And still Jada smiled.
It was dark when Max woke. She glanced at the clock. She’d been out for four hours. Four hours? How could that be? It wasn’t possible. From the sill, Buzzard stared down at her with hungry yellow eyes. Not planning on passing out cold for that length of time, she hadn’t fed him before she’d fallen asleep.
Four hours. She sat up in bed, the spread slipping to her waist. It was possible. In fact, it was exactly what Bethany did. When she didn’t have to contend with her small business and couldn’t find a talk show to interest her, she’d slept her days and nights away. Except midnight to two a.m. She lived for midnight to two.
Max’s message light blinked.
Damn. The phone. She pounced on it, turned the ringer on. God, that was close, what if she’d slept right through midnight? Right, as if Bethany would let her. Still, what if one of those callers had gotten her message machine? The jig would be up. She had to be more careful, she admonished, as she erased Witt’s second message, same as the last.
“What did it mean, Max?” Cameron pushed, as usual.
“It means I’m supposed to call him.” Again, she wouldn’t return that call.
“The dream,” he snapped. “Pay attention.”
Max huffed and sat up on the edge of the bed. “I have no idea. Now leave me alone while I change this machine.” She cleared her throat and started a new message. “Hi, this is Helen. I’m dying to talk to you. Let me call you back. Please.”
“Jesus, that got me hot.”
She’d gone for the breathy, sexy sound, but now he’d embarrassed her. “Cut it out.”
“You sounded like her, you know.”
“Like Bethany?”
“Like Helen.”
“That’s not a bad thing.” Still she didn’t want to contemplate what Witt—or her boss Sunny, for that matter—would say.
“So why’s your tone defensive?”
She drummed her fingers on the plastic face of the machine. “We were talking about the dream, not my message.”
He laughed. “First you use the message to sidetrack me from the dream. Now it’s the other way around. You’re so damn transparent, and I love you for it.”
“Prunes and shale,” she whispered, pretending his words hadn’t made her eyes sting.
“Prunes and shale,” he repeated, a wealth of understanding in his matching tone.
It was the most bizarre of her dreams yet. The others, while sometimes absolutely terrifying, still contained a semblance of reality. Not this one.
“Dreams can be allegories,” Cameron went on, “sometimes even clichés. There’s a hidden meaning here.”
“Maybe I think she’s two-faced. Or two-skinned, as the case may be.”
“Prunes-n-shale.” He slurred the words together. “Doesn’t it sound familiar?”
Well, it did. Somewhat. She still couldn’t place it. “Prunes-n-shale,” she tested the sound, climbing from her bed and moving to the small refrigerator. Bethany was suddenly ravenous.
“Prunes-n-shale,” Max said as she grabbed a bag of frozen pot stickers. Not a completely unhealthy meal. Except that she’d popped the entire bag into the microwave.
“Prunes-n-shale,” she experimented with the accent on different syllables as she opened a can of cat food and plopped the whole thing on a chipped saucer for the buzzard. “Prunes-n-shale,” she chanted as she pulled her white shirt from the waistband of her slacks and started to unbutton it.
Her fingers stilled on the first button.
“Prunella Shale.”
Cameron gave a small whoop that swirled around the room.
“She was Wendy’s psychiatrist,” Max went on as if Cameron had asked. “I never talked to her, but she was on my list.” She pulled her organizer from her purse, and there, on that fateful page she’d filled out almost two months ago, was a series of names and numbers she’d copied from Wendy Gregory’s DayMinder.
Dr. Shale was the second name on the list, Prunella written in parentheses beside it. Max had learned her first name later.
“I’d be willing to bet she also works with Jada.” Forgetting everything else—except the pot stickers, Bethany would never forget the now-steaming bowl of food—Max flopped down on the edge of the bed, pulled the phone close, and dialed the number from her organizer. She got the doctor’s voicemail. She left a message saying she needed an urgent appointment, could the good doctor please call her back first thing in the morning. Please, please, please call me in the morning. She added the extra pleases to emphasize her supposed desperation. The doctor would have to call her back.
It was just shy of midnight. She might have time to finish the pot stickers before her first call of the night.
“She’s not going to tell you anything about another patient. So how’s that going to help you get closer to Jada?”
“Because anorexics move in packs. Don’t you know that?” She shoveled another pot sticker into her mouth and chewed.