Born to Die - Lisa Jackson [89]
“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 look-alike 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.
Not