Maryse ignored the icy fear in her stomach and tried to slam down the cover on the file before Helena could see the horrible word on the test sheets. But she wasn’t fast enough. Helena sucked in a breath and looked at her, her eyes wide.
“Oh my God,” Helena said finally, her voice barely a whisper. “I thought maybe an unexpected pregnancy or some other nonsense that your generation is usually up to. I never thought for a minute…”
Maryse opened the file again and began to scan every page. The pages were all crisp, clean, and neat—so passive resting there, totally belying the information they contained.
“Are the results there?” Helena asked.
Maryse finished looking through the file and closed it. “No, only the request for the tests. But that wasn’t the first one. There have been four others, all over the last three years.”
Helena gave her a shrewd look. “But the others turned out okay, right? That’s probably why Sabine never told you anything. She probably figured this one would be the same as the others.”
Maryse looked over at Helena, her mind racing with the awful thought of a life without her best friend. “But what if she’s wrong? What if this time is the one? More than once a year is an awful lot of times to think someone might have cancer. Doctors don’t usually jump to that conclusion. And why now, right when I feel like I’m so close to discovering the secret and can’t even get into the bayou to work?” She gave Helena a determined look. “This changes everything. My life isn’t the only one at stake anymore.”
Helena gave her a solemn look. “I promise, Maryse, I will do everything within my power to see that this turns out all right for everyone.”
Maryse nodded, not even wanting to think about Helena’s meager power. If only she could make Helena visible to the bad guys, maybe she could distract them with her wild wardrobe changes.
Maryse sighed. The earnest look on Helena’s face let her know right away that she was sincere in her promise, if not entirely adequate to do the job, and Maryse didn’t have the heart to point out her shortcomings. Not at that moment, anyway. “Let’s get out of here,” Maryse said. “We’ve already pushed our luck far enough.”
Maryse had just replaced Helena’s file when she heard a jangle of keys outside the record’s room door. “Holy shit,” she hissed, and Helena stared at her in alarm. “Don’t just stand there,” Maryse said, waving her arms at Helena. “Figure out a way to stop them from coming in here.”
“How?” Helena’s eyes were wide with fright.
“I don’t know,” Maryse said, and dove under the desk. “But you need to come up with something in a hurry.”
Maryse peered through a narrow crack in one side of the desk, watching Helena hustle toward the door just as it swung open and someone entered. A second later, the lights came on and Maryse squinted, trying to focus in the bright glare. As her eyes adjusted, Maryse made out a nurse walking across the room toward the desk.
Helena vainly tried to knock items over in her path and finally resorted to jumping in front of her, but the nurse passed right through her continuing on her task. And it looked like that task was taking her, straight to Maryse’s hiding place. When the nurse was a foot or so from the desk, Helena really turned up the volume. Only problem was, no one could hear her but Maryse.
Wailing like a banshee, Helena pummeled the nurse with invisible fists and feet that never connected with their mark. Oh, but she’d managed another costume change and was now wearing long, bright purple boxing shorts with a neon green muscle shirt and swinging at the nurse with a pair of black boxing gloves. Apparently, something had gone wrong in the change, however, and instead of the new Nikes, she was back in the old pink pumps.
Maryse shook her head and almost hoped she’d get caught. Jail had to be better than this. Just as she thought the nurse would swing around the desk and discover her hiding spot, the woman turned and walked down a row of the shelves. Maryse let out a breath and sucked it back in again until the nurse returned from the row and made her way back out of the room, securing the door behind her.
“Are you still breathing?” Helena leaned down to look underneath the desk.
“I’m not sure,” Maryse said as she crawled out from her hiding spot. “Ask me again in a minute.” Maryse brushed some dust off her pants legs and looked back at Helena, who was still wearing the boxing outfit. “What’s up with the shoes?”
Helena threw up her gloves in exasperation. “Hell if I know. I hope this isn’t going to happen often. I’d hate to see a mixed combination of everything I’ve worn since my death each time I try to change clothes.”
“Well, at least take off those gloves. You look ridiculous.”
Helena glared, then focused on her hands, a wrinkle of concentration forming across her forehead.
Nothing.
She relaxed for a moment, took a deep breath and focused again.
Nothing.
Maryse groaned. “Forget it. You can figure it out later. Let’s just get the hell out of here before the nurse comes back.”
Helena stomped through the wall of the record’s room, then stuck her head back inside. “It’s clear. We can make a run for it.”
Maryse nodded. “Good.” She eased open the door and stepped into the hall, locking the door behind her. She had just started down the hallway toward the employee exit when Helena yelled, “She’s coming back. Run!”
Run? How was she supposed to do that without making any noise? She yanked off her shoes and ran as fast as possible down the hall, slipping her way across the cold, hard tile. She could hear the clacking of heels behind her and knew Helena wasn’t far behind. She rounded the corner to the employee exit and stopped for a moment to peer back around, using a medical cart that was positioned at the corner to hide her face.
