Chapter 19
Violet
“Did you know that Plainsview has a strip club?” Bradley asked as we walked from the Fell Hospital parking lot toward the doors. “It opened last year. It’s only thirty minutes away. I might go tonight.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “And why are you wearing that shirt?”
Bradley shrugged. I reached the door first, and he made no move to open it for me. “I’m making conversation. And this shirt is comfortable.”
I gave him a sour glance as I opened the door. I didn’t hold it open for him, either, instead letting it start to swing shut in his face. He grabbed it without comment.
He was wearing the same jeans and ball cap as yesterday, but he had switched to a sleeveless shirt. A muscle shirt, I thought it was called. It was gray, and his arms were bare in the brisk September sunshine. It wasn’t even hot out.
The tattoo I’d glimpsed on his biceps yesterday was on full view now. It was Snoopy on his doghouse. It was badly done.
“I have so many questions,” I said, looking away again. “I don’t want the answers to any of them.”
Like the rest of Fell, the hospital was both old and ugly. The ceilings were low, the floors yellowed, the air heavy with unpleasant smells. This was a building that vividly remembered World War Two.
I’d never been here before. We hadn’t broken bones as children, us Esmies. We didn’t play hard enough for that. Vail had dislocated a shoulder once, and I had cut my chin deeply enough to leave a small scar, but that was all. Dodie had sailed through childhood without a flaw.
There was a quiet hum of busyness in the hospital, the crackle of announcements over the speaker system, low conversations. I led Bradley to a front desk labeled information. A fortyish woman sat behind it, wearing glasses on a chain around her neck.
“Can I help you?” she asked, giving me a narrowed look.
Bradley stepped around me to talk to her. “Hey,” he said. “How are you?”
Glasses Chain blinked at his biceps. I didn’t know whether she was pondering his slightly seedy masculinity or, as I had, was wondering why Snoopy was there, and why half of his face was blurry. “I’m fine,” she replied.
“We need to find Joan Sleeter,” Bradley said. “Can you tell us where to go?”
The woman lifted her gaze, just a little too slowly, to his face. “Do you know Joan?”
“She’s expecting me,” Bradley said.
Glasses Chain lifted her phone. “She’s the assistant to the administrator. I’ll have to call her.”
“You do that,” Bradley said.
As the woman dialed and spoke on the phone, he glanced over his shoulder at me and waggled his eyebrows. “Dad told me who to ask for,” he said.
“What name should I give her?” the woman asked, cupping her palm over the phone and leaning over the desk.
“Bradley Pine,” he answered her. I was completely forgotten. “Gus Pine’s son.”
“I could have handled it,” I grumbled, after the woman had directed us to the third floor and waved us on.
“Yeah,” Bradley agreed. “But you’re not wearing this shirt.”
I pushed the button for the elevator. “Do you always use your biceps to get what you want?”
“It’s worked since high school,” he replied, and I let loose a reluctant laugh.
The elevator doors opened, and we both paused as we looked into its tiny parameters, badly lit by half-dead fluorescent lights. “Should we take the stairs?” I asked.
“It’s only two floors.” He didn’t sound much more confident than I was, but he stepped inside. “It’ll be fine.”
It should have been amusing, the two of us silent in the elevator, listening as it creaked upward through the depths of the building. Normal people would laugh it off. But this was Fell.
“Is this place haunted?” I asked Bradley in the silence.
“That’s a really good question,” he replied.
The doors slowly opened, and we stepped into a soulless hallway, the waxed floors silent beneath our feet.
There were far-off voices, but no other sign of humans.
The hallway arched off both left and right, with no indication of which direction we were supposed to go. I picked left and started walking.
“You should apply,” Bradley said as he followed me.
“What?”
“To the strip club. I bet they’d hire you. I’d pay to see you naked.”
He was being annoying, but I knew he was doing it on purpose this time to distract both of us. To make us feel more normal as a chill crept up the back of my neck.
“You don’t have any money,” I shot back, playing along.
“Fine. I’d spend Dad’s money to see you naked.”
“Gus doesn’t have enough money for that.” It was definitely cold up here. Someone had turned the air-conditioning up high. There was a door at the end of the corridor, the only exit.
“We should have gone the other way,” Bradley said.
“I don’t think the other way is any better. Besides, people work here all day, every day. How haunted can it be?”
“Pretty haunted,” was his reply. “Violet, let’s go get a sandwich. I’ll even buy.”
