Starlene sighed. Dirty jokes and sacrilege. Things were going to be very interesting with Freeman around. Not to mention having a ghost in the Home. The good thing about doubting your sanity was you didn't have to worry about dying of boredom.
ELEVEN
Bondurant didn't believe in ghosts. No sane man did, no holy man did. But the incident with Starlene at the lake was the third of its kind in recent weeks. Each of the three people had claimed to see a man in a dirty gray gown.
The first report had been from a kitchen worker, a wrinkled Scots-Irish whose family used to own the farmland where Wendover had been built in the 1930s. The man said the ghost was dressed just like the patients who had shambled down these halls when it was a state mental hospital during the Second World War. He'd been a boy back then, and as Bondurant had interviewed him, a childlike fear had crept into the old man's eyes. Bondurant had written him off as a superstitious hillbilly.
The second report was from a counselor, Nanny Hart-wig, who had worked at Wendover for eight years. Nanny was a reliable sort, thick-bodied and dull and as patient as a cow. She'd never been rattled by the children, even when they threw food or cursed or spat. Nanny could slip a child into a restraint hold as smoothly as if it were a choreographed professional wrestling move.
But Nanny had shown up one morning to begin her three-day shift as a house parent, then disappeared. The other counselors noticed her missing and found her several hours later, huddled in a closet, gripping a mop handle so tightly that her knuckles were white. Nanny muttered incoherently about the man in the gown who had walked right through her. Bondurant had given her two weeks' vacation and hinted that she might consider therapy. In a church, not a clinic.
But this last sighting, with Starlene today, was the worst. Bondurant believed that the third time was a charm. The third time meant that the sightings couldn't be written off as imagination or drunkenness, because Starlene was of good Christian stock. Bondurant could lie to the Board of Directors, give positive spin to the grant foundations and private supporters, even snow the Department of Social Services if it came down to it, but quieting rumors among the staff was like trying to keep water from flowing downhill.
He'd considered approaching Kracowski about the sightings. Kracowski had an easy answer for everything. Usually the doctor could open one of his journals or spew some charts from his computer and Bondurant would be left standing dumbfounded, overwhelmed by terminology and formulas. Bondurant was always comforted by the doctor's confident manner. The very lack of humility that made Kracowski irksome also made his explanations believable.
Bondurant leaned back in his chair. The office was quiet except for the faint ticking as the clock hands moved toward nine. Darkness painted the windows and a few dots of stars hung above the black mountains beyond. The children would be settling down for evening prayers, boys in the Blue Room, girls in the Green Room. Except for the house parents on duty and the night-time cleaning lady, the staff was gone, either in the on-site cottages or far beyond the hard walls of Wendover to Deer Valley.
Bondurant opened the bottom drawer of his desk. His Bible lay next to the wooden paddle and a purple velvet bag. He lifted the bag. Crown Royal. The first sip bit his tongue and throat, the second burned, the third warmed him so much that he shivered. Someone knocked on the door.
Bondurant traded the bottle for the Good Book, slid the drawer closed and parted the Bible to a random chapter. The Book of Job. That was one of his favorites, with suffering and a defiant and unrepentant Satan, and someday he was going to get around to understanding it. That and the damned parable of fishes.
'Come in,' he said.
Nothing. He pressed the button on his speakerphone. The receptionist's office was left unlocked at the end of the day in case the staff needed to get to the patient files.
'Hello?' he said, listening as his amplified voice echoed around the outer office.
Still nothing.
Bondurant rose, annoyed that he should have to answer his own door. He swung the door wide. No one there. He crossed the receptionist's office and looked down the hall. There, in the dim angles leading to the cafeteria, a shadow moved among the darkness. One of the boys must have sneaked out of the Blue Room, probably on his way to swipe a treat from the kitchen.
'Hello there,' Bondurant said keeping his voice level. Even if you were angry, you had to feign calm. Otherwise, you ended up yanking the little sinners by their ears until they cried or bending the girls over your desk and paddling them and paddling them Bondurant swallowed. The person had stopped blending into the shadows. The hall was quiet, the air still and weighty. Bondurant's lungs felt as if they were filled with glass.
'Aren't you supposed to be getting ready for Light's Out?' Bondurant said stepping forward.
The figure crouched in the murk. Bondurant cursed the lack of lighting in the hall. The budget never seemed to cover all the facility needs, though administrative costs rose steadily, along with Bondurant's salary.
As he drew nearer, Bondurant realized that the figure was too large to be that of a client. What was a staff member doing creeping around the halls at night? The house parents were supposed to stay with the children, to act simultaneously as guardians and jailkeeps. The cleaning lady would be cleaning the toilets in the shower rooms in the boys' wing, the same schedule she'd used for as long as Bondurant had served as director. Maybe it was one of Kracowski's new supporters, one of the cold and shifty types who acted as if they needed no permission or approval.
'Excuse me, did you know it's after nine?' Bondurant saw that the person was plump and squat, drab in the half-light. Nanny? Had she gotten headstrong and come back to prove she had in fact seen something that couldn't exist?
'Everything's going to be okay.' Bondurant wished he'd studied psychology now, because he sounded to himself like a TV cop trying to lure a suicide away from a ledge. He held out his hand and closed the twenty feet of distance between them. What if she broke down and did something crazy, like bite him?
'You can tell me all about it,' he said.
Fifteen feet, he wasn't sure the person was Nanny after all. Ten feet away, and he was still uncertain, though he could tell it was a woman.
She huddled face-first in the corner, shoulders shaking with sobs. But no sound came from the woman. She was aged, her hair matted and gray, her legs bare beneath the hem of her gown. The gown was fastened by three strings clumsily knotted against her spine. The skin exposed in the gap was mottled. The woman was on her knees, her broad, callused feet tucked behind her.
Bondurant hesitated. Perhaps he should get one of the house parents, or call the local police. But the police had long complained about Wendover's runaways and the extra security calls. This was different, though; kids ran away all the time, but how many grown-ups ever ran to Wendover? Before Bondurant could make up his mind, the woman turned.
Bondurant would have screamed if not for the numbing effects of the liquor. The woman's face was twisted one corner of her lip caught in a rictus, the other curved into a crippled smile. Her eyelids drooped, and her tongue moved in her mouth like a bloated worm. What Bondurant had taken for sobs now seemed more like convulsions, because the old woman's head trembled atop her shoulders as if attached by a metal spring.
Worst of all was the long scar across the woman's forehead, an angry weal of flesh running between the furrows of her skin. The scar was like a grin, hideous atop the skewed mouth and slivers of eyes. The woman held out her shaking arms. The tongue protruded like a thing separate from the face, as if it were nesting inside and had just awakened from a long hibernation. The lips came together unevenly, yawned apart, spasmed closed again.
Oh, God, she's trying to TALK.
Bondurant took an involuntary step backward, forcing another breath into his chest. Sour bile rose in his throat, a quick rush of heartburn. He would have broken into a run if his legs hadn't turned to concrete. The woman scooted forward on her knees, a shiny sliver of drool dangling from her warped chin. Her soiled gown was draped about her like an oversize shawl. Her lips quivered again, the worm-tongue poked, but she made no sound.
