The Children's Ward (17 page)

Seventy-one

Florence Delano watched her brother pace back and forth across their tiny living room.

“He looked good, don’t you think?” he asked for the twentieth time.

“Yes, Frank, he looked fine.”

“I told you what the doctors said, didn’t I? Yes, of course I did.” He smiled at her sheepishly. “I guess I’m a little excited.”

Her heart ached for him but she smiled in return.

“It’ll be so great. We can get rid of all these ramps and put him back in his old bedroom upstairs…”

She nodded, knowing that it was all he required by way of a response.

“And this summer, I’ll take some time off work…hell, I’ve got four or five weeks coming…and we’ll go camping again…”

Florence got up, patted her brother on the arm, and went into the kitchen to start dinner. The rain, which had stopped for most of the afternoon, had started again and the kitchen was cold.

Frank, when he’d built this house, had wanted the sunniest kitchen possible for his bride and baby son, and had extended the kitchen away from the house so that three walls had large windows.

It was sunny during the spring and summer, but when the temperature cooled and it rained, it was the coldest room in the house.

She went to the windows, drawing the drapes before she turned on the lights. Living so far from town made her a little uneasy and at night, with all the light inside, working in the kitchen made her feel like a guppy in a fish bowl.

She turned on the gas stove and waited. The pilot light had gone out again. She struck a wood match and stiffly leaned over to put the flame near the gas jet. After it was lit, she waited for a minute, never quite trusting that the fire wouldn’t die and the kitchen fill with gas. She only closed the oven door after she could feel the heat on her face.

When her brother’s wife had died, she had gladly given up her solitary existence to come and help him make a home for Russell.

She had never regretted her decision. Her brother was a decent, hard-working man and Russell had always been a good boy.

But now…

She turned her mind away from the thoughts that had haunted her since she’d looked in Russell’s eyes.

Dinner, she reminded herself.

While she worked, she could hear her brother pacing the floor, talking to himself.

By the time the chicken was fried and the potatoes boiled, the kitchen was nice and warm. She set the table and looked with satisfaction at the platters of food—too much, she always cooked too much food, even for the three of them—before going to call Frank for dinner.

“Something’s bothering you?” Frank asked.

“I’m just a little bit tired,” she said, “and the rain makes my bones ache.”

“Rain.” He got up from the table and went to the window, pulling aside the drape to look out.

“Your dinner…” she scolded gently, knowing that, with his mind racing, it was hard for him to be still.

He turned to look at her, smiling that open smile of his that she remembered from when they were children. It had been some time since she’d seen him this happy.

How could she burden him with her worries?

Frank helped her wash up after dinner, drying the dishes with such enthusiasm that she wondered if the floral pattern would survive.

He was quiet now, having talked himself out, but his high spirits were evidenced in every move.

Some men would have celebrated such news with a visit to a bar but her brother was content to stay home. Too many nights on the road had made him even more appreciative of a home-cooked meal and a quiet night in front of the fireplace.

When the fire was going, she joined him in the living room and took up her knitting.

For a while, the only sounds were the crackling of the fire and the click of her knitting needles. Frank watched the flames and she watched Frank.

“He’s going to be all right,” Frank said.

Florence, who had her doubts, nodded.

Seventy-two

Quinn hung up the phone.

It was nearly ten o’clock back east and Emily Ballard was still not at home.

“No luck?” the evening nurse asked.

“No.” Quinn copied the phone number on a piece of scratch paper and put it in the pocket of her lab coat, closing the chart and handing it back to the nurse. “I’ll try again from my office in a little while.”

“You’re not going home?”

“Not yet.” She picked up the three most recent videotapes. “Too many of these to review.”

“You have my sympathies.” The nurse indicated the closed-circuit monitor. “They’re not very active.”

Quinn looked at the monitor. All four of them were very still, apparently watching television.

“Even for being in the hospital, I think they’re awfully quiet,” the nurse continued. “Except for the boy, there’s no reason why they can’t be up once in awhile. Someone went to the trouble of putting books and puzzles in there for them, but I’ve never seen one of those kids even show an interest in doing more than…staring out the window.”

