Mindy made a sound like she was going to reply, then stopped.
“Did … others try to escape? Had two of you been planning to make a break for it and Orin attacked the other? Beat her up so badly that her eyes swelled shut? He dragged her out of the room while leaving the other girl on the floor.”
The sound from Mindy was more like a choked sob now. Softly, she said, “Why are you doing this?”
“Pete … the … Pete died at that ranch, didn’t he? Orin killed him. Killed him first. Killed him before Gabriella was even on his radar.”
The pause was long and drawn out again, and when Mindy finally spoke, her voice wavered. “Do you know him? Is this some kind of test to see if I’ll crack?”
Brow furrowed, Riley cocked her head. “Know who? Pete? He—”
“No,” Mindy snapped, word sharp and biting, like her teeth were clenched.
Riley desperately tried to remember what Mindy’s voicemail had said. Hadn’t she asked if Riley had been friends with someone? Someone who knew … “Hank?”
Mindy hung up.
“Shit!” Riley redialed, but it just rang endlessly. Had there been an answering machine and Mindy unplugged it so Riley couldn’t even leave another message?
Hank as in … Hank Gerber? Riley had thought that was a possibility when she’d been wine-drunk, but the idea had started to lose traction once she’d sobered up. The police had never found a trace of Hank Gerber. Most assumed he’d been a fever dream of Orin’s. A scapegoat to help minimize his sentence.
What the hell was she supposed to do now?
“Any bright ideas, kid?” she asked, but Pete didn’t reappear. He hadn’t been completely solid-looking since yesterday and hadn’t spoken since then either.
By the time Riley left for work just before two, Mindy still hadn’t called back.
Two days later, Riley lay in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to ignore the fact that Pete had, once again, found a way to drift his beanie onto her bed while she slept. She saw the thing out of the corner of her eye, its grimy maroon fabric lying on top of her clean, baby blue comforter.
Pete was nowhere in sight. How much energy did it take to perform his little tricks? When he wasn’t wandering around her apartment, where was he? Charging up his ghostly battery so he could pop in later to scare the bejesus out of her?
Her phone rang, buzzing loudly on her nightstand.
When she saw the call came from a private number, she nearly fell off her bed in her haste to get the thing unplugged and answered. “Hello?” she said breathlessly.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Oh my god. Hi. You called back.”
“How do you know about … about … Hank?” She practically whispered the last word, clearly apprehensive to even speak the name.
“Honestly? I don’t,” Riley said, sitting up in bed now, her legs folded beneath her. “Just hear me out, okay?”
Mindy sighed heavily into the phone, but neither said no, nor hung up.
“I’m a medium … you know, like a psychic? I can communicate with spirits.”
“For fuck’s sake …” Mindy said. “Another one of you? Seriously?”
Riley swallowed. “Other psychics have contacted you?”
“I’ve lost count.”
She was at a loss. Had Pete tried this with others, too?
“You’re the first one who doesn’t sound totally batshit, though,” Mindy finally said. “I … don’t get why you’re so desperate to talk to me.”
“I have reason to believe that the body of Peter Vonick is still on the Jordanville Ranch property. I can’t free his spirit unless I find it. Since you’re the only person left who has a connection to the ranch from back then, I thought you might know something about him.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Dammit.
“What … what you said about the girl who got beaten to a pulp? And how there was another girl at the property?”
“Yeah?”
“The girl on the ground was me,” Mindy said.
“No way.” The Hyssop Room had been Mindy’s room. “Who was the other girl?”
“That’s the thing,” she said. “What you described happened, but it wasn’t me and another girl. It was me and … and …”
Riley swallowed. “Hank?”
Mindy’s breath whooshed through the phone in a rush. “This is going to sound super paranoid, but I don’t like talking about shit like this on the phone.”
Riley glanced at her alarm clock. Eleven-fifteen. “So let’s talk in person. I’m in Albuquerque too. I have to be at work by two, but we could maybe meet around noon?” Long pause. “I’ll buy you lunch.”
