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  "And, please, call me Francis," he said, mushing his sibilants. He'd dropped his careful manner of speech. She moved aside as he tried unsuccessfully to slide his key in the lock. "Damned red tape."

  He gave her a bloodshot look, and his gaze crawled down her body like a spilled basket of snakes. "It's bad enough to get regulated by the state. Now the federal government says 'Do this and mat.' And all this talk about children's rights, like we 're the bad guys."

  He licked his lips, and Starlene saw why the children compared him to a reptile. "We do the best we can," she said.

  "Goddamned right we do." On the fourth try, the key slid in the lock and the hasp popped free. "We're in service of the Lord but all these layers of deception get in the way of the real work. You know what that work is?"

  "Healing. Loving. Caring."

  He banged his foot against the door and it swung open. "Hell, no. The real job is about looking good on paper. That's what brings in the money. That's why Kracowski is the best thing that ever happened to Wendover."

  Bondurant shouted up the stairwell. "You hear that, Kracowski? You're the best goddamned thing that ever happened."

  Starlene stood clear of Bondurant, who swayed and leaned against the doorjamb. She couldn't resist looking past him into the dark basement.

  Bondurant held out his hand and gave a wiggly grin. '"Fraidofthedark?"

  More afraid of YOU, she wanted to say, but this might be her only chance to see inside the basement. Vicky and Freeman had been trying to tell her something, but she'd been unable to cut through her own educated biases to listen. Maybe her faith was a bias, too. Now the door was open. It was up to her to walk through.

  "She smiled at me," Bondurant said spraying her with his liquor spittle.

  "Who?"

  "The woman. The woman in the wall."

  Starlene barely heard him, because she saw a glow emanating from inside the basement. It was an eerie, diseased half-light. She felt herself being drawn forward almost against her will. Behind her, Bondurant pressed close against her, his stench as repellent as his body heat.

  "She's here," he whispered and closed the door behind them. Starlene knew this was dangerous, that the drunken fool might do something embarrassing, but her fears were overwhelmed by what she saw before her.

  The metal tanks themselves would have been cause for wonder, set in rows with coils and wires around each. The wiring that Vicky had tried to describe circumvented the ceiling, and several sizes of conduit ran overhead. An array of expensive-looking machinery lined the walls behind the tanks. The technology was a vivid contrast to the musty gray of the stone foundation, but that wasn't what caused Starlene's blood to freeze in her veins.

  An old woman, Bondurant's "woman in the wall," stood in the glow of the generator components.

  The woman had an ugly scar across her forehead her facial wrinkles so deep that it looked to be the work of several hundred years of gravity. The woman's eyes were set back in her skull like the openings of small caves, holes that allowed no light to enter. From the tattered condition of the woman's robe, she looked severely neglected.

  Starlene's first instinct was to help the woman. "What are you doing here?"

  The woman's mouth opened, as slow as dust. Bondurant had pulled a flask from somewhere and was busy assaulting his central nervous system. "She lives here," he said, after removing the flask from his lips.

  "Here?" Beyond the tanks set in the middle of the room, a series of dark corridors broke off from the main floor area. Starlene saw a few doors that promised even deeper shadows.

  "When she's not in the walls, I mean," Bondurant said.

  The woman's lips moved again, slowly, and Starlene thought the woman had spoken. Maybe sound wasn't what the woman emitted, because the top of Starlene's spinal column tingled and the words "A white, white room in which to write" flitted across her head and were gone. Except the voice had been a man's, not an old woman's.

  Bondurant put his arm around Starlene, the gesture more boozy and paternalistic than sexual. "We got plenty down here. They're the best kind of patients you could think of. Don't have to feed them, they never complain, and no Social Services bastards breathing down your neck."

  "You mean they stay down here?" The cobwebs, the stained concrete floor, and the wet smell of corruption made the basement seem more suited for a colony of rats.

