Before I Wake (5 page)

Beyond all that, hidden by buildings and landscape, was Cottage 25…

Eli pulled the car to a stop in front of the pillared Building 50, near the old stone carriage steps. Together he and Arden dragged the duffel bag from the back and toted it up the stairs to the double doors.

He let go, straightened, and stood there. Arden waited, expecting him to leave.

The long good-bye
was what Arden had always called this awkward moment when it was time for the characters to separate but it seemed something more should be said.

She didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want to turn and walk through the doors by herself.

A tip. He was probably waiting for a tip. She dug into her pocket and pulled out some bills. He waved the money away.

He was such a sweet kid. Standing there, he reminded her of Daniel.

Here she was, a person bleached, yet everything reminded her of something that hurt. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. Bleaching should have taken away the pain. What good was it if it didn’t do that?

Then Eli was gone. Down the stairs to his car.

She watched him go. Instead of making a U-turn, he continued up the road, going deeper into the grounds. There were many ways out.

When she could no longer see his car, Arden grabbed her bag and dragged it across the threshold and through the double doors, where she was met by a woman who introduced herself as Victoria. She was tall and thin, with dark, curly hair and red lipstick.

Arden followed her into a small office adjacent to the lobby.

“We’re putting you on the fourth floor in what used to be the women’s wing,” Victoria explained. “You have a nice view of the park and town from there. I think when you were here before those rooms were closed, but the Hill has changed, and what was the men’s wing is now an assisted and independent living facility.”

An old-folks’ home? The last time Arden had been on the Hill, the participants had roomed in the old Mercy Hospital, adjacent to Cottage 25. She was relieved to find that her new digs would be farther away.

Years ago, in order to save the asylum from crumbling into disuse and disrepair, the city had purchased it for a dollar. In return, the town council agreed to restore it to its original glory. In order to afford that restoration, the city rented out various buildings. Some of the residents had probably changed, but back in Arden’s day, the main occupants had been the Webber Research Institute, a mental health clinic, physicians’ offices, and a psychoanalysis wing.

“You have your initial consultation with Dr. Harris tomorrow morning at eight thirty.” Victoria whipped out a photocopied map and circled one of the outer buildings with a red pen. “Go out the front doors, then take a right down Maple Lane. Webber Research Institute, located in the Mercy Unit, will be on your left, just past the power plant and blacksmith shop.”

Arden stared at the building labeled Cottage 25, her heart slamming. The FBI agent had said it was closed, that they were no longer using it, but it had long been rumored that a tunnel linked the Mercy Unit and Cottage 25.

“And Cottage 25?” Arden’s voice echoed, and the vast space seemed to fill with bleak imprints of the past.

“Administration. But most of the building is in disuse. I think it’s the next one slated for restoration.”

Arden felt herself relax. “What about Harley? Harley Larson.” She had to see Harley. Harley was the only one who would understand. Harley had been through what she’d been through.

Victoria frowned in thought. “Mr. Larson was here, but he didn’t stay.”

Arden tensed again.

“He left after a couple of hours, as I understand it.”

“Why?”

Victoria shook her head. “I have no idea.” She handed Arden a heavy gold key that was worn smooth.

A key. Even the Holiday in Artesia had upgraded to a card system.

“Unfortunately, the main lobby elevator is the only one in working order right now. That is, except for service elevators.”

Why had Harley left? Had coming back been too much for him? Or had he been turned down for the program? Would they turn her down?

All along she’d been thinking she would have Harley’s support when she got here, that they would be a team once more, and be able to lean on each other.

Arden dragged her bag across the black-and-white-checkerboard lobby floor to the antique elevator, pushed the button, and waited.

When the brass doors finally jerked open, a shriveled old woman stood in the corner. “What are they serving?” she asked loudly. “I hope it’s not turkey and mashed potatoes.”

The woman shuffled off the elevator. She looked around. “Where’s the lunchroom?” she asked, as if she were accusing Arden of making off with it.

Arden got herself and her bag into the elevator. The space was hot and stuffy. Taped next to the round, black basement button was a yellowed label that said lunchroom.

“It’s in the basement,” Arden said.

“Huh?”

“You’re on the wrong floor.” This time she made sure she spoke with more volume.

“I am?” Panic set in. “Oh, oh.”

Arden held the open button while the woman got back inside.

