Kessler covered her face a moment, then shook her head in an unexplainable fit of remorse. She looked at Mandy as if trying to find words, but finally just waved her along. “Go on,” she whispered, “go on!”

“Are you sure—”

“Get out of here!”

Mandy hurried, looked back—the doctor was still resting against the wall, head down, a hand to her forehead.

She made it to the lobby and slowed to a brisk but normal-looking walk, making a beeline for the front doors. She came by the reception desk, smiled at Nancy—

A hand grabbed her right arm. “Hold up there, girl!”

“What—”

It was Bill the male nurse and …

Tyler the security guy, grabbing her other arm. “Take it easy now.”

Her first reaction was natural, to squirm and try to break away, but their hands were clamped on her, digging into her, and she couldn’t move. It hurt. From somewhere she found the self-control and civility to ask, “Please let go of me.”

“Not till we’ve cleared up a few things,” said Tyler.

So here she was again, held against her will and painfully so by two insensitive brutes—like Johnny the cop and Dr. Angela’s apes Bruce and Dave and the sneaky Samaritans Clarence and Lemuel—and once again, she was being held and manhandled in a hospital.

“Let go of me,” she said, and it was a warning.

Of course they didn’t. They started forcing her along and she knew they would take her down another long hallway to another door that would lock behind her.

Any thought of doing the right thing, any consideration of being reasonable and compliant, flickered out like a candle in a gale, and in their place flashed a burning, visceral rage. She growled, clenched her fists and eyes, reached from the depths of her rage into unseen places and times, and drew back to herself any and all parts of her that were free and could fight.

It happened fast. It was noisy and alarming. Nancy screamed and cowered behind the reception desk. Everyone else in the lobby froze, and some ducked. Mandy remembered making some kind of shrieking animal sound, and before she drew another breath she was coming at Tyler and Bill from every direction, fighting mad, ready to show them how it felt to be grabbed, dragged, manhandled, and hurt. Both came off the floor and sailed several yards before landing, Bill on the floor, Tyler slung over a couch in a sitting area. A lamp next to the couch shook, then slid, then sailed in Tyler’s direction.

It stopped, in midair.

Mandy was looking at herself looking back. The Mandy she was had just come in the front door, neatly dressed, wide-eyed and curious, looking at every little thing until she saw herself.

The lamp crashed and rolled on the floor before it ever reached Tyler.

Mandy was crouching like a cat, panting, disheveled. She’d just decked two men twice her size and was ready to do worse and she would have … which scared her. She stared at who she was then, shocked at who she was now. How in the world did she get from thereto here? Sense and civility returned—whipped and ragged, but they were there, along with a healthy dose of shame and embarrassment. “Oh, boy, are you in for a ride!”

She made sure Tyler and Bill got the message—they were obviously in pain as they looked up at her, not moving—then walked up to her earlier self. The words didn’t come from memory; they burst from her as if foreordained. “Don’t let ’em do this to you, you hear me?”

She could hear hurried footsteps from the hall, see Bill and Tyler stirring. She brushed past herself and headed for the door.

“Let her go!” came Kessler’s voice. She looked back to see Bill and Tyler get to their feet. “Let her go,” Kessler repeated, and they remained in place. Kessler met her eyes, but only to watch her leave.

Kessler did not want to talk to Ernie Myers. She dreaded what she would learn, loathed what she would have to do with it. But the others were waiting.

She leaned over Ernie. “You look like you’ve seen someone, Ernie.”

He was ready to confess. “Yeah, yeah, I did. But it wasn’t a hallucination! I saw her. She was standing right there. She tried to zap me again!”

“Who?”

“The ghost, the Tinkerbell girl.” He spilled it. “Yeah, I saw her on the job. She was this ghost kind of thing, all dressed in pink and sparkles and she just came out of nowhere and when I touched her she, she zapped me, she did all this to me! And I’m not crazy, I swear to God!”

“It’s okay, Ernie, it’s all right. Did she have a name?”

“Uh, yeah. Mandy. She said her name was Mandy.”

Of course.

Ernie brought out a section of Sunday’s newspaper. “And I found her, can you believe that? I’m not crazy, I really found her. She was asking about the Orpheus Hotel, so I checked the paper. Take a look!” He folded the newspaper to the page and handed it to her, pointing at an ad featuring a sprite young magician opening at the Orpheus. “That’s her! Mandy Whitacre! That’s the gal I saw! Man, she must be really good. I’d just like to know why she zapped me and broke my collarbone.”

Kessler straightened. No surprises here, just confirmation. “I’m sure she could have explained it all to you.”

“Yeah, well, she’ll explain it all right, she’ll explain it to my lawyer!”

Her heart sank. No surprise there either.

chapter

38

Well, she hadn’t had any visitors yet.

Mandy sat in her dressing room trying not to botch her mascara again, hoping she would never hear an authoritative knock at the door. There was a cop right there to handcuff her for that afternoon’s Dumpster escape, but he didn’t say or do anything that wasn’t part of the act.

Her hand still shook a little.

Girl, you havegot to remember the rules: don’t be a danger to yourself or others. If Kessler hadn’t stepped in and stopped those guys …

She whooshed a sigh. Oh, the things she was about to do to Bill and Tyler and that lobby. It was God’s grace that she didn’t.

But she really could have, and that was why she was shaking. Call it an answer to prayer— hoo boy, what an answer!—but ever since that visit to Clark County Medical Center, a realization had come together piece by piece, growing from a hmmm?to an aha!to a big-time life changer over the course of the afternoon: all the weird “delusions” she’d been having weren’t delusions. They were weird and otherworldly, scary at times, mysterious, and hard to control, but one thing they were not and delusions were, was false. The Clark County Medical Center wasn’t a bunch of nightmarish flashbacks but a real place she had visited, if not in body, in fact, countless times. She’d seen real things, been real places, met real people, learned real names. She’d talked to Ernie Myers from a supposed delusion and she’d talked to him in the real world, and in the real world he was mad at her for doing something to him from her delusion, which told her the delusion was as real as the real. She was never making any of this stuff up, she was really going there and seeing it.

Just like her visions of the ranch, the white paddock fence, the driveway, the three aspens, the house, the barn, all of it. She’d seen those things because they were really there and somehow, some way, she’d been there to see them before really being there. The Mandy she saw coming out of the hospital was the same Mandy she saw coming in—now, how that worked she hadn’t a clue, but both Mandys were she, and both were real.

She beckoned to Maybelle, who sat with her friends on their perch in the corner. Maybelle fluttered, alighted on a lipstick, and brought it to her. The dove got a treat and returned to the perch.

Anyway, this changed everything. Seeing things that weren’t real was crazy. Seeing things that turned out to be real wasn’t. Thinking she could move things from somewhere else was crazy, but really moving them from somewhere else wasn’t. Just ask Clarence, Lemuel, Preston Gabriel, Bill, and Tyler, and most every audience she’d ever had—to name a few. Until today she’d gone with it and figured it was just part of her crazy world, something she would never understand, much less discuss. Now she still didn’t know what it was—a gift, maybe?—but she knew it wasn’t crazy.