by J. Thorn
Randy didn’t reply.
And she’d thought he understood her, that they shared the beginnings of a growing trust. “Randy?”
He faced her and put his hands on her shoulders. “One thing about Wendover is that you’re not supposed to ask any questions. The sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”
She looked into his ice-blue eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“That sounded like a question.” He turned and walked up the path ahead of her.
She took one last look at the lake, shivered, then followed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dinner was barely recognizable as food, even though it was served on the same beige fiberglass trays that every other group home used. The beige always bled into the meat and gravy, muted the colors, and made it all taste bland. Could be worse, though. Could be Pepto-Bismol pink.
The dining room was small, but Freeman managed to find a corner table off by himself. Dipes came through the line with his tray and briefly caught Freeman’s eye. Freeman looked away to dodge any lingering gratitude.
Just keep on moving. Nothing to see here, folks.
Freeman definitely wasn’t in the mood to collect acquaintances. The thing with Deke and the book had been a convoluted act of self-preservation. He wasn’t here to serve as Defender of the Weak, Protector of the Innocent. Leave that to the comic book heroes and Dirty Harry. His job was to survive long enough to figure a way to get the hell out, preferably in one piece.
One of Freeman’s house parents sat at the table, a couple of chairs down. Randy. He had that weathered, beefy look, the kind of guy who was probably smooth with the ladies until they figured out his IQ was equal to the number on his old high school football jersey.
Freeman concentrated on his mashed potatoes. Powdered. Why in the world did they have to be powdered? It’s not like real potatoes were that expensive. Maybe the staff dietitian wanted to avoid the dark spots. You couldn’t have specks in your potatoes when you were trying to build perfect people.
Randy leaned toward him. “So, Freeman, what do you think of Wendover so far?”
The dollop of potatoes was too small to hide behind. Randy showed teeth, the kind that could bite through his own leg if he ever needed to free himself from a steel trap. A kindness that could kill if necessary.
“It’s fine, sir.” Freeman stuck a generous forkful of mystery meat into his mouth as an excuse not to say more.
“You’ll like it here. We have a lot of success stories.”
And I’m sure you’re about to tell me some of them.
But Freeman was wrong. Randy’s fork went up and down as steadily as if he were pumping iron, packing away the beige food and building biceps at the same time. Freeman scouted the room.
Bondurant was nowhere to be seen. No surprise there. A warden could eat with neither the convicts nor the guards. Many of the counselors sat together at a long table. There were no empty seats there, and Freeman wondered if Randy had been forced to sit with him. Short straw gets the loser kid.
At the next table over, a group of girls hunched over their trays, giggling. All except the girl at the head of the table. Her skin was nearly as pale as her ash-blonde hair. Black eyes, large and moist-looking, stared down at the plate before her. The food was untouched.
She suddenly looked up, directly at Freeman. An image flashed into his brain, a single word: Trust.
He swallowed hard, sending the bland and thoroughly-chewed meat toward his inner plumbing.
That was weird. It’s not like I was trying to triptrap her or anything.
But she was already staring at her plate again. Freeman took the opportunity to study her face. Even though she was a little sickly-looking, with dark wedges under her eyes, she was pretty. Except thinking of a girl as pretty still seemed a little freaky. Prettiness made his heart light and his lungs stiff, as if he couldn’t get any air into his body. Prettiness was pretty damned scary. Luckily, prettiness had always stayed a safe distance away. Bogart in “Casablanca,” wrong place, wrong time, that sort of thing.
He recognized the suffocating sadness in her eyes, though. He’d seen it often enough in the mirror. Maybe she hadn’t yet learned how to shut it off, to bury it. But that was enough about her. He didn’t want to be caught staring again. And he definitely did not want to fool himself into thinking he’d read her mind when he wasn’t even trying.
Across the room, Deke was using his spoon as a catapult, flipping navy beans at some eight-year-olds. That was a tired trick. Maybe Deke had been here so long that he was behind the times, not up on cutting-edge goon techniques.
