HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (20 page)

Simpson went on. “It’s . . . I’ve never seen it. We were preparing him for brain surgery. Giving him your blood to lower his sodium levels. But it . . . well, after the transfusion, the sodium levels are good. Even the fluid under his scalp is gone, the pressure reduced. And it . . .” Simpson looked at Sophie, who then studied the floor. “I’ve just never seen it. The holoprosencephaly is gone. Whatever trauma he experienced in the uterus has been remedied. His hemispheres are looking good, and should grow normally. No more MIHV. He appears to be . . . cured.”

“I want to see him,” Liz said, looking at both of them. “Take me down to him, wherever he is. Okay?”

They exchanged looks again, and then the doctor nodded.

“I’ll get Eddie,” he said to Sophie, and left the room.

Liz and the young female resident sat there in silence. After a little while, Liz turned to her. “What did you say his name was again?” She’d heard, and she remembered, but for some reason wanted to hear it again.

“The baby’s name is Caleb.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Tom pinched the phone between his shoulder and ear, smoked, and scratched at his paunch, watching the young kids who stood in the parking lot. Not a self-conscious man by nature, Tom was suddenly very aware of himself as he stood there near the entrance; a balding man in his late fifties with liver spots materializing on his scalp, notable gut hanging over his belt, brown dorky schoolteacher pants, pit-stained button-collar work shirt, and a hunting coat. He’d gained some significant style, he supposed, when Steph had been around (she’d bought him two sport coats and a handful of ties) but he had obviously regressed. It was a funny thing to be thinking about, given all that was going on, but it was one of those things you just couldn’t help when you were suddenly on display, people coming and going in a big public place like Fletcher Allen, and you, standing there.

“Hello,” said Tom, mashing his cigarette out on the ground. He wasn’t in a designated smoking area, he realized, as there were no ashtrays anywhere. “Trooper Cruickshand? This is Investigator Tom Milliner.”

“Hold on, please,” said the trooper on the other end. Tom heard a clattering and what sounded like a hand smothering the receiver and some muffled talk. More scraping noises and a gruff, and then the out-of-breath voice unmistakably belonging to Jim Cruickshand said “Yeah?”

“Jim. I’ve been trying to reach you on your cell.”

“Tommy? Where the hell are you?”

Careful
, said a voice.

“I’m at Fletcher Allen.”

“What the hell are you doing there? Sheriff Johnston seems pretty pissed at you, Tommy. He didn’t say for what, but Jesus.”

“What did you find out at the Kingston place?”

“What did I find out?” Jim’s voice was loud in the earpiece. “What I found was a stockpile of dead women in Kingston’s shed, is what I found out. I tracked him through the woods for half of the fucking day and when I got back —
fffipp
— the bodies were gone. How come you never told me what was in the shed? What’s going on with you? You on the sauce again, Tommy? You know what happens to you, Tom, we all know what ha—”

“Jim, Jim,” said Tom, lighting another cigarette, “I never went into the shed.”

“You never went into the shed?” Nearly shouting, now.

“I could smell rotten meat — the kid said he’d shot coyotes.”

“You never went into the shed?”

“Jim, I didn’t have the right to. I didn’t have any probable cause to search the place. There was no reason to suspect that the kid was lying.”

“There were
dead girls
in there, Milliner!”

He had heard Jim yell before. Tom was unfazed, keeping his tone conversational. “Did you get confirmation of that? Have the bodies been identified?”

The other end was silent. Tom smiled at a woman pushing an older man in a wheelchair through the entrance doors. He watched the people coming and going, scrutinizing in particular anyone around the age of twenty-five, and anyone around eleven or twelve years old, unaccompanied or not. The kids across the street were still standing there, twenty or thirty of them, lined up on the sidewalk underneath the bulbous lights. Not one of them had so much as twitched.

“You don’t know,” said Jim. He seemed to have calmed down, but Tom knew what was coming next. He’d heard it all before.

“I don’t know what, Jim?”

“You weren’t there.”

“Are we talking about the Kingston place, Jim? Is that what we’re talking about? Or aren’t we.”

