Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8) (32 page)

I blinked a few times, reading
it over and over. I put it aside and picked up another letter. This
was also from Elliot, addressed to his mother.

Dear mommy,

Please come get me. I am very
scared. I think that nurse Amy wants to kill me. I think she killed
Susan. I don’t want to be here anymore. Everyone is scared that Amy
will come after them next. She didn’t let me eat dinner for all of
last week until I started crying. Please come get me and take me
home. I love you. Elliot.

I swallowed hard and brought
out another letter from the bag. This one said Mildred Wachman from
Gold Beach, Oregon on the envelope but had no return address.
Inside the letter though, it was obvious who it was from.

Dear Aunt Mildred,

I keep writing you every day
but I still haven’t gotten a response. You never call or write or
visit and I’m so scared. After father died, I’ve had no one to turn
to and no one to talk to. We are not allowed to talk about death at
Sea Crest, and yet that’s all I see, all day long. The nurses
promise me that I’ll be allowed to go free, but the other day one
of them told me that I would need to be moved up to the fourth
floor in order to make room. I don’t want to go up there, that’s
where the children go to die. I don’t want to die, in fact I feel
better each day. Oh, please come see me Aunt Mildred and take me
out of here. You’re all I have left.

Love, Shawna.

I exhaled slowly, trying to
wrap my head around it all. My heart was still galloping from the
escape, my nerves still buzzing along on adrenaline. And yet, the
crazy thing was that the minute I found the bag, the fear seemed to
blow away from me, like the wind that was howling at the windows.
All these letters were from children pleading to be taken away,
that they were in danger and scared for their lives, letters that
were never mailed.

And souls that were never
found.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I just couldn’t believe it. I
sat cross-legged on the floor and rifled through the rest of the
bag but it was all the same. So much loss in one place.

Suddenly the door to the body
chute swung open, snapping me back to the danger, to the fear, and
I screamed as I tried to get to my feet, nearly falling into the
hole.

“
Perry!” Dex
cried out as he appeared in the doorway, looking down at me in
amazement, flashlight in hand. “Are you hurt? Oh, thank fuck you’re
here,” he said as he took a step toward me.

“
Get back!” I
screeched, trying to get to my feet. I put my hands out in front of
me. “Stay away from me!”

He looked absolutely
bewildered, sticking the flashlight into his jacket pocket, but I
wasn’t buying it.

“
Baby, it’s
me.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, my
heart getting another workout. “Yeah, well I thought it was you
earlier too.”

“
I ran into
Rebecca,” he said. “She’s gathering up our stuff and meeting us
down here. She told me what you guys saw. You saw my
doppelgänger.”

“
How do
I know
you’re
not the doppelgänger?”

He cocked his head and frowned.
“Because, baby, I’m me. And I’m yours. Ask me anything if you have
to. Or fuck, let me tell you a few things.”

“
Stay away,
I’m warning you.”

“
You know,
you’re awfully cute when you get all threatening and
stuff.”

“
I mean it.”
And I did. I think.

“
That
doesn’t mean I won’t start flapping my mouth. I
know
you, Perry
Palomino.”

He took two steps forward, eyes
never leaving my face, and I staggered backward only to hit my back
against a counter. He raised his palms at me. “I can tell you that
you hum Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to yourself as you brush your
teeth and I think it’s completely adorable. I can tell you that
when you eat, you like to get equal amounts of each different food
on your fork with every single bite. Drives me fucking crazy. I can
tell you—or show you—exactly how you like to be kissed, how you
like to be touched, what I do to make you come in five seconds
flat.”

With his palms still up, he
came forward another step. “I can tell you that I’m head over heels
in love with you. That this…” He paused and breathed in deeply, his
eyes glittering. “What we have, it consumes me. It devours me. And
it scares me more than anything we have ever encountered, because
if I ever lost you, if I ever had to live without you, I wouldn’t
be whole. You, Perry, have my heart. You are my heart.”

My breath hitched as I was lost
in his words, lost in his eyes as they looked deeper into me than
ever before.

“
Do you still
need convincing?” he asked in a low, husky voice, taking another
step forward.

I didn’t. I knew this was Dex.
My man, right in front of me. Still, I could never pass up the
opportunity to hear him say these wonderful words, to hear him
speak from his soul.

So I nodded. I needed more
convincing.

His mouth ticked up into a
smile. “Well then…”

He briefly closed his eyes,
exhaled through his nose, and shook out his limbs. If I didn’t know
any better, I’d say he was nervous as hell.

Then he got down on one
knee.

For a moment I was completely
puzzled, like what the fuck is he doing, why is getting on his
knees? My first thought was that it was something sexual and kinky.
My second thought was that something was scary and wrong. After
all, we were in an abandoned post office; the door to the body
chute was still open, and a storm was raging outside.

My third thought
was…
holy shit. Holy shit! Is
he proposing to me?

“
I was waiting
for the right time,” he said, staring intently at me, his voice
shaking slightly, “but you’re right—I do have shitty fucking
timing. So I might as well embrace that. And so, here it
goes.”

He reached out for my left
hand, never taking his eyes off me.

I felt like I was about to
black out.

This couldn’t be happening.

This had to a dream. A
beautiful, crazy, amazing dream.

I needed him to pinch me.

Instead he said, “When I
first met you, I knew, somehow, that you were going to change my
life. I just didn’t know in what way. I didn’t know that you’d make
me love you. And most importantly, I didn’t know that you’d make me
love
me
. Baby, you make me see the good in myself and the good in
everything on this damn earth. You chase my ghosts away, and…” He
cleared his throat, and to my surprise, I saw his eyes were
watering.

Oh fuck. Please don’t cry, Dex,
cuz I will fucking lose it.

