Another headache fires off, and it feels as if someone’s mercilessly slamming a boot heel into my forehead. With teeth clenched, I try to endure in silence, hoping Jenna won’t catch on. As the head trouncing continues, a dizzy spell sends the room swimming around me. I squeeze my eyes shut and search for balance, stability, anything, in my increasingly out-of-balance world.
After what feels like a decade of screaming misery, the pain subsides. I open my eyes. Jenna’s been talking, but I haven’t heard a thing she’s said. I check the phone screen. About four minutes have passed. Four minutes I don’t remember at all.
More loss of time. More trouble. It just keeps coming.
“Chris?”
“Huh?” I say, trying to snap to.
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“Yeah . . . Sorry. Just got distracted for a minute.”
Times four.
Knock it off! Okay?
“Look, sweetheart,” I say, “I’ve really got to cut this short. I have a lot of work to get done.”
“Of course,” she says, leaving so much unspoken between us. “We’ll see you tonight.”
28
I enter the consulting room and immediately observe that Donny Ray continues to show signs of improvement. His cheeks, though still a little pale, have gained significant color. Even more interesting is his shift in demeanor. He’s calm, lips leaning toward what could be an expectant smile, like he’s been waiting for me. His composure does nothing to abate my lingering discomfort over what happened on Alpha Twelve yesterday, but I have to push those feelings aside. I’ve got four days to complete my evaluation, and while Donny Ray may be strange, none of his strangeness adds up to a diagnosis—nor does it mean that he deserves a prison sentence or the death penalty.
I settle into the chair, bring up his case files on the consulting room computer, then an odd sound from above distracts me, as does a quick and vague movement off to my side. I glance to the left, then at the ceiling, but see nothing. I swing toward Donny Ray, but he seems more surprised by my jitteriness than anything else.
Was it nothing?
Concentrate, Chris.
I refocus on Donny Ray. Prepared to look at him more objectively, I observe as he now curiously—and rather leisurely—takes in his surroundings.
Today, his striking appearance is even more evident. While this, of course, has no direct bearing on whether he’s malingering, it’s still worth noting. Physical beauty can have interesting effects on the psyche, not to mention on those who fall—willingly or unwillingly—into its path.
I return to his files. A short while later, I look up and realize that he’s been observing me with interest. I stare back, and he quickly, perhaps even bashfully, averts his gaze.
“How are you feeling today?” I ask.
“How are you feeling today?” he replies.
“Fine, thanks,” I answer a little hesitantly. It wasn’t what he said, but, rather, how he said it. The inflection in his voice sounded like he was repeating my question instead of asking one himself.
I’m reading too much into it, I decide. After taking another look at his files, I roll my chair toward him until we are face-to-face.
“I’d like to continue,” I say, “with what we were discussing before.”
“Before,” he repeats.
“Yes. Going back to when you were a kid.”
“Going back.”
“Donny Ray,” I say, “are you having difficulty understanding me?”
He shakes his head. His expression appears innocuous, and yet . . .
“Can you give me just a minute?” I ask.
He nods.
I return to the computer and skim his case files. The automatic and repetitious vocalization pattern he’s exhibiting has overtones of what could be echolalia. Since the action can be the byproduct of a closed head injury, it’s worth examining. I didn’t pick up on this during our last session, but with the behavior very prominent now, I feel certain in identifying it. Did I miss something in the notes about this?
But after going through Dr. Philips’ file again, I find nothing to reference any sort of speech abnormalities. No differential diagnoses of autism, Tourette’s syndrome, epilepsy, or any other disorders that might also be culprits.
Strange.
“Is something wrong?” he asks, as if unaware that anything might be.
Not wanting to further influence his behavior until I get a better understanding of it, I smile and say, “No. Just checking on some information about your case.”
“Oh.” He smiles back.
I roll my chair toward him and continue. “I was thinking about your mention of feeling alone as a kid. I’m just wondering how your sister played into all this. Did you have a relationship with her?”
“I adored her,” he answers immediately.
I hear the statement but detect an odd glitch in his tone—not quite the level of detachment I witnessed while he spoke of having pets but something similar. Of course, since Miranda disappeared, and since his father was at one point the key suspect, Donny Ray could be blocking out tragic feelings about his sister.
“How close were the two of you?” I ask. “Can you tell me more about that?”
“More about that . . . ,” he repeats.
I elaborate. “You said you adored her. How did she feel about you?”
“I guess the same,” he says, and I notice his hand closing around the chair’s arm.
“You guess?”
“No, she did. We got along great.”
“So, did that connection between you help at all? With the loneliness?”
“In some ways, yeah. But she was so much younger than me, you know?”
“How about your father? What was your relationship like with him?”
“Okay . . .”
