Saving Meghan(113)

“You said it all fell apart. What did you do? Just tell me that. I deserve that much.”

Nash pulled me to a hard stop but kept the scalpel against the side of my throat. A trickle of blood continued to ooze from my neck. One swipe of her wrist, one quick pull across my skin, and it wouldn’t matter what I was sick with.

“What I did?” Nash’s cold voice cut through the air. “I killed your father, Meghan. That’s what I did. I killed him because I had to.”

The world tilted. It seemed to stop. The wind no longer bit at my face. All noise became a loud ringing in my ears. My throat closed up like I was being choked.

“My father? Dead?”

I sputtered out the words. I didn’t want to believe it. I refused to believe it. But something told me it wasn’t a lie. My father was dead, and Nash had killed him. But why?

“He told me, did you know that?” Nash said. “That you went snooping on his phone. That you found out about us.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You’re … you’re Angi?”

“We were so, so good together … so good.”

My thoughts tumbled as though the floor had given way. “If you loved him, why would you hurt him?” I was shaking with anger and fear even as a horrible emptiness swelled in my chest.

“You’re too young and stupid to understand,” she said.

The pressure of the scalpel against my throat lessened. My mother’s voice, her face, her strength came to me like a guiding light.

Before Nash could say anything more, I jumped forward, and with agility mastered on the soccer field, spun around, driving my left foot into Nash’s shin in a move that most certainly would have earned me a red card. Nash cried out in pain as I brought my right leg, my kicking leg, into her knee the way I would send a ball to the goal from twenty yards out. The kick dropped her to the ground. Nash tried to roll away, but I pounced on her, pinning her beneath my arms.

I tried to hold her down, but she was far stronger. She hadn’t been confined to a hospital room, didn’t have switches clicking off inside her. She rolled me onto my back as though moving a sack of laundry, but somehow, I kept the momentum going, causing us to roll over a second time. As we did, Nash’s cell phone spilled from the pocket of her lab coat. I heard it clatter, but couldn’t reach it.

Nash swung her free arm in a wide arc. In pure reflex, I attempted to block the strike instead of dodging it. A slice opened in my sweatshirt, and an instant later I felt blood filling my shirtsleeve. I fell off Nash in a sideways tumble that brought me within a few feet of the discarded cell phone. Scrambling forward on my hands and knees, I sent a donkey kick into the side of Nash’s head. Nash groaned. The kick bought me enough time to reach the phone, which I picked up as I clambered back to my feet.

I pressed the word EMERGENCY.

“Nine one one, what’s your emergency?” I heard a woman say.

“I’m on the roof of White Memorial Hospital!” I shouted into the phone. “She’s going to kill me. Help! Hurry!”

But before I could say another word, I felt a sharp sting as Nash plunged her scalpel into the small of my back.





CHAPTER 58





BECKY


Terror swam through her veins. She raced for the elevator as fast as her rubbery legs could move. Nearly twenty-four hours spent in a hospital bed had stiffened her muscles and drained her endurance. A painful stitch formed in her side, slowing her gait. She hurried her steps to keep pace with Zach, who gripped her arm to hold her upright. A crowd gawked as she and Zach waited for what seemed an eternity for the elevator to arrive. Blood oozed from beneath a hastily applied wad of tight gauze and tape that covered punctures where her IV ports had been. The steady ache in her throat served as an unpleasant reminder of the nasogastric tube, but she found the discomfort easy to ignore.

Becky donned the scrub bottoms a nurse had supplied on her ride down from the eighth floor to the fourth, leaving the floral-patterned hospital johnny for a top.

“What if she’s not even there?” Becky said as she and Zach raced along the glass walkway connecting the Mendon Building to the main hospital. “They could be anywhere. We don’t know if they’re even in the hospital.”

“We’re going to find them,” Zach said reassuringly. As proof, he gestured to the chaotic scene swarming outside the locked doors to the BHU. The bedlam involved dozens of security personnel, along with orderlies, Boston Police, nurses, and doctors, all of whom had assembled with startling rapidity, crowding the narrow hallway. Radios crackled. Phones rang. Voices rose above the din. Becky heard sirens blaring outside and watched with widening eyes as the commotion intensified. The noise was utterly disorienting, enough that the room began to spin.

Without warning, a blue tide of police moved toward the stairwell with frenzied purpose. Uniformed officers danced in and out of her field of vision, but nobody recognized her as the mother of the missing girl until Detective Spence gripped her shoulder forcefully.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “We’ll handle this.”

Becky thought she saw Detective Capshaw in front of his partner, both men in blazers, not blues.

Zach waited until the two detectives were out of sight before he pulled Becky into the stairwell into which they had vanished. He kept a tight grip on her hand as they ascended one floor after the other. The stairs were cacophonous with shouting, the echo of fast-moving footsteps, and the click of gun holsters unsnapping.