The House of Memory (Pluto's Snitch Book 2) Page 20

  The notes on Cheryl’s chart were more extensive than the others I’d looked at. After the surgery, she’d been morose. She ran away from Bryce to be in the wooded areas, particularly along the river. When she was brought back to Bryce and admonished to stay away from the river, she told the orderlies that she had to go there. She said she was meeting someone there.

  The doctor had noted that the flowing river water seemed to calm her, and she was often found sitting on the bank watching the current, waiting for her “friend,” as she called the person she was to meet. She was docile and sweet tempered otherwise.

  I thought of Nurse Brady’s comment that she kept running away. To the river. I wondered if it was a clue to how she’d grown up, because she was listed as an orphan with no family. She’d had blood relatives once upon a time, but they’d simply abandoned her. Maybe her happy memories came from the river. There was little to go on and no family to check with.

  In fact, none of the three—Connie, Joanne, or Cheryl—had close family. No one to check up on them. The surgery Dr. Perkins championed was experimental at best. It made sense he’d select patients who had no one to fight against it. I wondered how the male patients who’d been operated on had fared, but I didn’t have any names to check, and the files were too extensive to start reading and hope I chanced across something.

  I turned out the light and sat for a moment, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The sound of something clattering to the floor made me start out of the chair. Someone was inside the office with me.

  “Who’s there?” I asked softly. If it was a security guard, I didn’t want to scare him and get shot for my trouble.

  “Save me.”

  I inhaled slowly. The voice was feminine, tired, without hope. “Who are you?”

  “Save me.” She stepped into the moonlight filtering in through the open window where I’d gained entrance. She was young, the yellow dress covered in water and mud. Water puddled about her feet in their shiny black shoes with a single strap across the top.

  “Who are you?” But I knew. It was Connie Shelton. I’d known she was dead, but I didn’t know how. Now I believed she had drowned. We’d find her body in the river. She’d come to let me know.

  “Save her.” She’d changed the refrain.

  “I will save Camilla. I will.”

  She nodded. “Beware.”

  “What happened to you?” I had to have some facts to take to the law. If she could help me with a detail of her death, I would have something real. The sheriff wouldn’t come and search the river simply because I’d been visited by a ghost. “Who hurt you?”

  “Save yourself,” she said, her image wavering in the moonlight as if she were being blown about by a slight breeze. “Save yourself. He’s coming.” She started to cry, and the force of her emotions made her more corporeal. I could see the bruises on her throat, the swelling of one battered cheek. She’d been beaten before she died. “Save yourself!” Her words were a blast of chill air against my face.

  And then I heard it.

  Outside the office heavy footsteps echoed on the wooden floor of the lobby.

  “He’s coming,” Connie said. She was across the room, pressing through the wall.

  “Don’t go.” I had unanswered questions, and I might never get another chance. “Who’s coming?”

  “Save her.” She beseeched me; there was no other word for it. Her voice broke on a watery sob. “Home. Oh, please, home.”

  The emotion she felt slammed into me, and I thought I’d break into tears myself. Homesickness, that wretched longing for a place out of reach, left my stomach roiling. I’d never shared emotions with a ghost, but Connie wanted her home, and I knew what that terrible desire was like. I let her memories flow over me and saw the rural clapboard house, unpainted, shaded by large oaks. The ground was bare but neatly raked. The front porch held planters of zinnias and variegated sweet williams, a swing, and two chairs.

  A large tin pan filled with purple-hull crowder peas sat on the floor, waiting to be shelled for the night’s supper. Beside the swing was a bucket of sweet corn, still in the shucks, also waiting to be cleaned. It was a small farm, isolated but lovingly maintained, somewhere in the South. This was the Shelton farm, I somehow knew. This was the home of Connie’s birth father, not the stepfather who’d driven her to acts of violence. I jotted down some details and forced the image into memory so that I could examine it at a later date for clues to the place where I believed Connie had once experienced love. If I could, I would pay her grandparents a personal visit to tell them what I suspected, even if I couldn’t prove it.

