The CEO beamed. “Well, step right this way, Mr. Winchester.”
“Oh, please, call me Sam,” Caden said, without missing a beat, and Ashlyn had to bite back a laugh when it garnered no reaction from the older man. Clearly the administrator was not a fan of Supernatural.
“Sam it is.” He glanced at Ashlyn, “And you too, Miss…?”
“Talbot.” She smiled at him. “Bella Talbot. But I think I’ll leave the two of you to talk business. I’ll just wait out here, if that’s okay.”
“That’s fine,” he agreed. “Make yourself at home.”
“I will. Thank you. And Sam….” She let the name hang there. “If I get bored, I may just slip down to the gift shop. So if I’m not here when you’re done, you’ll know where to find me. Okay?”
“Perfect.” Caden/Sam said.
“But first, Mr. Ross, could you direct me to a public washroom?”
“Of course. Down the hall, on your left.”
As Caden disappeared into the administrator’s inner office, Ashlyn shouldered her bag and hightailed it for the washroom. Two minutes later, she was eyeing her reflection critically in the mirror. The uniform was a little too large, but that was okay. It made her look older, as did the neat bun she’d made of her hair. Then she clipped onto her uniform pocket the laminated photo ID Caden had dummied up for her, picked up the armful of files filled with random papers, and the disguise was complete. She looked like a professional … something-or-other. A clinician of some kind.
Please God, let it be good enough.
She stepped out of the washroom. Trying to look as casual and confident as though she actually belonged in this milieu, she made her way to the elevator. The car was empty, and she rode it to the next level. There were four nurses waiting to board the car as she disembarked, but they didn’t pay her the slightest attention. Swallowing her anxiety, she moved quickly down the corridor to the psychiatric ward and pulled the door handle. The door did not budge.
Crap! Locked. Of course it would be. Dammit! Unfortunately her dummy ID didn’t come with a swipe stripe to let her in. Thinking fast, she hustled back down the empty corridor, flipped open a file and pretended to be reading as she slowly walked back toward the ward. Sure enough, she heard steps behind her. Timing her own steps, she arrived at the doors the same time as did the orderly, a tall, pale man.
As anticipated, he swiped his card and held the door open for her to save her the trouble of juggling her files. With a smile and a murmured, “Thank you,” she preceded him through the doors. Once inside, he continued on his way briskly.
Moving more slowly, Ashlyn exhaled a shaky breath. She was in. Next step was to find which room was her mother’s, which she would do just as soon as she could bring her pounding heart under control.
A moment later, she conceded that wasn’t going to happen. She’d just have to carry through, dry mouth, racing pulse and all. But where to start? She could begin sticking her head in rooms and saying, “Whoops, wrong room.” Or she could go to the nurses’ station and just ask for Ms. Caverhill’s room. Which was the likeliest to get her caught? What would Veronica Mars do here?
Resisting the urge to chew her lip, she walked confidently toward the nurses’ station, ready to bullshit her way through in true Veronica fashion. But when she arrived there, it was deserted. A temporary situation, she knew, but one she was damned well going to take advantage of!
She stepped into the station and headed straight for the circular rack bristling with charts. Heart pounding deafeningly in her ears, she pulled out one chart after another. Come on, come on, come on. From somewhere down the hall, she heard the squeak of approaching rubber soles. Whoops! She was caught! Ready to babble an explanation, it was all she could do to keep the words from spilling out when she saw it was the same orderly again. He gave her a polite nod as he passed, continued to the end of the hall, plugged a code into the alarm and left the ward the same way he’d come.
Nerve endings positively singed from that last blast of adrenaline, Ashlyn went back to her search. On the fourteenth try, she scored pay dirt. Room 225. Shoving the chart back into place, she scooted out of the nurses’ station and down the hall.
Room 225 was a corner room. The door swung open soundlessly. A private room, it was occupied only by the small figure in the bed. A lunch tray stood beside the bed, barely touched. Ashlyn’s heart contracted when she focused in on her mother’s face, pale and still on the pillow. Sleeping, she realized.