Helena was huffing down the hall as fast as her heels would allow, which wasn’t exactly setting speed records compared to the nurse about twenty feet behind her wearing those white tennis-looking shoes that they all wear. Maryse spun away from the corner and dashed toward the employee exit. Helena could fend for herself. It wasn’t like anyone could see her anyway.
Maryse had just unlocked the exit door and was about to edge through when Helena rounded the corner and hit the medical cart, sending all of the contents flying down the hall. Maryse let the door close with a bang and ran across the parking lot, waving her sneakers like an idiot and hoping like hell Luc was paying attention.
Apparently, he was on high alert, because the car started immediately, then raced across the parking lot, headlights off. He screeched to a stop beside her and she jumped in and yelled, “Let’s go!”
Luc tore out of the parking lot without question, and Maryse turned around, kneeling over the front seat, her eyes fixed on the employee exit door. Sure enough, the nurse burst out of it as soon as they hit the parking lot exit. Helena came barreling behind the nurse and knocked her clear to the ground as she ran out the door.
“What about Helena?” Luc asked, watching the fiasco in the rearview mirror.
“We’ll wait for her at the gas station down the road. There’s no way I’m taking a chance on getting caught here. After all, no one can see her.”
Maryse turned around and slid down into the passenger seat. “We can stop at the Texaco at the end of the street. I need a cold beer anyway.”
Luc frowned. “You shouldn’t drink while you’re taking pain medication.”
Maryse waved a hand in the air in dismissal. “I’m not taking those pills, and besides, there’s not a painkiller strong enough to cover what I’ve been through tonight.”
Luc looked in the rearview mirror once more. “That bad, huh?”
Maryse slumped in her seat, her entire body aching from all the running. “I don’t think a beer is going to cover it, either.”
Luc smiled. “Jack Daniels with a shot of cyanide?”
“Only if you make it a double.”
Maryse had downed one beer and was seriously contemplating a second when Helena rounded the corner at the gas station. She was still wearing the gloves and apparently hadn’t had any success in the shoes department, either. The only switch was her top, which had reverted back to the polyester suit jacket, but it was layered on top of the neon green muscle shirt. Put together with the purple shorts, it was a nightmare of monumental proportions.
Luc took one look at her and spit his soda on the ground, his face contorted in agony, and Maryse knew he’d taken as much soda up the nose as he’d put onto the pavement.
“What the heck happened?” Luc finally managed.
“Apparently, Helena is having a bit of a wardrobe malfunction,” Maryse replied. “Don’t even ask how she got that way. She can’t tell you.” Maryse turned to Helena and glared. “And why did you have to pick running out of the hospital as the time to figure out how to touch things? Are you trying to get us caught?”
“Do you think I was trying to turn that damned cart over? If I wanted for it to happen, it never would have. Then that nurse with an ass as wide as a barn had to get in front of me on my way out the door and it happened again. But can I get these things off?” She shook the gloves again. “No, that would be far too convenient.”
The throbbing in Maryse’s head began to amplify. “Let’s just get back to the hotel,” she told Luc. “I have some research to do on Mildred’s computer.”
Safely back at the hotel, Luc tried to insist that Maryse go straight to bed. Maryse had worked to hide the fact that her head was killing her, but she figured it showed on her face plain as day. Luc finally convinced her to take half of a pain pill, and after fifteen minutes or so, she started to feel a bit more human.
Normally, she would have thought that anyone taking Vicodin after drinking beer probably wasn’t in the best condition to research the chemical makeup of prescriptions drugs, but Maryse didn’t feel the least bit out of it. Maybe all the stress had worn off any chance of a buzz. It figured. The only good side effect was that the issues with her head had completely distracted her from her carnal thoughts of Luc.
She glanced over at his perfectly formed butt, tightly clad in faded jeans.
Well, almost completely.
She tore her gaze away from the Adonis of asses and plopped down into Mildred’s office chair. Then she pointed at the door. “I can’t work with you two underfoot.”
Luc frowned but didn’t say a word. After checking every window in the office and securing the latches—again—he perched outside the door and sent Helena outside to patrol the perimeter of the hotel. She didn’t look particularly pleased with her assignment, especially as she was still wearing the pumps, but couldn’t exactly argue since Luc strolling around the hotel at two A.M. would have looked a bit suspicious.
When her self-imposed bodyguards left the room, Maryse logged onto the Internet and began her research. She started with the chemical makeup of the medications Helena was taking and did a quick map of the areas of the body affected by them. Then she did a search of agents that would cause a respiratory collapse in spite of the medications taken, but without causing so much of an attack that it brought on suspicion. Last was the really fun part—figuring out how someone could have gotten their hands on one of those agents. It took a little over two hours to complete her work, and she had narrowed it down to a liquid contained in nuclear reactors and two different plants, one of which grew across almost every square inch of the preserve.
Which narrowed her suspects down to everyone in Mudbug. Again.