eyes.

It wasn’t a photo Dani could show anyone and ask, “Do you know him?”

She practiced putting a smile on her face and sauntered away from the administrative offices and into a patient area.

“I’m looking for a guy who works in patient support services.” Dani smiled at the nurses at their station. “Dark hair, wears green shoes?”

The nurses shrugged. Dani thanked them anyway and moved on down the hall to a nurse standing at a computer and filling little paper cups with various assortments of medications.

“Maybe you can help me?” Dani gave her description again, but the meds nurse just shook her head.

Dani made another stop at the end of the hall that yielded nothing. She turned around and headed back toward the elevators. A young woman in maroon scrubs emerged from a patient room and tossed a wad of sheets into a hamper stretched open on a cart.

“You looking for Bobby?” the woman said.

Dani smiled. She’d been asking the nurses. How many people on the housekeeping staff had she walked past?

Bobby.

“Yes,” Dani said. “Have you seen him?”

“They keep him pretty busy on Two. He doesn’t get up here to Three much.”

“Oh. Okay, thanks. I’ll look for him there.”

“If he’s not on Two, try the basement. He transports patients down for X-rays and scans.”

“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” Dani wondered if this young housekeeper was aware of hospital policies safeguarding employees from wild, aggravated strangers.

Dani strode to the elevators and punched the button. When she emerged on the floor below, she looked both directions. She had abandoned Nicole six hours ago. Pretty soon she was going to feel guilty about that.

When she ducked her head into the second floor waiting room and saw no one she knew, Dani decided to check on how Lauren was doing. Maybe Cooper was there holding her hand or something.

He wasn’t. Instead, Dani found Nicole at Lauren’s bedside. Lauren was sitting up in bed, picking at a turkey sandwich on wheat, red grapes, and cottage cheese. She looked good. Maybe Cooper had satisfied himself that Lauren was fine and dared to leave the premises.

“Sorry about this morning,” Dani mumbled.

“As you can see, I survived.”

Nicole looked none the worse for wear to Dani. “I thought Cooper might be here.”

Lauren shrugged. “Haven’t seen him all morning.”

Lauren didn’t fool Dani with her nonchalance. She was disappointed Cooper wasn’t there. As soon as Dani found Bobby Green Shoes, she would track down Cooper and tell him to get himself back to the hospital. She was going to need him to arrest Bobby, anyway.

“How’s the head?” Dani asked.

“Hurts. But they say I’m better.”

“They’re probably right.” Dani looked at the clock, wondering what time Bobby had come on duty and when his shift would end. If she didn’t find him in the hospital, he could be anywhere.

There was no place to sit, which suited Dani. She was glad to know Lauren was in good shape, all things considered, but she didn’t want to feel obliged to sit and chitchat.

She heard the wheels of a gurney in the hall and reflexively looked toward the rapid rhythmic rattle of emptiness.

It
was
empty.

And it was being pushed by a man wearing green tennis shoes.

Dani bolted into the hall. “Hey!”

Bobby glanced over his shoulder, showing half his face. He couldn’t know that he’d given Dani the exact pose she needed to be sure the face matched the image on her phone.

Dani ran with her phone in her hand, taking one photo after another.
Click. Click.
Bobby put the gurney between himself and Dani and gave it a shove. She leaped out of the way.
Click. Click. Click.
Dani ran hard. Staff and visitors in the corridor pressed up against the walls. Bobby was headed for the stairwell, and Dani intended not to let him reach it. She dove for his ankles, and he tumbled. Dani scrambled to sit astride his chest.

The elevator doors opened, and Cooper stepped out.

7:17 p.m.

Ethan opened a deep lower kitchen drawer and found the dish towels neatly folded, just as he’d expected. They weren’t the same dish towels as ten years ago, of course, but floral patterns in blues and greens still dominated the collection. Beside him, his mother rinsed the platter she’d served baked chicken on.

“You don’t use the dishwasher?” he asked. She used to.

She turned the platter over and rinsed the other side. “It’s only the two of us, and I cook fairly simply these days. It seems easier to wash up the old-fashioned way.”

Ethan took the platter, dried it, and put it away. So far he hadn’t yet opened a cupboard and not found essentially the same contents they’d contained since the Jordan family first moved into the house when he was a little boy.

His father, of course, sat in the living room watching the TV. His mother was making an effort, Ethan realized. Perhaps she always had. Perhaps she had never shared her husband’s passivity and disinterest in their children. Because she had never put her foot down and made her husband do the right thing for their boys, Ethan had lumped her in with him. Now he realized the dynamic of their relationship was more complex.

This day had proven anything could be more complex than it seemed on the surface.

Kay was eager to please her younger son, pointing out that she still kept his favorite chewy chocolate chip cookies in the cookie jar and showing him that a houseplant he’d once given her for her birthday was thriving and enormous. Ethan hadn’t expected to spend the whole afternoon or sit at his mother’s dining room table after all these years. When he arrived, he hadn’t thought beyond her right to know the truth of her own heritage. The way she paled surprised him. His medical training made him want to check the pulse in her wrist, but he refrained. He settled for restoring color to her face simply by not leaving an hour after he got there.

The antique clock in the dining room sounded.

“I suppose you’ll need to go.” Kay wrung out the dishrag and used it to wipe down the counter.