She moved closer to the bed, pushing the meal tray out of the way.
“Mom? Mom, wake up. It’s me.” Ashlyn laid a hand on her mother’s arm. Her much thinner arm. “I don’t have a lot of time, Mom. Come on, wake up.”
Her mother’s eyes fluttered open. At first, those green eyes were … empty. Then they filled with wonder and sheer happiness. “Ashlyn!” she breathed.
Ashlyn beamed. She knew those stupid nurses were lying. Her mother did want to see her. Was overjoyed to see her.
Then the pleasure in her mother’s gaze abruptly turned to alarm, and then horror. “Ashlyn? Omigod, Ashlyn! Nooooooo! You can’t be here.”
“Hush, Mom. I know I’m not supposed to be here, but I had to see you.”
“Those fools!” Leslie was wringing her hands. “Oh, I told them not to let you come. He wants you, Ashlyn. You can’t be here! You can’t!”
“Keep it down, Mom. They’ll send nurses to investigate.” Then, although she had a sinking feeling she knew the answer, she asked the obvious. “Mom, what you said just then … who wants me?”
“That damned conductor!” Leslie wailed. “He took your father and now he wants to take my little girl from me. Everything I ever loved….”
“Mom, I saw him,” Ashlyn said in a rush, unable to contain the news a moment longer. “I saw Dad on the train. Well at first I didn’t know it was him, but then I found your yearbook and I recognized him.”
“You saw him?”
Leslie had started to tremble like the aspens behind Maudette’s house in a stiff breeze. Ashlyn’s eyes widened in alarm. “Mom? You’re shaking! Are you okay?”
“You’ve been to the tracks? Seen the train? The conductor? And he saw you?”
“He wasn’t interested in me,” Ashlyn said, waving a dismissive hand. “There’s another girl — Rachel Riley. I’m pretty sure he wants her. But we’re not going to let him get her.”
“Oh, dear God in heaven, he saw you! He looked into those green eyes and now he knows!” Her mother started rocking her head and shoulders up and down, just repeating the same words: “He saw you he saw you he saw you he saw you….”
Oh, no! Her mother was really coming unglued right before her eyes. She’d better work fast. “Mom, it’s okay,” she said quickly, with as much assurance and authority as she could muster. “Really. I’m not going to let him get me. I promise. But … he’s not going to get Rachel either.”
But her mother was gone. Her green eyes — suddenly glassy and unfocused now — had turned inward, and she started to sing. Ashlyn’s blood ran cold as she recognized the tune:
“Oh, the Conductor will be there to greet her when she comes
When she comes!
The Conductor will be there to greet her when she comes
When she comes!
She’ll get on board that train and her life won’t be the same
Oh, the Conductor will be there to greet her when she comes!”
With each word, her mother’s voice grew stronger and more strident, more agitated.
“Mom, stop it! The nurses will come if you don’t be quiet.”
Leslie kept right on singing, but sobbing helplessly now as she did.
“And he won’t stop till the end of the line.
He’ll always come another time.
He’ll get my little girl, when he comes….”
Ashlyn was crying now, frightened to see her mother so agitated and out of control. “Oh, Mom, please!”
In the next
instant, the door burst open and a nurse bustled in with a hypodermic needle in hand. She stopped in her tracks, however, when she saw Ashlyn.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Ashlyn had already removed the laminated photo ID and stuffed it in the pocket of her uniform. The jig was up and she would not get Caden in trouble. Even though he wasn’t using his real name for his negotiations with the hospital administrator, she didn’t want any of this to come back on him.
She squared around to face the nurse, hands on hips. “I’m Ashlyn Caverhill and I’m here to visit my mother. I’ve been trying to get in to see her for weeks, but you people wouldn’t allow it. So I had to resort to this.” She gestured to the uniform. “I have every right to be here. She’s my mother.”
As she faced down the nurse, her mother’s voice continued to grow in volume and desperation, and she’d begun flailing in the bed. Or trying to. It was only then that Ashlyn noticed one bruised arm and one leg were belted with restraints.