  "They don't stay here all the time. They used to, then they got in the walls. And now, sometimes, they get out." Bondurant waved his hand toward the ceiling, indicating the rooms above them.

  They took it by hook and by crook.

  The words were there, inside Starlene's head, like voice-over edited into a movie soundtrack. The woman's lips hadn't moved, but Starlene was sure the words had been the woman's.

  I got half a mind to tell somebody about it, what they did. But I only got half a mind.

  Maybe Freeman had been telling the truth. He'd exhibited some remarkable guess work during his session with her. But mind reading was a little too loopy, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something God would never allow. Yet so were old men who walked on water and disappeared. And shadowy secret agent types making deals with doctors. And expensive equipment bidden in an underfunded children's home.

  "Who are you?" Starlene asked the woman.

  The woman said nothing, just turned her stooped body and shuffled back towards the shadows. It was only after she'd reached the throat of the widest corridor that Starlene's legs obeyed her brain enough to follow.

  "You don't want to go back there," Bondurant said.

  "She needs help," Starlene said, angry. "How could you stand it, knowing she was living down here in this filth?"

  Bondurant's drunken laughter bounced off the stone walls. "I don't think 'living' is the right word."

  Starlene paused in mid-stride, and stood breathless in the center of the metal cylinders. Ahead of her, the woman had faded to nothing.

  The woman's final words reverberated inside the bone cave of Starlene's skull: Got half a mind. Off to find the other half.

  TWENTY-TWO

  "Starlene went down there," Freeman said. The sound on the rec room TV was turned down, and a cat food commercial was playing. He looked out the window at the sun sinking behind the impossibly distant mountains. Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz.

  Vicky had "finished" her meal, and the counselors hadn't noticed that she'd only eaten one teaspoonful of food. Freeman had no appetite, so they left the cafeteria early. They were allowed to wait in the rec room near the offices while the rest of the kids ate. Randy had cast a suspicious eye at them, but then had to go break up a shouting match between Raymond and a second-string goon who was probably making a play for Deke's vacated throne.

  "I guess Starlene can find out for herself," Vicky said.

  "You can't talk any sense into a grown-up's head. They already think they know everything."

  "She's not so bad. Not like The Liz or Doctor Krackpot."

  "Who do you think those people down there are?"

  Freeman looked at the ugly swirl rug beneath his feet. He narrowed his focus, deliberately keeping his attention above floor level. He was pretty sure he wasn't keen enough to triptrap into the heads of the people underneath, but he didn't want to take the chance right now. "I'm not sure, but they're somehow wrong?"

  "Do you believe in ghosts?"

  "No, but that doesn't mean that ghosts don't believe in me. I didn't believe in ESP, either, until it jumped up and bit me."

  "Do you believe in anything else?"

  "Sometimes."

  Vicky sat back in the worn armchair and crossed her thin legs. "When it's dark and all the other girls are asleep, I talk to God."

  "Now that's what I call ESP."

  "No, really. And I feel like He's talking back to me."

  "Starlene got to you, didn't she? Fed you the company line. Well, has your life gotten any better since you've developed a meaningful personal relationship with
a thing you can't see?"

  "Why do you always get so defensive over things that have nothing to do with you?"

  "Why do you vomit every time you eat?"

  Vicky pointed at the scar on Freeman's wrist. "You disappear your way, and I'll disappear mine."

  Freeman moved away from the window to the entrance of the rec room. Through the glass cafeteria doors, he could see the counselors stooped over their food. All he had to do was walk away. No one would even notice he was missing, at least not until after-dinner group sessions.

  He headed down the hall past the main office. The office lights were off and Bondurant was nowhere around. Vicky called Freeman, but he pretended not to hear. She wasn't the only one who knew how to escape. He'd been doing it for years, both inside and outside his head.

  Freeman paused at the front entrance. A keypad beside the door blinked, a security system that required a code. The door's release bar would set off an alarm. Still, if he ran fast enough and reached the fence at the back of the property, he could cross over the farms and hide in the woods. From there, he'd have a decent shot at making it to…

  Where?

