Collecting Cooper (30 page)

“How do you know about that?”

“It’s on page bloody two!” Cooper says, turning the newspaper
and pushing it against the glass again. “And let me guess, you burned down her house the same way you burned down mine.”

“It worked so well the first time,” Adrian says, talking at the newspaper now, “so yeah, but I burned them down in a different order and . . .”

“And the police have made the connection,” Cooper says, pulling the paper away and folding it up.

“I don’t see how.”

“They will have,” Cooper says. “You killed Nurse Deans, didn’t you?”

“She called me a freak,” he says, clenching his fists, and damn it, he didn’t want to confess that to Cooper, not yet.

“Is there anything else you’ve done?”

“No,” he says, thinking about Theodore Tate. He killed Tate’s cat, and tonight he was going to go back to the house and knock on the door and shoot Tate with the Taser. He’s starting to think Tate will be an easier item to maintain.

“The police probably already know who you are,” Cooper says.

“No, no, they can’t.”

“They’re going to send somebody out here to look around.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s routine. Because they know I’ve been abducted by an ex-patient and they know that same ex-patient has to have taken me somewhere and they know this place is as good as any.”

“It doesn’t make sense. How will they know I’m an ex-patient?”

“You took my book off Theodore Tate. The police know about it. They’ll connect the dots.”

“Oh,” Adrian says, understanding what the dots are now. “Is that really what will happen?”

“They’re on their way, Adrian. They may only be five minutes away. Or five hours. But they’ll be here. Today. Trust me. And if you don’t trust me all you have to do is wait around and see for yourself. Then they’ll take away your collection.”

“I don’t want them to do that,” Adrian answers.

“And they’ll put us both in jail.”

“I’d rather kill you than lose you.”

Cooper goes quiet for a few seconds. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that. First thing we need to do is figure out where we can go.”

“Go?”

“We can’t stay here, Adrian.”

“But this is my home.”

“Not anymore.”

He’s confused. “But . . .”

“Listen, Adrian, if we stay here we’re both going to jail. We only need to find somewhere else for a few days. The police will come here and they’ll find nothing, and then they’ll move on and have no reason to come back. We can give it two days, three at the most, then come back here. It can still be your home.”

He thinks he understands, and he’s certainly keen to make Cooper think he understands everything. He’s completely divided. Part of him believes Cooper is right and the police may well be on their way, and just as equally he thinks Cooper may be trying to deceive him. It’s a huge risk. His instinct is to hide and see if the police come, but if they do they’ll take Cooper away and he meant what he said earlier, he’d rather kill Cooper than lose him.

“Where will we go?” he asks.

“I know a place,” Cooper says. “A couple of them actually. East-lake Home and . . .”

“Sunnyview Shelter,” Adrian finishes. “That’s where you took Emma Green.”

“How . . .”

“I’m not as stupid as you think,” Adrian says, enjoying this feeling of . . . of what? He doesn’t know the name for it because he’s never felt it before. A word like super, but longer. And with a
t
in it somewhere.

“You were there? Is that how you knew about me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Adrian answers, not wanting to tell Cooper how he had been following him for days before collecting him. “If I agree to take you there, how do I know you won’t try to escape?”

“You can do what you want to me,” Cooper says. “You can tie me up if you must, but please, Adrian, we must leave now. I cannot afford to be caught here.”

“Because you killed that girl.”

“Yes.”

“For two days,” Adrian says.

“Two days.”

“And then we come back.”

“And then we come back,” Cooper says. “I’ll pack up some stuff and hide everything away,” Adrian says. “Nobody will ever know we were here.”

Grover Hills is a twenty-minute drive out of the city to the west, taking me well past the airport and the prison and beyond, into the Canterbury Plains, made up of farms with barbed-wire or electric fences keeping livestock and wheat at bay. It gets even hotter out there the further I get from the city, the extra kilometers west bringing me closer to the sun.

