Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  "I'd say we're talking serious mental illness here, and that narrows down the search. If she's clinically mentally ill, it's likely she's institutionalized. That would fit in with the white nightgown, bare feet and the long hallway with doors."

  "If we stickin' with what we've figured out so far — which is that these paintings ain't 'bout some crazy woman in Des Moines — then there ain't but a couple of places she could be. She's either in Forest Hills Sanitarium in McKinley or Westminster Acres." T.J. turned to Brice. "Am I missin' anything?"

  Brice had grown quiet when the conversation began to center on mental illness and sanitariums. Dobbs wasn't surprised. He had almost been killed two months ago by a woman with a split personality, had spent a week in intensive care on a ventilator and had only gotten the arm she broke out of the cast a couple of weeks ago. He was entitled to be creeped out by mental disorders.

  "Westminster Acres is the more likely," Brice said, the words coming slowly. "Forest Hills is older, and as far as I know, they kind of specialize in long-term care for … the chronically mentally ill. Not treatable."

  "Both these places are right here in Kavanaugh County?" Bailey asked.

  "Westminster is," Dobbs said. "Forest Hills is one county over. Still within our imaginary circle." They'd figured out when they were looking for the little girl Bailey'd painted that the events she and T.J.'s mother painted were "local," not disasters in Bangladesh, but somewhere within something like a hundred-mile radius of Kavanaugh County. "It's closer than driving to Huntington."

  "So we're sayin' we think some mentally ill woman, hospitalized, got away somehow, and was tryin' to escape 'cause someone … on the staff or an orderly, somebody like that, threatened to kill her?" T.J. said.

  "Hate to sound like a fortune cookie, but it's not paranoia if the world really is out to get you," Dobbs said. "She wasn't hallucinating or dreaming up the threat. Someone was out to get her—"

  "And they got her," Bailey whispered.

  "Not yet, they ain't."

  "How do we go about finding her … how do we look? It's not like Westminster Acres is a petting zoo." Dobbs took the final swig of his coffee and set the mug on the tray on the table. "We can't show up and ask to talk to every female patient between the ages of—" Dobbs looked at Bailey. "How old?"

  "Early twenties. That should narrow it down."

  "I can come up with some plausible explanation for needing to talk to some of the patients," Brice said, but didn't look a bit happy about it.

  There was a silence.

  "What if it's tonight?" Bailey's voice was barely audible. "What if that man is going to—"

  "It ain't tonight," T.J. said.

  "How do you know that?"

  "Cop's gut. Ain't never lied to me. They's times I didn't listen …" He looked pained, and Dobbs wondered if T.J. had been suspicious about the kidnapper who'd snatched the three children but hadn't done anything about it.

  He reached over and patted Bailey's knee. "Trust me, it ain't tonight."

  Her smile looked like she'd affixed it to her face with roofing nails.

  Chapter Seven

  The gauze of sleep, falling away in tattered skeins, was still fuzzy-ing her brain when Bailey opened her eyes … and smelled perfume.

  Perfume? Here … in her bedroom … why …?

  Then she knew.

  The girl in the portrait in her studio whose ruined face would haunt Bailey for the rest of her life, was at that moment smelling perfume. Maybe wearing it. Maybe just near someone who was.

  And the two of them were … connected.

  The smell wasn't overpowering, not like some woman in Walmart who'd doused herself with Blue Waltz, which they sold there by the quart. If this had been the real thing, rather than a knockoff, it was expensive perfume. Bailey didn't recognize it specifically, but she could probably have guessed what the real thing would have cost.

  Clive Christian No. 1 sold for more than two thousand dollars an ounce, and the Imperial Majesty version cost six times that. This wasn't that, but it was definitely seated in the front of the plane with those fragrances, in first class.

  Caron or Chanel or Baccarat. Francis Camail or Annick Goutal. One of those great houses had created it, and the aroma was … sigh … enchanting.

