Secrets to the Grave

35

Dennis was angry. Miss Navarre hadn’t shown up all day. He had waited for her, looked for her, asked the stupid nurses where she was and when she was coming. And she never showed up or called or anything.

He had even done his stupid reading assignment and everything. How could she just not show up?

Maybe she was dead. Maybe she was in a car accident and ran her car into the back of a tractor-trailer and cut her stupid head off. That would be funny. He could picture her decapitated head still lecturing him as it lay on the pavement.

That made him laugh.

She would have asked him why he thought that was funny.

He imagined running up and kicking her head like a soccer ball, and her head flying through the air. He wouldn’t have to listen to her then.

He laughed harder, but held his pillow up to cover his face so no one would hear him.

The hospital was quiet now. All the crazies were drugged and in bed asleep instead of babbling to themselves in the halls and in the common rooms. The lights in the rooms were off. The lights in the halls were low.

Dennis liked this time of night. He knew what time the nurse would come by. Sometimes he would pretend to be asleep, then a few minutes later he would sneak out of his room and roam around in the dark. He liked the idea that just about everyone else was asleep and he could pretend he had the place to himself and could do anything he wanted.

Sometimes he would sneak into other people’s rooms and just stand there watching them sleep, imagining the things he could do to them if he still had his knife.

Sometimes he would hide in the lounge near the nurses’ station, waiting. Arlene, the skinny head nurse on the night shift, smoked, and she would go outside to do it because smoking wasn’t allowed in the building. The short, fat nurse, Betty, would go with her, and then no one was at the desk.

They were never gone for more than ten minutes, but in ten minutes Dennis could sneak behind the desk and steal stuff. He never took big things. He would steal a pen or some paperclips or candy the nurses kept stashed. Or he would go into the trash and steal a newspaper someone had already thrown away.

He had never been a very good reader, but now it was the only way he could find out what was going on in the world outside the hospital—other than his preferred method of eavesdropping. He always looked for articles about Peter Crane or the Dodgers.

Nowadays the stories with Crane in them were about the trial that would happen sometime soon. There had been all kinds of delays already, and pretrial motions—which Dennis really didn’t understand. But there would always be a paragraph about Dr. Crane and what he had all-ed-ged-ly done to Miss Navarre, and how he was suspected in those murders where the women had their eyes and mouths glued shut. That was the part Dennis liked to read about.

He imagined now what it would be like to glue Miss Navarre’s eyes and mouth shut so she couldn’t look at him or tell him what he shouldn’t do. That would be cool.

Nurse Betty walked past his door without looking in.

Dennis slipped out of his bed. He counted under his breath to a hundred, then cracked the door open and stuck his head out to see if the coast was clear. The hall was empty.

He went out into the hall in his stocking feet because that way he didn’t make any noise at all, and he could run and slide on the slippery floor. He scurried from shadowed doorway to shadowed doorway to the intersection of hallways where the nurses’ station was.

The two nurses were at the desk yakking away while Arlene dug in her purse for her cigarettes. Then they were on the way down the hall away from Dennis, going for the front door.

Dennis slipped behind the counter, eyes scanning the lower counter for good stuff. He grabbed some Jolly Ranchers from a candy dish and stuck them in a pocket of his pajama bottoms. He pulled the front page of the newspaper out of the trash and scanned it, his heart jumping at the big black headline: GRUESOME MURDER ROCKS RURAL OAK KNOLL.

Dennis got so excited he thought he might pee his pants. A murder! A gruesome murder! Maybe someone had murdered Miss Navarre.

He folded up the paper and tucked it under his arm. He was about to beat it out of there with his treasures when he spotted Arlene’s purse sitting open on the desk.

The bag was huge and full of all kinds of junk that looked like it had just been thrown into it like it was a garbage bag. Her wallet was on top. Dennis glanced down the hall. No sign of the nurses coming back.

Very carefully, he opened the wallet. There was a lot of cash. Maybe a hundred dollars. He wanted to take it all, but then she would know she’d been robbed. Better to take what she wouldn’t miss right away. He pulled out a twenty from a bunch of twenties, and one ten out of four, and a couple of ones, and stuffed the money in his other pocket.

He was about to put the wallet back when his eye caught on something deeper in the bag. A yellow Bic lighter. It must have been her spare. Now that was a prize.

Dennis lifted the lighter and hurried out of the nurses’ station. He made his way back to his room the same way he had come, ducking from recessed doorway to doorway. He was halfway to his room when he heard the nurses coming back. The soles of their shoes squeaked against the floor every few steps.

Dennis held still where he was for what seemed like forever, waiting for one of them to come down the hall and catch him. But they stopped at the nurses’ station and Nurse Betty said, “Jeez, Arlene, you left your purse sitting open. You should stick it in a drawer. One of the crazies will make off with it.”

Dennis snickered to himself and shot down to the next doorway and the next doorway to his room.

He flicked the lighter a couple of times, just to watch the flame burn, excited at the prospects of what he might do with it. Burn this fucking place to the ground.

But not tonight.

Tonight he stashed all his new treasures in his special hiding place under the mattress, and climbed in bed to sleep over the top of them and dream dreams of bright orange flames ... and freedom.