“My daughter-in-law tricked me into coming here,” the woman confided. “Told me it was just for a week, while she went on vacation. Been here six months. Don’t have a car. Can’t drive anyway. And where would I go? They sold my home. I don’t have a home.” She looked at Arden with eyes that were clear and lucid. “Is that why you’re here? To visit your mother-in-law? Did you trick her into coming, too?”

“No, I’m staying in the women’s wing. I don’t have any relatives here.”

“Good for you. My name’s Vera. Vera Thompson. I suppose you think that’s an old-lady name.”

“I’m Arden.”

Vera glanced around with that sudden, swift irritation old people often displayed. “Did you push the button, Arden?” Vera pointed. “Push the button.”

Arden pushed the button. They shook and shimmied to the basement. The door opened.

“Turkey,” Vera muttered as she exited the elevator for the second time, seeming to have completely forgotten Arden now that the food had presented itself. “
I
hate turkey.” At the last minute, she turned back. “Lock your door before you go to bed. The shadow people run up and down the halls at night.” She passed a tongue across dry lips. “And if somebody tells you they’re taking you to stay at a rest home for a week, don’t believe ‘em.”

The elevator door closed. Arden was happy to escape to the fourth floor.

Once there, she discovered Victoria had told her a skewed version of the truth. Arden’s fourth-floor room did overlook the front drive, but the pair of six-foot-tall, wooden-framed windows hadn’t been cleaned in years, and she could hardly see through the glass. There was also no chain lock or dead bolt on the door.

What was it with these people? Did they think serious crime didn’t happen in small towns? Some of the bloodiest, most horrendous murders had taken place in sleepy, idyllic burgs in Middle America.

The room smelled old. Wood and plaster had absorbed and encapsulated the air of almost 150 years. No amount of paint or furniture polish or pine-scented air freshener could cover it up.

A piece of paper on a table near the bathroom listed amenities. For an additional fee, she could eat turkey downstairs. Also located at basement level were vending machines.

The room had a single bed, tidily made with a smooth, beige spread. She checked the bathroom. Claw-foot tub enclosed by a white, plastic shower curtain. Clean sink. Clean towels. New bar of wrapped soap.

Back in the sleeping area, she looked through the desk drawers. Empty except for a Gideon Bible. Those people got around.

The room was stuffy.

She undid the latch on one of the windows. It opened like a double door, swinging inward to expose wrought-iron bars.

The evening air was cool against Arden’s face, but it didn’t ease her claustrophobia. Outside, construction workers had gone home, and only a few cars dotted the parking lot.

Darkness was falling.

Arden needed to get away. Just for a little while, she assured herself.

She left the room, key in one pocket, cash and ID in the other. Rather than risk an encounter with the diners returning to their rooms, she took the stairs.

The lobby was deserted, the little office Victoria occupied closed.

Arden hurried out the front door and down the sweeping stairs. There was no sidewalk. She ran across a grassy area, clinging to the shadows of the buildings and evergreen trees.

I’ve done this before.

But not alone.

Someone had been with her. A man. A dark-haired man whose name and face she couldn’t remember. Harley? Maybe it had been Harley.

They’d run down the hill, smothering their laughter, excited and thrilled to be out of the building.

It had been late summer.

Crickets had chirped and fireflies had flickered in the darker areas beneath the trees.

Years ago, patients had once farmed some of the asylum ground. They’d milked dairy cows and harvested apples from the orchard. On a slanting hillside that was much too steep to farm or graze, the dead had been buried. No real headstones. Just rows of numbers etched into four-by-six-inch granite slabs that stood upright, the numbers cross-referenced between the covers of a handwritten book.

That other night, while running down the steep slope with the dark-haired man, Arden had tripped over one of the numbers and had tumbled to the ground.

The man had plopped down beside her and they’d looked up at the stars.

Now Arden slowed, then stopped. She looked up.

The sky was cloudy. No stars.

He’d kissed her. The night of their escape. Then, just as quickly, he’d jumped to his feet and given her a hand up. Together they’d run the rest of the way down the hill.

Arden thought of that night, trying to remember…

They’d gone to a bar. Grumpy Steve’s. Grumpy Steve’s had pizza. It had darts. It had alcohol.

She needed a drink.

A drink would help. A drink always helped.

Nathan Fury watched Arden disappear into Grumpy Steve’s.

He waited in his rental car.

And waited.

After an hour, he gave up and went in after her, pausing just inside the door.

