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If she didn’t ask whether I’d done something to Brie, it meant one of two things. It could mean she had faith in me, that she believed I wasn’t the kind of man who’d murder his wife. Or it might mean she was fearful I’d provide an answer she didn’t want to hear.
Anyway, she was looking like she was ready to break her silence.
She took a sip of her coffee, set the mug down, then linked her fingers together so tightly they looked like they might snap. She rested her hands on the table and looked right at me.
“I’m pregnant,” Jayne said.
Sixteen
By the time Isabel McBain emerged from the hospital and ran out to the parking lot, the woman was gone.
That moment when the woman had looked up at Isabel and her brother and her husband, grouped together in the window of their mother’s hospital room, and waved, changed everything.
A stranger wouldn’t have waved. A stranger wouldn’t have recognized them. A stranger would have assumed they were looking at something else and not her.
But Brie would have spotted them for who they were.
Brie would have waved.
“Oh my God!” Isabel had shouted, no longer thinking to whisper as her mother lay sleeping. “Oh my God!” she’d said a second time.
And then she had started running, pushing Norman and Albert out of her way. She raced from the room and down the hospital corridor to the elevator. She pressed the down button, but after five seconds she no longer had the patience to wait. She spotted the sign for the stairwell and dashed off in that direction, with her husband and brother right behind her.
She scurried down the stairs, not quite coordinated enough to jump every other step, but she made good time just the same. When she emerged from the stairwell and into the hospital lobby it took a moment to get her bearings, having zigged and zagged her way down to the ground floor, not sure which way to go to exit the building and reach the lot.
“This way,” said Albert, who’d reached the lobby half a second behind her.
The three of them emerged from the building and circled around to the parking lot, but there was no one there.
At least, not the woman they had seen waving to them.
“Are you sure this is the right lot?” a breathless Isabel asked.
“This is it,” Norman said. “There’s the red Corvette.”
“Where is she?” she asked. “She couldn’t just disappear into thin air!”
Albert looked back, and up, at the building. “There’s Mom’s room right there. This is the spot. This is where she was.”
Isabel nodded. Norman appeared miffed, as if she needed assurance from her brother over him.
She spun around, scanning. “This is insane. Where did she go?”
“It did take us a couple of minutes to get down here,” Albert said, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees as he struggled to get his wind back. “That’s enough time to run away or get in a car or God knows what.”
“Let’s split up,” Norman said urgently. “I’ll go that way, you guys head down the sidewalk in different directions, meet back here in a couple of minutes.”
Isabel didn’t need a second opinion from Albert. “Okay.”
They fanned out. And, as Norman had suggested, they regrouped a few minutes later. No one had spotted the woman.
“I didn’t believe … I didn’t believe it was her,” Isabel said. “I didn’t think it was possible, not until … not until she waved.”
“I know,” Albert said. “I mean, it could have been her, but it could have been a lot of people who looked a bit like her. But when she spotted us … Christ. It was like she knew who we were. Like she recognized us.”
Isabel was starting to look unsteady on her feet. Norman and Albert flanked her, each taking an arm, in case she suddenly fainted.
Crying, she said, “Oh God, could she really be alive?”
