HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A hand came down on her shoulder. She looked up and saw the detective, Milliner, smiling down at her. He was smiling, though the bags beneath his bloodshot eyes looked big enough to drop dimes in.

“Here. I got this for you in the gift shop.” He handed her a book with a glossy cover. It was by Dan Brown, the kind of bestselling writer she didn’t read, but the gesture softened her. Only a little. Her desire to escape swelled in her, rising in her throat and chest. They were loading her into the ambulance.

“Please,” she said to him. “Let me go. I don’t even know what’s going on. I want out.”

Tom leaned down over the gurney. The EMTs backed away to give him a moment, sensing the situation.

“Right now, it’s this, or it’s jail. Just take the ride, kid, okay? You can still decide when you get there.” He searched her eyes. “But I hope you make the right choice.”

“This is . . . this can’t be legal.”

“I won’t force you to do anything. I just want you to see. You can make up your own mind.”

They piled into the ambulance. It was a short ride to Red Rock Falls, only seven miles from Lake Meer. The hospital in Meer, Little Rock, was a single floor. No one really stayed overnight or got admitted to Little Rock, there was no operating theatre. Red Rock Medical Center in the Falls was a three-story facility with an OB-GYN, physical therapy, pediatrician’s office, and all the rest.

Once around back at the emergency entrance, Elizabeth was wheeled inside. They crowded into an elevator and went up two flights. It was sterile and claustrophobic. Liz thought she might scream. No one spoke on the trip up, except for a PA, talking low on his cell phone, perhaps to his wife.

The doors opened and Liz saw that everyone on the floor outside of the elevator was watching them. One woman, behind the desk, looked like she was about to cry. Everyone was motionless.

Then someone began to clap. Then they all started to clap. The woman behind the desk now had tears making bright tracks under the fluorescent lights. Liz was wheeled past. She looked up at Milliner, whose face was inscrutable he walked along beside her.

“I haven’t signed anything yet,” Liz said. It was a whisper. She didn’t want to upset anyone.

The clapping tapered off and people starting busying themselves again.

Maddy said, “Here it is,” and they turned into a new room.

There was a doctor in the room, and two more nurses.

Liz was confused. She saw no other patient. There was another bed, and it looked like it had been slept in, with rumpled covers, but no patient lay there.

And then they wheeled her close, side-by-side with the other bed, and when she looked at their faces, she saw expectation; hope. She didn’t understand. Then Liz heard a noise. It was a tiny voice, and the covers on the bed beside her moved, and a little fist came out, unfurled small pink fingers, and then closed again. Someone, one of the other nurses, delicately pulled back the blanket and a round little blonde head was revealed.

A child, in the bed next to her, head turned away. Then the head lifted, turned, and resettled; a boy. Sleeping. Maybe two, maybe three years old, she didn’t know. And then he pursed his lips, wrinkling the skin under his button nose, and yawned.

Liz could not speak, could not move, as she saw the baby boy’s eyes were swollen and stuck shut, a greenish film along the eyelashes of an otherwise perfect porcelain face. His long and full yawn made Liz think, for some reason, of a lion cub. His little mouth snapped shut, and he lifted his head and suddenly started to cry.

“Okay,” said the doctor, “We don’t have too much time.”

They all stood around, looking down at Liz.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Thomas,” someone said. He thought for a moment it might be his mother.

Tom Milliner opened his eyes. Maddy was standing there.
Kruger
, they sometimes still called her, as they had in high school. It wasn’t his mother, no.

Tom was in a bed in one of the few unoccupied rooms. He looked out the window. The corner of day that he could see was grey, the light failing.

“How long have I been out?” Tom sat up, rubbing at his temple with the heel of one hand, and waving his other in the air, trying to get his watch to circle back around on his wrist so that it faced up. It was just after four.

“A couple hours. Not too long,” said Maddy. “I’m sorry to wake you, hon . . .” Maddy looked tired too, but she carried it well. Maybe it was makeup, but Tom didn’t think so. Maddy had some special sort of batteries. Some reserve of energy that came from he didn’t know where. Not coffee — Maddy didn’t drink it. Tom knew this because he’d asked her to join him for a cup on more than one occasion.

“What? Is everything all right? The baby? Elizabeth? Is she—”

“The baby is fine. Elizabeth’s fine. They’re about to go into surgery now.”

“Oh,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed. “Where do I get suited up?”

“Oh no,” said Maddy. She was acting strange, Tom thought. Her behavior reminded him of when they were young, how she acted when she had a secret.

“Then what?”

“You have to look outside,” she said. There was a giddiness to her manner.

Tom snorted and got to his feet where a coughing fit took him by surprise. Maddy patted his back until it subsided.

“What’s outside?” he asked, choking a bit.

“Just go and look.”

Tom walked toward the window. Maddy stayed where she was. He stopped halfway across the room and looked back at her. She only nodded her head at him, still with that girlishness about her. “I don’t know what it means,” is all she said.

