The Night Season

by Chelsea Cain

  Susan turned her gaze back into the room, just in time to see the AED administer the third shock.

  Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest.

  She saw Henry wince. Like someone startled by a distant sound.

  She held her breath. The pulse in her ears thrummed.

  “Check pulse,” the AED said calmly. “If no pulse, give CPR.”

  Susan couldn’t see the heart monitor, not that she could have made anything of it. It had the attention of everyone in the room, though. They watched it without blinking, without moving a muscle, like they were at mission control waiting for Neil Armstrong to announce that he’d landed on the moon.

  One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

  Susan had always gotten in Henry’s way. She’d annoyed him from the start. He’d been trying to protect Archie, and she came along intent on making Archie relive his nightmare. Henry had tried to protect her, too, to keep her safe. But she’d ignored every warning he’d ever tossed her way, nearly getting herself killed in the process. That was how she was with men in authority. She either rebelled against them with all her might, or fell in love. Never anything in between.

  Wait.

  Henry’s jaw moved.

  Not a muscle spasm. Susan didn’t know how, but she knew it to be true without hesitation. This was something different. Something intentional. His jaw opened. His chest—which had seemed so sunken and pale, so decrepit—expanded and lifted. His skin flushed.

  “He’s breathing,” someone said.

  Susan felt hot tears running down her cheeks. If Henry lived through this, she would listen to him, she wouldn’t get in the way, she’d be less annoying.

  Please, God. I promise.

  “We’ve got a heartbeat,” someone else said. “It’s getting stronger.”

  Susan turned toward Archie and Claire and grinned, wiping her face with her sleeve. They had heard. Archie was already helping Claire to her feet.

  Susan’s phone rang. She knew who it was. She reached into her purse and turned off the volume.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Archie was used to pain. There was the physical pain—the ribs that still ached where Gretchen had broken them, the acid that burned deep in his throat where the poison Gretchen had fed him had eaten through his esophagus. He’d mostly learned to live with it. He’d taught himself not to take deep breaths, to sit up when he ate, to sleep on his back. The emotional pain had taken longer. But he could look at himself in the mirror now, scars and all. He could spend time with his children without the crushing weight of guilt that clung to him like a smell.

  There was always pain.

  The trick was to make it part of you.

  The machine inhaling and exhaling for Henry made breathing sound easy. Steady, strong. Each breath exactly the same as the last. You could trick yourself into taking that kind of breathing for granted.

  It was eleven P.M., and the hospital was quiet. They’d moved Henry to the ICU, a land without doors, where all the patient rooms had three walls and were open to a central area, like a hospital dollhouse or a TV sitcom set. Everything in there was made out of molded tan plastic that reminded Archie of school cafeteria trays. Speckled linoleum floors; a soap pump and paper towel dispenser on the wall above a sink. The effect was part cheap motel, part public restroom.

  Archie was sitting there in sweatpants and a sweatshirt borrowed from some hospital storeroom, his own clothes a wet bundle in a plastic bag at his feet, next to his coat.

  The ecosystem had been restored, everything was in order.

  Henry was alive for now, heart beating, blood pumping. But the tox screens hadn’t turned up anything yet, so there was nothing the doctors could do but try to keep Henry breathing until his body fought off whatever was shutting it down. Archie wasn’t about to sit around and wait for Henry’s heart to stop again.

  There were plenty of things that Archie wasn’t good at. He knew that. He could tick them off like the names of family members. He hadn’t been a good husband. He’d been weak, self-indulgent, and careless. He’d given in to temptation, and lied. He’d disappointed the people who depended on him. But he was a good detective, always a good detective—always that. He could find killers. He could save lives.

  The front of his head throbbed. He pushed a thumb and forefinger against his sinuses. He could taste the river water at the back of his throat, rusty and dank like flat cola. It was the middle of the night, but sleep was still far off. He was vaguely aware that Claire had gone downstairs to meet her sister. He hadn’t known that Claire had a sister. But she was here now. That was good. The sister would be here for Claire, Claire for Henry. That meant that Archie could go and do the thing he was good at—his job.

  They had to get back to the park. They had to re-create Henry’s last steps. Archie’s team was already down there. They had to stay ahead of the flood.

  He’d apparently lost his boots in the river. The sweats and hospital booties would get him out the door. But he had to go back to his apartment to change before he could work.

  But first Archie had to talk to the boy.

  The boy had to have gone in the river at least a half mile from where Henry had been found. There had been thousands of people between them. But Gretchen had taught Archie not to believe in coincidence, and he wondered now if the attack on Henry and the boy going into the Willamette were related somehow. Had Henry seen something? Had he tried to help?

  Archie leaned forward and cupped a hand on Henry’s arm. It was cooler than it should have been, like something not quite alive. Henry’s eyes were closed, and a faint sheen of sweat glazed his forehead. A vein zigzagged across his temple.

  “Keep an eye on things here for me,” Archie said. His voice sounded rough and loud in the silence.

  He stepped out of the room and nearly ran into Susan, who had her hands filled with individually wrapped packets of saltines and was carrying a tower of foil-topped plastic containers of orange juice pinned between her chin and fist.

