Midnight Rain Read online

  But she did have another call she had to make.

  With shaking hands, Phoebe dialed a number that she’d memorized a long time ago, a number she had always hoped she would one day forget.

  The woman’s voice on the other end of the phone was calm and no-nonsense. “Mercy Cove Total-Care Home, long-term-floor-can-I-help-you,” she said.

  Phoebe shuddered, the memory of all the times she’d heard those words suddenly sharp and ugly. She looked around her townhouse, at the triple-deadbolted front door, at the windows screened from the outside world, and she listened to the emptiness of the place. Just her. Just her — and that had seemed safest. Best. Only now it just felt vulnerable again.

  “I’m just calling to check on the status of one of your patients. M-M-Michael Schaeffer.”

  “May I ask who’s calling, please?”

  “Phoebe Rain.” A pause, then the reluctant, “Used to be Schaeffer.”

  “Phoebe... Schaeffer.” The sound of a metal rack rotating, a heavy thud, a softly muttered imprecation she hadn’t been intended to hear. “Okay. Just a moment, please.” Phoebe waited some more, while pages were riffled, while two voices spoke, while — judging from the sudden silence — a hand went over the phone mouthpiece. Then the voice came back on the line, markedly cooler. “I’m sorry. We only give out information on our patients to family members.”

  “I’m his ex-wife.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Your name is not on the list the family approved.”

  Of course it wouldn’t be. Her ex-in-laws would have seen to that.

  “It’s important,” she said quietly. “I just need to know if his condition has... changed.”

  “I suggest you call his family, Mrs. Schaeffer.”

  “Rain. Ms. Rain.” Either I’m Mrs. Schaeffer and you give me the information, or I’m Ms. Rain and you don’t, she thought. You don’t get to have it both ways. “He tried to kill me once. I have to know if he could try to kill me again,” Phoebe said, fear adding a note of hysteria to her voice.

  “Ms. Rain, then. Please call his family for information. No matter what the circumstances, I absolutely cannot give any information to you. I’m sorry,” the woman said. But she didn’t sound sorry.

  Phoebe said, “I understand,” when what she wanted to do was scream, “Bitch!” She hung up the phone.

  Michael was still at Mercy Cove — otherwise the woman on the phone would have simply told her he was no longer a patient. But whether he could have called her — whether he might once again be a danger to her — that she couldn’t tell. That secret lay in the nursing home in Ohio.

  She couldn’t find out about him as Phoebe Rain, or even as Phoebe Schaeffer. If she called again, she was likely to be told they couldn’t give out information no matter what name she gave — she would guess, remembering her in-laws, that they would have requested notification if she called. They hated her for what she’d done to their son. They had never believed a word of what she said he’d done to her. She imagined that they would use any tool available to them to stand in her way. No way in hell would one of them tell her how he was doing.

  If she had only thought to identify herself as Laine Schaeffer, Michael’s sister, she could have gotten information. Laine and Michael had never been close, and with Laine all the way out in Oregon, they’d had almost no contact in all the years Phoebe and Michael had been together. But Laine and Michael hadn’t been enemies. Phoebe guessed that Laine would be on the list to get information, even if it was a privilege she never chose to use.

  Phoebe sat for a moment, staring at the little gray headset phone she used for the psychic line, thinking. The phone call had come through with a Network prompt. Which meant it had gone through the system.

  Which meant the Network’s computer had logged the originating phone number.

  She smiled slowly. Which meant that whoever had called her, she had him.

  She checked the Network’s employee contact line number on her phone list — she’d only had to use it once before, when her priority rating had inexplicably slipped to 89,000-something. A man who called himself Therian answered.

  Phoebe identified herself and said, “Can you do a check on the last call that came through for me? I need to take the phone number to the police. The caller used my real name, and... threatened me.” Her throat tightened as the pictures flashed through her mind: blood on the chalkboards, terrified young faces, screaming. Blinding pain. She cleared her throat, got her voice back, said, “I can’t afford to ignore this.”

  Therian sighed heavily. “It will take me a minute.”

  “I have all night... well, morning.”

  She heard him sigh again before he put her on hold. She found herself listening to bad, digitized New Age music; she blocked it out by trying to figure out how the caller had located her. No one except Ben Margolies in the Moonstruck New Age Shoppe, who’d recommended her, and the woman at PSN, Inc., who hired her and whose name she didn’t even know — whom she had never even met except for a single phone interview — knew she worked as a psychic for the Network. Getting her extension number was simple — she gave that out at every call, hoping that her readings would be good enough that she would develop a clientele of regulars.

  But knowing that she was the person on the other end of it — how could anyone have discovered that Ariel the psychic was Phoebe Rain? She’d been careful never to give out her real name. The caller had said he knew where to find her. Did he? He might. She didn’t have any credit cards and all her mail went to a drop box, and both her home and Psychic Sisters phones were unpublished, unlisted. But her driver’s license had her correct address on it — he might have managed to obtain her address from that. It still wouldn’t explain how he’d reached her through the Psychic Sisters. They didn’t have a directory — the only way a caller could get a specific reader was to have called her once before and to have copied down her number. The odds of the man with Michael’s voice getting her and recognizing her had to be right up there with winning the big prize in the lottery.