  He had nowhere to go.

  Just like always. He put his back against the cool glass and slid to a sitting position. Vicky was waiting.

  "I know the code," she said. "That's how I get out."

  "What did you do, read the night watchman's mind?"

  "No. Cynthia… did things for him in trade."

  "Does Cynthia want to get out, too?"

  "No, I think she just likes doing it. She told me what she did, and I didn't believe her until she gave me the code. I think she wanted to shock me."

  "Did it work?"

  "I've heard worse. Like your saying you could triptrap into my head and not being afraid of what you found. That's way worse."

  Freeman looked up. Vicky's eyes blazed with intensity. Even if he could have triptrapped her at mat moment, he wouldn't have dared. She punched three keys, a green light flashed, and she pushed the door open.

  The evening Appalachian air swept over them, whisking away the mildewed odor of Wendover. Freeman rolled to his feet, grabbed Vicky's hand, and men they were off, running silently across the lawn. The grass was damp from an early dew, and Freeman's sneakers were soaked before they reached the boulders. One of the second floor windows lit up but they didn't stop.

  "Is this the best way to go?" Freeman asked.

  "There's a place on the far side of the lake where you can climb a pine tree and jump over the fence. You land in a laurel thicket. Get a few scratches, but no broken bones."

  "Sounds like you've done it before."

  "You're not the only one with secrets."

  They slowed when they reached me cover of the boulders and Freeman let go of Vicky's hand. The moon was three-quarters full and glowed off the skin of the lake. Among the scant patches of forest, reflected light spilled silver across the ground. They moved down the path, Freeman's ears straining for the slightest sound.

  It wasn't sound but sight that stopped them.

  They rounded the bend, and the old man in the gown stood on the path in front of them.

  "You can't go this way," the man said, or maybe he hadn't said anything, only put the words in Freeman's head. His lips hadn't moved at all, just parted as if he wanted to draw a breath but couldn't.

  "Did you hear that?" Vicky whispered.

  Freeman nodded. "I didn't even triptrap."

  The old man stood there, unmoving. Moonlight caught his flesh where the gown was ripped. His skin was milky, translucent, as if you could poke a finger in and it would keep on going.

  "Who are you?" Freeman said, wondering if he even needed to speak in order for the man to understand.

  "I live here," the man said or thought. He waved his hand across the lake. "I used to sleep here. But they woke me up."

  "They?" Vicky said.

  "I kept them."

  Freeman looked behind Vicky. He couldn't decide if he was more afraid of the old man or of Bondurant and Kracowski and whatever was happening in Wendover. They could rush past the old man and make it to the fence. Even if the man had any muscle inside the ragged gown, he looked to be a hundred and twenty.

  "I saw you in the home," Freeman said waving in the darkness toward Wendover. "You say you live here?"

  "Here, there, nowhere," the man spoke-thought. "It's all the same."

  "Are you…" Vicky said. "Are you dead?"

  "Not dead. Not anymore. The dead get to sleep. The dead are lucky."

  Freeman pressed backwards against the rhododendron branches. "You're one of the people underneath, aren't you? The people in the deadscape."

  "You can't go this way."

  "We don't want to go back to the home. It's too scary."

  Vicky gave Freeman a look that said So even a snake-eyed tough guy suffers a moment of weakness now and then.

  "You can't go this way," the man repeated in a voice like the lost wind over an empty grave.

  "We're in a hurry," Freeman said. "Any minute, the counselors are going to notice we're gone."

  "Please," Vicky said. "We haven't done anything to you."

  The old man looked out over the lake, eyes as blank as water. "Drowning isn't so bad."

  Freeman nudged Vicky away from the old man and stepped between them. "You're not going to hurt us. I won't let you."

  The man's lips finally moved, lifted into a wrinkled smile that might have been hiding swallowed light. "I don't need to hurt you. They're doing a good enough job of it already. Wendover gets us all, sooner or later."

