Cold Image

by Leslie A. Kelly

  Knowing how smart she was, and how she was always able to retain her cool, Derek had no doubt she’d be able to handle it. She would come up with something to tell the detectives about how she’d known her brother hadn’t run away…something that didn’t include psychic communication. But he still wished he could be in there with her.

  Since he had no way of knowing if she’d be another ten minutes or two hours, he decided to seek out Eli. “Hey, where are the freshman dorms?” he asked a passing teacher.

  “Third floor. But most of the boys are gathered in the community rec hall on four.”

  Before Derek even had a chance to thank the guy, he was gone, heading toward the health clinic. Derek had heard that, with his office full of Slate’s blood, Fenton was now using the nurse’s.

  Finding Eli was easy—he was sitting on a couch in a large, common rec room that didn’t appear very recreational. Uncomfortable-looking couches lined the walls, with little padding and no pillows. There was no TV, no video games, no snack fridge. It was essentially just an empty room big enough to handle a group.

  Three faculty members were watching over the quiet students. One was Angel, who offered a hard nod. The other was the assistant gym coach, Gardener. The third he hadn’t met, but knew her by reputation: The school nurse.

  “There you are!” Eli had apparently been watching the door, because as soon as Derek entered, he was on his feet and at his side.

  Derek didn’t know Eli well, but he knew fear and regret when he saw it. Extending his arms, he drew the boy in for a quick hug. “Sorry it took so long to get here.”

  “It’s okay, I’m just glad you came.”

  “If you are going to conduct a conversation,” said the nurse, “kindly do it outside of this room where you won’t disturb everyone else.”

  Knowing they must still think he was a member of the faculty—otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed to just waltz out of here with a student—Derek nodded and led Eli out into the hall. “Are you all right?”

  Eli’s brown eyes filled with tears. “I can’t believe Mr. Andrews is dead!”

  “I know, I’m so sorry. I just got there too late.”

  “They’re saying it was Mr. Slate. Is that true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t get it. He was weird, but he wasn’t usually mean to us.”

  “He obviously had some mental problems, Eli. We might never know why he did the things he did.”

  Eli sniffed, and then wiped his nose with the sleeve of his stiff uniform shit. “And Charlie. He killed Charlie, too, didn’t he.”

  Dropping a hand on the teen’s skinny shoulder, Derek said, “I don’t know. But I suspect he did. The police are doing a thorough search; hopefully they’ll find out the truth.”

  “I figured.” He sniffed again. “I just can’t help thinking that if I’d gone with Mr. Andrews…”

  “Don’t. Do not think that way.”

  “But I was there when he got the note. I knew something was funky about it.”

  Derek’s curiosity rose. “What note?”

  “Somebody slid it under his door when I was talking to him in his room after dinner. I know he was supposed to meet you, but he didn’t say where. I think he thought you’d left the note to change the time and place.”

  Derek swept a hand through his hair. “I didn’t. Damn it. We were supposed to meet in his classroom at 6:30. He wasn’t there when I showed up.”

  Eli nodded. “He went up to the third floor showers, and then he went down to the loading dock doors in the back of the school by the caf.”

  “How do you know?” He had a suspicion. A frightening one. “You followed him, didn’t you?”

  Eli didn’t try to deny it. “I knew something was wrong with that note. I knew it. I thought if I kept an eye on him, he’d be safe, you know? But as I was following him on the first floor, I was tagged by a hall monitor. I had to go to detention.”

  “Thank God for that,” he said, not even wanting to imagine where this boy might be now if he’d gone with Andrews to Building 13, which was where he suspected the teacher had been told to go. Suddenly thinking of something else the student had said, Derek asked, “Why did he go to the third floor showers? Do you know?”

  Eli nodded and explained about the secret hiding place he’d shared with Charlie. Hearing it had interested Andrews. Now Derek was interested too.

  “Do you think he found it?”

  “I saw him go in, and it took a couple of minutes for him to come out. So yeah, I’m sure if Charlie left anything there, Mr. Andrews found it.”

  “Was he carrying anything when he left?”

  “Nope, not that I saw.”

  Although the case had been solved, the murderer caught, Derek couldn’t help wondering about that stop Andrews had made. He’d thought it important enough to go before his meeting, and it was not along the way. That interested him.

  “Eli, I think I should take a look in that hiding place.”

  The boy looked surprised. “Don’t you think if something was there, Andrews would have taken it?”

  “Probably. But maybe not.”

  The young teacher hadn’t known who to trust, or what might happen. Derek thought about it, putting himself in the other man’s shoes. What would he do if he knew there was darkness in this school, and that someone might be trying to lure him into it?

  Maybe he would have wanted to leave a clue. And maybe he would have left it in a secret place known only to a dead boy…and the living one he trusted.

  As for what kind of clue, Derek couldn’t stop thinking about that note. Had Slate sent it? Had he signed Derek’s name? Why else would Andrews leave?

  More importantly—since the police hadn’t mentioned finding a note in Andrews’ bloody clothes, or in his desk—where was it?

  “I want to see this hiding place of yours,” Derek said.