  “I’ve got food,” she said. Her raspberry-colored hair looked especially wild, electric from the rain and hospital lights. She seemed to see him notice it, and blew at a piece that had flopped over one eye. It fluttered up, and then fell back exactly where it had been. She’d taken off her yellow raincoat and tied it around her waist.

  A nurse scrambled out from behind a desk. Her scrubs were pink and fitted, with cargo pockets on the pants. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. At first Archie thought she was going to admonish him for having left the ER, but she was glaring at Susan’s armload of snacks. “You can’t just take all that,” she said to Susan.

  Susan rotated a half step and shielded the food. “It was in unlocked cabinets.”

  Archie stepped between them. “I need to talk to the boy I came in with,” he said to the nurse. He used his best voice-of-authority, though the sweat suit probably worked against him. The elastic waistband barely stayed up over his hips.

  The nurse pulled at her ponytail. “He’s resting.”

  “It’s police business,” Archie said, a little more firmly.

  Her upper lip tightened. She had the telltale fine lines of a smoker around her mouth. “I’ll have to check with my supervisor.” She turned and hurried off. Her white sneakers didn’t make a sound on the linoleum.

  Archie held on to his bag of clothes and waited. If they wouldn’t let him talk to the kid, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He looked back toward Henry’s room, but he could only see Henry’s feet from here. A pair of lumps under a tan blanket. Archie thought he could still hear the machine, though: inhaling, exhaling …

  Susan cleared her throat.

  Archie glanced over at her. She was still balancing that ridiculous column of juice. The hair was still in her face.
r />   “Room eleven,” she said in a stage whisper.

  It took him a second.

  She jerked her head in the direction of the nurses’ station, and Archie followed her gaze until he noticed the giant whiteboard hung on the wall. On it were the names and room numbers of every patient on the ward. JOHN DOE, HYPOTHERMIA, ROOM 11.

  The kid was still listed as John Doe. It had been two hours since they’d been brought in. It had to be all over the news. But if they didn’t have a name, it meant that the boy hadn’t been claimed.

  How does a kid disappear during a flood and nobody notice?

  Henry was in room three.

  The ICU was horseshoe-shaped. For luck, Archie would have joked, if he’d been feeling lighter-hearted.

  He started walking, counting down the dollhouse rooms as he went, Susan on his heels, still with the snacks. There wasn’t a hallway, just a variation in linoleum tile color, a thick black path on the floor where a hallway might have been. Archie glanced in at each bed they passed, finding only slack, unconscious faces. No balloons. No flowers. Unanimated like that, even the people looked the same.

  “Next one,” Susan said.

  Room eleven.

  Three walls. A sink. A wood-grain-veneer cabinet. Same colors and bathroom aesthetic. Except the tan molded plastic bed in this room was empty. Someone had been there, and recently. The white sheets were thrown back, the pillow dented. But there was no one in the room now.

  Archie checked the number above the bed.

  It was the right room. Archie recognized what looked to be heating blankets cast aside on the floor.

  “Maybe he checked out,” Susan said.

  Had his parents come and gotten him after all?

  The nurse in pink scrubs silently jogged up in her white sneakers. Another woman, older and sturdier, followed behind her.

  The pink nurse squinted at Archie and gave him a disapproving frown. “You can’t…” she started to say, but trailed off when she saw the empty bed. Her eyes widened. She was wearing blue mascara.

  “Where is he?” Archie asked.

  She looked over at the other nurse, who was wearing green scrubs—old-school, no cargo pants for her—and glasses around her neck on a practical-looking gold chain. A tiny silver angel was pinned above her heart. Pink’s supervisor, Archie guessed.

  The pink nurse hesitated and fluttered a hand in the air. “He should be here,” she said.

  Susan was still holding the snacks, though no one seemed that concerned about it anymore.

  They all stood staring at the empty bed like it might get up and walk off, too.

  “Marcie,” the supervisor called calmly to someone back at the desk, “did eleven get taken somewhere for tests?”

  “No,” Marcie called back.

  “Then where is he?” Archie said again between gritted teeth.

  “Check the bathroom,” the supervisor said, and the pink nurse scrambled to a nearby door and opened it.

  “Empty,” she reported.

  They all looked helplessly at one another.

  How could a kid just disappear from an ICU? A kid nobody reports missing, and nobody notices walk away from his hospital bed in the dead of night.

  “Call security,” Archie said. “Maybe he’s still in the hospital.”

  “We never got his name,” the supervisor said, almost to herself. “He never said a word.”

  Susan moved forward, and Archie almost told her to stop, to stay out of the boy’s room, but there was something about her sudden purpose that made him wait. He watched as she walked up to the bed and opened her arms and let the juice containers and saltine packets tumble onto the mattress.

  “She can’t just take all those snacks,” the pink nurse said again.

  “No one cares about the snacks, Heather,” her supervisor snapped.

  Susan dropped to her hands and knees and reached under the bed. No one moved. Susan withdrew her hand from under the bed. There was something in it. She rocked back on her heels and held her hand out toward Archie, palm up, like a street kid looking for a buck.

