Before I Wake (15 page)

Someone screamed.

Franny looked at Eli to gauge his reaction; then they both scrambled to the nearest window.

A crowd was gathering below.

Someone was lying on the ground. Naked. Facedown.

Dark hair. A circular tattoo on the shoulder. A tattoo Franny recognized.

No!

She ran to the bathroom and burst inside, her eyes rapidly scanning the small space.

The empty shower stall. The empty room. The open window.

“No!”

She ran from the bathroom, out into the hall, down the stairs, flying over them three and four at a time. Footsteps behind her: Eli’s.

Out the door and into the blinding sunlight.

Sobbing loudly, she shoved people aside until she broke the circle, until she was on her knees on the ground next to Noah.

“No, no, no.” She shook her head, tears streaming down her face, into her mouth.

Someone turned him onto his back.

Someone threw a coat over him.

Blood pooled in his mouth and ran down the side of his face. He pulled in a sucking breath and lifted a hand to her. The suffering in his eyes squeezed her heart.

She had the most inane thought: He should have picked a taller building. Now he was suffering horribly, with shattered bones and pierced lungs.

But maybe he would live. Maybe he wasn’t dying.

“He’s in pain!” she shouted to anybody who would listen. “Help him!” she implored. “Make him stop hurting! Make the pain stop!”

Time was weird. Stopping. Starting. Voices fading in and out.

Millions of voices. A soup of conversation, nothing distinguishable, women and their high
sshhh, sshh, sshhh
the only sound to pop out.

At some point in that wall of noise, Noah’s body relaxed.

The pain—for him, at least—ended.

Franny looked up, searching for a familiar face, spotting Eli, his eyes glistening. “He’s dead, Eli!” she shouted. “He’s dead!”

Earlier, they had made light of another death. Someone old. Someone half-senile. But this was Noah. This loss touched her personally, and the pain was intolerable. She thought she’d die from it.

Throughout most of Franny’s life, she’d never missed having a mother. It had never mattered. Now she needed one. At times like these, a girl needed a fucking mother.

Paramedics appeared out of a sea of faces. They put Noah on a gurney and covered him.

Wait till I tell Noah
, Franny caught herself thinking.
He’s not going to believe this
.

Arden moved through the crowded lobby. People were looking outside, craning their necks to see what had happened.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her heart pounding with a sense of foreboding and urgency.

“Somebody jumped from the roof.”

“Not the roof,” another person added. “It was the tower room. Someone jumped from the tower room.”

Arden edged her way through the crowd and out the main door. She walked rapidly down the worn marble steps, past the passive white pillars and across the grass. She spotted Eli’s curly hair. She spotted Franny—Franny’s anguished face.

Oh, my God.

Arden started running before her brain issued the command. She was swept along by a reaction that seemed to come from somewhere else, someone else.

“What happened?” she heard herself shout to both Eli and Franny.

Their responses came in slow motion. They looked at her, recognition finally registering.

Relief to see her. Then pain. Horror.

Eye contact was broken. They turned their heads toward the body lying under the white sheet.

Arden understood, but she didn’t want to believe and had to make sure. “Where’s Noah?”

No. Not Noah. It couldn’t be Noah.

Franny put a violently trembling hand to her mouth. Her face crumpled in a wave of agony.

Arden had to see for herself. She pushed her way through the throng of bystanders. “I need to see him,” she told two men getting ready to heave the gurney into the back of the ambulance.

“And you are?”

With one smooth movement, she unzipped her sweatshirt, quickly flashed it open, then let it drop before anyone could see that she didn’t have a badge. “FBI.”

People murmured, looked down at their feet, dropped back, and let her through.

Before she lost her nerve, without a pause, she lifted the sheet.

Noah.

Skin the shade of paste. Lips already blue.

She’d liked that kid. He’d been a good kid. Annoying, but a good kid.

The blood on his face was already turning dark.

No. She couldn’t accept it. What was going on? This was all wrong. All screwed up.

She dropped the sheet, turned and moved blindly through the crowd.

Death was all around her. Breathing down her neck.

Hot breath.

Cold breath.

No breath.

Her dead father.

Her dead mother.

Run! It’s here! In the house! Death is in the house!

She’d run that day—outside. Six inches of snow on the ground, and she was wearing nothing but a pair of socks because she’d kicked off her boots at the door. But she had to get away. Away from death. Away from the images death had left behind.

She ran through a field to the barn, out the other side and into the corncrib.

Is he coming? Is he back there?

Up she climbed.

You’ll be trapped. Once you get up there, you’ll be trapped.

But she could climb like hell. When she was younger, her dad had always called her his little monkey. He’d send her up to the top of places he and the hired hands were afraid to go. Nobody had been to the top of the corncrib, the cupola, for years and years. Nobody but her and the rats…

She used to climb up there to get away from her parents because nobody had the guts to come after her. She used to climb up there on Fourth of July to watch the fireworks being set off in the nearest town fifteen miles away.

Nobody else.

The killer didn’t come after her either. He didn’t have the guts.

On the Hill, the ambulance gave a couple blasts of its siren, then drove off.

Arden almost bumped into someone.

She sidestepped.

So did he.

She sidestepped again.

So did he.

She looked up.

Fury.

Images collided in her head, and for a moment she was back in the corncrib, and Fury was looking up at her, begging her to come down.

She’d run that day.

Her mother and father were dead. There had been nothing she could do but save herself.