He swallowed hard, blinking
tears back. “And you bring me peace. I can’t thank you enough for
being in my life. And I want you there for the whole journey.
Through everything—the good and the bad, the batshit crazy and the
sane, the scary and the sexy. Especially the sexy. Just you and me,
baby, until death do us part.”

Somehow I found my voice. “Even
though we’ve only known each other for eight months?” I asked
quietly, afraid of his answer.

But he just smiled up at me.
“Time has no bearing on the truth. And what we have, that’s true as
fucking anything.” He gave my hand a squeeze and reached into his
pocket.

I sucked in my breath, feeling
all my emotions flood me at once, and watched as he took out a
beautiful, sparkling ring, and held it poised at my finger. He
gazed at me, and it was like I saw every moment we had with each
other captured in his eyes.

“
Perry
Palomino, kiddo, baby—will you be my wife?”

I didn’t even have to think
about it.

“
Yes!” I
blurted out in a sob as the tears started coming. I put my hand to
my mouth, trying to control myself, but it was useless. I was a
goner. “Yes, I will be your wife.”

A single tear rolled down his
cheek, which he didn’t wipe away. His face broke out into the most
breathtaking smile I had ever seen, a smile of absolute pure joy,
the same joy that I felt bursting out of me like hot butterflies.
He slid the ring onto my finger and it sat there perfectly, like it
was custom made for me, vintage-style with shimmering stones that
sparkled like heaven.

“
It was meant
for you,” he said, voice still choked up. “Just like you were meant
for me. My future wife.” He got to his feet and cupped my face in
his hands. “My god, I’m going to do whatever I can to make you
happy.”

I smiled, sniffling back the
tears. “You can start by pinching me. This doesn’t feel real.”

He grinned cheekily. “Oh,
I’ll show you how real this is.” He kissed me passionately, just
the way I loved to be kissed, and reached around to grope my ass.
He snuck in a pinch, a wonderfully sharp pain. Yup. That hurt.
And
this
was real.

I buried my head into his neck
as he held me close to him, our bodies melding into each other,
giving each other support and strength.

Holy fuck. Oh my god. Dex just
asked me to marry him.

I was going to be Mrs. Declan
Foray.

Me.

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my
god.

“
How you
feeling?” he murmured, pulling away and gazing down at me. He wiped
the tears away from under my eyes.

“
I feel like
I’m going to die from excitement,” I said. “I feel like I want to
tell the whole world we’re getting married.” I pulled him close to
me and kissed him. “I feel like I want you to show me that thing
where you can make me come in five seconds flat.”

He groaned lustfully. “My
fiancé is a wild one.” He slid his hands under my shirt, feeling my
skin. “Unfortunately, I do think we should probably get the hell
out of here.”

I nodded. I’d been so over the
moon, so crazy overwhelmed about his proposal that I had completely
forgotten where we were. Damn fucking reality. I pulled away and
looked over at the body chute’s door. “How did you find me
anyway?”

He glanced at it over his
shoulder. “Rebecca told me that you disappeared into the autopsy
room. I figured if you were going to find a way out, you would go
through the chute. I went through on the first floor and just kept
walking, calling for you.”

My chest tightened at the
memory of the doctor, the sounds that the
bad thing
was making in the
tunnel. “Did you see anything?”

He shook his head and tucked a
strand of my wayward hair behind my ears. “No, nothing. Then I came
across the little woodpile in there, and it looked like you might
have wormed your way through it.”

“
And Rebecca
is back at the school alone?”

“
She should be
here any minute. As soon as I found you, I said we were getting the
fuck out of there.” He glanced down at the mailbag near the hole in
the floor. “What’s that?”

“
Something
very
interesting,” I informed him. I went over to it
and bent over to pick it up. My ring gleamed on my finger as I did
so and I did a whoop of joy inside my head.

I was engaged!

Oh man, it was going to take a
long time for me to get used to that.

I brought the mailbag up for
him to see. “This whole bag is filled with letters written by
patients, letters that never made it to their final destination. In
every one of these, a child is telling their loved ones that they
are scared for their lives, and that abuse is happening in the
hospital. Obviously, whoever was working here at the post office
didn’t want these letters to see the light of day. But now, they’re
going to have to.”

He frowned, turning an envelope
over in his hand. “What are you going to do?”

“
We’re going
to take this down to the museum and give it to Gary Oldman and
whoever else works there, and we’re going to make sure that this
comes to light. I want every single letter to be read and I want
everyone to know the truth of what happened at Sea
Crest.”

“
This is
getting to be a very Scooby-Doo ending.”

I shrugged. “Call it what you
want, but there was a grave injustice done here. If we can expose
this place, maybe then the haunting will stop. The demons, Shawna,
the doctor, they all seem to be held here like they’re bound by a
grudge or revenge, eaten up by what happened. Even Shawna is
keeping Elliot here, preventing him from moving on. I don’t know,
but I bet once these patients are recognized for what happened to
them, the ghosts will leave. And people like Brenna and Jody,
everyone in the school, they will be safe.”

Dex smiled shrewdly.

I gave him an odd look.
“What?”

“
I think you
found your calling, Mrs. Future Foray.”

I couldn’t help but grin at the
way he addressed me. “What do you mean?”

“
You know the
story of the Warrens, don’t you? They were the couple—a married
couple—who were responsible for investigating the Amityville case,
the Perrons, the Smurl haunting. They founded the New England
Society for Psychic Research. They didn’t just hunt ghosts; when
they could, they banished them, like a mini exorcism, or something
like it. Encountering a truth, figuring out the reason for the
haunting, and then fixing it.”

“
So you’re
saying that could be us?”

Now it was his turn to shrug.
“I don’t know. I’m just saying, if we aren’t going to be chasing
ghosts for entertainment, maybe we can use our, um, abilities, for
something good.”