Revealed (8 page)

“Here they are, Dr. Plummer,” said the nurse, and she clapped her hands together and gave a tiny jump of excitement.

“Thank you so much,” said the doctor, and he came over to the three of us. He was a small man, maybe five six or so, with grayish-blond hair and glasses. Between his lab coat, the manila folder he held tucked under his arm, his pale hair, and his silver-rimmed glasses, he gave an impression of being almost completely white; I had the feeling I could pass him in a corridor and not even realize there was anyone there.

“So, you've come to see your father.” His voice was chilly but he grinned broadly, as if there was nothing he liked more than meeting the families of patients in the critical care ward.

Nia stood up. “Are you his doctor?” she non-answered.

Dr. Plummer swung his eyes from me to Nia. “I might be,” he said. There was something scary about the contrast between his cold voice and his bright smile, almost like he was two people in one body.

“Can we see him?” Callie took the flowers from Nia and held them toward the doctor. “We brought these.”

“Mmm, all in good time,” said Dr. Plummer, and he squinted slightly as he leaned forward to read our name tags. “Nia. Hal. Callie.” When he read Callie's, his voice sounded slightly disappointed, almost like he'd hoped she would be somebody else. “The three Thornhill children,” he announced. Then he stepped back and folded his arms. “Well, well, well. What brings you here?”

“We've made it clear. We're looking for Roger Thornhill,” Nia said. I wondered if her saying Roger Thornhill instead of “our dad,” meant she, too, had the feeling the jig was up.

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Plummer agreed. “You three do spend a great deal of time
looking
, don't you? Looking for people.”

I felt as if my body had been dipped in ice water.

“What?” Callie gasped.

“What's your point?” Nia's voice was sharp and she took a step toward the doctor. To my amazement, the guard, who had stationed himself by the door, took a step forward.

Dr. Plummer waved him back. “No, no, there's no need for all this . . . fuss.” He lowered his voice so he was practically whispering. “What have you found, you three?”

Nia ignored him. “Where is he?” she demanded.

“Where is
she
?” the doctor countered. His voice was a hiss of rage.

Nia seemed completely unconcerned by the doctor's anger. “We have no idea what you're talking about,” she said firmly. “We've come here to see Roger Thornhill.”

“So I've been told,” Dr. Plummer responded. “Unfortunately, Roger Thornhill is no longer at this hospital.”

“What?!” Callie cried.

Dr. Plummer shrugged, like he was terribly sorry he couldn't help us, then crossed over to where the nurse was sitting and placed the folder he'd been carrying on the counter in front of her.

“If you could file this when you have a moment,” he murmured, and she nodded. I wondered if there was some connection between the folder and Mr. Thornhill or if it concerned some other patient and he'd just happened to be carrying it when he got the news we were here.

“Has something happened to him?” Callie asked.

Dr. Plummer swung around and faced us, his face red with anger. “Why are you refusing to tell me what I want to know?”

“We have nothing to tell you.” Nia was in her fighting stance, arms crossed, one foot in front of the other. “If you're not going to tell us where Roger Thornhill is, then we're leaving.”

“Such
dedicated
children!” The doctor turned to the guard. “Isn't it touching, how much they love their father?”

The guard smirked but didn't speak.

Was this an emergency? Was it time to press the in case of emergency button?

“I'm so glad you're touched,
doctor
.” Nia spoke the last word with such sarcasm it was like an insult.

Or a question.

“Oh, yes, very.” Dr. Plummer squinted at us through his glasses, then took them off and began polishing them. “You know, it's a misdemeanor to impersonate a family member in order to gain access to a hospital patient.” Popping his glasses back onto his face, he stared at us through them. “And I believe you've
already
spent quite enough time with Orion's finest, am I correct? I don't know that they would be particularly . . . sympathetic to
you
, for instance, Mr. Hal
Thornhill
?” His gaze settled on me, and I tried to meet it.

It was Nia who spoke. “Are you threatening us?”

