Minneapolis, Minnesota
Burn victims were the worst, like fish skin left too long on the barbecue. The patient arrived sedated, rushed from the ambulance to the ER. Alice Dunbar watched the blur of blue scrubs pass as the ER nurses took possession and the paramedics surrendered control. A male nurse broke off the cavalcade to handle the paperwork; three others, all women, stayed with the patient, running the gurney toward the elevators in order to expedite delivery to the burn ward.
As the emergency room administrator, Alice could observe all this with a certain degree of detachment. She kept the health care machine working: admittance, insurance, scheduling, on-call assignments, and she attended administration meetings to convey the inherent problems, the personality conflicts, the budget overruns-all part of her daily life. The job had nothing to do with her technical expertise, but that had been the case for most of the past six years. As a former systems analyst and fraud investigator for Jamerson Ltd., a British-owned insurance underwriter, her computer skills had once proved incredibly valuable. Now those talents went unrecognized and uncompensated for, until a colleague had a problem with a PC. Alice was the unpaid computer geek of the emergency room administrative offices.
She’d chosen Minneapolis nearly at random, but in part because Garrison Keillor’s show had let her imagine that good, simple lives were lived here. A wholesome place to bring up her daughter. And also because it had a robust theater community-including Shakespeare in the Park. Of course, if WITSEC ever came looking for her, Roland Larson would concentrate on cities offering Shakespeare first. He knew this about her. He knew too much about her.
Alice had been a redhead for the past six months-a fairly convincing color given that it was out of a box. Beneath the red was natural blond. She’d tried to gain weight, but to no use-her metabolism, her nerves, burned it off as fast as she could eat. The result was a slightly gaunt look, sunken eyes, pronounced cheekbones. Unflattering, she thought. She looked a little sallow, unable to spend the time she wanted outdoors, simply because she felt safer while inside. They were out there somewhere. She never forgot about them-not for a second. Not in the shower, not on her way to sleep, not now as she worked in St. Luke’s. Anybody, anytime. This mantra had been drummed into her during WITSEC orientation. She could make friends, but she could not trust them. She could tell no one. She lived like the bubble boys on the sixth floor of this same hospital, insulated, isolated, and completely alone. Except for Penny.
“The new website is pretty cool, don’t you think?”
That was Tina, sweet Tina, who worked as her administrative assistant. Tina, whose job it was to dig them out from under the pile of paperwork, but who toiled at it like a dog digging in sand. Perfect Tina, with her perfect body, her perfect kids, and her perfect husband. There were times Alice ached to trade lives with her.
“What website?”
“The daycare,” Tina answered. “It went up over the weekend. Such cute shots! You should see you and Penny in the music circle. The two of you are adorable. And I’ll tell you something, I like that they only use first names. You know? A little extra measure of safety.”
Alice ’s ears whined, like standing too close to a jet airplane. She remembered the music circle, vaguely.
“Do you read any of the e-mail they send us?” Tina worked the keyboard of her computer, opening the website. “The coolest part of it is this…” She spun the monitor so that Alice could see.
On the screen, in a small box, Alice saw the jerky motion of kids playing, and she understood immediately that she was watching a live webcam.
“Are they insane?” Alice said, far too loudly for the small office. She dropped the pile of papers she’d been holding.
She broke into a full run as she reached the same corridor through which the burn patient had just been admitted. She felt burned as well.
Tina watched through the office’s interior window. She called out, her voice silenced by the thick glass.
Tina inadvertently left the webcam up on her computer. Five minutes later, in that same jerky, almost inhuman motion, Alice entered into frame, snatched Penny into her arms, and looked once directly at the camera, with a face so full of fear that Tina flinched and backed from the screen.