Bone weary, she tried to clear her head and concentrate on getting home.
Tonight traffic was light, the roads nearly clear of snow, though a few crystals shimmered as the moonlight pierced the thin cloud cover. Watching the play of light, Kacey was thinking about the women who had recently died when she spied a still-open coffee kiosk less than ten miles from the outskirts of Grizzly Falls.
Pulling in, she rolled down her window and ordered a skinny decaffeinated latte from a woman who looked dead on her feet. The Christmas spirit was missing at the kiosk, despite the string of winking colored lights decorating the windows, stencils of snowflakes on the glass, and an advertisement for a Santa’s Cinnamon Blend Latte.
Waiting in her darkened car, she hoped the steaming milk would coat her stomach, and she accepted the hot cup gratefully, leaving a tip. Showing the barest of smiles, the barista shut the window, then turned off the neon open sign.
Kacey tasted the hot drink, hoping to warm herself up from the inside out. No amount of adjusting the temperature in her little SUV had been able to ease the chill that had settled in her soul when she’d learned the truth.
As she was starting to pull out of the gravel, she saw fast-approaching headlights and, holding out her cup from her body, hit the brakes. Her SUV ground to a stop at the edge of the road as a big dark truck s
ped past. Her coffee slopped a little bit onto her lid.
For a split second she remembered the pickup with the big grille, the one that had put the dent in her back fender, and the driver Grace Perchant had referred to as “evil.”
Kacey shook that off, still frozen in position. She brought her cup back and sucked up the overflow of coffee.
Grace wasn’t reliable.
She thought she could talk to ghosts or something.
And this was Montana, where pickups reigned.
For a split second she thought about giving chase, checking to see if the big rig had out-of-state plates with a three or an eight in the lettering. Then Trace called about Eli. All of her thoughts turned to the boy.
She made it into town in a little over twenty minutes and pulled into the empty parking lot of the clinic. This side of the building was shadowed and dark, only weak light from the streetlight at the front of the clinic offering any kind of illumination.
She left her finished coffee in the cup holder, locked her car and walked to the back door, where she let herself in with her key and reached for the light switch.
Click!
But nothing happened.
She hit it again, but the rooms remained dark, not even the few security lamps glowing. And it was colder than usual in the offices.
The damned circuit breaker!
She’d like to wring her lowlife, tightwad of a landlord’s neck! How many times had she complained, even ordering out an electrician once herself?
“Great,” she muttered.
She knew the layout of the offices, of course, and she had a flashlight in her desk drawer, so she worked her way through the back hallway and past the examination rooms, which somehow appeared dangerous and slightly sinister, the odd shapes of the equipment looming like robotic monsters and sending her already vivid imagination into overdrive.
It’s just the damned lights.
Fingers running along one wall, she eased past the exam rooms and around the corner. She stubbed her toe on the edge of the freestanding scales, then bit her tongue to keep from letting out a yowl.
She did, however, curse under her breath.
All the electronic equipment, the phones and fax machines and computers, usually gave off a bit of light from the buttons, which reminded the users that they were plugged in and waiting, but no little green or blue lights glowed. The rabbit warren of rooms was completely and utterly dark, save for those rooms with windows, where the faint light from the streetlamps slid through the slats of the windows and striped the floors and opposing walls with thin, watery illumination.
The place was creepier than she expected, but with only a little trouble, she found the door to her office and pushed it open. Her eyes had adjusted to the semidark, and she made her way to her desk and opened the second of a stack of drawers to her right, her fingers delving into the dark space where she kept extra supplies.
The tips of her fingers touched the ridged handle of the flashlight, and she only prayed that the batteries weren’t dead. With a click, she turned on the weak beam, which was just enough to help guide her to the mechanical closet, where the main switch had flipped.
Weird.
Usually the switch to the outlets in the front office would snap off, but the rest of the rooms were unaffected. Then again, this old wiring probably hadn’t been up to code since the Kennedy administration.