Identity (Eyes Wide Open) by Ted Dekker Page A

soon as she woke.
    The sun was already well up when Christy woke at nine—no reason to get up any earlier. She’d graduated from high school six months ago and was still trying to figure out what to do with her life. The trust fund had kicked in when she turned seventeen, so getting a job wasn’t critical. Two thousand dollars a month wasn’t exactly pay dirt, but the anonymous account turned over to her by the orphanage she’d entered when she was thirteen was enough to buy her time.
    She decided to walk the three miles to the hospital in case she’d lost the locket on the street somewhere. She pulled on a pair of jeans, slipped into a red blouse, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and forgave herself for avoiding any makeup before heading out.
    No one to impress; she was searching for her locket, not a man.
    Truth be told, she wasn’t interested in men if the ones she’d known were representative of the entire species.
    Despite an ugly overcast sky, the day was already uncomfortably hot by the time she reached the south end of Saint Matthew’s Hospital. She wasn’t in the best shape, maybe even fat if ten pounds too much was the rule of men. And it was; so, yes, she was plain fat and she secretly hated every one of those ten pounds. She was sweating now because of them.
    But she wasn’t there to be seen by anyone, or to be judged and found lacking. She was there to find her locket.
    The south end of the building was called the old hospital. It was made of red brick and adjoined the much larger new construction. One block north, the streets and landscaping looked pristine, but approaching from the west as Christy was, no one would guess they were approaching a hospital.
    Quincy Street was home to several shops—everything from antique stores to Bill’s Round Bar at one end. A dirty yellow taxicab rolled past on dirty asphalt, followed by an ambulance. The street was otherwise vacant, except for an old bum slouched on a bench under a picture window just ahead.
    Someone had dropped sections of the morning paper along the sidewalk without bothering to use the trash bin on the corner. If her locket had fallen off here, some vagrant had surely found it and taken it to the pawnshop for a few dollars.
    The world was ill, she thought. Building a hospital in the middle of that sickness didn’t change all the suffering. If anything, the building was only a sad reminder of the fate that awaited every last soul helplessly born into such a cruel world.
    A wave of emptiness washed through her chest as she passed the man on the bench. He wasn’t dead yet, but he’d given up on life, and isn’t that what inevitably awaited everyone?
    She wasn’t any different from him, not really.
    Christy turned into the alleyway that ran between the old hospital and the shops. No sign of her locket. She kept her eyes down, searching for any flash of silver on the ground around the base of the four large green dumpsters that hugged the wall to her right.
    Nothing.
    The door to the hospital’s storage room was made of metal, covered by mottled gray paint, dented in several places as if someone had taken a bat or hammer to it.
    Two years earlier, during a discussion with a doctor about how medical equipment had advanced so rapidly, Austin had learned about the old artifacts all but forgotten in the storage room. Curious, he’d broken in and found a haunting space that became a bit of an obsession for a few months. Its secrets still drew him from time to time.
    Christy angled for the door. Austin had gone to the trouble of jimmying the lock so it could be opened with a key of sorts, which he hid in a crack between two bricks.
    Picking up a splinter of wood, she pried the ‘key’ out of the crack, then walked up to the door, glancing left and then right to make sure she was alone.
    She inserted the thin metal piece into the keyhole and wiggled it until the lock sprang. With one last glance both ways, Christy opened the door, slipped through,