Chapter 21
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
“Patricia!” Dr. Lawson bellowed as she marched past their tents, headed for Ms. Montague’s private sanctum. “Patricia!”
She might be old, but she was moving at a pace that forced Oscar to trot to keep up with her. “Dr. Lawson, wait,” he started, but she ignored him.
As they reached Ms. Montague’s tent, Ethan stepped outside, placing himself in the way. “Dr. Lawson,” he said with a small nod. “Ms. Montague asks that you?—”
“Get out of my way, you simpering toady,” she snarled and gave him a hard shove.
The physical contact seemed to shock Ethan. He stumbled a little, mouth flapping open, but by then she had charged past him and flung open the tent.
“Patricia! I—what the fuck!”
Oscar followed her inside, hoping to calm the situation, but what he saw within stole his voice.
One wall of the spacious tent was entirely occupied by monitors. Some of them showed the views from the static cams, and one displayed the feed from Chris’s cam. Someone, perhaps Ethan, had hacked into their signal.
Other monitors held views of their living quarters and the command center, where Tina was even now abandoning her chair to come see what was going on.
Ms. Montague had been spying on them the entire time.
“Whoa,” Zeek said, coming to a halt beside Oscar. “Not cool. Seriously—not cool.”
Ms. Montague herself sat in a comfortable chair, dressed in a pale blue suit that matched her eyes. Her wrinkled mouth was drawn into a stern frown, her attention focused on Dr. Lawson. “What is the meaning of this, Ruthie?”
Dr. Lawson’s nostrils flared. “Don’t play dumb with me.” She stabbed a finger in the direction of the monitors. “You know damn well we found your generator. What the hell were you thinking?”
“We have limited time to investigate this location,” Montague replied, without the slightest hint of remorse. “Installing the Van de Graaf gave the spirits enough strength for us to get truly interesting results.”
“Us?” Adrienne asked, folding her arms over her chest. “What do you mean, ‘us?’ We’re the ones who’ve been doing all the work and taking all the risks!”
“And you’re being very well compensated for it,” said Ethan from behind them.
Dr. Lawson shot him a glare. “Shut up. You’re not a part of this conversation.”
“Don’t speak to my staff in that tone,” Montague said, an edge to her voice now. “And Ethan is quite correct—both OutFoxing the Paranormal and Zeeking the Unknown would be, well, unknown, if not for my patronage.”
“Hey, we had followers before,” Zeek objected. “Not as many as we do now, sure, but still.”
“Money isn’t everything,” Chris said tightly. They’d lowered their camera, expression stormy.
Ms. Montague sighed. “Of course it is. We live in a capitalistic society. It takes money to make money, as the saying goes.”
“Oh really?” Dr. Lawson fixed Ms. Montague with an angry stare. “How much was Robin’s life worth, then?”
Her shot struck home. Ms. Montague’s mouth opened, then shut, then opened again. “That’s not…”
“Of course it is.” Venom coated Dr. Lawson’s words. “You were the rich girl who only had to snap her fingers to get whatever she wanted.”
“I don’t remember you complaining when I paid the rent on our apartment.”
Oscar had known there was history between the women, but never guessed they’d been close enough to live together.
“Or when I bought the video recorders, or any of the other equipment we used that was high tech back in the day,” she went on.
“We didn’t love you because of the money!” Dr. Lawson shouted.
Silence fell. Oscar glanced around, wondering if they should leave, but everyone else was transfixed by the scene.
Ms. Montague looked as if she’d been slapped. “I…I never said that…”
“Your money isn’t what got Robin into that house.” Lawson’s tone was low, vicious, her words sharpened to hurt. “You were so fucking sure this was what we needed. We’d capture her brilliance as a medium. The university would throw its support behind my work in survival research. She was worried, but you?—”
“I didn’t force her to go in there!”
“She trusted you!” Dr. Lawson’s voice cracked. “We trusted you. You pushed and you pushed, and we trusted you so we went too far, ignored our own boundaries. And when Robin died, you tried to fix the problem by throwing money at me. As if that would heal a broken heart.”
Ms. Montague dropped her gaze. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said quietly.
“You could have talked to me.”
“I tried! You were too angry!”
“Whatever.” Dr. Lawson turned away, then back. “All these years, and you haven’t learned a damned thing. You’re still pushing people, still trying to use your riches as a replacement for responsibility, or empathy, or whatever other emotion you find inconvenient. I’m leaving, and I’m taking these poor kids with me. You can stay here and rot for all I care.”
She shoved past Oscar, and the rest parted to let her through. Oscar cast a glance at Ms. Montague, uncertain if he should say anything. She’d always been so calm, so in control, but now she slumped in her chair, one hand on her silver-headed cane.
“I’m-I’m sorry,” he said, then went after Dr. Lawson.
Dr. Lawson stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at nothing. The sun was heading westward, flirting with the mountain peaks and sending warm yellow light across the tops of the trees. It caught the clocktower atop the asylum, now almost denuded of paint.
Which made no sense…but that wasn’t Oscar’s problem right now.
“So what do we do, boss?” Chris asked.
This was his only chance to set things right here, to do what he was certain his mamaw would have wanted…but maybe it was time to face the facts. He just wasn’t up to the task. With more time, perhaps, but after Ms. Montague’s actions, setting foot back inside the asylum would be wildly dangerous.