Another pause. “Yeah, okay. Where?”
Riley shot a fist into the air.
They settled on the Redbird Café, about a fifteen-minute drive for them both; they’d meet in the middle. Riley had been there once with Jade—the place had a nice outside patio area where they might have some privacy if the place wasn’t too crowded. It usually filled up for lunch, but it was local business people running in to grab to-go orders before rushing back to their offices.
Riley requested a spot outside in the corner. There were a few other occupied tables out there, but the patrons all sat alone, busily typing on phones or tablets with one hand while shoveling food in their mouths with the other.
At a little before noon, Riley got a text from an unknown number.
This is Mindy. Should be there in five or so. Had a hard time finding parking.
Riley programmed Mindy’s cell into her phone, then texted back: No worries. I’m on the patio. Wearing a black top and slacks.
Riley’s leg bounced under the table.
And then Mindy was there, poking her head out the open doorway to the patio, gaze shifting this way and that. Riley raised a hand in greeting. When Mindy spotted her, she offered a tight-lipped smile, both hands tightly clasping the strap of her messenger bag.
Riley stood as she approached, the heavy feet of her iron patio chair scraping loudly across the cement floor. They both flinched.
Holding out a hand to Mindy, Riley said, “Thanks for meeting with me.”
Mindy nodded, giving her hand a quick, firm shake.
The waiter brought them menus.
Mindy looked less haggard than she had in the last video. Her jet-black hair was still lightly streaked with gray, but it was down around her shoulders now. The freckles were less prominent than when she was a teenager, but Riley wasn’t sure if that was due to age or makeup. She wore jeans and a T-shirt of a band Riley had never heard of. Mindy pulled the strap of her bag over her head, then draped it on the back of her chair.
“So, a psychic, huh?” Mindy said, folding her arms and resting them on the table after they ordered.
Riley shrugged. “Technical term is medium, but yeah.”
“This like your job or something? You lure me in with details no one else knows and then make me cough up cash to talk to the ghosts of the girls who didn’t make it? Offer me closure as long as the check I write has enough zeros at the end?”
“What?” Riley asked, head reeling back as if Mindy had slapped her. “Do you just not trust anyone or have people truly been that shitty to you about all this?”
“Both.”
Riley wanted to reach across the table to grab the Mindy’s hand. But given how jumpy she seemed, Riley figured that would be a surefire way to scare her off, so she kept her hands to herself. “No. Not my job. I don’t want money. I have a nine-year-old male ghost wandering my apartment and I want to help him. And my attempt to do that led to you. Granted, when I came up with said plan, I was wine-drunk.”
Mindy fought a smile. “Are you usually wine-drunk when hatching your schemes?”
“I’m usually wine-drunk when ghosts show up unannounced.”
The silence that descended on them was long and just awkward enough that Riley’s leg started to bounce under the table again.
“I don’t really know what to say,” Mindy finally admitted. “I just … I don’t talk about my time there. Unless it’s to my shrink. And even then, I feel squirrely as hell.”
“Can you tell me about this Hank guy?”
Mindy flinched at the sound of his name. She tucked her hair behind her ears. Folded her arms. “How do I know I can trust you with any of this? Why should I? I don’t know you from Adam.”
“Yet here you are.” When Mindy didn’t reply to that, Riley said, “I just want to help. Hell, if all you need is someone to listen to you, I’m good with that. As corny as it sounds, I feel like I’m here talking to you now for a reason. Maybe this is the universe’s way of letting you know it’s safe.”
Mindy readjusted her shoulders, glanced over one, scanning the sidewalk full of people rushing around on their lunch breaks. Was she still looking for someone after all this time?
“In that video of you outside the police station, you said he was still out there watching you. That you worried he’d find you? Did you mean Hank?”
Mindy visibly swallowed. Then nodded.
