Night Film

17

They escorted me across the grounds to the Security Center, a boxy cinder-block bunker away from the other buildings at the edge of the woods. We entered a stark lobby, where a toad-faced guard sat behind glass. I was led down a hall past rooms buzzing with monitors, each displaying jumpy black-and-white shots of corridors and classrooms.

“Is this the part where I get waterboarded?” I asked.

They ignored me, stopping beside the open doorway at the end.

Nora was there, hunched on a metal folding chair at the center of a yellow-carpeted room with plywood walls. Thankfully, she appeared to be out of character, biting her nails, staring wide-eyed up at Elizabeth Poole — now so red-faced she appeared to be radiating thermonuclear heat. Beside her, perched on the edge of a desk, was a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair. He was wearing ironed khaki slacks and a bright Easter egg — blue sweater.

“Scott,” he said, rising and extending his hand. “I’m Allan Cunningham. President of Briarwood Hall. Very nice to meet you.”

“Pleasure’s all mine.”

He smiled. He was one of those beaming men not merely clean-cut but spick-and-span, with the unblemished complexion one usually finds on babies and nuns.

“So, Nora,” he said, looking down at her and smiling — she actually smiled back—“whose pseudonym today I understand has been Lisa. She’s been explaining that you guys aren’t potential guests, as you claimed, but here to dig illegally for information on a former patient.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Ashley Cordova. She escaped from your care and died ten days later. We’re trying to determine if there was misconduct on the part of the hospital, which directly resulted in her death.”

“There was no misconduct.”

“You admit, then, Ashley Cordova was a patient here.”

“Absolutely not.” It was taking considerable effort for Cunningham to keep that broad grin on his face. “But I will say there have been no breaches in patient safety.”

“If Ashley was authorized to leave with an unidentified male in the middle of the night, why did the hospital file a missing-person’s report the next day?”

He looked incensed, but didn’t answer.

“She was Code Silver. The acute-care unit. They’re not authorized to leave without a guardian. So someone at the hospital must have been asleep at the wheel.”

He took a deep breath. “Mr. McGrath, this is not a public hospital. You’re subject to trespass laws. I could have you both taken straight to jail.”

“Actually, you can’t.” I unzipped my pocket, handing him a folded brochure. “You’ll find that, in addition to our concerns about Ashley, Nora and I are here to distribute materials about our religion, as we are legally allowed to do under Marsh versus Alabama, the Supreme Court ruling that upholds, under constitutional Amendments One and Fourteen, state trespass statutes do not apply to those involved in the distribution of religious literature, even if it takes place on private grounds.”

Cunningham surveyed my old Jehovah’s Witness brochure.

“Cute. Very cute,” he said. “You’ll be escorted off the premises. I’ll file a complaint with police. If I hear you or your friends—including the person sleeping in your car — try to enter our grounds again, you’ll be arrested.”

He crumpled up the brochure, making a nice rim-shot with it in the trashcan by the door. I was about to thank him for his time, when sudden movement in the window behind him caught my attention.

A woman was racing through the woods along the dirt path encircling a deserted construction site, her red hair flashing in the sun. She was wearing pink nurse’s scrubs with a white cardigan and appeared to be in a serious hurry, heading straight for our building.

Cunningham glanced over his shoulder out the window, but then turned back, nonchalant.

“Do I make myself clear, Mr. McGrath?”

“Crystal.”

Cunningham nodded at the guards, and they escorted us outside.

We filed down the sidewalk around the construction site. Lisa, for all her bad-girl scowling, certainly looked docile now. As we walked between the two guards she shot me countless freaked-out, what-are-we-going-to-do-now? looks — all of which suggested she was relishing this clash with authority. If you could even call these security officers authority. They looked like La-Z-Boys.

Farther down the path, I noticed that nurse again — the same redhead I’d spotted out the window. She’d just stepped out of nowhere and was rushing toward us, staring emphatically at the ground. But when we were just a few yards away, she jerked her head up, staring agitatedly right at me.

I stopped in surprise.

She only picked up her pace, veering onto another route leading around the back of a dormitory.

“Mr. McGrath. Let’s go.”

When we reached the parking lot, news of a security breach appeared to have traveled around the hospital, because we had a handful of onlookers — nurses, administrators, shrinks — standing on the front steps of Dycon, watching our procession.

“A going-away party,” I said. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Kindly make your way to your vehicle,” the guard ordered.

I unlocked the car, and the two of us climbed in. Hopper was still passed out in the back. He looked like he hadn’t moved.

“Why don’t you make sure he has a pulse?” I muttered, starting the engine.

I eased out of the parking space, edging the car toward the exit. There were people still milling around Dycon, watching us, but no sign anywhere of that redhaired nurse. Had she wanted me to follow her? Surely she’d have seen with the security guards it was impossible.

“He has a pulse,” chirped Nora happily, turning back. “That was a close call, huh?”

“Close? No. I’d call that a bull’s-eye.”

I made a right, accelerating out onto the main road that would get us the hell out of here, a dizzying two-minute drive through the woods.

“You mad or something?” Nora asked.

“Yes. I’m mad.”

“How come?”

“Your little Houdini act back there? You didn’t just draw attention to us. You drew a red circle around us and added a They are here arrow. Next time bring a mariachi band.”

She huffed, fiddling with the radio.

“Right now Cunningham’s on the phone with Ashley’s family — Cordova himself, probably — telling him a reporter named Scott McGrath accompanied by a white cracker Floridian is snooping around his daughter’s medical history. Any hope I had at keeping this investigation quiet is gone now, thanks to you, Bernstein. Which brings me to your acting. I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, but you need to rethink your life purpose.”

I checked the rearview mirror. A blue Lincoln had just appeared behind us — in the front seats, the unmistakable boxy forms of the security officers.

“Now we’ve got Mumbo and Jumbo tailing us,” I muttered.

Nora excitedly whipped around in the seat to look. The girl was about as stealthy as a semi hauling a wide load.

We sped down the hill, rounding a grove of trees. I counted about fifteen seconds between the time our car rounded a curve and the blue sedan appeared behind us. I pressed harder on the gas, racing around another bend.

“Bet I got more on Ashley than you,” Nora announced.

“Oh, yeah? What’ve you got?”

She only shrugged, smiling.

“Bupkis. Exactly.”

We sped around another turn, the road straightening and intersecting with a dirt service road. I paused at the stop sign and was just starting to floor it when suddenly Nora screamed.

That woman—the redheaded nurse — was crashing out of the steep wooded bank just to our right, running directly in front of our car.

I slammed on the brakes.

She fell forward against the hood, red hair spilling everywhere. For a horrified moment I thought she was hurt, but then she lifted her head, racing around the car to my side, leaning in an inch from the window.

She stared in at me — her brown eyes bloodshot, her freckled face desperate.

“Morgan Devold,” she shouted. “Find him. He’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“What?”

“Morgan. Devold.”

She lurched back in front of the car and ran to the shoulder, scrambling up the steep embankment just as the blue sedan appeared behind us.

Frantically she was crawling on her hands and knees up the hill, sliding in the leaves and dirt. She reached the summit and wrapped her cardigan around herself, pausing to stare down at our car.

The guards had pulled up behind us and beeped.

They hadn’t seen her.

I took my foot off the brake and — still intoxicated with shock — we continued down the drive, though in the rearview mirror, just before we rounded the next bend, I saw the woman was still standing on the hill, a gust of wind whipping that red hair into her face, blotting it out.