by Tara Brown
She said sorry for the fourth time but it didn’t change anything.
Jenson was dead.
His body was no longer facedown on the cold floor where he had died alone. His Robin’s Jeans rested on a cot in a body bag instead of being in the lonely concrete room.
The screaming still rang in my head. The feel of shrill shrieks still hurt my throat. I hadn’t realized it was me making all that noise until I couldn’t breathe. My throat had been closing with tears and fear before I knew it was me screaming.
I had brought the guards and the other group with my noise. Finn had been there, his eyes focused on mine, telling me to look at him and nowhere else. He’d plucked my hands from my arms where the nails dug in.
But it didn’t matter.
I didn’t need to see it again.
It was burned into my eyes and brain.
It would never leave me.
I would see Jenson facedown on the concrete floor for the rest of my life.
I knew that.
Rita reached over from the seat next to Finn. Her beautiful skin was drained and pale. Her eyes were puffy. She didn’t know Jenson well, but she knew murder well enough. She shuddered when she touched me. We didn’t speak.
We didn’t need to.
I saw it there in her face.
I would never doubt her being on our side again.
She was traumatized. She wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be. Like me, she was fragile, breakable.
The paramedics unloaded us at the hospital. My father’s worried expression was the first thing I saw. He was angry and worried and sad all at once. But when he dragged me into his arms and crushed me, I knew he was relieved too.
“You are grounded until you’re forty. You’re never leaving the yard again.”
I believed him and I didn’t even mind.
“What were you thinking?” He pulled me back, shaking me a little.
“I couldn’t leave him there! She sent a picture and I couldn’t leave him there.” I shoved my dad back, fighting with the blankets around my shoulders. Rita still gripped my arm like a lost child. “I couldn’t leave him there!”
He parted his lips to say something, but he lost the fight and pulled me and Rita back in. We hugged as a group until I felt his head turn to the side. “Where were you?”
“Next to her,” Finn answered softly.
“Thank you,” Dad muttered after a moment. “Next time call me before you get on the helicopter.”
“Yes, sir.”
I shoved Dad back again. “Do you see Linds and Lain? Where’s Sage?” We got separated.
“Right there.” Finn turned me to see them stepping out of other ambulances and into the parking lot. “Everyone’s fine.”
“Except Jenson,” Rita whispered.
My eyes met hers and both of us leaked the same silent tears.
“Sierra. Rita,” Linds shouted at us, nodding her head for us to come. I pulled away from my dad, staggering on my heels that felt like concrete blocks, to the small crowd of us. “I found something.” She pulled a small notebook from her bag.
“Lucy W. 2003.” I read it with my head tilted.
“That’s not the interesting part.” Linds opened the book and showed us the ripped out pages. Nothing was left except one page with one sentence.
“After her initial assessment, Dr. Hendri—” I lifted my gaze to Linds. “Where’s the rest of it? Is that Hendricks? As in Hendricks, our Hendricks?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing but this tiny bit of book. It was right next to poor Jenson.” She shrugged and glanced to where Vincent was talking with Ashton and Jake. “He can’t know. None of them can until we know what they know. Vincent is hiding whatever secret our parents have that involves Hendricks. We need to get into Mr. Banks’ safe.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” Lainey whispered.
My gaze was pulled back to Finn. “We might have some help.”
“Genius, if you think he’ll do it.” Linds nodded. She didn’t seem to care about Jenson. She might have said poor Jenson, but she was still a dog with a bone as far as the case was concerned.
“I want to go home,” Sage spoke quickly. “I want to go home now. But we all have to sleep at each other’s houses. No one alone.” Her eyes darted around the parking lot like she expected another surprise from every shadow.
“Okay.” I turned and looked back at my dad. “We wanna go.”
He nodded. “Okay. Let me just make sure you’re all clear to go.” He said one final thing to Finn—it didn’t look like a friendly thing either—and headed for the door to the hospital.
Finn looked concerned for a moment before his detached expression crept back into his eyes.
By the time we got back into the helicopters to leave I was falling asleep.
I blinked and stared at the ceiling as we waited for the pilot to take off. My phone vibrated but I didn’t look down at it. I clung to it, knowing who was texting us. Everyone I knew was in the helicopter with me. All the girls were together.
“Happy New Year’s,” Linds spoke softly.
Yawning, I lifted my head to sneer at her but realized she was reading her cell phone. My eyes lowered to my phone, seeing the same message from that same random number.
“What a bitch.” Lainey clicked her cell phone off.
“Agreed.” Sage nodded.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Faculty
“Who actually did the required reading?” Mr. Boswell scanned the class.
Most faces were cheerful but blank. No one did their homework. The first week back after break was always hard; rich kids were tired. The holidays were rough on us. It was all differing time zones and parties and private planes. No one just stayed home, not like we had.
We had to be the only kids that had stayed home.
But Christmas had been a buzzkill and New Year’s was much worse.
That didn’t mean we weren’t exhausted though.
We clearly weren’t focusing on geography.
Jenson was dead.
Why him?
Was he just a random guy getting killed in the cross fire or was he involved somehow?