  Archie shuffled forward and stared down at the object on Susan’s palm. It was rusted metal and looked like a key, but it was tiny—the size of a tack. Like something that would open a very small door.

  “What is it?” Archie asked.

  “Search me,” Susan said.

  CHAPTER

  16

  The drizzle was relentless. It was the kind of rain that got in your eyes and streamed down your cheeks, so everyone always looked like they were crying. Archie had gone home and changed into corduroys. That was one of the things you learned living in Portland—avoid wet denim. The wicking action of the cotton carried the water upward so wet cuffs would bleed up to your knees. The denim leeched heat from your body like a cold bath. When they found missing people dead from hypothermia in the snow, and they were wearing jeans, they weren’t hikers. They were walkers. Tourists. Snow hikers didn’t wear jeans. They wore wool hats and thermal underwear and polypropylene.

  It was two in the morning, and the crowd was still working on the seawall at Waterfront Park. The mild weather that had been causing the snowmelt had chilled, but only to the low forties, far above freezing. Gravity was pulling the runoff from every mountain stream straight down into the valley.

  Archie was wearing brown leather shoes. He imagined his boots out in the river somewhere, floating next to the incongruous glut of crap that the flooding had knotted together: empty beer bottles, logs, lighters, condoms, plastic bottle caps, water jugs, and the occasional lost Croc. The leather shoes laced up to his ankles. Clarks. Debbie had told him once that they had gone out of style around 1980, but Archie had a soft spot for them.

  The entire Japanese American Plaza was cordoned off with crime tape. Judging by the flashlight beams, there were fifty cops down there at least. Some of them knew Henry. Most probably didn’t. But that’s how it was. If one of your own was hurt, you showed up. Never mind that it was the middle of the night and a state of emergency had been declared. Fifty cops. Too many, Archie thought.

  They all knew Archie. He tried not to think about that now. Gretchen Lowell had brought him more than his share of infamy. Within the ranks of the Portland Police Department, he was a ghost or a prophet. The ones who thought he was a phantom back from the dead avoided eye contact. The ones who thought he was some super cop, brimming with serial-killer know-how—they wouldn’t leave him alone. They thought he was smart and brave and lucky.

  He was none of those things.

  Not lucky, anyway. Certainly not that. Everyone around him suffered, one way or another.

  Now Archie had to make up for that, had to find a way to save Henry. He couldn’t do it standing there alone in the rain.

  Detective Jeff Heil trotted up. Archie recognized him from his stride. The sky was a thick frosting of clouds that blotted out the moon and stars and seemed to have its own vast unnatural glow. It wasn’t enough to see by. And even the buildings that lined the waterfront were dark—lights normally left on at night had been turned off, electrical box switches thrown to prevent short circuits.

  Heil lifted his flashlight beam, illuminating his long face. His dark blond hair was so wet it looked painted on, and the shadows of the beam made his chiseled cheekbones look even more hollow than usual. Heil had joined Archie’s task force a year and a half ago, when Archie had come off his two-year post-Gretchen medical leave. Archie had been popping Vicodin all day long back then. Heil had to have known it. But as far as Archie knew, he’d never said anything.

  “So?” Archie said, wiping rain from under his eyes.

  Heil lowered the light. “We’ve searched it all,” he said. “There was nothing there. Bird shit. Mud.” He held something up. “And this.”

  Archie swung his own flashlight up to see that Heil was holding a plastic evidence bag.

  It was empty.

  “Is it an invisible clue?” asked Archie.

  “It’s a
plastic bag,” Heil said. He caught himself. “I mean, inside the plastic bag.”

  Heil focused his light on the bag, too, and gave it a little shake.

  Archie took it and gave it a closer look. There was something plastic inside, almost exactly the same size as the evidence bag itself. From the looks of it, it was a plastic Ziploc freezer bag.

  It looked clean. No drug residue. No crumbs from a sandwich. “Dog walker might have dropped it,” Archie said.

  Portlanders were zealots about scooping up their dogs’ poop. The bags of choice were biodegradable store-bought ones designed for waste retrieval, or the blue plastic sleeves that The New York Times came in. Somewhere there was a landfill brimming with knotted blue plastic shit-filled NYT bags.

  “Sure,” Heil said. “But I wanted to show you something, and it’s all we’ve got.”

  An empty Ziploc bag. If that was a metaphor, they were screwed.

  “Where’s the guy who had Henry’s phone?” Archie asked.

  “Under the bridge.”

  Heil led Archie up the promenade, shifting to get between the volunteers and guardsmen still hoisting sandbags into place in their race against time. Archie was grateful for the crowd. There were still local news teams around, and he didn’t want to get spotted. They would have been on him in an instant, cameras rolling, wanting details of the rescue.

  By now the department would have gone public about the missing boy. The hospital security cameras had captured his grainy image leaving through an exit door, alone. It was a lousy shot—three-quarters profile, still in a hospital gown, barefoot, fleeing into the midnight rain. That was Archie to a tee—save someone and then immediately lose him. Classic.

  It took looking at the photograph to make Archie realize how much the kid looked like his son.