I retreated downhill, traversed to where I judged James was hunkered down, and crested the summit once again. Still short of James by ten feet, I elected to crawl on hands and knees, never taking my eyes off the general area where I’d seen the Stranger.
James saw me coming and tried to give me a hand signal to lie lower, but if he thought I was going to grass stain a favorite dress, he was crazy and probably belonged in the Gadwall mansion himself.
We whispered so softly we had to move our heads closer to each other in order to hear and be heard. I told him Ben’s description of Gadwall and heard a change in his breathing. “But why Father?”
“I’ve thought about that,” I said. “Do you suppose he’s sick, that he gets treated here?”
I couldn’t be sure James had heard me; he seemed to have turned to stone. “No way,” he finally whispered. “Besides, then why not just take a cab here?”
“Pride? Business stuff? Maybe the Stranger is a private investigator hired by Father’s business partners.”
“I’m guessing it’s more like he has a friend in there.”
“Maybe,” I said, “he doesn’t want his visit connected to the family name.”
“You’re good at this.” He sounded in awe.
“Just making stuff up.” I feigned a shrug.
“But it makes sense, Mo. It’s smart.”
That was a word Jamie had never applied to me. I about fainted, although it might have been from the climb. “What now?” I had a plan. Of course I had a plan—this was me!—but I knew when to shut up and listen.
A minivan arrived down the road. We both crouched down automatically. Behind it came a fancy foreign sedan, black with tinted windows.
“A meeting?” I suggested. “Who would think anyone would take a meeting in a place like this. Maybe it is spy stuff!”
The van stopped. A wheelchair lift lowered an elderly woman to the asphalt and another woman, this one younger, wheeled her up a ramp and inside.
“If I move closer,” James said, “then when the van leaves I could make it to the front door and inside without that dude seeing me.”
“You would have to be so fast!”
“Yeah? So what? I don’t have a problem with that.”
“I’m not sure I could make it.”
“You don’t have to,” James said to me. “You hang back and keep an eye on Stranger Danger. If he does anything weird, text me.”
“How about if he doesn’t do anything weird I text you? Just kidding. I can do that.”
“I’m going to figure this out,” James said. “And if I blow it and Father catches me, then I’m going to rat out the Stranger and hope that buys me a pass.”
“Us,” I said. “Buys us a pass.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Hardly matters. He won’t catch me.”
I disliked his arrogance. “If you don’t find him, you might try one of the computers. There are bound to be computers in there.” Of the two of us, James was the computer expert. He was so close to being a hacker that I assumed this would appeal to his ego as well as to his plan. It had been the major focus of what I would have proposed if asked.
The van restarted.
“No time for talk,” James said, already moving low along the shrubs in the direction of the mansion.
CHAPTER 9
DECIDING NOT TO BE LEFT BEHIND, I FOLLOWED close on James’s heels. There was nothing he could do to stop me, not given the scant few seconds we had to cross the open driveway and get inside while the van screened the Stranger. I’d managed to snag a handful of wildflowers planted around the trunk of a birch tree. It spoke to my forward thinking and excellent planning. I hoped James knew how lucky he was to have me.
“You idiot!” he said, once we were inside a large foyer separated by yet another door before the reception hall.
I shoved the flowers into his hand. “I have a plan, moron. We need the name of a resident, a patient, whatever, or we’ll look like fools and we’ll be tossed out before we even start.”
He appeared dumbfounded. “And how—?”
“People get flowers in places like this. They sign in and sign out on a list. All we need is a name, one name.”
“We could just tell them that the man who just entered is our father. That we need to talk to him.”
“What if he uses a different name and they ask? What if my new friend, Ben, is wrong and it isn’t a mental place but a cancer hospital or army men or whatever? What if they won’t tell us anything without a name?”
We’d spent several long seconds arguing on the other side of a glass door. We couldn’t keep it up. I pulled open the door and we entered a marble hall with a vaulted ceiling, love seats and couches pushed against the walls. A receptionist desk faced us. Near the back rose a wide wooden staircase with ornately turned balustrades and an intricately carved finial. Mozart’s clarinet concerto played from unseen speakers. (If you have to ask how I knew that, then you don’t know me very well.) The room smelled of something sweet, the air as cool as a fall afternoon.
The receptionist was perhaps fifty, with colored hair pulled tightly back. Her eyebrows were drawn on, her green eyes warm and welcoming, her mouth dour, a living conflict of hostess and gargoyle.
“Welcome. How may I help you?”
I was already moving to the side, leaving James and his handful of fresh flowers. Unfortunately, a few had torn loose carrying their roots and balls of soil, revealing our theft.
“We’re here to visit . . .” James looked like a child struck with stage fright. He’d forgotten his line. He had no idea how to complete the sentence.
“Gloria Furnbright,” I said quickly, having lifted the printed name off a waiting basket tented with cellophane and filled with chocolates, scones, and boxes of tea.
James appeared noticeably relieved, which I didn’t think helped us any.
“Relation?” the woman asked without hesitation.