  The cost of communicating the farm image to me had drained Connie’s psychic energy and left her a mere shimmer. “I’ll try to find it,” I told her. “You should go home.”

  “Home,” she said, the word sounding as if she were underwater.

  “If I find your body, I’ll take you home,” I promised.

  “Home,” she agreed. She flared back, fully corporeal for just a moment. “Beware! He’s here.”

  And then she was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  My body felt like a tuning fork, still vibrating from the charge of her warning. Footsteps came across the lobby floor. The same tread I’d heard earlier, coupled with additional steps and a strange, scrabbling noise. I ducked behind the desk, clutching my little notepad filled with the information I’d jotted down and my pen, and prayed that my heart slamming into my rib cage would not give me away.

  Who was outside the office? Friend or foe? Alive or dead? Often the spirits I saw moved in a gliding motion or simply appeared closer or farther away. This was someone—several someones—walking with a solid tread, indicating they were alive. Truthfully, I’d rather face more ghosts than a security guard, nurse, or orderly of the hospital.

  Cowering on my knees, I waited, afraid to breathe, running through the potential consequences. Uncle Brett would send bail money, hire a lawyer, and rush to my rescue, no questions asked. For his trouble, I would taint his name and ruin my own. Standing outside Bryce talking with Reginald about the potential price I’d pay, it had seemed negligible. Now I’d had a change of heart.

  I was almost ready to stand up and confess my sins when the footsteps stopped. An eerie silence fell over Bryce. Even the breeze outside that had kicked up with the pending storm had stopped. After several minutes, I wondered if I’d imagined the footfalls. I was keyed up, afraid. Connie Shelton’s warning may have excited my hearing, my expectations. I crept out from beneath the desk and eased over to the door, which was heavy wood with a frosted-glass top. I couldn’t really see through it, but I could see vague images: the visitor chairs against the wall, two upright images that I figured to be pillars, the reception desk. The room was devoid of people or entities. I’d wasted valuable time hiding from my imagination.

  I had to get to Camilla’s room, and my time was running out. The day started early in Bryce, with inmates awakened for breakfast at five. I did not have long to convince Camilla. I couldn’t hide out in the business office another minute.

  My hand clutched the doorknob; then I heard a strange sobbing shuffle. It was so plaintive, so desperate that I froze. In the center of the frosted glass, I saw a blurry image in the center of the lobby. Two big men supported another person, who hung between them as if he or she were unconscious or injured. As they dragged the person, her feet made paddling movements. She tried to walk but couldn’t make her legs work.

  Through the cloudy glass, I couldn’t tell who the people were, but they moved across the lobby at a funereal pace, and I realized they were not alive. I had to risk it. I cracked the door and peeked out. Two orderlies, lumps of men with no features, assisted Cheryl Lawrence. A trail of water dripped from her, and for a split second, a wild hope that she hadn’t drowned, that she’d been revived and they were assisting her to her bed, fluttered in my chest. But I remembered her gray and bloated body coming out of the water, the grappling hook piercing
her stomach and digging into her ribs as she was snared and dragged to the surface. She could not be alive. I was witnessing some scene from the past. Or something Cheryl Lawrence was trying to tell me, much in the way that Connie Shelton had.

  She might be reenacting her murder, trying to show what had happened.

  A cold, wet hand brushed my cheek from behind, and I whirled, barely stifling the scream that tried to tear from me. Dead Cheryl, water dripping, pale-blue eyes rolled up in her head, revealing the whites, reached out to touch my hair. “So pretty.”

  I didn’t flinch, though every impulse in my body was to run. To run as far and fast as I could. Her hand patted my hair, water running from her flesh to mine.

  “Pretty girl. The river brings her to me,” she said.

  “Who? Who does the river bring?” I croaked the words, but it was the best I could manage with her cold, dead hand stroking my hair.

  “The good lady.”