Instead of being offended, Dr. Plummer laughed. But it was a creepy, bitter laugh with no sense of humor in it. “Oh, no, my dear. I would never threaten three such lovely children. I might just . . . keep an eye on them. See what they were up to.”

“Talk about a
misdemeanor
!” Nia countered.

As abruptly as Dr. Plummer had started laughing, he stopped. “My dear young lady, know whose side you are on before you begin issuing legal threats.” He smiled to himself at the wisdom of his observation. “Yes, indeed. We should all know whose side we are on.”

A second later Dr. Plummer was walking through the double doors he'd come in, the guard close at his heels.

As soon as they were gone, Callie and I walked over to Nia and high-fived her.

“Nia,” I said. “You're a total Bond girl.”

“As if,” Nia corrected, snapping her head around and giving me a withering stare. “More like a total Bond.”

I put up my hands to indicate I'd meant no offense. Callie smiled weakly. I saw that her hand holding the bouquet was trembling.

“Here,” I said. “Give me that and let's get out of here.”

I reached toward the bouquet and for a second Callie seemed to be handing it to me, but then I felt her pulling it back.

“Wait!” she whispered. She glanced in the direction of the nurses' desk. “I have an idea.”

“What are you—” Nia started, but she broke off when she saw the nurse was staring at us.

“I suggest you three leave. Immediately.” She was standing behind her desk, grinning her freaky, cheerleader grin at us.

Barely moving her lips, Callie muttered, “Follow my lead,” and the three of us shuffled toward the nurses' station. When we were a few feet away from it, Callie said loudly, “Um, we have these flowers and it seems a shame to . . .” She shrugged, then seemed to slip on an invisible spot on the scuffed floor. Her right leg shot out and as she missed her footing, she got tangled up in Nia's leg. Nia shouted as she went down. An instant later, Callie had fallen across the counter, dropping the bouquet almost onto the nurse's lap.

“You
idiots
!” screamed the nurse, looking down at her soaked uniform. “You absolute idiots!” She brushed at the water that I could literally hear dripping all over the floor.

“Oh, I am so, so sorry,” Callie said. She was practically hanging over the nurses' desk. I heard the sound of tissues being pulled up from a dispenser and keys on a keyboard being depressed and released. “I think the keyboard's okay, but . . .”

“Get out of here!”
the nurse exploded.

Callie backed away from the nurses' station, helping Nia to her feet as she did so. “I'm really sorry, ma'am,” she said. The nurse took a step back and there was a large crunch. Callie added, “Careful of the glass!” before whispering, “Let's run.”

Nia and I didn't have to be told twice. We followed Callie out the doors and down the corridor, bagging the slow-moving elevator in favor of our own foot power and the stairs. As we raced down the empty, dimly lit, cement stairwell, I had time to think of all the movies I'd ever seen in which the criminal corners the protagonist in just such an abandoned setting, when at last Callie was pushing on a door marked
EXIT ONLY-NO REENTRY
and we were outside in the cool Orion dusk.

“What a
waste
.” I kicked angrily at the Dumpster in front of us.

“The ‘she' the doctor was talking about was Amanda, wasn't it?” asked Nia. “I mean, I'm not being crazy here, right?”

“I got it,” said Callie, from right behind me.

“Yeah, I figured,” said Nia, her voice thick with disappointment and frustration. “We all got it. The question is—why?”

“No.” Callie put one hand on Nia's shoulder and one on mine and turned us to face her. Unlike ours, her face was sparkling with excitement. “I mean, I got
it
.” She reached under her thick green poncho and pulled on something.

An instant later, she was holding in front of us a manila envelope with the words
Roger Thornhill
printed on the tab.

Nia clapped her hands and spun around on one spiky heel. “Oh my god,
you're
the Bond. I can't believe you used to spell your name with just an ‘i.'”

“I'll forget you said that,” said Callie, but her grin made it clear she didn't care
what
Nia said.

