It was, she thought, a mirror of what she was going through. There were things that were familiar, and yet they remained hidden, distorted, concealed by the darkness inside the hospital. She needed to find a way of illuminating evidence, suspects, and theories. She just couldn't see precisely how.
She leaned her head back and believed she'd done much to make a mess of things. At the same time, despite the lack of anything concrete to point to, she felt more persuaded than ever that she was dangerously close to achieving what she had come to the hospital for.
She tried to picture the man she was hunting, but found that just like the shapes in the room, he remained indistinct and elusive. The hospital world simply did not lend itself to easy supposition, she thought. She recalled dozens of moments, where she sat across from a suspect, either in a police interrogation room, or later, in a courtroom, and she had observed all the tiny details, the wrinkles on the man's hands, the furtive look in his eyes, perhaps the manner in which he held his head, all of which blended together into a portrait of someone narrowly defined by guilt and crime. When they sat across from Lucy, it always, she thought, seemed so obvious. The men she'd seen through arrest and prosecution had worn the truth of their actions like so many cheap suits of clothes. Unmistakable.
Continuing to stare into the night, she told herself that she had to think more creatively. More obliquely. More subtly. In the world she came from, there had been little doubt in her mind whenever she'd come face-to-face with her quarry. This world was the exact opposite. There was nothing except doubt. And, she wondered, feeling a chill that didn't come from the open window, she might even have been face-to-face with the man she hunted. But here he owned the context.
She lifted her hand to her face and touched her scar. The man who'd attacked her had been a cliche of anonymity. His face had been obscured by a knit ski mask, so that she only saw his dark eyes. He wore black leather gloves on his hands, jeans, and a nondescript pullover parka of the sort available in any number of outdoors equipment stores. On his feet had been Nike running shoes. The few words he spoke were guttural, rough, designed to conceal any accent. He didn't really need to say anything, she remembered. He let the glistening hunting knife that had sliced her face speak for him.
That was something she had thought about hard. In the processing of the event afterward, she had dwelt on this detail, for it spoke to her in an odd way, and had made her wonder if the rape had been less of the purpose of the whole encounter than the disfigurement of her face.
Lucy leaned back, bouncing her head off the wall once or twice, as if the modest blows could loosen some thought from where it was glued within her imagination. She wondered sometimes how it was that her entire life had been altered by the time she'd been assaulted in that dormitory stairwell. How long was it, she asked? Three minutes? Five minutes from start to finish, from the first terrifying sensation when she'd been grabbed, to the sound of his footsteps heading off?
No more than that, surely, she told herself. And everything from that moment on had been changed.
Beneath her fingers, she touched the ridges of the scar. They had retreated, almost blended back even with the rest of her complexion, as the years had passed.
She wondered whether she would ever love again. She doubted it.
It wasn't anything as simple as coming to hate all men for the acts of one. Or being unable to see the distinctions between the men she had come to know and the one who had harmed her. It was more, she thought, as if a place within her had been turned dark, and iced over. She knew that the man who had assaulted her had fueled much of her life and that every time she had pointed accusingly in a court of law at some sallow-faced defendant destined for prison she was slicing slivers of retribution from the world and gathering them to herself. But she doubted that the hole inside her would ever be filled enough.
Her mind slid then to Peter the Fireman. Too much like me, she thought. This made her sad, and unsettled, unable to appreciate that they were both damaged in like fashion, and that should have linked them. Instead she tried to picture him in the isolation room. It was the closest thing to a prison cell the hospital had, and in some ways it was worse. It existed for the sole purpose of eliminating any outside thoughts that might intrude on the patient's world. Gray, stuffed padding covered the walls. The bed was bolted to the floor. A single thin mattress and threadbare blanket. No pillow. No shoelaces. No belt. A toilet that had little water in the bowl to prevent someone from trying to drown themselves in that sad way. She didn't know if Peter would be put into a straitjacket. That would be procedure, and she guessed that Mister Evil would want to see procedure followed. For a moment she wondered how Peter was able to maintain any sanity at all, when just about everything that surrounded him was crazy. She guessed that it took a considerable force of will to constantly remind himself that he did not belong.
That would be painful, she thought.
In that regard, she realized, they were even more alike.
Lucy took a deep breath and told herself that sleep was critical. She needed to be alert in the morning. Something had driven Francis to confront the stocky man, and she didn't know what it was, but suspected it was relevant. She smiled. Francis was proving to be more helpful than she had imagined he would be.
She closed her eyes, and as she shut one dark away with another, she was suddenly aware that she could hear an odd sound, one that was familiar, but unsettling. Her eyes popped open and she recognized the noise as the soft padding sound of footsteps in the carpeted hallway outside her room. She let out a long slow whistle and realized her heart rate had increased, which she instantly told herself was an error. Footsteps weren't that unusual in the nurse trainees' dormitory. After all, there were different shifts, requiring twenty-four-hour attendance, and this caused the sleep patterns in the dormitory to be erratic.
But as she listened, she thought the footsteps paused outside her door.
She stiffened in the bed, craning her head in the direction of the faint, distinctive sound.
She told herself she was mistaken, and then thought she heard the handle of her door slowly turn.
Lucy instantly turned to the bed stand, and fumbling noisily, managed to click on the bedside lamp. Light flooded the room, and she blinked a couple of times, as her eyes adjusted. In almost the same motion, she threw herself out of the bunk, and stepped across the room, banging into a metal wastebasket, which skittered noisily across the floor. The door had a deadbolt lock, and she saw that it had not moved from the closed position. Crossing the room rapidly, Lucy pushed herself up to the solid wooden door and placed her ear against it.
She could hear nothing.
She listened for a sound. Anything that might tell her something; that someone was outside, that someone was fleeing, that she was alone, that she was not.
Silence gripped her as awfully as the noise that had plunged her into alertness.
She waited.
She let seconds slide past her, craning forward.
One minute. Perhaps two.
Through the window open behind her, she suddenly heard some voices passing by beneath. There was a laugh, then it was joined by another.
She turned back to the door. She reached up, threw the deadbolt lock, and with a sudden, swift motion, thrust the door open.
The corridor was empty.
She stepped out and peered to the right and to the left.
She was alone.
Lucy took another deep breath, letting the wind inside her lungs calm her racing heart. She shook her head. You were always alone she told herself. You are letting things get to you. The hospital was a place of unfamiliar extremes, and being surrounded by so much odd behavior and mental illness had made her jumpy. If she had something to fear, it was far less than whoever it might have been had to fear from her. This sense of bravado reassured her.