Sixteen
This hallway is full of the kind of eerie silence that still just seems too loud. Our movements, rather than slicing a clean swath through the quiet, seem to be devoured by it (eaten by it). The muffling quality is far deeper than we’ve encountered thus far, and a fearful, primitive side of me is grateful that I didn’t explore this far when I was alone. Further introspection leads me to suspect that this comes from the same part of my brain that, in most people, generates a fear of the dark. I suppose a more complete assessment of a fear of the dark would be a fear of the aggressively unknown. An unsolvable puzzle flaunting its impossible curves and edges. Perhaps that’s why I’m not afraid of the dark; I’ve been there, grappled with the monsters. I’ve seen worse in the light of day than darkness has ever delivered to me.
Beyond that, I’ve simply adapted to the darkness. I visited as a tourist at first, and decided I liked it so much that I turned in my flip flops and Hawaiian shirt in exchange for a mailbox. I’m not afraid of what goes bump in the night, because more often than not, it’s me.
The probing beams of our flashlights set fire to masses of tangling webs, something I just now notice this investigation has had a supreme lack of.
The three of us stare at the geometrically perplexing series of webs both in the corners and spanning the width of the hallway.
“Well, then,” says Todd, “let’s go make friends with Shelob.”
“I’ll wear my mithril underwear,” I say.
Despite that I’m not afraid of spiders, I get the unnerving sensation that webs are sticking to my face and neck, and the sensation grows more vivid and intense with every step. By the sounds of it, though, my discomfort is nothing compared to that of Creed, who would possibly have leapt straight into orbit were there not a ceiling above us.
Todd handles the situation as well as I do—no surprises there—and leads our small group with his signature poised calmness, progressing at a measured, steady pace.
Curiously, the walls are virtually barren—aside from the multitude of webs strewn all over the place, of course. No clever puns or silly nicknames grace this hall and no humorous attempts at being relatable and charismatic manifest. Instead, the sneaky webs are complemented only by various sizes of patches of missing paint, ranging from the size of a paperclip to that of a soccer ball.
In this side of the hallway, at least, there’s only one door, but to my surprise, it has a window, the cross-hatched kind you always see in academic or administrative settings. The kind that says, “Mr. Important will see you shortly.”
Todd presses his face up against the glass (a more paranoid bit of me objects, but I don’t vocalize this), but he just shakes his head as he steps back.
“Can’t see a thing,” he says.
“Open away, my friend,” I say. He inserts his key into the lock, but it won’t turn.
“I believe your skills may be necessary here,” he says. He steps away and gestures for me to step up.
With Todd’s steady flashlight beam (and the less steady one from Creed), I insert my picks and set to work, all the while imagining what more could lie beyond these doors. As far as I can speculate, everything of relevance or importance is contained either in the school building or in the floors beneath us.
This lock, from what I can feel, takes a key cut from the same blank as the other locks’ keys, but a couple of the pins are situated differently.
With a bit more effort, the door clicks and swings inward, revealing exactly what Todd relayed: nothing. However, the perceived ‘nothing’ opens up under the flashlights’ beams, and we find ourselves in yet another hallway, lined on either side with still more doors, ending with one solemn-looking wooden one, facing us, at the end of the hall. None of them have labels, save for that last one, upon which hangs a plate reading “Copy.” Upon closer examination, the doors without labels bear the odd, contrasting, faded marks of having had labels, but they must have been taken when the facility shut down.
“Oh boy,” I say, “I really hope these doors take those generic keys.” I count eight doors, excluding the copy room, for a total of nine. In desperation, I put my key into the lock of the nearest door and apply pressure, but it resists with the awkward uncertainty of the time-worn mechanism it is. I push a little harder in case one of the pins is stuck, but still no give.
“This is going to take a while,” I say. “One of you want to check the other doors to see if they’re all the same?”
Todd sets to work on the other doors, leaving me with the shaky assistance of Creed, but it’s enough to complete the task.
Each time Todd tries a door, he reports his lack of success with a deflated, “Nope.”
The shape of the keyhole is the same as we’ve been dealing with, but again, it requires a different key.
“Nope,” says Todd.
I work the lock like always, and in time, it submits.
“Nope.”
Inside, there’s another office, but aside from the heavy wooden desk, it is completely empty. The walls have a few holes, and in a couple of places, there are patches where the paint has come up. This office was not always so barren, it seems; there must have been posters and photos on the wall in here, based on the tiny damaged areas.
“Nope.”
I check the first of the remaining doors in hopes that Todd may have an oddly cut key or perhaps it simply didn’t work for some reason, but that hope withers as the lock resists my key with an equally insistent “No.”
“Nope.”
I get my picks out and get them started. This lock must have been in better shape than the other, because it only takes a few seconds before it clicks open. The door swings open like the other.
“Aha!” says Todd from down the hall. His enthusiasm startles me, but Creed almost seems not to have heard it; his flashlight’s beam shifts only slightly, and even then, little enough that it may just have been his natural unsteadiness.
I look down the hall to see Todd’s silhouette framed in the doorway of the copy room. “Anything in there?” I ask.