“It’s a little odd,” Quinn agreed.

“A little.”

In her office, Quinn turned on the video players, making sure that the second machine was loaded with a blank tape.

The stack of unviewed tapes was growing steadily higher.

So far, all that she had deemed significant enough to record for Joshua to review was the incident involving Courtney. Even that accounted for only a few minutes of time.

She turned on the tape and sat back to watch. The computer-generated digital clock in the lower right corner of the screen raced with the player on scan, the constantly changing numbers almost mesmerizing.

What was she seeing?

Quinn leaned forward and hit the record button of the second video player.

The image on the screen had changed, darkened. The faces were blurred and indistinct but she knew that these were not the children.

The ward itself was not the same. Bars covered the window and instead of beds there were cots…

The figures in the ward were in constant, aimless motion. Moving from one side of the room to the other, occasionally bumping into each other…

Voices, but no words.

How could that be? She had turned off the sound on the television since the tapes had been recorded without audio.

A long, keening wail.

One of the figures was turning in circles, hands to its head, mouth wide as if gasping for breath.

What was happening?

A second figure ran at the first, striking blows with a fury that turned to frenzy when blood erupted from the other’s nose and mouth.

“Oh God,” Quinn said, sickened.

The first figure had fallen to the ground and the second fell upon it, gouging at the eyes…

The door to the ward opened and a white-uniformed nurse rushed in…

As suddenly as it had begun, the darkened image faded from the screen, and she saw instead the children sleeping.

The digital clock indicated the time as one a.m.

Quinn rewound the tapes on both machines.

Playing the first tape at normal speed, she watched the children sleep as it neared one a.m.

The image did not change.

At two minutes past one a.m., she stopped the player and rewound it again, this time playing the tape at the faster scan speed.

Nothing.

She turned off the first machine and started the second tape. Courtney’s seizure. And then nothing.

That was not possible. If nothing else, the second recorder should have taped the children sleeping.

The screen was completely blank.

Quinn locked the tapes in the filing cabinet.

What had she seen? A hallucination of some sort, brought on by…what?

She was tired but not excessively so.

A reaction to having witnessed the death of Lloyd Marshall?

No. She had seen many people die, some of them after having suffered far worse injuries than Marshall. Even the first of those deaths— a man almost decapitated when his chainsaw kicked back while he was trimming trees in his yard— hadn’t produced more than a profound sense of sorrow that she couldn’t do more and an awareness of human frailty.

She could find no answers.

The only thing that she knew for sure was that she
had
seen it. She was not dreaming, she was not imagining things, she had seen…

It was the children’s ward.

A stark, empty space instead of a brightly painted room, but clearly the same space.

Outside, the wind blew the rain against the window.

Standing in the doorway, looking into the darkened office, Quinn frowned.

How could she tell anyone about what had happened?

That she’d been alone in her office as a storm raged outside and had seen ghost images on a tape recorded by a closed-circuit camera in the children’s ward.

If it hadn’t been so obvious that the violence had occurred in the ward, she might have thought that it was simply a defective tape. Or that the recorder was somehow picking up a signal from another source. Or that someone had an odd sense of humor and had tampered with the tapes.

She was halfway home before she realized that she had forgotten to try to reach Emily Ballard.

It was far too late now.

Tomorrow.

Seventy-three

Alicia carried her overnight case out to the car, shivering as a blast of cold wind blew her coat open, allowing the rain to soak through her clothes. She unlocked the trunk and tossed the case in, then turned her back to the wind and buttoned the coat with shaking fingers.

Back in the room, she decided against changing her clothes. The car had a good heater and after she was on the road for a while it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.

She had decided to fly out of Los Angeles rather than leave from a closer airport. She could leave the car at the apartment and take a cab to the airport, and no one would know where she was.

She’d told Tessi and the doctors that she’d been called back to L.A. to complete the editing of her company’s year-end report to the stockholders. She would, of course, spend most of the weekend at the office where, unfortunately, the switchboard would be unattended. They would not be able to reach her, but she would call in periodically.