Hank Gerber was a real person.
The waiter arrived with their food then, and they waited a minute while he came back with a lemonade for Riley and an iced tea for Mindy. Riley low-key wanted to slap the guy for interrupting.
“So … uhh …” Mindy said, staring at her newly arrived sandwich. “You asked before if there were ever two girls there at the same time. There were, but never more than two—alive, I mean—at the ranch.”
Riley swallowed and nodded. It hit her then how close Mindy had been to being number six. That there could have been others—dozens of others—had she not managed to escape. Who knew how many lives she’d saved by making a break for it.
There was also a sick sense of excitement now—and disgust with herself for being so enthralled by something that had happened directly to Mindy.
“It was me and the second to the last girl—Janay. Orin … Orin liked her because her skin was so dark.” Mindy worked her jaw, like she was somewhere between crying and throwing up and wasn’t sure which one would win out. She lowered her gaze for a moment, then looked back up at Riley. “He liked finding ways to batter her to see how she’d bruise in comparison to someone lighter-skinned.”
A memory from the night in the cellar came back to her then. The image of blood dripping off the tips of dark fingers. Riley’s stomach roiled.
“I think Orin liked to have one ‘fresh’ girl there as well as a nearly destroyed one. I don’t know if it was a psychological thing for the new ones—giving us a taste of what was coming next—or if he just liked seeing the comparison.”
“Sick bastard.”
“Yeah,” Mindy said. “But, uh …” She blew out a breath, rocking gently back and forth in her chair, the pressure of the table’s edge against her forearms turning her skin white in two horizontal lines. “One or two girls before Janay, Orin brought Hank to the ranch. He was a runaway too. He was seventeen by the time I was taken, so he must have been thirteen or something when Orin nabbed him?”
“A male victim … like Pete?” But that instantly felt wrong. Mindy could hardly say the guy’s name, even all this time later.
Mindy shook her head. “Orin used Hank to lure girls. He started showing up at the shelter where I was staying. He was a good-looking guy, really nice in a kinda understated way? I was in a really bad place mentally and he knew what to say to make me think I finally found someone who got me, you know?”
Riley nodded.
“So when he told me he’d found this cool place we could hang out, have some alone time …” She shrugged. “I went with him thinking we were just gonna fool around. Instead Orin was waiting for me in the dark.”
“Jesus Christ.” Riley fought the urge again to reach across the table to squeeze her hand. “I swear I’m not judging you. I … just … why haven’t you mentioned any of this to the police? What happened to Hank?”
“Ever wondered how I got out?”
The question took Riley a bit by surprise. Very little time in the reports focused on her escape. From the sporadic reporting of it, Riley had pieced it together. Mindy had claimed Orin went to bed at a certain time every night, like clockwork, yet something had upset him that day, and though he tied her to the bedpost like usual, he’d closed the bedroom door without locking it. It was unusual for him to be so careless, so she’d known this was likely her only chance. She’d nearly broken every bone in her hands getting loose, and from there, it had just been a matter of getting outside as quietly as possible before running like hell out into the dark forest.
Riley had never given that part of the story much thought. Of all the things she could have lied about, why would her escape have been one of them? “So how did you really get out?”
Mindy chugged half of her iced tea. “I wish we were wine-drunk right now.”
Riley managed a half smile.
“Hank let me out.” At Riley’s confused expression, Mindy said, “He was pissed at Orin.” She guzzled down the rest of her tea, then folded her arms on the table. She had a black, leather band around one of her wrists. “Orin wasn’t interested in us sexually, which I guess was a small blessing. But Hank was another story. Orin was obsessed with John Hunter, so—”
“Sorry. Who?”
“Oh, right. Sorry. John Hunter was a Scottish guy who lived in London in 1700-something. Father of modern surgery. Had really extensive anatomy records—like crazy extensive for someone from that time,” Mindy said. “He needed bodies to study, so he and his brother hired graverobbers.”
