Knowing she had to plan on a future for both of them, however—one that didn’t rely on their parents—she’d had to accept a full-ride to NYU. After college, she’d gone to medical school, knowing she couldn’t fight them for custody of Isaac while he was underage. But they’d both sworn when he turned eighteen—which would have been last month—he would come live with her. Neither of them would have anything to do with their parents again. She didn’t think they’d have cared, except for the possibility others would find out how dysfunctional the family was.
The plans she and Isaac made had been for nothing. While she was overseas, counseling damaged soldiers about to return to civilian life, her parents had shipped Isaac to a rigid school that meted out harsh discipline with the trigonometry and history. They hadn’t reacted much to his disappearance, believing he’d run away in rebellion or in a scheme to get ransom money out of them. Although a ransom call never came, and a kidnapping was never suspected, her parents still didn’t worry too much. He was an embarrassment, he’d turn up sometime, let’s not talk about it. As if they wanted to forget his existence.
Kate never would forget. Not ever.
“Dr. Lincoln?” Julia prompted, recalling her to the here and now, and not the ugly past.
“I’m sorry. Lost in history.”
“I understand. So you were the closest family he had. Does that mean he called you or something the day he disappeared to tell you he was afraid?”
She turned in her chair to face them both, knowing if Derek was the one handling this investigation, he had to know the truth. More importantly, he had to believe it. She had to reveal each detail, no matter how insane it sounded or if it made her look as disturbed as her patients.
“My brother and I shared some pretty traumatic experiences as kids.”
“Oh?” He didn’t sound skeptical, merely interested.
“My parents were…unkind. They used to lock him away in small, dark places when he was just a toddler.”
The man’s rock-hard jaw thrust out the tiniest bit.
“He used to scream to be let out, and beg me to come get him. I did a few times, until they started locking me in my room. But I still heard him.”
With each wail, every sob, her heart broke a little more. Her rage built until she broke, too, tearing her room apart and screaming to be let out.
“One day, I silently wept with him, sent out a mental wish for him to calm down, to stop crying, knowing that was the only way he’d be released.”
After a long second, Derek said, “He heard you.”
“He heard me.”
Heard her, and responded, his childish voice echoing in her mind. She’d thought she had imagined it, at least until she saw his face and he repeated the words they’d shared from across the massive mansion.
“That was when we realized what all of you must have realized at some point in your lives. We had a mental link. Telepathy, if you want to call it that.”
Derek remained still. Julia slowly nodded. Neither rolled their eyes or smirked.
She had come to the right place. Her whole body relaxed, though she hadn’t even noticed tension had been holding her stiffly in her seat.
“Have you always have that ability? Do you still?” Julia asked.
She shook her head. “Just with Isaac. We’d have entire conversations in our minds. Although I tried it with a few other people, it never worked. Isaac was the same way. It was only him and me.”
After a long moment of silence, Derek cleared his throat. “That’s how you know what happened to him? He told you while it was happening?”
Sniffling a little, knowing she couldn’t allow her weakness to interfere with this case, Kate lifted her chin. “We had one last, uh, conversation, on the day he disappeared. I was working in Afghanistan and he was here.” She noticed the quick widening of Monahan’s eyes. Not surprising. Most people wouldn’t expect a female doctor to spend time working in a war-torn world. “He didn’t tell me what was happening, but he was utterly terrified.” Like he’d been when crying out from a tiny, dusty closet as a three-year-old. “I couldn’t understand much. I just heard him begging me to help him. He said, ‘Oh my God, Katie, he’s gonna kill me. I’m in the dark and he’s gonna kill me.’ Then there was a scream, followed by silence. Nothing but silence for the past six months. I’ve reached out to him again and again, but he never answers.”
Julia was sucking her lips into her mouth, and her eyes were shiny. She was, however, enough of a professional not to react with any more emotion than that.
