A drop of sweat snakes down my back, sending a chill down my spine. My skin prickles all over. The silence of the woods—so peaceful a moment ago—feels ominous now.
Panic, Laurel told me once, comes from the name of the Greek god of nature, Pan, because of the sudden irrational fear that could strike a man in the woods.
That’s all this is, I tell myself, a panic attack. There’s no lunatic prowling in the woods waiting to pounce on me. There’s only me.
AT THE BOTTOM of the path I find a ten-foot-tall mesh fence with razor wire on top and WARNING! ELECTRIC FENCE! signs posted every couple of feet. There’s also a locked gate. Clearly no mental patient has broken through this barrier. The uniformed guard standing on the other side doesn’t look like he’d let a crazy woman hit him over the head. He’s young, well over six feet tall, broad shouldered, muscular, and armed with a Taser. The eyes he trains on me are sharp and alert.
“Ms. Hobbes?”
It takes me a moment to remember that’s who I am and to get over the surprise of his knowing my—or Laurel’s—name, but then I remember that Billie has set this all up. “Yes. I’m here to see Dr. Hancock—Schuyler Bennett set up the appointment?” I’m instantly annoyed with myself for repeating what he must already know and for letting my voice go up at the end. As if I wasn’t sure why I’m here or who I’m supposed to be.
“Can I see some ID?”
Has he picked up on my insecurity? Or has he seen my picture on a Missing Persons Alert? When I don’t immediately produce my wallet he adds, “Just SOP, ma’am. Standard operating procedure.”
“Oh—” I fumble for my wallet in my bag and produce Laurel’s driver’s license. Will it still look like me with my brown roots showing? “It’s an awful picture.”
The guard looks down at the picture and then up at me. I have time to notice there’s a brown freckle in the white of his eye and a small scar dividing his right eyebrow. When he narrows his eyes, little crowfeet appear at their corners and he looks older than I first thought—thirties rather than twenties.
“Thank you, Ms. Hobbes.” He hands me back my wallet. “Hospital policy.”
“Of course, Officer . . .” I crane my neck to read his badge and I’m startled by what I read. “Marcus? That’s the name of the guard who was attacked by a patient in the seventies.”
The guard grimaces as he unlocks the gate. “My father. And the family claim to fame.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I grew up in a small town too. Everybody knew me as Tammy-the-town-drunk-some-people-shouldn’t-ever-have-kids’s kid.”
He winces and grins at the same time, which makes him look somewhere in between the callow youth and seasoned veteran. Like a guy who’s seen plenty of trouble but hasn’t completely given up on people. I’ve made a connection with my confession but, I realize as I step through the gate, I’ve slipped up. I’d given him a piece of my own past instead of Laurel’s.
OFFICER MARCUS, WHO tells me to call him Ben, gives me a tour on the way to the Main Building. “There’s the laundry and the power plant. The hospital still produces its own steam power. That’s where the dairy was.” He points to a peeling red barn. “But it got too expensive to run. It produced enough milk and cheese and butter for the whole facility back when there were more than four hundred patients. They kept chickens too, and grew their own vegetables.”
“Like a medieval village.”
“Yeah,” he says, “only populated by crazy people.”
“And doctors,” I add, “and nurses.”
“Who do you think I was referring to?”
I laugh, although the idea that this place was run by crazy people makes me feel cold all over. “What did people say about Dr. Bennett?” I ask.
“Oh, he was like a god to the town for a while back in the sixties. He built the hospital up with his new and improved methods of treating the insane. Brought in a better class of patient too, socialites with drinking problems, the unruly pot-smoking teenagers of the rich, burnt-out executives . . .”
“You make it sound like a country club.”
He shrugs. “I haven’t been to many country clubs, but we do have our own golf course.” The path, which has been winding decoratively through landscaped lawns, has led us to a rise that looks over a green golf course. A man in baggy pants and a tattered sweater vest is leaning over a ball with a club. As we pass he swings the club back and then forward toward the ball—but stops just before it makes contact. He shouts something incomprehensible and then swings the club back again and repeats the same aborted swing accompanied by the same shout, which should be “Fore!” but is actually, I hear now, “Fuck!”
“That’s Mr. Simmons. He used to be a big deal at Lehman Brothers. Thank God for the sub-prime fallout. We were down to less than a hundred patients before 2008.”
“What happened to Dr. Bennett’s kingdom?” I ask.
“He retired. Then private insurers and Medicare stopped paying for long hospital stays. Then someone invented Prozac and the rich found other ways to treat their own. We’re mostly a rehab clinic now with a few of the old guard in attendance.”
I think of the blinking light I’d seen from the tower. “Are there any dangerous cases?”
“Most of these poor souls are so medicated, they wouldn’t be able to punch their way out of a paper bag, but there’s always one or two who tongue their meds and suddenly decide to do a runner. They can be surprisingly strong—and fast.”
I look around at the gently curving
