In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (29 page)

Just as they reached the stairs, Kyle happened to glance down the long corridor. He saw the black orderly who had accompanied Dr. Lassiter to the limo helping a man from one of the rooms off the corridor. He noticed the black man seemed to be the only thing keeping the man on his feet.

“The more sedated patients are kept on the lower level,” the nurse said, seeing where Kyle’s attention had gone. “That one there is a real pain.” She sniffed. “No one has much to do with him.”

Edna Mae stopped on the bottom step, her eyes intent on the stumbling man. His hair, although darker and much longer than Gabe’s, his height and weight about the same, caused her to draw in a breath and hold it. But as the two men drew closer and the young man lifted his head to look at the orderly, to nod to something the black man had asked, Edna Mae let the breath out in a sigh of keen disappointment. The man with the orderly didn’t look anything like Gabe.

The letdown making her heart ache, she hurried up the stairs after Kyle and Doc.

“Don’t you worry
none now, Jamie,” Cobb said as he tucked James Tremayne into bed. “I’m gonna talk to the doctor about Beecher.” The black man’s lips pursed into a tight, disapproving line. “Ain’t no call for him to go on tormenting you like he does.”

Jamie closed his eyes. All the talking in the world Marty did wouldn’t help. Beecher was his hell on earth. Liam Tremayne had seen to that.

“Now, you go on to sleep. I’ll bring you your dinner myself.” He walked over to the barred windows and pulled the curtains. “I’ll make sure the cook gives you a double helping of that rice pudding of hers.”

“Marty?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Who was that old woman I saw on the stairs?”

Martin Cobb shrugged. “Missus Boudreaux. She brought her son, David, here.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s ailing him, but he looks kind of haughty to me. You know how them rich boys are.”

Jamie opened his eyes and looked at the black man. “No. No, I don’t.”

“Like your brother, Andrew, that big shot lawyer from Hotlanta.” At Jamie’s slow nod, Cobb smiled. “You go to sleep now, hear?”

Jamie turned on his side and curled his knees up to his chest. He stuck his hands between his legs and buried his face in the pillow.

“She looked nice, though,” he said as Cobb pulled his door shut.

“Go to sleep.”

The door swished shut on its well-oiled hinges, cutting off more of the afternoon light in the room. It would be seven o’clock before his meal tray arrived, twenty minutes after that when they injected him for the night. He tried to push the thought of the drug and the well-remembered sting of its needle out of his mind. He tried to concentrate on the little, old lady he had seen watching him from the stairs.

Her eyes had been kindly, and her face sweet and gentle. She had looked at him as though she would like to know him, but when he had glanced at her, he had seen such keen disappointment registering on her lined face that he had ducked his head, ashamed in some deep part of his soul that she had found him lacking. There was something vaguely familiar about her, something that nagged at him and wouldn’t let her escape his mind’s eye, but whatever it was, it was well-hidden, buried, pushed so far under he couldn’t retrieve it. Instinct warned him that he had better not try, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her.

Somehow he associated her with potholes in the road, small silver things flying, rolling away, getting lost in the snow, but that made no sense at all to him, so he finally gave up trying to make a connection. But her kind face remained behind to ease him into sleep.

Kyle listened to
one of the patients telling him all about the little men who lived in the closets at The Chancel. As he listened, he watched one of the women patients bend over, pretending she was picking flowers from the carpet. He shook his head as she offered the non-existent bouquet to one of the nurses, who ignored the woman and continued on with her rounds.

His gaze shifted to the short, balding patient in the corner whose left hand was tucked into the front of his robe. The man thought he was Napoleon Bonaparte. A loud giggle swept his eyes to the two young women playing jackstones by the front desk. One of them was Rebecca. The little men were sneaking out of the walls, the fellow beside him gasped, drawing Kyle’s eyes back to him.