Across the road from the hospital was Lake Colden. In the marshaling dusk and early spring temperature, the water, only weeks after ice-out, appeared bituminous. The sky above was a skin of grey, blotched and swirled with darker discolorations. The mountains rising beyond the lake were green-black, ragged with trees and garlands of snow.

Tom’s gaze moved to the parking lot and the lawn between the lot and Route 4, and there he saw them.

Ten or so kids were standing on the lawn.

They weren’t in a line, they weren’t in a cluster, but loosely,
freely
spaced, he thought. Some wore sweatshirts. Some with the hoods up. Most wore black. Some were dressed in cargo pants, he saw, as he squinted, cupping his hands around his eyes, and one or two had pants that were camouflaged. A couple were wearing what looked like peacoats, like sailors ashore, and still a couple here and there had on black winter hats — or “tuques,” as his mother had called them. The group was drably dressed, to say the least.

He’d seen kids just like these around in town, the ones he called Goth kids and the press called
Millennials
.

“What’re they doing?” Maddy asked the question behind him, sounding like she still hadn’t moved. There was still a kind of excitement in her voice.

“Jesus.” Tom pulled his weapon out and checked it. He turned and started marching away from the window, out of the room.

“Hey!” called Maddy, stopping him for a second. He heard her clip-clop across the floor to him, and turned back around. She came up next to him, her perfume arriving a second or two after she did. She took him by the arm.

“Maddy,” he said.

She led him back across the room, and crowded against him there, by the window. “What do you think they’re doing?” She eyed the young men on the lawn. Tom didn’t look there. Instead he craned his neck, leaning back away from Maddy in order to see her. His eyes were no good up-close, and his glasses were in his hunter’s coat on the chair next to the bed. He hadn’t put them back on after he’d shut his eyes the morning before, but he’d thought to bring them along.

Maddy massaged her hands on the window sill. It was a nervous thing, Tom thought, but born of nervous excitement, not anxiety. His own heart was pounding. “I think,” she began, “I think maybe they’re here for a reason,” she said. “Anyway, who are you to trample the right to Free Assembly?”

“Maddy, you have to let me go.” But he couldn’t help but look back down.

The moment lingered, the two of them standing there watching the twelve young men (Tom counted them) standing on the front lawn of Red Rock Medical Center.

At last, Tom turned from the window, walked quickly across the room to the chair by the bed and scooped up his hunting coat. “I’m going out there,” he said, and left the room without looking back.

* * *

Tom weaved through the cars, his .38 drawn. He held the firearm with one hand, pointing down, swinging by his thigh.

The parking lot was six rows of twenty or so spaces apiece. The lot impinged on the hospital length-wise, so it didn’t take him long to cross it and reach the far curb, which bordered the lawn. Right away he notice that there were fewer kids than before. He did a fresh count to confirm it.

He looked around behind him, in between the cars for movement. Seeing none, he looked beyond the lawn and across the road, along the bank of Lake Colden. There were two picnic tables there on the long, narrow patch of grass abutting the lake, but no people. Tom looked both ways, up and down Route 4. Nothing. No one walking. Only one car — headlights at least a quarter mile away — coming in his direction. He surveyed the parking lot again, listening, watching for a car or truck to pull out of a space, a door to bang open or closed, a dome light to wink out.

Nothing.

Red Rock Medical Center was on the edge of town. It wasn’t impossible to walk here, not at all; it might be a fifteen or twenty minute walk from anywhere aside from the neighboring car dealership and lumber yard, but it was doable. Still, Route 4 was a straightaway along the lake here. It had taken Tom no more than a minute to get downstairs and outside. Anyone on foot would still be visible, unless they had gone around to the back of the hospital, and into the tract of woods there.

With Tom’s next step, he was on the grass, where he stopped again, the .38 still down at his side. He looked at the faces of the young men.             

Each one of them was ostensibly watching the hospital, but each wore the same vacant look as the kids in his driveway the night before. Well, not exactly
vacant,
Tom thought, something more like
contentment
was visible on the faces of these young men. A rightfulness
to each of them, in their posture, in their countenance, as if each one of them were in the only spot, the exact place they could be, or should be, at the moment. That wasn’t just a feeling, he reasoned, it was an assessment of the evidence before him. There was no skulking here, no air of mischief. They just were
there
.

“Hey,” said Tom, and had to clear his throat. “What are you guys doing?”

As he had expected, none of them replied. And, as he had also anticipated, none of them even acknowledged his presence.

Tom grinned, just a curl of a smile on his face.

“You boys come here often?”

Still none of them said a word. None of them even looked over at the balding investigator who had barely slept in the last twenty-four hours, let alone the last three months. Not an eye twitched in his direction.

