HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (26 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Tom looked out the window of the unoccupied room and saw Mahoney standing in the rain with the officer in the poncho, Bader. Mahoney was five flights down. Tom was back on the pediatrics floor. It was quiet now. Patients and their families were sleeping. The rain came down outside and occasional gusts caused it to sheet against the window. It sounded a little like the ocean.

The floor had emptied. The mousy resident who had been standing on the bed with her clipboard held to her chest like a seminary schoolgirl’s bible. The dreamy doctor Soap Opera. The CPS workers. The nurses and orderlies crowding around to watch the young boys in their drab clothes, their lopsided old-timey caps. All gone. The boys were gone as well, suddenly just saying their goodbyes, being escorted out by the cops. And taken where? Did they have parents? Had they just disappeared into thin air, like their counterparts in front of the Red Rock Medical Center?

Tom didn’t know where they had been taken, he had been outside with Mahoney at the time. His eyelids fluttered. The space possessed a calm that reminded him of peaceful times in his own home, a family there, sleeping. Most nights now were spent on the couch, smoking, looking out the picture window, watching the trees sway in the night. They danced subtly. The movement could be misunderstood if you didn’t look closely; they were breathing, those trees, communicating.

Tom left the room. He walked the pediatric ward. The hallway went around in a loop, like a track, with all the patients’ rooms on the outside of the track and things like radiology and baths and closets on the inside. The only rooms on the outer-side that were not patients’ rooms were the break room and the children’s play room. It was very quiet now. People seemed to have melted away like ghosts.

He stuck his head into the room where Caleb was asleep. Elizabeth had moved into the same bed as Caleb. He had his red pacifier in. Her hand was on his head so that her fingers gently touched his forehead. The lights in the room were dim. It smelled of antiseptic, but also of people.

Tom left.

He finally found Maddy in the playroom. She was reading in a child’s bright-orange chair. Tom couldn’t see what the book was. She looked up at him standing in the doorway and smiled.

“I checked,” he said. “Not a cocktail in the whole place.”

He held his hand out next to another child’s chair, as if asking permission to sit. Maddy nodded cordially.

“Of course, babydoll. Join me.”

Tom sat down awkwardly in the small chair. He looked at his hands. He looked at the books on the shelves and at the toys. He looked at Maddy. He decided to talk to her, to tell her some things, but then he decided against it. He couldn’t have known it would be the last real conversation he would ever have with her.

Her eyes scanned the children’s book she held.

“In stories, you know, or in the movies, people never have to eat, sleep, or poop.” She looked up at him. “How are you holding up?”

“Oh, you know me,” he said.

She left it at that, and leafed through the book.

“What’re you reading?”

She held it up. “
Peter Rabbit
.”

“He still getting into mischief?”

“Everything you need to know,” Maddy said tapping a page with a painted nail, “is right in this book.”

“Everything you ever needed to know, you learned in kindergarten.”

“Boy howdy.”

She let the book drop between her thighs and looked up at him thoughtfully. Her eyeliner was smeared. “You still have a job?”

He shrugged. He didn’t know.

“You’ve done the right thing, Tom. Even if you don’t have your job, you’ll be fine. You’ll think of something.”

“I don’t know. Cast me into the unknown, and I’ll swim for the nearest rock.”

She looked at him seriously.

“I don’t think so, Tommy. You may think you’re a hard case, all evidence this, and provable facts that, but I don’t think so.”

She held up the book so that he could see the page. It showed Peter Rabbit, in the overturned wheelbarrow, Mr. McGregor in the distance, hoeing fastidiously, and beyond him, the gate. “That’s you,” she said, her finger on the rabbit. Then she tapped the gate. “That’s your goal.” And finally she pointed to Mr. McGregor. “And that’s the obstacle.”

“Pretty simple.”

She let the book down and looked at him. “So?”

Tom looked into her soft blue eyes. For some reason Madison Kruger was seeking his advice, or something like it. Him, Tom Milliner. One of two boys. Not a war vet. Investigator in a small mountain community — if he still had that position. Witness to recent supernatural events and other unexplainable phenomena. She was asking him to say something. About all of it.

