Storm

by Lagomarsino, Giulia

  I covered my face with my hands and groaned. “Did she tell you what happened?”

  “No, she just said that Jessica didn’t understand how someone so hot could be so clueless in bed. What the fuck did you do, man?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I burst out. “It’s Lindsey and Kate and Maggie and fucking Claire’s fault. They were drinking wine last night. I went looking for a guy to talk to and I came across them.”

  Hunter groaned and chuckled to himself. “Please tell me you didn’t stop and talk to them.”

  “Of course I did. I needed someone to talk to, but then things went sideways and the things they were saying, they got in my head and shit just happened when I went back to my room.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Tony asked curiously.

  I thought of how to explain it to them, but there was really only one way. “It was like they were reading from their porn books. Claire told me to eat Jessica like a starving dog or some shit. Only, I actually said that…or some version of that when I was in the room with Jessica. I don’t know what came over me. It was like a fucking out of body experience.”

  “What would possess you to do that?” Hunter asked. “Their porn is not shit that you should repeat. With a guy like Fabio, that shit gets a woman in bed faster than a man drops when he finds out his chick is pregnant.”

  “I know that now. You’re just pointing out the obvious.”

  “Well, it wasn’t very obvious to you last night,” Coop said. “What else did you say?”

  I groaned, rubbing the back of my neck as I thought back to the night before. “There was something about glistening doors and her honeypot. But I’m not sure how I phrased it. It was all screwed up in my head.”

  “Her honeypot?” Tacos laughed. “Hell, you should just hand her over to me right now. You don’t stand a fucking chance after calling her vagina a honeypot.”

  “That’s not the worst,” I cringed. “I think I referred to my cum as pus.”

  They all stood there staring at me. I chewed my lip and tried to think of something to help me out of this.

  “There’s a way to save this, right?”

  “Sure,” Coop nodded. “Just explain to her that you sucked in too much coal dust yesterday and it screwed with your head.”

  “She’s the one that had the concussion,” Cap pointed out.

  “Ooh,” Hunter said, pointing at me. “That’s good. Just play it off like it was all her imagination.”

  “What?”

  He nodded vigorously. “Yep, I’m telling you. Just make her think that she imagined the whole fucking thing.”

  “You think I should lie to her?”

  “Hell, we’ve all been there,” Cap said. “You get hit on the head and you can’t remember what’s real and what’s not. It’s worth a try,” he shrugged.

  “Cap, you of all people are suggesting that I lie to a woman I want to sleep with. Am I understanding this right?”

  “Fuck, I know it’s wrong, but I’m with Hunter on this one. The shit you said? You’ll never get a second chance with her otherwise.”

  I looked around the room at all the guys. They all looked like they agreed. “No, there has to be another way. I’ll just be honest. It’s so unbelievable, she’d have to feel sorry for me.”

  “I don’t know,” Coop said. “None of us have ever said shit like that. At least, not that I know of. I can’t imagine a woman just letting that go.”

  “Hunter,” I turned to him, “you’ve done some stupid shit before. How did you fix things with Lucy?”

  He laughed slightly, shaking his head. “You’ve got it all wrong. We,” he said, gesturing to the rest of them, “all have the sex part down. See, you can screw up the relationship and still fix things because you can draw them back in with sex and whispering sweet words. You can’t do that. You’ve already shown that you can’t be trusted to say anything during sex.”

  “He’s right,” Cap admitted. “How do you bring your woman back to you when you no longer have sex on your side?”

  “Can I just point out that she’s not actually my woman?”

  “Yeah, she should be my woman,” Tony grumbled.

  “Can we please forget about the fucking thumb war? Face it, you lost. You won the battle, but lost the war. It’s over for you.”

  “I wouldn’t be too confident right now if I were you,” Coop said. “I think right now she’d take Tony Tacos over you.”

  “There has to be some way to prove to her that it was a one time mistake. Okay, let’s just say that I wanted help getting her back. How would I go about this?”

  “Well, you have to prove to her that you are good in bed,” Hunter said. “You are good in bed, right?”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m gonna prove it to you,” I grumbled.

  “He’d be the one you’d go to,” Cap chuckled. “Hey,” he said, holding up his hands as Hunter advanced on him. “Wax jobs, watching people fuck, thongs, pedicures, and hot tubs. I’m just saying.”

  “That wasn’t all me,” he growled.

  “Doesn’t matter. Enough of it was,” Cap laughed.

  “Can we get back to my issues?”

  “You know what you need?” Coop said. “You need a sex tape.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, you know, to prove that you can do it the right way.”

  “And who exactly would be filming this? And who would be in it?”

  Coop scratched his jaw and shrugged. “Okay, well, unless you have any in storage, that won’t work so well, but there’s gotta be something you can do that will show you’re not a total douche in bed.”

