Heartsick (22 page)

Chapter Forty-Five

A lone plant swings on the porch in the wind. The gusts splash my loose hair across my face, and I have to turn to keep the harsh force off my cheeks. I take a deep breath, adjust my belt and my purse, and take out my cell phone, flashlight app ready to shine. I scoot around to the side of the house, peering in windows. The furniture is covered in billowing, ghostly white sheets.

Dust bunnies dance before leather-bound books on old shelves. There must be a window open.

I keep tiptoeing around the house until a car pulls up. The wheels crunch over the gravel, each noise seems to puncture my ears. I slide behind a bush, squishing onto a slimy slug family. I readjust.

Footsteps hit the gravel. “Honey, don’t forget there are some groceries in the back.”

More murmured conversations and noise and footsteps up a staircase finally have me convinced. It’s next door. Not here. I clutch my chest.

When the neighbors’ screen door squeaks and slams shut, I move. I need to move fast. Who knows when someone might see me?

Walking quickly around the perimeter, it doesn’t take me long to find the window that has been kept open with a wooden block. The mud below is perfectly smooth. A little spatula type thing peeks out from behind a bush. Mud is caked at the edge. Someone covered up their tracks.

I pull on the gloves Luke gave me and prop the window open. I hoist myself into it extremely ungracefully, tumbling to the floor of the dining room and smacking my shoulder into some furniture.

I groan under the dining room table. The underbelly of the elegant table is raw and marked up, and there’s a piece of paper lodged between the top of the table and one of its legs. I pull it out.

The paper shakes in my hand. I open it. The scratching is hasty. But I can still recognize the handwriting: Zachary’s.

Feed twice a day. Pellets are in the basement next to their cage.

Fill water.

Change the lining of the cage and store the droppings in the containers on the top left shelf.

Record unusual behavior. Especially if they are not able to heal.

Always lock back in secure room. Always lock door.

Use Extreme Caution.

To contact, call 202——

The dash after the 202 is long, as though someone swiped his hand away while he was writing it.

I place the paper back, as carefully as I can to get it exactly right.
Don’t fuck up a potential crime scene.

I have to get up. I have to look for Mandy. But I’m frozen. The house is quiet. My breathing is too loud.

I’m afraid of what I might find. But I might as well pinch my nose and do a cannon ball into the deep end.

I creak through the old house. There’s nothing on the first floor but books and globes and wine decanters and other things that signify you’re important in a classic kind of way. I go up the stairs to the bedrooms, which are pristine minus the dust. The furniture has white sheets over it. Under that white sheet in the corner it looks like there’s a chair. But I can’t actually see it. What if it’s like a shadow puppet on the wall? It looks like a dog but it’s just hands. It looks like a chair, but it’s actually someone. Could bodies be stored in here?

I whisper. “Mandy,” I say. “Mandy, it’s me Quinn.” I talk into the dark. I talk to nothing.

I go to the basement. I flip the switch at the top, and light beckons me below. The steps are wooden and steep. The rest of the house was creaky, but this part seems to have been auditioning for a creak band.

The basement is a lab. Cabinets and test tubes and sinks and Bunsen burners and microscopes.

A normal, unassuming lab, except for the large cages. A normal basement lab except that all the windows are covered with padding. No daylight can penetrate this room. No noise can escape it.

A large, silver freezer sits in the corner. My heart races as I approach it. My shaking fingers curl under the lid and lift it. I take in a sharp breath as I see the rats. Frozen. Dead. Frost covers dried blood and dead skin. Their purple eyes are like glass. I clutch my mouth and close my eyes, shaking my head back and forth and murmuring no, no, no, no, even though no one is there to hear it. My stomach contorts. My mouth goes dry.

My palms go to my temples. I have to soothe myself. The lid snaps shut, whipping dead air to my waist. It startles me. Of course, it just shut because I let it go.

I open it again. I must look. Some of the rats have marks around their neck. Others have deep wounds. Others have bruising. They all died. The purple disease didn’t save them.

There’s shuffling, scratching somewhere. I let the lid drop again and I swirl around. It sounds like fingers scratching against the ground.

Mandy?

I move toward the noise. A closet. “Mandy,” I whisper. “Mandy,” I shout.

The scratching stops. The silence makes my spine feel as though icy fingers are running down it.

I think carefully about placing one foot in front of the other, despite my shaking thighs, until I’m at the door. I place my sweaty palm on the handle and force myself to turn it.

My purple eyes adjust to the light quickly. There’s a cage. There’s the source of the scratching.

More rats. Live and healthy and with gleaming purple irises.

But just rats. No Mandy.

Footsteps pound above me. They’re quick, then they stop. I tighten my fists. Who would be here? More footsteps, deliberate but fast. Another pause. I hear a yell, a man’s voice, but I can’t make out the words.

I join the rats in the closet. A surgical saw dangles to my left. I can grab that, if I need it. I peek through the slim crack of the door. I hold my breath as the creaky steps sound their chorus.

