Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  "And she was a beautiful little girl." Bailey added that part, knew in her gut it was true. "Strikingly beautiful, with honey blonde hair, golden curls. This search is a total shot in the dark, but it's worth a try."

  "The person you described could be a lot of people," said the woman. "Could even be my daughter except she's type A positive and she was never bitten by a dog so there's no scar on her butt. Tattoos, but no scar. At least, she believes there are tattoos, thinks she's covered in them, can tell you where she got every one, what the weird symbols mean — she's drawn pictures for me. None of it's true."

  She gave Bailey the scraps of a smile.

  "Her reality is a pleasant one, not difficult. Life's not difficult when you don't have to deal with the real world."

  Bailey nodded, wondering if Stephanie would, indeed, look like her mother. But no one came out of the cafeteria except an old man and a black woman, both of whom looked like they were taking serious medication.

  Bailey crossed to where Brice stood like a sentry guarding the water fountain. She tried to engage him, lure him out of the thousand-mile stare he'd worn since he picked her up this morning.

  "If Mrs. Callahan's daughter is any indication, the girl we're looking for could be so out of touch with reality it's useless to ask her questions."

  "She was lucid enough to—"

  He stopped as the nurse who had shown them in came in through the entrance door. But she didn't approach them, and went instead to talk to the woman waiting for her daughter.

  "Mrs. Callahan," she said, in that particularly patronizing voice some nurses used, "they're looking for you in C Wing. You should have told someone where you were going."

  "I'm waiting for Stephanie," the woman protested, sounding as sane and rational as … as Bailey herself.

  "When she comes in, I'll bring her to you. Now, come with me."

  The nurse grasped the woman's arm firmly and she went along docilely enough, but turned to look back at Bailey and Brice.

  "I hope you find the woman with the rare blood and the butt scar," she said.

  Bailey and Brice exchanged a look.

  "That was instructive," Brice said.

  Other people began to file into the room. None of them could possibly have been the young woman in the portrait. There were several girls about the right age and body type. But one had brown eyes, not blue, and another had real tattoos from head to toe, without a bare spot to call her own on her whole body.

  Maybe Stephanie did exist after all.

  The most likely candidate was a young woman who immediately began walking around the perimeter of the room, her shoulder dragging along the wall. When Bailey tried to talk to her, the young woman told her that cranberries were out of season and she couldn't have them with the turkey and that was final.

  Clearly, that woman was not in possession of enough of her faculties to have decided she was being stalked by a murderer or the presence of mind to run from the threat. They had brief conversations with half a dozen others who only marginally fit the description. Nothing.

  On the way back to town, Brice was as taciturn as he had been all day. She couldn't get him to bite, no matter what conversational bait she dangled. Finally, she gave up and they rode in silence. Everybody was entitled to an off day.

  "Same time tomorrow for Forest Hills?" Bailey asked when he pulled into her driveway late that afternoon.

  He nodded, offered a perfunctory, "See you then," and drove away.

  Forest Hills was the old facility, the one where chronic, "incurable" patients were warehoused. Clearly, Brice wanted to go there even less than he'd wanted to go to Westminster Acres.

  Bailey shivered, even though the unseasonably warm October weather was holding. The chill she felt had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with a girl in a white gown running in terror down a hallway.

  Would the girl with the golden curls survive the night, wake up to another sunrise in the morning? The clock was ticking. Tomorrow was Thursday. Halloween was Saturday.

  Chapter Nine

  The sheriff drove away from the Watford House where he had dropped Bailey off in the driveway, made it down Sycamore Street, turned off on Beckwith Drive and made it almost all the way to Route 27 before he finally had to pull over, fling open his door and vomit violently on the asphalt. The oily fingers of nausea had begun to coil in his guts at the mere mention of Forest Hills Sanitarium yesterday. He had barely eaten anything all day, which was a good thing, because there was less of it to come back up when he couldn't hold onto his visceral response any longer.