“See them? Can you see them?” There was horrified fascination on the man’s moon-shaped face. He reached out a hand, grasped one of the invisible men, then twisted his hands as though wringing the invader’s neck. He smiled up at Kyle. “All gone, all gone.” He dusted his palms together and smacked his lips.

Kyle shivered, turning his eyes away from the man, thankful when one of the orderlies came to take the looney away. He looked about him, gauging the sanity of those people left in the day room, eyeing them as warily as he would have a darkened corridor down which a suspect had run.

“Mr. David?”

Kyle looked up, smiled at the black man who stood beside him, white pill cup and water glass in hand. “That my joy juice?” Kyle asked in as bored a tone as he could muster.

“Dr. Gardner thought you might need something to help you sleep.” Martin Cobb extended the pill and water to Kyle.

“Are all the folks as looney as the ones I’ve seen in here?” He took the pill and tossed it back, tonguing it between his lower teeth and lip.

“These folks have some problems, yes, sir,” Cobb said. He swung his eyes back to David. “But I guess we all do, don’t we, sir?”

Kyle’s eyes narrowed. “Some more than others,” he sniffed. He drained the water from his glass and handed it back to the orderly. “How many patients you got here?”

“Twenty-four, sir,” Cobb answered. He started to walk away, but stopped at the hard, leering voice that questioned him.

“Any young men my age?” As the orderly stood there, glaring at him, his dislike evident, Kyle shrugged. “Someone I can talk to?” He looked around. “Most of these men are too old and too crazy for my taste.”

Cobb’s face became a stone mask of disgust. “Mr. David, we are very careful with our patients. They are never allowed out of our sight.” It was a warning, clear and simple.

Kyle’s eyebrows lifted slowly. “Is that your way of telling me to stay away from that man I saw you with this afternoon?”

Martin Cobb’s jaw clenched. “Mr. Sinclair is a very troubled man, Mr. David. He’s got enough problems without having any more added to them.” Stiffly, he turned and walked away, his huge fists as tightly clenched as his jaw.

“He’s not my type anyway,” Kyle called out to the man. He had to look away to hide the laughter on his face.

“We’re going to give you a mental condition which would seem totally natural to those watching you if you should find Gabe and try talking to him,” Alec had explained.

“What kind of mental condition?” Kyle hadn’t liked the look on the psychiatrist’s face.

“An abnormal attraction to young men,” Alec had said.

“What?”
Kyle had nearly swallowed his gum. “You’re going to make me a pervert?”

“But a nice pervert,” Doc Remington said with a chuckle.

“It was either jail or a private sanitarium, dear,” Edna Mae explained. “You opted for The Chancel.” Her eyes were twinkling.

Kyle’s face had turned hard and mulish. His lower lip had thrust out in an aggrieved pout. “I am
not
a pervert!”

“No, but if you should show an interest in the young men your age at the clinic, it’d seem altogether in character, though, wouldn’t it?” Alec had asked.

Sitting there, feeling Cobb’s eyes on him across the day room, Kyle couldn’t stop the blush of embarrassment that stole over his expressive face. He ducked his head and looked around at the people gathered in the room.

None of them bore even a hint of similarity to Gabe James. He counted the people around him. There were eighteen patients. That left six—five if he counted himself—unaccounted for. He hoped in his soul one of those absent patients was Gabe.

Jamie stared up
at the nurse as she uncapped the top from the syringe. A shiver ran through him as the gleaming stainless steel needle with its tiny drop of liquid fire at the tip was revealed.

“Turn over, sweetie,” Abby Anderson told him.

He turned onto his side, closing his eyes as she pulled the waistband of his pajamas down to gain access to his hip. Tightly clutching his pillow, his face buried in the softness, he drew in his breath as the alcohol swab cooled his flesh and the needle slid into his hip. He winced as he always did when he felt the thick, fiery liquid spreading through his muscle.

“That’s a good boy,” Abby said, pulling up his pajama bottom. “You don’t ever give me any trouble, do you, Jamie?”

“No.”