Todd’s flashlight beam flicks around the room, as though trying to find out for itself.
“The copy machine is still here. Man, it’s like the second they heard they were being shut down, they all just up and sprinted from the building. There’s so much stuff still around.”
“Well, you’re not far off,” says Creed. He looks quite a lot more present than a few seconds ago; the mention of the school’s history yanked his consciousness back from wherever it was. “When they closed down the school, their first order of operation was to close everything off as a crime scene. The presence of the tape and the lights, it was quite a lot to take in, especially for youth with histories of trauma. So they moved them, temporarily. By a convenient happenstance, the numbers were down on the boys’ campus, so with some impressive finagling, they were able to consolidate the boys into two units, while the remaining girls took the other two. It ended up just barely working because the girls’ numbers had gotten so low, too. From what I understand, there was a proper line of angry parents demanding to withdraw their daughters from the program.
“Understandably, of course. I would have been in that line, too, I think, had I been in their situation. Anyway, it was only temporary. But when they got back, of course, everything was different. Friendships that had been forged there disintegrated in the space of a week because of so many people having been moved and removed.
“So, when it happened again—they asked them to clear out, I mean—the administration, the therapists, everyone, they thought it was temporary again, that they’d get a nice little break and that they would just wait for the phone call to come back to work. They would have had to jump hoop after hoop in order to get in to retrieve anything, so it just wasn’t worth the hassle to them.”
“I wonder if the confusion was the product of deception or miscommunication?” I say.
“I’ve wondered the same thing,” says Creed. By now, he’s
not only engaged in the present, but he’s so much here that he resembles an ambitious conspiracy theorist vying to convince people that everything from the JFK assassination to 9/11 was an inside job.
“And what’s this? I believe we may have our answer,” says Todd. He holds out a single sheet of paper for us to read. “This was left in the copier.”
I lean forward to take the paper, but I figure Creed will get more out of it (in terms both of divining information from it and of sheer indulgent pleasure), so I let him take it instead.
He reads aloud: “To whom it may concern, the facility will be closing for an unknown length of time, effective this Monday, November twenty-second. Please await our calls to return to work, and until then, enjoy your time off, and thank you for your patience.”
“It’s a memo,” says Todd.
“They misspelled ‘effective,’” says Creed. Todd and I laugh.
“So, either they themselves didn’t think it would be permanent, or they did indeed deceive their staff. But even in the administrative offices—the directors, medical records, the likes—they also look like they flew out of here like bats out of hell,” says Todd.
“Yeah. I think they really didn’t know,” I say. “Well, except for maybe that guy.” I point toward the empty office.
“Yeah. But with their numbers dwindling, they may just have been letting people go,” says Todd.
“Right. Maybe the other offices will offer something useful,” I say.
With that, I get to work on opening the remaining doors. The one I opened before Todd found the memo turned out just to be a small break room, smaller than the one downstairs but nicer. It has a squashy couch whose original color I can’t discern. The room looks like an upgraded version of its more accessible counterpart, in all aspects other than size; seven or eight people use this one, as opposed to the dozens who would have shared the one below.
The next office looks a lot more like the ones downstairs; posters and drawings litter the walls, and a neat stack of papers sits perfectly centered on the desk, the uppermost sheet bearing the company’s logo in the upper left corner. That sheet, I find, is a letter penned by the therapist to be sent to the parents of one of her clients. Never to be sent after all, as it transpired.
Her files don’t contain any names that ring bells, so we move on. Fascinating as it may be to rummage through therapists’ notes about anonymous patients, looking through these offices may take some time.
“Why don’t we split up?” says Todd. “We can cover them a lot faster that way, and if we all know what we’re looking for, a single pair of eyes in these small offices is just as good as three.” The man can read my mind, I swear it.
After I unlock the next door, Creed steps through its threshold, and Todd takes the next; my entry into the following room is hindered a bit by my having to pick the lock in deep darkness, but I get it open and step inside.
One word swims around the surface of my mind for the minute I spend taking in this office: sweet. It looks like a Valentine’s Day advertisement cut out of a K-Mart newsletter. The office is adorned in all sorts of reds and pinks—streamers line the ceiling, little paper hearts pock the walls, and pink, white, and red doilies overhang just slightly from every surface, including the bookshelves and even the main desk. A modern-looking couch sits on one end of the desk, which is a surprising (but relieving) break from the trend of the rest of the room’s obscene cuteness.
This is what happens to all of those girls who dot their ‘I’s with hearts, I think.
Even her client files are stored in red binders with hearts on the spines. Aside from the sofa, the eye’s only reprieve from the ever-present reds and pinks is the hand-drawn art on the walls, given to her by clients, and even that isn’t entirely free from it. Surely in an attempt to appeal to the therapist, many of the pictures on the wall have hearts done in red crayon, or are themselves done on pink, heart-shaped construction paper.
Good lord, how did this lady not go crazy in this room?
Then again, perhaps she did. Or maybe she already was.
Once again, I find nothing important or relevant in the office. And, frustrating though that may be, I’d be lying if I claimed I wasn’t at least a little relieved to be able to excuse myself from that office. I think I feel a cavity forming.