“Soon.” Ethan neatly hung the damp dish towel through the round wooden hoop above the sink. He wanted to see Nicole one more time. Then he would have to make a decision about driving straight through to Columbus or sleeping a few hours first.

“I’m glad you came.”

“Me, too.” Ethan put his hands behind him and leaned against the counter. “Mom, how are you feeling about what I told you today?”

Kay scrubbed at a stubborn spot on the stove. “Your grandmother used to call me Katie-bug.”

“I never knew that.”

“I’d forgotten until today. My father didn’t like it. He scolded her once about it. Do you know that’s probably my earliest memory of him?”

“I’m sorry it wasn’t happier.”

“I’ve been thinking about that all afternoon. My mother still called me Katie-bug when we were alone, but she made a big game of how it was our secret. But do you know what I think?”

“What’s that?”

“I think my birth father gave me that nickname. Dennis Pease or Merrill Tabor or whoever he was. I think my dad was trying to erase the fact that my mother had been married before, that I’d had another father.”

Ethan scratched the back of his neck. “Well, I suppose he loved you. He adopted you, after all.”

“I never doubted he loved me.” Kay rinsed out the rag and draped it over the faucet. “But why should he be jealous of a man who was dead and someone I was too young to remember anyway?”

“Because your mother remembered him, I suppose. She’d loved him first.”

Kay took in the thought. “I hadn’t got that far in figuring it out.”

Ethan said nothing but only watched the muscles of his mother’s face move as her next words formed in her mind. Outside the window above the kitchen sink, the day had sunk into darkness.

“I’m the same person I always was,” Kay said. “Blood doesn’t make you who you are.”

Ethan had never thought of his mother as pensive. As she looked into the darkness, wistfulness crept through her expression.

“I’m curious,” she said. “I’ll admit that.”

“About your birth father?”

“No. Maybe someday I’d like to know what happened to him, but I was thinking of the Tabors.”

As far as Ethan knew, there hadn’t been any Tabors in Hidden Falls in decades. Their businesses had been sold or merged through the decades.

“Somewhere out there,” his mother said, “is a man who thinks he’s Merrill Tabor—if he’s even still alive. I guess he’d be close to eighty. Maybe he has children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And none of them knows what you and I know now.”

“Maybe,” Ethan said. “It’s ironic that you and Dad ended up in Hidden Falls so long after all this happened.”

“I suppose so, though I lived here when I was very small.”

“What?” That didn’t make sense. Ethan’s parents had moved to Hidden Falls together.

“I told you I went through my mother’s things when she died.”

“Right. You were looking for baby pictures.”

“I was looking for all sorts of things, anything I might find that would make me feel close to her. I found an old letter addressed to her, with a return address from Hidden Falls.”

Words refused to form on Ethan’s tongue.

“It was just a note,” Kay said. “Somebody forwarded an electric bill with a few cheery words about how lovely it had been to know my parents for their few months in Hidden Falls.”

Few months.
“When was this?”

“Judging by the postmark, before I was old enough to go to school. Now I wonder if my mother knew something—if my birth father knew something and might have told her. Maybe that’s why they came here.”

It hadn’t occurred to Ethan that either of the boys who had been exchanged—a premise that remained an unproved theory—would have learned the truth.

“I guess there’s no way to know that,” he said.

“And I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.” She touched his cheek. “I know you need to go.”

Ethan took his mother in his arms. Very little mattered in that moment except that they were together. Why had he thought all these years that his mother understood so little of the world? That she hadn’t crafted a life for herself? He inhaled the fruity scent of her shampoo.

“I’ll come back,” he whispered.

“I’ll be waiting.” She kissed his face.

Ethan moved into the living room.

Richard looked up. “Are you leaving?”

Ethan nodded.

“Don’t forget your documents,” his mother said.

Ethan picked them up. “Would you like to keep them?”

Kay shook her head. “You’ll do the right thing with them.”

Ethan picked up the papers from the end table. His father stood up to shake his hand, but his eyes didn’t leave ESPN. Ten or fifteen years ago, Ethan would have found only insult in his father’s habit. Today it didn’t matter.

His phone rang as he stepped out the front door and began the walk around the block to where he’d left his car parked in front of Quinn’s house.

“Hi, Nicole.”

“Where are you?”

“Just leaving my parents’ house. Where are you?”

“At the hospital.”

“Still? I thought they would have discharged Lauren by now.”

“Something happened, Ethan. She was doing fine, and then all of a sudden—I don’t even know. They made everybody get out of the room. Cooper’s going crazy, the nurse is trying to find Dr. Glass, people are going in and out of Lauren’s room. Some doctor from the ER came up.”

Ethan’s phone beeped in his ear to alert to him to a call waiting. He pulled the phone away from his ear long enough to look at the caller’s name.

G
ONZALEZ.

He let it go to voice mail and began to jog.

“You have to get over here, Ethan,” Nicole said.

“I’m coming.”

They ended the call, and while he ran toward his car, Ethan listened to the voice mail Dr. Gonzalez left.

“If I find out you are still in that Podunk town, I will throw the book at you. I want to hear from you in the next three minutes. Whatever shenanigans you’ve been up to are over, Dr. Jordan. I seriously doubt you can offer any persuasive justification for your professional negligence, but if you are not in my office at six o’clock tomorrow morning, you can consider your career ended.”