  As they watched the man's form softened and blurred, the edges blending with the moonlit night. His body broke into milky ropes, which then unthreaded themselves until at last only a pale mist hung in the air. The mist drifted from the path, down the grassy slope of the bank to the water's edge. There, it slowly dissolved, and Vicky and Freeman were left with nothing but the distant chirping crickets and the fireflies blinking against the thick0*.

  The old man's words came again from the sky, talking like dead snow: You can't go this way.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. Freeman's heart was pounding so hard he could feel his pulse in his temples. A bullfrog croaked and splashed. From the darkness beyond the rhododendron came the hoot of an owl.

  "Let's go," Freeman whispered.

  "But he said-"

  "Who cares what he said? He's gone and besides, he's dead. What can he do to us?"

  "I don't like this."

  Freeman glanced at the night sky. The moon had risen higher. The ground was well-lighted now, and they could make good time if they kept moving. Every minute counted when you were serious about running away.

  "Do you trust me?" he asked.

  "Trust doesn't mean anything. You trusted Starlene Rogers, but you left her back there at Wendover, in that creepy basement. No telling what's happened to her."

  "She's a grown-up. She's one of them. The enemy. You have to stomp people who get in your way, like De Niro in Raging Bull. She'd end up shrinking you to nothing if you gave her half a chance."

  "I'm going to be nothing anyway."

  "Someday we're all going to be nothing. But we have to keep trying, keep dodging, keep running as long as we can. I don't know about you, but I'm not going down without a fight."

  Vicky pulled away from him and sat on a flat stone at the edge of the path. "And I thought you were brave. You really fooled me, didn't you?"

  Freeman walked away from her, to the edge of the lake. He looked across the water where the mist had disappeared.

  "You can stand up to a bully like Deke," she said. "But you can't stand to look inside yourself. You play tough but you're nothing. You're as scared as any of us. Clint Eastwood, my ass."

  "No fair. You don't know anything about me."

  "I went inside your head, remember? Triptrapping works both ways when you're dealing with somebody else who can do it."

  "You didn't see anythi
ng. I've got all that stuff locked away. I'm over it. Nothing's bothering me anymore."

  "Except your Dad. And what he did."

  Freeman balled his hands into fists. He wasn't going to lose it. Not like Clint in Dirty Harry. Though it would feel so goddamned good.

  The heat rushed through him and he fought the pain in his head. He wasn't going to cry in front of a stupid girl. Especially one who was nothing but skin and bones, who was so messed up she couldn't eat a solid spoonful of food. Who was she to tell him what was going on inside his own head? The best shrinks in the state system hadn't been able to touch him. He was fucking by-God bulletproof.

  "I know about the acetylene torch," she said quietly. The water lapped at the shore with a series of tired sighs.

  "He didn't burn me on purpose."

  "Not the first time. And I know what happened to your Mom. What you saw-"

  Freeman wheeled and stormed over to her. He could break her in half, she was so scrawny and brittle. He could slap her and make her skull shatter like an eggshell. He could rearrange her face until she shut her big fat mouth.

  "You don't know a goddamned thing about my Dad, or my Mom, or about me," he yelled, so loudly he could hear his own echo across the water. Anyone listening from Wendover could have heard him, but he didn't care.

  "Admit you're scared, and I'll show you the way out."

  Freeman had lied plenty of times in his life. Lying was a survival skill when you were in the system, when you were one of society's mistakes. And right now, he could lie and get his way. He could fool Vicky into thinking he was scared, because girls seemed to get the emotions of anger and fear mixed up. He could play her, manipulate her the way he'd done with every group home shrink and sociologist in the state.

  But Freeman wasn't going to lie, not this time. "I'm not scared. I just want to see what it's like to live one night under the stars, to not have somebody tell me when to go to bed and when to wake up, or make me get in touch with my feelings. Or shock me like a freaking lab monkey until I do tricks and turn flips. Even if they catch us, I need one night where I belong to me."