“Or maybe it’s back to making sure you take care of yourself.”

  She winced at that. “I don’t have a death wish, you know? I just care about my patients.”

  “I get that, and I know that you truly care and want to do right by them, but you also need all your senses alert, until we figure out what’s going on right now.”

  “Now that”—she picked up her fork and stabbed the air in his direction—“is quite true.” Then she dug into her meal.

  There wasn’t anything good about what he was saying, but, as long as things were happening that she didn’t like, maybe she did need to leave, maybe that was what this was all about. Maybe her tone and time had shifted here, and maybe it was time for a change. When she was almost finished eating, she murmured, “Maybe it is time to leave.”

  “What would you do?” he asked.

  She contemplated that and shrugged. “Probably find another center.”

  He didn’t say anything at first. “So, you would stay in this kind of work?”

  “Absolutely. It’s what I do. As long as I can help people—and I do feel that I need to—I’ll do whatever I can.”

  He just nodded.

  She was grateful for that. At least there was no condemnation or any run and save yourself type mentality. “Most people don’t really understand, but, when you have a calling for something, it’s really not a choice.”

  “I’m sure Dr. Maddy would agree with you.”

  She laughed. “Absolutely. Maybe I should start to think about working with Dr. Maddy,” she muttered.

  “Would you like to?”

  “I would still need to be working in my own field, so I don’t know if there’s enough call for that in her world. I mean, she does whatever she can, and she already sends those she can’t help any further over to me.”

  “I would really like to ask more about what you do,” he began, with a wry look, “but I’m not sure I would even understand it.”

  “No, probably not. I like to say that I dance into people’s minds and play with them in their own playgrounds. I talk to them and help them sort through their feelings and beliefs about what’s gone on in their lives. In short, I help them be right in their own minds. In this case, with the boy, he has his fears.”

  “Dance in their minds?” he repeated.

  She smiled. “Right? I knew you’d pick up on that, and I’m sure that’s not something you want to hear.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to hear it,” he admitted, as he pushed his own empty plate off to the side. “Yet the way you say it, it doesn’t sound bad at all.”

  “It’s not bad.” She stared at him. “Why would you think that?”

  He shrugged. “I guess because I’m thinking that they don’t have a choice and that you’re inside messing around with their thought processes.”

  She smiled. “No, that’s definitely not what I’m doing, though I can see why you would get that impression. That’s because you haven’t worked with me, and I haven’t worked with you, not energetically.”

  “No, and I’m not sure I want you in there either,” he muttered, with a little more force than intended. She burst out laughing, and he smiled at her. “Now that makes me feel better. Although that sounded a little rusty.”

  “What?” she asked, looking at him curiously.

  “Laughter. It doesn’t sound as if you’ve done very much for a while.”

  “Not for the last six months anyway,” she admitted. “There hasn’t been a whole lot to laugh about.”

  At that, he smiled. “Times are changing.”

  “They’re changing, indeed, but I’m back to wondering what it is I want to do with my life.”

  “You don’t have to make a decision right now anyway. Even if they did manage to squeeze you out of there—which doesn’t make sense when you’re the one who brings in the big paying customers—but, even if they did, you would still have plenty of options.”

  “I did think about some of those options a bit, but I was more focused on getting back to my patients. Even now it would be very hard for me to leave them again because I know what I would be leaving them to. Last time I had the benefit of a doubt and assumed my colleagues would have my back and the decency to put patient care above all.”

  “So, are they all like that?”

  “No, absolutely not, and that’s the problem. I don’t know who is and who isn’t. They all tell me how they’re absolutely delighted to have me back, but clearly that’s not true.”

  “And you don’t know whether you can believe them or not?”

  “No, not now. Especially not now that I know what you found in my office. And in that back room particularly.”

  “Why that room?”

  She winced. “Because I do some of my night sessions there.” At his off look, she added, “And, no, my night sessions are not what you would think of as nighttime sessions.”

  His grin flashed. “Dang, and I was just going to say, Tell me more.”

  She rolled her eyes at that. “No, it’s definitely not that kind of a thing, but I can’t really explain it here. It would have to be someplace where I don’t have to worry about being overheard.”

  “Let’s go for a walk. It’ll help us digest some of that food.”

  “I need to get back to the office,” she muttered.

  “Yeah, I know, but you also need to take care of yourself, so, if you could help me understand some of this, that would be good.”

  When they got up, he paid both bills. She looked at him when he did so. He shrugged. “Hey, I’ll just expense it.”

  “Oh, great, so my taxes pay for it. How very generous of you.”

  He grinned. “Does that bother you?”

  “Maybe it’s okay in this instance.” She shrugged. “I really don’t know what to say. I presume if they don’t like the expense chit, they’ll kick it back to you anyway.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then tell me if they won’t cover it because it’s not as if I’m destitute.”

  She had said it in such a dry tone that he had to laugh.