Tom started moving among them. The closest kid was only a couple of yards away, and Tom walked slowly by him, not with any menace, but perhaps to get a scent of something, weed, maybe, or booze. It was the same procedure he’d first gone through with Christopher, and then the boys outside his house in the Acres.

As he passed the young man, the wind blew off from the lake and in the direction of the hospital, chilling the air as it came. Tom heard breathing — at least he could verify that the kid was alive, he thought. He felt giddy, then, something like how Maddy might have felt; as he walked into the midst of the rest of them he experienced the sense of something in the air. It wasn’t quite electricity — no, but a kind of
thinness,
like you’d expect at high altitudes. Only in this case, it was simultaneously the opposite, as though there were an abundance of oxygen surrounding the boys on the hospital’s front lawn, instead of the dearth one expects at high climes. It was the extra oxygen, imaginary or real, that might have been making him feel loopy.

And then, yes, if he stopped moving and listened, there it was. A faint noise in the background, not unpleasant, but like a machine left on somewhere, a child’s toy with its tiny gears whining.

He reached up and smoothed back the remaining hairs on top of his skull.
Just a fresh-air night, a brisk spring night in the mountains
, he told himself.

And then it all passed.

By the time Tom moved into what could roughly have been called the center of the group, the giddiness was being overtaken by impatience. He may not have been a Gestapo-style cop, but he was human. If this was a prank of some kind, maybe, or if it were some kind of vigil, or a religious thing, or even some absurd protest, Tom was getting edgy for an answer. This was three times in twenty-four hours, for God’s sake, he’d been amid these
drones
of human beings, and enough was enough. And if you counted the girl, with her slip into some kind of catatonia, then it was even more. Call it the stirring of the sleeping alcoholic, repressed grief over the loss of his would-be wife and surrogate son, call it simple fatigue, Tom Milliner was finally starting to get agitated.

“Alright, guys, disperse. Let’s get out of here. Go home. Whatever you’ve got going, it’s over. People in there are working, and they don’t need distractions.”

Tom started swinging his hands out, the .38 gripped in one, the other palm-out, making shooing gestures at the young men like one might make at pigeons or cattle. “Come on. Let’s go. I’m with the Red Rock County Sheriff’s Department and I’m telling you to disperse. You’re causing a scene.”

Not a single movement. Not a blink. The group of young men, faces calm with that unmistakable
rightfulness
, their eyes sparkling, some wearing black hats, some with their hoods up, one or two in coats, all in dark jeans or cargo pants, they didn’t budge. Nor did they stand like stones. They stood like ghosts.

“You don’t get moving and you’re all going to get arrested.” Tom’s voice rose into almost a shout. He plucked his cell phone from the clip on his belt and flipped it open, thumb poised over the buttons. He didn’t want to have to get local Red Rock PD down here, but he didn’t want to call the Sheriff either. Not just yet. Besides, the lights and the commotion would only mean more distraction for those inside. There was a baby boy to consider, his life on the line.

“Alright, goddammit,” said Tom, and bent his arm and lifted and pointed the .38 at the sky, ready to fire one shot to get them scampering. One loud disruption would be the lesser evil than the prolonged commotion of arresting all the remaining ten of them. His finger was on the trigger, he was seconds away from discharging the firearm when he stopped.

There were no longer ten of them.

Tom dropped the .38 down to his side again. He suddenly felt watched, and turned around to see someone in the window on the third floor. Maddy. There were other figures too — nearly half of the windows had curtains back and were occupied with silhouettes. Everyone who could stand had come to see outside.

The cell phone was still open in his other hand. His thumb hovered again over the numbers on the phone. He looked left, down the road, and then right, and then spun and looked over the cars and trucks and vans in the lot. Then he turned back to the scattered group again, and started to count them to be sure of what he was seeing.

Tom didn’t finish counting. As he approached eight, the eighth guy disappeared. It was one of the kids with a black tuque on. He was a good-looking kid with dark stubble and shining eyes. He had on dark green or brown cargo pants — it was tough to tell in the dusk. And then he was gone.

He didn’t run off, he didn’t dive out of sight (there was nowhere to hide, no bushes or shrubbery on the gently sloping swath of lawn) he just disappeared. At the same time Tom realized this, he heard a yell from the hospital behind him, an excited sound, almost like a “whoop!”

He felt sure it was Maddy.

Tom stayed where he was, phone forgotten, butt of the .38 and the fingers that wrapped around it pressed to the side of his chest, and looked quickly from kid to kid, reflexively counting yet again. This time he got up to no more than three when three — a kid with long hair in a ponytail, no hood, camouflage pants on — promptly disappeared as well.

There was no fanfare that came with the disappearing. No “pop” sound, no whoosh of air, no tinkling of bells, no odor, nothing. It was just a
goneness.
Like the
rightfulness
, there was now
goneness.
Tom cocked his head even and listened; if he could hear that high whistling, it was now faint enough to be a mosquito.