Ricky rounded the corner of boxes and ground to a stop, feeling the blood in his veins run short and cold. A man? A corpse? No, a man, pale and fragile and bone-thin, sat in the little hollow space made by the boxes. His hands were wrapped around his knees, pulling them tight to his chest, and he heard Ricky at once. The untidy mop of dark hair on his head ruffled and then his head snapped up and he gawked, mouth hanging open, at Ricky. His eyes were huge, black, leaking murky tears.
“I’m so sorry, don’t put me in the basement again,” the man hissed, his cheeks lined with welts, tracks where fingernails had scored the flesh. His hand trembled as he held up a scalpel, blood running thick down his fingers. “I’ve been so good. I’ve done everything you asked! I’ve done everything you asked, just don’t make me do this. I can’t! I’m sorry, so sorry . . .”
“Ricky! Ricky?”
Someone was holding him by the arm and shaking him. He suddenly couldn’t tell if he was staring down at the skeletal man or if he was down there on the floor with him, collapsed. Yes, he was definitely on the floor. He could feel the freezing cement under his palm and the coating of dust that floated over his knuckles. How had he fallen down? Nurse Ash was still shaking him, then thrusting her hand against his forehead to feel for a fever.
The man was gone.
“I saw . . .” No, don’t tell them. They’re not your friends. They can’t know. “I just felt so dizzy all of a sudden,” he lied.
“You’re ice-cold,” Nurse Ash whispered. “No fever. Did you eat at breakfast?”
“No,” he lied again. “I . . . wasn’t hungry. I guess I got a bit faint or something.”
“I’ll say. You dropped like a sack of bricks. What were you saying?” she asked, helping him gradually to his feet.
“Saying?” Ricky flapped his mouth for a few seconds, staring at the blank spot on the ground where the man had been nestled against the boxes. He could swear there was a depression there in the thick film of dust. “I don’t think I said anything.”
“You shouted something before you collapsed,” she said fretfully, holding tight to both his arms as she steered him away from the boxes. There was no wig, he saw now. There never had been one. “It sounded so afraid, Ricky. It sounded like: Help.”
The cafeteria was lit warmly for a change, the air heavy with savory, herbaceous sauces, and roasting meat. Hors d’oeuvres, glistening with butter, shimmered on the banquet tables lining the outer perimeter of the cafeteria-turned-ballroom.
The smell, the kind that would normally make his mouth water, left him feeling pit-stomached and sick. He really hadn’t eaten much at all today. Or the day before. His feet felt leaden in the heavy shoes provided for the patients for tonight and tonight only. He stood, numb and nervous, with his back to the wall.
“Shameless,” Kay said at his side. She and the other patients allowed into the warden’s gala were dressed in simple white shirts and slacks for the men, the same shirts and black, modest skirts for the women. Kay shifted in her trousers, looking miserable. It was a palpable insult from the warden, but Ricky had made sure to emerge from his fog of nerves to tell her she still looked pretty, even without the skirt. All the patients waited anxiously, watching the guests mingle and cram their faces with food. He’d been keeping an eye out for a sympathetic-looking guest, but so far he hadn’t spotted a single one. Kay seemed to agree. “They’re all so oblivious. I don’t think we’re even people to them. Do you think these clowns ever lose sleep over this kind of thing?”
“No. They go home and sleep soundly on their beds made of money and get up again without a care in the world. Anyway, look at the banner.” He pointed to a giant, paper banner that was painted festively and hanging over the doors to the common area.
SAVE OUR SICK—BETTER FOOD AND BEDS FOR BROOKLINE
“They think they’re doing us a favor,” Ricky said. “Not that I would complain about better food . . .”
“Yeah, well, I think they’re miserable. They just don’t know it.”
Ricky managed a grin at that. “Always looking on the bright side.”
“When do we get this play over with?” she asked. Their meager props were hidden in a cloth laundry bag on Ricky’s other side. His players looked to him anxiously for direction. He didn’t know what to do until the play, and avoided their eyes.
