Page 24 of Diagnosis Attraction

“You have a card?”

He handed her a card with his name and a phone number.

She bent it back and forth in her hand.

“I’ll call if I get a lead,” he said.

“When will the article be out?”

“I’ll let you know.”

The man left, and Cynthia looked toward the phone. Should she call Polly? Or should she just act like nothing had happened? In the end, she didn’t make the call.

Elizabeth thought that she would never have consideredherself in this helpless situation. Then she laughed because she was making up the “never in her life” part. The truth was that if she had imagined this, she didn’t know about it.

She showered and dressed and spent a restless morning flipping through TV channels.

Over two hundred channels and nothing held her interest. As she looked out the back window, her gaze roamed over Polly’s weedy garden. If she went out and worked for a few hours, at least she’d be doing something constructive.

This was one of the days Polly didn’t go to work. Or that’s what she’d told Elizabeth, who hoped the nurse hadn’t made special arrangements to stay home and watch over her.

So far, so good, Derek Lang decided. Hank Patterson, who had posed as Jack Regan, returned with valuable information.

“Elizabeth Forester is staying with a nurse who was on duty yesterday.”

Derek swung to his computer and consulted one of the many databases he had access to.

He quickly came up with the personnel files of Memorial Hospital and found out who was on the nursing staff. Next, he used a hacker program to get into the hospital work schedules and could zero in on the medical unit that had treated Forester.

A few moments later, he looked up from the computer. “There were three nurses on duty in her area. We know it’s not the Price woman. That leaves two others.” He gave Patterson the names. “You and Southwell check them out.”

When Patterson had gone, he went back to the computer. It might be good to know what doctors had been on duty, too.

Elizabeth found Polly folding laundry in the bedroom.

“I’m going to be out back, doing some yard work.”

“You don’t have to do anything like that.”

“I want to.”

“All right, dear.”

“Do you have some gardening gloves?”

“In the shed.”

Elizabeth took a plastic grocery bag from the kitchen. She could stuff weeds inside it and periodically empty the bag at the side of the shed. Then, she would ask Polly what she wanted done with the mess.

She slipped out the back and stood on the cracked concrete patio for a moment before crossing to the storage building. As soon as she stepped inside, she started thinking about what she and Matthew had been doing in there.

Banishing that intimate scene from her mind, she located the gloves and looked around at the garden. It had been laid out with several flower beds, although it seemed that Polly had lost interest in keeping the place up. But it wouldn’t take much to make it look a lot better. Elizabeth crossed to the far-right corner of the yard, got down on her knees, and began pulling at the various weeds that had invaded the flower beds. She didn’t know their names, but she knew which plantswere choking out the flowers.

She’d been working for a half hour when the back door opened. Expecting to see Polly, she looked up. Instead of the nurse, a man stood in the doorway staring at her. A man with a gun that had a strangely long barrel.

She gasped.

He gave her a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Let’s go.”

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