She reached up to adjust the nurse’s cap pinned to her tightly knotted hair. When she glanced down at the desk, she saw that the black velvet box containing the perfume bottles was gone. The intruder had taken it.
She selected one of the two open jars of chemicals to use as a weapon and left the other one behind on the desk. She picked her way through the moonlit lab. When she got to the staircase, she descended cautiously.
At the foot of the stairs, she paused in the stairwell and looked around the edge of the door.
The inmates continued to howl and scream through the grills set into the locked doors, but the hallway was empty. There was no sign of the intruder.
Her room was located at the far end of an intersecting hallway. There were no other patients in that corridor. Earlier she had arranged the pillows and blankets on her bed in an attempt to approximate the outline of a sleeping figure, but it looked as if the ruse had been unnecessary. The agitation of the other inmates and the commotion in the courtyard were sufficient to conceal her movements. The white cap and the long blue cloak, familiar elements of a nurse’s uniform, would do the rest. With luck, anyone who chanced to see her from a distance would assume she was a member of the hospital staff.
The entrance to the old servants’ stairs was in a storage closet on the opposite side of the hall. She was edging out of the stairwell doorway, preparing to make a dash for the closet, when the patients’ screams rose in another hellish crescendo. It was all the warning she got. It was just barely enough to save her.
She retreated to the shadows of the stairwell and waited. When the screams faded a little, she risked a peek around the doorway.
A man dressed in a doctor’s coat, a white cap, and a surgical mask emerged from the hallway that led to her room. The black velvet box was in his left hand. In his right he gripped a syringe.
The only thing that saved her from being seen was that the masked doctor was intent on rushing down the hall in the opposite direction. He disappeared through the locked doors just beyond the nurses’ station.
She did not think it was possible to be any more terrified, but the sight of the masked doctor leaving the corridor that led to her room sent another shock of horror across her nerves. Maybe he had intended to kill her, too.
With an effort of will, she pulled herself together. She certainly could not continue to dither in the stairwell indefinitely. She had to act or all was lost.
She took a deep breath, clutched the jar in one hand, and rushed across the hallway. She opened the door of the storage closet.
A bearded face appeared at the steel grill set into a nearby door. The insane man stared at her with wild, otherworldly eyes.
“You’re a ghost now, aren’t you?” he said in a voice that was hoarse from endless keening and wailing. “It was just a matter of time before they killed you, just like they did the other one.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Hawkins,” she said gently.
“You’re lucky to be dead. You’re better off now because you can leave this place.”
“Yes, I know.”
She slipped into the storage closet, closed the door, and turned on the overhead fixture. The door to the service stairs was at the back. It was locked. To her overwhelming relief, one of the keys she had been given worked.
By the time she made it downstairs to the darkened kitchen on the ground floor, she could hear sirens in the distance. Someone had telephoned the local authorities. The sanitarium was located a couple of miles outside the small town of Rushbrook. It would take the police and the ambulance several minutes to arrive on the scene.
There was no one around to see her when she slipped out of the kitchen. She inserted another key into the lock on the massive wrought iron gate that the delivery vehicles used.
And then she was free, hurrying down a rutted lane with only the light of the moon to guide her.
She was not at all sorry that Ormsby was dead, but his death could complicate her already desperate situation. It would be so easy for the authorities to conclude that the patient who had escaped the secure grounds of the Rushbrook Sanitarium on the night of the doctor’s mysterious demise was, in fact, a crazed killer.
She had to get as far away as possible from the asylum before the orderlies realized she was gone.
It occurred to her that one person already knew she had disappeared—the doctor in the surgical mask who had gone to her room with the syringe.
She wanted to run but she did not dare. If, in the darkness, she stumbled over a rock or a fallen tree limb, she could twist an ankle or worse.
The emergency vehicles passed her a short time later. They never noticed her hiding behind the heavy shrubbery at the side of the lane.
* * *
? ? ?
?Dawn found her standing on the side of a highway, hoping that a passing motorist would take pity on a nurse whose car had run out of gas in the middle of nowhere.
She raised her hand to wave down a truck. The gold wedding ring on her finger gleamed malevolently in the morning light.
Chapter 2
Burning Cove, California
Two months later
“Your new neighbor is back,” Florence Darley said in a low voice. She plucked the kettle off the stove and poured hot water over the leaves in the teapot. “That makes eight days in a row except for Sunday.”
Adelaide did not look up from the small scale she was using to measure a quarter pound of Tranquility tea. “We’re closed on Sundays.”
“Which only goes to prove my point. Mr. Truett has become a regular. I see he’s reading the morning edition of the Herald, as usual. Five will get you ten he’ll order the same thing—a pot of that very expensive blend of green tea you convinced me to order from the San Francisco dealer, no sugar, no tea cakes, no scones, no cookies.”
“Mr. Truett does seem to be a man who likes to keep to a routine,” Adelaide said.
She did not add that Truett’s apparent preference for keeping to a schedule made it easy to time his morning walks on the beach. He never failed to show up at seven thirty. He always walked for precisely thirty minutes. It was June and there was often fog in the morning at this time of year, but that did not stop him.
She was the one who was annoyed by the fog, she thought. It meant that she could only catch fleeting glimpses of him taking his daily walk. And she had to admit she had come to look forward to watching Jake Truett in the mornings. He might be a man of strict habits, but he did not move like a man who was a stickler for rules and regulations. He did not march across the sand like a martinet. Instead he prowled the beach with the easy physical power of a large hunting cat.
Florence chuckled knowingly. “I don’t think he’s here every day because of your fancy tea. And he doesn’t come in because we’re fashionable these days. He’s not the type to care one bit if the customer at the next table is a celebrity or a garbage collector. Got a hunch you’re the reason our Mr. Truett has developed the habit of stopping by.”
Adelaide flushed. She was very fond of her new boss, not to mention extremely grateful for the job, but Florence’s newfound determination to play matchmaker made her uneasy.
After two months in Burning Cove, she was just starting to breathe more easily. No manhunt had been launched to recapture an escaped mental patient. In fact, there had been no mention in the press of her late-night departure from the Rushbrook Sanitarium.
As far as she could tell, no one was looking for her. Nevertheless, she was not yet ready to take the risk of dating. At least, that’s what she told herself every day when Jake Truett walked into the tearoom carrying a leather briefcase, sat down at the same table, and asked for green tea, no sugar, no tea cakes, no scones, no cookies.