“We hairless apes have lots of energy.” He affected a wry smile.

“Energy,” she said, her head bobbing up and down. She swiped the back of her hand across her nose. She closed the book and set it down. Then something passed over her, or through her, and when she looked up again she was the old Maddy, the one who went for hours on end tending to the sick, the infirm, and the wasted. “So, how are our kids?”

“Sleeping,” Tom said. Then added: “Together.”

Maddy nodded again, but faintly, as if she’d expected to hear this. He searched for the right words to tell her about the boy levitating.

Then Maddy’s eyes went wide, and she jumped, putting a hand over her heart.

Something hit the window.

Tom looked around, as if it had come from within the room. Somehow, though, he knew it hadn’t.

He ran to the window. There was only one window in the room, above the bookshelves, in the corner. He peered out into the silvery rain.

“Tom,” said Maddy.

“I know.”

He held his hand out behind him, palm down, meaning
hold on
. He put his other hand on the top of the books in front of him and leaned closer to the window. He could see fairly well through the rain. He could see the lights of the college, UVM, and its arena, in the distance. He could see the grassy lawn of the hospital, a kind of purple-black in the night. He could see Pearl Street, and the cars moving slowly along it. He saw the traffic light there, and watched it change from red to green. Then he looked into the sky. A jet was blinking. One red light, he saw at first, blipping across the sky, and then another. Things were hard to make out; the children’s playroom glared its loud reflection back at him.

“Maddy,” he said, “shut off the lights.”

She promptly did. As they were plunged into blackness, Tom thought to himself that it was funny, really, two old friends who had been children together, and here they were in this kiddies’ room, among these play things, scared of something in the dark, outside.

He peered into the night. For a moment he thought he caught sight of something in the sky. Just a dark streak of a shape, moving haphazardly, like a giant butterfly, or a bird.

“Jesus,” he said.

He waited a moment longer. Seeing nothing more, he said, “Okay. Turn them back on.”

He waited a moment. “Maddy,” he said.

He turned around. “Put the lights back—”

But she was gone.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Liz opened her eyes.

She saw the back of Caleb’s head, his light-colored hair. It smelled familiar, like Johnson’s baby shampoo.

She sensed someone in the room, and she felt sure that it was Tom, the investigator. He was watching over them, making sure they were all right. It felt nice. Then he was gone.

For a while, she just lay still there in the amber half-light of the room. There was one light on, a nightlight at baseboard level, which with the red and orange LEDs of the various machines combined to cast this honeycomb glow over the room.

She stroked Caleb’s hair. He stirred and then was motionless again. She listened to his breathing. She could feel the hummingbird beat of his heart. She thought she had never known such bliss.

Like her loon.

She must have drifted off, because soon she was aware of a presence in the room again. She assumed it was Tom, but as she surfaced from her dozing, she decided it wasn’t. She thought of sitting up, of getting out of bed, of looking around and making sure she wasn’t half dreaming (there had been a lot of that going on lately), but she didn’t.

She lay quietly.

She waited.

The machines in the room breathed with her. One beeped softly. They weren’t hooked up to much — Caleb to an IV and a heart monitor, which had been silenced at her request. The hospital staff would still be alerted to any change or disruption in the heart rate. Liz was no longer plugged in to anything. Caleb’s surgery had been effective and the blood had worked and his sodium levels were normal, but they were still keeping a close watch on him. His little precious head was no longer swelling, and for the moment his eyes were clear. No goop. The CPS workers had left having concluded there was no evidence of abuse. They’d made plans, however, to return the next morning when the child was medically stable, and invited the local Children and Family Services office to join them. It would be another circus soon enough, full of custody issues and parental legalities.

While it was certainly the consensus that she must be the birth mother, with the DNA tests to prove it, the leniency she’d been shown was not going to last long.