  They all stood there staring at the ground in thought. “Really? Maggie went to you with this issue and this is who you brought me?” Cap opened his mouth to speak, but I held up my hand to stop him. “You could have brought me Sinner, the lady killer. You could have brought me the man who made his woman think he was a superhero. Hell, you could have brought me the stalker, but no. You brought me the guy who won the thumb war, but still lost the girl. You brought me the man who has a sixteen year old, but no woman. And you brought me the man who fights with his woman for a living.”

  I turned and headed for the door, determined to figure this out on my own.

  “Hey!” Cap called from behind me. “I showed up.”

  “Yeah, the man that’s hanging onto his woman by knocking her up repeatedly. Don’t think that’ll work here.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jessica

  After much begging and pleading, I got Maggie to drive me back to the estate. She said that I should stick it out and wait for the guys to talk to Storm, but I just couldn’t do it. He had to know that I talked to Maggie by now and he would probably be pissed. It was better if I just slunk away and ended this whole embarrassing incident. Maybe he would decide to just stay away and not show up at the estate at all. And even if he did show up, it was big enough that I could escape him. Besides, I had a lot of the estate to cover yet. And getting back into those tunnels was something I had to do as soon as possible. I wasn’t completely thrilled about it, but I had a feeling that the key to everything was in those hidden passages.

  “I really think you need to wait and talk with Storm. Something else is going on here. There has to be. I can’t picture a guy like Storm being that bad in bed.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me he was either, but I was there. I experienced it myself.”

  She sighed and leaned back in her seat, wincing slightly. “So, what are you going to do now?”

  “Get back to work.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me. “You may have the guys fooled, but I’m not that stupid. You didn’t buy an old insane asylum to fix it up. What are you looking for?”

  “Nothing. I’m just curious-”

  “I used to be a reporter. A pretty damn good one at that. There was a reason that I met Sebastian.”

  “What was that?”

>   She grinned at me and opened her door. “Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you all about it. After that, we’ll get to solving your mystery.”

  She got out and slammed the door before I had time to protest. For a woman that was about to pop out a kid, she moved pretty fast. I got out and ran to catch up with her.

  “So, how did you meet Sebastian?”

  “I was breaking a story on a dirty mayor in Pittsburgh.”

  “I read about that. That was you?” I asked, very impressed and kind of giddy that I knew a famous reporter.

  “Well, those were my actual work days. I feel like all I ever do anymore is pop out kids. But I still get in a good story when I get the chance. And I smell a story. So, tell me about it.”

  It didn’t take much for Maggie to pull the story out of me. I went through all the details that I knew, including my visit to Elsie. But what really piqued her interest was what the doctor had said to me at the Brookside Psychiatric Clinic.

  “I think you’re right. I think the answers are in those tunnels. Come on. Let’s go exploring.”

  “Whoa, wait a minute. That’s not a good idea. I mean, it was dangerous for me and I wasn’t wobbling around with a baby about to shoot out of my vagina.”

  She turned on me so fast that I stumbled backwards. “Did you just imply that I’m so heavy that I’m like a penguin, bobbing from side to side?”

  I was terrified. I knew I could look scary when I got angry, but Maggie had the bitch face down to an art. I simply shook my head with my eyes wide in terror. Then she smiled at me and proceeded to walk through the house.

  “So, the last tunnel you went in was a dud. That means we need to find a new tunnel.”

  “Well, I don’t know that it was a dud, but the guys did put cameras in there, so I would imagine we could always look through the feed later for any clues.”

  “Right, so let’s figure out where else we can look. Now, you said that the doctors closed down this asylum because it was getting overcrowded, but if that was the case, wouldn’t they have just opened up another asylum and started transferring the extra patients?”

  “Well, maybe this building was just too old. Maybe they just wanted to start over.”

  “Could be, but this is a huge estate. I think I heard that it’s over six hundred acres. That’s about one square mile, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “So, I’m saying that they could have built another facility right here. They already had everything they needed on site. So, what would be a good reason for moving everything off site? And if they moved everything off site, were all the patients accounted for?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I think the doctors had something to hide. If Dr. Abner was warning you that the answers were here, that implies that something nefarious happened here. They most likely tried to hide the evidence, but back then, would they really have destroyed all the evidence properly? I mean, we didn’t start using DNA evidence until the mid eighties. Imagine all the things that could have been ‘destroyed’ back then, but could still be useful evidence today.”

  “I already looked around for records. I didn’t find anything.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. They wouldn’t have left any records to be found.”

  “So, what are we looking for?”

  “You said that doctors used to perform lobotomies in the hopes of curing mental illness. And you said that your grandmother was kept here, according to Elsie, after she gave birth. If she wasn’t really raped and she didn’t want to give up her child, for what reason would she be kept here?”

  “Well, that’s what I was hoping to find out. But what does this have to do with lobotomies?”

  “I’m wondering if maybe they weren’t the only things that were going on here to cure patients. Maybe your grandmother was seen as uncooperative and needed to be silenced. Think about it. Who would stand to lose if your grandmother got out of here and told police what had really happened?”

  “Well, my great-grandparents, for one.”