  He sat there with his car door open, gasping for breath, straining tears rolling down his face. Then he slammed the door. The stink of his own vomit was threatening to make him start heaving again. He sat there then, in his cruiser, listening to the dispatcher.

  "Unit Four, see the white female at the Shell Station at the corner of Oakmont Drive and Pearl Avenue. Possible 10-17.

  A 10-17 was a domestic disturbance. The Rosewood Apartments were behind the gas station. Ben Phillips in Apartment 3C was obviously already drunk, shoving Sylvia around, and she'd run. Ben must have left work early today.

  "Unit Two, respond to a 10-10 at Jeter's Tavern."

  Fight in progress. The natives were restless and it wasn't even dark yet. Bet tonight there'd be a full moon.

  Listening to the calls soothed him some, helped him swallow back not only the bile in his throat but a bit of the fear in his belly. But not all of it. Not even enough to keep his hands from shaking as he pulled his cruiser back into traffic. Not heading to the sheriff's department in the courthouse. He wasn't ready to face anybody who knew him well, who would instantly spot his pale face for what it was — the face of a man who had just been confronted by the Boogeyman from his childhood that had stalked him day and night since he was seven years old.

  He is building a castle, no a fort … yeah, a fort where the good guys in the white hats, like the ones in the vintage western movies he watches with his dad, can make their last stand against the cattle rustlers.

  He's building with the special blocks his father made for him. They're wonderful blocks, not the pitiful little things you can buy at a toy store, made out of some kind of pine probably, small enough to fit in your hand and so light and flimsy that building with them is like building with a deck of cards. He used to have a set of those. But then his father, Brice Creighton Drummond McGreggor Jr. — folks called him Drum — had stood in the doorway watching him build, then disappeared into his wood workshop in a room off the garage.

  After that, for the next six weeks until his eighth birthday, Drum McGreggor worked in the wood shop almost every night after supper and didn't emerge until hours later. No one was allowed to see what it was he was making, but it was clear he was making something. You could hear the grumble of his heavy table saw, and the shriek of his circular saw eating into a piece of wood. Then the grumbling and shrieking were replaced by the high whirring sound his electric sander made when he used it to smooth some wood surface.

  All Brice's life, his father had built things. Drop-leaf tables, chairs, shelves, even a desk — anything to satisfy the woodworking lust of a man who had yearned to be a carpenter but who had been forced into the coal mines to support his family.

  Brice only begins to suspect that what his father has been working on for so long has something to do with him when he is shunted off to his grandmother's house to spend the night the day before his birthday.

  The next day, he's led into the big basement playroom with his eyes closed.

  What he sees at first defies description. It's a set of blocks, of course, but what a paltry description for such a wonder. His father has taken oak two-by-fours and cut them off into six-, eight-, ten- and twelve-inch lengths, then sanded them smooth. There are wooden arches, circles, half arches, triangles, every shape imaginable.

  And it isn't just that the blocks are twice as big as a store-bought set of blocks or even that they'
re made of heavy, sturdy oak rather than pine. What's the most astonishing thing of all is how many there are. Stacks of the different sizes of blocks fill one whole end of the playroom, floor to ceiling, ten feet deep. He thinks there must be … at least … six hundred blocks. A later count shows there are actually 850.

  There's absolutely nothing Brice can't construct with the blocks. He makes structures big enough that he can fit inside, has a whole town of block structures that he can assemble and disassemble at will. Every kid in town wants to come to his house to play.

  The blocks are the best birthday gift he ever got!

  And the last one he ever received from his father.

  It was after his eighth birthday that his father began to change.

  Months pass. Years.

  Now, as he sits making a wall out of blocks, he listens to the sounds from upstairs. But he doesn't listen. They don't exist. Except they do.

  Screams. Cries.

  A human voice making a sound that doesn't have a name.

