Cold Image

by Leslie A. Kelly

  “Now what about this Building 13?”

  She returned to her chair. “It was part of the old sanitarium, used for electro shock therapy. Isaac said the owners intentionally left equipment in there to terrify the kids.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, typical old mental asylum torture chamber stuff. Rusty beds with filthy, torn mattresses and restraint straps attached to the headboards. Stained straightjackets. Scalpels, operating tables.” She hissed out a breath between her teeth. “Actual McKenzie Leucotome devices, rusty and stained.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tools once used for lobotomies.”

  He grunted in disgust.

  “Isaac said there are gruesome pictures of patients taped to the walls. Doctors hammering into victims’ skulls, cutting their heads open, draining blood. It was barbaric then, and the reminders left for frightened boys to find are equally as barbaric now. They leave the offending student alone overnight, locked in with one flashlight, a cup of water, and all that terror.”

  “That’s sick,” he snapped. “Those bastards have to be stopped.”

  It took him a minute, breathing deep, calming breaths, to bring himself under control. She watched, hoping he would have the strength to act his part starting Monday. She’d had to take a lot of those calming moments herself over the last several months. And she’d been tempted to punch several people on her visits to Fenton, including the headmaster, a smug creep for whom the academy was named.

  “Okay,” he eventually said. “I think we’re done for tonight.” He shut down his laptop and slammed the lid. “I need to go home and wash my eyes out with bleach after reading the history of that place.”

  She nodded, knowing he wasn’t referring only to the school. They’d gone back in time a century-and-a-half in an effort to unveil all the secrets of the old site that stood not far off Route 80. Unsettling didn’t begin to describe it.

  “So…tomorrow night at nine,” she said as they both cleaned up the pizza dinner and prepared to leave. It was almost ten p.m. now; they’d spent a long night looking at this stuff. She might not need bleach, but a long, hot shower was definitely in order.

  “You’re sure you’re okay with it?” he asked, sounding concerned in a way he hadn’t earlier, when he’d told her he wanted her to accompany him on his clandestine field trip.

  “I’m sure.”

  “It could get ugly.”

  “You mean if somebody finds us?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Ahh, he must mean the swamp, then. Creatures in the muck, the darkness, the damp.

  Well, she could handle it. She could handle just about anything if it meant getting the answers she’d wanted for so long.

  “I’ll be fine,” she promised. “Nothing is going to keep me from finding out what happened to my brother. Absolutely nothing.”

  After making the disturbing discovery in the back of her roommate’s dorm room desk, Yvonne—Vonnie—Jackson spent much of Saturday evening figuring out what to do about Taylor’s current, crazy obsession. She had no idea what Taylor intended to do with all the stuff she’d hidden in the drawer, but Vonnie had her suspicions. None of them good. Or safe.

  “Time to shut this shit down.”

  When Taylor got back from her date tonight, Vonnie knew exactly what she would do and say. She and Taylor were as close as sisters. Surviving a literal monster and escaping a literal torture chamber/dungeon together could do that to people. So they knew each other about as well as anyone ever could.

  Taylor was stubborn, which wasn’t a bad thing—they’d both needed to be stubborn to survive their shared nightmare. But while Vonnie strove to always be rational and reasonable, Taylor’s stubbornness sometimes led to intransigence. If she felt like somebody was telling her she couldn’t do something, she was much more likely to do it.

  So Vonnie would be calm, unaccusing, and completely understanding.

  Actually, it was understandable. Taylor had lost two people she cared about in the last eighteen months. The murder of Jenny, her identical twin, had nearly destroyed her. Vonnie still heard her call out her sister’s name sometimes in her sleep.

  Now there was this guy.

  Vonnie knew how much Taylor had liked the boy they’d met at the campus tour. She’d talked about him for ages, and when they found out he was missing, she’d been way more upset than you’d think she would about someone she’d only met once face-to-face. But that was Taylor. Loyal and emotional, always springing into action. She had practically ordered Vonnie to go with her to visit the kid’s sister, despite everybody’s assurances that Isaac Lincoln had simply run away.

