Mirrors Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside. Plain bathroom with a toilet, a shower, and a sink with a mirror above it. No vanity, no soap or shampoo, no towels.
    She stepped up to the mirror and blinked at the image staring back at her. Her eyes were swollen and her cheeks had flushed a ruddy red. Lips dry and cracked. Strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail and were sticking out haphazardly, giving her the appearance of a crazed woman just out of an asylum.
    She tapped the mirror. Chromed metal. Of course. Nothing would be breakable in this place.
    A slow tour of the bedroom confirmed her thinking that everything was designed for permanence. The drawers on the desk were locked, the lamp had a sealed bulb and was bolted to the desk. Even the chairs were affixed to the floor, and the screws that fastened them down had no heads.
    When she ventured to the narrow pane of reinforced glass set in the door and peered out, the hall was vacant. Not a soul.
    Christy finally retreated to the bed and lay down, feeling deprived and lifeless. She stayed liked that, staring at the ceiling, for what felt like an hour and still no one came. Had they forgotten about her? Of course not. She didn’t know what “progressive treatment” meant, but she could imagine that leaving someone to their own thoughts indefinitely might qualify.
    There was no clock, no sunlight, no switches on the walls, nothing on the ceiling but the narrow vents and two banks of bright fluorescent lights. It could be the middle of night and she wouldn’t know it.
    Slowly her concerns began to sag into that place where meaninglessness meets hopelessness. She kept rehearsing the events of the day—her break in, her mistaken identity, Austin’s attempt to free them.
    The what ifs swarmed her mind like angry crows.
    If only she’d left home with her wallet, she would have walked out of the ward the moment she proved that she was Christy. Lawson would have checked his patient roster, found no Christy Snow, and let her go.
    If she hadn’t made the call to Austin, he wouldn’t have come looking for her. If he hadn’t come looking, he wouldn’t have stumbled upon Fisher and Alice. If he hadn’t stumbled on Fisher, the man wouldn’t have had any reason to cover his tracks and hide Alice. He’d have had no reason to admit Christy to replace the girl who’d gone missing on his account.
    If only…
    Christy paused. Somewhere in the back of her mind the if became an unless . Unless she was completely wrong about all of this. Unless she hadn’t left home without her wallet because she’d actually never left her home at all. She’d never left her home because she lived here, not there.
    She’d seen a documentary about a patient whose brain damage had so affected his long-term memory that he couldn’t hold more than one day in his mind.
    But the details of her life as Christy were too real. She had a couple dozen journals in her apartment that spelled out her last few years in great detail.
    Hours slogged by and no one came. She made a dozen trips to the door to peer out and not once saw any movement. If there were other patients on the floor, they were in a different section.
    What if she was alone?
    Christy had drifted into a mind-numbing stupor when the sound of the lock snapping open jerked her back to the room. She caught her breath and sat up as the door swung open.
    “Hello, Alice.”
    Kern Lawson closed the door behind him and headed for the desk.
    “Sit with me.”
    She rose and crossed to the seat facing the desk. Sat down as he sank into the chair opposite her.
    For a long time he studied her as if trying to decide what to do with her. A minute went by and still he said nothing.
    “This is crazy,” she finally said. Her voice was thin, not the kind of convincing tone she wanted to project.
    “It is. Very. Which is why we are here, darling.” He opened his palms. “Plum nuts, bonkers, crazy. You’ll note that up here we don’t use terms like mentally challenged . We tend to go