“Just okay?”
Donny Ray is silent for a moment, then says, “He worked a lot.”
“Meaning?”
“Just that he wasn’t around much.”
“And Miranda? How did she get along with him?”
“She was always his favorite,” he says through a laugh that sounds a little tight.
“Do you know why?”
Donny Ray shrugs and shakes his head with an indecipherable expression.
“Were you bothered by that at all? Your sister and father having a relationship that you didn’t?”
“I don’t know.” He rubs the back of his neck. His foot is bouncing. “It was what it was, I guess.”
“But you’d said you felt lonely as a kid, so why wouldn’t that bother you? I mean, it would be natural to feel some jealousy.”
He looks down at his feet and shuffles them back and forth along the tile. “Maybe it did, sometimes.”
“Can you tell me about specific times when it felt harder than others?”
“I’m not really sure if I can remember anything.”
With a raised brow, I wait him out.
“Well . . . there was this one thing,” he says a moment or two later. “They used to go off together a lot and leave me behind.”
“Where would they go?”
“I didn’t know.”
“You never asked?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“Because it was their thing. I wasn’t a part of it.”
“Okay. How did you feel when they’d go off without you?”
“Kind of lonely.”
“Anything else?”
“Angry, maybe?”
“Anger’s a pretty strong emotion.” My smile challenges him. “There aren’t many maybes about it.”
“I guess you’re right. It did make me kind of mad.”
“What made you mad about it?”
A dimpled grin appears, and he shakes
his head as if admonishing himself for the next thought.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s really kind of dumb.”
I motion for him to continue anyway.
“It’s just that . . . like . . . when they’d come back, she always had an ice cream cone. I was just a kid and all, but I’d get jealous. She really pissed me off that way, know what I mean?”
“So your sister pissed you off. Did your sister do anything in particular to make you feel that way? Did she . . . I don’t know . . . Did she brag about getting something that you didn’t?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Then why were you angry at her instead of your father? After all, wasn’t it his decision to give her the ice cream cone? To spend time with her and not you?”
“Yeah . . . but it wasn’t really his fault,” Donny Ray says, and now he’s not just gripping the arm of his chair—he’s white-knuckling it.
“Why not? He was the adult, and it was his choice.”
“Because that’s how little six-year-old girls are. They know how to get what they want.”
Cold goose bumps scale up my arms. The hair on my scalp tingles.
Donny Ray squirms in his chair.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I say. “What do little six-year-old girls want?”
“Everything.” He spits out the word, then instantly sees my uneasy reaction and schools his expression into one of remorse. His lips start to part, but nothing comes out.
Tension twists through the air.
He breaks it. “Or at least that’s what I thought.”
I let my silence indicate he should continue.
“Because I realized I had it all wrong . . . So very wrong . . .”
“Had what wrong?”
“Everything,” he says again, but this time in a manner so feeble and fragile, it seems as though he could crumble and fall within seconds. A manner that surprises me, because in a flash, Donny Ray has flown from one end of the emotional spectrum to another, first disconnected, and now, quite the opposite. The only problem is, both seem so convincing that I can’t determine the validity of either.
“I’m a little confused here,” I say.
“Imagine how I felt.”
I wait for him to explain.
“One day,” he goes on, “I was sitting on a swing in the front yard. My dad and Miranda were taking off again.” Donny Ray looks off to one side as if watching the scene play out. “The second her feet hit the driveway, a hard rain started to fall, and she immediately turned back my way. So slow . . .”
“What was?”
“The way she waved at me . . . and so sad.”
“Did you know why?”
“No . . .” He looks past me and into some distant place, seemingly lost in the retelling. “She’d never waved good-bye to me before going off with him. It was so strange. Then they were gone.”
“What happened next?”
“The rain fell harder, but I just sat on the swing. I must have been there for two hours. I’d never felt so lost before in my life. When they finally came back, Miranda got out of the car. This time”—a sad smile crosses his face—“she had two ice cream cones in her hand. She walked up to me and gave me one. Then without so much as a word, she just walked away.”
“Did she seem upset?”
“No . . . She seemed empty.”
He falls into a hush, as if thinking about that.
“I sat and watched her disappear into the house. Water was pouring down my face, and the cone was melting in the rain. I had ice cream dripping down my wrists, into my lap, but I couldn’t move a muscle.”
“Did you ever find out what was wrong?”
Donny Ray looks at me. A tear rolls down his cheek.
“I never got the chance.”
29
The ice cream cone story carried a disturbing—but as of yet unproven—undertone of Miranda’s sexual abuse. If true, it could lend reasonable support to the cops’ suspicion that the dad was a viable suspect in her murder. And while Donny Ray stopped shy of revealing those dark circumstances, he came close. My goal now will be to glean that information from him, then determine whether it has any bearing on Jamey’s murder or my patient’s alleged inability to remember it.