“Wait, this is real?”
“Yep. They were called the Resurrectionists. John and his brother didn’t want details on how the bodies were obtained as long as they got the bodies. Orin idolized the guy.”
Riley knew Orin had fancied himself some kind of doctor. “So … what he was doing to you girls was some even more perverted version of that?”
“Yeah. Orin thought John had sold himself short by mostly working on cadavers,” Mindy said. “Only problem was, collecting live patients was even more illegal than stealing already-dead people.”
“And Hank was the start of his Resurrectionist crew?”
“I think so,” Mindy said. “Hank wasn’t super into it like Orin was, but he helped him just the same. Hank liked having a roof over his head and food in his belly and the relative freedom to run around in the woods like a damn animal. Orin, on the other hand, genuinely thought his work would help revolutionize medicine.”
Riley could hardly process how ten shades of crazy that all was.
A snapshot from her time in the cellar flashed in her head again. “Did Orin have a lot of notes and books on anatomy?”
“Tons,” she said. “They were stacked all over the cellar.”
“And books and notes about John Hunter?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “He was even working on his own biography of sorts on him.”
“It seems weird this wasn’t ever mentioned in reports,” Riley said. “I could see the media having a field day with it.”
“Yeah, I thought it was a little strange too. I figured they didn’t think it was relevant.” She shrugged. “It was even weirder that Orin didn’t make a fuss about it. He was the kind of guy who would have wanted to be buried with his life’s work. So, considering that wasn’t an option, I figured he would have made a request to keep it preserved. Instead he never even mentioned it. But maybe he knew he wasn’t getting out again unless it was in a body bag, so why bother?”
Riley thought about that for a while. “You were saying something earlier about how Orin didn’t see you all … uh …”
“Sexually? You can say it. So, yeah, Hank saw us—Janay and me, anyway; I don’t know about the others—like girls first, and patients second. Hormones going into overdrive, I guess.
“Janay was … not doing well for most of my time there, so Hank left her alone. He would talk a lot about h
ow pretty she’d been when he first lured her there; how it was such a tragedy that she wasn’t pretty anymore,” Mindy said. “So he tried to get me to like him. I hated him, of course, since he was the reason I was there.
“I think he seriously was upset by that—that I wanted nothing to do with him. But he tried anyway. He had access to all the rooms in the house, except the cellar and our rooms, but he was pretty good at picking locks, so he’d bring me books or magazines sometimes. Or he’d save his dessert and leave it in my room.
“He was the one who told me about Pete, actually—Orin told Hank about him because he was his first ‘patient.’ Orin was stupid and snatched the kid from a store or something without thinking about it. Killed him too quick because he hadn’t figured out what he was doing yet. I guess Hank thought telling me Orin’s secrets would make me like him more.
“After a few weeks of Hank’s—I don’t know, flirting?—I tried to make him think I liked him so I could convince him we should leave together. It kind of worked at first, but he’d get mad if I wouldn’t let him do more than kiss me.
“He backed off at first when I told him no, but he got more and more angry about it. There was only so much he could do though, since Orin didn’t know Hank had found a way to get into my room even though he was ‘strictly forbidden.’ If something happened to me, Orin would know Hank did it. And he avoided pissing Orin off if he could help it.”
Mindy had been on a roll, but she stopped talking abruptly. She grabbed her glass and sloshed the contents, but all that was left was ice. She crunched down on a piece.
“You all right?” Riley asked.
“Yeah. Just give me a sec.” Mindy crunched another piece of ice. Put her glass down. Crossed her arms. “So, uh … one night, Hank let himself into my room while I was sleeping and pinned me down. I woke up and couldn’t move my arms. He said if I didn’t give him what he wanted … he’d kill me before Orin got the chance.”
When Mindy’s eyes welled with tears, so did Riley’s. She didn’t want to hear anymore. But she could tell Mindy needed to get it out.
The Forgotten Child Page 18
