Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 9, 2011 17:26:08 GMT -5
Chapter Nineteen – Oh, Brother!
and a doctor
Daniel Reynolds looked at the file the doctor had handed him. A smile grew on his face as he looked up and nodded. “Yes, this is her. This is my sister.” He closed the folder and handed it back to the doctor. “When can I see her? My family would like to get her home as soon as possible.”
“You have to understand that when a patient does an abrupt about face like Cassia did two months ago, their motives are rather questionable,” the doctor informed Daniel.
“What I understand,” Daniel replied without showing a drop of emotion, “is that I have been looking for my sister for a long time and that I have papers sighed by the Lieutenant Governor of the state of California which give me the right to get her out of this facility at once if I should find her here.” Sometimes it was rather useful that Belle’s husband was in politics. The look Daniel leveled the doctor with put fear into even the most dauntless of his competitors in the boardroom. This was one battle he wasn’t about to lose.
“Cassia requires constant attention until we have determined that she is no longer a threat to herself,” the doctor tried reasoning with him.
“The Chief Physician at Angel of Mercy Hospital in Sacramento has agreed to provide whatever medical aid is needed,” Daniel’s voice brooked no argument. He was loving throwing around the names of his older sisters and their spouses. Ash would be annoyed at him, but she would go along with it. Besides, she had agreed.
The doctor sighed. “Why don’t we go find her? Perhaps when you meet her, you will conclude that she’s not actually the person you are looking for. After all, she’s . . . a lot younger than you.”
Ironic really, that his older sister looked like she was younger than his daughters, but it didn’t matter. There was, however, no doubt in his mind that this patient was his older sister. Of course, he couldn’t tell the doctor that. All it would take was one word from him that their teenage patient was older than the over-the-hill business man in the head doctor’s office and they would lock Daniel up right along with her.
Chris sighed as he looked at Cassia. “I don’t know what to say. I think it worked, but I have no way of knowing for sure. Only your brother can tell us.”
Cassia offered him a week smile. “Thanks for trying.”
“I’d still try to avoid him,” he suggested.
“It might not be an option,” JD commented from the doorway. “He’s headed this way with one of the doctors.”
Cassia exhaled slowly. “All right. Thank you.”
“You’d better get going,” JD suggested. “Me, too. Good luck, Cass. Let me know if it works.”
Cassia nodded. “I will.” She watched as the two young men left and then she went the opposite direction. If her brother ran into the nurse that had directed them into that room, then she didn’t want it to be easy for them.
Since the hallways had security cameras, Cassia couldn’t just orb out, so when she heard someone behind her mention her name, she just walked faster. She opened the door to the outdoors and looked up. Come on, we both know you can fix this.
There was no response to her silent plea. She wasn’t all that surprised, since he had been ignoring her much of the time in the past couple of months. It seemed he was willing to go along with what the other elders had decided. It didn’t really surprise her, but it did annoy her.
Cassia felt a hand on her shoulder. Terrified that Chris’ spell wouldn’t hold, she turned around, a smile on her face. “Hello, Deary,” she said as she looked her little brother in the face. “May I help you?”
Daniel’s face fell at the sight of her. “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
“Oh, dear,” she replied, trying to sound disappointed when in reality she was thrilled to be this close to her brother. “Someone nice I hope.”
The doctor exited the building and approached them.
“Someone very nice,” Daniel said with a confused nod.
“I see you’ve met Cassia,” the doctor commented as he reached them.
Daniel tried to hide his confusion, before he turned to look at the doctor. “Would you mind if I talked to her?”
He must have succeeded, because the doctor didn’t appear to sense anything was amiss. “Do I have a choice in the matter?”
Daniel smiled at him. “I was trying to be polite.”
The doctor scowled at him.
As soon as the doctor was out of hearing range, Daniel turned back to look at her. “You look nothing like the young woman in the picture.”
Cassia saw the sadness in her brother’s eyes and she wanted so much to hug him, assure him that everything would be all right. “You’re disappointed.”
He offered her a weak smile. “I’ve been looking for so long.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t want to be found,” Cassia suggested, feeling terrible for saying it.
He sighed.
She laid a hand on his shoulder. “It might be time to end your search, Deary.”
“But Cassia . . .”
“Is that who you are looking for?”
He nodded. “My sister.” He sighed. “It’s been almost . . .” He stopped and looked at her, a glimmer of a tear in his eye. He rubbed it away.
