Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “I like to have the corners of my graves as sharp as an axe blade. Backhoes can’t do that.” Big Shorty twirled his shovel like a baton. He tossed it into the air and caught it on the spin.

  Robert wondered if all master gravediggers could do that. He watched the big man move around the bottom of the grave, cleaning up stray bits of colichi clay, patting the walls into a proper residence for the dead.

  “Make it perfect, even though no living soul appreciates how fine it is.” Big Shorty bounded up the stepladder he’d carefully positioned to avoid marking the walls.

  “No one but me and the dearly departed.” He left the boundaries of the grave as smooth and slick as a chalkboard.

  “A man could list his secrets on those walls, or draw a map to the next world if he knew the way.”

  The floor of the grave was level and perfectly aligned with the rectangle of space at the top. Big Shorty had created a rectangular polygon of air that would have passed muster with the most exacting mathematician.

  “Four inches of tolerance on every side from the top to the bottom. Makes it easy to lower the vault into place.” Shorty would be present for that phase of grave preparation, ready to correct accidental scrapes and scratches before the hourly-wage men filled his negative sculpture with loose dirt.

  “Four inches are as much as I can allow,” he said. “Should be enough but sometimes it isn’t.”

  Robert knew all about the sacred number four. The wind had told him. God, how he missed hearing her voice.

  “Four principal directions. Four seasons. Four days of fasting for a ceremony.” Robert looked at the watch on Shorty’s wrist. A timepiece had its uses, even for a recovering schizophrenic. Exactly forty minutes since Sarah went to Flanders. She’d promised her visit would be brief.

 

  “Just long enough to see that Mom is safe.”

  Safety is a relative thing inside a mental hospital, especially one that keeps a Choctaw witch on staff. Hashilli remained at large. The police actively sought him and Mr. Luna, but they had no plans for the famous Dr. Moon. There was no way a famous psychiatrist could be involved in a kidnapping conspiracy. Not according to the experts.

  “Different fingerprints on file. Different ethnicity. Different demographics.” That’s what the chief of detectives told Victoria Tiger. Hashilli, Dr. Moon, and Mr. Luna could not be the same person. The fact that Victoria was vague about her suspicions didn’t add weight to her argument. Dr. Moon wasn’t even a person of interest.

  Robert let another four minutes pass. Wasn’t that long enough for Sarah to check on Marie? He asked the wind, even though he knew she couldn’t answer.

  Sarah breezed through Flanders’ security without a hitch. She placed her name on the visitor’s list then proceeded to the commons.

  No one stopped her. No one reacted to her name. No one asked her to explain her role in the escape of the schizophrenic client, Robert Collins.

  Flanders was a special kind of a bureaucracy, part medical and part political, and the moieties were at odds. Paper rituals had been organized to reveal detailed personal information while simultaneously concealing identities. Some staff members knew who was who. Some knew what was what. Hardly anyone knew more than that.

  The secretarial staff posed the greatest danger. They had computer consoles at their fingertips and special mental compartments devoted to bureaucratic speculation. They knew almost everything, and what they didn’t know they could deduce during their union-mandated fifteen-minute breaks.

  Sarah walked the perimeter of the common area as though she were pacing off a temporary soccer field. She expected to find her mother in the center of a group of men actively competing for her attention. Marie Ferraro shared a fan base with professional wrestlers, NASCAR races, and monster truck rallies. That is to say, males with testosterone-induced judgment deficits.

  After three complete circuits of the commons, Sarah heard no male voices raised to the level of mating calls. She witnessed no strutting, muscle flexing or mock combat. Either Marie was not on the floor or she was off her game.

  Sarah found a seat near a television set where a mixed-gender collection of clients discussed the dramatic nuances of Days of Our Lives.

  Not many places to hide inside a mental hospital. Marie might be starring in one of her group sessions, or perhaps she’d had a setback and was confined to her room. If she didn’t make an appearance soon, Sarah would be forced to expand her intelligence-gathering operation from simple observation to discrete interrogation. Asking questions would raise her threat assessment level on the color scale from yellow to orange if she chose her subjects carefully, all the way to red if she did not.

  She couldn’t question the psychiatric residents. Too little knowledge of the clients. Far too anxious to please. An enthusiastic resident might take Sarah’s inquiries right to the administrative level. Damn the protests. Full speed ahead.

  Nurses never answered questions. They were suspicious of interested relatives and nearly as dangerous as secretaries.

  Clients were the safest resource. A man would be more helpful than a woman, not as observant, but less likely to harbor hostility for Marie. Sarah allowed herself ten minutes to select a candidate, but the problem resolved itself spontaneously, as problems often do.

  A male client picked Sarah out from the opposite side of the commons and made his way across the floor with little regard for pedestrian traffic. The man was too thin to be considered healthy and too robust to be considered sick. He took long clumsy strides on legs as slender as pipe cleaners and he made broad inappropriate gestures with arms too long for his body.

  “My name is Ben,” he told her. “No problem if you don’t remember. People seldom do.”

  Sarah did remember Ben. He was the man who introduced her to “Dr. Collins” when Marie was having problems. Ben wanted to be helpful, but was far too nervous to be discrete.

