Sanctuary Bay (23 page)

She stopped halfway up at a large window that looked out over the ocean. She leaned on the windowsill and gazed out. The glass was long gone, and the sea breeze felt refreshing on her face. From here, she couldn't even see the island beneath her. The building was so close to the bluffs that all she saw was gray-blue water.

“Karina isn't here.” Ethan said from behind her.

“No,” Sarah agreed, without looking at him.

“You didn't think she would be.” It wasn't a question. “You want to tell me what really happened last night, Ms. Memory?”

“We had a fight,” Sarah insisted. She couldn't tell him about the Wolfpack. “Honestly, I got kind of drunk last night, and that screws with my memory. Sometimes I can't tell if something's a memory or a dream.”
That's what Dr. Diaz thinks, anyway.

“Why did you say Karina might be dead?” Ethan pressed.

“I told you, it was because we were talking about your brother maybe being dead. I meant missing. What's upstairs?” Sarah asked. “There were no windows. Is it more ward rooms?” She pushed past Ethan on the stairs and jogged up. The top was hidden in shadow.
No window means no light,
she realized too late.

“It's nothing you want to see.” Ethan had come with her. Sarah felt a rush of relief to have somebody else here in the darkness.

“Why?” she whispered.

“These were the treatment rooms.” Ethan stepped around her and led the way down the dim hall. He stopped in a doorway and pulled out his cell. The light cast a dim glow that was almost swallowed up by the darkness. Sarah took hers out too.

“Is that a tub?” she asked, peering into the room.

“It's for hydrotherapy,” he explained. “They used to force people to take baths as a way to calm them.”

“Right. Sometimes they kept people in the baths for days,” Sarah said, stepping closer to the large metal tub. Secured on either side were rotting leather straps where a patient's wrists would go. She shivered, backing away. She didn't need to see any more of this room.

They continued down the hall. The next room looked like a dispensary, with glass-front cabinets lining one wall. Only a few shards of glass remained. Big wooden filing cabinets ran along the opposite wall, so massive they looked like they should have fallen through the moldering floor.

Sarah gave the floor an investigative shove with her heel. Seemed stable. She stepped inside and eased open the door of one formerly glass-front cabinet. It was filled with small metal canisters—each one bearing a skull and crossbones symbol printed on the peeling paper label.

“But this is marked as poison,” Sarah said. “Why would there be poison in a hospital?”

“I think you're using the term ‘hospital' pretty loosely,” Ethan replied. “I doubt anyone really cared much about keeping the inmates healthy.”

“Their families would've cared if they were being poisoned,” she said.

“Maybe.” He sounded dubious. He took a canister from her hand and squinted at it. “Malaria.”

“That's not a poison, it's a disease.” Sarah gasped. “Oh, but malaria was used as a treatment for neurosyphilis! I read about that. They would give people malaria and hope that the high fevers would fry the syphilis from their brains.”

“I guess they could have been trying to help some people.”

“Except for the ones who died of the malaria…,” Sarah said. “There's a lot of other stuff in here too.” Some of the thick glass bottles had labels still attached, but most of the words had faded beyond recognition. There was one she was pretty sure said “Opium” and another that said “Bromcyan.”

Sarah stared at the label, stunned as if she'd taken a jolt of electricity to the heart. Bromcyan. The word she'd seen carved over and over in the POW's cell, the word she'd thought might be the prisoner's name.

Had he known it was the name of a drug? Why would he have become so obsessed with it? Obsessed to the point of madness. Had they given it to him? What could it have done to him to make him spend all that time scraping it into the walls, and even the floor, of his cell?

“What's with you?” Ethan asked.

“Nothing,” Sarah said. “I was just thinking how, um, a lot of old psychiatric treatments seem like torture, but they led us to where we are now. Think about it: chemo is poison. Maybe someday in the future people will be horrified we used it.” She shrugged. “It's the progression of science.” She was babbling, but telling him about the POW cell would mean talking about the Wolfpack, and she couldn't go there. Not yet. He was an outsider.

“It's ancient history,” Ethan replied, bored. “We're looking for Karina. She's not in here.”