Starlene, the counselor who had taken him to the Blue Room when he arrived, entered the dining room. She had a towel around her neck, and her hair was wet. She was dressed in a red sweat suit, looking like a generous Christmas stocking. Freeman wondered if there was a gym here and if she’d been working out.
She collected a salad and a cup of coffee, then headed Freeman’s way. So much for splendid isolation.
“You feeling better?” Randy asked her as she sat between him and Freeman.
“No.”
Randy waved a fork at her salad. “I’m surprised you weren’t in the mood for fish.”
“I only eat the ones I catch. Except for the undersized ones like you, then I throw them back.”
That’s when Freeman figured it out. Ms. Sweat Suit and Mr. Muscles. The perfect jock couple, a match made in SoloFlex heaven. They probably had his-and-her headbands back at their condo love nest.
Freeman concentrated on his butterscotch pudding. It blended perfectly with the beige tray, and was the first pudding in the history of the world that could have doubled as wall spackle. He could imagine Deke stowing some away for later pranks on Dipes.
“I don’t care what you and Dr. Bondurant think,” Starlene said to Randy. “I know what I saw.”
“We can talk about it later.”
Grown-up talk. Freeman tried to will himself into invisibility. Starlene noticed his discomfort and said to him, “Sorry. I’m having a bad afternoon. Even grown-ups have them from time to time.”
“Except grown-ups don’t have to apologize.” Freeman immediately regretted smart-mouthing her. But Clint Eastwood mode wasn’t something you could climb into and out of at the drop of a hat. You had to stay in character. Unlike Kevin Costner in practically anything.
“I did apologize, Freeman.”
He tried to triptrap her, just for the hell of it. All he got were ringing ears and the jolt of a live wire slicing through his head. He might as well have slammed his forehead against the dining room’s cinder block walls. Some people were like that, natural shields, and even with the ones he could read, there was no way to control which stuff he got. Sometimes it was whatever the person had watched on TV the night before, or a favorite character from a movie. Sometimes it was a sick relative or money and how to get more money. Sometimes . . .
Sometimes it was the kind of stuff that made his heart fluttery.
“Is something wrong?” Starlene asked, and Freeman blinked himself back into the dining room.
“I just saw somebody I thought I knew.” He poked at the pudding, then glanced at the pale, blonde girl. She was staring at him again. She was exotic, dangerous, Faye Dunaway in “Chinatown.”
Sure, something’s wrong, Queen Starlene. Someday when you have a few years, maybe I’ll tell you. Until then, ain’t no shrink getting inside HERE. Because your kind always has to find something, and you always have to “fix” it, no matter if you break more stuff than you glue back together. So you keep on YOUR side of the table with Mr. Hunk-a-Hunka Burnin’ Love there, and I’ll sit right here, and both of us will get along just fine.
Just stay out of my head and we’ll be okay. That goes for you, too, Miss Spooky Skeleton Girl who hasn’t eaten a bite.
A bell rang, and Randy checked his watch. “Yard time, soldiers,” he barked, loudly enough for the entire dining room to hear.
Deke slipped
in a quick lip-synch in imitation of Randy, eliciting giggles from his goon squad. Chairs scraped and flatware clattered as the kids assembled to dispose of their trays. Freeman took a last stab at the pudding and slipped a forkful into his mouth. It even tasted beige.
Starlene smiled at him, an alfalfa sprout caught between her teeth. Freeman felt guilty for trying to read her. She was the only one here who had been nice to him so far. Maybe he could use it later on, play that particular character flaw to his own advantage. The best victims were those blinded by their own sincerity.
Freeman ended up in line behind the skeletal blonde. He wasn’t sure if he’d slowed his pace to arrange the encounter or if it was coincidence. Her hair hung halfway to her waist and looked so soft it was almost translucent against her baggy black shirt. Freeman stared straight ahead, hoping she didn’t turn around and speak to him.
She scraped her plate into the garbage can. It was obvious she had stirred her food but had eaten nothing.
