All at once, I see what he’s staring at: a fleece blanket. The stiff, clinical kind. And it’s embroidered with the words OAKSIDE BEHAVIORAL INSTITUTE.
“Oh my God, they were here,” I breathe. The pressure in my ear constricts again. I swallow to try to relieve it, but to no avail.
“Yeah.” Evan gingerly picks up the blanket, shaking it out onto the ground, releasing some gravel and a few blades of desert scrub.
“I’m going to search the other room,” I say, and hurry through the other doorway.
“Hey, wait. Be careful of the floor. Maybe you should slow down a little!” Evan calls to me.
But I’m already in the next room. My heart races. “Nell, if you’re here, if any part of you is in here, give me a sign,” I whisper.
The pressure in my ear releases. A damp, rattling croak creeps down the back of my neck. A gasp sounds like it’s struggling, like it’s climbing out of some dark hole.
I hold my breath while it inhales and exhales into my ear. I’m waiting for the murmuring to start, waiting for the wordless command. My eyes go wide in the dark.
“Sophie, are you—”
The floor creaks, then splinters. My stomach drops from under me as the floor parts.
“Sophie!”
When I open my eyes, Evan is above me, and I’m a foot lower than I was a second ago, now standing on the dirt ground beneath the floorboards. My leg is burning.
“The floor. It just . . . it just cracked open!” I stutter.
The wood underneath where he’s standing starts to bow.
“Evan, I think it’s going to—”
Transferring weight to another, sturdier floorboard, Evan puts his hands under my arms and lifts me out of the hole, but not before the splintered wood drags a second path down my shin bone.
“Ow! Damnit,” I grumble, and before I can say another word, he picks me up and hustles me out into the sunlight.
Easing me back to the ground, he squats to examine the damage. “Ouch,” he says.
I don’t want to look. With the breeze hitting it, the cut goes cold, then burns like fire. I know it’s bad, and I can feel something damp puddling around my sock.
“It’s deep, but I don’t think you’ll need stitches or anything,” Evan says, his face surprisingly close to my shin. I’ll say this for him—he has an iron stomach, despite how he looked on the switchbacks. I can’t look at my own blood, let alone anyone else’s.
“Those floors are rotted to hell in there. I tried to warn you.” He looks apologetic and protective as he squints up at me from near my feet.
“I had to see if there was anything else,” I say. He nods and gestures at my shin. “We should probably get this cleaned up. You got a first-aid kit in the car?”
I do, but I’m not ready to leave yet. There are still a few more shacks we haven’t checked. Of course, one is probably still occupied by those kids from earlier.
As though reading my mind, Evan coaxes me back toward the main road. “That was the sturdiest of all the shacks. If your sister and Adam were going to hang out anywhere for a while, that’s the one they would have stayed in. Clearly no one’s been in there for a while. You saw how nasty that blanket was. After Nell—after everything—I’m sure Adam figured he had to find somewhere else to stay.”
Evan helps me limp over the curb to the main road, then across the street and onto the sidewalk that leads to the car. I thought answers would make me feel better. That blanket is the only bread crumb we’ve found on this trail. And we have no idea if it was left there before or after Nell died. In other words, we barely know more than we did before we came up here. I am beyond discouraged. I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. And the shin.
At the car, Evan does his best to bandage me up, and I do my best not to let him see tears pool in my eyes—from pain and loss and hopelessness and frustration. As he eases gauze over my freshly disinfected wound and affixes it with first-aid tape, I reread the poem for the thousandth time. Now I understand that Nell and Adam had planned to run away to that particular location all along—though why, I still have no idea. I’m back at the beginning.
“We should probably . . .,” Evan starts, and it’s obvious he doesn’t want to finish. He doesn’t want to admit defeat either, but the sun is starting to drop. At this rate, we could bumble around Jerome for a hundred more days without getting any closer to finding the clues Nell buried in her poetry.
“I know,” I say. “Look, can you drive? My shin is still pretty sore.”
