THIRTY-EIGHT Wild Goose Chase
T RISTAN
I don’t know why I’m so taken aback by the appearance of the Virginia Heights Mental Care Facility, but I am. I guess I was picturing those horrible, dank images of early 1900s sanitoriums and asylums with windows that gape out of the structure’s fa?ade like sunken eye sockets. The kind where patients are restrained by straitjackets as they shriek at the confusion in their heads and where descriptions like hellscape and nightmarish won’t go amiss.
Yet this psychiatric hospital is bright and airy.
Patients and hospital employees in scrubs stroll around the grounds together sedately. There are no signs of unusual behavior much less shrieking, and there isn’t a straitjacket in sight. Not that this is particularly comforting.
The woman who kidnapped Elle used to work here, so looking upon this place fondly is out of the question.
Once the kid pulls up into the circle drive that must be a patient drop-off point, all three of us scan the property. The truth is this might be a wild goose chase. There’s no evidence that coming here was the right move.
I’m sure the good detective put out an all-points bulletin for that license plate—he goddamn better have—but we won’t be notified of it even if hundreds of leads are reported. I’m feeling downright desperate to do something. Anything. To act.
The parking lot here stretches toward an assemblage of medical offices that loop around a pond with one of those man-made fountains in the middle. It looks like an upscale type of place, a higher-end locale that doesn’t mesh with the piece of shit Chevy Cavalier the security footage showed.
I have an uneasy feeling in my chest as I scrutinize the view.
Anyone who’s watched the nightly news more than twice knows that the longer someone remains unfound, the worse the odds become of their recovery. Their healthy, safe recovery. They might bring someone back alive after that, but there’s more of a chance that the person will be injured or have had God knows what done to them in the meantime.
But I can’t bear to go there. Not even for a second.
All I know is that the clock is ticking, and Elle could be anywhere.
“Think I’ll take a look inside,” I say, popping out of the passenger side, but as I enter the front lobby, a receptionist greets me.
“Hello, there,” she says pleasantly enough. “May I ask who you’re here to visit?”
“Uh...” Damn, I should’ve had some sort of plausible plan at the ready. I don’t, though, so I decide to make one up as I go along. “I’d like to see Tanya Brubaker. She around?”
I examine the lady’s face—it’s barely wrinkled despite the pure whiteness of her hair—and try to determine if she might be hiding something. But she’s not so much as glancing at me. Instead, she frowns at her computer monitor with pursed lips.
“I’m sorry, but no one by that name is a patient here. Might you have the wrong address?”
Why, yes. Yes, I might.
“You sure? I heard she worked here.”
Now she narrows her eyes at me.
“No member of staff by that name works here,” she states, but there’s something shadowy behind the lady’s gaze. She knew Tanya. I’d bet dollars to donuts. “There are other mental health hospitals and clinics in the area, however.”
I notice she doesn’t offer one up as a diversion. But I’m pressing my luck doing this. Pushing too much could draw security or worse, alert local law enforcement. If word ever got back to Ruiz, he could even press charges against us for fucking up his investigation.
We can’t do anything to assist Elle from a jail cell.
“I must be mistaken.” I throw her my most blandly cordial expression. “Thanks anyway.”
I leap back into Noah’s truck to discover that Jackson’s off scouting out the vehicles in the adjacent parking lot. Luckily, he’s clever enough to not go gallivanting so close to them that it raises any eyebrows. Rather he chooses to access the sidewalk outlining the lot which gives the appearance of someone cruising along for fresh air or exercise.
I take back everything I said about his lack of subtlety and stealth.
“Detect anything?” Noah inquires the second Jackson returns, but the guitarist shakes his head.
“Three orangish vehicles, but none of them are the one we’re looking for.”
Goddammit.
I wanted this trip to provide us with a solid lead, not be a fucking waste of resources. We’re glum as hell as Noah steers us back to D.C. proper. This little excursion of ours just took up three hours of our time, and as of an hour ago, the sun went down.
Where does that woman have Elle? And what might she be doing to her?
Unfortunately, sitting in a truck as someone else drives provides me with endless minutes to think, and those thoughts go down a dark spiral of increasingly horrific possibilities.
I’m still so angry at Elliana for her decision to get rid of us. I love her all the way to my bone marrow yet know under different circumstances, I’d still have the need to make my displeasure with her known. But remembering that the last words she might ever hear from me were spoken in fury and disappointment makes me want to hurl.
What am I going to do if I never see her again?