One of the counselors came over, a man in a vee-necked sweater and carefully-trimmed mustache. “How was your dinner, Vicky?”
“Fine, Allen,” she said.
“Looks like you had a big appetite tonight.” Not a hint of sarcasm.
“It was yummy.”
He patted her on the shoulder. “We’ll have you up to fighting weight in no time.”
Allen left and Vicky brushed her hand across the spot he had touched, as if ridding herself of cobwebs. Freeman couldn’t believe she had fooled the counselor so completely. Either she was smart, or Allen was stone dumb. Or maybe a little of both.
Freeman put his tray in the window slot. A conveyor belt carried the dirty dishes into the mysterious depths of the dishwasher’s room. The churning of water and the hum of rubber belts reverberated inside the little space. Freeman stuck his head in to see if an actual human being did the work or if the system was automated like something out of “The Jetsons” cartoons.
Standing beside a large rack of glasses was the strange old guy Freeman had seen shuffling down the hall earlier. Maybe he was a janitor after all. No, not a janitor. Custodian. Everybody got a special name for their jobs these days so they could feel good about themselves.
The man didn’t take any notice of Freeman. He probably saw dozens of kids come and go, change placements, rejoin their families, or have the juvenile justice system finally catch up with them. The man’s blank eyes were undoubtedly a gift of evolution, a survival mechanism. The less you see, the less you know. The less you know, the better off you are.
Sounded like a pretty good philosophy.
If the game was to be invisible, then the man in the dirty gown was a master.
Freeman tossed his fork into a pan of soapy water, then turned and found himself face-to-face with Vicky.
“By the way,” she said. “You didn’t accidentally read my mind. I read yours.”
She walked away, joining the herd of kids gathering to go outside. Her next words slipped inside Freeman’s skull without the benefit of sound: You’re not the only one who’s special.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bondurant felt humbled here, the only place in Wendover that wasn’t part of the domain he ruled. Two walls were lined with equipment, computers and monitors and racks of color-coded wires. Shelves of thick books covered a third wall, texts of everything from clinical cases to alternative religions to New Age healing modalities. A faint air of ungodliness cramped these quarters. Dr. Kracowski’s office reeked of seeking.
Bondurant looked through the two-way mirror that bridged the office to Room Thirteen. Kracowski was attaching tiny electrode patches to a young, dark-skinned boy. The boy sat on the bed in gym shorts, socks, and nothing else except for the rubber circles stuck to his chest and his left temple. Bondurant pulled the boy’s case file from his mental drawer.
Mario Diego Rios. Nine years old. Found at a bus station in Raleigh where he had gone without food for three days. His dad, a mechanic for the bus line, had locked him in an unlit storage closet. Little Mario still suffered nightmares, even after intensive talk therapy and Bondurant’s prayer sessions. Since the abandonment, Mario couldn’t stand to be in enclosed places.
Which was why the boy was trembling now, because Thirteen was fairly cramped. Kracowski said something to Mario, which was picked up by a microphone in the ceiling. The displaced words came to Bondurant through the computer speakers.
“It’s okay, son. I’m going to help you. But first you’re going to have to do something for me. Can you do that? Por favor?”
The boy nodded, lips tight.
“You’re going to have to think about something.”
The boy looked at the door, then at the mirror.
“It’s going to seem a little scary at first, but that’s the only way I can help you.”
The boy’s brown face faded to light tan.
“You trust me, don’t you, Mario?”
Bondurant hated to witness the treatments. Since the incident with the girl who had stopped breathing, Bondurant feel obligated to keep a closer eye on Kracowski. The doctor had the charisma essential for successful fundraising, and some of his past research had been published. But these new methods struck Bondurant as extreme, improper, worse even than the tenets of the modern church of psychotherapy.
The computer recorded data from the patches that covered the boy’s chest and head. The boy’s heartbeat played out on a graph, along with a corresponding jagged line that had something to do with Kracowski’s electrodes. An inset image showed a multi-colored map of the boy’s cranial cavity on one corner of the screen. Bondurant concentrated on the graphics so he wouldn’t have to see the boy’s frightened face. Green, purple, and red fields marked a transverse image of the boy’s brain.