You could have killed him. You could have killed the man who murdered your parents.

Instead she’d hidden. She’d never even gotten a look at his face…

“It’s Noah,” she heard herself telling Fury.

“I know.”

For a while now she’d thought of Fury as her friend. But a face she’d thought of as occasionally kind now seemed threatening. Eyes that had seemed sympathetic now appeared harsh and cold.

Funny how lighting changed everything.

“He jumped,” she told him in a voice devoid of emotion.

Fury’s gaze moved past her.

She turned to see Harris standing in the distance, hands in the pockets of his white lab coat as some silent form of communication passed between the two men. She looked for Eli and Franny. They were gone.

What was going on?

Franny. Eli, and Noah had all been weird and lethargic when she and Fury had gone to their room. She may have had a dislike of classical music, but since when did listening to Mozart make you crazy? Since when did listening to Mozart make you jump from a window?

Dr. Harris was a research scientist, and some research scientists felt justified in pushing their patients to the edge and beyond. Was he doing that with Eli and Franny? Had he done that with Noah? Did the study they were involved in have anything to do with Noah’s death?

Eli burst through the crowd. “I was just up in our room.” He was out of breath, his eyes big, his chest rising and falling. “Noah left a bloody shirt and bloody shoes in the bathroom.”

At three a.m., the morning after Noah plunged to his death, Arden slipped silently from her room. Dressed in dark jeans and her navy-blue hooded sweatshirt, she walked down the hall. Dim lights illuminated the way, casting shadows on the coved plaster ceiling.

Trust your gut.

She’d learned that as a kid, as a woman, as an agent. But there had been a few times in her life when her gut had lied, when it told her someone good was really bad, and the other way around. At least now she knew what was what. Well, not
exactly
, but she knew she had to get out of there if she wanted to discover who’d killed her parents. The answer to that question wasn’t on the Hill. The only thing she would find on the Hill was death and confusion.

The bloody shoe print had been a positive match, tagging Noah as the likeliest murderer of poor Vera Thompson. DNA testing would take longer, but given the circumstances, Arden didn’t hold out much hope for an alternative conclusion.

Before leaving, she had one last thing to check off her list. Two things, if she counted the heart-to-heart she planned on having with Eli and Franny.

First she had to prove to herself that what she’d seen that night in Cottage 25 had been nothing more than a crisis apparition.

She took the stairs, the soles of her running shoes letting out a squeak against the marble surface. When she reached the first floor, she paused to listen.

After the recent “events,” as Fury had called them, they’d hired more guards. Police patrolled the grounds.

If anybody stopped her, Arden would say she was going for a walk. No law against that, even at three a.m. But it would look damn suspicious.

Clear skies had once again given way to gloom, obliterating the moon and stars. Lampposts lined the cobblestone streets. The light they gave off was fuzzy, with undertones of orange, almost as if the light were being projected from the past.

Arden clung to the shadows and walls. The leaves under her feet were wet from dew; they hardly made a sound. Along the way she spotted the occasional policeman or guard. Her FBI training in stealth procedures clicked in, keeping panic to a minimum.

Cool logic. Hyperawareness.

She went directly to the back entrance of Cottage 25, the entrance Noah had used on a day that now seemed years ago.

Down steep cement steps surrounded by cement walls, turn right to a door hidden from view.

The broken glass had been temporarily replaced by a thin piece of plywood. Finding a loose corner, she bent and splintered the wood, stuck her hand and arm through the hole in the glass, and unlocked the door from the inside.

There had been talk of putting in an alarm system, but that kind of thing took time, and apparently the work hadn’t yet been accomplished, because nothing announced her invasion.

The only thing different between this visit and the last was that this time there were more lights. No blinding overhead lights, but small, low-watt bulbs partially illuminating areas above dark doors set in little square dead ends with high ceilings.

It was unnerving visiting a building that had once housed so many patients. She could still feel them. Their imprint was there. Clinging to the air, gathering in black corners. Civil War veterans with slippered feet and minds confused by death and blood and killing.

Arden moved through them, through the ghosts. Through the empty cafeteria that had been abandoned one fine day, never to be revisited.

Oops. Forgot to tell you we were leaving. Forgot to let you know we weren’t coining back.

And so the building had waited. Days, months, years…

Arden found the stairs where she’d collapsed that night. She steeled herself, braced herself against the feeling that had hit her before.

Things were different now. She was tougher. Noah’s death had given her resolve, a purpose that went beyond her own fear of the dark and things she couldn’t remember.

She made it down the stairs to the tank room door, with its thick, black paint and wire mesh window that was too high to see through.

From a room down the hall came the muffled sound of a television. An alien glow poured from a doorway.

Someone—a security guard?—was watching an old sitcom.

Arden slowly opened the tank room door.

There they were. The tanks. Green. Metal.

A light that glowed orange.

In use.

Fear filled her throat. It crept up her spine and the back of her neck.

She’d expected to find the tanks empty. The purpose of this final visit was strictly to reassure herself.

She crossed the room. An IV rack with a half-empty glucose bag stood next to one of the tanks, the tube feeding into the tank through a small access hole.

She unfastened the locks, hearing yet not hearing the sound of metal hitting metal. Caring yet not caring about the person down the hall.

With both hands, she pushed up the heavy lid.

A body. Floating like a cork on a bed of salt water.

This was the man she’d seen before. The man everyone had told her didn’t exist. This was a man she knew and recognized.

Harley.