  Oh, how Bailey loved perfume, and that was why she never wore it. She was a perfume snob, her tastes waaaay beyond what she could afford. She and her little sister, María, used to spend Saturday afternoons browsing the perfume aisles of high-end department stores just "window shopping." They'd sample one scent after another, dab a little on a wrist or behind an ear, until they finally went nose blind and couldn't tell one from the other. And, of course, the only thing on display for customers to sample were the synthetic knockoffs — often knockoffs of pricy knockoffs — certainly not the four-and-five-thousand-dollar-an-ounce fragrances like Joy, which was made from the oil of ten thousand jasmine flowers.

  Lying still, Bailey inhaled deeply — even though she knew that wouldn't enhance the fragrance because she wasn't smelling it through her nose.

  This was like the morning she had awakened to the smell of bacon and coffee and for a disorienting few moments had thought her whole two-year nightmare had been just that — a nightmare — and that Aaron really was in the kitchen making breakfast and Bethany was asleep in her crib down the hall. That was before she realized that she was smelling what the little drowned girl in her painting smelled.

  The tasteful, understated fragrance slowly faded away and Bailey lay in the still-warm sheets, thoroughly confused. T.J. had been right. The girl whose portrait she'd painted hadn't been murdered last night. She was definitely still alive, probably getting up about now and getting dressed.

  And putting on perfume.

  So how did a mental patient, institutionalized because she was so out of touch with reality that she believed monsters wanted to eat her eyeballs — how did that girl come by perfume as expensive as what Bailey'd smelled? Even a good knockoff was pricy. Oh, it was possible Bailey had been wrong, that she'd smelled some cheap knockoff. But she didn't think so. Bailey knew her perfumes!

  She sent out a group text to Brice, Dobbs and T.J., telling them that she still felt connected to the girl who was going to be murdered, knew the girl was still alive. Right now. They still had time …

  But the sand was sliding rapidly out the top side of the hourglass.

  When Brice picked her up to take her with him to Westminster Acres, she told him about the perfume. He didn't have any explanation for it either, but in truth he didn't appear to be concentrating, seemed distant somehow. That wasn't like him.

  Right. Like she knew for certain what was and what wasn't "like" the man she'd met only four months ago — in earth-revolving-around-the-sun time. More like half a lifetime in shared experiences. Only right now … Oh, he was cordial, but as cold as a salmon washed up on the shore of Nova Scotia. They'd have ridden along together in silence if they hadn't passed the entrance to a coal mine. Bailey pulled the handle on that conversational slot machine — "Did you ever work in a coal mine?" — and was rewarded with a lap full of tokens.

  "That'd be a big no!" He burped out a bleat of laughter. "Guys like me usually don't make very good coal miners."

  "Why not?"

  He looked surprised.

  "You don't know a lot about coal mining, do you?"

  "Only what I've seen in movies."

  "Ahhh … movies, the source of accurate information about all manner of things. Like police officers and bad guys in shootouts who never run out of ammo. And coal miners — some big dude with his face blacked out slings a pick over his shoulder and rides in an elevator down into a long dark tunnel deep underground. That about right?"

  "About."

  "Not even close. West Virginia coal mines aren't under the ground beneath your feet." He gestured out the window at the steep mountains rising up all around them. "They're under the mountain you're standing next to."

 
; "So you don't go down …?"

  "You sit on a train called a mantrip and ride straight in."

  "Like a ride at Disneyland?"

  "Except longer. Six or seven miles."

  "Miles? Underground? How do they breathe in there?"

  "A fan—"

  "What kind of fan can blow air six mi—?"

  "It doesn't blow. It sucks. Bad air out, good air in."

  She couldn't imagine what a contraption like that must look like, but she let it go.

  "I still don't see why you'd make such a lousy coal miner."

  "The miners in Lord of the Rings were dwarves — there's a reason for that."

  She still wasn't tracking.

  "The roofs in these mine shafts are only fifty-two inches off the floor."

