Excerpt of Chase the Past by Jasmine Cresswell

An aide wheeled the bedtime snacks into the patients' lounge at eleven minutes past ten, six minutes behind schedule. Courtney had counted out every second of the delay, and her body was dewed with sweat from the effort of keeping her face expressionless and her eyes fixed quietly on the flickering TV screen.

"'Evening, everybody,'' the aide said. "'How are we all doing tonight?'"

With quick, efficient movements she flipped out a side of the cart to form a serving tray, seemingly unperturbed when her remarks were greeted by a stony silence.

She'd worked around crazy people long enough to know that some nights you could wait forever and still not get a word out of any of them. Other nights you couldn't stop them talking. On the whole she was just as happy when they were in one of their silent moods. It usually meant that she got through her rounds that much quicker.

She unscrewed the cap from the gallon jug of apple juice. "'Ready when you are, Nurse,'' the aide called out cheerfully.

Courtney forced her gaze back to the television and gradually uncurled her fingers, placing her hands on her knees in a careful parody of relaxation. Only one more hour and it would be lights-out. Only two more hours and it would be time to try her escape.

She shut her eyes quickly, afraid of what they might reveal. Dear God, she hadn't even meant to think the word escape. It was far too dangerous. The staff members at the Walnut Park Mental Health Institute — known to the locals simply as the Nuthouse — were trained to spot unusual tension in their patients, and tonight of all nights, she had to avoid giving them any cause to watch her more closely than usual.

Courtney concentrated on making her body limp and her mind a blank. Starting at her big toes, she moved mentally up her body, carefully visualizing her muscle structure and willing the wire-taut muscles to unwind. It was a technique she had used before all her big races, and sometimes even here she managed to make it work.

On the periphery of her consciousness, she was aware that the night nurse was already walking briskly around the room, dispensing the inevitable pre-bedtime medication. Courtney shifted her chair, moving out of the nurse's line of vision. Nurse Buxton's heavy horn-rimmed glasses concealed eyes that were uncomfortably perceptive, and her nose for troublemakers was perilously acute. She had already come over once and asked Courtney how she was feeling. Courtney, clamping down hard on the terror swelling inside her, had replied that she was feeling wonderful.

For a moment Courtney considered postponing her escape until another night, a night when fluttery little Nurse Matlock was on duty, perhaps. After twenty-one weeks shut up with Colorado's looniest, one day more or less no longer seemed all that significant. Her priorities had certainly changed since that mind-blowing morning when she had first woken up and found herself locked in a windowless room with only a mattress for furniture. That morning she had wanted nothing except to be let out. She had pounded on the walls, screaming hysterically for Justin, begging for her freedom. What she had gotten was an overworked psychiatric nurse and a hefty shot of phenobarbital.

Now, after five months of imprisonment, she wanted more than simple freedom; she wanted answers to a hundred questions. Most of all she wanted to know what had happened to Justin, and why he had never been to visit her.

No, she couldn't wait any longer to make her escape. Unless she went tonight, she didn't have a hope in hell of getting away with the petty-cash box she had stolen from the head nurse's office. And without money she wouldn't have a chance of making it all the way from Denver to Aspen. At best she might have three hours before the night staff realized she was missing. Three hours before every police patrol car in the state would be looking for her. No, she definitely needed money, which meant that Nurse Buxton or not, she would never have a better chance to escape than tonight.

Courtney glanced down and saw that her hands had once again curled into two tight fists. She forced herself to open them. Her mental discipline seemed to be increasingly shaky, and her gaze turned toward the snack trolley. Nurse Buxton handed a paper cup of pills and an accompanying cup of water to young Bill Di Maggio. The nurse conducted a few minutes of one-sided conversation, then moved on to the next patient. The aide trotted along in her wake, collecting the empty pill cups and rewarding the patients with chocolate-chip cookies and plastic mugs of chilled apple cider. There was no glass or china on the tray, of course, in case one of the inmates should suddenly be overcome with an urge to do violence either to himself or to one of the other patients.