“Soon, hopefully,” he said. Having failed to cobble together a convincing disguise, he was desperately scanning the room, hoping for a sign that the orderlies were letting their guard down—that he could make it out of here unnoticed. “Are you still in?”
“Sure, but I’m losing my nerve by the minute over here,” Kay said softly. “It would be a shame to impress everybody and then ruin all the goodwill if your scheming doesn’t work.”
“If my scheming doesn’t work, I think we’ll both have a lot more to worry about, Kay. It’s starting to feel like now or never.” He hadn’t told her about seeing the ghost or whatever it was in the storage closet. The fear that was gnawing at him, almost as much as whatever the warden had written on that clipboard of his, was that the longer he stayed in here, the more he needed to be in here. Brookline was driving him insane.
“If I . . . if I don’t make a break for it, I don’t want that to stop you from running,” she murmured, looking at the floor.
“Kay. You know I would never just leave you in here. There has to be a way for us both to escape. You can give me a list of your relatives, the good ones, and maybe they can check you out.” It was thin, and they both knew it. It was unlikely that anybody but her father would have the authority to pull her out of Brookline.
The warden entered from the doors to their left, effectively silencing their conversation. And not just theirs. The guests began to notice, a whisper of interest snaking through the crowd. Ricky couldn’t believe how many people had come. Most were older, but he spied a few young men and women, too. One woman practically sprinted up to the warden as he arrived. She was short and curvaceous, with dark hair and a heavy jumble of necklaces hanging over her blouse. If he guessed correctly, she couldn’t have been older than college-aged.
By design, surely, the guests wore only black and white, but here and there Ricky noticed splashes of red hidden on a lapel or lady’s neckline. They were little red pins, but not everyone wore them.
The warden eschewed the drink and food, at once plunging into conversation with the dark-haired young woman who had intercepted him.
Ricky wasn’t much interested in what they had to say to each other. He turned his attention instead to the doors. There was no music, but the hushed conversations around the room provided a soft soundtrack as he weighed his options. A single orderly stood at the doors, watchful, but not too concerned with his post, judging from the way his gaze strayed to the dark-haired woman draped over the warden.
Nurses milled among the guests, most of them wearing cracking smiles as they put up with the strain of playing waitress for the evening.
It wasn’t lax supervision, especially not with Nurse Ash stationed close to them, though he did feel like a lot of nurses and orderlies weren’t here. Maybe after the skit he’d have more luck charming a guest; so far none of them had strayed close to the patients. Ricky and his players were being observed and whispered about from a safe distance. Sure, these were the “tame” patients, but they were patients in an asylum all the same.
Most of the nurses and orderlies were probably spread out among the rooms elsewhere, keeping patients quiet and subdued so as not to disturb the guests. Order and discipline. That was the Brookline way.
If the smallest thing went wrong, Ricky knew the warden would snap his team into speedy action. After all this work and preparation, nothing would be allowed to go wrong.
“I’ll make sure they save you all some cake for your hard work,” Nurse Ash said, leaning toward them and giving an encouraging smile. “I can’t wait to see how the skit came together.”
“Are we going to begin soon?” Patty asked.
She stood next to Kay, looking increasingly anxious. Her white shirt didn’t fit very well, and on her short, squat frame, the long skirt that should have been ankle-length brushed the floor. Her big, blue eyes were a little crossed, as if she needed glasses to correct her vision but wasn’t allowed them in the asylum. “The play . . . How long will they make us wait like this? I’m starving . . .”
“I’m sure it won’t be long,” Tanner said next to her. He stared straight ahead, his eyes narrowed and focused, as if he was trying his absolute best to shut out the chatter and smells.
Across the room, the dark-haired woman threw back her head and laughed riotously at something the warden was saying. She had a gap in her teeth so noticeable, Ricky could see it from here. He watched her disappear out the doors, where the last guests were trickling in. A moment later she returned, carrying a small gong and a drumstick with a soft, rounded end. She held up the gong and struck it twice, beaming at the room.