Chapter Forty-Six

I freeze, just like the rat bodies in the box behind me. Suit pants emerge, and then a familiar shirt and jacket.

And finally I let out a sigh and horribly hiccupping sobs. It’s Luke.

I burst out of the closet and he rushes to me, holding me as he whispers in my hair, “You weren’t picking up your phone, but we’ve got to get out of here now. The warrant. We got it. Representative Mitchell and the media attention, it all worked.”

“Mandy isn’t here.” I point to the freezer. “But rats, he’s been doing all these experiments on rats.”

Luke strides to the cooler. He opens it, careful to use the sleeve of his jacket. His expression stays the same when he sees it. He gently closes the lid, walks back to me and pulls me to his chest.

“What if he moved beyond rats?” I say into his shirt. “What if Danny...Mandy...”

Sirens are going off, far away into the distance. “We’ve got to get out of here before they come in.” He pulls my hand hard as we climb up the steps.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to deal with any accusations of planting evidence,” he says. “Or worse, that we’re here because we’re involved.”

We sneak carefully around the side of the house. The sirens are getting louder and louder.

“Just go home, Quinn. Okay? I’ll be by later.”

“I can’t go home. Mandy is still out there.”

Luke smooths his prickly blond strands back. A thin grin develops on his otherwise worried, exhausted face. “What dangerous activity do you plan to do next?”

The sirens are closer, maybe just four blocks away. I have to be quick. I have to think fast. “Let me talk to Zachary. Alone. No recording, no confession. It’s not about nailing him, it’s about saving Mandy.”

Luke scowls, but nods. The sirens sound so close now. He pushes the small of my back toward the backyard. “Okay, I’ll make a call. Now get out of here.”

He walks confidently to the front yard as the red-and-blue lights flood into the street and across his tall figure.

I dash in the other direction.

* * *

I want the hospital to once again be unfamiliar. I don’t like that the fluorescent lights and lime-green chairs of the waiting room are a common sight. I don’t like that what used to be strange smells—soaps and drugs and chemicals—now fill my nostrils and say, “Welcome back! This is where you belong.”

I approach the door and the two cops outside it. They don’t see me at first.

“So were they roofied or something?” one cop asks.

“I don’t know. But someone must have given them something. State troopers don’t usually just pass out at their posts...”

“Do you think someone else was trying to escape?”

The second cop doesn’t answer. Instead, he nods at me.

“Can we help you, miss?”

“Yes, I’d like to see Zachary,” I say. Voice steady and strong.

“I’m afraid that isn’t allowed. He’s a patient, but he’s also in our custody.”

“I’m Quinn Bellingham. I believe Detective Peterson called you about me.”

They exchange glances and for a moment I think Luke lied to me. Maybe he just indulged me to get me out of his hair.

But the taller cop leans in. “I understand you want to speak to him alone. Stay at least four feet away. We’ll be right here. If you need anything, give a yell.”

I thank him as he pulls three keys from his belt and unlocks three locks. Before he opens the door he looks back to me, concerned. “He’s on a fair amount of medication.”

“Okay.”

The cop sidesteps into the room. “Quinn Bellingham to see you,” he says. Like a butler. Like I’m here to nibble on lemon cookies and smooth my skirt as we sip tea.

I thought that Zachary would be staring out the window wistfully, letting the weight of all that he had done fester in his cheeks. But instead he’s swallowing a spoonful of red Jell-O and watching the news. When he sees me, he smiles and gives a lopsided wave.

The cop raises his left eyebrow, as though he is saying
are you sure you want to do this you crazy loon?
But I nod, cross the threshold, and gesture for him to shut the door. It clicks. I’m surprised to hear the three locks,
click, click, click
. But I’m not afraid.

Zachary’s wrist is already a little raw from the handcuff that has been rubbing against it. His gown is loose, vulnerable. Skin around his neck that is not usually exposed is thrust into the hospital lights.

“Quinn.” He smiles. It’s strange, but it’s real. He’s happy to see me.

I sit next to him. Fuck the four-foot rule. The more I treat him like the human he is, the more likely he’ll act human.

At least that’s the theory I’m going with.

He limps his hand over in a strange gesture. His purple eyes plead. He’s asking me to hold it.

I refuse him this.

He looks at the sheets. “Those hicks really roughed me up.” He croaks out a strange laugh.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Thank God I have this,” he says, pointing to his eye.

“You kissed Mandy when you had it.”

He nods. “I didn’t realize it was contagious through saliva. The rats. They only transmitted it to each other through intercourse. Or blood. And anyway, I had to kiss Mandy, you know. Being in love with her, it’s like...it’s like a whirlpool. Which is fun, until you start to think about what’s down the drain.” He twirls his finger around, faster and faster, as though he is being sucked into a pipe.

I try to keep the conversation focused. I try to forget that he talked about being in love with Mandy in the past tense. I try to remind myself that he is clearly on another plane, a plane where it might not be strange to gallop along rainbows. Still, maybe I can get something from him in this state. “The rats,” I say. “You mean the ones at Livingston’s house?”

