Without Mercy - Lisa Jackson [197]
Max Stillman’s money was being spent on her treatment as well as her defense, more, Jules assumed, to save his name and reputation than his daughter’s freedom.
Not that he should.
Shay was guilty.
Jules knew it in her heart.
Was her sister psychotic? Absolutely. But calculatingly so. Shay had left her cap at Nona’s murder scene intentionally—to throw off the police by intentionally incriminating herself. No one knew why she’d staged the murders as she had. All part of her game, Jules supposed.
“Yep,” she said, glancing at the cat again, “We all need a new start.” Through the open window, she heard the familiar rumble of Trent’s truck and she couldn’t help her stupid heart from kicking into a faster beat.
Knocking once, he let himself in. From the kitchen, Jules spied Diablo scurrying to hide under the couch, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“How’re we doing?” he asked, as he found her by the sink. From behind, he wrapped his arms around her waist.
“We’re not doing anything. I’m doing fine, except that I’m sweaty and gross.”
“Just the way I love you.” To prove his point, he nibbled her neck.
She wrinkled her nose. “Ew.”
“A dirty, sweaty woman is the best.”
“Spoken like a true cowboy,” she teased, but leaned against him.
“Mmm. Just wait until after you move in and I come into the house after dealing with the livestock.”
“Let’s not even go there,” she warned, but chuckled despite herself.
The song ended and an announcer’s sober voice filled the room. “Is your teen troubled? Acting out? Has he been arrested? Is she disruptive to your family?”
Jules froze.
A worried woman’s voice said, “My daughter was having trouble in school and running with the wrong crowd. She was failing all her classes and sneaking out at night. I was at my wit’s end, and then I heard about Blue Rock Academy, and it changed my life, our lives, forever….”
Shay sat in a corner. Rocking. Pretending that she didn’t see anything going on here at Halo Valley Security Hospital. Acting like she was just as out of it as most of the other deranged patients trapped inside these walls. She was on Side B, where all the real loonies, the scary ones, were housed, but she knew how to deal with them.
They thought she fit right in with Alice May, the mumbler who had wielded a machete against her husband, and Sergio who never said a word, but had been found naked, covered in blood, in a forest near Tillamook. The blood hadn’t been his, but that of an unidentified female who’d never been found. Orville, probably fifty, sat in the corner, sucked his thumb, and watched everyone with a weird look on his face. Someone said he’d burned down his own house, with his family inside. Shay didn’t know if any of it were true or not and she really didn’t care.
Oh, sure, she belonged here. Not! God, the authorities were ridiculous. She was way too smart to be confined in the asylum. Didn’t they know she was a genius? She looked at the psychos in this ward. Homicidal maniacs.
But she wasn’t scared.
She could handle herself.
The truth was that nothing scared her.
Nothing ever had.
She stared out the window, watched a rainstorm coming in from the coast, the trees with their new leaves bending in the wind, the sky a dismal iron gray.
Another prison; no better than Blue Rock Academy.
Rock, rock, rock.
She pretended to swing.
Keep up the movement; let them think you’re lost in your own little world. Don’t let them guess for a minute you have any idea what’s really happening.
“Time for your pills,” an apple-cheeked nurse said. Jesus, she was a pain. Her name tag read: Amy Dryer, L.P.N., and she was an idiot who droned on and on about her fiancé. If Shay heard Merlin’s name one more time, she thought she might get sick.
Dressed in purple today, pants and matching V-neck top that didn’t disguise how soft her hips were, the nurse offered Shay her sickeningly plastic smile along with the cup of pills, all pre-measured, all precisely counted out.
Shay didn’t look away from the window,