“Well?” Mike asked.
“In 1957, a doctor at the Smoky Hill Home for the Criminally Disturbed was found guilty of experimenting on the inmates. Evidently, several suspicious deaths were reported by a visiting nurse. The state investigated and found the doctor guilty. Before they could arrest him, he hanged himself. They shut the place down and moved the remaining inmates away. The building was a dare spot and attracted courting couples until one of the young ladies died of fright. The county supervisors went as far as tearing up the road and planting trees in the drive so no one could find the place who didn’t know it was already there. Marge’s father said that the last time he was in there, it chilled him to the bone, which is hard to do in August in Kansas.”
“But…” Mia said, trying to figure why Burt would wish to go back there. “Why would he go back alone? Last time he investigated alone, we had to go in and save his butt.”
Murphy was running his finger along the axe head. He stopped and looked over at Mia before he spoke, “Earlier, before Audrey had us choose candles, Burt was talking with Mike about how he wished he had this group of investigators when he was starting out. Maybe he was thinking about Smoky Hill when the candles were lit. Or simply thought, ‘Gee I wish it was twenty years ago and PEEPs could investigate.’”
“It may not have been deliberate at all,” Cid said. “His timing was just bad.”
“My question is, he would have woken up in 1998 with his memory intact, so why didn’t he seek us out to find out what had happened?” Ted asked.
“Burt has a pretty extensive collection of books on magic,” Mia said. “A lot of them he said he had collected by the time he graduated high school. He could have done his own research, and maybe he came to the same conclusion as I did, that it was someone simply wishing to be younger.”
“Maybe he didn’t think it was him who was responsible,” Mike said. “He was coming south to either seek Ted and Cid out, or perhaps Ma and me, when something prompted him to stop on the side of the road.”
Mia pushed away the sick feeling in her stomach and said, “Or someone.”
Chapter Thirteen
Burt pushed his pack behind him to ease his back as he sat against the cold wall. His fall from the story above had been a surprise. The floor of the old examination room seemed solid enough, an expanse of postwar tile laid wall to wall. He had walked in a few steps and stomped on the floor. There, it was a solid as could be. He had advanced further in to take a better picture of the spirit he had followed when the floor gave out under him.
Youth had been on his side. He managed to twist and grab an edge with one hand and then another. He was pulling himself up when he heard the squeaky wheels of a gurney being pushed after setting motionless for few decades. He turned to see the dull steel legs propped on ancient casters moving towards him.
“Please, I only want to help you,” he pleaded, managing to get his upper body above the plane of the existing floor.
The gurney barreled at him, hitting him in the shoulders, causing him to lose his balance and fall. He hit the floor hard, and his head bounced on the tile. He felt faint and woozy. Burt pulled his arms out of the straps of the backpack and managed to free a large box of salt. He saw black dots before his eyes and knew he didn’t have a lot of time. He lunged around on painful hips and legs until he had encircled himself in salt. Only then did he allow himself to pass out.
A beam of light reflecting off an old metal tray in the room above him hit him full in the face. He had opened his eyes with the hope that he was back in the aerie, or possibly on the peninsula which he still called home. He moved his head and waited for the blue dots to settle down before he recognized the predicament he had gotten himself into. He looked at his Casio watch and saw he had lost a day. It was now Wednesday. It was the very same watch that convinced him he had indeed gone back in time when he woke up in his boyhood room.
He looked around the room he had landed in. The mouse-eaten padded walls confirmed that he was in one of the solitary rooms of the facility. He carefully raised himself up and tested out his legs. They felt battered and bruised, but both legs held his teenage weight. He stepped over his salt line and moved to the door. It was the standard metal door with a flap where a tray could be scooted under without opening it. There was also a slot that must have been used for peeping in at the prisoner. It was rusted half open. Burt tried to open the door to no avail. He set his jaw and walked across the room and started to pull the long lines of padding off the wall until he found a header for a window. Upon further investigation, the window was bricked in. He moved to his pack and pulled out a hammer and a common screwdriver.
He stopped and went back to the door to see if he could use the screwdriver to open the door before he damaged it. Again, he was not successful. He returned to the bricked-in window. He placed the flat head in the grout of the brick work
