The Murmurings (27 page)

Evan pulls back from me and furrows his brow, as though he’s trying to unlock my meaning. All at once, the lines disappear from his forehead, and he says, “I’m so glad to hear that. I can think of a few charms he has right off the top of my head.”

“All right, I think that’s enough visiting for tonight, everyone,” the Pigeon interjects in her most hospitable but firm tone.

Aunt Becca opens her mouth to object, so I say something first.

“I’m okay, Aunt Becca. Really. Just go home and take care of Mom, all right? I’ll see you during visiting hours.”

She frowns and says, “Your mom’s fine. We just—we should have been—I wish I’d—”

I put my hand in Aunt Becca’s and squeeze. “I know. It’s okay. Just tell her I’m fine.”

She draws me in to give me another lung-collapsing squeeze, and I let her. I feel Evan’s hand reach for mine, and we lace our fingers together. I fight another wave of sobs and pull away from them both using my very last reserve of strength.

The Pigeon guides me away as Robbie and Pucker-Mouth
usher Aunt Becca and Evan out the sliding glass doors to the parking lot.

When we arrive at my bedroom door, the Pigeon nudges me inside and stands in the doorway, the light from the hallway casting her long shadow on the wall behind my bed.

“Don’t count on visiting hours anytime soon,” she says.

Without retorting, I let her feel her moment of victory before she closes the door.

Because I know three things she doesn’t. I know that Evan understood the message I gave him right there in front of her. I know that Deb found something in the linen closet near her room.

And I know I have the keycard to get in.

I
DON’T HAVE A CLOCK
in my room, but it’s not hard to tell when the shift change takes place at night. The diligent squeaking of shoes during the daytime gives way to stuttering, sporadic footsteps that pass the threshold of my door much less frequently. The monotony of this place might threaten to dull my senses if not for my new plan—conceived thanks to Deb’s help.

I wait for what feels like decades until the stumbling of lazy feet squeaks past my door at what I estimate to be thirty-minute intervals. Except for once—when I feigned sleep—nobody has bothered to check on me since the Pigeon left. As I expect, I hear dragging feet stop before my door and a lock slip from its place. The door sighs open, and the light
from the hallway seeps through the sheet I’ve used to cover my face and head. After a brief pause, the door closes, shutting out the light.

I wait for the footsteps to fade around the corner, then launch out of bed and drag my pillow beneath my sheets, balling the tail of the fitted sheet underneath it and curving it into the rough shape of a sleeping Oakside detainee.

Slipping Deb’s pilfered keycard from my sock, I pass it through the reader and watch as a green light above the door handle flashes three times before releasing the lock with a tiny ping.

I crack the door and look to my left, then my right, then my left again before I inch into the hallway. Heading toward the shower room, I stop myself, take another deep breath, then peer around that corner, finding the hallway beyond empty.

I duck into the corridor and hurry on tiptoe toward the showers. Around the corner on my right is the linen closet—the same room from which Pucker-Mouth pulled a new set of scrubs for me the day I spilled orange juice all over myself. It’s directly across from Deb’s bedroom, and I have a feeling they’ll be checking on her pretty frequently tonight. And I know why that might be the case. The peanut M&M’s mean she had a session with Dr. Keller, which means they might
have found out about whatever it was she was going to tell me today. Still, after the risk she took trying to tell me her secret, there’s no way I’m going to let her discovery be in vain. This might be our only shot at getting
both
of us out of here.

I inch my head around the corner, and duck just in time to catch a glimpse of a tight topknot lean from Deb’s doorway. I hold my breath, knowing there’s no chance I’ll make it around the next corner, let alone back to my room, before the Pigeon sees me fleeing. I strain my ears and listen for the squeaking of rubber soles, but as each lub of my heart pounds against my chest, I hear nothing to indicate the Pigeon’s movement.