“Not that I’m glad you hurt yourself or anything, but I’m happy to avoid sitting shotgun for those switchbacks. Even if it is easier going downhill.”
We fall into our seats, neither of us masking our sighs, and slowly pull onto the road. I turn Nell’s folded poem over in my hands. Just holding it somehow comforts me.
“You want to give that a rest?” Evan asks. From anyone else it might sound impatient, but from him, it only sounds worried.
“I will. I just don’t want to stare out the window.”
I know he knows I’m lying, but he leaves me alone and focuses on the hairpin turns.
“ ‘Holes that hold more than the mistaken treasure. Tunneled away, smuggled strife,’ ” I recite.
“What’s that now?”
I repeat the line from Nell’s poem.
“She really was good, wasn’t she?” he says, and the tenderness in his voice makes me uncomfortable. It’s as though I’m the only one who’s allowed to respect Nell’s writing on such a deep level.
“Holes,” I repeat, then look out the driver’s side window at the side of Cleopatra Hill. “I never noticed that before.”
“Noticed what?”
“How many abandoned mines there are. They’re at practically every turn. Did you see that on the way up?”
“No,” he smirks. “I was focusing on not losing my breakfast. But yeah, you’re right.”
“Evan, stop the car. Stop the car!”
Evan pulls to the left so fast that a cloud of smoke and dirt kicks up around us. He throws the car in park, yanks the emergency break, and turns to look at me. He’s wild-eyed and sweating.
“What the hell? Are you okay?”
But I’m not looking at him. I’m still looking past him out his window.
“Sophie, what . . . ?” He follows my gaze.
There, about fifty feet from the side of the road, lies a fenced-off area enclosing what looks like a small oil rig—a mining lift. I remember seeing something like it online. They were used for lowering men into the mine towers. Spray painted on a splintering piece of wood in big block letters is STRIFE MINE. KEEP OUT.
I fling open my door and spill out of the car, but I’m still not quick enough to beat Evan to the mine’s entrance.
A forbidding steel door, sealed shut with rust, covers the mine pit. The surrounding fence warns us to stay back in three different languages and threatens us with fines, arrest, and certain physical danger should we try to climb the crane without express permission—permission from whom, I have no idea.
“Well, Adam’s not hiding out in the mine, that’s for sure,” I say.
Evan chuckles, but it doesn’t sound like his usual breeziness. “Kinda hard to get a WiFi signal down there, I bet.”
I look at him and crinkle my brow.
“For blogging,” he explains, and now it’s my turn to laugh uncomfortably.
But the momentary excitement of seeing the sign with the same words from Nell’s poem has quickly faded upon seeing the mine itself.
“I was sort of expecting something else,” I confess.
“I know what you mean,” Evan says as he drags his hand along the diamond cutouts in the chain link. “If only it was a cave or something. And when we went inside, there he’d be with his little fold-up table, typing away on a laptop.”
I stare for another minute at the antiquated machinery, the door covering the hole to the depleted treasures below the ground, and I say wh
at we’re both thinking.
“Maybe she wasn’t talking about a place where they were going to hide out. Maybe she was talking about actual strife—a feeling, not a place. Just words in a poem.”
Evan envelopes me in his arms, and we stand that way, looking at the mine lift for another moment before succumbing to the same defeat we felt leaving the Cribs district.
As we turn to go, I see something I hadn’t noticed upon our approach. Tucked behind the rusted lift, set back several yards from the enclosure, sits a squat portable building with brown siding that can’t measure more than a hundred square feet.
And in its single window, I swear I see the flutter of a dirty white shade.
“Did you see that?” I ask Evan, pulling him to my side so he’s looking in the same direction as me.
“See what?”
“In the window of that building. I think I saw something move.”
“Not a chance. I’m sure that thing’s been locked up tight since the fifties,” Evan says, but he’s walking toward it in step with me.