“Your rights don’t supersede your mother’s, young lady,” the nurse snarled. “She has every right not to see you. We told you it would just upset her, that she’s not ready for this. Now leave. Please.”
As Ashlyn watched, the nurse caught Leslie’s free hand and pinned it down, quickly attaching a restraint.
Leslie stopped singing when she felt the restraint. It seemed to bring her back to awareness. To Ashlyn’s horror, she started moaning. “No, no! Not the needle. Please! I’ll be quiet. I’ll be good! I need … I need to….”
“Mom!” Tears sprang to Ashlyn’s eyes. To the nurse, she said, “Stop it! Can’t you see she doesn’t want it?”
The nurse rolled her mother far enough to poke the hypodermic into her hip.
“Noooo!” Leslie cried.
Ashlyn gasped, tears spurting to her eyes. “What did you do that for? She didn’t want it!”
“I did it because I had to! Because you came in here and upset her. Do you realize that your mother had gone two whole days without a serious incident? And now look at her! She’s right back where we started.”
Guilt knocked the fight right out of Ashlyn. Her mother had had a relapse? And it was her fault? “I’m sorry.” She turned to her mother. “Mom, I’m so sorry. It was selfish of me to come here. I just needed to see you so badly. But don’t worry about me, okay? I’ll be all right. And I won’t … I won’t get on that train, okay?”
“Time for you to leave,” the nurse snapped. “And if you should somehow get clearance to visit in the future, please do not humor her with talk of that train. Understood?”
Ashlyn ducked her head. “I’m going.”
“You certainly are.” And the nurse made sure of it, escorting her to the doors and overriding the alarm to let her out. “And please, if you care anything for your mother, don’t come back until you have approval.”
Caden was waiting for her in the lobby. He stood when he saw her.
“How’d it go? Did you get to see her?”
“I need to get out of here.” Even if she could have kept the tears out of her voice, there was no way she could stop them streaming down her face.
Without a word, he took her hand and led her out into the dazzling sunshine.
Chapter 15
ASHLYN WAS HAVING A migraine. Or so that’s what the matronly school nurse pronounced it to be when Ashlyn presented herself and described the one-sided headache and the nauseous feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Her grandmother was in Bangor doing whatever she always did on Monday mornings, but the school was able to reach her on her cell phone. When Nurse Wheaton realized Maudette was away, she had offered to accommodate Ashlyn on the world’s lumpiest, most germ-ridden cot located in her office. Unable to hide a shudder, Ashlyn had declined. She preferred to make the twenty-minute walk home, and with Maudette’s verbal permission, that’s just what she was currently doing.
Out of habit, she crossed the road to the tracks. That was the quickest way home.
The sky was overcast, but not sufficiently enough for Ashlyn’s liking. The diffused light that did make it through the cloud cover was bouncing around and sending spears of pain through her skull. The nurse had advised crawling into bed in a dark room and staying there until the migraine passed, and Ashlyn couldn’t agree more with that prescription. Her Podunk Junction bedroom had never seemed more inviting. And with every throb of pain, with every step she took, the prospect of lying down in the dark grew more and more attractive.
Stupid migraine. She’d never had one before, but she hadn’t really needed Nurse Wheaton to tell her what it was. Her mother had had a few battles with them over the years. And when one of them overtook her, life pretty much stopped for Leslie Caverhill until it passed.
“Guess it’s stopped pretty damn well for her now too,” Ashlyn muttered.
An image of her mother in the psych ward, rocking and wailing, stabbed Ashlyn’s brain worse than any migraine pain.
“I told them not to let you come.” That’s what her mother had said. And equally haunting, though not as heartbreaking: “He wants you, Ashlyn.”
The conductor.
In her troubled state, Leslie Caverhill was somehow convinced the conductor wanted her only daughter. But her mother had it wrong! Everything Ashlyn heard — everything she knew — pointed to Rachel being the one at risk of boarding that evil train. It was Rachel the conductor was after.