At the same time, Todd and creed exit their respective offices, shrugging: nothing.
A sort of full silence again washes over us for a moment, before we each select and enter one of the three remaining rooms. The one I enter is a janitorial closet—I opt to join Todd instead. Todd’s is similar to the empty one, but lacks even a desk. There are no holes in the walls, and the paint remains perfectly intact. Neither of us can venture a guess as to this room’s former function, but I note that there’s an almost supernatural quality to its perfect square shape. Of course, my perception is subject to poor light and the inevitable fallibility of humans, but I don’t need a tape measure to be sure, despite my humanity, that these walls are the exact same length and that the door through which we entered is exactly centered on its wall.
Todd and I exchange a glance that says, Slightly more than nothing, but still nothing. As we re-enter the hall, Creed steps out of the room he was in. Our hopes flutter slightly when we see past him and identify it as an office, but he shakes his head. No dice.
“Well that’s confusing,” he says. The same question rings in all of our minds, but none of us is willing to admit to our own groundlessness. What now? We’ve picked up some useful information, certainly, but our jackpot eludes us yet. That intrusive, full silence from before befalls us again, and while it’s actually sort of pleasant, I’m eager for it to be broken as our next plan of action hatches.
“Let me think,” I say. I wander through the hallway at a slow pace, peeking into the open doors as I go but searching more in my mind than in the inky halls and rooms.
It wouldn’t just be that Ginger didn’t have a therapist—they all did. It was part of the standard treatment program. So, either her therapist was one of the ones who up and left beforehand, leaving an empty office, or her therapist’s office is one of these, just without her records for whatever reason.
I remind myself that this is indeed a possibility; with Ginger having been so close to the whole situation, the prosecutor may have requested medical records. Of course, most places would simply copy them, but perhaps they just never made it back to their original places?
As I think it, I look up to see the entrance to the copy room. Todd must sense my intrigue, because he comes to join me in my search.
Seventeen
The copy machine is an ancient hunk of a thing, filmed over with dust and webs. There are a couple of marks wiped away where I assume Todd gripped the lid in order to look into the feeder tray. There’s a small garbage can next to it, containing nothing but a plastic liner and maybe some spiders. On the wall to the left, a bulletin board sports an explosion of leaflets and flyers, in all sorts of colors.
Karaoke night, an autumn training, a reminder of the Thanksgiving potluck. The opposite wall holds a large cubby unit, with each slot labeled at the bottom. Most are empty, but two are not. One such slot belongs to Greg Ayers and offers a revision of a new policy that would never see implementation. The other belongs to Lyla Branville.
Lyla’s box holds a thick manila envelope, marked in black ink as pertaining to Ginger Garrity. There’s our jackpot after all. I guess that, if it had indeed been requested for use in the case, it was probably on its way back to Lyla when things went sour.
“Either of you come across a Lyla Branville’s office?” I say.
Both Todd and Creed shake their heads no.
“I think this is our Houdini from the first office,” I say. “Probably got canned or something right around the end of this whole thing.”
“Lyla Branville,” says Creed. The crude residual light from our flashlights is sufficient to display Creed in a state of deep concentration, trying with he
rculean effort to summon some memory from the vaults of his mind. Despite the effort, however, he can’t quite seem to coax it into his consciousness. He shakes his head in disappointment. “I’m positive I’ve read that name in one of my articles somewhere,” he says.
“We’ll look her up when we get back,” says Todd.
“In my opinion, we’ve found what we came for. You guys ready to call it a night?” I say.
My odd state of mind renders the return trip just the smallest bit disorienting, as though I’m continuing deeper into the facility rather than exiting it on a route I’ve already taken twice now. My perspective is just skewed enough to make the hard turns seem foreign until we reach the courtyard.
The courtyard, as before, whispers and gasps with the hints of a breeze just shy of a gust, the kind that twitches with life. I connect the sensation to standing in a patch of tall grass, the kind that reaches for the sky rather than bowing over upon becoming too long.
Minutes later, we exit the property entirely, shedding the mischievous mantle one wears when they’re in a place they shouldn’t be.
“So how did you find this case, specifically?” I ask Creed.
“Well, your mother told me where she was sending you, so to speak, and I followed immediately afterward. It was tough to get out of my undercover position with those idiots in LA, but I managed to slip away. Anyway, the group I’m with—Deliverance—we have a huge database. I’m sure we probably seem kind of eccentric, but we have all kinds of people working there, from accountants to security to IT.
“That said, some of the volunteers are there just to find the cases. They look through homicide, domestic violence, and missing persons files from across the nation. Of course, their local law enforcements have access to the same data, but when your trends only pull data from within the city or state, your scope is limited. So we have eyes all the way through this country, monitoring.
“Because of that, however, the cases we pull in are so many, and we are so few, that there’s often fairly little we can actually do other than try to nudge the local police in the right direction. We had had our eyes on your father for quite some time. We were scratching our heads, trying to figure out what to do about him. When our system pinged a new homicide case in Riverdell, we feared for the worst. At first glance, we saw your father’s photograph and thought maybe he had been caught, but when we saw that he was the victim, well, that was something of a relief.
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