Her flight reservations were under a false name, likewise her car and room rental in New Mexico.

No one, except Howard, would know where she was.

She wondered if she would be able to contact Howard while she was in L.A. Their last conversation had not been very satisfying.

Locking up the motel room—she’d told the manager that she would be back late Sunday— she tucked the keys in her purse, turned up her collar against the wind, and ran to the car.

She was not particularly fond of driving at night under the best of conditions, and with the roads sheeted with water and the steady pounding of rain on the roof, she was more tense than usual.

It would all be worth it if her plans worked out.

She was certain that they would.

Tessi would thank her one day. There were so many things more important than that godforsaken ranch.

When Tessi came back to Los Angeles after six months on the ranch, it took Alicia weeks to re-civilize her. The child was constantly running around without shoes, her tiny feet calloused from six months of neglect.

Her hair, which Alicia liked to keep straight and elegant, would be frizzled from wearing it in braids. Her skin was burnished from exposure to the sun.

She looked like a little savage.

Her behavior also suffered. She had to be reminded not to talk too loud and not to run in the apartment. Her table manners were practically nonexistent in the first days back.

It was no way for a child to be brought up.

Alicia sometimes wondered if James hadn’t deliberately set out to violate every rule of conduct that she subscribed to. Teaching Tessi to run wild was a serious act of aggression.

But it would end.

Her child was meant for better things. A career, a wealthy husband, a nice home, a position in the community…

Everything that Alicia wanted for herself and was still determined to get.

With or without Howard.

That was a problem she had only recently recognized.

Howard should have been nicer to her. He thought she wouldn’t realize that he was backing out of their relationship. He had been playing games while she was playing for keeps.

She hadn’t decided what course of action to take, whether to write an anonymous letter to his wife, or perhaps send one of the cassettes she’d made of some of their more steamy phone conversations.

It had not been easy to get evidence against Howard Kraft; he was too well versed on what comprised incriminating evidence. No signed gift cards, no love letters, no Polaroid pictures.

He would be very angry with her—furious, even—but to her own surprise, she realized that she didn’t care anymore. He should have known better.

She considered it a contribution to his educational experience. It was time he learned what should have been obvious to him from the moment they’d met: Alicia Vincent would never allow a man…any man…to hurt her and get away with it.

She’d made that decision the day that James had walked out on her.

There was little consolation in the realization that she was now being dumped by a better class of man.

They could both go to hell.

There was very little traffic on the road and Alicia was finding it hard to keep her eyes open. The rhythm of the windshield wipers was oddly hypnotic.

She turned the heater down and cracked a window, hoping that the fresh air would keep her awake.

What she needed was about a gallon of hot coffee.

Miles of empty road stretched before her.

She turned on the radio and began the search for a decent radio station. She wasn’t that far south of Los Angeles, but there were enough canyons and hills to block the signals of even the most powerful stations.

The only thing that came through clearly was a country western station. She turned the radio off.

She’d take her chances on falling asleep.

Near the interchange she found a twenty-four hour coffee shop and pulled into the parking lot. Sitting in the darkened lot, she took all but five
dollars out of her wallet and hid the rest of the money under the seat.

There were three men seated at the counter and two others in a booth. She could feel their eyes watching her as she stood waiting for the waitress to seat her.

“Might as well sit down, honey,” one of the men said after a minute, and the others laughed.

Alicia remained standing, feeling the color rush to her cheeks. Wherever the waitress was, she couldn’t be gone for long and Alicia would wait.

“You can join us if you’d like,” one of the men in the booth offered.

She kept her eyes straight ahead.

“I don’t think she’d like,” the first man said.

“I bet I know what she’d really like.”

Alicia turned on her heel and walked quickly for the door, suddenly aware of how vulnerable she was.

Their laughter followed her into the night.

Driving on, she found that the stop had accomplished what she’d wanted after all: she was so furious that she was again wide awake.