I put my hand on the door and turned to him. “We’re doing this,” I said. “It’s for Ben.”
“What are we doing, exactly?”
He didn’t know. We’d talked about his shirt and his biceps, not my little brother or the terrible night I’d had last night. I’d told Bradley almost nothing at all.
“Your father’s file said that there were no medical records for Ben,” I explained. “No photos, either. No dental records. He didn’t go to school. According to the records, it’s like Ben didn’t exist.”
Bradley frowned. “That can’t be right.”
“No, it can’t. Ben existed. If he existed, he had to be born, right? And if he was born in Fell, it would have been here.”
“So we’re looking for a birth record.” Bradley rubbed his chin. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and it made a raspy sound. “Your mother didn’t have anything?”
“Nothing. I got a complete catalog of her belongings when she died. There was no paperwork. But it gets stranger. I have no memory of my mother being pregnant.”
“Wait. What? So—”
The door opened, bumping both of us back. A man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses—presumably a doctor—came through. “Excuse me,” he said curtly, and walked past us down the hall toward the elevator.
I looked at Bradley. “You saw him, right?” I whispered, because for a minute, I wasn’t sure. Who wore horn-rimmed glasses anymore?
“Yeah,” Bradley said. “Violet, what’s going on? You think your parents stole a baby?”
“I don’t know anything,” I hissed back. “That’s why we’re here. Let’s do this quick.”
I opened the door and walked through before I could second-guess myself, before I could turn and leave.
It didn’t matter that all signs pointed to this being a normal hospital on a normal day.
Something was wrong. I’d spent too many years seeing the impossible—and paying the price—not to believe my own instinct.
That voice in my ear from yesterday. Sister sent me.
She couldn’t be here. She wasn’t capable of it. Then again, she’d never sent anyone after me before.
I knew why my gut had told me to bring Bradley with me.
We had gone the wrong way. This was a ward, with a nurses’ station, corridors cluttered with equipment, orderlies coming and going.
Three nurses in blue scrubs stood at the nurses’ station, two of them talking quietly, one of them writing on a clipboard.
Doors opened from the corridors, presumably to the patients’ rooms.
Most people, I knew, hated hospitals. The smells, the fluorescent lights, the reminder of sickness and death.
I didn’t feel fear or hatred, only tired resignation.
This was all too familiar to me. Invisible weight settled on my shoulders, and I felt my teeth try to grind. I took a breath and made myself relax.
I took a few swift strides to the nurses’ station and spoke to one of the chatting nurses. “Excuse me. Hi there. I’m looking for Joan Sleeter.”
The glance she gave Bradley and me was the incurious kind that only a nurse is capable of.
It said I don’t know who you are, and if you’re not my problem, I truly don’t care.
“Oh, the admin wing,” she said. “You went the wrong way at the elevator. You can get there through that door, then take a right.” She pointed to a large set of double doors at the end of the corridor, sizable enough to easily wheel a bed through, as all hospital doors were.
They swung open, and an orderly pushed a man in a wheelchair through. A nurse passed them, going the other way, leaving the ward.
The nurse was wearing a starched white uniform, not the blue scrubs of the other nurses. Her hair was tied up tightly at the back of her head. The doors closed behind her.
I had paused too long. Bradley spoke up at my shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. I felt his palm on my upper back, urging me forward.
I looked around. The incurious nurse had already turned away and was talking to her colleague again. Everyone else in here looked normal. Didn’t they?
The orderly pushing the man in the wheelchair.
The elderly woman walking slowly down the hall, wheeling her IV stand, a bathrobe over her hospital gown.
The nurse passing at the end of the hall, wearing scrubs, a disposable coffee cup in her hand.
I turned back to the nurses’ station, looking for the nurse who had been writing on a clipboard. She was gone.
Had she walked away while my back was turned? Or had she been there at all?
“Violet.” Bradley’s hand nudged me more forcefully. I started walking toward the doors the nurse had gone through, my steps slow.
“Nurses don’t wear uniforms anymore,” I said. “The ones that look like a white dress. With nylons. That kind.”
“Um,” he said. “Interesting.”
“They don’t,” I insisted. “You didn’t see her, did you? Shit, shit, shit.”
My hands had gone cold, and it wasn’t because of the overused air-conditioning. It wasn’t even because of the ghosts, at least not entirely.