At once the guests fell silent, and Ricky felt like he had been left out of some kind of clubhouse.
“Formalities,” the warden said, almost apologetically. “If the top-tier donors could follow me . . .”
He wore a formal black coat and white shirt with an almost nonexistent collar. A small, red pin flashed where a pocket square might go. Ricky watched a dozen or so of the guests separate themselves from the larger crowd and leave in single file. All of them, he noticed, wore those bright red pins.
“We have to wait longer?” Patty whined, fidgeting. Kay tried to put a calming hand on the woman’s shoulder, but it was immediately shrugged off. “We warmed up ages ago. Maybe we should use it before we lose it. They brought us in here to put on a show, didn’t they?”
Ricky couldn’t tell if it was a gleam of mischief or anger in Patty’s eye.
A tall, handsome man with a ready smile and reddish-brown hair strode forward ahead of the rest, extending a hand to the warden, who shook it before ushering out the rest of the Red Pins.
“Where do you suppose they’re going?” Kay murmured.
“To count their money? Who knows? This might be the distraction I wanted,” he said.
Nurse Ash made eye contact with him and smiled, then gestured toward the middle of the room, signaling for him to start the play.
He rushed over to her, half choking on the cloud of flowery perfume sitting over the guests. “The warden isn’t even here,” Ricky whispered. “Shouldn’t we wait?”
“He’ll be back soon, I’m sure. Things are running a bit behind schedule, so why don’t you get started?”
Ricky nodded. He didn’t want to care if the warden missed out on their stupid little show, but it irked him that the man would ask him to manage the whole thing and then completely miss it.
He turned to his cast, all of them looking completely uninterested but for Patty, who squirmed in anticipation of beginning.
“Here goes nothing,” he mouthed to them.
“If I could have your attention,” Nurse Ash was saying, waving her hand above the crowd to try to quiet them. “Warden Crawford has asked some of his most improved patients to put on a brief play for you all. I’m sure they would appreciate it if you gave them your full attention.”
Ricky recognized the looks staring back at him—the expectant, mildly annoyed stare of parents forced to watch their rambunctious kids sing in the annual Christmas concert or orchestra performance. Almost all their heads cocked condescendingly to the side, lips pursed, the words “Well, aren’t you just too adorable” projected silently at them.
He cleared his throat and took his place in the empty area they had cleared for the patients. Holding a piece of cardboard that simulated a clipboard, he tucked his fist thoughtfully under his chin, delivering his first line. “A physician’s work is never done. Heal the ailing. Tend to the injured and downtrodden. But to tend to the ill of mind?” He made an exaggerated A-HA! and nodded. “The mysteries of the soul and mind are the greatest mysteries of all.”
Polite, soft applause chased around the room. He turned to his right, to the back of the room, seeking out Kay so he could give her the line cue. “My first patient of the day!” he cried, hating every dumb word that came out of his mouth. “How exciting! The first mystery to be examined!”
But Kay wasn’t listening or even preparing for her entrance. She was too busy trying to pull Patty back to the wall with the rest of them. Apparently the songstress had grown tired of waiting. With the nurses busy with their trays and the orderlies in other rooms, Patty broke away and into the thick of the crowd.
The guests billowed back, giving her a wide berth. A few giggled and pointed, and Ricky distinctly heard a man say to his wife, “Oh, fun! Look, they’re starting their little show!”
Patty lifted her arms, half singing and half reciting a speech, her voice booming with Shakespearean clarity off the vaulted ceiling. Nurse Ash ran for her, and the other nurses scrambled to put down their trays without spilling and assist.
“How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us,” Patty bellowed, her cheeks red with the excitement of it all. The attention. “We devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.”
As she reached her crescendo, two nurses corralled her, no doubt trying their best to talk her down and keep from injecting her into silence while so many eyes watched.