  I realized that Cheryl’s perception was childlike. Whether from drowning or her mental condition, I couldn’t say. If I had to bet, it would be that the operation had done it.

  “Where do you live?” I asked, my pen ready. If I could find her home, I could learn so much more about her.

  “Beneath the water. She’s waiting for me. I’ll be a princess.”

  There were so many things to ask, but my throat clogged with emotion. This poor young woman’s spirit was trapped in some watery fairy tale at the bottom of the river. Had she drowned trying to find a land where she would be a princess? The thought was unbearable. Would her mental condition condemn her forever to seek what could never be found?

  Or, more sinister, had she been lured to her death deliberately?

  Her wet hand moved through my hair again. “So pretty. Pretty as a princess. Do what he says and I won’t be punished.” Her features constricted. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Who hurts you?”

  She stepped back, and I realized she was weakening, much as Connie had after communicating her memories of home. What had been corporeal was now less dense. She was fading away.

  “Where is Joanne Pence?” I asked. “Is she still here?”

  “Tap, tap, tap.” Cheryl reached out a bluish hand. “Tap, tap, tap.” She tried to touch me, but I backed away. I didn’t want to feel those lifeless, clammy fingertips against my skin again.

  “Where’s Joanne?”

  Tap, tap, tap. Her fingers rapped against the wood of the desk.

  “Hush,” I said, worried that a guard or nurse might hear the commotion.

  Tap, tap, tap. She came toward me, and her pale eyes stared at me. Tap, tap, tap.

  I didn’t understand what it meant or what she wanted. I only knew she was growing agitated at my lack of understanding. “Please, if Joanne is here, help me find her.”

  Tap, tap, tap. She reached out for me, her hand clawlike. “I heard it. Tap, tap, tap. And then . . .” She looked beyond me to the door. “Now I’m his.”

  “Who?” I didn’t understand what she was saying.

  “Go for a ride and never come back.” Her words were echoey, unsubstantial, and then she was gone, and I was alone in the business office of the state mental institution. The only evidence she’d been there was a puddle of water on the lobby floor.

  As I prepared to vacate the office, lightning struck so close the smell of ozone sparked the air, and a boom of thunder made the panes in the building rattle. The lights sputtered and went out, and a most unnatural sensation climbed up my spine. Cheryl had gone, but I was not alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The sensation that I’d sought at Roswell House and failed to find tingled the nape of my neck as I stepped into the lobby. The dead were near at hand. I couldn’t see them, but I felt them. I’d noticed a candle on a shelf in the lobby, and I found it and struck a match beside it. The wick caught, and I turned slowly, aware of others around me. The dead filled the lobby with an overwhelming sense of loss and abandonment. The candle cast unsteady shadows against the walls and floor, hooded figures that loomed large and then shrank to hunched goblins as I walked.

  I staggered under the weight of the dead as I reached the hallway and walked toward Camilla’s room.

  Bryce Hospital had seen many deaths. It was a place where patients were often critically ill and unable to express their needs or help themselves.

  Most of the entities couldn’t incarnate in a physical form but came through only as vague shadow and emotion. I’d simply not expected the weight of death to be so pressing. I’d been foolish to come into the hospital at night without Reginald. He helped balance me, kept me from being overwhelmed in this underworld of the dead.

  My dream in the Tuscaloosa hotel came back to me. I’d journeyed to the tombs, the arched corridors of the spirits beneath the earth where Pluto ruled and the River Lethe brought forgetfulness. I remembered the figures, all clad in black hooded cloaks. The child who’d been featureless, unformed like the unborn. I hadn’t understood the lack of individuality, but now I realized it was merely a transitory state.

  These sad dead meant me no harm. At least none I could detect.

  I kept walking.

  Tap, tap, tap. The spirits crowded closer to me. They didn’t speak—were incapable of language. They generated the noise of a hammer striking a nail. Not hard, delicately.

  Tap, tap, tap, like a metallic woodpecker.