  But somebody won that, too, didn’t they? Sooner or later, someone took it home.

  With the feeling that her luck had run out, she stared at her phone and waited.

  Therian came back on the line. “The last call I have for you is from Idaho. Our database lists the caller as Clarise. The phone number—”

  Phoebe cut him off. “Clarise called at five fifty-seven a.m. I want the one that called at six twenty-eight a.m.”

  “The last call I show for you is at five fifty-seven a.m.”

  Phoebe shook her head. “This came through the system. Fifty-five-minute YES club prompt, I did the opening script, he didn’t give me his name. He used my name, said... what he said, I hung up on him. It’s got to be there.”

  “I’m checking. But I show you logged off at six twenty-seven, so any call that came through at six twenty-eight would have been dialed directly in to your number.”

  “I’m telling you, I got the system prompt. And the phone rang before I finished logging off,” Phoebe said, but then she realized that it hadn’t. She’d punched that final 2 that completed her log-off, and the phone started to ring the instant after that, though before she got confirmation from the system that she was off. Perhaps she really had already logged herself off, if only by nanoseconds.

  “I’m sorry,” Therian said, “but the last call that came through the system for you was the one from Idaho.”

  Phoebe sat there for a moment, eyes closed, fingers pressed against her temples.

  “Okay, thanks,” she said at last.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help. Why don’t you call the phone company and see if they can look into this for you?”

  “I’ll do that.” She hung up.

  She sat staring out her window, wondering how the caller had managed to get a prompt from the Psychic Sisters Network on his call if he hadn’t called through the 900 number.

  It might really be Michael, though she couldn’t i
magine how that could be. The last she’d heard of him, he’d still been in a coma. Had been in a coma for more than a year. She’d stopped keeping track at that point — everyone she’d talked to and everything she’d researched insisted that anyone in a coma for more than a year wouldn’t be waking up. Not that she slept any better at night for knowing that.

  It almost had to be someone else, someone who could imitate Michael’s voice and who had reason to hate her. To want to hurt her.

  Maybe someone from the school. One of her fellow teachers. Or one of the parents.

  Her skin crawled, and she tasted bitter fear. No matter who had found her, no matter why he had called her, he was the nightmare she’d been waiting for — the one that she’d known in her gut was coming. She looked at the four walls that surrounded her, at the big window with its drawn shades, with only the angled glass at the top open to the sky, at the sliding glass door pinned shut and also shaded. No one could see in, but suddenly she felt like a bird in a cage with the snake coiled just outside, studying her through the bars, looking for a way in.

  She had to get out.

  She rose, hurried, unthinking, and knives tore through her right knee, pain so white-hot she whimpered and fell back into her seat, tears flooding her eyes. She caught the table with both hands and pulled herself up, fighting the pain, trying to get on top of it; she clutched her cane with a sense of defeat. In the last few months she’d been making trips without it. But not this time. The damned leg felt like it might give out at any moment. Maybe that was just anxiety, which always made her pain worse, and maybe it wasn’t.

  She grabbed her backpack and her keys and threw open all three deadbolts, stopping on the other side only long enough to make sure all of them were locked again. Scared, shaking, unsure of what to do next, she hobbled down the walk.

  Chapter Two

  Alan MacKerrie left the emergency room at the end of his shift feeling like he’d been kicked in the gut. His final patient of the night hadn’t made it, and it felt like Fate slamming him in the face again — the fifth anniversary of his wife’s and daughter’s deaths, and once again he couldn’t do a goddamned thing to save the life of the person depending on him.

  He drove home with his head pounding. Logically, he knew it wasn’t the same — he hadn’t even been in the ER where they took Janet and Chick following the accident. No one had set out to destroy either of them — not even the wife-stealing bastard they’d been with. By contrast his last patient of the night had died because of a drunken brawl with her husband, and her death left Alan sick with humanity. He couldn’t understand the sort of heedless violence that kept pouring through the ER doors. He couldn’t comprehend taking a life. To have something — to have someone — and to destroy that life instead of protecting it... he had never been able to get a handle on that.

  He took a few deep, steadying breaths, determined to put his patient and her husband, the night, the anniversary — the whole hellish ordeal — out of his mind. At least for a while. He knew it wouldn’t stay gone, but he could banish it for the drive home.

  The morning traffic heading east on Commercial was brutal, but he was heading west. No sunlight in his eyes, almost no one else on the road with him, the brief but unquestionable pleasure of watching half a million poor shmucks coming the other way, enduring the dreadful commute to their cubicles when he was on his way home to sleep. That drive home was one of the few real benefits of having the night shift in the emergency room; Fort Lauderdale traffic rarely got better.

  He drove through the nest of side streets that led to the development where he lived and pulled into his numbered slot in the communal parking lot. The neighborhood had headed downhill, but the place did look better in the long-shadowed light of dawn. The sun gave the peculiar flamingo pink of his townhouse — that shade so loved by Florida developers — a rosy glow and made the palm trees and the coarse grass look like they were made of emeralds. In a few hours the boom boxes and the stereos would start up, and the parking lots would fill with blank-eyed men with no apparent sources of income.

