Brian Freeman - Thief River Falls

“What about your friend?” Lisa asked.

“Oh, don’t worry about her. I told her Willow’s story. She freaked when she saw someone out here.”

“She can’t call the police,” Lisa said. “I know that sounds strange, but it’s not safe.”

“I’ll text her and tell her to knock it off. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding. She’ll listen to me.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? What’s with the shovel? Is there really a body buried there? I mean, duh, sure, there are like a thousand bodies out here, but Willow said she saw someone actually digging a hole in the ground. That’s pretty creepy.”

“I know it is. And yes, I think someone’s buried out here who’s not supposed to be here, and I think I know who it is. That’s what I came out here to do. Find the body.”

“Like in your book?” the girl asked.

“Yes, just like in my book.”

“Is that where the boy came from?” the girl asked. “Was he in the ground? That was in the book, too, right?”

Lisa had to stop herself from jumping across the space between them and grabbing the girl by the shoulders. “What do you know about the boy?”

“Well, I don’t know who he is or anything, but a lot of the kids were talking about him at school yesterday.”

“What did you hear?” Lisa asked. “What were they saying about him?”

The teenager shrugged. “A woman on the other side of Pennington came across a boy wandering around the trailer park two nights ago. The park’s not far from here. It’s an easy walk from the cemetery. Anyway, this kid was hurt. He said he didn’t know who he was. He didn’t remember anything, his name, where he came from, nothing like that. So the woman took him over to the hospital to get him checked out. But the boy kept saying people die in hospitals, that he was going to die if he stayed there. He wouldn’t get out of the car.”

Lisa closed her eyes. Purdue.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“Well, that’s the weird part. A doctor came out of the hospital, and the woman flagged her down. The doctor got the boy calmed down and said she would make sure he was okay. She told the woman to go back home, that she had everything under control.”

“So the boy went into the hospital with the doctor?” Lisa asked.

“I guess. Except the woman called the hospital the next day to see how he was doing, and there was no boy. He was gone. The hospital told her they had no record of him ever being there at all.”

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.