She flipped open the folder. It was thin enough that I hadn't exactly expected to find a novel inside, but I'd assumed there'd be a bunch of medical records and maybe some information about his next of kin or allergies to penicillin or something. Instead, there was only one piece of hospital letterhead containing three brief sentences.

“Roger Thornhill was admitted to Orion General Hospital on March 24 having suffered a TBI to his sphenoid resulting in intra-axial lesions. He was released on March 27 to Dr. Joy of Baltimore, Maryland, for further observation at his lab. Dr. Joy's initials below indicate he has possession of Mr. Thornhill's medical records.”

The name of the place where Mr. Thornhill was and the town it was in were crossed out with heavy black ink. The signature beneath was illegible. On the bottom of the page were scrawled two letters, the first of which could have been anything, the second of which seemed to be a J.

“He's gone,” Nia breathed.

Callie held the paper up to the darkening sky. “I can't read whatever's under this line. There's, like, not a letter visible.” Callie looked at us, her face a picture of disappointment. “I don't get it. Are we supposed to find this Dr. Joy?”

“How could she even know about him? She sent us to find Thornhill,” Nia countered.

“Or,” Callie offered, “she sent us to find Thornhill because she knew he would lead us to Dr. Joy.”

I thought of Frieda, who I hadn't heard back from, and how she, too, was in Baltimore. Was it just a coincidence that Amanda had taken me for a day trip to the same city where Dr. Joy had his lab? “Amanda knows this woman in Baltimore. An artist named Frieda. I met her once. Do you think there's a connection?”

“Then why not just send us to Baltimore to find Dr. Joy in the first place?” Nia sounded ready to weep with frustration. Both girls stared at me, their eyes seeming to beg me to do something.

But what could I do? I had no idea why Amanda had sent us the get-well-soon bouquet, why she'd left me the watch with the mysterious inscription, why Louise had given us the box we couldn't even open.

“We don't even know her last name!” I bellowed.

For the second time in my presence, Callie and Nia gave each other a Hal's-clearly-losing-it look. I'd let it go at Play It Again, Sam, but having them think I was crazy in addition to everything else that had happened that afternoon was just a little more than I could take.

“I'm outta here.” I marched over to my bike and unlocked it. When Nia and Callie called my name, I swung around to face them. “I'm not crazy!” I yelled at them. And then I thought of something. “But if I am, she
made me
that way.” I threw my leg over my bike and pedaled off into the rush-hour traffic as hard as I could.

Mine was definitely a dark night of the soul, and by the time I saw Callie in the theater's lobby after school, I was feeling totally embarrassed about the meltdown I'd had the previous day; when Callie greeted me like nothing had happened, I could have hugged her.

“Hey.” She smiled, gesturing to her backpack. “I've got the box.”

I gave her an only slightly forced thumbs-up, trying to be optimistic. Surely things had to start improving. Surely we wouldn't strike out again. By the end of today's rehearsal, we'd have discovered what was inside the box, and that would answer at least some of our questions about Amanda. I put my hand on Callie's back, and the “Great” I answered was full of hopeful enthusiasm.

Nia called out and waved to us from the other side of the lobby. Her electric-blue shirt hummed across the crowded space, and I remembered again the time when Nia Rivera had been all about blending in, disappearing into the crowd that was our grade. We made our way over to where she was standing, and when we got there, she snapped her gum once, as if chomping on those days when she'd denied herself her rightful place in the pantheon of cool. I knew it was heresy to say this, but compared to Nia, Cisco Rivera seemed to me to be just a good-looking guy who also happened to be a great athlete and decent person.

I wondered how much longer he'd be known as the “cool” Rivera sibling.

To her credit, Nia didn't refer to my storming off the previous day, either. “Okay, kids. We walk through that door, we sign in or whatever, then we sequester ourselves in the corner with
that
.” She pointed toward Callie's backpack.