Cassia took him by the hand and led him over to a bench. “Tell me about it. Perhaps it will help.” It felt weird trying to comfort him about her death.
Daniel sat down on the bench next to her. “My sister, Cassia, was in a horrible accident just before she would have started college many years ago. My other sisters, my parents; they moved on, but I couldn’t not entirely. I married, had kids. I thought I had moved on, but then I saw this picture.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.
Cassia watched for glimpses of family pictures. She recognized her oldest sister, Ashley, in one picture, but all the other pictures flipped by too fast.
He pulled out a folded newspaper article. He handed it to her.
Cassia took it and unfolded it. She found herself looking at a picture. It took a moment, but she found what had caught her brother’s attention. Standing partially hidden behind the person the picture was focused on she saw a person with her face, her body. She looked up at him.
Daniel pointed to that person in the picture. “That’s Cassia, my sister. This picture was taken fifteen years ago. Someone who’s dead for twenty-four years can’t appear in a picture.”
“No offence,” she said in a whispered voice, “but the person in the picture isn’t twenty-four-years-old and certainly not old enough to have graduated twenty-four years prior.”
“I know,” he agreed, but there was something in his voice that told her there was more to it than he was saying. “I thought about that, too. At first I thought she might be a distant relative, but when I looked into it, nothing seemed to add up. Six years ago I found this picture.” He pulled out a photograph.
It was plainly a picture of Cassia despite hair that had been cropped off and clothes she would never wear. Apparently Ron had tried to deal with being in her body by making her body look masculine.
“Nine years later,” he reminded her. “Same person, same age. That’s not normal, but if she didn’t age in nine years, what’s another twenty-four?”
“It seems a little,” she paused before finishing with, “unrealistic.” She knew she had to end his search, but she didn’t want to. Besides, there was something about this whole conversation that was beginning to sound suspicious.
He shrugged, clearly unconcerned. “I can’t explain everything that I’ve learned over the last six years, but I’ve no doubt that it’s my sister in both pictures. I’ve no doubt that she died. She’s not a ghost. And I’m not crazy.”
There is definitely something up with this conversation. Cassia stared at him. She wasn’t sure what her little brother had found, but he seemed awfully sure of himself. And the way he worded it, it almost sounded like he really did know what he was talking about. It sounded like he knew about witches, warlocks, whitelighters, and magic, but how was that possible.
She had tried to avoid checking up on her family, but she knew Ash, perfect Ashley Nicole, was both a doctor and mother of ten, only one of who was a daughter. She knew that daughter, seventeen-year-old Kelsey Kinsey, because yes her sister did chose a first name for her daughter that was so close to her last name, was quite spoiled by her six older brothers, and adored by her three younger ones.
She knew that Belle’s son, Aaron Quinn, would soon be graduating college, and that Belle’s daughter, Linda Shay Norton, wanted to her follow her dad, Lieutenant Governor Anthony Quinn, into politics. Her election into the Sacramento city government the previous November was just a stepping stone for her.
She also knew that Danny’s oldest daughter, named Cassia for her, had died before his second daughter, Sophia, had been born. She knew that her sister-in-law didn’t care one whit about the money Danny made in the boardroom, but that she was most likely drinking herself into an early grave. It was to the point where Cassia had requisition some of her fellow whitelighters to try and help Eileen.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” he asked looking at her.
“It’s an interesting theory,” she hedged.
“A theory,” he repeated. “Is that what it is?”
“What else could it be?” she asked. “You’re trying to tell me that your dead sister isn’t dead.”
“I said she died,” he informed her. “I didn’t say she stayed that way.”
Cassia gulped. “Like I said, an interesting theory.”
He scowled. “Ash says I’m a fool to pursue this, but I never thought you could look me in the face and say you weren’t my sister.”
She looked away. “Visiting hours are almost over and I should go.”
He took her by the shoulders and forced her to look at him. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you aren’t my sister.”
She stared at him, motionless.
“Do that and I will walk away,” he informed her. “Otherwise I’m going to just keep coming back.”
“You can’t do that,” she told him. “It’s not right.”
“Cass, they brought you back,” he pleaded with her. “They brought you back and didn’t let you tell us. Please, I don’t care what your elders say. “
Did he just . . ? How . . ? Cassia stared at him stunned. How am I supposed to respond to that?