  “Right now?”

  He looked at Eli and recognized his need to do something. The boy was going to carry his guilt for a long time, no matter what anybody said. The least he deserved was the chance to feel like he’d done something about it.

  “Right now. Let’s go see if Mr. Andrews left anything for us to find in that hiding place.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Kate had no idea where Derek was, but she did know one thing: He had her damn car keys.

  Pacing around the room where she’d answered a thousand questions from detectives, she mumbled all the things she’d wanted to say to Derek this morning, until she ran out of mumbles.

  She couldn’t recall a time when she’d been more devastated.

  The realization that what had happened between them last night had been a one-time thing for him, the culmination of some serious attraction and a couple of weeks of foreplay, hadn’t been as much a slap in the face as a punch in the heart. The very night she’d realized she loved the man was the night he decided he only wanted to screw her and walk away.

  “He never said he wanted more,” she reminded herself.

  Gagging her rational side, she kept pacing and thinking of all the things she should have done this morning in the bathroom. Starting with slapping his face. Ending with dumping his boots in the toilet.

  Her fury had almost frightened her. She had called on every ounce of her upbringing and her training to hide her reaction, not wanting him to think she’d expected anything more.

  “Damn it, Derek,” she muttered. “It’s not bad enough you break my heart, you have to disappear with my keys when I just want to get out of this hellhole?”

  Her rational side reminded her of the truth: She wouldn’t have left anyway. Deep down, she knew that. How could she just go without talking to him? She would always wonder why she hadn’t stayed and looked into those dark, deep eyes to see if he really didn’t want her anymore.

  So she waited, knowing he would eventually come find her.

  Sitting on the couch, she noticed the paper-stuffed folder Julia had asked her to bring up
here. She hadn’t even opened it.

  Slate was dead, yes. This wasn’t a matter of life-and-death. He’d committed his brutal crimes because he was insane. But she still wanted to know what had brought him here. What had drawn his eye to this place…the place to which her brother had been exiled and where their paths had crossed?

  “You should have been home with me, Isaac.”

  Shaking her head, she wondered why the word home struck her as important. She didn’t think it was because of the happy home she and Isaac had never had together. Or the real home she didn’t have now. Or the one she might have in the future, wherever that might be.

  Home. “I’m home,” she said. “Home again…I’m home again.”

  Jiggety jig.

  The madman’s songs began to echo in her mind. She used to sing and read to Isaac, and she knew a few, though not the Billy one. But the home again one…how did it go?

  She whistled, thinking of the real lyrics, and they suddenly came to mind.

  “Home again, home again…not I’m home again.”

  Her heart beat faster, and her breaths deepened. Had it been intentional?

  The crazed man had been trying to tell her something about Isaac before he’d gotten lost in his own mind. Maybe he’d also been giving them a message by adding that one small word to his weird song. I’m home.

  Heart pounding now, Kate dumped the pages from the folder and dug for an article about the mental asylum that had once operated here. She scanned it quickly, looking for dates. It had opened in the 1950’s and closed in 1972. Slate was around seventy. The timing could fit.

  “Records, records, records,” she mumbled as she fanned the pages, looking for the ones from the state repository. She hadn’t been promised any patient names, but the guy she’d flirted with had hinted they might be available.

  Bingo.

  She shoved all the other pages aside, looking only at the stack with what looked like ledger-pages containing names and dates. The pile was too thin to cover all the patients for more than twenty years, and was probably only a sampling. But it could be enough.

  She began to read. “1953. 55-56. Too far back.”

  If Slate were seventy, he would have been born in 1948. They wouldn’t have put a child that young in a place like this, even if he had already begun exhibiting signs of his mental instability.

  “1959. 60. 61.”

  Twelve or thirteen sounded young, but in case Slate was older than she thought, she began to read the individual entries on each page, rather than discounting them outright. It wasn’t easy. The printout was a copy of a fax of a microfilm of a handwritten ledger that was nearly three-quarters of a century old. She wished she’d brought some reading glasses.

  “Nothing,” she mumbled as she ran her finger down the columns, looking for a familiar last name. These records weren’t in alphabetical order, but went by date of admission. The page listed only the barest details—names and dates. The handwriting for the discharge dates was often different from the rest of each line, which, of course, made sense. Some of these patients had apparently spent years in this place, and the original admission ledger had been updated after they were gone.

  “Come on, Slate, if you’re in here, show yourself.”

  She flipped to another page and another year. Again she ran her finger down and found nothing. Flipping to 1964, she realized Slake would probably have been about sixteen. A little young to have a schizophrenic break, which could be what afflicted him. But it had been known to happen.

  Her eyes were tired, so she rubbed them before bending down to look at the year in question. “No, not Teddy Angler. Not Zack Inglewood. No. No.”

  And then…yes.

  “Son of a bitch!” she whispered, completely shocked.

  She bent closer, her eyes zeroing in on one name in the center of the paper. The words were still there. The line read: Slate, Chester. Adm: 64/02/18. Dis: 66/07/21.