  Taylor hadn’t believed it. She didn’t want Isaac’s sister to believe it, either, and had begged the psychiatrist to go to the Extrasensory Agents for help, praising their “unique” abilities.

  “Nope, nope, nope,” Vonnie reminded herself. She would never forget—and could never repay—what those people had done for her. But her rational mind wouldn’t allow her to believe how they’d done it.

  They were good private eyes, that was all. Not psychics. Not people who talked to ghosts. The conversation Taylor had had with her dead twin before they’d escaped from Mark Young, with his maniacal Burger King mask, had been a product of Taylor’s imagination, or a concussion. Temporary insanity. Not a real visitation.

  Vonnie didn’t believe in such things. She wouldn’t allow herself to.

  Nor would she allow the person to whom she was closest in the world do something as crazy as she seemed about to do. Vonnie would stop her. Period. Getting Taylor to give up this scheme was just a matter of handling her the right way. That meant Vonnie had to play it totally cool and rational, and would quietly, reasonably talk Taylor out of this insanity.

  That was the plan.

  Unfortunately, however, Vonnie’s mouth forgot the plan. The minute Taylor entered their room, looking bored rather than excited about tonight’s date, Vonnie launched. “Girl, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Taylor saw the open drawer, the items taken from it, and the look on Vonnie’s face. “You snooped through my stuff.”

  Vonnie didn’t let herself be diverted. “I was trying to find my Psych notes you borrowed so I could maybe do some studying.”

  Taylor bit her bottom lip. “Sorry. They’re in my satchel.” She reached into her leather shoulder bag and pulled out the folded pages. They’d been pristine when Vonnie had given them to her. Now they were folded and coffee-stained. Vonnie sighed as she took them, not surprised, but also not distracted.

  “Thank you. Now back to my question. What are you up to, Tay? Please tell me you’re not going to do something stupid.”

  Taylor obviously realized she wasn’t going to evade this conversation. Squaring her shoulders, her chin lifting in defiance, she looked Vonnie in the eye, and replied, “I’m going to find out what happened to Isaac Lincoln.”

  Not the answer she was looking for. “You’ve been trying to find him for months.”

  “Well, now I have a new idea about how to do it.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” Vonnie pointed toward the weird books with the odd symbols on the covers. Each of them had something to do with the paranormal. None of them seemed a bit credible to Vonnie. “Do those have something to do with this new idea?”

  Taylor nodded slowly, taking off her jacket and dropping it on her bed in a stall for time. “Now don’t freak out,” she finally said.

  “Too late.”

  Taylor sat on the edge of her bed, her hands clasped, dangling between her legs. “There’s one person I think can really help find him. I just had to figure out a way to ask her.”

  Vonnie so didn’t like where this was going. Especially because, given the subject matter of those books, she suspected she knew who Taylor wanted to ask. And that who was buried in a cemetery down in Granville.

  “Jenny can help us. I know she can.”

  Her heart twisting as she no
ted the color in Taylor’s cheeks and the wet, defiant gleam in her eyes, Vonnie let go of her anger and her fear, and focused only on her friend. It had been a year and a half, but the wounds were as raw for both of them as they’d been the night they’d whispered plans for escape from that dank, evil cellar.

  She went to Taylor’s side of the dorm room and crouched in front of her, putting a hand on her roommate’s knee. “Honey, she’s gone. You know she’s gone.”

  Taylor’s head dropped, her long, dark hair swooping down to cover her face as she whispered, “Gone from this earthly plane, yes.”

  Vonnie’s hand tightened. “What are you saying?”

  “You claim not to believe in lingering spirits or psychic abilities. I’m not sure why, considering how insane it was that we were found and rescued, but that’s fine, you can keep pretending it was all completely scientific and normal.”