Grumpy’s was a neighborhood bar, the kind with a pinball machine and Pac-man game in the corner. The walls were covered with old framed photos of Madeline, interspersed with the occasional mounted fish. A board on the wall advertised chili on Fridays, fried catfish on Saturdays. But their specialty was pizza.

A family with two small children sat along the far wall opposite the bar, one of the kids begging for change for the pinball machine. Two guys in dusty seed corn caps sat smoking and drinking at another table.

Arden was at the bar, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, navy blue jogging shoes hooked over the bar stool’s footrest.

He crossed the room and slid onto the stool beside her.

She turned her head, glass in hand. Her eyebrows lifted in acknowledgment. She glanced at the suit he’d had on last time she’d seen him, then tilted her head and shook an ice cube into her mouth.

It had been cruel to bring her back here. He knew that. But her stint in New Mexico hadn’t been doing her any good. Fury had been behind getting her re-involved in the project and new investigation, and it had been a tough sell. Nobody else had thought it a good idea. And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he was just being selfish.

“Have you eaten?” he asked. “Want to split a pizza?”

She was a little drunk. Again. Her eyelids had that heavy look, and there was a slight smile at the corners of her mouth.

The old Arden hadn’t been much of a drinker. He’d never seen her have more than a few glasses of wine or maybe an occasional mixed drink.

A coaster appeared in front of him. “What can I get you?” the female bartender asked. She was tall and blond, about fifty.

“Light beer. Whatever you have on draft.”

Arden pushed her glass closer. “I’ll have a refill.”

The woman poured Arden a double shot. Bourbon on the rocks. Albert French’s drink of choice.

“How about that pizza?” Fury asked again.

“Sure.”

The bartender handed them both a laminated card that served as a menu.

Arden perused it quickly. “Mushroom, spinach, and pineapple.”

It was what she’d ordered last time they’d been there.

“Sounds good to me. Medium should be fine.” Fury grabbed his glass of beer. “Let’s move to a booth.”

She didn’t argue, which at first surprised him. But once they were situated in a dark corner, her reason for agreeing became obvious.

“Now are you going to tell me your name?” She leaned forward, arms crossed on the varnished tabletop.

“Nathan.” He waited a moment, hoping for the smallest flicker of recognition. None came. “Nathan Fury.”

She extended her hand. “Nice to meet you, Nathan Fury.”

They shook.

It was hard to let go of her hand, hard not to hang on longer than was appropriate, but he somehow managed.

How surreal to be sitting face-to-face in the very same booth they’d sat in before, and have her stare at him with the eyes of a stranger.

It hurt like hell.

They’d been agents together, partners. Later they’d both been in Project TAKE. TAKE had marked the beginning of the end of their personal and working relationship.

His hair had been brown then. It started to turn gray after his bout in the tank. Arden had noticed it first.

“Have you been painting?” she’d asked him one morning. “You have paint in your hair.”

“Where?”

“There.”

He’d looked in the mirror and had seen two patches of gray at his temples. That was the first visual indication that the tank was a bad thing. He’d already suspected it was messing up their minds.

Two days later, he announced that he’d had enough. By that time, he, Arden, and Harley Larson were the only ones left. Everybody else had bailed.

“My head is getting fucked up,” Fury had told Arden. “You’ve changed. I’ve changed. We have to stop. We have to get out. Can’t you see that we’re taking on traits that belong to the killers?”

She’d refused to believe him. “I’m the same person I’ve always been. And I’m not a quitter. I’ve never quit anything in my life.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

She’d accused him of being jealous. Jealous that she was doing so well, that in the short time they’d been on the Hill she’d become a star, while Fury had complained of motion sickness and headaches that left him weak and pale.

He dropped out.

She and Harley Larson stayed.

Fury had met Larson only once at the beginning of the indoctrination. He’d seemed a nice enough guy, although a little nervous and shy.

Arden and Larson became a dream team. A dynamic duo.

“What happened to Harley?” Arden now asked him. “He called me a few days ago. He told me he was coming back to the Hill.”

She’d remembered Larson, but she’d forgotten Fury—someone she’d once professed to love.

Recent studies had proven the existence of voluntary memory repression, and Fury couldn’t help but wonder if she’d erased him on purpose.

“Larson was here, but decided not to stay.” Fury hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t wanted to see him. “Nobody is forced to stay.”

Maybe she’d been right. Maybe he had been jealous.

