Free Nothing to Lose by Norah McClintock Page A

.” He shrugged. “He’s lucky that the car wasn’t going fast. It could have been much worse.”
    â€œCan I see him?” Nick’s aunt said.
    â€œCertainly,” the doctor said.“They’re just taking him up to a room.” He told us what the room number was.
    Nick’s aunt looked at me. “Do you want to come too, Robyn?” she said.
    I nodded.
    â€œMs. Thrasher?” A woman came over to Nick’s aunt and introduced herself as the person in charge of admissions. “I have a few more questions that I need you to answer, if you don’t mind.”
    â€œYou go ahead, Robyn,” Nick’s aunt said. “Tell Nick I’ll be up to see him in a few minutes.”
    Glen stayed with Nick’s aunt. I took the elevator up to the third floor and wandered through a maze of corridors until I reached Nick’s room. There were two beds in it. An old man, either asleep or unconscious, occupied the one nearest to the door. Nick’s bed was next to the window. A half-pulled curtain between the two beds divided the room. Nick’s left leg, lying above the covers, was in a cast from his knee to his toes. He had a nasty scrape on one cheek, but he managed a smile when he saw me.
    â€œI need you to do something for me, Robyn,” he said before I could even ask how he was. “I need you to find out what they did with my clothes.”
    â€œNick, what happened? I saw this guy—”
    â€œI need my clothes right now, Robyn.”
    â€œBut I saw—”
    â€œ
Now
, Robyn. Please?”
    â€œOkay, but when I come back—”
    â€œWhen you come back, we’ll talk. I promise.”
    Nick’s aunt entered the room just as I was leaving. Glen was with her, but he stayed outside in the hall.
    â€œHow is he?” he said.
    â€œOkay, I guess,” I said. “I just have to—”
Should I tell Glen that Nick had asked for his clothes?
I thought.
Would Nick want Glen to know?
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said. I hurried off to find someone who could tell me what had happened to Nick’s clothes.
    A harried-looking nurse referred me to an orderly, who hunted around behind the nursing station and then handed me a big brown paper bag. I thanked him and headed back to Nick’s room. Glen wasn’t standing outside anymore, and Nick’s aunt was still inside the room with Nick. I didn’t want to intrude, so I took a seat in the small waiting area just down the hall. While I waited, I opened the brown bag to make sure that none of Nick’s things had gone missing. Boots. Jeans. T-shirt. Hooded sweatshirt. Wallet. The small paper bag Nick had been carrying when he’d been hit. Inside was a wooden train—hand-painted, according to the box. I guessed it was a present for his nephew. I was putting it back when I saw something else at the bottom of the big bag the orderly had given me. A thick envelope. It must have fallen out of Nick’s hoodie.
    I told myself that whatever was in it was none of my business. But I kept staring at it. Nick had been acting strangely all day. So had some of the people I had seen him with, like the girl in the bakery and the man at the food court.
    I hesitated. I told myself it was wrong to snoop. But I couldn’t help myself. I opened the envelope—and gasped.
    The envelope was stuffed with money. I thumbed the bills. They added up to hundreds of dollars. There were also six thinner envelopes inside. Five of them were folded shut, but not sealed. I checked them one by one. They all contained money. The sixth envelope was sealed, so I couldn’t look inside. It felt different from the others. Maybe there was more money in it, but there was also something else.
    We had gone into a lot of stores that morning. In some of them, Nick had disappeared from sight for a few minutes, sometimes for longer. He must have ducked out of sight to collect envelopes