“She's not here at all, then,” Sarah said, feeling her hope die with a stab of disappointment.

“There's one more room we can try.” Ethan sounded hesitant. “Maybe I'll go alone.”

“What? Why?” Sarah asked.

“Um … it's personal. And weird.” Ethan headed back out into the hallway, the light of his cell bouncing along with him.

Sarah thought about the poison bottles and the tub with restraints next door. Who knew what else was up here? “Nope,” she called. “I'm not staying alone.” She jogged after him, but he had vanished in the darkness of the hall.

Sarah's cell gave off barely enough light to see a foot in front of her, so she slowed her pace. She didn't know the place as well as Ethan did. It was impossible to tell how long this passage was, or how many doors lined the sides. There seemed to be a lot of different treatment rooms, but she didn't see the light from Ethan's cell in any of them.

“Where did you go?” she called. “Ethan?”

The air felt heavy, as if it had been trapped here, stagnant, for decades. Sarah felt the hair on her arms stand up. This place wasn't right. The yawning, shadowed doorways led into even darker rooms filled with who knew what. More tubs? More restraints? Something worse? “Ethan!” she yelled again, starting to panic.

Why weren't there any windows up here?
she wondered. Did they not want screams reaching the outside? She'd heard stories about how a lot of old institutions abused their inmates. Had that happened here, in these blackened rooms?

Something skittered across the floor in front of her, and Sarah screamed.

“A rat,” she said out loud. “It's just a rat.”

The next door on her left loomed up, a square of darker black against the gray of the hall. Sarah peered inside, and there was Ethan. Finally.

“I can't believe you took off like that,” she snapped, starting toward the light of his cell. “Did you not hear me scream?”

“I also heard you say it was just a rat.” He strode toward her. “Karina's not here. Let's go,” he said quickly.

But it was too late. Sarah had already seen the table he stood next to. The strange, old-fashioned lamps hanging from the ceiling made it clear this was an operating room. The table had metal straps bolted to the side, all of them upright now, but Sarah got an immediate mental image of how they'd be fastened down over the person on the slab. “They performed surgery on inmates?” she asked. “For what? Lobotomies didn't start until the 1930s, and this place was abandoned by then.”

“Can we just go?” Ethan said.

“And why would they need to strap people down? Did they not use anesthesia?” She continued. “What kind of surgery would a mental patient even need?”

“I think they sterilized them.” Ethan's voice was low. “Most likely against their will.”

Sarah sucked in a breath. “Because they were mentally ill. The asylum wanted to keep them from breeding.”

“People did a lot of awful things in the past, things no doctor today would even consider,” Ethan said. “At least, not if they wanted to keep their license.”

Sarah frowned. “Why would Karina be in this room?”

“Look, she has a dark side, okay?” Ethan sounded embarrassed, an emotion Sarah hadn't even thought he could feel. “She liked it in here.”

“You mean you guys…” Sarah glanced at the table in distaste. It was almost impossible to imagine Karina in here, or even her with a dark side. Karina was … sunny. A sunny Southern California girl.

“I told you it was
personal
. Let's get out of here,” Ethan said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

They had only taken two steps toward the door when Ethan stopped her abruptly. Footsteps. Right outside the room.

 

13

Ethan grabbed Sarah's arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. With his other hand, he turned off his cell. Confused, Sarah did the same. He pulled her to the side of the door, against the wall, just before the beam of a flashlight cut through the room.

“School security follows me sometimes,” Ethan whispered, his mouth against Sarah's ear, his breath hot on her neck. “Be chill.”

She nodded, desperately trying to not inhale his pencils-and-oranges scent, still unsure why they needed to hide from security. She'd never heard of a “Don't leave the school grounds” rule. Of course, it had never occurred to her to try. It probably hadn't occurred to anyone but Ethan, since leaving involved crawling through a hedge.

“Clear,” a voice said from the hallway. “Must have been rats.”

The flashlight beam swept across the room again. The light caught one of the shards of another grouping of broken-glass-fronted cabinets, shining light directly into Sarah's eyes.

