Nothing Bad Is Going to Happen (15 page)

Rosa and Dom search my face, looking worried. Albus grins. “I dream about you all the time.”

“This is so weird.”

Dom still doesn't get it—he's blinking like a confused kid. “What the—”

“Shh,” Miss Rosa says again, stroking his face. “Stay awake, but quiet. You will need your muscles.”

“Dr. Ferguson let me out before they fired him,” Albus explains, still beaming at me. “It was the only nice thing he ever did.” She wrinkles her nose. “Even though I'm pretty sure he discharged me because he hoped that I would kill you. I talked about you all the time, and how I wanted to be family with you, and how in a perfect world it would be nice if we had the same blood—and I think he thought
that meant I wanted to see your blood, or something.” She shakes her head. “He really doesn't like you. He kept saying that the only way to get better was for me to find you and finally do whatever it was I desired to do. He called it exposure therapy. Little did he know I just want to have a slumber party. And now here you are!”

“Wait, what?” I ask, deciding to ignore the blood thing. “Dr. Ferguson retired. They didn't fire him.” I reconsider everything that's happened. “Oh. Of course they did.” I shake my head. “He hated me this whole time. He wanted me dead.”

“Why would anybody want to kill you?” Dom asks shrilly.

Miss Rosa grunts. “Everyone is wanting to kill Kippy. This is her destiny.”

“Some lawyer got in touch about a lawsuit they were building, and apparently the big bosses at Cloudy Meadows freaked out,” Albus says. “I heard the nurses talking about it. You were going to be a big problem for everyone, and they blamed him for you, and they thought it would look better once the suit went public if they could say they'd fired him—that's what the nurses were saying, anyway.” Albus frowns. “Then they sent me home. I didn't want to go home. I told them, but they wouldn't listen because I was a minor. And Dr. Ferguson had changed
all the paperwork to make it look like I was wrongfully incarcerated, too.”

“I don't get it,” I tell Albus. “You ran away and came here? I thought your family moved to England.”

“To England? Nah, they live a few towns over. I already told you, I dream about you. I've been looking for you everywhere. As soon as I could, I ran away from home to find you. I couldn't remember your last name, but I knew about your friend, the one who died, so I found her name in the papers and looked up her family in the yellow pages. I thought they could tell me where you lived. I went home, got my bike, and I rode it thirty miles.”

I think of the little girl's bike on its side in Davey's yard. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Albus says. “Anyway, I was about to ring the doorbell at the Frieds' house when Dr. Ferguson came around the corner taking off his hat. I recognized him and was like, ‘Hey, Captain Ferg! What a coincidence!' but instead of answering he scooped me up and threw me in his trunk. Weird, huh? I was so pooped that I decided to take a nap in there and when I woke up I was chained to this pole.”

“You've . . . changed,” I say slowly. When she was my roommate, Albus was childlike—generally more imaginative than insane. I guess riding your little girl's bike thirty
miles through snow and getting hypothermia and then being chained to a pole can probably alter a person's personality.

“You too!” she says. “You're even prettier.”

“Who's changed?” Dom asks, completely out of it.

“Is he okay?” I ask Rosa.

“No,” she says, like this is the stupidest question in the world.

“You need to buck up, soldier,” Albus is saying. “This is probably bringing back a lot of your trauma from the last time. Ralph and all that. How he tried to drag you into his basement. You probably hate it down here, don'tcha, Corporal?”

I glance at her. How does she know? Was that part in the papers? Dom wouldn't let me read most of the news.

“But the fact is: you're our most able-bodied person,” she continues. “We need you to be brave.”

“But I don't even know what's going on yet,” I say feebly.

“Then figure it out,” she says. “It isn't that hard.”

“Just tell me.”

“Think.”

I retrieve the torn list from my backpack.

“Ralph knew about what Dollar Dan did with the antlers, and he could have told Dr. Ferguson . . . and Dr. Ferguson would have known exactly what to say to get to me, because I went to him with all my fears. He knew I was worried Davey would start drinking again. He knew to pose as Davey's mom in those emails because I've always thought she was weird for leaving so much after Ruth died—he knew I was biased against her.” I look up at Albus. “And you were the second person Mildred saw on her video. . . .”

“Like I said, Private, he carried me off to his car.”

“Does he hurt you?” I ask suddenly, thinking of Libby's freak-out and the way men are.

