Cassie ignored the question. “The truth is I was so rattled I forgot to ask for the security tapes of my room.”
“There are none.”
“But there was a camera.”
“Never operational. New laws. No tapes.”
Cassie was flummoxed. She felt the air go out of her lungs. The tapes would have proven that the nurse out of the last century was inside her room.
“I think I was being watched.”
“Nonsense.” She said it as if it were fact, that anything untoward that Cassie may have felt or seen was paranoia and hallucinations. “The only ones watching you were the nurses who were assigned to you, and then not by camera. Only in person. We have hallway monitors and cameras, of course, but nothing in the patient rooms.”
“So if a nurse or doctor or aide slipped something they shouldn’t into my IV or food or whatever, there would be no record of it?”
“Not by camera. But we’d know from your monitors or lab results.”
“It might be too late then.”
“Too late?”
“If someone put something in my meds and I, you know, ended up dying.”
Dr. Sherling sighed audibly. “But you didn’t die.”
“Of course not. That was just a hypothetical situation.”
“All of our staff members, including Ms. Unger, go through rigorous background checks before they’re hired. Is that the reason you called so late on my private number?”
Didn’t she know that everything in Cassie’s life was an emergency? “I know it’s not life a
nd death, but I need to know some things. Does anyone on the staff ever dress in uniforms from the past?”
“What?”
“Like the uniforms nurses used to wear,” Cassie went on doggedly.
“Not the scrubs they have on most of the time, but the outfits with heavy white shoes and white stockings and white dresses. Sometimes pointed caps and a blue cape.”
There was a long hesitation, then finally, very seriously, “Why are you asking?”
The truth would not help her cause. “Just curious.”
“There has to be a reason, and it has something more than curiosity behind it.”
“I thought I saw someone wearing an outfit like that one night.”
Another weighty pause. “I think we should talk about this in a session. In the office. If you’re having hallucinations again, then—”
“I’m not hallucinating. She was there. In my room. In that uniform, and she even left an earring.”
“An earring?”
“Yes! Red. In the shape of a cross.”
“And you know it was hers?”
That stopped her. Was it possible that someone else could have dropped it?