Crystal Gardens (41 page)

“I should have known this wasn’t going to work out,” she said into the silence. “Not like I wasn’t warned.”

It took ten minutes, not fifteen, to gather up her personal possessions and dump them into a cardboard box. Carl was waiting at the door. He looked unhappy.

“I’m really sorry about this, Miss Bonner,” he said. “It’s been nice having you here. The patients all like you. So do I. Things seem more cheerful and sunnier here when you’re around.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Carl, but Dr. Oakford is right. It’s best that I leave. I don’t belong here.”

Carl cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose you happen to have any more of that tea that you blended for me, do you?”

“Not here in the office, but I’ll mix up another batch and send it to you.”

Carl brightened. “Thanks, I appreciate that.”

Five minutes later she was alone on the street, the cardboard box containing her things tucked under one arm, her purse slung over her shoulder. The low, dark clouds opened up as she walked quickly toward the bus stop. Naturally she would get caught in the rain without an umbrella today, she thought. Some days were just flat-out unharmonic from start to finish.

The cold, sleeting rain plastered her tightly pinned hair to her head and soaked her new, low-heeled black pumps. The shoes would be ruined. Not that it mattered, she told herself. No one wore black low-heeled pumps on Rainshadow. Boots—athletic shoes and sandals were the norm there. And she just happened to own a new pair of boots.

She waited for the bus, chilled to the bone but aware that she felt a lot better now that she was away from the Chapman Clinic.

She would survive the rain and the loss of the job. What mattered was that she would never again find herself alone in a therapy room with Marcus Lancaster. Because she was quite certain it was no coincidence that he had manipulated the situation so that they had wound up together today. If she remained on the staff at the clinic he would
manipulate things to ensure that there would be more such encounters. She knew that as surely as she knew the Principles.

Another shiver of apprehension swept through her. Rainshadow was Plan B, but the thought of returning to the island made her uneasy. Something had happened to her the last time she was—something unnerving. Twelve hours of her life had vanished.

She had gone into a psychic fugue late one afternoon and wandered into the forbidden territory of the Preserve. Somehow she had not only survived the night in the dangerous woods, she had done what most people who knew the island considered almost impossible—she had managed to find her way out of the Preserve.

She had emerged at dawn the following morning but she had no memories of the night.

She had, however, collected some souvenirs along the way—dark dreams that now haunted her sleep, the faint memory of ethereal music being played somewhere in the night and a handful of rainstones.