  All the noise comes from the guest bedroom upstairs where the man who'd made Brice the set of blocks, who'd helped him construct the first few buildings with them — where that man lies tied to the bed as he goes completely mad.

  It began innocently enough. Always an agile man, his father slowly becomes inexplicably clumsy. So clumsy, in fact, that he cut his hand severely, had to dash to the emergency room for ten stitches, and after that his mother begged him not to work with his tools anymore. At least not until the doctors could figure out why he had suddenly started to walk funny, in a jerky-jerky fashion that didn't look like anything Brice had ever seen before.

  Over time, his father began to shake, to twitch all over. He could barely feed himself because the random movements splattered food all over the room.

  They were calling it a name by then, but Brice didn't listen and didn't want to know the name. If it had a name, that meant it wasn't something like a cold or the flu that was going to hang around and annoy you for a time and then go away. If it had a name, that meant it was permanent and Brice flatly refused to believe his father would remain as he was forever.

  Brice is right about that part. His father doesn't stay like that forever. He gets worse.

  His arms fly up, his legs kick out, he has no control over them. He becomes too unstable to walk. Mama puts him in the bed in the guest room upstairs then, and stays home from work to look after him. Without her working, there would have been no food on the table if his grandmother — his father's mother — hadn't stepped in. She wasn't wealthy, but she had more money than anybody else Brice knew and she kept the wheels on so his mother could stay home and care for his father.

  Brice heard his mother and grandmother talking about his father only once. He had come home from school early because of a power outage and found his mother on the back porch sobbing and his grandmother trying to comfort her, saying she understood, she knew how his mother felt.

  "I know, I know," she'd said. "When I done it with my Mac, I didn't have nobody to stand with me. You got me. Nobody knew what it was back then. Everyone was afraid of him. At least, now folks understand that it's not his fault."

  Grandma had looked after his grandfather the same way his mother was now looking after his father, put off for as long as possible "taking him to the asylum." Eventually, his father'd have to go there, too, of course, just like his grandfather, but his mother and grandmother would keep him home as long as they could.

  His father forgot Brice's name, called him "Whoopie." He'd go into the guest bedroom where his mother had strapped him to the bed so he couldn't fall out, and his father would make those strange noises and grunt, and then call him Whoopie.

  After a while, Brice had stopped going into his father's room at all.

  The family moved to Lexington, Kentucky, to his grandmother's house there, where everything was on one floor and they could move his father around in a wheelchair. Brice's mother had told him how sorry she was to move him away from everybody he knew, all his friends. Brice didn't tell her he was glad to move! He hadn't allowed any of his friends to come inside and play with his mountain of blocks since his father started acting crazy. He was ashamed of his father, embarrassed by his condition, and enormously grateful to leave Shadow Rock to live somewhere nobody knew him.

  The day they moved his father to the nursing home his grandmother still called "the asylum," Brice hid in his room, hunkered down among the shoes and snow boots in his closet while family members called for him and searched the whole house.

  When his cousin Joe found him and ratted out his hiding place, his mother came and kneeled in the closet door, telling him he had to go with the rest of the family to help his father move in.

  Brice pitched such a fit, his aunt stayed home with him so he didn't have to go.

  But he couldn't avoid going to the asylum to visit his father, walking past the doors of other patients who were tied to their beds like his father was tied to his, people who made horrible, strange sounds and who couldn't control their arms and legs. Or people who didn't move at all, didn't talk, didn't look at anything or anybody.

  The man he saw on the few occasions when they forced him to go for a visit was nobody Brice recognized. He was a stranger who only vaguely resembled the man who had made the mountain of blocks for Brice when he was eight.

  He was skinny, so thin he might have been one of those prisoners of war he'd seen pictures of in the history books. His hair had gone from carrot-colored red to a dull gray that was the color of nails or the clouds that settled over the valley and drizzled rain for days in the springtime.