Monahan appeared deep in thought, his dark hair hanging in a curtain to shield his face, his hands fisting against his thick, jean-clad thighs. He was nodding, mumbling something.
Finally he lifted his head and looked at her. “All right. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Kate released the breath she’d been holding.
They were going to help her. She had allies, and they had a plan. She would finally get the answers she’d been seeking for so long.
Most importantly, Isaac would have the justice he deserved.
Eli Winston was scared.
No. Not scared. He was terrified.
Something was happening to his friends. He’d didn’t have many, being thought of as a psycho, a geek, a pyromaniac. Set a fire in one school sports storage building and suddenly you’re a freak. But he’d managed to make a few in this place that was filled with bullies and jocks, so like the ones at his old school, who’d hit him once too often, until he’d lashed out and burned down the football team’s storage facility.
Well, the bigger boys here had started as bullies and jocks. After a few weeks at the good old Fenton Academy, even the worst of them were no longer the pricks they’d been when they arrived. Picking on younger kids was the least of their concerns. Everybody was too scared they’d be yanked out of bed in the middle of the night and ordered to do a hundred push-ups because you gave a teacher a dirty look earlier in the day.
That was what really kept the students so tense. You never knew who had seen what, who would report what, when the punishment would come, or what it would be.
Running laps. Getting on your knees to clean toilets in the boy’s bathroom. Walking in circles for miles until you dropped from sheer exhaustion. Standing in a corner for five hours straight. No food for a whole day. A few hours in the hole—a tiny, dark closet. Being screamed at by older boys urged on by administrators.
Worst of all: Being locked in Building 13 overnight.
For somebody like Eli—a skinny, brainy computer geek, and one of the few African American kids in the school—those first few weeks had been horrifying. He’d lived in constant fear of getting beaten up, tormented, or worse.
It hadn’t been the upperclassmen who’d scared him. They ignored the newbies, already trained, completely in line and compliant. It was the bigger, meaner kids who’d come in as freshmen, dumped here by parents who wanted them off their hands, that he had to watch out for.
Fortunately, he’d met Charlie, Charles McMasters Jr. to his rich Montana parents, and things had turned around. Charlie was as big and strong as the upperclassmen, but he was a little slow. And nice. He’d joined up with some of the smaller kids, who didn’t make fun of him, and liked him for who he was. Even though Charlie wouldn’t hurt a fly, having him in their group made them all feel safer.
Soon, it didn’t matter anyway. The school broke down everyone eventually. Eli realized he didn’t have to worry about being beaten up by his fellow students for his skinniness, his glasses, or the color of his skin. His classmates wouldn’t dare.
And the staff didn’t need an excuse.
Although the whole group had become tight, Charlie was the one who was Eli’s best friend. Not just because he was strong, but also because he was vulnerable to ridicule from other kids and even from teachers. Eli hated it, feeling as protective of the bigger boy as Charlie did of him.
Now, Charlie was missing. Gone between nine p.m.
Thursday night and five a.m. Friday. Right before dawn, Eli had heard a noise and sleepily opened his eyes to see an empty, rumpled bed beside his own. He’d assumed Charlie had snuck over to the window to take a piss out onto the ground three stories below. Not being able to get up to use the bathroom during the night had been torture for Charlie, who sometimes couldn’t hold it. Especially when the room monitor made them drink water right before lights out, calling it training in self-discipline, and then locked them in the freshman dorm.
The first time Charlie had wet his bed, Eli had helped him hide the evidence. It hadn’t been out of fear the other boys would torment him about it, but because he might be held up for ridicule during a school-wide assembly. Or sent to the creepy school counselor. Or even the head, Richard Fenton, III himself. A sign with the school motto: Weakness is a Disease—Strong Boys are Successful Boys hung behind his desk. He never spared the rod or spoiled the child.
Those piss-stained sheets had been the first secret they’d shared, but it wasn’t the only one. They even had a secret hiding place—behind a loose wall tile in the third floor shower rooms. Because the staff had been watching every minute of their lives since Charlie disappeared, though, Eli hadn’t even had a chance to look behind it.