I take a turn off the highway and begin following a series of neglected roads. The institution is hard to find because once you start heading down these roads there aren’t as many street signs as in the city. Either the council didn’t care about this part of the world or the locals took them down in the hope strangers would get lost out here long enough to enter the gene pool. Roads go from tarmac to stone and back to tarmac, changing from intersection to intersection where you have to slow down every few minutes to give way to a farmer moving sheep or cows from one paddock to another, the farmer high up on his tractor, sheep dogs barking and running around with their tongues hanging out, desperate for water and attention. A few days ago, coming back from the prison, we passed
these kinds of sights, and the appeal at becoming a farmer and working the land hasn’t grown in that time.

I get lost and pull off the side of the road into short grass with deep tire ruts from tractor tires, the car bumping up and down. I keep the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning cranked up on maximum. I study the map for five minutes. Map reading has never been my strong suit. I trace over the lines with my finger wishing my wife was here because she’d ask one of the farmers for directions. Whenever we went anywhere new, I’d drive and she’d read the map and Emily would sleep in the backseat and it was a dynamic we were all happy with. I take an educated guess at where I might be on the map but am probably better off just flipping a coin. I carry on driving. It takes me another fifteen minutes driving over unpaved roads to find the place. I figure if you weren’t crazy when the courts or doctors committed you to Grover Hills, you certainly would be after the drive.

The start of the driveway has a couple of big oak trees acting as sentries, then dozens of silver birches lining the way, their branches thin and twisted and silent in the still air. I park out front and step out and dirt and dust settles behind me and covers the car. It follows me as I walk up to the building. Grover Hills is run-down and nature is trying to reclaim it. Most of the grounds are knee deep in wilted grass and overgrown shrubs that look like giant weeds. The building started out white last century and may have been painted once or twice since then, but certainly not since the moon landing. It’s a giant building that wouldn’t look out of place on a plantation, lots of clapboard and small windows and plenty of rooms. Some of the boards are twisting and others are rotting but all in all the building looks to be in pretty good condition. Abandoned, no doubt about it, but certainly habitable. One whole side of the building is covered in ivy, streamers of it climbing up the walls and entwined in the clay roof tiles. The amazing thing is that nothing has been vandalized. People in this country have a habit of finding places no matter how hidden in the middle of nowhere they are. They find them and smash the windows and knock holes in walls and spray paint giant penises all over them.

The rental car is the only thing out here making a sound. No breeze, no birds, just the car engine pinging as it cools down. It’s eerie. It’s like I’ve gone way off the map and into a different world, crossing over some
Star Trek
alternate reality barrier along the way. In prison there was always sound. The humming of the fluorescent lights. A toilet somewhere being flushed. Snoring, coughing, yelling, laughing, footsteps and fighting, air-conditioning. It became white noise, one sound canceling out another. But out here there’s nothing. I take a few steps forward, expecting my feet to make no sound, but they do, they pad against the ground and make exactly the amount of sound I’d expect them to make anywhere else, and the magical spell of being transported to another land is broken.

I start by walking the perimeter, the gun firmly in my hand. Out front the ground is mostly stone and dusty dirt and some areas of sand; nothing but weeds poking through it every few meters or so, there’s a path that’s broken up by nature and time, triangle corners of cement broken and pushing upward like merging tectonic plates. There is absolutely nothing to suggest it rained last night. Off the path and I start treading carefully, not wanting to step into a rabbit hole and disappear or break my ankle. The grass gets thicker and scratches my legs. I do a circuit of the house. Behind it there’s even more vegetation than out front. There’s plenty of mold all over the walls. The dirt is softer. I make it back around to the front without seeing anything of interest. No people, no cars, no graves, just two lines of compacted stones and dirt in the driveway where cars have come and gone, no way of knowing when the last one was here. There’s a block of trees about a hundred meters away that is the start of a series of woods.

I keep the gun pointed down as I walk. Grover Hills feels empty. I have the feeling you get when you knock on somebody’s door and you know nobody is going to answer. But I still keep the gun out. The front entrance is a pair of wide double doors. I step up onto the wooden porch and try them. The left one swings open noisily, the hinges like that of an opening coffin that’s been unearthed. The sun is so high that the angle stops it from gaining
entry through the doors because of the veranda. It’s dark inside. Not nighttime dark, but the kind of dark you’d get stepping into a boarded-up church. The air inside is dry and a little cooler the further inside I go, but not much. It doesn’t feel like anybody is here, but the building doesn’t quite feel abandoned either. It feels like some
thing,
not some
body,
is here.

