Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(24)

Lisette dealt as Josie tried to remember how to play, her ears straining for the click of the door down the hall, hoping that Sherri had the good sense to give the poor girl some privacy.

“You don’t remember how to play, do you?” Lisette broke in.

Josie gave her a sheepish smile as Lisette offered her another butterscotch candy and took her through the basics of the game. Slowly it came back to her as they played a few practice hands, before Lisette took the deck and began shuffling it again. “Now we’ll play to win,” she said.

“Don’t we need a notepad to keep track of the score?”

Lisette raised a brow. “I don’t suppose you want to take a walk back to my room to get one?”

“I don’t,” Josie said pointedly.

“You don’t have some fancy snap on that phone of yours we can use?”

“You mean app, Grandma.”

She waved one hand in the air. “Whatever. Or is it whatevs? I heard Mrs. Sole’s great-granddaughter in here the other day and she said, ‘whatevs’. Is that the new thing? Young people are too lazy to even finish saying words?”

Josie was laughing so hard it took a moment to register the commotion coming from down the hallway. Then a bloodcurdling scream sliced the air, followed by another and another, from more than one person, until it sounded like a pack of hysterical, panicked wolves howling. Josie raced into the hallway and saw a gaggle of nursing aides standing outside June’s room. Their mouths were stretched wide in horror, their faces ashen. One woman stopped screaming just long enough to be sick. Another fell to her knees and covered her eyes as more staff rushed to the door.

Josie ran for the room, the world revolving in slow motion around her. She was moving toward something terrible, she knew it, a large stone of dread pressing down hard on her center of gravity. Sherri’s cart stood untouched and unattended outside the room, June’s electronic chart aglow on its screen.

Pushing through the crowd, she made it to the threshold at last. Sherri lay on the floor near the foot of the bed, face up. Her hands lay limp on her chest. She was gone. A pool of blood spread quickly beneath her, her throat in shreds, a tiny geyser of blood still gushing from the torn flesh. Her eyes were huge and glassy, frozen. Not so much in horror or even panic. She simply looked surprised, like someone had jumped out of the closet and startled her. Your face will freeze like that. Josie’s mother’s voice rang in her ears.

She dragged her gaze to the far side of the room, where June squatted beneath the window, her naked rounded spine facing the door. The non-skid socks on her feet were thick with blood and the hem of the hospital gown swished back and forth in the crimson puddle. From where she stood, Josie could see she clutched a fork in one bloody hand, a small shard of flesh dangling from its tongs. She was doing something with the other hand. Josie couldn’t see what, but her shoulder and elbow worked at a frenzied pace, up and down, back and forth.

“Call 911,” Josie said quietly to the sobbing women at her back. “And do not come into this room.”

She took a halting step inside. Then another. Whatever June was doing, it was to the wall beneath the windows, her movement smooth and steady, her crouched body blocking Josie’s view.

A few feet from Sherri’s head lay a white foam cup at rest on its side. The lid had been removed and was still on the tray table. The water for the hot tea. She must have flung it in Sherri’s face, then gone for the jugular.

Josie sidestepped the pool of blood edging along the tile floor. Now she was close enough to see that June had written a word on the wall in Sherri’s bright, warm red blood in large streaks using her fingertips. Not a word, actually. A name.

RAMONA.





Chapter Twenty





Josie felt hollow staring down at June as she traced the R in Ramona again and again with a steady, blood-soaked hand. After everything she had been exposed to in her childhood, Josie didn’t think there was much that could shock her, but this—this was difficult to take in.

Carefully avoiding the widening swath of blood, she circled around Sherri’s body and knelt about four feet away from the girl. June didn’t look at her as she moved on to the first A in Ramona, her palm rubbing the letter into the drywall. Her chin jutted forward—in concentration or determination, Josie couldn’t tell. Maybe both.

Josie said, “June, it’s me, Detective Quinn.”

No acknowledgement. It was as if she were the only person there—not just in the room, Josie realized, but in the entire world. Her hand reached back and scooped a fresh gob of Sherri’s blood with which she began stroking the long, straight lines of the letter M.

Josie inched forward. “June, I’m only here to talk to you. Do you think you could put down the fork?”

The fork flew across the room, clattering against the wall opposite Josie and falling to the floor. The girl had reacted with such speed and nimble assurance, Josie hardly believed her eyes. She wondered how deeply hidden was the real June?

Josie swallowed. Her face felt unusually hot. “Thank you,” she said as June swept more blood into the oval shape of the letter O in a rhythmic motion.

Josie looked at the door. The nursing staff had left the doorway, likely rounding up all the residents and sheltering them in the common area. She didn’t have much time. She scooted forward a bit more and swallowed again. “June, I need to ask you something. Who is Ramona?”