  Her heart was pounding so hard she had to pant to keep up with it. But needing to be triply sure, she decided to look again to be certain that Chester Slate, the so-called “swamp killer” had been a patient in this very facility in the 1960’s.

  If it was true, that meant when he came to work here he had come home.

  Starting from the top, she read down again, going very slowly, name by name, just to make sure her mind hadn’t created an answer she desperately wanted to find. But Kate stopped before she got to the middle. In fact, she stopped on the fifth name in the ledger.

  “Fenton,” she whispered, surprised it hadn’t leapt out at her the first time. She’d just been so focused on Slate, it hadn’t registered.

  It wasn’t a terribly unusual name. That the school now shared it was certainly within the realm of possibility. It did make her curious, though, and she leaned even closer to read more.

  “Fenton, William. Adm: 64/02/16. Dis: NA/DIC.”

  William Fenton. A lilting refrain whispered. Billy boy, Billy boy…oh where have you been, charming Billy?

  Kate shivered, her whole body quaking, from neck to knee. Her nerves were twanging, and goosebumps rose on her arms. She couldn’t even put her finger on why, but her pounding pulse and the loud hum in her ears told her she was on the verge of discovering something.

  “God, Derek, why aren’t you here?”

  He will be. You know he’s not far.

  While she could not recognize the voice in her mind that kept bringing her back to the tidbits and moments that mattered most, she found herself wondering if it could possibly be Isaac. Was her brother helping her solve his murder from beyond the grave?

  “Knock it off, Kate,” she told herself. “You’re getting as bad as Slate with the voices. You’re going to be singing crazy songs next.”

  She shuddered at the thought, remembering the lyrics of the songs Slate had sung, now understanding what they had really been about. Each song had had an element of truth or history, flashes of reality coming from somewhere in Slate’s fevered brain.

  Goin’ in the stewpot—the bodies went into the swamp.

  I’m home again—Slate was back where he’d lived as a teen.

  Billy boy—Billy had been a real person Slate had encountered here.

  But who was he? Who was William Fenton? The more she thought about it, the less she thought it was merely by chance that a William Fenton had been admitted here in 1964, two days before Slate, and that the person who now owned this place was Richard Fenton.

  She grabbed the rest of the documents, looking for the biographical stuff Julia had found on the headmaster of the academy. Finding it, she glanced at several black and white pictures on the first page. They’d probably been printed off the Internet.

  On the top was the official school photo from the academy’s website. Another showed a beaming Fenton accepting a civic award. The next row down went back in time—Richard Fenton as a middle-aged man. Fenton as a college student. Fenton as a teenager, this time with a younger boy who resembled him.

  Below that was a family portrait. Kate had seen it before, hanging in the headmaster’s office. It depicted four people—mother, father, older son, younger son. The boys looked to be about seven and nine. The mother, who, she knew, would go on to commit suicide, already looked careworn.

  “Names, Julia, give me their names.”

  Of course, Julia had done just that. There was a basic family tree below the last picture, going right down to the youngest Fentons. Richard, obviously. And then little William. Born 1950. Deceased 1964.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  William had been Richard Fenton’s brother, the one who had died young.

  Billy had been fourteen years old when he landed in this place. He had also been fourteen when he died.

  “Here? Did you die here, Billy?” Going back to the ledger, she almost smacked herself in the head for being so stupid.

  Dis: NA/DIC.

  Discharge: Not available/Died in custody.

  Richard Fenton’s y
ounger brother had died within these walls. Chester Slate had been here when it happened. The two men shared a dark connection in the past. Now they had been reunited in the place where that horrible tragedy had happened.

  Minor coincidences were one thing. This, though…this was the Mount Everest of happenstance. “Them being here together now—that was no accident,” she said softly.

  Slate’s mental condition had deteriorated to the point where he completely fell apart when challenged. Could he really have lured those missing boys? Could he have killed them on his own? Could he have covered it up for so long?

  No. He couldn’t have.

  That voice again. Leading her, pulling her, dragging her along.

  Kate dropped to her knees, facing the table. She let her thoughts race, let that strange whisper—not sounding like Isaac, but not sounding like her either—rewind and review everything that had happened in this corner of hell. All the way back to 1964. To Billy Fenton’s death.

  In the end, only one thing made sense. One person had the resources to buy this land, to build this school, to hire an old mental patient with flesh-cutting proclivities, and to draw in angry, troubled, rebellious youth who could be punished, tormented.

  Perhaps like the ones who had killed William?

  “It’s Richard Fenton,” she said aloud. “You son of a bitch, you’re behind all of this.”

  Fenton could easily have ordered a boy to come to his office in the dead of night, without telling another soul, for some random punishment. The boys were too terrified to disobey.

  Before she even began to wonder what to do about what she had discovered, Kate heard the stark clang-clang-clang of a fire alarm. It startled her enough that she flinched, sending a few pages swishing to the floor. They swooped under the couch.

  Not far from an exit, Kate didn’t panic. She quickly gathered the rest of the documents and put them away. She would find Derek outside and get him to go with her to see Gabe Cooper so they could lay out the case against Fenton.