The Last Day of Emily Lindsey

by Nic Joseph

  ALSO BY NIC JOSEPH

  Boy, 9, Missing

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  Copyright © 2017 by Nic Joseph

  Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover image © Cristopher Civitillo/Plainpicture

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Joseph, Nic, author.

  Title: The last day of Emily Lindsey / Nic Joseph.

  Description: Naperville, IL : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014662 | (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3610.O66896 L37 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014662

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Reading Group Guide

  An Excerpt from Boy, 9, Missing

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To Damian, for the morning commute brainstorming sessions.

  Chapter One

  Then

  Here’s how the adults tried to protect them:

  • locked rooms the size of large closets, on either side of a dim hallway;

  • a thick layer of sand on the floor that alerted those in charge to their every step;

  • not one but two sets of imposing steel gates, which could only be opened with a single key that was guarded at all times;

  • and maybe most important of all—the constant feeling that they were being watched by the tiny, black cameras in the sky, which tracked them while they slept, while they ate, and even while they brushed their teeth.

  It wasn’t really the sky. They all knew it, even the youngest ones, since no amount of light-blue paint or strategically placed lighting could come close to the real thing, and they’d all seen the real thing at least once or twice in their young lives. When Frank first decided that the ceiling of the children’s wing should be painted to look like the sky—so they could “safely and securely experience the beauty of nature”—he’d received overwhelming support from the other adults. But through the years, the dingy clouds that covered the low ceiling served only to mock the children, a reminder of the world they’d never be a part of.

  On most days, the locks and gates and cameras truly did feel like protection, and the children played safely and happily within confines they could not quite understand. The rules were the rules, and temptation to break them required an understanding that there could be any other way. The older children occasionally bent them—staying awake past bedtime or leaving footprints in the perfectly swept sand as they visited one another secretly in the night. Most days, these small indiscretions were met with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, if there was any punishment at all. The mothers were known to sweep up the footprints of their favorites.

  June 2 was not most days.

  On this one day every year, the measures didn’t feel like protection at all, but rather closer to what they really were: a complex system of rules, procedures, and securities designed to keep the children in their wing, away from the events that took place on the eighth floor. It became essential that the rules, so casually regarded the other 364 days of the year, be treated as law—the mothers turned into different people overnight, it seemed, inflicting the strictest of punishments for the smallest offenses.

  Most of the children were careful to heed the rules on June 2. There was no reason not to, since one day was a small price to pay for their relative freedom the rest of the year. They combed their hair neatly and filtered into line when necessary; they were in their rooms when the lights went out, and they spoke in hushed voices. Mothers liked to make examples of troublemakers during this important day, and no one wanted that.

  Besides, even if the children did try to break the rules to find out what was going on upstairs, they weren’t likely to get very far. Here’s what it would take:

  First, they would have to find a way to get out of their rooms without being noticed. They would have to take care not to leave footprints as they did this—the mothers would be looking for disruptions in the sand. After tiptoeing to the first of the steel gates, the children would need to open it with a key they didn’t have; the gate key swung from the neck of the mother on duty.

  Another sand-covered hallway would separate them from the second gate, which would open with the same key. This gate was similar to the first in almost every way, except for one critical difference—the hinges were old and worn, and rust lurked inside every crevice, causin
g the gate to squeal loudly whenever it opened or closed.

  If the children were to get through the second gate unobserved, a moment of celebration would be in order, but not for long. They’d be in a small hallway that offered three ways to get upstairs: the main elevator, the movements of which were constantly watched by security cameras; the stairwell, which required a key for reentry at every floor; and a door that led to a freight elevator, which was typically—conveniently—out of service every June 2.

  Regardless of how they entered the eighth floor, the children would have to pass through the heavily guarded main atrium where the evening’s events were being held. There were no cameras on the eighth floor, but a guard sat at a desk near the center of the floor, with a view in every direction, for it was critical—absolutely critical—that what took place in the small auditorium at the far end of the hall not be interrupted. If the children did, miraculously, make it by the guards, they’d have to slip into the back of the room without being noticed.

