The Hollower (13 page)

The signs above the doors to various corridors read:

FAMILY/SUBSTANCE ABUSE/OUTPATIENT
COUNSELING
CRISIS/PSYCHIATRY/PSYCHOLOGY

He half walked, half jogged down the corridor to the right, his chest tightening to force out the hospital air, to dispel the nightmare of Sally’s disappearance in a long sigh.

Gone. Just vanished into thin air. How could that be? How could it have happened?

“She wanted to go,” a female voice replied, heavy with tears, and Dave stopped short, his attention turned to the source of the words. Fear skittered up Dave’s chest like a leaf caught in a breeze.

In the room to his right, he noticed a pretty young nurse with shoulder-length curls of auburn hair. She shrugged at a doctor with a clipboard. “In the end, she wanted to go.”

The doctor shook his head and patted the hand of a teenaged girl whose pale face looked slack. Strands of hair (blond, like Sally’s, he noticed) lay fanned out on a pillow, and her hands—tiny, bony little things at the end of stick-figure wrists, lay folded and motionless on her fairly flat, unmoving chest.

“It’s a tragedy, what some of these girls do to themselves nowadays.”

Dave started down the hall again. Behind him, he heard the nurse’s voice again, calm this time.

“She wanted to get away.”

Quiet enough to get lost under the scuffle of shoes down the length of hall he’d put between himself and the room. Quiet, and confidential, as if meant only for Dave’s ears.

“She wanted to get away from you, Dave.”

He nearly tripped over his own feet trying to turn around.

No one behind him—no rushing nurses, no orderlies, no patients—no one and nothing at all but a gurney laid out across the width of the hallway. A sheet had been draped across it, and a dark wet stain pooled in its center. In that stain, spattered by red so deep it was almost black, clots of something soaked the fibers of the sheet. That’s what Dave thought at first, that he was looking at blood clots, and the acidy fear in his gut gusted to an unpleasant squall. He walked back toward the gurney, his feet tingling. Each footfall caused a surreal echo too loud for the space. He thought he heard words in their reverberation, but couldn’t quite make them out.

When he got within five feet or so of the gurney, he realized the stain was most certainly blood, but the contents on the sheet weren’t clots at all. The smell of them was coppery, metallic like blood, but . . .

Stuck between the teeth of the gears and the coil of the springs, he could see wisps of blond hair and milky bits of flesh.

Clock parts
.

For a moment, the gurney swam out of focus, and
Dave staggered to a nearby wall. His breath came in ragged clumps of air.

Clock parts, for Chrissakes. Clock parts. Clo
—

From his periphery, he saw the wheels turn and the corner of the gurney squeaked out of view, but he couldn’t look up.

He flinched when the voice behind him said, “She wanted to get away from you, and she found . . . me.” The delighted, almost girlish giggle tinkled close to his ear.

Then the world was yanked like a rug out from under him, and he sank to one knee.

Don’t you dare, you dumb bastard, don’t you dare pass out, don’t you
—

The walls around him shimmered, and the air in his ears made a chuffing sound that blocked out all other noise.

Don’t lose it, man, not now, not like this. Don’t do it
.

The tiles gained clarity first, followed by the wall on which he leaned. They felt cool, solid beneath his burning palm. The floor and walls were back. He chanced a look up. The nurse from the young girl’s room was half jogging down the hall to him. He glanced around the empty hall. No gurney now.

“Sir, are you okay? I saw you go down and thought for sure you were going to pitch forward onto your face.” The nurse offered him a smile, but he found he couldn’t return it.

“I’m fine—fine, thanks. Just got a little dizzy for a moment.”

“Would you like me to get a doctor? Wait there, and I’ll grab someone on call—”

“No—no, really. Thanks, but I’m fine. I—I gotta go.”

He rose with a shaky groan and pushed off from the wall, then turned away from her and continued down toward the bend in the corridor.

Behind him, canned laughter, like a cheap laugh track, followed until he turned the corner.

DeMarco had decided right off the bat that she didn’t like Dr. Stevens, officious little asshole that he was. She nodded at everything the doctor told her, jotting a continuous stream of notes onto a small pad, but the more he talked, the less she liked him. Too quick to place blame, too much hot air of no real consequence. He told her what Mrs. Saltzman had claimed to see in a rather clipped and uninterested narration, and moved on from the standard protocols of the hospital (which he followed to the letter, of course) to Mr. Kohlar, the missing woman’s brother, who could do no right in this man’s eyes. DeMarco wanted to punch him in the mouth to get him to stop talking. She didn’t care about blame; she just wanted resolutions.

“And Mrs. Saltzman wants to talk directly to Ms. Kohlar’s brother, is that it?” DeMarco asked between words in a stream of fault-finding and accusation.

Stevens, nettled at having been interrupted midrant, replied, “Yes, yes,” with an impatient wave. “She refuses to tell me more. She wants to speak with Dave Kohlar.”

Something about his expression gave DeMarco the impression that his mind was not so much on Sally’s well-being, but on potential complaints of negligence and lawsuits. She didn’t know the man well and nothing about his body language suggested outwardly that this was true, but there were the subtler
mannerisms of the body that told so much—the movements of the eye, the turn of the lips, the amazing power of the eyebrows to convey so much with so little. And in these quiet little ways, this man screamed
defensiveness
and
worry
.

“I’m sure Mr. Kohlar will appreciate your letting us talk to Mrs. Saltzman,” she said.