At last, the footsteps head down the hallway in the opposite direction and fade away. I stealthily peek around the corner again, and after ensuring it’s clear, I move on the balls of my feet toward the linen closet. I glance at Deb’s door and fight the urge to check in on her first. I know I might only get one shot at this, and I need to stick to the plan. I swipe the card through its reader, but my movement is jerky, and a red light followed by a buzzing scolds me that I’ve done it wrong. I hold my breath and look over my shoulder at a thankfully empty hallway. I slide the keycard slower, steadying it with both hands. This time I’m rewarded with a flickering green light. I push the handle down and disappear behind the
door, letting it settle closed behind me as I lean against it to catch the breath I forgot I’d been holding.

“Okay, Deb. I’m here,” I whisper to the room. “Now tell me what you found.”

I thought my room was small, but this closet is only about seven square feet in size, and with the shelving, there is barely enough room for me to turn around. Cracks of light from the hallway seep in around the door frame. I quickly spot the blue stacks of scrubs. The opposite wall has similar sets, only these are mint green.

For the other patients. The real patients.
The ones being neglected at the expense of Dr. Keller’s obsession and his orderlies’ allegiance to him. I think back to what Deb told me about her excursion to the other side of Oakside, and about the woman in the overcrowded and under-visited room. More than ever, I want to shut this place down. But none of that’s going to happen while Deb and I are trapped here. Even if Evan understood my message, and even if he’s able to come through, that’s only half of the plan. The other half will be up to me when the time comes.

I scan the room with what I hope are fresh eyes, terrified to turn on a light for fear of it shining underneath the door. Instead, I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark and imagine I’m Deb on a similar mission just a night earlier.

On the wall opposite me is a heavy-looking wire shelf filled floor to ceiling with towels and blankets, each embroidered with the Oakside insignia, just like the blanket Evan and I found in the old house in Jerome.

I follow the shelf to the ceiling, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Then I trace the stacks of blankets to the gray linoleum floor. It practically yawns at its own boredom. As I peer a little closer at the floor, I think I see a groove in the seam of the linoleum. I stand over it and quickly find a perpendicular seam joining its corner, then another at the end of that seam. The last side of the roughly two-foot-by-two-foot-square in the floor is a crease in the linoleum.

I walk all around the square on the floor, bending to trace my fingers in the grooves. I feel a tiny breeze of air from the cracks, and my heart thuds behind my ribs. I press my fingers into the cracks, trying to pull the edge toward me, but it won’t budge. I push from the same place, but the floor will not give. I stand in the center of the square on the floor, but nothing moves, not the floor and not me.

I stand outside of the square of linoleum and frown at it. Then, for lack of trying everything else, I run the keycard along the edge of each side of the square. And when I get to the edge closest to my feet, I see a faint green circle illuminate from beneath the floor, and a muffled click tells me I’ve
succeeded. The floor pops up, a lip of the square slanting upward toward me, and a dusty wooden staircase illuminates itself below me.

“A basement?” I question.

I’m no architect, but I know enough about Arizona buildings to know that it’s not common to have a basement here. Some of the newer houses have them, but that’s only because housing development companies can charge more for a house with a basement. Typically, the clay-laden ground is too hard to dig that deeply. This already feels wrong.

“A secret basement. What else are you hiding, Dr. Keller?”

I take one more breath before lowering myself into the stairwell and closing the trapdoor behind me.

The wooden stairs creek under my weight, and I clamber quickly to the bottom, eager to make the noise stop. What I find ahead leaves me far from comforted.

I’ve only seen a mausoleum once in my life, but once was enough. It was right after my grandmother’s funeral, and I was maybe four years old. The image of that place is seared into my memory like a scar. I recall an endless row of little doors leading to the resting places of so many people, all for someone’s mother or brother or uncle—or sister.

The entire place had been made of concrete, floor to ceiling, except for those little doors. So everything had echoed.
My shoes with their squeaking patent leather, my mom’s heels with their click-click-clicking as she took her long, glamorous strides. Nell with her rubber soles that chirped in time with her tiny sobs, knowing that she’d never see Nana again.

Everything was amplified in that place, and sound pinged from one end of the mausoleum to the other. That is, until the sound approached one of those doors. Every time we passed by one of them, sound seemed to disintegrate. I always got a chill thinking about that later. It was as if the doors, and whatever was behind them, had somehow swallowed the sound.

