They got there in less than half an hour.
After making it abundantly clear to Donovan that this was against her better judgment, that he needed to go to the hospital- now — Rachel brought her car around and used her considerable driving skills to get them there in record time.
No doubt about it. He was gonna have to marry this woman.
Despite the ordeal he’d just been through, Donovan felt surprisingly good, thanks in part to sheer willpower, an abundance of hope, and the adrenaline Wong had pumped into his veins.
There were only a few scattered cars in Saint Margaret’s parking lot. They took the elevator to the second floor, and when the doors opened, Donovan was relieved to see that Nurse Baker had not returned. Instead, a lone nineteen-year-old was manning the nurses’ station.
“Sara Gunderson,” he said. “What room?”
The nurse looked at him as if he were something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe. “I’m sorry. Are you family?”
Donovan frowned and flashed his credentials. “Just take us to the goddamn room.”
Looking flustered, the nurse came out from behind the counter. “Follow me,” she muttered, and headed down a hallway.
A moment later she led them through a doorway into a small, dank room, a single bed against the wall, surrounded by a collection of medical equipment, including a ventilator.
The woman on the bed did not even remotely resemble Sara Gunderson. She looked like ninety pounds of nothing. A sickly old woman on the brink of death.
But it was Sara all right. Eyes closed, chest rising and falling to the wheezy beat of the ventilator.
Donovan looked around, surprised not by what he saw-but what he didn’t see. His stomach lurched.
“The window,” he said. “Where’s the window?”
The nurse studied him, clearly confused by the question. “She… doesn’t have one. This is a converted storeroom.”
“How long has she been in here?”
“Sir, if-”
“How long?”
The nurse flinched. “Ever since she was admitted. Why?”
Donovan glanced at Rachel, feeling the ground beneath him roll. Overcome by a sudden, intense despair, he found a chair and sat, the nurse eyeing him with a mix of distrust and concern.
“Are you okay, sir?”
“Get out,” he spat.
“Sir, I’m not sure what you’re-”
“Out,” he repeated. “Get out.”
Looking frightened now, the nurse turned and scurried out the door. Donovan felt Rachel looking at him and held a hand up.
“Don’t say it,” he told her. “Just let me think.”
He lowered his head and stared at the floor, studying the pattern in the linoleum. Everything he’d been through and this was where it ended?
No. There was something here he wasn’t seeing. There had to be.
The puzzle. Concentrate on the puzzle.
One word. Ten letters.
All you had to do was look out Sara’s window.
Cursing himself for being so bad at these things, he glanced up at Sara, watching her chest rise and fall. “Come on,” he said. “Help me with this.”
What had Gunderson meant? If there was no window in the room, what other kinds of windows were there? Sara’s eyes? The window to her soul?
No. Too literary for Gunderson.
Ten simple letters. What could they…
And then it hit him.
Rising, he crossed to the bed and searched the nightstand next to it, but it was littered with medical paraphernalia, nothing else.
“Come on, goddammit.”
“Jack,” Rachel said. “What’s wrong? What are you looking for?”
And then he found it, partially hidden by one of the machines, taped to the wall directly above Sara’s head.
Ten letters.
Photograph.
A Polaroid photo he’d seen at least a half dozen times: Alexander Gunderson smiling for the camera, standing in front of the Lake Point Lighthouse.
“What is it?” Rachel asked.
Donovan ripped the photo from the wall. “Sara’s window.”
54
Hold on, Jessie.
He’s coming to get you.
…Jessie?
She struggled to open her eyes and peered into the darkness she’d grown so accustomed to.
Was that the angel’s voice she’d heard?
Had she finally come back?
The angel had left her a while ago, promising to return, but Jessie didn’t hold out much hope. She was too tired, too weak to believe anymore.
She couldn’t stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time. The cold and hunger and thirst that had consumed her those first few hours-or was it days? — had been replaced by numbness, and the places on her skin that had been rubbed raw by the duct tape no longer hurt.
The sound of the rain was long gone, leaving nothing to connect her to the real world but the hiss of air filling her nostrils.
Then that, too, had finally gone.
Every so often, that hiss had trickled to a stop, only to kick into gear again, pumping fresh new air.
But this last time, nothing…
Only silence.
And as that silence stretched out longer and longer, she began to realize that all that was left to her was the air in this box. Air that was thick with feces and urine and stale body odor.
Air that smelled like death.
Shaking her head from side to side, she had managed to dislodge the mask just enough to allow her to breathe. But each breath she took seemed harder than the one before it, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she’d be unable to fill her lungs.
Like the angel, Jessie Glass-Half-Full had abandoned her. And the funny thing was, she didn’t have enough energy to care.
She thought of her father, frantically searching for her. Thought of Mr. Ponytail’s wicked smile and Matt Weber’s championship rear end and her mother and Roger doing it in their hotel room in the Caymans-and it all seemed so distant to her. So silly.
So many things in her life seemed pointless now that she was about to take her last breath.