“Totally,” Callie agreed, but I couldn't help sensing that her enthusiasm sounded a little muted.

“You okay?” I whispered as we followed Nia through the door and into the auditorium.

“Yeah, of course,” Callie said quickly. “It's just . . .”

Heidi Bragg's voice boomed from the front of the theater. “Just because I'll be dressed like a boy doesn't mean I won't look hot.” Sitting on the edge of the stage, she flipped her hair off her face and beamed out at the people sitting in the seats and milling around the auditorium, putting on a little pre-rehearsal show.

“It's . . . well, that,” Callie whispered, indicating Heidi with her chin.

When I'd suggested we use play rehearsal as a way to spend time examining the box, I'd totally forgotten about Heidi's being the star of the show, but now that I remembered, I felt terrible. “God, Callie, I wasn't thinking. Why don't we . . . Just leave the box with us, okay? It's crazy for you to have to be here.”

Nia stopped abruptly in the middle of the aisle, and Callie and I walked right into her.

“Hi. Klutzy much?” she asked, but the look on her face when she turned to Callie was more concerned than annoyed, and it made me wonder if she, too, had suddenly realized what our decision to meet here meant for Callie.

Nia and Heidi were ancient enemies. But with Callie and Heidi, the days-old wound hadn't begun to scar over.

“You know, Callie,” Nia said, her voice way too casual to be casual, “there's no reason for you to hang out if you'd rather . . .”

Callie tossed back her curly hair in a gesture that, ironically, was not unlike Heidi's and her eyes seemed to sizzle with defiance. “What, rather go home and wait by the phone? I don't
think
so, honey.”

Was it my imagination, or did she actually square her shoulders as she spoke?

At the sound of Callie's voice, Heidi's head swung in our direction. I waited for her to shout a nasty comment like the ones she'd hurled at Callie the day of the lunchroom showdown when Callie chose to sit at lunch with me and Nia rather than with her now former friends, the I-Girls. Instead, Heidi gave our threesome a long, long look, then turned away without saying a word.

Far from being relieved by her silence, I felt chilled to the bone. Heidi Bragg was one scary girl. From the time I'd arrived at Orion, I'd been hearing from all the guys in our grade how Heidi Bragg was “so hot” and “super fly” but she'd always left me cold. She was great-looking, sure, but in a totally synthetic way. If you touched her, I imagined she'd feel as hard as a plastic mannequin.

“Let's go tell Ms. Garner we're here,” said Nia, and in her voice I heard the decision to ignore Heidi's glare.

“So I was wrong,” I hissed. “So sue me.”

“Oh, I plan to, Hal Bennett. Don't you worry your pretty little head about
that
.” Nia's words were muffled by the pins pressed between her lips, but they were clear enough for me to understand. A second later, she swept by me for the zillionth time in the past hour, an enormous pile of costumes laid across her arms, a train of fabric trailing behind her.

From the second we'd told Ms. Garner who we were and why we were there, she'd pressed us into immediate service. Callie and Nia were whisked away to the costume designer, home ec teacher Mrs. Hayworth, almost before we could say good-bye, and except for a brief glimpse of them as they came in and out with costumes and materials from the costume shop, I hadn't seen them since.

It wasn't like I was exactly rolling in free time myself. The Forest of Arden that had been painted on the scrim hanging at the back of the stage looked as if it had been designed by the love child of Jackson Pollock and Georgia O'Keeffe—there were strange, elongated figures that, if you glanced at them quickly while squinting hard, almost looked like they might have once been trees. Also gigantic blobs that I supposed were bushes or maybe the huts of Ardenian gnomes (though I didn't recall from our English class's reading of the play there actually
being
gnomes in Arden).

“Hal, work your magic,” Ms. Garner had murmured, her eyes slightly teary as she pulled away from the awkward embrace in which she'd clutched me. “I believe in you,” she added, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Um, thanks,” I muttered. When she indicated the piles of paint cans and brushes that were mine to use, I really had to hold back from asking for a blowtorch instead.