It was no wonder the teachers were all on high alert. Charlie wasn’t the first kid who’d gone missing from Fenton Academy during the night. Nor, Eli feared, would he be the last.
This was the third time this year the whole student body had been whispering about a student who’d disappeared from his room after lights out. From what he’d heard, there had been four last year. One of them had made a run for it a couple of days before he was gonna graduate and get outta here forever. It made no sense. No more than the idea of Charlie, big and strong but also scared of the dark, taking off in the middle of the night.
“He didn’t run away,” he muttered to Jeremy Scott, one of the other members of their nerd-herd, as some of the other boys called them. Whispered verbal insults were about all any student dared. “He wouldn’t have.”
“Are you sure?” Jeremy looked around the quiet cafeteria to make sure nobody was paying attention to them. “I mean, he was pretty scared of Professor Leggett.”
Eli could barely hear his words. As usual, the guards—who called themselves teachers—were walking the aisles between tables. Their heavy shoes clomped on the tile floor, as if to make sure none of the students forgot they were always being watched. Mealtimes were supposed to be held in complete silence. He’d dared to speak to the boy sitting next to him only because the nearest guard was two aisles away, and it was Professor Andrews. Their English teacher, a new, relatively young member of the staff, wasn’t as much of an asshole as most of the others. In fact, there were times when Eli thought he actually liked kids.
“I’m sure,” he finally mumbled back, trying to disguise his mouth movements by chewing. “Leggett moved on to a new target last week in our military history class. He wasn’t leaning on Charlie so much. Definitely not enough to make him run away.”
“So what do you think happened to him?” another kid asked.
“No clue.”
Mr. Angel—who was totally misnamed, which was why Eli and the others secretly called him The Devil—turned his head sharply, looking at them from all the way across the cafeteria. He had the hearing of a bat. And the face of one, all mean and ugly, with wrinkles hugging his mouth from all the frowning he’d done over the decades.
Eli shoved a forkful of peas into his mouth, almost gagging because he hated them, especially mushy ones like these. Remaining silent as he chewed, he didn’t stop shaking until after his Algebra I teacher turned away and went back to his pacing. Or stalking. Even then he waited a good two minutes before even thinking about talking again; The Devil had been known to swing back around an aisle he’d already patrolled.
He watched. Waited. Finally, he got the nerve to whisper, “He was fine yesterday. He was excited about his English grade.” English was the only class Charlie had half-liked, mainly because Andrews didn’t regularly call on him just to make him look stupid, unlike most other profs. The Devil was especially bad, hammering away at the boy while Charlie stuttered and stumbled, trying to find an answer to a complicated math question. “He was hoping his folks would let him stay home after summer break. Normal.”
That was what bothered Eli the most. If Charlie had still been the terrified, lonely kid he’d been—they’d all been—at the beginning of the school year, Eli might believe he’d made a run for it. Now, though? Why? It didn’t make sense. Charlie seemed okay. He had friends who stuck up for him, as he did for them. They only had a month more of school, and then they’d all get to go home for a while to show their parents they’d become decent kids.
Well, unlike a lot of the others, Eli’s parents had never doubted he was decent, which made him one of the lucky ones. They hadn’t wanted to send him to this shithole, but it was the only way to get the judge to agree to probation.
Eli’s mom and dad had tried for months to stop the bullying that had been going on at his old school. But the administration had always stood by the jocks who brought in the donations from alumni. So his folks had actually understood when Eli had lost it one day and fought back with fire, the way he’d never been able to with his fists.
He was super glad nobody got hurt, but also hated himself for doing it because it landed him at Fenton. He had to stick it out for three more years if he wanted his record expunged when he turned eighteen. Knowing how worried his parents were, he couldn’t tell them the truth about what went on here, since they couldn’t pull him out.