  I traversed the halls, and all around me Bryce creaked and moaned as patients shifted in their bunks—mumbling, coughing, snoring, calling out for family. When I heard a door open, I ducked into a linen closet as someone hurriedly walked past me.

  When the footsteps had died away, I stepped out into the hall and found myself confronting a half dozen young girls. The oppression of the multitude of spirits was gone. Now it was only the young women. I recognized Connie but none of the others. They wore dresses designed for evening wear, stockings, dark lipstick, and heavy kohl around their eyes that aged them. Several cut sidelong glances at me, their lips pulled up in a sneer. Others, like Connie, looked down, shy or ashamed—I couldn’t tell which.

  I recognized the two girls I’d seen in the hospital hallway earlier, and the two from the hotel corridor. They lounged against the wall as if they knew a secret, one that offered an advantage. Bad girls. They knew things, secret things. It was clear to see in their eyes. They clustered around the door of Camilla’s room, forcing me to stand in the hallway or walk through them.

  Why are you here? I asked without having to speak the words. And I knew. In my heart I knew. They’d been surgically traumatized here at Bryce and then put on the street. Reginald had said the missing girls and Camilla had me in common. Yes. But it was more. We all had Bryce in common. They had experienced the horrors, and I had been brought here to expose what was happening. Something terrible was going on with the experimental brain surgeries and these young women.

  The girls had no answers for me, at least none they were willing to share. They milled around the doorway.

  “Stand aside, please. You have my word I’ll try to help you.”

  They shifted back, and I felt relief and also curiosity that they’d obeyed me. I might feel pity for them, and I certainly wanted to help them, but Camilla was my first priority.

  A breeze threatened to snuff out my candle, and I put up a hand to shield the flame. The entities around me drew back even more. A terrible odor rose up, overwhelming me. The young women began to decay in front of me. Wounds and bruises appeared, and some began to drip water. Their skin turned gray, and their bodies bloated, pressing through torn dresses. Others showed dark bruises on their necks—blood leaking from their scalps or eyes, leaking down their dresses and falling from their hems onto the floor, mingling with the water.

  Tap, tap, tap. The sound was now sinister.

  “What does it mean?” I tried to hold my breath to avoid the stench of decay that rose from them.

  Tap, tap, tap, was the only answer.

  �
�What does that mean?” I was beyond frustrated.

  “Find us.” One of the hotel girls stepped forward. “Find us.”

  The hallway was empty. My candle illumination showed only the silent hallway and the door of Camilla’s room. I turned the knob to discover it was locked. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I shook the knob. “Camilla?”

  “Who is it?” She sounded groggy, and I wondered if they’d drugged her.

  “Open the door. It’s Raissa. I need to speak with you.”

  “I can’t. They lock it.”

  I twisted the knob again, gauging how the bolt engaged. It was a simple mechanism, and one I might master with a hairpin. Thankfully the heat and humidity had prompted me to pin my hair back from my face. I removed the spiral pin and opened it, working as quickly as I could with the dim light from the candle on the floor.

  In a moment the door opened. Camilla stood on the other side, fully dressed as if she’d been waiting for me to arrive.

  “You have to come with me.” I didn’t intend to give her time to think. If we couldn’t open the front door, we’d go out the window I’d entered. There was no time to waste. The dead had convinced me, by emotion if not words, that Camilla was in more danger than I’d suspected. We had to make our escape now. She was smaller than I was, and I could boost her up. I reached for her arm, but she stepped back.

  “I’m not leaving.”

  My first reaction was to grab her and haul her down the corridor and then out the office window. I’d risked a lot to help her, a fact she seemed not to recognize. A little cooperation would be appreciated. “If Reginald and I can help you, it will happen at Roswell House.” I forced civility and concern into my voice, burying the anger. “The house has a history, Camilla. Reginald and I have learned a lot about the property. It’s possible something from the past, something lingering from the house’s past, has . . . linked to you.”