Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
After two attempts by the GPS in Javi’s borrowed car had left him standing at a locked gate with a rusted padlock, Javi had stopped at a gas station to ask directions. There had been a free basket of chicks peeping by the till as the owner had rung up Javi’s purchase of gas and an air freshener.
Whoever had driven the car before him had not thought to pack deodorant in their go-bag.
The woman behind the counter had called it “the nut farm” as she handed Javi a candy-scented, plastic-wrapped cardboard dinosaur. She’d told him to drive until he saw the berry, then just head in that direction.
The twelve-foot metal strawberry sat back from the road, in front of a dilapidated wooden stand offering people the chance to “pick their own” for $5.
“We keep meaning to start it up again,” Alice Montgomery, the head administrator, said as she looked up at the sun-blistered landmark.
Despite her title, she looked like she spent as much time in the fields as anyone else, with muddy boots and a dark farmer’s tan.
“It’s just hard to navigate liability and…
you don’t care, that’s not why you’re here, is it. You want to talk about Brian?”
Javi unbuttoned his jacket in a concession to the more rural environment.
“If you can,” he said.
Alice took a deep breath. “Helping you helps him,” she said. “And we’re a private facility, not a hospital. Some elements of Brian’s time here are covered by HIPAA—his therapy sessions or his medication regimen—but I’ll talk about what I can.”
She gestured for him to follow her over to the picnic bench parked by the fence.
There was a greasy bag of takeout trash left on it.
Alice cleared it up, pulling a tissue from her pocket to scrub away a smear of eye-watering, hot-smelling sauce, and took it over to the bin to dispose of it.
She wiped her hands on the same tissue on her way back, then grimaced as she realized her mistake and wiped them on her thighs instead.
“I hope you don’t mind talking out here,” she said as she sat down. “Some of our residents wouldn’t be…ah…too comfortable with you being a Fed. You can imagine why.”
“We don’t have to tell them,” Javi said. He clocked the bird shit on the bench, sighed to himself, and sat down anyhow.
Alice burst out laughing. “Good one,” she chuckled, then folded her lips over her teeth as she caught up with herself. “Um, sorry…I didn’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just the suit and—”
“It’s fine. I get it,” Javi assured her before she dug herself any deeper. He fished his phone out of his jacket. He set it between them and hung his finger over the record button. “Do you mind?”
“Oh no,” Alice said. She pinned both her hands between her knees and gave him a tired smile. “Go ahead. It’s not my first rodeo.”
Javi tapped the button. The number started to roll.
“What can you tell me about Brian?” he asked. He expected something vague, clearly pulled from a quick once-over of patient files before he got here. That wasn’t Alice’s way, though, apparently.
“Oh, Brian was one of my favorite residents,” Alice said warmly.
“He cooperated with his treatment plan, he took part in every vocational course we could throw at him, even though none of them were a challenge to him, and he had a job helping us in the office for a while. Our website? All Brian. He was a model patient and one of our success stories.”
The earnestness in Alice’s voice as she said that made Javi feel bad for what he knew that she didn’t. He ignored it as he rested his elbow on the edge of the table.
“So why weren’t you surprised when I called?” he asked.
Alice grimaced and looked down at her feet, and used the toe of one to scrape mud off the other.
“Well, it’s not the first time that doing well here doesn’t translate to functioning out there,” she said, jerking her chin in the general direction of…well, the desert. Javi assumed she meant Plenty, or just the wider world. “But in Brian’s case, I think we liked him too much.”
Javi raised an eyebrow. He had the feeling that Alice wasn’t the type to take much prodding.
She took a deep breath and pressed her knees harder against her fingers.
“We wanted him to do well, to get better, for us to have helped him get better,” she said. Her eyebrows pinched together, and she sighed down her nose. “So when he seemed to be, we just believed it. Do you know why Brian was here?”
Javi shook his head.
“I can tell you, because Brian didn’t come here from a psych hold,” Alice explained. “His sister got his roommates to agree to let the whole thing drop if she got him to break the lease and get help. He’d been staying in a shared house with some people he knew at work—”
“State of Mind Security?”