“All I’m saying is, you weren’t there, Milliner. You didn’t . . . you never found that edge. You’re lucky. Those girls were in there, Milliner. I saw them. He’s working with an accomplice, the Kingston kid, moved the bodies, maybe someone giving him instruction, and—”

“Where is he now?”

“—I’m going to find out who. Where is he? The fuck you think he is? On his way to county. Let me ask you this, you old hippie—”

“I wasn’t an objector, Jim, I just was never drafted.”

“—if you didn’t snoop the shed, or anything else, the fuck were you doing out there in the first place?”

“Following a lead.”

“What lead?”

“A kid that showed up in town a couple of days ago.” Tom looked across to where the phalanx of motionless pre-teens stood.

“What kid? Who?” Cruickshand was excited again, starting to yell again. Tom could hear a whistle in his breathing, a wheeze.

“A kid, Jim, just a kid. Homeless, maybe, I don’t know. He showed up in town a couple of days ago, right before all of this started.”

“
The kid who was supposedly fucking
shot?” Jim was back to shouting again, like he was on the sidelines of a football game, screaming at his Patriots, or like he was in the shit again, barking orders at the squad he’d eventually commanded. “
Why didn’t you tell me this before now
?”

“Because it wasn’t relevant,” Tom said, “I was just following the kid, just c—”

“You listen to me, Milliner, you fucking listen to me good. Whatever you do outside the wire, that’s your business, okay?
But when you find something, you fucking let me know
.”

And Trooper Jim Cruickshand hung up.

“Hello?” Tom snapped his phone shut. He dragged on his cigarette. “Asshole,” he said.

A middle-aged man with his infirm wife who had a bandage over her eye, glanced over as the doors slid open to let them in. Tom smiled and dropped his cigarette butt to the ground, stubbing it out with his heel.

Then Tom had an idea. He walked closer to the doors and prepared to interrupt the next comers or goers. It happened that an older woman, maybe in her sixties, was coming out of the hospital, both of her arms hooked through the handles of her floral purse.

“Excuse me,” said Tom. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

She stopped and looked at him, scowling. Tom fumbled for his badge, fishing it out of his inner coat pocket.

“I’m Investigator Milliner.”

“Oh. Is something wrong?”

“No, no.” He put his arm gently around her shoulders and walked her away from the entrance and to the side of it. “I just need your help for one second.”

With the hand holding the badge he extended his index finger and pointed across the street. “Can you see those kids over there, standing along that sidewalk? Over there, across the way? Can you see them?”

The woman frowned and squinted, then looked at Tom apologetically and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “My eyes aren’t so good. Let me get my glasses. Kids, you say? Young people?”

“Yeah,” said Tom. He watched as she opened her purse and proceeded to fumble around for her glasses. He realized he’d left his sitting in the Blazer.

He let his hand slip from the older woman’s shoulder as a pretty woman in a tracksuit came jogging up. Tom managed to step in front of her with his badge as the doors slid open, just before she could walk in. “Excuse me, sorry,” he said. “I need to ask you a question.”

“What?” The woman, mid-forties, wasn’t wearing makeup and was sweating lightly. Either she worked at the hospital or was one of these people who had no choice but to camp out here, due to whatever health issue was going on with a loved one.

“Just a question, ma’am.”

He took her too, around the shoulders, and turned her gently so that she looked across the road. “Can you see those boys across the road? Can you see them standing there?”

Nearby, the older woman was just opening her glasses case with some difficulty. The pretty woman in the tight jogging outfit looked at Tom, like she wasn’t quite sure what to think of him, if he might be some nut job, or she might be being put on as some sort of practical joke.

“Right there. See them? Standing in a row?” Tom prompted.

For a moment Tom was suspended in time, sure of what she was going to say, and sure that he was going to have to reevaluate everything. That every move he had made since first following the kid — Christopher — had been the wrong move. Off to one degree or another, and exponentially worsening. That Jim was right, that he had no edge. That maybe he was depressed, or that he was becoming schizophrenic. Christ, he’d had some sort of spell right there in front of Little Rock Hospital. It would have explained a lot.

It wouldn’t even matter if Maddy had seen things too, if any or all other people in the world had witnessed the same things, it could all merely be part of his own delusion. He could just check the box marked “crazy” and sign off on the whole thing. Maybe, just maybe, he’d even be able to get some sleep at last.