Dr. Stevens’s eyes would have rolled, she thought, if not for the possible interpretation of unprofessionalism. “For the purpose of exhausting every possible lead, I suppose. I’ve cleared the necessary paperwork with her family, but I have my reservations about this.”

“Duly noted.” DeMarco scribbled into her notebook, and offered him a bright smile.

Dave found them at the end of the hall. The detective, a tiny woman with a wild tumble of brown hair, looked up as he approached. She had a nice smile—an understanding smile. He noticed it before it faded to a quizzical turn of the mouth, and decided she might be okay.

“Are you all right, sir? You look a bit peaked.”

“Fine, fine,” he replied, then put out a hand to greet her. “Dave Kohlar.”

“DeMarco,” she said, gripping and shaking it firmly.

“Hello, Dr. Stevens,” he said, and the doctor returned a polite nod. Dave turned back to the policewoman. “Any news?”

“Nothing so far, but please rest assured that we will do everything within our power to find your sister. Time is crucial in missing persons cases and I don’t want to waste any. May I ask you a few questions?”

Dave nodded.

“Good.” The officer flipped the notepad to a clean page. “I take it Ms. Kohlar hasn’t tried to contact you, is that correct?”

Dave nodded again. “Not a word. I would think if she was in trouble—”

“Sometimes, in these cases, the missing person wants to be missing. Or at least isn’t thinking clearly enough to know who to notify or why,” Dr. Stevens broke in.

“I can assume, though, that you’re close?” DeMarco continued. “She’d otherwise have no reason not to contact you?”

“No, no, of course not.”

“And she hasn’t made any attempt whatsoever to give you some signal of her whereabouts . . . ?”

“No.” Dave’s brow furrowed. “I’d tell you if she did.”

“Of course you would. Just checking. Gotta be thorough and all.” She smiled, and Dave met it straight-faced.

The officer continued. “Any other next of kin she might try to go to? Any other family? Friends, maybe?”

“No, none that I can think of. Our parents are dead, and she didn’t have many friends other than the ones in that help group she used to go to.”

“Anyone from there, maybe?”

Dr. Stevens shook his head. “I’ve called them all. No one’s seen or heard from her.”

“Any enemies?” DeMarco asked.

“No, no one. People liked Sally, she . . .” Dave fished for the words. “She was like a kitten. People
think she’s helpless and fragile. They want to take care of her.”

“Any places she loved to go, then? Parks or something of that nature?”

Dave shook his head. “Nothing that I can think of offhand.”

DeMarco nodded, sizing him up a moment before flipping the notepad closed and sliding it into her pants pocket. “I see. Well, if you think of anything, give me a call.” She handed a business card to Dave. “It’s got my pager, so call anytime. If you think of anything—anything at all, let me know.”

Dave pocketed the card. “Of course.”

“Great.” The detective offered another bright smile. “So, shall we see the lovely and vivacious Mrs. Saltzman?”

DeMarco and Dave followed Dr. Stevens to the far end of the hall and waited as he punched in a code to open the first set of doors. Along the length of the hallway that followed, there were closed office doors, good solid oak affixed with gold plaques that bore the names of the doctors who used them. At the end of that hall, they passed through to a second set of doors into one of the main gathering areas of the psychiatric wing.

The air of the General Recreation Room was past its sell-by date all around—stale flesh and stale minds, and the faint hint of stale urine hung over the room like a fog. In spite of the pleasant pastelled hues of the walls and furniture, Dave saw washed-out faces and blank stares, pasty nightgowns and ragged slippers. Some watched the soaps without really seeing them. He heard someone whimper, “No-no-no-nononono”
from behind a potted plant that stood next to the Ping-Pong table. Others played checkers by a large window. A few stood staring through the thick panes of glass to an outside world they’d likely never see again.

Dave sidestepped a wandering old lady drooling and chattering nonsense words to herself. One young woman whose tangled strands of black hair hung in her face glared at them as they got closer. Her wild eyes, sunken deep in bluish sockets, darted with clear hostility from one face to another. Thin white scars crisscrossed her cheeks and neck.

Dave took all the patients in with that same grim and stoic discomfort which he felt every time he’d gone to see Sally anywhere. These people had been parents or siblings, children or lovers to someone once. Every one of them revenants, not uniformly old, but possessed of the same haggard dryness, like flowers pressed into books, preserved but lifeless shells of what they once were. He felt for them.

And part of him, the guilty part that had never forgiven Sally for being sick, hated every one of them.

Dave turned his head, waiting for Dr. Stevens to punch in an access code for yet another set of doors. Passing through quickly, the three continued down a long corridor.

“We’ve moved her to a new room so that your people can collect whatever evidence they need undisturbed,” the doctor stated, then came to a halt about halfway down the hall. He rapped on a door to the right, then led them into a small room with a white slab of bed to either side of the wall. Between the beds, a tiny box window looking out over the grounds let a narrow wedge of sunlight fall across the white-and-green-tiled
floor. On one of the beds, a pale, withered woman in a blue and pink floral dress sat hunched on the edge of the cotton coverlet. Her hands were folded in her lap. Dave thought she looked fit to fall apart, a pile of dust held together by flaccid skin. Her hair, cobweb fine and whiter than any sterilized part of the room, was bound in a loose bun atop her head. She looked up as they entered, and Dave noticed that one of her gray-blue eyes was slightly cloudy with the onset of cataracts.

“This is Mrs. Saltzman,” Dr. Stevens said. “Mrs. Saltzman, this is David Kohlar, and this is Detective DeMarco. They’ve come to talk about Sally.”