The Cupcake Coven Read Online Free PDF

toward her and studied her for a moment. Her long black hair looked slightly damp as if she’d recently showered. She worried her lips. Her blue eyes stared at him, as if searching for something, but not knowing what.
    “Hi, April. I’m Dr. Frampton. A psychologist from Portsmouth General Hospital. I stop by every now and then to talk to the residents. How are you feeling today?”
    “Okay,” she said meekly.
    “I understand you came here a little while ago. Can you tell me what brought you here?”
    “A police car,” she answered simply.
    She’d pronounced the hard R. If she had an accent, an expert in linguistics might be able to pinpoint her place of origin. She certainly didn’t sound like a New Englander.
    “What can you tell me about that day?”
    She chewed her lip and looked sad. “I don’t remember much. I was on a bus.”
    “Did you have a ticket?”
    She shrugged. “I must have given it to the bus driver, but I don’t remember.”
    “So, what’s the very last thing you remember?”
    “I was on the bus. The woman next to me was sleepin’. When we stopped, the driver turned around and said, ‘Aren’t you getting off here?’ I looked out the window and didn’t know where I was but reckoned I’d figure it out once I walked around.”
    ‘Reckoned’. Definitely not New England.
    “So, your very last recollection was being on the bus. Did you have any luggage?”
    “There was a bag on the floor between me and the sleeping woman. I didn’t recognize the bag, so I left it there. I got off the bus, because the driver said it was where I was supposed to get off. Nobody was there to meet me, but I waited a while just in case.”
    “And you don’t remember anything before that? Your name or where you’re from?”
    “No, sir.”
    Manners. That’s not very common among New England’s youth either. Maybe she’s southern.
    “Did anything happen to you? Did anyone hurt you that you know of?”
    “No, sir. My head was just fine. Nothing on me hurt. A lot of people have asked me that.”
    “Okay. So, what happened when you got off the bus?”
    “Well, I waited for a good half hour, then walked around some. I never did see anything familiar. There was a newspaper stand, so I looked at the date on the papers, and it was April first. That’s how I got the name April. Some of the newspapers were from other places like Boston, Manchester, and Lawrence, so I still didn’t know where I was or who I was, but at least I knew it was April First.”
    Dr. Frampton smiled slightly. “You must have felt like the butt of the worst April Fool’s Day joke ever.”
    Danielle was afraid she’d be insulted, but she didn’t appear to be. She simply nodded and seemed quite calm, even if sad.
    “So how long have you been here, April?”
    “I think it’s been…eighty days since the day the cops asked me what I was about.”
    “What you were about?”
    “Yeah. You know. What was I doing here? What was my name? I couldn’t tell them anything except that I was hungry, so they brought me here.”
    Her sad gaze fell to her lap. She really did look lost.
    “So, you’ve been here for well over two months.”
    “Them’s the facts,” she said.
    There it was again. It wasn’t so much the accent, but the word choices that reflected a very different part of the country.
    Danielle had told him, that if she had to guess, the girl hailed from the Deep South. Anywhere from Georgia to Texas. She picked up a pencil and tapped her desk calendar. “We kept expecting her memory to return, or we’d have called before this.”
    “Doctor?” April asked.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m goin’ stir crazy just sittin’ around and waitin’ for my memory to come back. Is there anything you can do to hurry it up?”
    Dr. Frampton glanced at Danielle. “We have open beds at the hospital, but I don’t see her needing that much care. Most of our patients have pretty major psychological problems. I want to keep an eye on her,