If it was just himself…but it wasn’t. “We leave,” he said, turning to face them. Chris looked relieved at the pronouncement, Tina uncertain, and Nigel…
“Where’s Nigel?” he asked.
Zeek looked around, as if Nigel might suddenly pop up. “Maybe he went into the command center to get some more meds?”
He wasn’t in there. He wasn’t in their other tent, either. Oscar tried to think back to the last time he’d actually seen his boyfriend. It had been in the old superintendent’s quarters, after they’d found the Van de Graaf generator. After that, all his attention had been on Dr. Lawson.
“When was the last time anyone remembers seeing Nigel?” Oscar asked urgently. “He came out of the asylum with the rest of us, right?”
Zeek took his cap off and scratched his head. “I thought he was behind us, but I don’t think I actually saw him come out?”
Dr. Lawson went pale. “He must still be inside.”
Oscar strode toward the asylum, and Chris and Zeek jogged after him. Damn it, why hadn’t he paid more attention? He knew Nigel was sick. What if he’d passed out?
What if the ghosts had found him alone and?—
“Nigel!” Oscar bellowed as he climbed the stairs and entered the asylum. “Nigel, can you hear me?”
“Doc!” Chris yelled. “Are you in here?”
Zeek pointed to the end of the hall. “What’s that?”
A yellowed folder lay near the elevator, documents spilled out of it. Oscar picked it up and read the label. “This is Dr. Wilkes’s file—the one Nigel was carrying. He must have dropped it.”
Dropped it right here, near the entrance…then never come out.
Panic clawed at his throat. “Nigel!”
“I’ll check upstairs, in case he lost it on the way up,” Zeek said, and ran to the staircase.
They shouldn’t split up—but Nigel was missing. “Let’s check the wards,” Oscar said to Chris. “Or maybe he went back to the storage area to look for more files.”
They yelled until their voices were hoarse, opened every closed door, but neither they nor Zeek found a trace. Oscar even went around the back of the building, searching for the elusive cellar doors or coal chute into the basement. All he found were piles of broken planks and chunks of concrete from what had been the old kitchen and cafeteria building, now long collapsed. The rubble washed up against the base of the main building like flotsam left behind by a tide, burying any doors or hatches beneath it.
Nigel hadn’t come this way. But he didn’t seem to be inside any of the floors they could access, either.
He was gone, and Oscar didn’t know how to find him.
Nigel opened eyes that felt crusted shut. His head swam and his lungs ached. Rolling onto his side, he gave in to a violent coughing fit that seemed like it would never end. When it finally did, he lifted his head to take stock.
Darkness. Not even a sliver of light managed to illuminate the scene around him.
Where was he? What the hell had happened? He’d been left behind when everyone else rushed out of the asylum, made his way downstairs after them, the door had slammed shut before he could reach it, and…
Nothing. Whatever had happened next was a blank.
Panic clawed at his throat. Was he still in the asylum? He must be. His whole body ached, he couldn’t breathe through his clogged nose, his lungs were filling with phlegm, he was alone and?—
No. Freaking out wouldn’t help anything. Clearing his throat, he weakly called out. “Oscar? Dr. Lawson? Is anyone there?”
Silence. But of course, in a building filled with ghosts, that didn’t mean no one heard him. One could be standing right next to him, slowly reaching out a freezing hand to touch his neck…
He slapped his imagination down a second time. The situation was bad enough; no need to scare himself into a panic. He fumbled at his belt, and almost wept with relief when he found the flashlight still clipped there.
The beam seemed dimmer than it should, as if the darkness was pushing back against it, but at least he could see something now. He lay on a concrete floor that sloped gently down to a drain set in the center. There was an old sink with a disintegrating rubber hose hooked up to the tap at one end of the room, and a pair of double doors at the other. To either side, the walls were lined with square doors, one of which hung open to reveal a sort of long tray hanging half out.
It was a morgue, and the doors were for body storage.
Heart rabbiting in fear, he sat up. The morgue was in the basement, which meant he was underground. How the fuck had he gotten down here?
That didn’t matter right now. What mattered was: How was he going to get out?
This was no time to panic. He tried to imitate Oscar’s deep breathing technique, but his lungs rebelled and left him bending over, coughing and struggling to draw air in.
This was bad. Really bad.
Okay, step one: Stand up.
Using the sink for leverage, he pulled himself to his feet, trying not to think of the fluids the rubber hose had been used to wash out of the body storage drawers. Once he was up, he shone his flashlight to the opposite end of the room, where the double doors waited.
Step two: Get to the exit. Even though that would mean walking past the bodies.
No, that was stupid. A lot of things had been abandoned here when the asylum shut down, but no one would have left human remains behind.
Would they?
“Fuck,” he muttered out loud.
There was still a pouch of salt in his pocket, so he drew it out, poured some crystals into one hand, and held them ready. The EMF reader didn’t seem like it would be of much use, so he left it on his belt. All he had to do for the moment was cross the room to the doors. Once he was there, he’d take stock and worry about what came next.
“One step at a time, Nigel,” he whispered to himself. “You can do this.”
Something banged on the inside of one of the drawers.