  Vonnie gritted her teeth, but didn’t defend herself. She intended to go to medical school after she graduated. The scholarship fund set up for her and Taylor after the story of their kidnapping got out would be more than enough to cover it. Still, she worked hard in all of her science classes, and she knew humans used only a small portion of the brain. Vast expanses remained untapped, their abilities unexplored. Maybe Aidan McConnell could reach into his. Maybe that’s how he had known where to find them. She was willing to go that far.

  But no farther.

  “Can we get to the point?”

  “This is the point.” Taylor’s head lifted. “Stop trying to convince me I didn’t see what I know I saw, Vonnie Jackson. You might have closed your mind and shut out your memories of that night, but I have not.”

  Jenny’s ghost.

  Vonnie felt a little queasy, as she did whenever the subject came up. “Tay, be reasonable. Even you weren’t entirely sure of what happened. At first you thought it was your imagination.”

  “Maybe, but I’m sure now. She was there, Von. She helped me get through it.”

  Taylor wanted to believe. If that helped her deal, okay. Still, Vonnie could not humor her and go along with the fantasy if it became any more than wishful dreaming.

  “Honey, please be realistic. We can’t Ouija board your dead sister to ask for help finding a probably-also-dead boy you barely knew.”

  Considering it, Vonnie suspected this crazy scheme was as much about trying to reconnect with a dead sibling as seeking answers about Isaac Lincoln. Never having had siblings until Taylor’s family had taken her in and made her one of their own, Vonnie wasn’t sure what she would do in her friend’s place. A twin made it that much worse. So maybe she’d grasp at straws, too.

  “I did see Jenny that night.”

  “I know you think you did.”

  “And I’ve heard her a few times since.”

  Startled, Vonnie jerked back, landing on her butt on the floor. “What?”

  Taylor dropped to her knees beside her. “Don’t you understand what that means?”

  “I have no clue what it means!”

  Taylor grasped both of Vonnie’s upper arms. Tension—intensity—roared from her body, and her grip was almost painfully tight. She actually shook her as she said, “It means she’s still nearby. Jenny left her body, but her spirit hasn’t left and gone on to whatever afterlife is waiting for her. She’s here, lurking.”

  Vonnie’s jaw dropped, all the air exiting her lungs in a hard whoosh, as if she’d been punched. She could hardly grasp what her friend was saying, and wondered when on earth Taylor had gone so completely off the rails.

  Obviously seeing her disbelief, Taylor jerked her chin up and dropped her hands onto her own thighs. With a quiet dignity Vonnie had never seen in her before, she added, “If she can’t get all the way to me, I am going to find her.”

  Vonnie merely shook her head, eyes wide, thoughts a jumble.

  “You can either help me, or stay out of it. But either way, with what I’m learning in those books, I intend to go to wherever my sister is, and ask her to help me find out what happened to Isaac Lincoln.”

  CHAPTER 4

  They prowled the grounds at night, walking silently through damp grass and slick, marshy moss that sunk like a sponge with every step. Hugging the trees, dressed in black, they moved like shadows. As usual, summer had descended on Georgia after about three days of spring. Though it was only early May, and very late at night, the air was still warm and thick with humidity. Derek’s shirt stuck to him, and sweat dampened his brow. At times like this, he missed the Arizona of his childhood; it had been equally as hot, but at least you didn’t have to breathe soup.

  A voice intruded from several yards away. He froze, and so did the woman behind him, neither of them moving a muscle and barely breathing.

  “You’re getting’ outta here kinda late, aren’t ya?”

  “I’d say that’s obvious.” Deeper voice. “And not unusual.”

  “No rest for the wicked, huh?”

  “You’re the one who works all night long.” The second man sounded annoyed at being questioned. Derek tried to identify them from the conversation. Guard? Teacher?

  “Humid out here tonight, ain’t it?” The other man cleared his throat. A hawking sound said he’d spat out a phlegmy wad. “Satan must be cranking up his steam room.”

  The one who was leaving said, “I just heard a noise in the B wing. There might be some talking going on. You should probably investigate.”