Oakside’s secret basement looks just like that mausoleum.

The walls and floor are concrete. The only non-concrete part of the whole basement seems to be the doors and the stairs to each tiny storage room—and those are made of rotting wood. Little black numerals, like house addresses, are nailed to the tops of the doors, each number indicating a range of years. Oakside’s lifespan is noted in five-year increments beginning with 1955 all the way up to the present day. The door at the end of the corridor is labeled with the most recent years.

A groaning sound above me snaps my attention from the door.

A giant pipe runs the length of the low ceiling, painted white like the ceiling and the walls down here. Only they’re
not really white anymore, not after years of grime and decay.

I thought Oakside was a hole. Its basement makes the rest of the facility look like a palace. I am quickly regretting descending those stairs. Dust covers every surface. More to the point, it covers the floor, and on that floor are exactly zero sets of footprints. If Deb made it to the basement, she would have left a mark of some sort, which leads me to believe that when she said she didn’t get very far, she meant she got as far as discovering the door, maybe the stairwell, but that’s it. I suddenly feel more alone than ever.

But the memory of Deb’s face as she sat slumped in the lobby’s recreation area renews my courage, or at least what I’m trying to convince myself is courage. If she thought this place might hold answers, I want to know why.

Standing in front of the door at the end of the corridor, I see that it’s adorned with the same keycard reader as every other door in Oakside, and not a rusted padlock like the rest of the storage doors.

“Great,” I whisper.

I only have the one keycard. I shrug and slide it through the reader. My effort is returned with a brief green flash, followed by a click.

“Well, what do you know,” I say to the lock, half expecting it to respond.

Turning the industrial metal handle affixed to the rotting wood, I give it one more command. “Show me what Deb didn’t get a chance to see.”

Freed from its tether, the door opens. I should be excited, but I’m unsettled, afraid of what I might find.

The storage closet is dark and probably six feet high, tall enough to admit me or Deb with ease, but squat enough to make anyone else stoop low. It’s impossible to tell how far back it goes. Not far, I would imagine, probably no more than eight feet. But I’d feel better if I knew where it ended.

I’m surprised to find only a few boxes—moldy cardboard folding in on itself with age and wear. Two rotting steps precede the door. I climb them reluctantly and enter the musty-smelling closet. Big black letters announce a few boxes are
TAXES
, and the one on the floor beside those is labeled
MISC
. I decide to search that one first, and though I don’t know what I expected to find, I am at once disappointed and relieved to find it filled with more blue scrubs, mostly in extra large.

I peek into the boxes marked
TAXES
and find nothing of interest, mostly receipts and government forms. But my toe hits another box—one I hadn’t seen at first, and when I slide it closer to me, there’s no label marking its contents.

As I unfold the top flaps, I find an assortment of files and folders, scraps of paper, a laminated tag. I pick up the tag
first. It’s a photograph of a somber-looking Adam dressed in stiff white. The photo was snapped against a gray background, making his dark features even darker by contrast. Below his photo is his name,
Adam Newfeld, Orderly
.

I don’t have to search through the box much before I find a thick folder, a burgundy accordion thing bound with elastic and sealed with a gummy adhesive stamped
CONFIDENTIAL
. The cover of the folder, I see once I hold it to the faint light by the storage door, reads
David, Nell
.

“Nell,” I repeat to the folder, as though I could conjure her just by staring at her name. And when I unbind the folder, I’m startled to find that in a way, I do: a Polaroid of her falls from the top of the stack of papers I’ve unearthed.

I draw in a sharp breath at the sight of the photo, realizing this is the most recent picture I’ve seen of her, maybe the last one ever taken. My stomach turns at the image of her face, thin and stark against one of Oakside’s smooth gray walls. Nell’s cheekbones, normally plumped by a sly smile, are sharp and crude. Her sunken eyes are nearly buried in dark circles, and her hair, normally full of body, looks lank and is splayed across her shoulders. For the first time, I understand why the sight of her makes my stomach ache so much—I was afraid of her.