Now came the tricky part. We had to answer equally quickly, and if the woman was elderly and we said “children” we would expose ourselves; if we replied “grandmother” and the woman was in her thirties we were equally vexed. I could see a reply dangling on my brother’s tongue. I leaped to intervene, confident he had not thought this through.
“We’re just visiting here, the town, with our parents,” I said. “A friend of our mother’s asked her to visit Mrs. Furnbright while we were here, and our parents are tied up all day with this charity thing, so Mom, knowing this place was close to the beach, and that that’s where we’d be spending all of our time, asked us to come up here and spend a few minutes with her. If you tell us we can’t, you won’t hear us complaining, if you know what I mean?” My experience with grown-ups was that the more complicated an explanation, the less they wanted to hear it, and that if you really didn’t want to do something they would figure out every possible way to make you do it. I hoped the receptionist fit the mold.
I had my phone out, as if texting. In fact I was set to video. This was the most important part, the part I hadn’t had time to explain to James while on the other side of the glass door.
The receptionist began typing. Paused, waiting. Typed some more. Asked us for our names. I replied, “James and Martha.”
“Family name?” Still typing.
“Keynes,” James said, using his middle name. “James and Martha Keynes.”
“I’m certain Ms. Furnbright will be delighted to receive you. Just give me a moment to announce you.”
“We’d rather it be a surprise,” I said. “If we have to do it, it would be more fun that way. If we can’t, then we can’t. I get that. We get that.”
The woman smiled. “One moment.” She dialed a number on a complicated phone and spoke, asking someone if 216 could accept young visitors.
James flashed me a complimentary look when the room number was mentioned. He loved extracting data in roundabout ways.
It took a few minutes, but we won approval. She offered us the elevator,
but I asked if we might be allowed to take the stairs and she said, “Of course.”
At the first landing I stopped James, my phone already out.
“This is not a time to text someone, you jerk,” James said.
“Yeah? Well, this ‘jerk’ videoed the woman typing her log-in name and password in slow motion, thank you very much! Take this down.”
Flabbergasted, James withdrew his own phone and typed as I dictated, letter by letter, number by number. “You genius!” he said.
“A jerk can’t be a genius and the other way around, too. The plan is this, Einstein: you find a computer terminal, since you live your entire life on Xbox, and get inside and search names of everyone who lives here, or stays here, or is treated here, or whatever. Find out who Father is visiting.”
“And you?” he said.
“I’m the poor lost little girl looking for Ms. Furnbright’s room. I’ve forgotten the number. I will look and listen for Father. If I find Father, I’ll text you, unless you text me first. Deal?”
“You don’t have to brag.”
“I’m not bragging.”
“We’re both smart, you know?” he said.
“That’s why we make such a good team,” I proposed.
He patted me on the back, which was about as good as it got between us. The equivalent of boy athletes slapping one another’s bottoms. “Good luck, and don’t do anything stupid.”
“One requires the other,” I said, hurrying up the stairs.
CHAPTER 10
THERE WAS NO SENSE FOR BOTH OF US TO START on the second floor, so I continued up to the third. The staircase air burned warmer up top. It smelled of dust and old age. A slightly medicinal taste lingered like bad perfume.
The hallway, once meant for servant quarters, was long and narrow and painted pea green. Numbered rooms counted down from 362 toward a break, a larger opening, after which the hallway continued. I took that opening to be a recessed nursing station or sitting area, or maybe a hallway off in another direction in a building that had to have dozens of similar hallways. I walked slowly, quietly, ears alert for Father’s voice. Doors to some of the rooms hung open slightly. At each of these I paused, or at least slowed, mindful of the hemispherical globes on the ceiling indicating security surveillance cameras, and wondering if images from those cameras could be viewed at the nursing station. I didn’t want to appear too nosy.
I heard the clanking of metal on metal. More than one TV running. Opera coming from a stereo. Coughing. Not Father. Wary of arriving at the nursing station, I approached the break in the walls carefully, peering around a corner. To the right I saw an unmanned counter with a glass window behind it enclosing a medical space with work areas. To the left, a group area with padded chairs, a few harvest tables, two couches facing a large-screen television, flowers, two folded wheelchairs against the wall.
I crossed quickly and continued down the hall. At the end, I arrived at an elevator, a door marked as an exit, and, to the left, another long hallway much the same. Number 350 and declining. The Gadwall Specialist Center, as I now knew it was called, had to have hundreds, not dozens, of patients. The discovery made me uneasy. I couldn’t pinpoint why. Perhaps it was the remoteness of the facility. Or maybe the idea of so many sick people in such an isolated place. Perhaps it was that there were so many people less fortunate than the Moriarty family, people afflicted with brains unwilling to function properly. Perhaps it was the mission. Suddenly, finding Father seemed an improbable if not impossible task.
The next opening, midway down the hallway, offered a smaller sitting area with a view of the driveway and grounds. Drawn to the window, I peered out at the distant figure of the Stranger lurking beneath a tall pine tree, ominous and foreboding. Though it was nothing more than a vague shape, I knew exactly what I was looking at: danger. Added danger arrived in the form of a police car coming up the road.
