Dead Ringer: Chapter Twenty-Five
I want to thank all of you mystery fans for hanging in here with me! Of late, it’s been challenging to juggle the several projects I now have going. I feel as if there are a lot of spinning plates I’m tending to. I know it must be frustrating to wait for new chapters, and I’m hoping once I get the book proposal all done, I can get back to a more regular update schedule. In the meantime, thanks for your patience as we plunge ahead in this grand experiment of a serialized novel.
Go here to read Chapter 24.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I’d worked up a nice sweat from my mad dash out to the car to look for that danged notebook, and let’s just say the surprise of running into Guy Trubiano, with his innocently sexy smile, certainly hadn’t lowered my body temperature. I could still see the puzzled look on his face as I turned and ran. Later, I’d have to find him and explain. But how much could I really tell him?
Hustling up the stairwell had left me breathless, reminding me how badly I’d neglected my exercise routine. Also, can you call it a routine if you haven’t really done it in weeks? I stood outside the door to Pastoral Care panting and did some deep inhales and slow exhales to regulate my breathing. It’d be great to avoid glances and questions from Mavis.
I was reaching for the doorknob when I heard a noise from behind and to my right, as if someone had just disappeared around the corner at the end of the hall. The thing is, the hallway had been empty when I came out of the stairwell. Or at least I’d thought so.
“Shake it off, kid,” I muttered to myself. “Stop imagining things and find that notebook.” I turned the doorknob…only to find it was locked. “Oh, come on!” I yelled. I was so rattled I forgot for a moment that I was holding a wad of keys in my hand.
“Mavis?” I called out as I walked in. Papers were scattered across her desk. Clearly, she’d left in a hurry. Sort of odd but also maybe not. Maybe right now she was down in maintenance or medical records chewing someone’s ass right off.
I went into my office and sank down in my chair with my head in my hands. That notebook contained everything about my work with Omega from the very beginning, and in particular my notes from my meeting with Weston. I’m a really good note-taker, but that didn’t matter now. For a few seconds, I indulged in berating myself for not taking Mark’s suggestion and buying a digital recorder to have on hand. Of course he’d been right, damn it.
Mark. Oh, geez. I would have to call and let him know about this possible breach, but I had no idea where he’d gone or how to reach him.
In frustration I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek and winced. I tried not to imagine someone — maybe Rachel Roper’s killer, because who else would take it and why? — reading page after page, knowing what I know about what he — or she — did.
A momentary thought jolted me. Would Mavis go through my stuff? I couldn’t imagine it. It wasn’t her style to go snooping around. When Mavis wanted to know something, she’d come right out and ask it in that tone she used that scared just about everybody except Fred.
I repeated my steps from earlier, opening the drawer and pulling out my tote bag. I went through it again, rechecked the side pocket just because.
Shit, shit, shit.
And then something dark blue caught my eye and I bent down to look and there was my notebook, wedged at the very back of the drawer. I grabbed it, flipped it open and scanned the pages as if it might be a fake. “How?” I said out loud, and again, “How?”
Had I missed it earlier in my hurry and panic ? Bigger than a pack of index cards but smaller than a standard notebook, I supposed I could have overlooked it. But I could swear it hadn’t been there. The drawer wasn’t that big and the only thing I kept in it was my bag, so there’d been no clutter to obscure it.
Occam’s Razor, that sharp little principle, says the answer requiring the fewest assumptions is usually correct. In other words, the likelihood of my overlooking the errant notebook in my hurry vs. the likelihood of someone sneaking into the office, going right to the drawer with my tote bag, opening the drawer and pulling out the notebook, sneaking back out, going somewhere to rifle through the pages, then sneaking back into the office and putting the missing notebook back in the drawer, meanwhile avoiding Mavis and me and counting on the door being unlocked or else having access to a key — I mean, yeah. Seems implausible. At the same time, it’s not unheard of to slice your pinky finger on Occam’s Razor.
Ergo, implausible but not impossible. Or maybe I just didn’t want to face the fact I’d been jangly and overreactive and if I told all this to my counselor, she’d ask in that way she had in a higher-pitched voice with a slightly tilted head and beginnings of a concerned frown, “So, Blainey, what’s going on with you right now?”
What’s going on? Hovering in the back of my mind, like an ever-present shadow, was the knowledge someone had cold-bloodedly planned and plotted and taken the life of a person I knew and cared about and felt some responsibility toward. How do you just let that go? I couldn’t.
So now what?
That’s when I remembered the security camera in the hall, the one I sometimes gave a shy wave to. Anyone coming and going from Pastoral Care would have been captured. Now, I just had to figure out who to talk to about getting a look at any recorded footage. I decided I’d start with Hospital Security. I slid the notebook back into the pocket of my tote bag and returned the bag to the drawer. This time I closed my office door and locked it. I locked the main door and double-checked to make sure the latch had caught, leaning against it a couple of times.
I headed for the stairs but some kind of weird paranoia was needling around in my brain. The thought of being alone in the stairwell made my heart race. Instead, I went to the elevator and pressed the down button.
The doors slid open and I stepped in and nodded briefly at the only other passenger, a man leaning against the back wall. I didn’t recognize him at first. Tall and slender with smooth, tanned cheeks and sandy hair, one hand was thrust in the pocket of his white coat and from the other dangled a blue surgical cap.
Then that voice, the one I knew, sent a little shiver along my spine. “Blainey Blair,” he said, lingering over each syllable.
At that moment I deeply regretted not taking the stairs. I turned and looked at him. “Oh,” I said. “It’s you.”