  “Damn punks.” A thwacking noise reached Derek’s ears, like something being slapped into a meaty palm. Derek recognized it as a club or a nightstick, and flinched. Guard. “I’ll head over there now.”

  One set of footsteps crunched on gravel, the other clicked on pavement. A car door opened and closed, an engine firing, tires carrying it away. The steps on the sidewalk blended with the thwack of that heavy object on the palm, and the jangle of a heavy ring of keys. He gritted his teeth, his body tense, wanting to stop the man before he got to the boys in B wing.

  He knew he couldn’t. He had to be patient. Finally a door slammed. Silence.

  Although he suspected no-one else was about, Derek still didn’t move. Massive live oaks encircled the expansive lawn of the Fenton Academy, tall pines rising above them, high into the sky. Beyond them—swamp. The dense woods guarded the view of the place from the nearest road, and the perimeter couldn’t be penetrated by curious eyes looking out the windows of the school. Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Long, tangled webs of Spanish moss draped to brush the dead leaves, brush, and pine needles strewn below. He avoided it, hating the sensation against his skin. Right now, though, thin fingers hung against his temple—the unwanted caress of a witch’s mane. He resisted the urge to shove it away, not wanting to disturb the air with the slightest movement. If they were caught, it would all be over. He’d never be able to go undercover as an educator here, senator’s recommendation or not.

  After five minutes, he relaxed. Only the screech of crickets and the croak of frogs—maybe a gator or two—filled the night. One man had driven away, the other had gone inside, his hand still fingering the phallic object he was pounding into his other palm. Poor kids. Otherwise, he believed they were completely alone.

  He was about to tell Kate they could proceed when the bong of an old church bell rang from what looked like the tower of the school’s chapel. Not a bright peal, the ring was low, dour, and, in this strange place, malevolent. He listened to each clang, counting the dreary chimes that reminded all present they had one less hour to live on this earth.

  Midnight. And all was not well here at the Fenton Academy for Boys.

  “Do you think it’s clear?” the doctor eventually whispered.

  Kate. Her name is Kate.

  A strong name. How it suited her.

  She was, of course, beautiful, with springtime green eyes to go with that amazing red hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail for tonight’s adventure. Her outdoor clothes—black jeans and shirt, and boots, didn’t do much to d
isguise her incredible figure, which he was trying to ignore. What took her a notch higher in attractiveness, though, was that Kate Lincoln was tough.

  From what she’d said about her family, she’d had to be to survive an awful upbringing. As for her work, well, this was no society princess who’d gone to medical school to land a wealthy husband. He’d spent time in battle zones with emotionally destroyed soldiers, so he knew what she’d faced. Her going overseas to treat them said she was both good at what she did, and empathetic. She might be a little stiff, but she wasn’t cold.

  In fact, she was too damned hot for Derek’s peace of mind.

  “Can we go?”

  He shook off thoughts of how that body would feel beneath his hands and mouth, and focused on the job. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  He moved forward, knowing she could see him via the slim rays of moonlight sifting through the creaking, rustling canopy above. Derek would be able to look around in the daylight tomorrow, when he became a member of Fenton’s faculty. But he wanted the client—the sexy, flame-haired woman whose green eyes were too brilliant and whose curves too distracting for a shrink—to show him around. Unfortunately, she was banned from here, having raised hell once too often. The idea that a school would threaten to take out a restraining order on a grieving family member of a missing student told him a lot about the place. Not to mention the people who ran it.

  “Jesus, this is a nightmare,” he murmured. Thank God Gram and Aunt Kim had never resorted to a solution like Fenton, even during Derek’s worst, most rebellious teen years. “A boy’s prison rising out of the swamp like a tenth circle of hell.”

  “Poetic. In a Poe way.”

  “That was Dante.”

  “So it was,” she said, eyeing him with curiosity.

  He cursed himself for the comments. She probably wouldn’t believe he collected first-editions of Poe’s earliest works. He liked his rough reputation and worked hard to maintain it, not wanting anybody to know his business. Or his real self.