“Hey, Dad, I saw you called, what’s-”
“Where are you?”
Nick barked into the phone at the same time he jumped up from his desk. He glanced down the hall either way before closing the door and drawing the blind across the little window in the middle.
In the past six hours he’d called Ryan exactly twenty-seven times. Every time it went to voicemail he wanted to scream. He’d made some of those calls out front, behind the registration desk, outside a patient bay. The effort to keep his face neutral, smiling even, as the phone rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and clicked over to Hi, it’s Ryan Castro, I’ve missed your call, leave a message at the beep had drained him. Of energy. Of emotion. Of soul. By midafternoon he’d claimed a migraine and retreated to his office. Ellen, that beautiful angel, was out there playing interference for him.
For today, they only had each other.
As he sat down on the couch he could sense Ryan’s offense at being immediately yelled at. A near-silence, punctuated only by sharp breaths through the nose.
“I was at work,” she said, her voice cold. “At the Lodge. Where I always-”
“Where you inside?”
“What?”
“Did you go inside at all?”
“No! I’ve been out on the lake all day, that’s why I couldn’t answer my damn phone.”
The relief he felt was nothing. Like trying to scratch an itch with a brief touch of silk. It wasn’t enough that she hadn’t been inside today.
“Dad, what’s going on? You’re sort of freaking me out.”
Nick held the phone away from his mouth as he took a long, deep breath. The air came into his lungs, transferred oxygen and carbon dioxide, and slowly seeped out. No congestion. No struggling.
“Over the past week, have you had any contact with someone staying at the Lodge named Hazel Augustine?”
He didn’t need to look at her chart for the name. It was burned into his brain.
“Hazel? Yeah, of course. She loves the lake, she was out here every day. Haven’t seen her in a few days, though. Why? Dad? Hello?”
Nick was once again holding the phone away from his face. This time to hide the sob that had tried to claw its way out of his throat. He squinted his eyes shut and tried to breath with hitching.
Disengage. Not family. Not your daughter. Stranger. Patient. Turn it off. To get through it, you have to turn it off.
The lake…
The thought finally gave Nick the push to put himself together. He wiped at his nose before putting the phone to his ear, where Ryan was practically hysterical.
“Ryan…Ryan…” he said, trying to cut through the frenzied questions. “Ryan, listen to me. Did you ever see Hazel inside the Lodge?”
“I…what the fuck is going on?”
“Just…think about it and answer the question. This is very important. Did you ever see Hazel inside the Lodge?”
A few seconds of silence.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, is it ‘no’ or is it ‘I don’t think so?’”
“No! It’s no. I don’t actually go inside much, actually. All my equipment is in a shed out by the lake.”
“What about eating? Going to the bathroom?”
“I eat in the shed, otherwise people staying at the Lodge keep coming up to me with questions. And there’s a separate bathroom for outside, so people can go without tracking mud across the lobby. If I really thought about it, I haven’t been inside the Lodge in…over a month, probably.”
That sob finally managed to escape, exploding from his mouth as he hung himself over his knees. Relief, true relief, threatened to pull every last bit of tension from his cells. He was seconds away from passing out.
“Dad? You’re really scaring me. What’s this about? Should I come-”
“No!” He quickly sat up, the room spinning around him. “No, don’t come here. Are you home now? Good. Stay there. Call out of work for the rest of the week. At least. Listen…are you sitting down? Maybe do that. Grab a drink. I…I need to tell you something.”
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 