Read Hedging (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery) for Free Online

closed her eyes. Yes, she would rest. Her breath became slow and deep. She opened her mind to her thoughts. And as they swirled, she gave each thought value, even those that frightened her. When she finished her meditation, for this is what it was, and she recognized that she was comfortable with the process, she understood what she had to do.
    The dinner trays were delivered at five o’clock. Mushroom barley soup and stewed cod with rice and vegetables. She saved the saltines and wrapped the roll in napkins. She would need them later. While she ate the bland food, she turned the pages of the book on dogs. Her whole existence was uncertain, but she knew she owned a dog.
    After dinner, she closed the book on the photo and description of the Labrador retriever and strolled down the hallway to the nurse’s station.
    A nurse called Lucy sat yawning at a desk in a small glass-fronted room off the station doing paper work. The one at the station was on the telephone. She looked up. “Do you need anything, Mary Lou?”
    “No. Just getting some exercise.” They both looked tired; their shift changed at ten o’clock. She’d watched and clocked them, not yet certain how it would work. The great escape.
    When they came around with the sleeping pill, she took it without protest, slipping it to the side of her mouth, and then into a tissue as soon as the door closed.
    All she had to do now was wait until the lights in the corridor were dimmed and the footfalls of both patients and staff ceased and the uneasy institutional night settled in.
    There was a script for this. She’d seen it in movies. You take the extra pillows and blankets from the closet and shape a body, drawing the covers around it. In the dark it looks like a sleeper.
    She didn’t know what time it was when she opened the door a crack. Time here was not real anyway. The corridor both ways was empty. No one was at the nurses’ station. No one. She knew Lucy usually hit the bathroom before she went off her shift.
    A dark blue down jacket was hanging from the back of a chair in the small office. “Sorry, Lucy.” She put it on. She needed it more than Lucy did right now. There were gloves in one pocket and a woolen ski cap in the other. And a wallet. The moral dilemma held her for only a moment. She took the cash—sixty dollars—and the MetroCard. That was all. It was bad enough she was stranding Lucy without a coat.
    But she had no choice. Her life was in danger. If she lived, she would find some way to make it up to Lucy.
    Down the hall to the elevators. Total quiet here. She pressed the down button, pulled the knit cap over her ears. If she made it to the lobby without seeing anyone, she’d be home free, or at the least, on the street. She had no thought of anything else, otherwise she might have wondered what she would do on upper Madison Avenue late at night without a place to go. Or maybe even if her loss of memory, her trauma, had made her so paranoid that she wasn’t thinking straight.
    The street was a wide, white ribbon in spite of the occasional car and the surreal lights of a bus heading uptown. Snow reeled lazily in the wind, dazzling her eyes, fuzzing the light from the street lamp, the night crystal like frozen tears. The gloves were wool and stretched to fit her hands.
    She started walking. Some coffee shops were open twenty-four hours, but where? Bus and train stations. Grand Central Station. She would wait out the night over a cup of coffee and maybe by daylight she would have a plan.
    She hurried along Madison Avenue, passing only a few pedestrians, some protected by umbrellas, all with heads down against the icy wind and snow. It would be safer, she thought, to cross over to Lexington on Eighty-sixth Street at this time of night. That gave her pause. Her real life was definitely here in New York. She was familiar enough with the city to think of Grand Central Station and to know that the bus went downtown on Lexington. Maybe things would begin