On the other side of the table, Walt, another member of their gang, leaned over, as if trying to scoop the last of his meatloaf into his mouth. “He was crying the other day.”
Eli’s mouth fell open. “Huh?”
“Saw him. Locker room. After gym class. Really sobbing—snot running and everything.”
Crying? Charlie had been upset enough about something to cry, like he used to at the beginning of the year, and he hadn’t told Eli? “How come?”
Walt leaned again and the boys on either side of him did, too, to try to block him from view. “Dunno. He didn’t see me. I didn’t want to embarrass him.”
“Did anything happen during gym?”
“Coach Emerson rode him really hard. Embarrassed him in front of the whole class.”
Eli suddenly felt awful. Charlie had been the first friend he’d made here and was the best he’d ever had. Despite his size, he’d been soft and vulnerable. And Eli hadn’t been there when the other guy had needed him. Why hadn’t he talked about what was bothering him? It wasn’t like Charlie to keep his secrets or fears to himself.
“Didn’t Coach Gardener step in?” Gardener, who was Emerson’s assistant, was younger and nicer than his boss. He coached the J.V. track team. Every boy at Fenton had to participate in a sport, and track was the one thing Eli felt he might do okay in. He’d had a lot of practice running from assholes at his old school.
Turned out he was pretty good at hurdles. Also turned out Gardener wasn’t a prick like his boss. A bit of a meathead, but at least not brutal.
“He wasn’t there.”
“Shh!” The sound was almost as quiet as their whispers had been, and came from Mr. Slate, the crusty old custodian. He pushed a wide broom between their table and the next one. Although the old man often whistled when he mopped the halls, even he stayed silent in here. His mouth barely moved as he bent his head down to keep any of the other grown-ups from seeing. “You boys better shut yer mouths.”
Slate had barely issued the warning when a more terrifying one filled the cafeteria.
“Silence!”
It was a female voice, meaning the school nurse, Mrs. Brewer, had entered the cafeteria. Everyone flinched, including the custodian and a couple of the teachers.
Although she was small, only as tall as some of the freshmen, Nurse Brewer was as hard as a board…which he’d
heard she liked to use on the butts of kids who got out of line. Reminding him of Umbridge in the Harry Potter books, she scared Eli even more than Mr. Angel did. He hoped he never got sick and had to sit in her cramped clinic, getting gagged by tongue depressors. Or worse. Rumor was she liked to make boys strip down naked so she could stick a thermometer in…other places. He’d heard guys say she did it to humiliate them. Sick old hag.
“I’d better not hear one more whisper or there will be a broth diet all week!”
He and his friends had snapped their mouths closed the minute they realized she was on the prowl for somebody to terrorize. Nobody would say another word until after lunch ended in five minutes. They didn’t even look at each other. They didn’t dare. If they were ID’d as the talkers, they could find themselves in big trouble later, after they’d had lots of time to sweat over it. Talking during lunch could mean no dinner. Or it could mean an overnight in Building 13, which terrified the boys most of all.
Eli forced those fears away, going back to the much bigger fear. He couldn’t help thinking something really bad was going on at Fenton.
Where was Charlie? Why did boys keep disappearing from the Fenton Academy?
Scariest of all: Who would be next?
CHAPTER 3
Kate thought she had done a lot of research on the Fenton Academy. A few hours with Derek Monahan in his office on Saturday evening, however, showed her how much she’d missed. There was more. So much dark and awful more.
“I can’t believe this,” she said, reading posts he had found on the secretive dark web, and had printed out for her. “There are so many comments from former students about the vile things going on there.” Not much actual physical torture, but the emotional and psychological stuff was horrific. “How can nobody have done anything about it?”
“Who would? The parents certainly aren’t backing their claims. They’re just happy their kids come home completely obedient. Would yours, if Isaac had told them?”
Cold Image (Extrasensory Agents Book 4) Page 4