  At the moment, though, the only people visible were the dog owners who spent their morning walks studiously not noticing their animals crapping beside the sidewalks, and carefully leaving the steaming messes behind. Aside from them, the place still looked deceptively middle class.

  Alan took a deep breath as he got out of the car and consciously shook off the night and everything associated with it. He had a couple days off. And he had never been more grateful for those days. He walked around the corner of his privacy fence, rubbing his eyes and yawning, and ran right into the girl with the cane.

  She went over backwards with a cry of pain, and his first ungallant thought was Shit! My malpractice insurance. But he dropped to one knee beside her. “Christ, I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. Are you hurt?”

  She closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath, and with her eyes still closed said, “I’ll be fine.” She looked at him then, and he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes — and she managed a strained smile. “You’re the guy next door. The doctor.”

  He nodded. “Alan MacKerrie. Sorry to meet you this way.”

  Her pained smile got a little broader, but he noticed that she did not offer her name.

  “If you were going to get pasted on the sidewalk, I guess you got pasted by the right guy.”

  She was pretty in a delicate, underfed sort of way. Long, curly dark hair worn loose, large dark eyes, a pointed chin, the undeveloped build of a teenager who might one day fill out and be gorgeous — but this girl wasn’t a teenager, he realized. If he looked at the first ghosts of smile lines in the comers of her eyes, he’d have to guess early thirties.

  He’d only seen her in passing before and had never paid much attention — most too-thin women never showed up on his radar. “So where do you hurt?”

  “My butt. My knee. The palms of my hands.” She held them up and looked at them. Dirt embedded in the skin, a few scrapes and flecks of blood — nothing major.

  “Any pain in your wrists?”

  She wiggled them. “They’re fine. My knee’s the only thing that really hurts, and it already hurt.”

  “You feel a pop or a snap when you fell?”

  “No. The pain just got worse, but it was already pretty bad.”

  “Let me take a look, okay?”

  “I’d... rather you...” She sighed and shrugged. “Sure. Take a look. I don’t think it’s any worse than it was, but if it is I’d rather know now.” She tugged up the leg of her jeans, and for an instant he thought she had really pretty legs, which made up for the flat chest, and then he saw the scar tissue and it was everything he could do to keep the shock from showing on his face.

  He put his hands on either side of the knee and made a production of palpating and gently moving the joint to hide his reaction. Her right knee bore the branding of half a dozen surgeries; the square outlines of two grafts, one white and relatively old, the other pink and a bit puffy; a dozen black circles tattooed into the skin and grown over; a missing chunk that had healed hard and red and ugly.

  “What happened?” he asked, keeping his voice neutral and not looking at her face.

  “Shotgun.” He looked into her eyes and saw a wall so solid no emotion leaked past. She said, “I’ve had a bit of work done on it.”

  “I see that,” he said. “I don’t see any new damage, but if you want I’ll take you to the ER and get it X-rayed for you. I’ll cover the cost — I did knock you down.”

  She smiled and shook her head, and he marveled that her expression could convey absolutely nothing of what she was thinking. “I’ll see if I can stand on it. It doesn’t feel any different now than it did when I walked out the door. I think it just twisted a little when I fell.”

  “Twisting can be significant. Pins can slip loose, slice things up inside...” He stood and gave her his hand and said, “I’d feel better if you’d have it x-rayed.”

  He leaned back a
nd pulled, and she rose to her feet without much difficulty. He guessed that she weighed less than a hundred pounds and that she was about five one or five two. But there’d been a sinewy strength to her grip that surprised him and a grace to her movements that changed his first impression of fragility. She was tougher than she looked at first glance.

  “In the last two years I’ve seen more of the insides of hospitals than I ever wanted to; if I never have to go through the doors of one again, that will be just fine.” She scooped up her cane and tested the leg, putting her full weight on it, then taking it off several times in a row. Testing. Her face remained impassive, but Alan caught the flicker of suppressed pain in her eyes. She wiped her palms on her jeans and slung her bag — a small canvas backpack that looked heavy to him — over her shoulder again.

  “Good as new,” she said, then with a shrug added, “or at least good as slightly used.”

  Definitely tougher than she looked. “Let me know if it gives you any trouble.”

  She smiled, already moving away from him. “I’ll do that. Thanks. Thanks for being so nice.” She headed towards the parking lot. He watched her for a moment, wondering about her, about the scars, about her polite but carefully maintained distance and the fact that she didn’t offer her name. As she limped out of sight, he turned to his townhouse — a corner unit of the building, which had eight total units, four facing south, and four that mirrored them, facing north. Each had a little fenced patio to the front; each made an attempt to feel like a detached home from the inside. But all shared side and back walls. For just an instant he was conscious of those other people in those other units, with their separate lives kept apart from his by only a layer of studs and drywall — but the walls might as well have been acres thick. He didn’t know any of his neighbors by name, only a couple of them by sight. They were neighbors only in the physical sense, in that they inhabited the same building.

  We all keep our secrets, he thought.

  He found himself wondering what hers were.