“I’m sure you’re right. Probably abandoned like the rest of this stuff,” I say as we approach the building with a little more speed.
“I’ll bet folks have forgotten all about these old buildings. Half of them are boarded up anyway.” He squeezes my hand tighter. Pretty soon, I understand why.
The door looks boarded up, but not well. Almost as though it was rigged to look like it’s boarded up.
I point to the door with my chin, and Evan lifts an eyebrow.
Shrugging, I reach for the board. It’s so easy to pull away, I almost fall backward, expecting more resistance.
Propping the board against the flimsy siding, I raise my hand to knock.
“Hello? Anyone home?”
Our only answer is a faint creaking from inside.
Evan tenses beside me. I grab his arm.
“Well,” I say louder than I need to, “guess nobody’s here. You were right.”
Evan shakes his head and starts to say something, but then he catches on, and responds, “Yup, guess so. Got a long trip back to Phoenix.”
Another creak from inside, and the faintest shuffling.
“Told you it’s all crap. There’s no such thing as the Insider. Just some psycho looking for his fifteen minutes of fame,” I shout.
Silence is all that follows. Desperate, I turn to my last resort.
“I guess Nell was just making it up.”
The door flies open and I scream. In the same instant, Evan has my hand and is edging between me and the doorway, but not enough to block my view of the person standing in it.
His closely shaven black hair nearly skims the ceiling of the room behind him, and he has to duck under the doorway. He is perhaps the tallest person I’ve ever seen. Maybe seven feet tall, like a basketball player, and just as lanky. His hands are huge. His knobby knuckles bulge at the joints. In fact, his entire body looks that way—spindles connected by huge bolts. It’s so unlike Evan’s muscular proportions. This guy’s face is also long, and his ears push outward, as though trying to fill him out and give him width. Black eyes, set deeply into his head, are fixed on me in the most unsettling way.
“Everything she said was the truth,” he says quietly. “You know it and I know it. The question is, What are you going to do about it?”
12
* * *
EVAN AND I SIT SQUEEZED together on a bench that folds out from a half wall. A narrow table folds out from a perpendicular wall, locked in place by a bar below. Adam sits across from us on another fold-out bench, but he sits in a sideways sort of way, his legs too long to fit underneath the table with ours. Everything about this ramshackle building is too small for him. Even his clothes look wrong for him, faded red cotton shorts and a tan T-shirt that looks about three times too wide. It’s as if he plucked his clothes from a clothesline when no one was looking. His whole appearance would be funny if it weren’t for his eyes. Never in my life have I seen eyes so dark they look black.
“Ask me what you want now,” Adam says. “I won’t be here if you come back.”
“Because you think we’ll turn you in?” I ask. I’ve been so eager for answers, it never occurred to me I might notify the police of Adam’s whereabouts.
“Won’t you?” Something in the way he asks makes me think he expects me to turn him in—to blame him. Maybe I do.
“We’ve read your blog,” I say, not yet ready to answer his previous question. I’m in more of an asking mood.
“But you didn’t need to read it, did you?” Adam tilts his head at me in what feels like an accusation.
“Not all of it, no.” I meet his challenge, even though my stomach is starting to twist into a knot.
“And why not? Why didn’t you need to read all of it?” he asks.
Evan tenses next to me, but I put my hand on his knee and squeeze it under the table. This is a conversation that needs to happen.
“I already knew some of it,” I say, hoping I sound brave.
“Because her sister—”
Adam cuts off Evan with a twitch of his hunched shoulders. “I’m not talking about Nell.”
Evan opens his mouth, but I interject before he can ask more. I’m not ready for him to know I hear the murmurings. Not yet. Besides, I have a bigger demon to face.
“You’re right,” I allow, though I can’t seem to unclench my jaw when I say it. “I wasn’t . . . I should have been there for her.”
This is the first time I’ve said it aloud. I’ve been trying for so long not to, and now that I’ve unleashed the words, I feel empty. Adam looks down and squeezes his eyes shut behind thick black lashes. The angry veneer he’s been holding over his face dissipates, and what’s left looks exposed and pale.