  She shook her head. “I’m sure your background research on me has already provided you with that information.”

  “I know that you’re fairly wealthy and that you live a very modest lifestyle, basically living for your patients,” he shared, with a smile.

  “Yeah, I do, and, until recently, never really found that to be a problem.”

  “Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean that other people aren’t holding grudges against you.”

  “Good God, but why? Why would anybody bother? I just don’t get it. There are people way wealthier than I am.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean anything. As a matter of fact, in some cases, it makes things way worse. Can you think of any reason for people to dislike you?”

  Outside, she stopped and stared at him. “Most people don’t even know that I have money, and I sure wouldn’t mind if we left it that way.”

  “Got it, and I’m okay with that. I’m just not sure that it would be an option before this is all said and done.”

  She hated to hear that too. “I’ve been there a long time. I did get paid while I was on sabbatical, at least for quite a bit of it. I got medical leave for whatever the insurance covered. Then that was the end of it.”

  “Yet you were totally okay to not work for six months?”

  “Honestly I don’t have to work for a living at all, and I’m sure you know that too.”

  He gave her a big smile and a nod. “Yeah, so I understand.”

  “Is that a crime now too?”

  “No, only for people who are looking for a reason to hate you.”

  “Yeah, but people looking to hate me don’t really need a reason.”

  *

  Gray made it back to his apartment, where he immediately set up the monitoring equipment and hooked into the system he had set up in her office. He heard her talking.

  “That’s fine. I’m on my way down now.”

  She hung up the phone, and he heard her footsteps.

  He adjusted the tone, making sure it was as crisp and as clear as he needed it to be, and then he checked in on the other equipment in the back room that she wouldn’t talk about. He figured it was where she did whatever she and Dr. Maddy apparently did so well that nobody else understood. Voodoo stuff, as he would most likely call it.

  Checking that everything was all working, he sat back and tried to figure out what he was supposed to do next. The boy wasn’t even on her roster today, and yet Gray needed to push Cressy in order to get any information she could from Adam.

  Meanwhile, no way Gray would allow himself to sit here and do nothing. He pulled up the case files from the prior incident, wishing he had the follow-ups, but they were coming later. He went over the event again and again. The first couple times hadn’t gotten him anywhere, and he kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, if he read one more section again, he would come up with something that made sense, but, so far, there just wasn’t anything.

  She’d been working on a patient, when the patient had gone off the rails and had attacked her. The attack had been prolonged, since the security cameras weren’t working, and she’d had nobody outside the room waiting for her. After a good twenty minutes, she was found unconscious in the room, with the patient basically sitting on her, hitting her face over and over and over again.

  When he’d been hauled off, and she’d been rushed to emergency, there had been a lot of talk about what had happened and why, but nobody seemed to understand it. It brought up an ugly debate regarding the lack of security and the safety risks to the doctors and staff, all with good reason.

  That wasn’t something that should ever have been allowed, but they’d gotten lax because the center had had no problems before with doctors around a violent patient. With Dr. Cressy being one of the biggest proponents of not having everybody doped up and locked up and in chains, it had been simple to just write it off as a one-time incident that nobody needed to worry about, and, for a while, everybody had agreed. Still, a big push remained to increase adherence to the usual safety protocols and to ensure the procedural systems in place were followed.

  The orderly who had been there with Cressy had left her, after receiving notice of a disturbance out front, and it took a good twenty minutes for that to be calmed down. By the time he’d made it back, right when Gray had returned too, they’d found her unconscious on the floor. She’d been comatose for ten days afterward.

  The patient had been subdued and then put into the high-security area. He hadn’t had any reason to attack her, and, up until that point, their relationship had been incredibly strong, with the patient showing great strides of improvement. He’d been out in the common room areas multiple times, where he’d been slowly socializing and a model patient.

  Until this incident.

  Nobody knew what had set it off. The other patients all heard about what had happened, several of them saying they had heard Cressy crying for help, but no one had paid any attention. That was not easy to keep under wraps. Although only a few patients had heard her cries, that notation made Gray suspicious all over again.

  Had the orderly deliberately left on his own, or had somebody pulled some strings to have a disturbance out in the front so they could attack her?

  But why attack her? And, if they would attack her, why hadn’t they done a decent job of it? They could have killed her. She was right there, incapable of defending herself at that point.

  Certainly a lot of people wondered at the time if the perpetrator or perpetrators just didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to kill her because no weapons were available. The report of her being in a coma for as long as she was had been according to Grant. And, all thanks of Dr. Maddy and Stefan, who’d fought long and hard to keep her alive, Cressy was returned to the land of the living and fully sane.

  When she’d finally regained consciousness, her recovery had been slow and deliberate. Slow because she had made it slow, needing time to assimilate what had happened and to sort it out. Whether she ever had, Gray didn’t know.

  He wasn’t privy to that personal information, and that was frustrating. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, so he didn’t know if it could happen again. And now that he saw how security was running in the sanatorium, he realized that things had gotten even more lax.