Their pizza arrived.

“And you?” she asked once the bartender was gone. “How are you involved?”

“I guess I’m the gopher.”

With the pointed spatula, he slipped a slice of pizza onto a small plate and passed it to her. “Just overseeing things for the Bureau. I don’t know how much you remember about TAKE,” he said, “but the FBI has a symbiotic relationship with Dr. Harris and his crew.”

TAKE wasn’t the only project going on in the old hospital. Private funds and grants were paying for all kinds of studies involving sleep deprivation, music therapy, and memory function.

“Dr. Harris presents the protocol for TAKE, and the FBI approves and finances it. We wanted the best research scientist to head the project, and all research scientists need cash to fund their studies. It works out well all the way around. We get Harris, and he gets the funding he needs.”

“I had a vague understanding of how it worked, but I’m surprised the FBI is willing to give up that much control,” Arden said.

Fury served himself a slice of pizza. “This isn’t J. Edgar’s FBI.”

“Thank God. Are you staying at the Hill?” she asked.

“I’ll be dividing my time between here and Quantico.”

His job had been to get Arden to the Hill. During her time there, he was to report back to headquarters and FBI director Nelson Roberts. On a personal level, he was there to keep an eye on her. “I have some open cases needing my attention, plus I’m working on the recent Oklahoma family murder case.”

She stared at him a long time. So long that for a moment he had the notion that she knew everything. Who he was. That he was stretching the truth about his presence on the Hill. But somebody had to watch out for her.
He
had to watch out for her.

Her hair was shorter than it used to be. Straight and smooth. One length, hitting at about the chin. He remembered how the strands had felt between his fingers. Soft and silky.

Her skin was pale. She had a few freckles across the bridge of her nose, light and almost invisible.

He was supposed to have met her family, but each time their plans fell through. Each time some FBI business got in the way. Then they broke up.

“Are you going to tell me how we knew each other?” she finally asked.

His heart thudded, and he suddenly wished he’d ordered a double bourbon for himself. “We were both in the academy at the same time.” He lifted the glass of beer to his mouth. His hand trembled slightly. He didn’t think she noticed. “A long time ago.”

She nodded, seemingly satisfied. “I thought it was something like that.”

“Do you remember anything about it?”

“About the academy? A little, but I don’t remember you.”

She didn’t seem to care. That bothered him. It shouldn’t, because how could she care about someone she didn’t even remember? That would be like loving somebody you never knew.

He was tempted to tell her who he was, to get it out in the open, but he worried that it would be too much for her to absorb on top of the news about French. She’d cracked once before; he didn’t want it to happen again. And their personal relationship had ended before she was bleached. It would be unfair to confuse her with it. That he’d never stopped loving her had no bearing on anything. It was his private pain, not hers.

They ate the pizza. He had three pieces; she had two.

Just like old times.

She finished her drink.

He could see she was preparing to order another.

“Do you think that’s wise?” he asked, placing a hand over the glass. “You have a big day tomorrow.”

Wrong thing to say.

She dropped back in her seat and gave him a hard look. She could do that. Drill a hole right through you.

Then she leaned forward and tugged a small billfold from the back pocket of her jeans. She got to her feet, dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table, and left.

Just like that.

*

Outside, the streets were deserted, the traffic lights obediently doing their duty, turning from green to red, directing people who weren’t there. Arden looked up. The air was heavy; the sky had no visible stars. Winter was coming. It wasn’t obvious, but she knew. She could feel it.

A single drop of rain hit her forehead. Arden didn’t quicken her pace. Rain was something she’d grown to miss while living in New Mexico.

Trying to forget her irritation with Nathan Fury, she crossed the four-lane, feeling exposed until she ducked under the shadow of the massive evergreens lining the drive to the asylum.

The brick under her feet was slick and uneven. Abandoning the road for the grass, Arden made her way through the cemetery, her eyes straining to spot the small numbered markers.

From somewhere behind her came the sound of a vehicle.

It slowed. Headlight beams reflected off tree trunks as a car turned up the drive.

The car moved slowly, the engine working hard to make it up the steep incline. When it drew even with her, it stopped. The electric passenger window silently lowered.

“Hop in,” Fury said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

He’d been right. She’d had enough to drink. That was what had made her mad.

She remained ten yards from the car. “I’d rather walk.” To demonstrate, she began hiking up the hill, the raindrops quickly increasing in number and speed.