Thief River Falls

34

The hospital.

Somehow Lisa had always known that the road would take her back to the hospital. Sooner or later, that was where she had to go. She’d gone through those doors thousands of times in her life, and now she would have to go through them again. That was where she’d find the last piece in the puzzle about Purdue.

She sat in the Camaro in the hospital parking lot. The one-story brown-brick building sprawled over a flat lot in the middle of empty fields. It was night, but the parking lot was crowded, and people came and went through the doors. Emergencies didn’t punch a clock. She’d worked the graveyard shift as a nurse for years, and there were nights when she’d have hours of boredom where she could take out her laptop and write, and there were nights when she’d spent the whole shift literally running from room to room to keep up.

Lisa waited for the right moment. It didn’t take long. Two SUVs pulled up near the ER doors, and a crowd of people piled out of the vehicles, including a teenage girl who’d obviously injured her leg in some kind of high school sports accident. Several of the people with her were teenagers who wore uniforms from the local team, the Prowlers. Two adults carried the girl inside, two other adults called for help, and everyone else flooded into the hospital lobby with them, triggering what Lisa knew would be a chaotic scene of confusion and noise.

She got out of the Camaro and hurried across the snowy parking lot to slip into the hospital in the wake of the crowd. No one noticed her. The attendant at the desk was busy. Lisa put her head down and walked into the main corridor that led past the waiting room and into the treatment areas of the facility. The soft brown wood and ochre color on the walls was supposed to be soothing, but Lisa felt her heartbeat take off like a thoroughbred out of the gate. She could feel it beating madly in her chest, and to her ears, it sounded like the electronic beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor. She knew that sound only too well.

A nurse approached her from the other end of the corridor. Lisa knelt down, letting her hair fall in front of her face and fiddling with one of her shoelaces to avoid being seen. She made the mistake of looking up too soon and found the nurse staring right at her. The woman’s brown eyes widened with recognition. The nurse didn’t say anything or sound an alarm, but her shoes squeaked on the floor as she moved quickly away.

The nurse would tell everyone about her. Soon security would be looking for Lisa in the hallways. She thought about shouting questions after the nurse while she still had time.

Did you hear about the boy who disappeared two nights ago?

Did you see him?

Which doctor brought him in?

But Lisa didn’t need to ask those questions. She already knew which doctor had brought Purdue in from the parking lot. It could only be one person. She remembered what Purdue had said about Laurel’s reaction while the boy pretended to be asleep.

How did she look at you?

Like she knew who I was.

Lisa continued past the hospital rooms one by one. Most were empty. It was a quiet night. But she passed one room that was a hive of activity, and she found herself stopping to see what was going on. They’d forgotten to draw the curtain. A gray-haired man, easily in his eighties, lay under the white sheet of a hospital bed. A doctor and two nurses clustered around him. The doctor wore a white lab coat, and all three of them wore white masks. Something about the sheer volume of whiteness filled her with an inexplicable horror. White was the absence of color. White was the absence of life. The people in the hospital room didn’t look like caregivers, like people who would save you and protect you. Instead, they looked like angels come to collect a body, come to usher you from death to the other side. It made Lisa want to scream. She closed her eyes and covered up her face with her hands, but she didn’t see blackness on the other side of her eyelids. She saw white.

Everything was white.

She couldn’t get away from white.

Lisa stumbled down the corridor. When she found an empty room, she went inside and shut the door behind her. She kept the lights off, because she didn’t want white light. She went to the hospital bed and ripped off the white sheet and crumpled it up and stuffed it inside a drawer. She wanted nothing white in here at all, but she realized that she couldn’t escape it. The whiteness followed her wherever she went, chasing her when she tried to hide. She sat on a window bench, and outside, white snow poured down through the white tower lights of the parking lot.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She closed her eyes again. Her body was bathed in sweat, and her heart continued to race. Nothing felt real to her. Her lungs struggled for breath, and she was self-aware enough to realize that she was having a panic attack. She tried to coach herself to breathe more slowly, more deeply. She concentrated on her muscles and tried to relax them. Her arms, her legs, her chest. She opened her eyes to look for something she could focus on, and she picked the green EXIT sign outside the hospital’s rear door. The letters glowed at her, telling her there had to be a way out of this situation.

She heard words in her head: You are not going to die, my sweet.

Madeleine’s words. Madeleine’s voice. Her mother had told her that with a musical little laugh, when Lisa was thirteen years old and in the hospital to have her appendix removed. She’d been so scared, and her mother was right there to give her comfort and tell her that everything was going to be fine. That was what mothers did when their children were frightened or in danger. They protected them. They saved them. That was their job.

You are not going to die, my sweet.

But Lisa felt as if she really were about to die. No, that wasn’t even it. She wanted to die. She wanted to escape, to be done, to have this burden lifted from her heart. It was too much.

The door to the hospital room slid open.

The light went on, making Lisa wince at the brightness. Someone stood in the doorway, and it took her a few seconds to focus on who it was.

Laurel.

Laurel was here.

She wore her street clothes, so she didn’t look like a doctor. She came into the hospital room and shut the door behind her. The two of them were alone. She took a seat on the long bench near the window on the other side from where Lisa was sitting. Seeing Laurel made Lisa want to run, but part of her also wanted to know what she would say to defend herself.

How do you justify betraying a friend?

“You don’t look good, Lisa,” Laurel said.

“No?”