“What do we do?” Kay gasped, covering her mouth.
“We let her keep going,” Ricky said, seeing his chance. Nobody was left standing near the doors. “And we thank her later for the showstopping performance.”
Kay shook her head once, quickly, sadly. It stung a little, but he didn’t have time to hesitate. If he didn’t go now, he might never escape.
Ricky skirted the edge of the commotion, leaving Kay behind with the other patients. He couldn’t blame her for not coming along—the chance of being seen or caught was high, and it only got higher if they went together. As he neared the doors, he glanced back at her, watching as she tried to comfort Dennis, who had become agitated from the noise and turned, facing the wall and leaning his forehead against it.
Patty was not going down quietly. She fought off the nurses who tried to subdue her smack in the middle of the room. He thought maybe she glanced at him and smiled, but by then he was out the doors and in the hall, breathing a sigh of relief to find it completely empty.
Moving quickly, he followed the corridor as it hooked around toward the lobby. Here he was more careful. The entrance to the lobby, a single tall door with a metal mesh window and heavy lock, was never left unattended. The door was closed, certainly, and locked, but the lobby beyond was low-lit and quiet now that all the guests were inside. As far as he could tell, nobody manned the station.
He took advantage of his good luck, rubbing his sweaty palms on his borrowed trousers and passing by the lobby door. It wasn’t difficult to find the offices from here. The hall only went one way, despite plenty of doors on either side, before ending at the heavy door that led to the reception area and then down to the basement level. Ricky felt a prickle of cold at the back of his neck and slowed, remembering the voice that seemed to be following him around the asylum. It always came with that unearthly chill. Now it visited him again and he let it pass through him, determined, ignoring the goose bumps rising along his arms as he stopped outside the warden’s office.
It was dark inside. Dark, but the door was unlocked. He didn’t know if that was a mistake on the staff’s part or an arrogant assumption that the gala would go off without a hitch. Whatever the case, Ricky didn’t think twice about going inside. He had come this far, and he doubted the punishment would be much different for sneaking into a specific office than it would be for having snuck out at all. And he wouldn’t get caught, he reminded himself.
He rushed to the tidy desk,
clicking on the light and locating the warden’s clock. He allowed himself three minutes. Even that felt like a risk. But whatever he unearthed would have to be put back again. If he didn’t make it out tonight, the warden couldn’t know he had been snooping around. So he worked feverishly, opening drawers at random, searching for the clipboard, a notepad, anything he could riffle through.
The bottom drawer of the desk on the right-hand side held a file organizer with about fifty brown folders. Tabs at the top displayed last names that filed back alphabetically. He found “DESMOND, R” and yanked it out of the drawer. This was it, and he had at least two minutes left to put everything back in order and leave. He tapped the folder open and—
Empty.
Ricky stared at the place where dozens and dozens of helpful notes should have been but there was nothing. Panicking, he picked out another folder at random. That one, of course, was practically overflowing with charts, records, handwritten observations . . .
He felt that odd, cold miasma envelop him again and froze. Either he was imagining it or there were footsteps coming from down the hall. Luckily he had closed the door behind him. He clicked off the desk lamp and stood in the darkness, listening, breathing raggedly. The footsteps were coming closer.
Run, the disembodied voice whispered hoarsely in his ear again. Hide.
Ricky shut the desk drawer as quietly as he dared and ducked down under the desk, wedging himself against the corner. It was the kind of desk with the flat front and a big, hollowed out space on the other side for your legs and feet. He hid in that space, knees to his chest, clutching the two folders.
For a moment he thought maybe the footsteps had simply been in his head, but no, the door opened, a soft creak giving it away. He held his breath, shivering, helpless, waiting to be discovered.
Three separate pairs of footsteps entered, and he felt the room fill up with bodies. One pair of feet was wearing heels, he could tell, from the exaggerated clicking. All three of them congregated in front of the desk, just a few inches of wood barrier separating them from his head.