“What is it, some kind of vigil?” The pretty woman’s head was craned forward, her hands on her hips, her eyes narrowed. “Are they Boy Scouts?”

“You see them?”

And the woman looked at Tom again, gave him that same look of suspicion and said, “Unless I’m hallucinating, yes, I see them, officer.” She held her arm out in front of her, palm of her hand at an angle, and swept through the air. “They’re standing there like little Indians.”

Next to them, the older woman had finally gotten her glasses ready and slid them over her nose, still squinting. “Yes, I see them, too.”

“Thank you,” said Tom. “Thank you, ladies.”

He turned and walked quickly away from them. He reached into the outer pocket where he had stuffed the cigarettes and pulled out one that was still intact and lit it. He wasn’t sure whether this was better or not. Whether the reality of this was better than being crazy. Or if it proved anything. Multiple people saw the same thing, but what did that show? Besides, he’d been there before, hadn’t he? The summer he and Maddy and Jim had read
The Lord of the Rings
. The summer they’d sat by the pond and the water itself had come alive and they’d all felt it, they’d all experienced it, and Jim Cruickshand had taken off into the woods. They hadn’t seen Jim again, either; he’d left for Vietnam, just before the war’s end.

Tom walked and smoked and kept from looking over at the far road where the kids were arranged.

“Tweens,” he muttered around the smoke. He’d heard Steph refer to Brian as a “tween” once or twice.

He thought of the kid in his car only an hour or two ago, the one who said his name was Samuel, the one saying that “they” were coming. The defectives.
Why
?

Kidnapping, maybe. Ransom. Who was the little boy? A neglected kid born to a young, dope addict mother. He’d come in around the same time as Tom had been there with Mark Massey, apparently the father, who had tried to kill himself and who was a dead ringer for the kid who’d been burning on Tom’s own lawn.

Wagerers
, Liz had said before she’d slipped into whatever shock-induced trance.
It means someone who pledges themselves for a cause, prepares for battle, prepares for death.

Hirelings,
Samuel had confirmed.
We can’t interfere. We can only guide.

Kids, floating in the air. In the sky. The sky, lit up like the
aurora borealis
. Maddy, giddy with it. Tom, feeling lighter than air as he walked among the young men as they’d stood in front of Red Rock Medical Center.

Which were these? Wagerers or defectives?

Tom abruptly started across the parking lot, looking for traffic, looking down where he stepped, and then, finally, up and across the way.

But he didn’t have to go anywhere. They were coming to him.

Side by side, spaced ten or fifteen feet apart, the row of kids, pre-adolescents, no more than boys really, were crossing the road, coming up onto the lawn towards him, and towards the hospital.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Liz was watching the baby boy, Caleb, sleep. They had taken out her IV and helped her out of bed. It was the only way that she would agree to cooperate, that she would tell them anything. The truth was that she had nothing to tell. Nothing that she knew of, anyway.

They watched her carefully. She felt their eyes on her. They were waiting for her to break down and start crying and tell them all what she had done. Only Maddy, her hair a bit mussed on one side from sleep, seemed to regard her in the same way as before, her face full of concern — non-judgmental.

Caleb looked peaceful. There were pillows on either side of him, but to Liz he looked too old to roll out of bed. His limbs were at a lengthening stage, she thought. Like he was in a growth spurt, or coming out of one. It just looked that way. He was still a baby, by most accounts. Not a baby in the swaddling, ga-ga-goo-goo sense of it, no, in that respect he was a little boy — but there was still baby in him. Innocent. And, if anything, wasn’t that what a baby was?

Maddy smoothed her hand over the child’s head and rested it there, looking off and up to the side, her face drawing into a little frown.

“Feel that there,” she said. “Go ahead.”

Liz took a step closer and Maddy placed Liz’s hand over her own and then slipped hers out from underneath. His hair was more like little boy hair, but it still had a delicate feel. Beneath his hair, on the scalp, she felt a little bulge. It was soft like a sack of fluid.

Liz withdrew her hand quickly. “What is it?”

“We’re not sure. The neurologist says he’s fine. The transfusion was successful, and the brain has responded. MRI is clean. His reflexes are good. All of his faculties are there . . .” Maddy looked down at the child and her large bosom heaved with a sigh.

