CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Rachel woke up the following morning and decided to play things out as normally as possible. The first thing she did when she stirred awake at 6:10 was check her texts and emails. She saw that Jack had indeed texted her around one in the morning. And, as she expected, there was nothing in Stephen Ayer’s house to suggest that he had been killing terminally ill patients who had been seeking help from Life Fulfilled.
The text read: Found some questionable emails from female patients and a few memberships to fetish porn sites. Becka’s prints on the doorframe to the basement and her hairs all over the place but nothing to link Ayer to our case. Will touch base tomorrow.
Realizing that their case was very much still open, Rachel placed her plan firmly aside as she went downstairs. She put coffee on and started making a breakfast of pancakes and eggs. As the first batch of pancakes stiffened on the griddle, Grandma Tate joined her in the kitchen, with Paige coming down ten minutes later.
“You haven’t cooked breakfast in forever,” Paige said as she delightedly poured syrup on her pancakes.
“I wouldn’t say forever,” Rachel said. “But yeah…it’s been a while. And if it’s okay with Grandma Tate, I think I’d like to take you to school this morning, too.”
“Oh, yay!” she said, shoveling syrup-soaked pancake into her mouth.
“Now, you make sure you get some eggs, too,” Rachel said. “Eat up. I’m going to drag Grandma Tate into the living room for a second, okay? Don’t choke on those pancakes. Chew. Don’t swallow them whole.”
Paige giggled, a little trickle of syrup running down her chin. Rachel stood up from the table with her coffee in hand and waved Grandma Tate to follow her. Rachel didn’t bother sitting, as she didn’t expect to spend much time going over what she had on her mind. She glanced back into the kitchen to make sure Paige wasn’t trying to eavesdrop before starting.
“I wanted to run this by you,” Rachel said, “because I think you deserve to know what’s going on. You were right yesterday…on just about everything. I feel like I may be taking you for granted and that’s not fair.”
“Rachel, all I was—”
“Hold on a second. Let me finish. I just wanted to let you know that I am going to head out this morning after I take Paige to school. But I’m not going out with Jack. While it is related to the case, it’s sort of on an unofficial scale. And unless something drastic comes up, I should be back in plenty of time to be here when Paige gets home.”
“I appreciate all of that, Rachel. But really, you don’t need to fill me in to that level.”
“I think I really do,” she said. “You’ve been an enormous help here ever since Peter left. I don’t know how I would have survived it all without your help.”
“As long as you try to take care of yourself and are now at least considering going after this thing,” she said, softly tapping the side of Rachel’s head, “I’m glad to do it. Now, let’s get back in there. The little one is trying to listen in, I think.”
Rachel nodded and blinked back tears as she went back into the kitchen. She checked her watch and said, “Fifteen minutes, Paige.”
“Okay,” she said, sliding her last bite of pancake through a little pond of syrup on her plate. “I just have to brush my teeth and I’ll be ready.”
Rachel sat back down at the table and had her own pancake. She ate and sipped on her coffee and started to think about the best way to go about enacting the small plan she’d been working out in her head since last night.
***
It did Rachel a world of good to realize just how excited Paige was to have her mother taking her to school. After sitting in the drop-off lane for about ten minutes, Rachel received a big hug and a wet kiss on the cheek before Paige got out and headed into the school building. Rachel wondered if every parent had the odd pain of watching their child enter a school—a feeling of pride but also of profound sadness.
It clung to her as she pulled away from the school and headed in the direction of downtown. Before she arrived at her destination, she thought she had a decent idea of how to pull off her plan without getting into any real trouble. And while the news of her tumor may become wider knowledge when she was done, she thought she could probably play it off as a bit of theatrics—something she had to make up in order to get the job done.
She pulled her car along the side of the curb in front of Life Fulfilled at 8:52. The signage on the front door told her that office hours didn’t start until nine, so she sat in her car for those eight minutes, putting the pieces together. She supposed that Jack must be feeling an odd sort of victory this morning, if he was awake yet. While she was still convinced that Stephen Ayer wasn’t their killer, they’d manage to nab a killer anyway, and that was always a good feeling. She thought about texting him to check in, but didn’t want to interfere with his morning. If his text had come in after one in the morning, there was no telling when he’d finally managed to get to sleep.
Several minutes later, a woman came to the door from inside and unlocked it. Not wanting to jump the gun, Rachel remained in her car, making sure she was still comfortable with what she had planned. As she waited, she watched as a man of about forty or so walked into the offices. Rachel watched through the window as the woman at the front desk greeted him with a smile.
After another few minutes, Rachel got out of the car and finally went inside. The same woman at the counter smiled at her but it wasn’t genuine. Rachel figured she was probably good and tired of seeing her.
“Agent Gift, right?” the woman asked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Something else we can do for you?”
“Maybe so. So, we now strongly believe that the killer we’re after somehow has access to your waiting list. And while we have the names and addresses, thanks to your cooperation, I was rather hoping that I could talk to a few of them. But instead of going down the list one by one—which would take a considerable amount of time—I was hoping you may be able to point me to a few that seem a little more hopeful than the others.”
The question seemed to baffle the woman at first, but Rachel barely noticed. Instead, she was hung up on her own revelation. She was starting to understand that she personally needed to speak with those people—not for the case, but because of her own needs and internal struggles. She was one of them, whether she wanted to admit it or not. And now, on the cusp of agreeing to an experimental treatment with Dr. Emerson, she needed the encouragement.
“Well, I can only base what I know about our clients on my brief experiences with them as they check in and when I speak to them on the phone. If you need something deeper, you’d need to speak with some of our doctors or therapists.”