  She almost choked. "A little over four feet tall? You're kidding! You are kidding me, right?"

  "Coal miners — even short ones — work bent over, squatting or on their hands and knees."

  "Bent over all day? Why is the roof only fifty-two inches high?"

  "Because the coal seam is only fifty-two inches thick and no coal company on the planet is going to dig out the rock above the seam just so the miners can stand up while they work. Moving rock costs money; miners with bad backs can be replaced."

  "So you're saying there's no place in the whole mine where you can stand up?"

  "Oh, there are places where the roof's taller — but they're usually not a miner's favorite place."

  She watched him as he spoke, his face more animated now than it'd been before the mine discussion. His features looked like they'd been chiseled out of stone, solid. No carrot head, his red hair was wine-colored, almost burgundy. Surprisingly, his eyes were brown, not blue, almost caramel-colored. And his face and hands wore an overlay of freckles so close together there seemed hardly any space between. She recalled watching his face as he lay in intensive care after the spider bite that almost killed him. His freckles then had stood out on his pale skin like pepper on a fried egg.

  "Okay, I am officially confused. Why wouldn't you like a place where you didn't have to bend over?"

  "The roof of a mine shaft is unstable, caves in. When that happens, you use the scoop to dig the rock out of the shaft and haul it away. But there's a hole in the roof there, and it's a place you can stand upright."

  "Yeah, but you're standing right where the roof just caved in!"

  "Now you're getting it. And sometimes, pieces of roof do keep falling in the same spot. Roof falls, haul the rock away. Falls again, haul it away again. By the time the roof stabilizes, it could be fifteen, twenty feet off the floor in that spot."

  He smiled and she saw the faint hint of a dimple in his right cheek. Funny that she'd never noticed that before.

  "One of my deputies told me about a spot in Harlan #7 where the roof was so tall they just left the last pile of rock that fell. It made a little island in the shaft and the miners'd climb up on it to eat their dinner. Called it the 'Break Room.' I think there are a couple of places like that in Last Hope Ollie."

  "Last Hope Ollie?"

  "After Oliver Northfield lost his shirt in the mining business half a dozen times, his wife finally laid down the law. 'This is your last hope, Ollie,' she told him, so when he filed his claim and mining papers, that's what he named the mine. Made his first million there. Now Mr. W. Maxwell Crenshaw owns it."

  "Of Crenshaw Coal Company fame?"

  "One and the same."

  The impound dam at the top of Turkey Neck Hollow had been owned by C3. Brice had to be thinking the same thing. He'd been right there when the dam exploded. Bailey had been in the hollow below.

  They could have died that day, both of them. And very nearly did die the next time Bailey painted a portrait. Would their lives be in danger every time they tried to … change destiny?

  Her arms suddenly pebbled in gooseflesh, like ice water was dripping down her spine. She felt an uncanny — and unpleasant — certainty that it would, indeed, be so.

  The man with the tattoo and the pinky ring — that was a dangerous man. And they were about to mess with him.

  Chapter Eight

  Brice turned off Miller Pike and wound down a smaller road that had no sign but Brice said it was Cedar Stump Road — which, of course, he knew because he grew up here, while she was an intruding interloper from Away From Here. Half a mile down Cedar Stump Road, they came to a black gate in a wrought-iron fence. Imposing, architecturally at least. Gave a gothic feel to the place. But if there were any other barrier than that, any other fence to keep the crazies in and the rest of the world out, Bailey couldn't see it.

  Bailey waited outside while Brice was shown into the office of the hospital administrator.

  Hello darkness, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again.

  Bailey froze. The music was faint but distinct. Simon and Garfunkel.

  … vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping.

  Brice came back, saw the look on her face and asked, "What?"

  "‘Sound of Silence’ … you don't hear it, do you?"

  "No, but apparently you do."

  The sound faded and was gone.

  "Not anymore."

  He understood, was silent for a beat, then handed her a lanyard with a tag that said "Visitor" on it. At the door leading into the facility, he punched a button. Bailey heard a dignified buzzer sound on the other side of the door and the knob released.

