Simple Genius

Chapter 28

Barry walked down the hallway carrying a cardboard box. Lurking ten paces behind him was Michelle. The drop-off for mail and overnight parcels was right outside the front door.

Barry unlocked the front door with his key and headed outside. Michelle picked up her pace, reached the unoccupied foyer and ducked down behind a large potted tree.

When Barry unlocked the door and came back in, Michelle tensed. This would be tight because she didn’t have a key. With one eye on Barry and one eye on the slowly closing door, she darted out. He was less than three feet from her and never turned around, a testament to how silently she could move. As Barry disappeared around the corner, Michelle stabbed her foot inside the door to prevent it from closing. Removing her shoe she wedged it between the door and the jamb and hurried out.

It only took her a few seconds to find Barry’s package in the pile outside the building next to the mailbox. Michelle whipped out a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote down the address where the box was going. She also glanced at the sender’s name and wasn’t terribly surprised to find it wasn’t Barry’s.

“Lola Martin,” she said, reading off the sender’s name. She ducked back inside the building, grabbed her shoe and jogged back to her section of the building. She managed to distract a nurse long enough to take a peek at the patient records at the nurse’s station. Lola Martin was comfortably ensconced in the Cuckoo’s Nest, the psychotic residents of which were not known to post many packages. She ducked into the patient services center and used a telephone there to make a phone call to a buddy of hers with the Fairfax police. After she’d filled him in, he said, “How’d you score this info, Maxwell?”

“I’m, uh, working undercover.”

An hour later, Michelle went into Sandy’s empty room. The flowers were still there, but the dirt had been cleaned up off the floor. Michelle assumed that Sandy’s hands were by now spick-and-span clean too, even under the manicured nails. Michelle had never had that problem for the simple fact that she’d never had a manicure. She didn’t want anyone messing with her trigger finger.

Five minutes later, her mission accomplished, Michelle headed back to her room. That afternoon she attended a group session. She was so pleased with the progress she’d made on nailing Barry that she actually stood up and talked about herself. “I’m Michelle and I want to get better,” she said.

“In fact, I think I am better.” She’d smiled at the others in the circle as they nodded approvingly. Some lightly clapped their hands while others whispered words of encouragement. A few others sat there sulking or else looking at her in disbelief.

If it occurred to Michelle that the only reason she thought she was better was because she’d made herself too busy to think about her own problems, the woman showed no sign of such an internal dilemma. She essentially lived for the adrenaline and not for the often calamitous revelations of self-examination. True to that personality trait, all she could think about was Barry and Sandy. After that she just wanted to get the hell out of here before they finally figured out she might belong in the Cuckoo’s Nest after all.