“No, you don’t. You’re sweating. You’re having trouble breathing. By the looks of it, I’d say you were having a panic attack.”

“I don’t need your diagnosis, Dr. March. I don’t need anything from you.”

Laurel let that remark sit there without challenging it. She kept staring at Lisa the way she always did, with her mind running in the background, showing nothing on her face. She was always so calm, so unflappable, so perfect with her hair in place and her long neck making her look like some kind of queen on the throne. Bombs could be falling around her, and her face would have that same expression.

“Do you want me to give you something to relax you?” Laurel asked patiently. “When did you last sleep?”

“If I sleep, where will I wake up? Underground, like Purdue? Or will I not wake up at all?”

“You’ll wake up right here,” Laurel replied. “I promise you, nothing will happen.”

“Forgive me if your promises don’t mean shit to me right now, Laurel.”

Laurel didn’t react to Lisa’s cursing. She removed a pen from the pocket of her suit and rolled it rhythmically between her fingers. She had the look of a chess player who was trying to figure out the best move.

“Curtis is okay, by the way,” Laurel told her. “In case you were concerned about that. There’s no skull fracture and no concussion. Just a lump the size of an orange on his skull. You remember hitting him, don’t you?”

“I remember him plotting to have the police kidnap me and Purdue at the airport,” Lisa replied.

Laurel shook her head. “We need to end this. It has to stop, Lisa.”

“It stops when Denis Farrell admits what he did. And when you admit what you did.”

“What did I do?” Laurel asked.

“Two nights ago. That woman from the trailer park took the boy to the hospital and flagged down a doctor in the parking lot. It was you, wasn’t it? You told her you’d take care of everything. How did you manage to get the boy inside without any record of it? Did someone help you? Wilson Hoke is the administrator here. He’s in Denis’s back pocket, always playing politics with the county board. Did Hoke find a way to keep this whole thing off the books?”

Laurel said nothing. She still had that same patient, infuriating look on her face.

“And then what?” Lisa went on. “What happened next, Laurel? How did it go wrong? Did you call Denis to tell him you had the boy? Did Purdue hear you talking on the phone?” Lisa nodded toward the window and the bright green EXIT sign outside. “He slipped out the back door, didn’t he? There was a delivery truck parked out there, and he hopped on board. You lost him. That’s when everybody really started to panic.”

Lisa studied the parking lot again. Out past the fields, she could see cars on the highway. She was no fool. Deputies Garrett and Stoll would be arriving any minute to take her away.

“You think you can put the genie back in the bottle, but you can’t,” she told Laurel. “It’s all going to come out. Do you really believe no one here knows about Purdue? The rumors are all over town, Laurel. People are talking about the boy who disappeared from the hospital. You think you can wave a magic wand and make people forget about that? What about the woman from the trailer park who brought Purdue here in the first place? Do you think she’s going to let it go? She’ll be back asking questions, just like me. She’ll recognize you. Everything has gone too far, Laurel. You can’t wish this away.”

Laurel kept playing with her pen. “Yes, you’re right. I’ve let this go too far.”

“Then do the right thing and come with me,” Lisa urged her. “We’ll pick up Purdue, we’ll drive to Minneapolis. We’ll find Will at the FBI, and you can tell him what happened. About Denis, Fiona, Nick Loudon, about what they tried to do to the boy. Look, I don’t know what influence Denis has over you, but I know how he controls and manipulates people. It’s time to make it stop. It’s time to fight back.”

She could see Laurel’s mind working fast. Laurel was smart. She’d always been smart. “Where do we pick up Purdue?” she asked. “Where is he, Lisa?”

Her friend said it so smoothly that Lisa almost trusted her again and walked right into the trap. She opened her mouth to say something, and then she snapped it shut again and closed her eyes and took another deep breath. “Oh, Laurel, why are you doing this?”

“I know you were at your parents’ house today,” Laurel went on. “Is that where you’re hiding the boy?”

Lisa’s eyes flew open, giving away the truth. “How do you know that?”

“You were seen, Lisa. You of all people should know that everyone recognizes you around here. You think you can come and go without the town knowing about it? Your next-door neighbor spotted you, and she called someone in her book club. As it happens, that was me.”

“When? How long ago?”

“Enough time to send people over there,” Laurel replied. “If he’s there, we’ll find him. That’s the way it has to be.”

Lisa’s voice was a low, angry hiss of despair. “You bitch. We’re talking about a ten-year-old boy.”

“Settle down, Lisa. Don’t upset yourself any further. Why don’t you let me get you that medication? You need to relax.”

But Lisa was already on her feet. She wasn’t going to wait to be taken in, and she wasn’t going to give up on a boy she’d sworn to rescue. She had to get home and see if Purdue had hidden in the crawl space. She needed to know if he was still there, or if the police had found him and taken him away from her.

Laurel stood up, too, blocking the way to the door.

“Stay here, Lisa. Please. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Get out of my way.”

When Laurel didn’t move, Lisa shoved her aside with a strength she didn’t even know she had. She yanked open the door to the hospital room and ran for the rear exit just a few feet away. The white world welcomed her back as she crashed through the door into the blizzard of snow. Driven by adrenaline, she sprinted for the Camaro. Inside the car, she fired the engine, making the tires screech as she sped through the slush.

Lisa reached the highway and turned north. When she glanced in her rearview mirror, she saw the red lights of a squad car arriving at the hospital parking lot. They were looking for her, but they were too late.

She left the hospital far behind as she drove into the night.