  And then, of course—they’d have to find their way back.

  Getting caught on the way down would be as bad as getting caught on the way up, maybe worse. Rumor had it that only one child had ever made it all the way up, but he was caught in the stairwell on the way back. He was whipped repeatedly—four lashes on his back for each of the three rules he broke (curfew, stealing a key, and lying)—and the children had been able to hear his cries through the vents in the wall. He’d never returned to the wing, and no one was brave enough to ask why.

  Was it worth it? Not for most kids.

  But then, just like June 2 wasn’t like most days, Jack wasn’t like most kids.

  It wasn’t just that he was quieter and less playful than the other twelve-year-olds. It wasn’t just that he was one of the few who hadn’t been born there; his mother had brought him to Frank’s when he was two, the oldest age children were allowed to come in from the outside.

  No, what made Jack different was his careful study of those around him. He noticed things—not just what people said but the way they said them, and the way people responded. He noticed the different patterns that each mother swept in the sand and how the second gate didn’t squeak as much when you lifted up a little as you pushed. He noticed how at least once a week, Mother Deena sobbed quietly by herself in the back of the cafeteria when she thought no one was watching.

  What made Jack different was that he knew that whatever happened upstairs every year on June 2 was the reason that his mother—his real mother, not the glassy-eyed women who smiled and called him Son—had disappeared two years earlier. What made him different was that despite all of the reasons that he couldn’t, and shouldn’t, try to get upstairs to find out what happened to her, he knew that he could, and that he would.

  Was it worth it?

  Of course it was.

  Chapter Two

  Now

  Before Emily Lindsey, I would have said that the line between a person who murders and one who does not should be heavy. Thick, defined, and resolute. That the deliberate act of taking another person’s life should separate you, quite firmly, from all the rest.

  Before Emily, I might have said that people’s dreams and nightmares were theirs and theirs alone—that no matter how terrible or terrifying, ridiculous or absurd, dangerous or inappropriately erotic, dreams were, at the very least, private. Personal.

  I may even have said that people can surprise you only as much as you let them and that you can know almost everything you need to know about a person if you get one good, solid look into their eyes.

  But again, that was before Emily Lindsey.

  Before Emily, I would have said a lot of things.

  • • •

  I’ve never told anyone about what happens in the prison nightmare.

  It’s simply not the kind of dream you talk about in detail. You might tell someone about the dream where you die during sex, or lose all your teeth, or piss in a cup on the subway and leave it beneath the seat. Dreams are ridiculous and weird, but for the most part, they’re allowed.

  That can’t be said for the prison dream.

  It’s not so much the fact that I kill somebody in the dream or that I don’t know who I’ve killed or why I’ve done it. It’s the fact that I do it so often. I’ve had the dream at least a couple of times a week for as long as I can remember. I’m trapped in a small, gated room, the smell of mildew and standing water so strong, it curdles my insides. I want to get out, but really, all I can think about is that smell and how it’s so much more than water damage. It’s something rotting, someone dead or dying, and I know that if I look hard enough, I’ll find out exactly who it is.

  Sometimes I do try to figure it out. Not by looking around, because I couldn’t bear to see what was surely rotting flesh, but by stretching my foot out to one side or the other. I grip the bars in front of me and search around with my toes, preparing for the moment when they connect with something soft or sticky. I never find anything, and somehow, that’s worse.

  I’m always a child in the dream, maybe three or four, but my mind is older, keenly aware of the hell I’m in. I stand there, holding the bars, breathing in particles of someone’s lost life, and I stare at a small symbol scratched into the metal gate. It’s there every night, etched with a key or some other sharp object: a tightly coiled, tornado-like spiral overtaking a small cross. I drag my thumb across it, the rest of my fingers still wrapped around the bars, and the panic rises, because I know that I’m trapped in there, lifelong cell mates with this dead body that I can’t see.

