Night Film(28)

These two kids clearly knew a hell of a lot more than they let on. But if they were hiding something, I’d learn what it was soon enough. Secrets—even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their natural proclivity was always to head straight to the surface—to get out.

Nora loaded Hopper into the back. He mumbled something as she removed his sunglasses, and then, stretching out across the seat with a boozy sigh, he slung his arm behind his head and conked out. Nora resumed scanning the radio. She stopped on a folk song—“False Knight on the Road,” read the display—and sat back, staring out the window at the ragged fields.

The morning seemed to tiredly sponge off the sky, washing the road signs and windshields in dull, bathwater light as the rhythm of the highway thumped under the tires.

I didn’t feel like talking, either. I was too surprised at where I found myself: with two total strangers, an assortment of stories behind us and who the hell knew what in front of us, but for the time being, our lives three frail lines running side by side.

We made our way toward Briarwood.





15


“We don’t think of our guests as patients,” Elizabeth Poole told me as we strolled down the sidewalk. “They’re part of the Briarwood family for life. Now, tell me more about your daughter, Lisa.” She glanced back at Nora—known for the time being as Lisa—who’d fallen twenty paces behind us. “What year is she?”

“She was a college freshman,” I said. “But she dropped out.”

She waited for me to elaborate, but I only smiled and tried to look uncomfortable, which was easy.

Elizabeth Poole was a short, plump woman in her fifties with such a sour expression I initially assumed she was sucking on some type of hard candy, only to realize as the minutes ticked by that expression showed no sign of subsiding. She wore high-waisted mom jeans, her thin brown hair slicked into a ponytail.

Nora and I had left Hopper passed out in my backseat and found Poole’s office on the ground floor of Dycon, a redbrick building that housed Briarwood’s administration, which didn’t so much sit on the pristine hill as nail it down with long boxy annexes and gray tendrils of sidewalks. I’d taken just one look at Poole—then, as it jingled out from behind her desk, her snow-white, pink-barretted Maltese, Sweetie, who glided around her office like a tiny Thanksgiving Day parade float—and immediately wanted to call off our ruse.

Making matters considerably worse was Nora’s acting ability—or alarming lack thereof.

As we’d sat down, I’d explained that my daughter, Lisa, had disciplinary issues. Nora had grimaced and stared at the floor. I was sure the many hard, knowing looks Poole shot me were not compassionate but coolly accusatory, as if she knew my daughter was a sham. Just when I was certain she was going to order us off the premises, however, Poole—and panting, tingling Sweetie—had kick-started the tour, leading us out of Dycon and across Briarwood’s sprawling grounds.

“What sort of security do you have in place?” I asked her now.

Poole slowed to consider Nora again, who was glowering at the sidewalk (a look Sue Ellen gave Miss Ellie throughout season twelve of Dallas).

“I’ll go over the specifics with you in private,” Poole said. “But in a nutshell, every patient is assigned a level of surveillance, which ranges from general observation, when the patient is checked by staff every thirty minutes throughout the day and night, to constant observation, when the patient must remain within arm’s length of a trained technician at all times and may use only a spoon at mealtimes. When she arrives, Lisa will be evaluated and assigned the appropriate level.”

“Have there been any recent incidents of escape?” I asked.

The question caught her by surprise. “Escape?”

“Sorry. Don’t mean to make it sound like Alcatraz. It’s just, if Lisa sees an opportunity, she’ll make a run for it.”

Poole nodded. If she was reminded of Ashley Cordova’s breakout, she gave no indication.

“We have forty-six acres,” she said. “The perimeter is fenced in and secured with video surveillance. A twenty-four-hour detail at the gatehouse entrance monitors every vehicle entering or exiting.” She smiled thinly. “Patient safety is our biggest priority.”

So that was the official statement on Ashley’s escape: It never happened.

“The funny thing is,” she continued, “once people settle in it’s harder to get them to leave than stay. Briarwood is a sanctuary. It’s the real world that’s brutal.”

“I can see that. This is a beautiful place.”

“Isn’t it?”

I smiled in agreement. As beautiful as an injection of morphine.

A vast, immaculate lawn spanned out on either side of us, smooth, flat, and ruthlessly green. Far off to our right stood a massive oak tree, an empty black bench beneath it. It looked like the front of a condolence card. The grounds were eerily deserted, except for an occasional smiling nurse striding past us in purple pants with a matching festively patterned shirt—to distract you, no doubt, as she fed you your meds. Farther off, a bald man hurried purposefully between brick buildings.

Though Poole had explained that at this hour everyone in the clinic—clinic seemed to be code for psych ward—was in a behavior therapy session, the place had a creepy, muzzled feel. Any second now, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a man’s gut-wrenching scream pierce the chirping birds and the breeze. Or to see one of those doors fly open—a door to one of the buildings Poole had expressly skipped on our tour; “Just another dormitory,” she’d said when I’d inquired what it was—and some patient in white pajamas come out, trying to make a run for it before he was tackled by a male nurse and hauled off to his electroconvulsive therapy session, leaving the landscape stiffly serene.