The trolley had just reached Courtney's side when Mrs. Anthony — stage name Adrienna Antonio — stood up in the center of the room, carefully balanced a cushion on top of her head and launched into the opening chords of an operatic aria. It was the ''Jewel Song'' from Gounod's Faust, Courtney realized. Mrs. Anthony, despite her obvious preoccupation with keeping the cushion balanced on her head, was singing it brilliantly.

Most of the patients glanced, uninterested, toward the singer, then continued to munch on their chocolate-chip cookies. Freddy Sternham, however, was trying to watch the weather forecast on Channel Four, and he let out a howl of outrage when Mrs. Anthony's soaring notes began to drown out the newscaster's promise of unusually warm weather for mid-October. "'Shut up, you crazy old bag! Or I'll shut your mouth for you.'"

The cushion tumbled from Mrs. Anthony's head, and there was a moment of silence as she bent, with great dignity, to pick it up. As soon as the cushion was in place again, she resumed her impassioned swoop toward high C.

Freddy's chair crashed onto the floor as he jumped up, fists clenched and arms swinging wildly. "'Stupid old cow! Didn't you hear what I told you?'' he screamed.

An orderly grabbed him before he had taken more than a couple of steps, forcing him back into his chair and scolding him like a recalcitrant child. Nurse Buxton tapped Mrs. Anthony firmly on her shoulder. "'It's time to have our cookies and apple cider now. You must stop singing at once, please.'"

Mrs. Anthony seemed to recognize the cool voice of authority. She stopped her aria in midphrase and sat down obediently in her chair, clutching the cushion. Nurse Buxton returned to Courtney, checked her prescription sheet and handed over the appropriate little package of pills. "'Enjoying the television program, Ms Long?'' she asked.

Courtney had long since given up telling the hospital staff that she was married and that her married name was Mrs. Tanner. There were some battles, she had found, that it just wasn't possible to win.

She wiped her sweat-slick hand on her slacks and accepted the pills. "'I guess it's okay,'' she mumbled, deliberately avoiding the nurse's eyes. "'But they never report any of the good news.'' She put the pills in her mouth, using her tongue to shove them up high inside her cheek, then drank two or three sips of tepid water. "'All gone.'' She looked up toward the nurse, stretching her lips into the blank, apathetic smile she had been perfecting over the past two weeks, ever since she first started planning her escape.

Nurse Buxton's gaze narrowed, and Courtney realized that somehow her body language had betrayed her, but just at that moment, Mrs. Anthony unleashed a fresh burst of song.

The aide clucked her tongue impatiently. "'Let's do her next, Nurse,'' she said. "'Otherwise she'll get this lot all on edge just when you want them to settle down for the night. Lord love us, has that woman ever got a pair of lungs on her.'"

"'All right.'' Nurse Buxton cast one final, quick glance at Courtney, then walked rapidly toward Walnut Park's most famous inmate. "'Mrs. Anthony, you have to behave yourself if you want your juice and cookies.'"

Courtney pulled a tissue from the pocket of her slacks and raised it to her face. Pretending to blow her nose, she spat out the three pills Nurse Buxton had given her. The blue one was a sleeping pill, she knew, and she thought the others were probably antidepressants of some sort. The state of Colorado required that mental patients should be well cared for. It didn't require that they should know what medication they were being forced to take.

Courtney rolled the tissue into a tight ball, with the pills as a hard center, and quickly pushed it into the pocket of her slacks. In a minute she would make her way to the bathroom and flush the pills down the toilet. During the past two weeks, one way or another she had gotten rid of all the pills the psychiatrists kept prescribing for her. It was amazing how much more coherently her brain seemed to function.

Her heart raced wildly as she smoothed out the creases in her slacks, then clasped her hands neatly together in her lap. Please God, she thought, turning her gaze in the direction of the television screen, let this next half hour be over soon, otherwise I think I really will go mad.