“What?” She shakes her head at me. “No, that's gross. He's been really nice to me. It's actually been great. I've slept a lot and he made me lasagna yesterday. He gave me all these old blankets. It's way better than at Cloudy Meadows, to be honest. I've even got my own room.” She gestures expansively at the dank basement. “I think he's planning to kill me at some point but keeps putting it off.”

She glances at Dom's blood-soaked pants. “But I guess he's gone sort of insane now, huh? Tonight might be the night.” She smiles at me. “I'm glad I got to see you before we die, Kippy.”

I start screaming. Rosa and Dom stop hugging for a minute to join in, yelling for help.

Albus shushes me.

“Don't bother,” she says, repositioning her rag blankets. “I've tried a million times. I think it's soundproof.”

She reaches into her sweater, pulls out a red whistle, and blows into it so hard that my eardrums hurt. “See?” Dom and Rosa keep on screaming.

“How much has he told you?” I ask Albus, straining to be heard over the yelling.

“I dunno,” Albus says. “He seemed pretty happy about this hairy head that he brought down today.”

The Chewbacca head.

“He also brought down the entire lower half of a dead man,” she continues, smiling, “no head, just the lower parts. At first I thought it was a werewolf he killed, because of the furry head, but then I remembered those are fake.”

Dom quiets down and Rosa murmurs something to him. He stutters, pale from blood loss.

I put a hand on his shoulder.

Jim's body is down here somewhere. Probably in one of those freezers.

“There also might be something in those letters.” Albus nods at a box under the stairs. “He brought some down today, and when I asked him what they were he wouldn't answer me—just gave me more lasagna and sauntered off. I tried to look at them already but my chain
isn't long enough. Oh well.”

I'm not exactly inclined to open up the creepy freezer, but I do drag out the box Albus indicated. As soon as I take off the lid I recognize the letterhead. “They're from Ralph.”

“Dr. Ferguson talks about Ralph constantly,” Albus says. “He tells me Ralph is his ticket to everything. He talks about you guys, too. Like, I really can't believe you're here because he genuinely hates you. He rants about it. He says you got him fired, made him broke. He's, like, bankrupt or something. He's planning to ruin you.” She rubs her ankle, still smiling at me. “I told you he hated us.”

“We gotta get out of here,” I mutter. I glance at the dormer window but it doesn't look like it opens, and it's pretty small. I scoot under it to read the letter in the moonlight.

“Ralph paid him to hurt Davey,” I mutter, passing the letter to Dom, who's using Rosa as a backrest. They look like a bobsled team. “He must have been pissed that I was happy. But then who did I see at Davey's?” No one, I guess. My heart pounds.

“Kippy,” Dom says, his fingers shaking as he reads the letter. The skin on his hand is rough with dried blood.

Rosa reads the letter, too, and growls.

“Jim told me he was going to look into who was auctioning off Ralph's stuff,” I mutter. “He was going to bully them into handing over the cash. He didn't know it was Dr. Ferguson.” The words feel heavy. I should never have baited him to go.

“Collateral damage,” Dom whispers.

“Hey, Private,” Albus says, nodding at the window. “You've got a visitor.”

A shadow passes on the other side of the glass.

I would recognize those snow boots anywhere.

“Libby,” I shout, climbing onto a folding chair to bang on the glass with my good arm. She ducks down, gawking at me.

“Oh my Gah,” she mouths.

Just then the ceiling starts to vibrate.

“What is that?” I yell, straining to be heard over the noise. I recognize the whirring sound from the Frostbite Challenge.

“Chainsaw,” Albus shouts. “You better hurry up and save us, Corporal.”

Rosa's glasses slide down her nose from sweat. “Is time for traps.” She scrambles to her feet, reaches behind her, and pulls her bra through one of her sleeves. “Straps!” she says, wiggling her fingers at me.

I step on the folding chair and turn around, gingerly holding my bad arm so she can unhook my bra. She ties mine together with hers and grabs some of Albus's blankets. “I build snare,” she grumbles, barreling up the stairs.

Libby is banging at the glass with the butt of a rifle. Glass fractures overhead, crunches, and breaks.

I open up my eyes to see her clearing away the shards with a sweatshirt.

Upstairs, the chainsaw has stopped and the doorknob is rattling.

“I tie shut door, Doctor,” Rosa yells. “Is because I hate you!”

“Hi,” Libby says, beaming at me. “I got your text and I accept your apology. I Googled how to forgive someone without letting them, like, fully off the hook, and there was an eHow saying that ‘I accept your apology' is better than ‘It's okay'—”