And she was in. Light from the muzzle of the gun flashing over Izzy's face. Izzy smiling. Aiming the gun at Karina. Sarah screaming. “No!”

A hand clapped over her mouth and she was out. No. Sarah felt the world go spinning around her. She wasn't out or in. She was out
and
in. The woods mingled with the dark of an OR, and Karina's eyes were still there—
her dead eyes
—but it was Ethan's hand on her mouth. There was no clear break between her memory and the present. Confusion flooded her body, and Sarah retched.

“Whoa!” Ethan snatched his hand away, and Sarah stumbled to her knees.

Footsteps came running toward them in the dark. Sarah couldn't think of anything besides breathing. Where was she? In the woods with the Wolfpack, or in the asylum with Ethan?

“Sarah, what the hell?” Ethan's voice cut through the chaos in her mind. “What's going on? Are you okay?”

She clung to his voice, using it to pull her out of the memory. And she was out, finally. “Yeah. I just—”

“What are you kids doing in here?” The two security guys appeared in the doorway, flashlight beams focused on Sarah and Ethan. The light hurt her eyes and she flinched without meaning to.

Ethan stepped in front of Sarah, blocking the light. “Nothing,” he said. “We were just messing around.”

“You can't be here, and you know it, Mr. Steere,” the bigger of the two men growled. “This time we're going to—”

“But we're just doing research,” Sarah said, impressed that she'd managed to think so quickly after that surge. It had only lasted moments, but it had felt as if she'd never escape it. Climbing to her feet, she held up her hand against the flashlights. “Can you lower those?”

“Excuse me?” The big guy sounded a bit thrown, but he pointed the light at the floor. “Research?”

“Yes. For Dr. Diaz,” Sarah improvised. “He wants our chem class to focus on the proper usage of psychotropic chemicals, and there are some examples of improper storage out here. We told Dr. Diaz we'd collect the samples so he could reference them in class.”

“Just look at them,” Ethan said, smoothly picking up on her line. “In the cabinet there, unsecured.” Sarah was relieved that there were old medications in these cabinets too. “Some of them were marked poison, but the storage method allowed the medicines to seep out into the atmosphere as they decayed.”

Sarah had to bite her lip to keep from laughing, but the mention of poison seemed to do the job.

“It doesn't matter. You can't be in here. This structure isn't sound,” the big guy said, his tone less angry than before. “Let's go.”

“We're going to have to confirm your story with Dr. Diaz,” the second guard added as they all headed down the grand staircase. Sarah felt a huge sense of relief just to be back where the sunlight reached them.

“That's okay. Dr. Diaz will confirm it,” she said, hoping that it was true.

*   *   *

“I didn't mean to get you involved,” Sarah said the instant Dr. Diaz closed his office door behind the departing security guards. “I was trying to keep Ethan from getting in trouble. He was only out there because he was helping me.”

“Wrong. I was there looking for Karina. You're the one who insisted on coming with,” Ethan argued.

“You were helping me by looking for her,” Sarah pointed out.

“Karina?” Dr. Diaz's eyes narrowed. “Is this about last night, Sarah?”

“He knows about last night?” Ethan asked, turning to Sarah, annoyed. “He saw the fight in the library? How insane did this fight get?”

“A fight? Sarah, you didn't say anything about that.” Dr. Diaz sounded concerned.

“I … We…” Now Ethan was going to find out about the Wolfpack too. Sarah closed her eyes and pictured Grayson's face as the branding iron seared her.

“What the hell is going on? What happened to Karina?” Ethan demanded.

“I'd like to know that, as well. If this is some sort of stunt that your little group is pulling, Sarah, it's gotten out of hand.” She cringed. Dr. Diaz had never acted so much like a teacher before. Instead of the friendly, easygoing man she was used to, she was facing yet another disapproving adult. One who suspected that she was doing something wrong.

“It's not. Or if it is, they're pulling the stunt on me too,” Sarah answered. She opened her eyes and forced herself to meet Dr. Diaz's gaze. “I'm really scared that what happened last night was real. I don't know how else to explain where Karina is.”