Another stab of right-side pain.
Whoa! Ashlyn shot out her arms with it. This one made her wobbly, her knees weakening just as she approached the train bridge. No way did she want to be passing by that path to the river or walking the footbridge on anything but steady feet. She had to sit. Just for a minute.
Should be okay.
Of course, there’d be no trains coming — the ghost variety or otherwise — in the daytime. So Ashlyn plunked herself down on a rusted rail. Cringing against the pain, she curved her back to lay her head down on her knees and closed her eyes tightly.
She’d just rest here a minute. One peaceful minute.
The world took on a silence as Ashlyn sat there with her head down. As the moments passed she found herself tuning everything out around her. No cars passed on the road behind her. No birds chirped in the cool fall air; no dogs barked in the distance. The peacefulness, the blessed absence of sound, helped her headache. And as she sat there, she could again imagine nothing better than being in her upstairs bedroom, the curtains drawn to blacken the room completely. God, she could just swim right in it now. The feel of the darkness. The closeness of it around her.
But then Ashlyn could imagine it a little too well. The press of it turned sinister. She could literally feel the black depth pressing across her shoulders, chilling over her back. Bleeding right down through flesh and bones as if trying to consume….
She sat up straight and opened her eyes. Good God! It was almost completely dark out! But how could that be? She’d only rested a minute. She was sure of it. The skies had been overcast, sure, but just a moment ago, there had been plenty of watery morning light filtering through the cloud cover. Now the skies were nearly black. Her heart leapt, and with it, the throbbing in her head ratcheted up. Were they in for a tornado? A hailstorm? Severe thundershowers? All three?
Ashlyn leapt up and looked down the tracks toward the school. The ancient pines lining the rail bed had begun to bend and toss with a sudden wind that seemed to blow right through her now, too. She glanced up to see the sky filling with heavy, rolling clouds. They felt oppressively low, those clouds, completely blanketing the earth.
She lifted her hand in front of her eyes. It looked oddly gray as she brought it close, mere inches from her face. What the hell?
Suddenly, Ashlyn wished fervently that she were about to be hit with a severe storm or whatever nature could throw at her. For that would be a perfectly natural explanation for what was happening. Unfortunately, she knew with gut wrenching certainty that what she was immersed in right now wa
s no mere freakish weather change.
This was deeper.
This was evil.
Pain forgotten, every nerve in her body on razors, Ashlyn turned toward the presence she now sensed looming behind her.
Jesus! The train!
She stumbled back quickly.
The midnight black engine towered just inches from her face. As her gaze climbed, it seemed to rise ten feet above her, its black iron skin almost blending in with the darkened sky as it sat there, unmoving.
How the hell did it get there? In the middle of the day? It only came through at night. That was the legend. That was the damned deal. And how had it arrived without the slightest sound to alert her?
Just then, the engine chuffed loudly, like a smoke-filled giant clearing its throat. Though it didn’t budge so much as in inch, the feeling that it was about to plow her down was overwhelming.
In full flight response, Ashlyn stumbled backwards again, this time trying to get off the tracks, but she tripped on the steel rail and landed hard on her butt and her out-thrown hands. Her left palm stung from being punctured by the crushed rock, but she didn’t so much as look down at the wound. Alongside of the train now, she could only look up, up, into the conductor’s evil face.
“And so we meet again, little girl with the Caverhill eyes,” the voice of evil said.
Ashlyn stared up into those malevolent, sunken eye sockets. Fear slicked her whole body in an instant sheen of sweat, and her mouth went dry. But even in the grip of terror, she was thinking, thinking, thinking. Mentally she measured the distance between herself and the conductor, who stood once again in the engine-room door of that damnable dark train.
He couldn’t reach her, she realized. Not without stepping off that train. And that he wouldn’t do. As he stood there looking down at her, she was suddenly certain that he couldn’t get down from his hellish perch. No, the victims had to come to him, had to take their ticket! His goal was to lure suffering souls closer. Ensnare them within his seductive promise of an end to their suffering.
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