  “But also the doctors, because they would have seen that she wasn’t really crazy when her father brought her here. They would have kept her for maybe a month to make sure that there were no missed signs of dementia. But once they figured out that she was sane, they would have released her.”

  “So, the doctors would also be culpable. Which means there could be other patients that were held here against their will.”

  “Right, so we need a list of patients that were kept here around the same time and we need to talk with their families. We also need to find out why they needed all these tunnels.”

  “I’ve already been through one of the tunnels. I’m not sure you want to go in there in your condition.”

  “It’s never stopped me before. Besides, I think we need to go to the room where they performed the procedures. I have a hunch that we’re going to get lucky.”

  I headed in the direction of the east wing, climbing the steps with unease. “Sebastian’s going to kill me. This is such a bad idea.”

  “Sebastian can kiss my ass. He knew all along the woman he was marrying. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen?”

  I stopped on the stairs and looked back at her in disbelief. “Are you serious? You could get hurt like I did. Or you could go into labor. Hell, a ghost could attack. How the hell do I fight off a ghost?”

  “First, there are no ghosts in this house. I know you think you saw one, but I’m fairly confident that it was just your imagination going into overdrive. Second, I have a three guns on me. Trust me, we’ll be fine.”

  “You carry around three guns?”

  She shrugged and continued up the stairs. “I would have brought knives and grenades, but it’s getting a little awkward now that I’m so big.”

  “Can I just say that while you’re totally badass and I respect you more than any other woman I’ve met, you’re fucking crazy.”

  “Thank you,” she grinned. “I’ll take the compliment, whether you meant it that way or not.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment,” I mumbled under my breath as I finished climbing the stairs. I hated going into this room and I had purposely put it off, hoping that Storm would do the work on this room. I took a deep breath and opened the door. There was a foul odor in the room and the floor was slightly stained.

  “This was definitely not set up for performing brain surgery. What were they thinking?” Maggie asked.

  “That’s what I was wondering.”

  “Okay, well they chose this room for a reason. Let’s see what we can find.”

  I went over to the window, looking for curtain hooks like the other room had, but came up empty. Maggie was tapping on the walls and listening for something. I kind of wished that I had her investigative brain. I pulled up a rug that was lying on the floor, but all it showed was mold. Dropping it, I brushed off my hands and walked over to where Maggie was checking out a gold plated light switch. There were four push buttons. She pressed the first one and the overhead light flicked on. She pressed the second one and nothing happened, same with the third. But when she pressed the fourth, a panel in the wall opened and inside the tunnel sat a gurney.

  “Oh, God.” I pressed my sleeve to my face to block out the stench. It was terrible, like rotting corpses or something. “I don’t think we should go in there.”

  “What do you mean? We’re so close!” Maggie practically ran through the door and pulled up the light on her phone. “This is so cool. I mean, going after the mayor and taking down corrupt politicians is great, but this is a mystery that has been locked away for years.”

  “Yeah,” I said grudgingly. “I’m so glad to be walking in this dark, smelly tunnel, trying to find out what doctors did to patients here.”

  “Sorry, I’m not trying to be inconsiderate of what might have happened to your grandmother, but this stuff just really gives me the chills and gets my motor running.”

  “Was Sebas
tian aware of the fact that you were a psycho when he slept with you?”

  “Of course,” she said, giving me a funny look. “Hey, look, there’s a door up ahead.” She started moving faster and when we reached it, we found it opened up and down instead of side to side. “It’s a dumbwaiter,” she said cheerily. “A very big one. I’m not sure how they managed to use one this big.”

  She opened the door up and then stuck her head inside. I did the same, feeling like I wasn’t really pulling my weight in this whole search for the truth. “It looks like it’s still in tact.”

  “Come on,” she said, flinging her leg over the lower part of the wall. “Let’s see where it goes.”

  “Are you kidding? You want to go in a contraption that’s probably a hundred years old and most likely transported bodies?”

  “Yeah, you know, that’s probably what the gurney was about. So, if we follow this, we’ll see where they took the bodies and have more answers to your questions.”

  “Or have some very disturbing images in my head that I’d rather not have.”

  “Look, you came here to find answers. If you don’t want to know any more about what happened, then let’s leave. You can sell the property and just move on with life. But if you’re not going to be able to do that, then we need to know where this goes.”

  I hated that she was right. I was scared to do the exploring, but for Maggie, this was like a treasure hunt. I did want to know what happened and that meant that I had to suck it up and not be afraid of the dark. I climbed in next to her, and together, we lowered the dumbwaiter until it stopped at the bottom.

  Together, we pried the doors open and stepped out into a dark room. There was an eerie calm to this room. Something in here felt so final that it sent chills down my spine. Maggie shone her flashlight around the dark space until she came upon a dark object at the far end of the room.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Let’s find out.” She hurried over, illuminating the huge thing with every step closer she got. “Oh my God.”

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “If you think it’s a giant oven, then I would say it is.”