Soulsearch (Teen Paranormal Romance Series) (The Soulmate Series: Teen Paranormal Romance Book 2) (4 page)

“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie, but that would’ve been before we switched to electronic records, so I don’t really have easy access to it.
 
It’s probably buried in a box somewhere in the basement,”
 
the receptionist offered.
 
“Don’t worry too much about the questions.
 
Just answer what you can,” she said with a kind smile that made Rachel think she was used to dealing with ignorant teenagers.

Rachel smiled back gratefully and turned to find a seat.
 
The three took chairs on the far side of the waiting room, out of the receptionist’s line of vision, and grinned happily at each other, pleased with what they had learned.
 
Paige knew from her own visit that they used computers now for all the records, but she was confident that the old records were still on paper somewhere, the task of transferring them all to the computer too big of a task for such a small operation.
 
The teens could text, tweet, SnapChat, and Instagram like nobody’s business, but hacking into a medical database to access old records was way beyond their scope of talent.
 
Plan B involved recruiting one of Rachel’s science club buddies to infiltrate their computer system, but Rachel was loathe to ask for that kind of felonious favor.

While Rachel busied herself filling out the paperwork, Rider was surreptitiously scoping out the comings and goings of the people around them.
 
The waiting room was about half-filled with women of all ages, shapes, and sizes: a hugely pregnant teenager with a nauseous look on her face, a middle-aged mother with three rowdy children all scrambling for her attention, a plump, menopausal woman who looked like she was having a hot flash the way she was fanning herself with a magazine.
 
Rider was the only guy in attendance and his handsome male face quickly drew the ladies’ eyes.
 
The attention embarrassed him and he mumbled something to Rachel before heading back up to the front desk.
 
Rachel heard him ask for the bathroom and the receptionist pointed down the hall, so he whispered, “Be right back,” to Rachel, winked, then quietly slipped away.

Just a few feet past the front desk, the hall turned a corner and Rider could see exam rooms jutting off on either side.
 
His sneakers squeaked noisily on the hard tile floors despite his attempts at furtiveness and he found himself tiptoeing to quiet his steps, but that just made him look suspicious, and laughable, he thought, so instead he lifted his chin and strode confidently down the hall, ignoring the ridiculous sounds coming from his feet.
 
Each door he passed was labeled informatively: Exam Room 1, Exam Room 2, and so on, and a sign at the end of the short hall indicated he should turn right to locate the restrooms.
 
A few people crossed his path, doctors and nurses scurrying busily from room to room.
 
None of them paid him any attention.
 
He could hear muffled voices and the whirr and beep of machines coming from behind some of the closed doors, but the loudest sound was his own heartbeat, thudding wildly in his chest.
 
He knew his behavior looked totally innocent — just a kid heading for the bathroom, but his nefarious intentions had his heart palpitating faster than the beat of a mariachi band.
 

As he neared the end of the hall, Rider saw the bathrooms, clearly marked with an overhead sign almost impossible to miss, and Rider slowed but did not stop as he approached the door marked “Gentlemen.”
 
There were a few more doors before the end of the hall and he was hoping one of them led to the aforementioned basement.
 
Sure enough, the very last door had a small sign that read “Basement.”
 
It might as well have said “Pot of Gold” as far as Rider was concerned.
 
His eyes lit up and his heart started thumping even faster than before.
 
A quick glance behind him revealed a momentarily empty hallway and Rider’s hands shook as he reached for the doorknob.
 
He expected the door to be locked, but surprisingly the knob turned and a rush of cool air enveloped him as the door swung open, stunning his brain and paralyzing his body as he stared dumbfounded at a set of stairs leading down into the hidden depths of the clinic.

The stairwell was dark, but a set of light switches was visible on the left wall.
 
Rider’s heart was still pounding out a frantic rhythm in his ears, but as far as he could tell no sound came from the space below, and a thin layer of dust on the handrail assured him that the basement received very few visitors.
 
Pausing for only a moment to consider his actions, Rider stepped through the doorway and closed the door behind him.
 
He stood at the top of the stairs listening intently for several more seconds, but the chamber below was so quiet it deafened him.
 
Rider dared to flip one of the light switches on the wall and the stairwell lit up with a warm honey glow as the dusty incandescent lightbulb in the fixture above crackled to life.
 
The brightness stunned him for a moment and he braced himself for some kind of reaction, but there was no response.

Fairly convinced that no one was lurking in the depths below, Rider slowly descended, each step carefully placed to avoid noise from his shoes or the creaky wooden stairs.
 
He was only half successful in his endeavor to be silent, but he made it to the bottom of the stairwell without provoking any blaze of lights or shouts of, “Who goes there!”
 
The basement stretched out black and empty before him, no signs of life except for the smell of mold growing unchecked in the dark recesses.
 
The space was too dark for Rider to tell if it was just one room or many, but he saw no tell-tale lines of light escaping from beneath closed doors.
 
Fumbling blindly, his hands eventually located a light switch on the wall at the bottom of the stairwell and Rider took a big breath to embolden himself as he flipped the switch.
 
Another single bulb sputtered to life in the center of the room, it’s weak light strong enough to reveal a large room filled with bookshelves, each one stacked with cardboard boxes filled with records.

Rider gaped as his eyes traveled from box to box, reading the labels scrawled onto each box with a wide black marker.
 
“Last Visit 2010 A — E,” a box on the bottom shelf read.
 
The box next to it was “F — L” then “K — O” and so on through the alphabet.
 
Rider pulled out the “A — E” box and peeked inside.
 