  But the biggest problem of all is that, deep down, I know I’m not really in jail. This place in my dream is no prison—it’s home. As I trail my finger against the final curve of the spiraled symbol and stare out into the dark space, I pray for death so it can all be over and I can begin to rot, too.

  • • •

  Nowadays, I just pray for morning.

  I’ve become better at managing the dreams, but it was a lot harder when I was a kid. As a boy, I spent hours constructing elaborate lies and explanations for why I’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

  The first time I had the prison dream after moving in with my parents, Nell said I screamed so loudly that she felt her chest rattle, a whole room away.

  She’d grabbed the first thing she could find—the rabbit ears antenna from the box TV in their room—and held it up like a weapon as she charged into my room. Mike, her husband, was just a couple of steps behind her and weaponless, but at six foot two, ex-military, and filled with what would easily be recognized today as a shit-ton of seventies tough-guy swag, he didn’t really need one.

  “What’s wrong?” Nell asked breathlessly as she flipped on the light and raced closer to the bed, her eyes alert, even though sleep lines covered her face. She scanned the room and then looked down at me. “Steven? Are you okay?”

  It took a few moments for me to leave the dusty prison floor and make my way back to the room Nell and Mike had put together for me in their small, two-bedroom bungalow in southern Wisconsin.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, the horror of what had happened sinking in, and I remember thinking that I was stupid for upsetting them this early in our relationship. I was nine years old, and it was my third stop in the Douglas County Foster System. I was old enough to know that forever wasn’t a guarantee and young enough to keep trying anyway. “I had a bad dream. I’m really sorry I woke you up. You can go back to bed now.”

  I remember the look of confusion on Nell’s face as she put the antenna down and sat on the side of the bed. She grabbed a tissue off my nightstand and dabbed at my forehead before touching the sheets around my belly.

  “You’re soaking wet,” she said, looking back at Mike, who was still walking slowly around the room, his shoulders tense and jaw clenched. He was wearing bright-red flannel pajamas that Nell had bought him for Valentine’s D
ay, but he still didn’t look like someone you should mess with. He walked over to the closet and opened it, peering inside.

  “You don’t have to apologize for having a bad dream,” Nell said.

  I pushed myself up in the bed so that I was leaning against the headrest. “I know, but you have to go to work in the morning,” I said. “I feel really bad for waking you up.”

  Nell bit her lip, and I think she was trying not to cry. She leaned forward and kissed me on my sweaty forehead.

  “We’re going to get up and get you something else to wear and change your sheets,” she said. “But first, I need you to make a promise to me. I need you to promise that you’ll never apologize to me again for something like having a bad dream. I know we’re getting to know each other, and it’s going to take us some time, but we have a whole lifetime for that. Forget about what I have to do tomorrow. My most important job is taking care of you, and it’s a job I’d give up almost anything for. Sleep included.”

  I didn’t say anything, and she stuck out her hand.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  I reached out from beneath the covers and grabbed it, my small, damp hand engulfed by hers. I nodded.

  When Rose, my foster care coordinator, first took me to meet Nell and Mike, I was torn between wanting to keep my expectations low and hoping that maybe, just maybe, I’d made it home. When I first saw Nell, sobbing like a madwoman because she was so happy to meet me, I’d let myself think it was possible, just a little.

  The next time I had the dream, they were both there again—Nell, petite and sleepy with her hair wrapped up under the bandana she wore at night, and Mike, huge and stocky, wearing both his bright-red pajamas and his determined scowl. They were there the third time and the fourth time and the fifth time, too.

  There wasn’t a hint of annoyance, no shared looks, no “what the fuck did we do” under their breath. Nell no longer brought a weapon, but she still looked concerned, and Mike still checked the closet every time, though I think he did that mostly for my benefit.

  About a month after I moved in, an entire week went by without any nightmares.