“Think back for me,” said Kracowski, his voice low and soothing. “Can you do that?”
Then, “Good.”
The jagged line rose slightly as the boy’s heart rate increased. The purple field on the brain scan shifted to red, measuring increased blood flow.
Through the microphone: “I want you to remember what it was like in the storage closet.”
The line jumped, spiked, fell off rapidly, and jumped again. The red of the colored brain map pushed at the green.
“Dark,” said Kracowski. “You feel the walls closing in, don’t you?”
The line made a saw-tooth pattern, the peaks nearly touching the top of the computer screen. A tape machine whirred, recording the session. The computer printer spat out a paper version of the data being stored on the hard drive.
Kracowski’s voice went even lower. “You’re trapped, aren’t you? You scream and nobody can hear you.”
The boy’s rapid panting was picked up by the microphone. Bondurant couldn’t resist any longer. He looked away from the machines and through the mirror. Kracowski stood over the boy, fidgeting with the buttons on a small box that looked like a cross between a television remote and a control for a radio-operated toy. The boy’s eyes were pressed so tightly together that they quivered.
“Now, Mario, what you’re feeling is the negative energy inflicted by the experience,” the doctor said, as if the boy could understand those big words. “The fear has disrupted your energy fields and blocked the normal flow of your emotions.”
The doctor poised a finger over his control box. “I can help you. Now, it’s going to hurt for just a moment, but I want you to keep thinking about that small, dark space.”
Kracowski pressed a button and the boy shook uncontrollably for a couple of seconds. Bondurant glanced with concern at the computer monitor and saw that the bottom line had flattened. The boy’s heart had stopped.
Bondurant clasped his hands together and asked Jesus to have mercy, on both the boy and on Wendover’s good standing.
In Thirteen, the boy had fallen back on the bed. Kracowski adjusted the controls on his hand-held box, then thumbed a lever. Both lines on the computerized chart took a wild leap, then ran together in synch. The
gap between the lines had narrowed, the top one no longer jagged and inconsistent. The red on the brain map softened and faded to a placid purple.
Kracowski bent over Mario and lifted one of the boy’s eyelids. The doctor smiled, turned to the mirror, and nodded, then began removing the electrode patches. Kracowski turned off the lights and left the room.
A few moments later the office door opened. Bondurant pretended to study the odd items on Dr. Kracowski’s desk. A human brain, crenulated and obscene-looking, floated in a jar of formaldehyde. The label on the jar read, “Do Not Open Until Judgment Day.” Bondurant shuddered at the sacrilege.
“Satisfied?” Kracowski brushed past Bondurant and dragged the sheaf of printed data toward his desk.
“As long as he’s not dead.”
“He’s not only not dead, he’s better than ever. How long have your therapists been working with the boy?”
“Six months.”
“Six months of suggestion and mind games and feigned kindness. And the boy’s claustrophobia didn’t improve.”
“Of course not.”
“Post-traumatic stress disorder, adjustment disorder, possible Axis IV diagnosis of situational heart arrhythmia due to anxiety. Far too much negative energy, wouldn’t you say?”
Kracowski sat behind the desk. Bondurant stood like a servant awaiting orders. “The boy’s afraid of the dark. The Lord is the light,” Bondurant said.
“You found one answer, and it works for you, no matter the question.” Kracowski nodded at the bookshelf. “But there are ten thousand paths to knowledge or God or truth. According to quantum theory, we don’t even exist as separate entities because our atoms have no substance when you get close to the center. According to the Taoist philosophy, the closer you get to the center, the farther you are from where you were going. According to Dr. Richard Kracowski, the center and the outer limits are exactly the same.”
Bondurant looked at the dark window into Thirteen. “What happens when he wakes up and starts screaming?”
Kracowski tented his hands, the fingers like painted bones. “He won’t scream.”