For one, there were his other parents to reconcile. From what she knew, she doubted they would fight for custody; Caleb had been in foster care, according to Milliner.

And she was a suspect in a murder investigation. And though there was no evidence, no charges, and even Milliner didn’t seem to believe she had done it, she felt guilty. She could try to rationalize it away, to tell herself it was another one of these dreams, a schizoid fantasy brought on by anti-depressants and alcohol consumption and her own tendencies, but it still
felt
true. It felt like she had killed.

Suddenly there was movement nearby. Low, along the baseboards. Like a mouse, but bigger. Something was definitely in the room.

Then it was on the bed. Elizabeth closed her eyes. There was a sound like fingernails scratching against the steel bed frame and pressure on the mattress.

She realized she was holding her breath. She lay there, pretending to sleep next to Caleb (
Did someone have a cat on the ward? Were such things allowed?
)
as the thing moved up toward their faces.

Then she heard something else. It sounded like a gas leak, like a broken pipe softly hissing.

The thing on the bed moved closer, until she could feel pressure on her thigh, something that was a paw or a hand.

She screamed.

Nothing came out. She was still holding her breath. She felt as if she were submerged under water, yet somehow getting air. She could feel her lungs expanding and contracting. She could still feel Caleb’s heart. They were both alive, they were okay. She thought of the coins, and of the five children, the small boys dressed in their ragamuffin clothes, standing around the bed reciting nursery rhymes with lilting accents, and for a moment she drew some comfort from that.

She tried to open her eyes and realized that she couldn’t. The thing on the bed was now beside her hips, in the pocket of space between her body and Caleb’s. She could still hear the
shhhhhh
. It sounded like rain, or the tide ebbing and flowing. A kind of breathing. Not a hospital machine; some small creature.

She thought of the things that had tried to get in from the porch. Pink, scrubbed raw things. Like oversized zygotes. Their mouths misshapen beaks. Tiny eyes rolling around as they tried to look in, to look at
her
.

Bile rose from her stomach into her throat. She wanted to bring her hands up and touch her own eyes, to find out why she couldn’t open them, but she didn’t dare. The thing on the bed was holding perfectly still, as if waiting for her to do something. The moment lingered. Then, without feeling its retreat, with only an awareness that it was there one moment and gone the next, the presence left the bed, the weight of it was gone, and she breathed.

The next thing she knew, someone was in the doorway again, and this time she was sure that it was Tom — she could smell the cigarettes and
Old Spice
cologne on him. He came in and looked at the two of them again. She wanted to open her eyes and sit up and acknowledge him, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. A strange pall had come over her. Her body would not respond to her commands, and the words,
Hello?
and
Help!
felt like they were spoken behind soundproof glass.

Milliner left the room. She heard the sound of the door snick shut as it closed.

She tried to move again and found that she could, a little. She shifted her weight and withdrew her arm from Caleb. She touched her eyes gingerly. Something was covering her lids and lashes. Like plastic. Touching it sent a shockwave of memory through her, and she felt her heart leap. She was suddenly there, sitting on the chair and overlooking the pond, glass of wine in her hand, and then she was standing, in her memory, and the glass fell and shattered on the fieldstone path.

When the electric wave of it passed, she found that she had brought her other hand to her neck. The locket was gone.

She wished Finna was there, or even the nurse, Madison. She wished anyone was there. She was tired.

Elizabeth put her arm back around Caleb.

No one was in the room with them now. No investigator, no malformed, oversized demon-creature. She felt sure they were alone. She also knew, deep within her, that something was going to take place which she would have to face alone. With no Christopher or Jared by her side, no Finna to defer to, not even the protection and friendship of Investigator Milliner or the mothering comfort of the loving nurse.

Something was very close now, waiting, waiting for her, and she would have to encounter it alone. It had covered her eyes, preparing her. It would come for her again. For years, she had known it was coming.

Liz pulled Caleb closer to her and kissed the top of his head, smelling the shampoo again.

Whatever it was, whatever was coming, it was not going to take her son.