It doesn’t look like the kind of building you’d expect an institution to be. It doesn’t have long white corridors with doors locking them off every fifteen meters. Instead it looks like a giant farmhouse, lots of wood everywhere, a very New Zealand version of what we must have thought mental institutions looked like back then. The windows have wire grills over them. There are lots of rooms, and I can see that each one of them has a lock on it. There’s a staircase leading up to a second floor. I haven’t had much luck with staircases lately so I start with the ground floor. I follow the path of the hallway, opening doors and looking into bedrooms on my way to a large communal area where maybe there was a TV set and a Ping-Pong table. There are still couches here, all of them in poor condition, some of them facing the windows overlooking the fields. There’s a door that leads to the kitchen. There is no sign of life, but there is the feeling of being watched. It’s creepy. I can’t shake the feeling that all the dark thoughts from the patients who were locked up out here have formed some malevolent entity that’s haunting the soul of this building, and if that entity came forth my gun would do me no good. In the kitchen there’s a large fridge that looks a hundred years old. I open it up and it’s empty except for layers of mold and no light comes on. I flick one of the kitchen light switches and nothing happens. No power. There’s a long stainless-steel bench with two sinks in it, there are clearings in the dust, circles and lines where objects have been placed and then moved very recently.

I open the rest of the cupboards and drawers and find them empty except for a dead mouse. I head back to the staircase. It’s not soaking in petrol so I take it. On the top floor I find pretty much the same as the ground floor, same layout, same kind of communal area, but no kitchen. There are lots of spiderwebs caught in every
available corner and nobody tied up anywhere. Mouse shit against the edges of the walls. Sunlight angles through the windows and lights up the dust raised by my footsteps. Most of the rooms still have some furniture left in them, single beds with old foam mattresses, some chests of drawers scarred by scratches and stains. The bathrooms are full of hard enamel edges with external pipes lining the walls. One of the bedrooms is cleaner than the others, no dust on the drawers. Walking around the place it’s impossible to sense anything good ever happened here. Impossible to know how much help those who needed it really got once they came here.

The bedrooms on the north side of the building are hot, enough sun coming through the narrow windows to heat every room, but on the south side the rooms are cold even though it’s heading up to one hundred and ten degrees outside. There are other rooms, two of them with doors that have latches on the outside of them. I open them up, the walls and ceiling and floor inside are padded.

I head downstairs. I take the hallway in the opposite direction from before. More bedrooms. More bathrooms. I open up a door that leads into a basement. The stairs are poorly lit, and I reach out and swipe at the light switch on the side of the brick wall more out of habit than hope, and nothing happens. The stairs seem to lead down into a pit, the only light to hit them coming from behind me, my body casting a shadow. I start down them, expecting my feet to disappear in darkness, but instead my eyes slowly adjust to the gloom.

I follow the stairs to the concrete floor. There’s another room ahead of me, this one sealed off by an iron door. A cell of some kind. The door has a small window and I look through it but can’t see much beyond. I tap my knuckle against the door and it echoes through the room. There’s a latch on this side of it that is unlocked. I swing open the door where there is even less light. There’s a dark shape against the wall that turns out to be a bed, and there’s a bad smell in here, maybe stale body fluids. I step away from the door to let more light into the room. The bed has an old mattress and a pillow that looks like it could contain about a thousand different kinds of germs. There’s nothing else in there. I step back into the
main room. There’s an empty bookcase on this side of the cell, an old couch, an old coffee table. I try to imagine people being brought down here, locked in this room and kept in the darkness. Did these rooms predate the padded rooms upstairs? Or was this basement used for the worst of the patients? And why the couch, did people sit down here and relax while others were locked up? How long were people kept down here, and how many people knew about it? Is this standard practice? I can’t imagine that it is. A room like this may have been necessary. Jesse Cartman, the man who bit off pieces of his sister’s flesh, probably spent time down here. It may have been the only way to keep the others safe. As bad as this cell is, if the padded rooms upstairs were full, then there wasn’t anywhere else for those people in those moments. Only if that were the case, why not pad this cell too?