He turned onto his back, feeling the stinging in his hip, knowing there would be another lump there come morning. The languid numbness began to flush through his system and he sighed, hating the feeling more than anything he could think of.

“Have you met our new patient?” Abby asked him as she adjusted his covers.

“No.”

“His name is David Boudreaux.” A dreamy expression entered the woman’s eyes. “He’s gorgeous.” A slight frown replaced the dreamy expression. “But he’s not interested in me.”

Jamie watched her as she turned out the light over his bed. Her breasts, large and full, strained against the cotton of her uniform and seemed to make her slim waist even smaller. When she looked down at him, a little smile on her lush lips, he looked away, not wanting the attention she sometimes gave him late at night when no one else was around to see what she did.

“You be careful around him, Jamie,” she said, her face serious. “He’s in here for molesting other men.”

A stark wave of fear shot through Jamie and he shuddered. Even the woman’s hand on his shoulder, kneading softly, promisingly, did not dispel the anxiety such news brought him. Even as her hand moved to his chest, pushed down the covers, lingered on his body, caressing the taut muscles, slid lower to allow her slim fingers to dip beneath the waistband of his pajamas to the crisp hair under his navel, could he dismiss the feeling of acute dread her words had caused.

“Who sent him here?” he asked, his voice husky with anguish, fearing the worst and expecting it.

“His mother,” Abby answered. She slid her hand lower, but a sound in the hall made her jerk back her fingers. She glanced at the door, fear of being caught evident in the soft brown of her eyes. She found Jamie looking up at her with apprehensiveness.

“Don’t worry, baby,” she assured him. “He won’t bother you. Cobb’ll keep a close eye on you.” She patted his hand, re-adjusted his covers and turned to go.

“Abby?”

The nurse looked over her shoulder.

“Don’t shut my door. Please?”

“I’ll leave it open,” she answered, smiling at him.

Jamie lay there, feeling the strength seeping from him, draining him of his energy, his consciousness. He fought it for as long as he could, his eyes on the door, but at last the strong medicine took complete control of him. His eyelids fluttered, closed, opened wide in an effort to stay open, then fluttered shut again as he drifted uneasily into a fitful sleep.

“What’s dat over
dere?” Justin Thibodeaux asked the man sitting in the back of the pirogue.

Andre Boucharde peered through the swampy darkness trying to see what his buddy was pointing at. “Don’t see nothin’.”

“Over dere. By dat cypress stump.”

Boucharde narrowed his eyes. Through the gassy whiteness that hovered over the bayou’s surface, he thought he could make out a pale cylinder lying beside the cypress. Digging his paddle into the murky water, he aimed the flat-bottomed boat toward it.

“Hold up de lantern, Justin,” he ordered in his thick Cajun twang. “How you ‘pect me t’see?”

Something jumped off to their left, crashed back into the muddy waters of the bayou. The cicadas quieted along the far bank as the humans slid their boat closer to shore. Only the slap of the paddle entering the water and the soft skidding sound of the boat as it moved made any sound in the swamp’s vast darkness.

Justin lifted his arm, the lantern sending a faint halo of harsh yellow light over the blackness of the water. A splash of luminescence shone on the water-logged cypress stump and the pale cylinder was lit with ghastly clarity.

“Holy Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Andre Bouchard gasped as his eyes took in the grisly scene.

“Dat a fille?” Justin asked, peering at the partially decomposed body floating in the water. “Where de rest o’ her?”

Andrew crossed himself. “Gators.” He thought he was going to puke.

“We better call de constable,” Justin breathed, also making the sign of the cross over his chest.

As the two men backpedaled to turn their pirogue around, the top half of the woman’s body bobbed and slapped, undulating with sickening eroticism against the black stump of the cypress. One thin, partially-eaten arm dangled in the water while the other lay hooked over the soggy cypress stump. Her eye sockets were empty and her mouth, open and wide, half-filled with the murky bayou water, seemed to be screaming in terror.