AT LAST THE hospital floor was quiet. Even Mrs. Anthony, Courtney's opera-singing roommate, had finally fallen into a deep, drug-induced sleep. Courtney fought back the urge to spring out of bed and dash for the nearest exit. She estimated that it would be another twenty minutes before Nurse Buxton made her final routine check on all the patients. After that, during the dead hours between midnight and three a.m., the night nurse usually checked on individual rooms only if she was summoned or if she heard some noise that warranted investigation. Courtney was determined that tonight Nurse Buxton would hear nothing unusual from room 10B.

She lay back on her pillows and stared at the window. Through the thin curtains she could see blurred shadows cast by the elegant wrought-iron grille that completely covered the shatterproof glass. Her mouth twisted in an ironic grimace. Nothing as crude as metal bars for Walnut Park, but the fancy scrollwork was every bit as effective.

In the early days of her confinement, she had sometimes filled the long, dark stretches of the night by asking herself how a perfectly normal, twenty-six-year-old ski instructor had managed to end up in a state-approved, maximum-security mental hospital. Unfortunately she had never managed to come up with a satisfactory answer.

She understood the mechanics of the system by now — she even understood how her own obstinate refusal to admit to the ''facts'' documented in the doctors' files made it impossible for them to campaign for her release. When she first awoke in Walnut Park, she felt as though she had wandered into some surrealistic world where nobody perceived the same reality she did. It took several weeks before she finally stopped screaming that she was perfectly sane and that they had to let her out of this crazy place right now. In this calmer state, she realized that somehow the system had made a monumental mistake, and the doctors were no more responsible for the error than she was. Her common sense returned, and she decided to stop protesting everything the professional staff did. What she needed, she realized belatedly, was to work with the doctors to secure her release.

The senior psychiatrist listened with great politeness to her carefully reasoned explanation as to why a terrible mistake had been made. Then he placed his fingertips neatly together and peered at her over his glasses. "'You remember, Courtney, I've explained this to you before. The state of Colorado requires at least three expert witnesses and a hearing in front of a judge before anybody can be committed to a mental institution against their will. You had your hearing, with a qualified psychologist testifying as to your mental state and with an excellent lawyer to represent you. Judge Brown is extremely conscientious, and he listened carefully to all the evidence before ordering you to be committed to our care. In view of Judge Brown's decision, it would require another legal hearing to get you released.'"

"'That's not really a problem,'' Courtney said, refusing to give way to depression. "'You can get me another court hearing, can't you?'' She had even tried to joke. "'It probably only means you need to fill out a million forms, give or take a few hundred.'"

"'A new hearing wouldn't do you any good, Courtney, I'm afraid.'"

"'Why not? I'd explain to them how they've made a mistake, and you could tell them that they've made a mistake —"

"

He interrupted her, his voice kind and rather sad. "'The trouble is, Courtney, I might not be able to tell them that.'"

She drew in her breath sharply. "'You mean...you mean you agree with Judge Brown? You think I'm crazy?'"

"'I don't like to use that word. I don't think it's helpful to either of us. Perhaps we should say that I don't think you're quite ready to face up to the world outside these doors. We hope —"

"

She cut him off. "'How long before I get another hearing, one where I can testify?'"

"'When we think you're ready to be released, we request the hearing. Your job is to concentrate on getting well.'"

"'I am well. It's the system that's screwed up.'' He took off his glasses and looked at her steadily out of kindly gray eyes. "'My dear, don't you think it's time you stopped worrying about when you'll get out of here, and started thinking about how you can help to make yourself a stronger and healthier person?'"

It took two months of black despair before Courtney pulled herself together sufficiently to realize that since the doctors would not help her to leave legally, she had to escape illegally. She knew that she had to get back to Aspen — and to Justin. There was no other way for her to find out what nightmare she had unwittingly wandered into.

There were so many puzzles, so many frightening gaps in her memory. She had been ill, of course; she remembered that distinctly. In fact, she'd been ill almost from the moment she and Justin were married. She'd woken up on the morning of their wedding day with acute stomach cramps, and by the time their plane landed in Mexico City, she'd already thrown up twice.