  A woman in a nurse's smock was waiting for them. Bailey was grateful that her smock was not decorated with cartoon figures, as had been the attire of the nurses when she woke up in the hospital after her suicide attempt. This nurse's smock was surgical green.

  "The residents are eating lunch right now and they'll be wandering in here as they finish." She gave Brice a look that made it clear she thought he had no business here. "If you need anything," she pointed to the video cameras in all the corners and over the doorways, "big brother's always watching."

  After the nurse left, there was only one other person in the room — a smartly dressed woman about fifty-five, wearing a business-style gray pants suit. Her hair was blonde, cut short, and her face looked tired and care worn. But when she saw them, she smiled a small smile.

  "Here to see someone in particular, officer, or did you just come to bust the whole lot of them?"

  "There are several people we want to talk to," he said in his official Sheriff Brice McGreggor tone, which was off-putting and probably designed to be. Bailey tried to soften the moment.

  "Who are you here to see?"

  "My daughter, Stephanie." She brightened a little. "You'll probably recognize her when you see her. Everyone says she is the image of me, though I can't see it." She paused for a beat. "She won't recognize me, of course. If we stood side by side in a mirror, she might remark that we kind of look alike, don't we, and isn't that strange."

  "She doesn't know you're her mother?"

  "If I try to tell her, it upsets her. So I just let her think I'm whoever she wants me to be today. Maybe I'm her mythical friend Martha, who is a fashion designer in New York and who wants her to go there and model clothes. When you see her, you'll know why somebody might actually want her to be a model … but she doesn't have a friend Martha."

  The woman started to speak again, then seemed to realize that she was the only one speaking.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude. But there are seldom any other visitors besides me. Chronic patients like these don't have many people left in their lives who haven't given up on them, written them off because of their behavior, or just want to pretend they don't exist." She put out her hand. "I'm Miriam Callahan."

  Bailey shook. "Bailey Donahue." Brice just stood there, so Bailey covered for him. "How long has your daughter been here?"

  "Almost ten years," Mrs. Callahan said. "There were other institutions before this one. When it first … started happening, we had her committed — had to, we couldn't handle her. She was only fourteen. M
y husband and I—" She looked sheepish. "Just me now, he falls into the category of 'pretend they don't exist.' We didn't want to believe someone so young could …"

  The woman looked into Bailey's eyes.

  "Is it hard for you? That they change, become somebody else entirely? Don't you think that's the hardest part?"

  The sheriff had been standing silently beside her, not a party to the conversation, just in the presence of it, which wasn't like Brice at all. But when she started talking about changing, becoming somebody else, he looked uncomfortable and discovered he wanted a drink of water from the fountain on the other side of the room.

  "Actually, we don't know the person we've come to see. I mean, we're looking for someone."

  "Who?"

  "Uh … we don't know."

  Bailey hopped behind the wheel of the cover story they'd concocted and gave it a test drive.

  "There's a little boy in Kavanaugh County Memorial Hospital who was in a wreck and he will need multiple surgeries. But he has a very rare blood type, AB negative. Only .6 percent of the population has that type."

  "Can't they just give him, O negative? I thought that—"

  "The doctors say his weak little body doesn't need to be dealing with non-matched transfusions on top of everything else and they're looking for an AB negative donor. One of the nurses remembered a little girl who was treated for a dog bite in the emergency room there years ago who had that blood type. We're trying to find her."

  "And you're looking here because …?"

  "We know almost nothing about her. There was a fire in the administrative wing of the hospital about ten years ago that destroyed thousands of records. All we know about the child is what the nurse remembers — her blood type, the fact that she will likely have a good-sized scar on her backside from the dog bite … and she might be mentally ill."

  Bailey claimed not to know the details, only that the nurse had said the child had displayed extremely bizarre behavior, might have been autistic, paranoid schizophrenic … who knew?