Lisa Jackson - Born To Die

She’d felt a little off all day and attributed it to a restless night filled with worries about intruders and dark pickups, along with the more pleasant fantasies about Trace O’Halleran.

She reminded herself that he was her patient’s father, strictly off-limits, but after running into him at the veterinary clinic yesterday and spending time with Eli and him, she’d had trouble pushing the rugged rancher from her mind.

She’d just taken the last bite of her Snickers when there was a tap on the door and Nadine, the weekend receptionist, poked her head inside. “Your next appointment called, a new patient, Mrs. Alexander. She’s running fifteen minutes late, but Helen Ingles is here and asked if you would work her in.”

Kacey nodded.

Nearing sixty, Nadine was trim, her jaw strong, and her eyebrows were plucked to a fine line. She wore little makeup, lavender-framed glasses, and let her gray hair feather around her face. Her pale lips were pursed into a knot of disapproval.

“Something else?” Kacey asked.

“This morning I was the first one in, and that damned circuit breaker had tripped again. Not a light on in this place!”

An ongoing issue. “Would you put in a call to the landlord?”

“I already left a message on his answering machine and shot him an e-mail,” she stated primly. Once in the military, Nadine Kavenaugh was a stickler for detail and didn’t like anyone who, as she put it, “couldn’t get their act together.” Routines were not to be changed.

“Good.” Whirling her desk chair around, Kacey tossed the candy wrapper into her wastebasket, then grabbed her lab coat. As the chair stopped, she saw that Nadine’s skinny eyebrows had dipped below the rims of her glasses. Obviously, she didn’t approve of the changes in the schedule or much of anything else, for that matter.

“I’ll put Mrs. Ingles in room two,” she said with a bit of bite, “and when Mrs. Alexander gets here, in one.”

“I’ll be in as soon as Randy takes vitals.”

Huffing her disdain through her nose, Nadine closed Kacey’s door, but through the thin panels Kacey heard her sharp footsteps marching back to the main reception area.

Slipping on her lab coat, she checked her pocket for her stethoscope, then paused to take a look at her e-mail. She’d hoped for some word on the birth records she’d asked about, even though she knew no state offices had been open for the past three days. Her grandfather’s warning, Don’t be gettin’ the cart before the horse, there, Missy, echoed in her ears, and as expected, there wasn’t a response. Then again, maybe she was tilting at windmills. Just because a couple of women who resembled her had died, and her mother was a little weird about her family, weren’t reasons to go off the deep end.

She clicked out of her account and headed down the short hallway to the examination rooms. Helen Ingles complained about being tired all the time. “Goddamned fatigue, it’s killin’ me,” she admitted, though she swore she was monitoring her glucose levels religiously and eating right and exercising. “Then again, maybe it’s because my daughter and her eight-year-old moved in. She’s separating from her husband and doesn’t have a job.” Worry shadowed Helen’s eyes.

“Let’s talk about that,” Kacey said and spent the next ten minutes listening. After determining that worry was as much a part of Helen’s problem as her diabetes, Kacey ordered more lab work for the following week and suggested a consultation with a family psychologist.

“A shrink?” Helen said, horrified. “I’m not crazy.”

“You’ve had a change of lifestyle. That’s always hard. Here, take the doctor’s card, and make an appointment, if you want to.” When she saw her patient’s hesitation, she added, “What would it hurt?”

“My pride, I guess. I’ve always thought I could handle all my problems.”

“We all need someone to listen sometimes.” Kacey left her to mull it over, then plucked the new patient’s chart from the basket on the door of exam room one. Elle Alexander was thirty-five, fifteen pounds overweight, and complaining of a persistent cough that was keeping her up at night. Her previous physician was located in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Knocking on the door, Kacey was still skimming the chart. “Mrs. Alexander? I’m Doctor Lambert.”

The patient was seated on the examination table, her legs swinging over the edge. A little plump, with short red hair and rosy cheeks, she smiled broadly.

Kacey’s heart nearly stopped because the woman resembled her enough to be noticeable. Again? she thought in disbelief.

“Hi,” Elle greeted her.

Kacey tried to tell herself that she was imagining things, that she’d been too caught up in Heather’s conviction that Shelly Bonaventure was her twin, or Nurse Rosie Alsgaard’s fears that the Jane Doe patient lying near death in the hospital was Kacey, before Trace O’Halleran had identified her as Jocelyn Wallis. She might have blown it all off as coincidence, but now, staring at Elle Alexander and seeing Randy Yates’s expression as he was removing the blood pressure cuff from her arm, she wasn’t so sure.

“Are you two related?” Randy asked, and Elle laughed as she eyed the doctor.

“Oh, no,” Elle dismissed. “I’ve just got one of those faces, you know. I remind everyone of someone.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess it’s just my curse.” She grinned. “Besides, we really don’t look that much alike. Way different body types, for one thing.”

That much was true. Kacey was three inches taller and twenty pounds lighter, but the bone structure of Elle’s face, the slope of her cheeks, point of her chin, and shape of her eyes, mirrored Kacey’s. Elle’s hair was lighter, redder, but that could be changed, and Elle’s eyes were more blue than green, but there was just something. . and she was around the right age.

For what?

“You know, though, I think I could start a lookalike club,” she went on. “Since I’ve been in this town, I’ve met a couple of people who look a lot like me.”

“Is that right?” Kacey asked carefully, her pulse elevating.

“Oh, yeah, well, take that poor teacher who died, and then there’s a woman at the gym I go to. She’s one of the trainers, I think. Her name is. . Oh, what is it? Gloria, maybe.” She puckered her face in annoyance. “Well, I just started at Fit Forever, so I’m not sure, but now there’s you.” She shrugged, as if it were all a normal occurrence.

As Randy made notes to Elle’s chart on his laptop, Kacey tried to ignore the alarm bells jangling in her mind, alarms that said, Something here is just not right, and continued the examination, listening to the woman’s lungs, hearing about how her cough had persisted for the past three months despite several rounds of antibiotics, swabbing her throat twice. “You were under a doctor’s care in Coeur d’Alene?”

Elle offered up the physician’s name, then searched in her purse and handed Kacey a business card for a doctor and clinic in Idaho. “I saw him before we moved here,” she explained.

“Did you have any chest X-rays?”

Elle shook her head. “No.”

“Let’s start there, rule out strep and pneumonia, if we can.”

“Pneumonia? Oh, I can’t have. .” She looked stricken. “I mean, I’ve never had pneumonia in my life! Bronchitis a time or two, but. .”

“Let’s wait to see what the X-rays show. Our lab isn’t open on Saturdays, but I’ll order it out and you can come by on Monday and they’ll shoot the images over to me. We’ll send the swabs to the lab for the strep test.” To Randy, she said, “Please set up with the X-ray technician.” She slipped the two swabs into individual plastic bags. While Elle was adjusting her gown and Randy’s eyes were on the screen of his laptop, she slid one bag into the pocket of her lab coat. “And this needs to be checked for strep.” That bag she set on the counter next to his computer.