“Yes,” Charlotte said, stifling a yawn. “You find her again?”
“We did,” Michael said. “And well, the thing is, we’ve brought her back.”
“To the base?”
“To life.”
Charlotte just stood there, idly scratching the side of her face with the back of her fingernails. “What’d you just say?”
“She’s alive. Sleeping Beauty is awake, and she’s alive.”
From the look on her face, Michael guessed that she did think it was a joke, and a bad one, to boot.
“You woke me up for this?” she said. “Because I’ve just had a very rough day and—”
“—I’m telling you the truth. It’s for real.” He stared her straight in the eye, so that she could see not only that he was sincere, but that he also wasn’t suffering from the Big Eye. That this was the real deal.
“I don’t know what you’re up to,” Charlotte said, dropping her resistance, “but you’ve got me up now. Where is this phenomenon?”
“Next door—in the infirmary.”
Michael got out of her way as she went next door, rolling from side to side, still a bit groggy. Lawson, standing around in the waiting area like an expectant father in a maternity ward, said nothing as Charlotte entered the examining room with Michael close behind.
Eleanor was laid out on the table, like a body on a bier, her hands folded across her bosom. The orange down coat was thrown on a chair. She was wearing a long, old-fashioned gown, dark blue, with a white brooch fastened on her breast. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. She was breathing weakly through her open mouth.
And Michael could see that Charlotte was—quite suddenly—waking up.
Get a grip, was the first thing Charlotte told herself.
This young woman—whoever she was—sure as hell did look like that woman Charlotte had been allowed to glimpse in the ice.
“She collapsed an hour ago,” Michael was saying, “when we tried to get her to leave the old church at the whaling station.”
The whaling station? The old, abandoned whaling station? This girl—what was she, maybe nineteen or twenty years old?—lying here in the antique clothes? None of it was making any sense at all. Charlotte swore to think twice before ever taking Xanax again. She took the woman’s wrist and felt for a pulse. It was steady but feeble, though her fingers felt like frozen fish sticks.
“Her name, by the way, is Eleanor Ames.”
Charlotte looked down at her face—a beautiful face that reminded her of nineteenth-century portraits she’d seen hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago. The features were delicate and refined, the eyebrows thin and arched, but the overall effect was oddly ethereal and unreal, as if she was in fact looking at a portrait, or a lovingly created waxwork. Something that wasn’t quite real.
Focus, Charlotte thought. Just focus on doing your job. Don’t get distracted by all the other stuff you can’t make sense of yet. It was a lesson she’d learned, over and over again, in the ER.
“Eleanor,” she said, leaning close, “can you hear me?”
The eyelids fluttered.
“I’m Dr. Barnes. Charlotte Barnes.” She glanced over at Michael. “She speaks English?”
Michael nodded vigorously. “She is English.”
Charlotte took a second to absorb this, too. “Can you open your eyes for me?”
Eleanor’s head turned slightly on the headrest, and her eyes opened. She looked up at Charlotte with a confused expression, her gaze fluttering to the reindeer prancing across the sweater, then back to her broad face.