  The man didn't know Brice's name, didn't recognize his mother or the nurses or his own mother. He was a mean man who screamed obscenities when he used words at all, which wasn't very often. He tried to bite the nurses, so they'd had to use surgical tape around his jaw so he couldn't get it open far enough to hurt them, and then they'd hold him down and take it off and try to feed him, but he never ate a bite that Brice ever saw. He just drooled and slobbered and sometimes cried unconsolably.

  When his mother came to pick him up at school in the middle of the day when he was twelve, he knew why. They'd been saying for a long time, whispering so he couldn't hear — as if he were deaf as well as stupid and hadn't known for weeks that his father was dying.

  His mother took him out to the car that day, got in, turned to him and said quietly, "Your father is dead, Brice."

  Brice's first thought was, "I wonder if I'll be able to cry at the funeral."

  He had tried not to hear the name of the thing that had stolen his father, but over the years it was impossible not to. It wasn't until he was about sixteen, though, that it began to seep into his consciousness the significance of what he'd heard that day he'd come home early from school and found his mother and grandmother talking on the back porch.

  His grandmother knew how his mother felt because she'd had to take care of Brice's grandfather when the same thing happened to him.

  His grandfather'd had it.

  His father had it.

  When he was older, Brice looked it up. The thing he wouldn't call by its name for years was a disease with onset between forty and fifty that destroyed brain tissue, taking away faculties, physical abilities, memory, personality and eventually the whole mind. It was caused by a defect in the DNA, on chromosome number four, making it repeat too often. In normal people, it repeated ten to thirty-five times. In people like his father — up to 120 times. The more times it repeated … well, big number, bad case. And the bigger the number, the younger you were when you got it.

  The name of the thing was Huntington's disease.

  It was hereditary.

  Years ago, scientists had developed a test, a way to determine if a person carried the defective gene. If you were a carrier, you would develop the disease. One hundred percent of the time. No exceptions.

  Brice had never taken the test.

  Chapter Ten

  Jocelyn Far
rington looked out the big window at the end of the hallway in her wing at Forest Hills Sanitarium, seeming to study the view of the mountains, a stream and the woods beyond.

  That wasn’t what she was looking at. She wasn't looking at anything, was just staring out into space, trying to organize the jumble of thoughts in her mind, trying to think.

  It was hard to think when she was so scared!

  He would come for her tonight. He'd wanted her to know that, to be terrified all day, waiting. She'd seen him right after the shift change this morning. She'd crept out of her hiding place behind the mop bucket in the storage closet before anybody even reported she was missing, and there he was. The huge orderly had swapped his white uniform for street clothes, was wearing a King's Island Amusement Park t-shirt with the picture of a huge rollercoaster — the Beast — on the front. And bling. Gold necklaces he couldn't wear at work. In his hospital whites, he was only allowed the one ring with the bright, shiny stone. He spotted her, checked to see that nobody was looking, and then drew his finger slowly across his neck. He'd be back when his shift started tonight at eleven. He'd wait until everyone was asleep … and then he'd come.

  She heard the echo of geese honking. She wouldn't have heard them if she'd really been listening to music on her iPod Touch as she appeared to be, the earbuds snug in her ears. She never listened to it, of course. It'd been sent to her like everything else — the watch, earrings, new shoes — by the people who pretended to be her family, but weren't really. She'd been kidnapped from her real family and the imposters only sent her gifts to trick her. Of course, she never wore the watch! There was something hidden in the mechanism that would … do something to her. She didn't know what exactly, but something bad.

  The iPod had come loaded with music, and she had never listened to any of it, not one time in all the months since the crafts room nurse had shown her how to operate it. Who knows what would be piped into her head along with the music if she actually listened! Did they think she was stupid? So she had loaded her own music, old songs, ones she could remember from when she was little — the ones her real parents had liked in her real home. She only listened to those, only those! But she pretended to listen to them all, kept the earbuds in her ears all the time so the nurses would think she was listening and couldn't hear their conversations.