Beyond the Pale by Mark Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

way through an antiseptic labyrinth of corridors, past color-coded examination rooms and dim alcoves where emergency medical equipment lurked like alien creatures, waiting to suck vital fluids from human bodies held in their metallic grips. Spare wheelchairs and gurneys littered the hallways, along with a haphazard collection of patients. Most were bored refugees from the recuperative wards—those able to walk, hobble, or wheel their way out of their rooms, exploring in curiosity, maybe looking for a place to smoke a cigarette in secret, oxygen tanks and clattering IV stands dragged in tow.
    Grace detoured for a moment and pushed through the doorof the ladies’ rest room. She bent over the chipped sink, splashed water on her face and neck in an attempt to wash away weariness and the smell of blood, then used damp fingers to comb short, ash-blond hair. With a snap she straightened the white coat she wore over a blouse and chinos, then surveyed her appearance in the mirror—not to see if she looked attractive, but rather to determine if she looked capable, professional. Beauty was no concern of Grace’s, though in fact she was beautiful. She was a tall woman of thirty, lean and angular, almost stiff in bearing, yet possessed of a subtle elegance. Had her voice had substance, it might have been smoke, or butterscotch, or fine cognac. She never wore cosmetics, and although she thought her features sharp, others described them as
chiseled
or even
regal
. She had absolutely no idea that her green-gold eyes had the power to mesmerize.
    “It’ll work,” she murmured to the reflection.
    True, her skin was too pale, but there was nothing she could do about that. She spent far too much time in the fluorescent glare of the ED, far too little under the Colorado sun. She promised herself next summer she would try to get outside more, even as she knew she would not. Why should she, when all she needed was here?
    TEEN STUDIES MEDICINE , the headline had read, RECALLS PARENTS SHE NEVER KNEW .
    Newspapers adored that sort of stuff. Human interest, they called it. Grace still had the clipping, crisp and yellow, folded between the pages of a high school scrapbook she was too cynical to take out of storage and too sentimental to throw away. The photo showed a gangly sixteen-year-old wearing a too-big lab coat, her shorn hair looking like it had been hacked off with a scalpel. She held a human skull and stared at the camera with an earnest expression that couldn’t quite conceal the spark of grisly mirth in her eyes. But the pretty reporter had been squeamish of the skull, and it was a weakness that, even as a child, Grace had found funny and—more importantly—contemptible.
    “So, honey,” Colleen Adara of the
Denver Post
had snapped around an apparently delicious piece of gum, “you never knew your parents, is that right?”
    “No, I didn’t,” Grace had said. “That’s because, when I was a baby, they both … 
died.
”
    With that last word, she had thrust the skull at the reporter for dramatic effect. A look of horror had spread across Ms. Adara’s perfectly made-up face like a webwork of cracks on a sun-baked mud pan. It was a minor victory, but one Grace had relished all the same. That had been in the foster home days—the five years she had referred to at the time as one long game of Pass the Orphan—and she had needed all the small triumphs she could get.
    In the end, of course, Ms. Adara’s article had been hopelessly wrong. It wasn’t the regretful ghosts of her parents that propelled Grace onward. No, if Grace was haunted by anything at all, it was something very much alive.
    She had studied premed at the University of Colorado with fierce abandon and was accepted to the prestigious medical school at Duke University. Packing everything she owned into her primer-gray Mustang, she had traded the bright dryness of Colorado for the damp and shadowed green of North Carolina. It was her first time in the South, and,