The first file belonged to Abigail Abbott and a quick glance at her records indicated she was last seen on Monday, August 23, 2010.
 
Excitement growing, Rider shoved the record back in the box and scanned the rest of the shelves quickly.
 
Rachel was born in April of 1999 and she believed her mother switched doctors a few months before that, in favor of the larger, more modern clinic in Grand Rapids, near the hospital where she gave birth.
 
It didn’t take long to locate the shelf with the boxes labeled “Last Visit 1998” and soon Rider was pawing through the box labeled “K — O” in search of Mary Masterson.

Rider almost squealed when he found it and his greedy eyes scanned the paperwork inside.
 
Mary’s last visit was in December, a few months before Rachel was born.
 
The doctor’s notes, scrawled on the page, made very little sense to Rider as he perused the records and his heart began to sink as he realized this was no help to him in his quest to understand what happened.
 
He scanned the senseless words looking for anything that indicated trauma, or unusual test results, or body invasion by another soul, but Mary’s pregnancy seemed discouragingly uneventful and Rider’s hopes plummeted.

A loud chirping sound broke his concentration and made him jump like a cat with its tail on fire, dropping Mary’s file to the floor and scattering the papers inside.
 
Rider glanced guiltily around him as he quickly scooped up the records, his heart beating frantically, but the room remained empty and he realized the noise had come from his phone.
 
Feeling idiotic, Rider retrieved the offending device from his back pocket and glanced at the screen where a text message from Rachel was displayed.
 
“Where r u?” She asked.

“In the basement,” Rider typed.
 
“Where r u?”
 
In his excitement he had forgotten their plan.
 
He was supposed to let them know if he found the records.

“Exam rm 3, waiting on DR.
 
I’ll send Paige to watch,” Rachel answered.

Rider was just about to reply that he would be there soon when his eyes landed on another bookshelf across the room.
 
He shoved his phone back in his pocket and quickly strode over to investigate.
 
These boxes were smaller and the labeling was different.
 
“Appointments” was written on each box, followed by the year.
 
Rider quickly located the box from 1998 and carefully pulled it from the stack, trying not to knock the rest over.
 
Inside were printouts from each day of the year listing the appointments scheduled that day.
 
Rider shuffled through the months, looking for December 7th, the day of Mary’s last visit.
 
Eventually, his eyes landed on the sought-after sheet and Rider eagerly read through the list of appointments.
 
Sure enough, at 10:30 am on Monday, December 7th, 1998, Mary Masterson was scheduled for an ultrasound with Dr. Evans.
 
The clinic had presumably been smaller back then, but there were still two doctors working that day, each with their own list of patients.
 
Dr. Dewitt was the second doctor on duty that day, and at 10:30 am he was busy performing a D & E on Jessica Reynolds.

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Rachel sat awkwardly on the exam table, her bare butt cold and itchy on the crinkly paper.
 
The thin gown she wore left her bare legs exposed, all except for her socks, and she worried the doctor would take one look at her and know right away she was definitely not 18 yet.
 
She was pretty sure most 18 year olds did not wear lime green socks with pink stripes.
 
She had forgotten to pack socks, though, and had resorted to borrowing some from Paige, whose sock drawer looked like a piece of abstract art with all the different colors and patterns warring with each other for attention.
 
At least she had found a matching pair.
 
Paige didn't usually bother with matching them, she just threw them all into the drawer together and chose two at random each day.
 

Paige was currently playing lookout for Rider.
 
She was standing near the basement door, lounging against the wall, trying to look like she was waiting for someone to come out of the bathroom.
 
She had pre-typed the message, “Someone is coming — Hide!” into her phone and was ready to hit send if anyone came anywhere near the basement door.
 
So far, no one seemed interested in the basement, but the bathroom was so close that she had a mini heart attack every time someone approached.

Back in the exam room, Rachel was having a heart attack of her own as the doctor entered and asked her to lie down on the table and put her feet up in the stirrups.
 
She reviewed the medical information the assistant had collected while Rachel tried to block the cold air from invading the rarely exposed space between her legs.
 
At least the doctor was a woman, Rachel thought gratefully.
 
She hadn’t thought to request any particular doctor, but this would have been unbearably humiliating if a man had entered the room.
 
It was bad enough that the doctor looked a lot like her mother.
 
Rachel wondered what her mother would think if she knew what Rachel was doing today.
 
Her mom was pretty cool, but she barely agreed to let Rachel start dating, so Rachel figured she would totally freak out if she thought Rachel wanted to get birth control pills.
 
She hadn’t said it in so many words, but Rachel was pretty sure her mom expected her to wait till she got married before doing anything as intimate as having sex.
 
Mary didn’t know that Rachel had shared her body with Rider for the last 16 years, though, and Rachel couldn’t think of anything more intimate than having someone living inside your head.

As the doctor explored beneath Rachel’s gown, she asked friendly questions meant to ease Rachel’s nervousness, but they had the opposite effect.
 
“So you have a boyfriend?” she asked, her cold fingers pressing against the skin of Rachel’s abdomen.

“Yes, Ma’am, his name’s Rider,” Rachel answered politely, but without making eye contact.

“How did you two meet?” she asking, smiling, her fingers kneading Rachel’s breasts, feeling for lumps.

“Uh, at school,” Rachel summarized, the real story too long, complicated, and unbelievable to explain.

“Have you been dating for very long?” she asked, her voice innocent but the question rife with insinuation.

“A couple months,” Rachel muttered between clenched teeth as the doctor’s hand drew dangerously close to Rachel’s most private parts, “but we’ve been friends forever.”