“We both should have been there for her more,” he says so quietly I almost don’t hear him. “I knew more than you did. I should have been the one to protect her. I tried to. I . . . I tried.”
Adam’s voice breaks under the weight of what he’s saying, and I don’t even think before I reach across the flimsy fold-out table and put my hand on his wrist. He flinches at my touch, but then his black eyes meet my gaze. It’s strange to be sharing my grief about Nell with someone I’ve never met. But whatever suspicion or anger I was feeling toward Adam a second ago has given way to relief.
“So you are the Insider, right?” Evan asks, stunned by our exchange, and clearly uncomfortable with my touching Adam. But I can’t let him go. Not yet. However sympathetic Evan might be, he can’t know what it felt like to lose Nell.
Adam nods, his face crinkling against more unseen pain. “I am. Or I was. I haven’t written for a while. There’s just not much more to say.”
He looks toward a laptop plugged into an outlet in a tiny kitchenette. The outlet shares space with an ancient coffee maker, which looks like it’s filled with coffee. Come to think of it, the whole place smells like charred coffee.
From where we’re sitting, I can see the whole room: a squat fridge and a narrow, antique-looking stove, a small unmade bed, and a door, which is ajar revealing a closet-size bathroom with toilet, sink, and shower stall. A space on the plaster above the sink—roughly two feet high and oval-shaped—boasts a slightly cleaner surface, as though something used to hang there.
A mirror.
“Are you living here?” I ask, hoping the question isn’t offensive. It’s just so hard to imagine.
He nods again and looks surprisingly unashamed. “I think it used to be the foreman’s lodging or something. I don’t know. But it’s pretty much got everything I need.” Then he chuckles a humorless laugh. “Everything but running water, that is. There are places I can go in town for that, though.”
“How is there even electricity here still?” Evan wonders.
“Dunno,” Adam shrugs, and I guess I wouldn’t question it either if I had it when I needed it.
“You’ve been hiding out here ever since?” I ask, knowing Adam knows what I mean.
<
br /> “Almost.” The shadow returns to his face. He stands from the table with some effort—the cramped quarters beginning to show their wear on him—and begins pacing slowly. This person in this tiny, self-made prison cell is nothing like the one described in Nell’s journal, or even the angry bolding and italicizing Insider from his blog. Adam looks utterly vulnerable.
“It was her idea to come here,” Adam starts, then looks at me shyly. He’s being careful with me. He wants to be sure whatever he says doesn’t hurt. I give him a small smile that I hope tells him that’s impossible, so he might as well say it all.
“She said she used to come here when she was a kid,” Adam continues. “We thought with all of the tragedy that’d happened here, there would be a ton of that emotion still floating around, almost like a cloud of sadness. Maybe it’d be harder to detect our pain, our tragedy underneath all of that. We’d hoped it would run interference or something. Besides, who would think to look for us in Jerome? Not long after we arrived, I heard that the sheriff was counting the days until his retirement. I guessed it was as good a place as any to get lost and stay that way. All I knew was that the longer we stayed at Oakside, the more danger Nell was in—because of him.”
“Dr. Keller,” I confirm, and Adam nods.
“He had a special interest in Nell. Said she was uniquely talented. He’s out of his mind.” Adam smiles a sad smile. “You know, he used to actually help people. He was almost like a father to me.”
“We’re talking about the same Dr. Keller?” I ask.
“You didn’t know him before,” Adam says, his voice soaked in melancholy. “Haven’t you ever wished, just once, you could tell someone everything you see, everything you hear, and have him understand exactly what you’re talking about? Have him truly believe you, not treat you like some sort of maniac?”
I bite my bottom lip in response.
“You must know what that’s like,” Adam says, holding my gaze.
“I know what my sister knew,” I say, sneaking a glance at Evan as he scans my face for clues.
The Murmurings Page 12