It was impossible for me to know why a particular image held personal interest while another did not. An ambulance might pass by without me thinking about the ill person within. A fire truck could roar past without me feeling anything like a threat. But the police car was there for Father. The Stranger had called it in. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew the police car meant something to me personally. To me, and James, and Father. I knew what I normally considered a friend was a foe now, a help an aggressor. I texted James immediately.
The second-floor hallway had the look and feel of the fanciest of hotels. Crown molding, rich carpet alive with marine references, gilded frames displaying original oil paintings of seascapes, square-riggers in white-foamed chop, lighthouses and whalers. It held a palatial, formal reverence reserved for aristocracy. It held, according to a few open doors, what appeared to be massive private suites, similarly decorated and with twelve-foot-high plaster ceilings joined to the walls by handcrafted plaster dentil molding. It held medical equipment, a medicinal smell, and overly bright lighting.
James wasted no time looking for a computer. He found a nurse’s station, a man behind the counter.
“Hi, I’m looking for 216. Mrs. Furnbright.”
“Welcome!” said the effeminate man in the flowery pants and green surgical scrubs shirt. “That would be right down there. Third door on the right. We love Mrs. Furnbright.”
James thanked him. “You heard the man in 202, right? He was calling for someone when I passed.”
“Mr. Hanefee? Calling? Thank you!” He typed on the desktop briefly. James assumed he was logging out of the system, as might a grocery store attendant behind a cash register. The man came around the counter. “Third door on the right.”
James thanked him again. The man hurried off.
Phase One is complete, James thought.
Phase Two: Around to behind the counter where he didn’t belong. Check his phone for the user name and password videoed in slow motion. Start typing.
The screen refreshed. He was in!
His phone buzzed in his hand. The text: police out front. for father?
For James, the message made him feel added pressure, as if he were wearing a hat too small for his head, a pair of pants too small for his waist, shoes two sizes too small for his feet.
He located the “registry” and photographed screenshot after screenshot on his way to the Ms—Morgan, Mortimer, Newhall, Oppenheimer—no Moriarty was listed. He continued with the screenshots, noticing slightly too late the pair of large convex mirrors across the hall that revealed the hallway in both directions. The bent and stretched image of Mr. Flower Pants, at a light jog, heading toward him.
And if James could see him, then he could see . . .
James vaulted the counter, landed, and took off down the hallway.
“Hey! Hold up!”
James ran hard.
“Stop! You!”
James hit the panic bar to the door marked Exit and bounded down the stairs three at a time, his right hand frantically trying to direct his phone’s screen to messaging, where he typed: get out now
He pulled open the first-floor stair door and practically jumped into the hallway, only to see two police officers, a man and a woman, standing at the receptionist desk. They jerked their heads in the direction of James.
“You!” the male officer growled.
Nerves can be a person’s best friend or worst enemy. I jumped out of the way of a snake once at our Cape Cod compound without ever registering a snake was even there. My nerves had somehow sensed the creature and triggered my legs before my brain knew what was happening.
In James’s case, he froze. His brain said, “Run!” His legs asked, “Where to?” And in that infinitesimal fraction of time it took James to will his legs to move he was tackled by the man wearing flowery surgical pants and green top.
James hit the floor hard. When he opened his eyes, he discovered the two police officers staring down at him.
CHAPTER 11
THE INSIDE OF THE POLICE STATION WAS AS bleak a place as I’d ever been. (I, too, chose the
stairs to leave Gadwall, though it would have hardly mattered; they had the place on lockdown from the moment James was captured.) Thankfully, they didn’t put us in a cell. But the room we were put in wasn’t much better. It reminded me of a windowless garage, but the size of a kitchen pantry. No big mirror made of one-way glass like on television. Just a boring desk with a place to lock down handcuffs—not used on us, thank goodness—a few aluminum chairs, and two video cameras mounted high in opposing corners.
We weren’t about to lie to the police, so we only stretched the truth. In our version, we had traveled with Father for a day trip; we’d noticed a guy following Father; the rest we kind of made up as well. Left alone to contemplate our shoes, James ran through the screen shots on the phone in his lap as I looked on. He pointed silently to the missing Moriarty name. “Phew,” he said softly. Together, we scanned the list of more than 150 patient names. Not a single one jumped out at us. Not so much as a tickle or goose bumps. It was more like reading the phone book in terms of stimulation.
The door swung open, revealing the same policewoman who had interviewed us. “You’re being released,” she said. “We will not press charges on the bicycles because you were straight with us. You will, however, be required to write a note of apology to the families you ‘borrowed’ them from.” She drew the air quotes. I was struck by how normal police officers were. I’d always had this sense of terror seeing a police car, or a uniform on the sidewalk. Come to find out, they were just people. Who knew?
“No problem,” James said, pocketing the phone.
“You broke no laws at Gadwall. But you did lie, and I hope you’ll never do that again. Chances like this, getting off this easily, don’t come along very often. You should thank your uncle for that.”
“Our uncle.” I said it without thinking. It just kind of popped out of my mouth, seeing as we didn’t have an uncle. I was guessing Ralph. I’m not sure what James was thinking. He seemed to be kind of light-headed given the announcement of our release.
Lock and Key: The Gadwall Incident Page 4