I wanted to ask my friends but we were back in school.
Sage doodled on her page. Lainey stared out the window. Rita had her head down on her desk. Linds was writing notes, but I could have bet one of my limbs they had nothing to do with required reading.
“Lainey, you, Lindsey, Sage, Rita, and Sierra, see me after class please,” Mr. Boswell snipped and went back to teaching the class.
I barely stayed awake during his lecture. At one point I was certain I’d slept with my eyes open.
When the bell rang everyone hopped up but us.
Mr. Boswell watched as the kids filed from the room and then closed the door. When he turned I didn’t know what to expect but it wasn’t what we got.
“So I went home for the holidays to Ellisville.” He cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t know how much I should say, but Lucinda Wentworth was a very dangerous girl. My mom remembers her clearly.”
I sat up. The feeling of exhaustion didn’t fade away—it was ripped away.
“Mom said when Lucinda showed up at Hatton Head, she believed the poor kid was telling the truth, that she was being held there against her will, based on lies. She had a compelling story and evidence. She even had some theory about men catching her spying. She maintained her innocence right to the end. My mom and a couple of nurses had considered helping the poor girl escape. But then a bunch of evidence came in, proving she was as insane as they said she was. After she was lobotomized and sent back to Silver Hills she was calm.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen my mom the way she was telling me this story. She looked disturbed.”
“Did she say anything else?” Lain leaned forward.
“No.”
“Are there any secret rooms out there?” I asked, remembering the man who vanished in the room with me. “Any roo
ms with no doors?”
A mischievous smile crept across his lips. “Oh, you mean the rooms with the doors in the floors. Yeah. I saw those when I was a kid. I screwed with my brother one time. He thought he was locked in.” He chuckled. “It was actually a fairly mean thing to do.”
“They’re in the basement?”
“Yeah. In the basement with a door that leads to some tunnels underneath. The tunnels lead to the beach. Very creepy. That side of the place was closed down for a long time, years. Those deprivation rooms and cells and electroshock, and all the other torture devices they used to call therapy, are no longer part of modern medicine. So they just closed down that side of the hospital. But I guess it’s all done now. The whole place is going to be burned to the ground and made into some condos I think.” His eyes landed on mine. “Your dad has bought it and will develop the land with Crimson Cove Inc. That’s what I heard while I was there.”
“Crazy.” I swallowed hard. When I looked back at Linds I knew she was thinking the same thing.
We needed to go back and find the rooms with doors in the floors. The police wouldn’t have looked there. The tunnels to the beach were surely where Hailey was hiding. It was how she got me to my cell; I knew it.
“Anyway, I never told you this. I’ll lie, deny, and blame the other guy if anyone asks me about it.” He nodded his head at the door. “You are dismissed.”
“Thanks, Mr. Boswell.” Lainey smiled politely as she got up.
“For what? Nothing happened.” He sat again and started marking papers.
We left single file, flooding into a circle in the hallway.
“She’s still there. I bet no one knows about those old tunnels. That’s where she’s hiding. That’s how she killed Jenson. She was keeping him there too. She keeps leading us back there because she wants us to see it. We need to go back.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it, but I knew there had to be a reason she was tormenting us with this place. We hadn’t discovered the secrets yet.
Sage’s mouth dropped as she shook her head quickly. “No. I can’t. I don’t want to go back. The police must know about the floor plans. There’s no way.”
“I agree. I’m not going there again.” Rita backed up. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I slept with my mom last night.”
“Isn’t there someone who can go for us?” Sage looked around. “Like send Ash and Finn and Jake and Vince. But not us.”
“She isn’t tormenting them the same way she’s tormenting us.” Lainey looked down. “I think we have to go back. She wants us to find her. I believe that. She wants us to see it all.”
“She kidnapped Jake and tortured him.” Rita looked horrified Lain had discounted that.
“Yeah, she did. But she tranquilized him and watched me come to the conclusion she was in the closet waiting for me. I ran and she chased me. She stalked me. She terrorized me. He was asleep. And then she hurt him and left him as a trap for me, so I could either solve it or watch him die. It was all meant to hurt me.” Lain’s blue eyes sparkled with tears from behind her glasses.
“I agree.” Linds nodded. “This is meant for us. Rachel is dead because of Andrew. I don’t know that she was ever meant to die. I think we were meant to suffer, all of us. Andrew killed Rachel because he’s a sick freak. But our girl only tries to kill or hurt our men. Not us. She wants us to suffer. She has been hurting everyone who loves us.”
“Except me,” I added.
“You, she showed her darkest secret to,” Linds agreed. “But the rest of it has been hurting the people around us.”
“We go back. We can bring the guys but we go back.” Lain folded her arms. “I want to see the tunnels.”
“I’m staying.” Rita folded her arms too.
“Me too. I’m sorry, girls. I can’t do it.” Sage looked heartbroken.
“I can.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it. But I wanted to see the tunnels as well. “I’ll come.”
“I’m in.” Linds sighed. “I’ll message Vince and see if he can come.” She said it like he might consider not coming. I knew he wouldn’t dare let her go alone.