I'd spent the better part of twenty minutes trying to find someone who knew how to raise and lower the scrims, but despite there being half a dozen crew members around, everyone I asked looked with confusion at the complex system of ropes and pulleys that worked the different backdrops, finally suggesting I wait for Ms. Wisp before attempting to “mess” with stuff.

“I'm not ‘messing' with stuff, I'm ‘fixing' it,” I finally snapped at the last person who'd promised he could help me, then shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment when I asked him how to drop the scrim to the floor.

All I wanted was to be alone somewhere, working on my painting or running through the silent afternoon. Or sitting with Callie and Nia and finally solving one tiny piece of the Amanda puzzle. Instead, I was up on a ladder, my back halfway to broken, my shoulder screaming in agony as I leaned toward the scrim and attempted to turn what looked like a green flying saucer into something remotely resembling an object found in nature.

Amanda Valentino, when we find you, I'm going to make you pay for this.

It's possible I could have ignored my physical discomfort and gotten into the fact that at least I was painting if it hadn't been for the torture of listening to Heidi Bragg butcher Shakespeare. I will fully admit I'm not one to peruse the Bard in my spare time, but the sound of his poetry had never before made me want to run screaming from the room. Heidi's overacting, her dramatic pauses, her painfully tone-deaf rendering of his soliloquies were all like a subtle form of torture, one I had no doubt the government would be glad to get its hands on. I, for one, would happily have told anyone anything I knew if it would just make Heidi stop.

Normally when I'm working I don't even notice if my phone buzzes, but now I was so glad to have something to focus on other than Heidi's voice that in my eagerness to answer the call, I dropped my brush ten feet to the ground. There was a text message, and when I opened it, I saw it was from Cornelia.

“C
ome on, you have the cool clothes, the groovy hair, the earring. You need this. It completes the look.”

“Give me a break, Valentino. I don't have a ‘look.'” I shook my head at her, embarrassed. We were standing in a vintage clothing store in downtown Baltimore, and in front of her, Amanda was holding a worn biker jacket, the silver zippers gleaming against the weathered leather.

Amanda wore a tailored skirt and jacket of navy blue, and her hair was pulled back from her face in a tight, low bun. On her feet were low gray pumps, and the stockings had seams up the back. I didn't normally notice her outfits, but today she looked exactly like the pictures of my grandmother, who'd worked as a secretary (or, as she'd called it, a “Kelly girl”) in New York in the 1950s.

“Hal Bennett, do you really not know you have a look?” She cocked her head at me, like she was trying to decide if I was kidding her.

“Come on,” I said, pulling on her arm that wasn't holding the jacket. “Let's go meet Frieda.”

Something in my voice must have convinced her I was telling the truth because she slipped her arm out of my grasp and dropped the jacket to the floor. Then, taking both my hands in hers, she looked at me for a long, long moment. “You have a look, Hal. You look like a sensitive guitar-playing painter who can run 5K in under fifteen minutes.”

Despite (or maybe because of) the intensity of her gaze, I laughed. “Listen, I can't speak for the sensitive thing, but as for the rest—I don't look like those things, Valentino. I am those things.”

But my joke didn't make her laugh. “Exactly,” she said. Then she bent down, picked up the jacket, and slipped my arm into it.

Sometimes it was easier to humor Amanda than to fight her, and now was definitely one of those times. I let her work the jacket over my shoulder, then slipped my other arm into it. She came back to stand in front of me, untucking the collar where it had gotten twisted.

“Aah,” she said, looking at me like I was something she'd made and was pleased with.

“Satisfied?” I teased.

She moved me a few paces to the left, then turned me around to face a mirror that hung on the back of a dressing-room door.

I had to admit it—the jacket made me look very, very cool. It was cut broad at the shoulders and narrow at the waist, and seeing me in it, you'd think I'd just hopped off my motorcycle and was heading to play a quick guest set with Mick and Keith.