  “Marie has gone away.” He got right to the point, even before Sarah had time to ask her first question. “Dr. Moon pulled strings. Took her without the proper paperwork. Made the nurses angry. Even residents took notice.” He rocked back and forth from heels to toes and back again. He struck a series of poses that put Sarah in mind of a flamenco dancer.

  Ben got louder. His discourse grew in length and lost the thread of reason. Not only had Dr. Moon stolen Marie Ferraro, he had assassinated JFK, RFK, and MLK.

  “Murdered all the K’s,” Ben shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth so he could broadcast the news to everyone inside the mental institution.

  It didn’t take him long to catch the orderlies’ attention. Two sturdy-looking black men moved in to investigate the disturbance, but their eyes fixed on Sarah, not on Ben. Their expressions told her they were sorting through their memories. Incident reports, investigations, attempts to assign responsibility to someone easy to let go. Sarah knew the orderlies wouldn’t forget things like that.

  “Forgive me.” She placed one of her feet on one of Ben’s. The unbalanced client stood between her and the approaching orderlies. His body was too rail-thin to hide her, but the orderlies could not see the hand she placed on Ben’s sternum. A gentle shove, and fate smiled on Sarah Bible.

  When a client hits the floor, rules of triage set in quickly. All else is forgotten. By the time the orderlies had Ben back on his feet, Sarah had disappeared down a hallway.

  She needed a disguise, something quick and simple.

  Sarah pulled her hair into a severe ponytail and fastened it with a Scrunchy retrieved from her shoulder bag. She lifted a soiled white coat from a laundry cart and carried it draped over her left arm. She held her back straight, kept her hips rigid, and walked to the cafeteria. No heterosexual male would give her a second glance.

  The women could still see her. Nothing to be done about that. Women notice everything, even when they pretend to be oblivious. But women wouldn’t interfere. Sarah was too determined, too busy, too much of a
force to be reckoned with. The women would leave it to the men and the men would do nothing—probably.

  Sarah moved quickly through the cafeteria, sending employees scampering before her like a rag tag revolutionary army retreating before a superior force. Thirty steps and she was past the serving lines. Forty more and she was through the kitchen, opening the door onto the parking lot.

  It exactly the same route she had taken when she liberated Robert.

  The wind was brisk as Sarah moved beyond the grasp of Flanders security. It carried the scents and sounds of a road repair in progress somewhere to the west.

  “Miss.” The voice of authority called to her from the kitchen door.

  “Stop where you are, Miss. I need to speak with you.”

  Sarah turned to see a uniformed guard moving across the parking lot. He didn’t wear a gun, but a spray can in a leather holster and a glittering pair of handcuffs dangled from his belt. Security guards usually traveled in pairs.

  Because I am a woman, one is enough.

  The guard was young and fit. No sign of paunch over his waistband. His shoulders were broad and the contours of his shirt hinted at hours spent inside a gym. He’d catch her in a second if she ran. A bluff perhaps.

  Flanders security guards weren’t real cops. Undoubtedly they could detain people within the confines of the institution, but did their authority extend as far as the parking lot? Sarah didn’t know, and she’d bet the guard didn’t, either.

  He looked decidedly uncertain as he drew closer. His eyes darted left and right, as if trying to decide between two images that both deserved his undivided attention.

  The guard’s approach slowed. He unsnapped a leather cover on a canister suspended from his belt.

  Mace?

  “Problem officer?” Sarah put plenty of base into her voice and kept her consonants crisp, like the female lawyers on Court TV.

  The guard didn’t look at her. His eyes chose a target behind Sarah and to her right.

  Robert Collins stepped from between two parked cars, his clenched right hand extended forward like a Roman soldier saluting the Emperor.

  “Something for you, officer.” He rolled his hand over and opened it, revealing a neatly compressed pyramid of yellow dust on his palm.

  “Something you should see.” Robert’s manner contained no residue of threat. The guard did not withdraw his mace.

  “Look closely.” Robert spoke in a slow, regular monotone, like a stage hypnotist lulling an audience volunteer into complacent cooperation.

  The yellow powder had the guard’s full attention. He barely reacted when Robert blew the cloud of mushroom spores into his face.

  The Flanders security guard blinked twice and collapsed to the ground as dramatically as a Gypsy committing insurance fraud.

  Robert carefully positioned the unconscious man, turned the guard’s face away from the sun, kept his airway open.

  “You followed me.” Sarah wanted very much to disapprove, but she could not. “How did you know I’d need you?”

  Robert pulled a red construction paper heart from his hip pocket. He pushed it forward, offering it for Sarah’s inspection. The word love was written across the top with a black crayon in mixed upper and lower case letters. Two smiling stick figures were drawn at the point of the heart. They were holding hands.

  “The wind carried it through the graveyard. Shorty said it was a sign.”

  Sarah took the construction paper heart and placed it in her shoulder bag, next to Archie Chatto’s prison information.

  She and Robert walked away from the sleeping security guard. They held hands as they walked, like the stick figures on the construction paper heart.

  “Gotta love that wind.” She smiled. Sarah wondered if the wind still thought she was pretty.