“I know Jake will want to.” Lain lifted her phone and started texting. “Not want to, he won’t let me go alone.”
“Yeah, Finn will follow me even if I don’t tell him. He’s sleeping in his Jeep in the parking lot right now.” I rolled my eyes and sent him the invite.
He didn’t respond but when I turned to walk to my locker he was there, standing in the hallway looking very Clark Kent-ish. “No.” He shook his head. “You’re not going back. I’ll go.”
“We want to see these tunnels. She wants us to see them.”
He flinched and I realized something in that moment.
“You knew the tunnels were there, didn’t you?”
“That’s how she got inside the building. I told you that. She went the back way.”
“The back way and the tunnels are very different explanations. The tunnels are where she’s hiding. You purposely kept us from them.” I stopped walking and glared.
“I never saw a hideout, Sierra. I saw the room where she tortured you and, I’m assuming, Jenson. I saw the room with the door in the floor that she used to get into the building. And I saw the cell where she kept you. There’s no hideout.”
“We’re going.”
His calm exterior tensed. “No, you aren’t.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I can call your father.”
“Go ahead.” I rolled my eyes. “He can help us look. He owns the building now.” I turned in the opposite direction so he couldn’t make me go home with him, and walked away with Linds and Lain.
“Vince is meeting us at the car.” Lindsey’s eyes darted to mine. “He doesn’t sound excited either.”
“Jake said no too. He said the authorities need to be the ones to look in the tunnels. I said they wouldn’t know what they were looking for, that we needed to find the clues ourselves. He said I wasn’t allowed to go.” Lain scoffed. “He actually told me what to do.”
“Vince tells me what to do constantly.” Linds waved a hand at it. “I tell him to shut up.”
I didn’t add anything but I looked back, seeing Finn following me. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was glad he was. I even hoped he was calling my dad.
Chapter Thirty
The Cell
The familiar structure wasn’t growing on me, but I was getting used to seeing it. I was less afraid than I should have been.
We walked along the freezing beach, hands in mitts and heads in hats and hearts racing. The wind pushed us back, begging us not to continue on.
My parka couldn’t contain my rapid heartbeat.
When we got to the large building I didn’t see a single door we hadn’t already gone through. There were no doors at the beach. I couldn’t help but look up into the windows, the ones in the hallway where I’d been trapped. The metal bars and gray panes made me shudder a little. They were so creepy I half expected to see a ghost or the dark-haired girl in the window.
Finn, who still wasn’t speaking to me, walked past us to a small cluster of rocks. He kept going, well past the area of shoreline the institute looked out onto.
“Where’s he going?” Jake nudged me.
“I don’t know.”
We didn’t ask him, we just followed. He came to a spot at the far side of the institute where a huge deck went down to a dock going far out into the water. I thought he might stop but he didn’t. He kept going until he led us up onto the beach to a small green building nestled in the rocky hillside.
“What the hell?” Jake stopped as Finn opened the small steel door to the little shack.
“This is it. This is where I watched her come and go from.”
We all stopped dead, staring at the little green shack.
“Was that even locked?” Lain stepped back a bit.
“No.” Finn stared back at us, maybe not sure of what we were thinking. When no one moved he turned a
nd stepped inside, turning on the flashlight on his phone.
“Who doesn’t lock the underground passage into the nuthouse?” Lindsey asked quietly. “Maybe we should wait and call the police.”
“We’re going to die in there.” Jake sighed and walked forward. His knuckles were white as he clung to Lain’s hand.
The shack smelled like mildew, despite it being winter. Everything was frozen except the sea and whatever was rotten inside.
Breathing through my mouth so I didn’t smell it was hard, here where the ocean was so cold. The air felt like it might freeze my lungs.
We crunched along the debris-covered ground in the shack to the stairs. Finn was already at the bottom of the steep concrete staircase. His flashlight flickered, adding a creepy glow to the frightening place.
Lindsey’s hand slipped into mine as we took the stairs one at a time. All of us were lit up by the cell phone flashlights.
Vincent stayed behind us as Jake and Lain led the way, hurrying to catch up to Finn.
Shadows cast on the walls moved as all the different lights hit whatever was making them.
My hands started to sweat as the smell of the place crept into me. It was the same as before. The same stark walls and floor with concrete everywhere. Even the ceiling was cement.
A thousand bad thoughts roamed my brain as we walked, getting faster and faster with every step.
The cold darkness made the walk worse, but seeing Finn’s flashlight up ahead and feeling Lindsey’s mitted hand in mine, staved off some of the fear.
The tunnel was small and dark and exactly as creepy as a secret tunnel into an old mental institute should be. The walls leaked, even in the cold. Condensation and moisture built up but didn’t freeze.
As we rounded a corner we stopped next to a ladder going into a hatch in the roof. “This is the first room with no door. This was the one you were in.” Finn glanced at me. He was still visibly annoyed, which of course didn’t mean showing anger but indifference.
Vincent pushed forward and climbed the small ladder to the ceiling. He lifted the hatch and peered inside with his phone. “Empty.”