Zachary swallows and looks to his right hand. The one not sporting a handcuff. He brings it up, fast. I push back. I stand up. My chair clanks against the wall with the momentum of my move.

Click. Click. Click.

“You all right ma’am?” the officer asks.

“I’m right as rain, thanks,” I say. Zachary’s eyes grow big and wide.

The officer nods but it takes me three swooshes of my hand to get him to finally close the door again.

“I was just trying to show you where the rat bit me,” Zachary says in a pitiful voice. His lips tremble. “I guess that’s dumb though, because the bite healed long ago.” He looks up, forehead wrinkled. “Why are you afraid of me?”

“Because of what you did to Danny,” I say.

He pushes away the tray and grabs at the blanket around him. “I didn’t...”

I rub my hands on my thighs and make myself continue. “Because of what you did to Mandy?”

“I didn’t mean to give it to Mandy,” he says. The skin around his eyes creases hard. I wonder how deep the creases go.

I dig my fingernails into my palms to keep them from flying up. I breathe. “I don’t understand. Why would you make this disease in the first place?”

“I wanted to heal people. That’s what Livingston said we’d do. So I helped him make this virus. It latches on to the machinery in the bone marrow to pump out a new kind of cell. A cell that fights bacteria and viruses and cancer and, well, who knows what else.”

“How?”

Zachary smiles, like he’s happy someone finally took some interest in his science project. “The new cell produces more collagen than the regular fibroblast cells.”

Fibroblast cells, healing cells, had been mentioned, oh, a hundred times in Zachary’s research, so I feel like they’re my close intimate friends now. I understand them and what they’re about.

“But,” Zachary continues, “it didn’t heal everything. When we ran experiments, some rats died of internal bleeding and so I didn’t know, until you got hurt, that the disease was diff—”

It’s sharp in my mind. “Did you have someone push that set piece over on me, just to see if I could survive?”

His mouth drops, his eyes grow rounder and rounder. “No, of course not. No, no, no. I wouldn’t hurt you. You were Mandy’s best friend.”

Again with the past tense. Zachary holds up a finger. “The disease healed you. It made me realize the disease
was
different in humans. We’re still not invincible, not like Mandy thought.” He shakes his head. “Mandy thought she was invincible, but we’re not, we’re not.” He looks up and whimpers. “I tried to make her understand.”

I bite my thumbnail and look at his hands. He’s clumped a lot of the sheets into his fists. “But you killed Danny. Because he found out about you, how you started all of this. You decided you’d test him. See if he could survive a drop?”

His lips plump out. “No. I didn’t push him. He was rambling about white blood cells and how I must know about the disease. That I had the answers.” He puts his head in his palms and spreads some fingers, peeking between them with one eye. “I panicked. I couldn’t save him.”

I grip the armrests on my chair as though I’m in a roller coaster and not a static, calm hospital room. “Why didn’t you tell us what was going on? Did the NSA make you do this?”

He shakes his head and plops it on the pillow. He stares at the ceiling and tries to steady the chin shaking. “I didn’t know about the NSA. I didn’t know about the plans to give this to soldiers. I didn’t know anything.” He hangs his head so that his chin thrusts against his chest. When he talks his head bobs. “I didn’t know that the Pentagon wanted all the rats terminated. But Livingston, I don’t know, he didn’t trust them or something. He had me watch them while he was gone.”

“On sabbatical?” I ask.

“Who knows where the fuck he is.” Zachary kicks a little and flips his head. Like a mini seizure he brings on himself.

“If this was all an accident, why didn’t you just say something?”

“Livingston said stuff about national security and shit no one can know.” He darts up, sitting stiff. “No one. But, then it got out and I didn’t know how to contact him and all the shit...” He tosses his hands about as he squints. “It got all over the fan.” He lies back down and stares at the ceiling, his head swishing back and forth like a metronome keeping a slow and steady tempo.

So the disease was all part of some military project? And now that it’s creeping out, the NSA is trying to swoop in and hide it all. This is too much. I can’t solve this. I can’t fix this. And all that matters right now is finding Mandy.

“Tell me where Mandy is.”

The metronome stops, it glides slowly on the pillow ’til his head stops and he looks me in the eye. “I told you. She’s safe now. She’s safe in the shadows.”

I focus on the floor, the stretcher skid marks and dust bunnies. Zachary sits up enough to reach for me. I place my hand in his. He whispers again, “She’s safe in the shadows.”

“Safe in the shadows.” The familiar words fall from my lips. I squeeze his hand and face his moist, purple eyes. “But why? Why would she—”

The door bursts open. Our hands fall apart as we look to the officer. He stands back as two men in black suits stride in. “Miss, we are going to have to ask you to leave.”

“The cops said I could—” I sputter.

“We will escort you out if that is necessary,” one of the black-suited men says with narrowed eyes and a severe scowl. I want to ask Zachary so much more about Mandy. I want to ask about roofies and state troopers. I want to know why.

But I can’t, not with the black suits in the room.

I glance at Zachary’s still, serious eyes before standing. Before walking away.