Still, Donny Ray’s comment about six-year-old girls was chilling, not just because it seemed off-color, but also because Miranda and Jamey Winslow were the same age when they went missing. Then before I had a chance to form an opinion, he threw me for a loop with his heartbreaking story about sitting alone in the rain that day.
But is the story true?
I just don’t know. Once again, his emotional response seemed right on cue—and once again I find myself lost and searching for truth between layers of doubt.
After leaving the consulting room, I pass through Alpha Twelve, and a pocket of brightness off to the right flags my attention.
I don’t like what I see.
Nicholas’ door hangs wide open, fluorescent light spilling out onto the floor like something toxic. I look inside: empty, not only of him but also all his belongings.
What the hell?
I quicken my pace toward the nurses’ station. Melinda Jeffries, the head nurse, is working at her computer, and while I know my footsteps are loud enough to hear, she doesn’t look up.
“Hello?” I say upon reaching the counter, urgency and impatience ramping up my voice.
Melinda raises her head, but when our eyes meet, something in hers strikes me as peculiar—cold and detached. I nod toward the room and say, “What happened to Nicholas?”
“He’s no longer here,” is all she offers and goes back to typing.
I look at Nicholas’ room, then at Melinda, then back at the room. “But I just saw him yesterday.”
“And now you don’t.”
“Yes, I realize that. I was hoping you could tell me why.”
Typing faster now. “He’s been transferred out.”
“Where was he transferred? And why?”
“Smithwell Institute.”
I shake my head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“In Billings, Montana.”
“Why would he be transferred to a facility in Montana?”
“I don’t know.”
“And why wasn’t I informed of this?”
“You’re not his doctor.”
“I realize that, but I’m just wondering if—”
“You’ll need to take that up with the actual doctor.”
Getting information from this woman is like trying to swim through a sea of cable-knit sweaters. She’s being disrespectful—I’m not sure why, but I’ve had enough.
“Let me ask you another question, Nurse Jeffries,” I say. “Were you trained to treat actual doctors with contempt, or was that a self-taught skill?”
I have Melinda’s full attention, but her once-apathetic eyes now look as though they’re about to spin out of their sockets.
“Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be right now?” she barks.
I give no response—I’m about to blow a gasket.
She’s already returned to her typing. My choice is to either make a scene or report her, but all Jeremy’s likely to do is raise a brow and say, “You’d go crazy, too, if you had to sit down there all day.” Instead, I zoom from the nurses’ station and burn off my frustration with a fast walk through Alpha Twelve.
“Pssst! Hey, Christopher!” a whispery voice says.
I turn around. Stanley Winters looks eagerly at me through his window.
“Bitch Face at the counter ain’t gonna help you.” He throws a surreptitious glance up and down the hallway, then with a voice to match says, “You want answers? I got ’em.”
I step toward him.
He flashes a
stained-in-yellow, snaggletooth smile. “Cost you a pack of smokes.”
“Stanley, you know the rules,” I say with a shudder in my voice that I’m unable to curb. “That’s not how things work around here.”
“Nothing works around here!”
I shake my head.
“We have to get out of this place!” he loudly states. “It’s broken!”
I step back from Stanley, and he lets out a sharp yowl, so loud, so menacing, that it carries through the entire floor.
“THAT SLEEP OF DEATH, CHRISTOPHER!” He explodes into maniacal laughter. “IT’S THAT SLEEP OF DEATH!”
The other patients parrot Stanley’s message, shrieking, howling, and banging so hard on their doors that the reverberations beat against my chest.
I bolt toward the exit and leave Alpha Twelve, nerves buzzing, Stanley’s remark whipsawing through my head.
30
The patients are speaking to me.
That sleep of death, Christopher.
A message now poking at my psyche like a puppy’s needle teeth. Once was obscure enough to be the ranting from a mind gone sour, but coming from an entire floor?
And now Nicholas has mysteriously vanished.
What do the patients want me to know? The only way to get some peace of mind is to stay rational and seek information. So in my office, still trying to warm my shivers, I take a wild stab in the dark—or rather, at the Internet—and to my surprise, I score a direct hit.
Shakespeare?
Okay, so we have some lovers of classic literature among the men of Alpha. The phrase is part of the opening soliloquy in Hamlet’s nunnery scene.
To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream; Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
A whole lot of talk about death there, but whose? I’m a bit rusty on my Shakespearean studies, so I examine the words individually, hoping they’ll reveal some kind of hidden meaning.
Sleep.
Death.
Dreams.
I was dead asleep, Christopher . . . Nicholas has bad dreams all the time.
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