A prickling sensation stings behind my nose and tightens my throat at the thought. Would the universe consent to being this callous and uncaring? Allow me to actually give a damn about a woman only to steal her away?
Why have me develop feelings of devotion for someone, build a family with someone—an irritating in-law type of family in Jackson’s case—only to yank it all out from under me like some threadbare rug?
So I won’t let what’s trying to get out of me escape I haul off and with an almighty war cry slam my fist into Noah’s dashboard. It’s probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done and makes my knuckles ache and sting like a son of a bitch, but it’s preferable to falling the fuck apart.
I prepare myself to hear Jackson mouth off from the backseat of the crew cab or for Noah to shoot me a dirty look for conceivably denting his ride—I didn’t, I don’t think—but neither of them speak. Other than a wary glance from the kid, they don’t so much as peek in my direction.
Taking a deep breath, I force myself to calm my shit down. Going to pieces right now won’t help Elle.
I mutter an apology to Noah, then like I often do, return to keeping my own counsel.
He’s just taken the exit that will lead us back home when he comes to a screeching, gravel-spewing halt on the side of the road. It’s so abrupt and violent that my seatbelt engages. Jackson’s must’ve, too, because he grunts out a complaint.
“What the fuck, dude?”
But in the light of a passing vehicle, I notice that Noah is goggling back and forth between us, wide-eyed.
“When Andre was recounting how Elle left to Ruiz, he said something about her and the Brubaker woman attending high school together, right?”
Had Andre said that? I don’t remember.
“Yeah, maybe,” Jackson responds, flicking his guitar pick against his denim jacket. I don’t even mind the noise.
“Shouldn’t we go there? Scope the place out?” the kid suggests, and I’m already actively displaying my agreement. Going home without Elle would feel downright sacrilegious. Wrong on every single level.
Unforgivable.
“I vote yes,” Jackson says.
“Seconded,” I say like we’re in some goddamn committee, but Noah seems to take this as gospel as he slams his truck into gear and accelerates us toward the exit that leads to the Capital Beltway. Deep down, I fully accept that what we’re doing is filling our hours. We’re giving ourselves chores to tick off, so we don’t lose our minds waiting. “Any idea which one she attended?”
“How many are there?” Noah asks.
The kid was brought up in such a small town, my guess is that it had only one. I look up the total on my phone, counting them to give him a tally. “Currently, there are twenty.”
“Twenty? Fucking Christ,” Jackson complains. “Did she ever talk about it?”
She might have. I wrack my brain trying to recall. Much of my one-on-one time with her that wasn’t in bed tended to be in front of the television as we discussed our predictions for the period dramas we’d watch. God, I want to do that with her again.
Then, a recollection of us lounging tangled up in the middle of the sofa comes back to me. One of the characters we were watching was a lawyer—or in English period drama speak, a barrister—and she admits that she considered that as a major in her youth.
“I thought about becoming an attorney,” she told me. “I even went to a charter school founded by law students and professors from Georgetown University.”
“Yeah?” I asked her.
“Yeah, it was called—” Holy shit.
“It’s named for Thurgood Marshall,” I tell them, my pulse pumping as I scroll along the list again. I track down the screen with my finger hunting for the one named for the groundbreaking supreme court justice. “She told me the justice has always been one of her heroes because her dad taught her all about him. Here. It’s on Martin Luther King Junior Avenue.”
I provide the kid with turn-by-turn directions as we go, and soon, we’ve arrived. The main building is older and constructed of red brick with Corinthian columns along the front, but we pause further down to enter the parking lot along the side.
There are a number of cars here, which at this time of night must mean there’s some sort of event going on. Something holiday-themed, no doubt. Jackson and I helped Elle decorate the house for Christmas yesterday, but after hearing the news of her rejection, I could no longer bear to look at them.
Willing all that away, I analyze the vehicles. I see nothing worth noting there at the school, and any burgeoning hopes I might’ve had begin to collapse under the weight of this herculean task.
It’s the cliched needle in a haystack.
My thoughts are circling the drain when Jackson grabs my arm. “What kind of car is that?”
I whip my head to squint where he’s pointing. About half a block down and across the road is a giant warehouse with five massive garage doors. It’s the sort of building that semi-trucks use to drop off their trailers full of merchandise overnight.
In amongst a set of six or seven such trailers, the nose of a car is poking out beneath the streetlight in the darkness. A car the color of a rusted pumpkin.
And if I’m not mistaken, on the front bumper is a bowtie emblem, demonstrating that its make is Chevrolet.