  He pondered that and then started a deep dive into the other doctors at the center. They had to be thoroughly vetted before they were hired, but that didn’t mean that some people hadn’t slipped in who weren’t so carefully vetted. If they were making other changes that lowered the formerly higher standards, maybe that was a change they made at some point as well. The real question was, who was behind it all?

  Whoever it was had to be pretty powerful. Gray had no idea if a single person was behind all this, and that was a big question. In reality, he wasn’t even supposed to be looking at her life as part of this case; he was only trying to get information from a twelve-year-old boy who had been traumatized. Yet, in order to do that, it appeared that he had to do a deep dive into Cressy’s life at this center.

  What he found wasn’t making him happy. Not that anything was terribly wrong, but a lot of things just weren’t right. Something about Cressy had become a problem. He hadn’t heard very much in the way of coworkers who were unhappy with her return, but he definitely found some jealousy, a couple people calling her Queen Bee and things like that. But that kind of thing was a far cry from putting recording devices in her rooms, or was that somebody looking to see just what her methodology was, knowing she did something in that tiny room of her own?

  But who would know that?

  He picked up the phone, and, knowing it was a long shot, he called Dr. Maddy. She answered right away.

  “Gray,” she greeted him, her voice calm. “I presume you have a reason for calling me directly.”

  “Yes. Cressy’s busy with people, and I’m back at my apartment, monitoring the equipment. I don’t know if Grant told you, but we found a listening device. However, it was where we found it that is most disturbing.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “She has another room here, behind her office, where she sleeps.”

  “Yes. I do too.”

  “Do you only sleep in that room?”

  She hesitated and then asked, “What do you mean?”

  “That’s where the listening device was. If she was only sleeping there, that would not be a great place to set up a listening device.” Hesitating, he added, “Look. I don’t know really understand what you guys actually do, although she’s tried to explain it. However, I’m wondering if she would do something in that room that someone would potentially be trying to figure out. To listen in on. Even if I can’t know or I don’t need to know, I still need some inkling here. I don’t even know how to explain it, but it’s a very odd choice of location.”

  Silence came first on the other end. “Have you asked her about that?” she asked curiously.

  “Yes, not that I got a full answer. I will be asking her again though. But, as I’m running through all the doctors and doing a full check on the place right now, that is something I could really use help with.”

  “I would suspect that she does a lot of her healing work there. Call it her playground, as she would call it, or more like a work area.”

  “She did say something about dancing in playgrounds with her patients in their minds.”

  “Yes, that’s a good way to look at it. She brings out the part of their psyche that’s healthy and works to heal the parts that aren’t healthy, once she’s made a connection with the healthy part.”

  “Is that really possible?” he asked curiously.

  “Absolutely,” Dr. Maddy confirmed. “I do a variation of that myself, depending on what my patients have for issues, but not if I’m just dealing with physical issues. That’s a whole different story. In her case, she’s dealing with psychological issues—in most cases trauma that has affected people at the absolute core of who they are. So that’s a whole lot harder to treat. She is very gifted, but nobody can help everybody all the time. What she has been doing a lot of is checking patients for us to see whether they’re actually having episodic breaks or are mentally in need of healing or medication because of trauma or various other health concerns. In particular, we are interested if they’re actually psychics, like Stefan and I are, and have been locked up because of the things that they see, feel, and hear,” she shared. “Cressy’s role in that aspect is absolutely invaluable.”

  He sat back. “So, she’s kind of like a psychic detector?”

  Dr. Maddy laughed. “I won’t say yes or no to that, and I’m sure she would be quite offended by the term, so I wouldn’t use it, if I were you. Yet she has the ability to see whether people are incarcerated, rightly or not, and what type of work needs to be done.”

  “Which is why there have been some seemingly miraculous healings,” he stated in understanding.

  “Yes, in some cases those miraculous healings are actually occurring where she’s identified somebody who really only needs to accept and to understand their psychic gifts, and yet to be quiet about the aspects of their gifts that the world can’t handle,” she explained, with a note of amusement. “Once identified, we have a special program where we work with those people to help keep them on the straight and narrow.”

  “So, she finds them, gets them into your program, and you work at getting them to help establish and to control their abilities. God, it’s no wonder the world wouldn’t understand that.”

  “Exactly,” she replied, “and no way we can help the world understand because the world isn’t ready to understand. They want to believe that everything they see and hear is real. They don’t want to know that people are out there who can do things that would cause you, and sometimes even me, to cringe in our sleep.”

  “Jesus, I don’t want to know about that.”

  “Nope, you sure don’t. However, just because they’re in these centers or in a hospital, psychiatric hospital, under care, and off the grid, doesn’t mean that they’re any less dangerous. Much better that we identify who is where and then help them. Help them control their energy, control their abilities, and go on to lead fulfilling lives, and, in many cases, helping others like them.”