“You don’t think it’s dangerous?” Liz could feel the other doctors, Simpson, Sophie, looming, silently examining her. Two well-dressed women with tightly pulled back hair had joined them and stood to the rear of the room.

“Well,” said Maddy, “so far he’s fine. We don’t even know if it’s a response to the holoprosencephaly or not. The MRI showed no bleeding, no trauma.” She shrugged. “He’s good.”

“Trauma? Was that what they thought at first?”

Maddy’s eyes flicked around to the entourage. “There’s a procedure to follow, honey, you know? We have to look out for the child.”

“How did his eyes—” Liz stopped herself. She still wasn’t sure whether or not she’d actually seen the child with some sort of cataract goop over his little eyes, or if it had been part of her nightmares. Best not to open her mouth now, when they all seemed skeptical of her sanity as it was.

Liz could sense the doctor behind her — Simpson — wanting to cut in and say something, but holding back. She imagined he’d been instructed to stay silent, waiting to hear what Liz had to say; to let Maddy speak with her and see if anything came out.

“Where’s his pacifier?” asked Liz, shifting gears.

Maddy looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

“At the hospital,” Liz continued, “the other one, he had a pacifier in his mouth. A red one.”

She could feel the attention of the others in the room focusing on her.

“I saw it when he was wheeled by, when we, you know, were getting ready to roll on out.” She made two gang-signs with her hands, hanging them limp in the air, a pathetic attempt at levity.

Then Liz did something she hadn’t expected to. With her back to everyone else in the room, she winked at Maddy. The matronly woman took it well, relaxed her face and her diamond-hard eyes, and turned and looked at Caleb again.
Not bad
, thought Liz, feeling fine, but also like her mind was suddenly a runaway horse — that disconsolate feeling of being out-of-body, or at least halfway out, not a hundred percent accountable, you might say. Like she’d been feeling ever since sitting up above the pond the other night, wadding up that blanket, dropping her wine glass, rubbing her locket, running into Christopher in the kitchen, his head lowered, unspeaking. It was uncomfortable, but also somewhat exhilarating.

The part of Liz that was detached was eager to find out where the trail led and what was going to happen next. Yet that same passenger, observer — that girl
knew
what was going to happen next.

They both looked down at the baby, and Liz felt sure that the doctors were going to start peppering her with questions again, that the grace period had come to an end, and their silent observation of her was over. Then the elevator down the hall made a
ding
, and they heard shouting.

Everyone turned.

“Call the police,” a familiar voice said. “Call the police now. Tell them that a child’s life is in jeopardy.”

Liz and Maddy looked at each other with wide eyes. They both headed towards the door. Tom Milliner appeared. His gun was out, pointed at the air.

“They’re coming,” he said.

“Sir! Sir—” Simpson clamored. He was looking at the gun.

“We need to get this room blocked off,” said Tom.

His balding head glistened with sweat. Liz could smell cigarette smoke on him, even from a distance. Tom looked at the two women standing at the back of the room.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

Good question
, Liz thought.

“They’re with Child Protective Services,” said Sophie.

Liz turned and looked at Maddy, who wore a grim expression.

“Okay,” Tom said, his words coming in huffs. “CPS,” he said, “right.”

“Who’s coming?” asked Maddy. “Is it more of them?”

“Yes, but different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Younger,” said Tom. His eyes met Liz’s, and then shifted to the sleeping child.

“What are you talking about?” said Simpson. “Sophie, call security.”

“I already notified them,” said Tom, not without some measure of irritation in his tone, Liz appreciated his asperity. Dr. Soap Opera was quickly becoming a wet blanket.

“I was downstairs. I told security to stop and question them and find out who they were and not to let them up.” Tom’s eyes flicked to Maddy.

The elevator dinged again. Tom spun around, his gun still in the air, and walked out of the room. Everyone followed, Liz observed, except for the two women. So Liz stayed, too. Maddy tossed a glance back over her shoulder, and looked at Liz and then at Caleb. She pulled a pacifier from her shirt pocket and handed it to Liz. She put her hand on the baby boy’s head and said, “I’ll be right back, sweet-love.”