“No, that was after he left here,” Alice said.
She started to say something, stopped herself, and pulled her hand from between her knees to wave that topic back into the line.
“Sorry. I’ll get to that. No, he was doing some freelance work for a restaurant, setting up a chatbot and various automations for them—and he’d gotten friendly with some of the servers.
Until he got obsessed with the idea that they all had salmonella on them. ”
“OCD?”
Alice shrugged. “I’m not a doctor,” she said.
“But no, I don’t think that was ever on the table.
He just fixates on things. That time, it was triggered by a salmonella outbreak, and he just spiraled.
It did, from what his sister said, get quite unpleasant.
If she’d not been able to appeal to the other parties, it wouldn’t have ended well for Brian. ”
Or maybe it would have ended better, based on Fowler’s current situation. Something rustled in the long grass at the side of the bench. He glanced that way and saw a chicken foraging along the property line.
“But he did well here?”
“Seemed to,” Alice said. “Took a real interest in what we do here and the farm and the other residents. Last year, when we took part in that protest in town, against the bank’s mortgage practices, he got really involved. Invested, even.”
Javi nodded. “Fixated, even?” he asked.
For a second, Alice looked reluctant to agree to that, but eventually she nodded. She shifted her weight on the bench and crossed her legs, picking at a patch on the knee of her jeans with blunt nails.
“He spent a lot of time with the organizers, connected us with a lot of collectives across the country doing this work, and even arranged with some of his old restaurant contacts to help with refreshments for the protest,” she said.
“And then a few days later, he told us he was leaving, that he wanted to do the work full-time. It was sudden, but he was here of his own free will, so we couldn’t stop him. And it was a good cause…”
She trailed off and caught her upper lip between her teeth.
“It was only after he left, when we were clearing out his rooms, that we found his ‘research,’” she said.
“He’d tried to destroy it, soaked it in bleach in the toilet, but it was still legible.
Notebooks and binders under his bed. Some of it was just research about predatory lending and refinancing practices, especially in Plenty.
You know that’s a problem here. But he’d also printed some fairly extreme rhetoric from some of the more anarchist-inclined activists who’d gotten involved in the protest and dozens—dozens—of job applications to various loan companies and brokers in Plenty.
He’d scrawled all over them with his theories about why they’d not hired him. ”
Javi nodded slowly. “Except for State of Mind.”
“He’d left his acceptance letter behind,” Alice said. “It was the same day he’d told us he was leaving.”
“So you know he was fixated and unstable—”
“He was passionate,” Alice objected. “The brokers and loan companies in Plenty are practically unregulated and—”
“And how did you think Fowler and his anarchist principles were going to fix that?” Javi asked sharply. “Another protest? Or the same sort of solution that had landed him here in the first place.”
“What was I supposed to do?” Alice demanded. “Brian had a right to care about things. He had a right to get a job and not to tell us about it. He wasn’t a patient here. He wasn’t a criminal—”
“He is now.”
The statement dropped flatly between them. Alice flinched and deflated. She bent her head and looked at her hands, twiddling the heavy opal ring on her wedding finger.
“What was I supposed to do?” she asked again, but this time she just sounded tired.
It was the moment that Cloister would have reached out to her. He’d show understanding, sympathy. She’d grumble. It was the sort of good interview technique that instructors at Quantico spent hours trying to teach, but Cloister just acted on instinct.
Javi didn’t have the instinct; he did have the training. Somehow, he just couldn’t bring himself to soften.
“You could have told someone,” he said harshly.
Alice looked up at him. “I did,” she said indignantly. “I told his sister.”
“Obviously,” Marion Hayes, nee Fowler, snapped in answer to Javi’s question about whether she’d been concerned about her brother.
“I told Alice that I didn’t think Brian getting involved with the protest was a good idea.
He cares. He cares about things like that, about people, about causes.
That’s always what kicks off an episode. ”
Javi pulled into the rest area and parked at the far end of the lot, away from the other cars. He flicked the call over to his phone as he turned the engine off.
“She didn’t listen?” he asked.