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I feel for the light on the wall. It’s a risk—anyone could see the light spilling under the door—but then fumbling around in the dark, overturning furniture, will bring them ru
The room is dominated by a large desk and a stiff-backed leather chair. I recognize one of Fred’s golf trophies and the sterling-silver paperweight sitting on the otherwise empty bookcases. In one corner is a large metal filing cabinet; next to it, on the wall, is a large painting of a man, presumably a hunter, standing in the middle of various animal carcasses, and I look away quickly.
I head for the filing cabinet, which is also unlocked. I rifle through stacks of financial information—bank statements and tax returns, receipts and deposit slips—dating back nearly a decade. One drawer holds all the employee information, including photographed copies of the staff’s ID cards. The girl who showed me in is named Eleanor Latterly, and she’s my age exactly.
And then, stuffed in the back of the lowest drawer, I find it: an unmarked folder, slender, containing Cassie’s birth and marriage certificates. There’s no record of a divorce, only a letter, folded in two, typed on thick stationery.
I scan the first line quickly. This letter is in regard to the physical and mental state of Cassandra Melanea Hargrove, b. O’Do
I hear footsteps crossing quickly toward the study. I shove the folder back in place, push the cabinet closed with a foot, and stuff the letter into my back pocket, thanking God I thought to wear jeans. I grab a pen off the desk. When Eleanor swings the door open, I triumphantly flourish a pen before she has a chance to speak.
“Found it!” I say cheerfully. “Can you believe I didn’t think to bring a pen? My brain is cheese today.”
She doesn’t trust me. I can tell. But she can’t exactly accuse me outright. “There was no book of swatches,” she says slowly. “No book anywhere, that I could see.”
“Weird.” A bead of sweat trickles between my breasts. I watch her eyes tick around the whole room, as though looking for anything disturbed or displaced. “I guess we’ve all got our messages crossed today. Excuse me.” I have to shove past her, moving her bodily out of the way. I barely remember to scrawl a quick note to Mrs. Hargrove— For your approval!I write, even though I don’t really care what she thinks. Eleanor hovers behind me the whole time, like she thinks I’m going to steal something.
Too late.
The whole operation has taken only ten minutes. Rick still has the engine on. I slide into the backseat. “Home,” I tell him. As he maneuvers the car out of the driveway, I think I can see Eleanor watching me from the front window.
It would be safer to wait until I was home to read the note, but I can’t stop myself from unfolding it. I take a closer look at the letterhead: Sean Perlin, MD, Chief Surgical Supervisor, Portland Laboratories.
The letter is brief.
To Whom It May Concern:
This letter is in regard to the physical and mental state of Cassandra Melanea Hargrove, b. O’Do
In my professional opinion, Mrs. Hargrove suffers acute delusions provoked by an entrenched mental instability; she is fixated on the Bluebeard myth and relates the story to her fears of persecution; she is profoundly neurotic and unlikely, in my opinion, to improve.
Her condition seems of the degenerative kind and may have been provoked by certain chemical imbalances resultant from the procedure, although this is impossible to say definitively.
I read the letter several times. So I was right—there wassomething wrong with her. She went screwy. Maybe the procedure unhinged her, like it did for Willow Marks. Strange that no one noticed before she married Fred, but I guess sometimes these things are gradual.
Still, the knot in my stomach refuses to unravel. Beneath the doctor’s polished prose is a separate message: a message of fear.
I remember the story of Bluebeard: the story of a man, a handsome prince, who keeps a locked door in his beautiful castle. He tells his new bride that she may enter any room but that one. But one day her curiosity overwhelms her, and she discovers a room of murdered women, strung from their heels. When he finds out she disobeyed his order, he adds her to that horrible, bloody collection.
The fairy tale terrified me when I was a kid, especially the image of the women heaped together, arms pale and eyes sightless, gutted.
I fold the letter carefully and return it to my back pocket. I’m being stupid. Cassie was defective, like I thought she was, and Fred had every reason to divorce her. Just because she no longer shows up in the system doesn’t mean anything terrible happened to her. Maybe it was just an administrative error.
But the whole ride home, I can’t help but picture Fred’s strange smile, and the way he said, Cassie asked too many questions.
And I can’t help the thought that rises, unbidden, unwanted: What if Cassie was right to be afraid?
Lena
For the first half of the day we see no evidence of troops, and it occurs to me that Lu might have been lying. I feel a welling of hope: Maybe the camp won’t be attacked after all, and Pippa will be fine. Of course there’s still the problem of the dammed river, but Pippa will figure it out. She’s like Raven: born to survive.
But in the afternoon, we hear shouting in the distance. Tack holds up a hand and gestures for silence. We all freeze, and then, when Tack motions, disperse into the woods. Julian has adjusted to the Wilds well, and to our need for camouflage. One second he is standing next to me; the next he has melted behind a small group of trees. The others vanish just as quickly.
I duck behind an old concrete wall, which appears to have been dropped randomly from above. I wonder what kind of structure it used to belong to; and suddenly, I have a memory of the story Julian told me when we were imprisoned together, of a girl named Dorothy whose house spirals up into the air on the powerful surges of a tornado, and who ends up in a magical land.
As the sound of shouting gets louder and the noise of clanking weaponry and heavy boot steps swells to a pounding rhythm, I find myself fantasizing that we, too, will be whisked away—all of us, all the Invalids, the people pushed and elbowed out of normal society—will vanish on a puff of air, and wake up and find ourselves somewhere different.
But this is not a fairy tale. This is April in the Wilds, and black mud seeping up around my damp sneakers; and clouds of hovering gnats; and held breath and waiting.
The troops are several hundred feet away from us, down a gently sloping embankment and across a trickling stream. From our elevated position, we can easily see the long line of soldiers as it comes into view, a blur of uniforms weaving in and out of trees. The shifting diamond pattern of leaves merges perfectly with the shifting, blurry mass of men and women, suited up in camouflage, hauling machine guns and tear gas. It seems there is no end to them.
Finally the flow of soldiers trickles away, and by silent understanding we all regroup and begin walking again. The silence is electric and uneasy. I try not to think about those people at the camp, cupped in a bowl of land, trapped. An old expression comes back to me— like shooting fish in a barrel—and I feel a wild and inappropriate desire to laugh. That’s what they are, all those Invalids: wild-eyed, pale-bellied fishes, rolling up toward the sun, as good as dead.
We make it to the safe house in slightly more than twelve hours. The sun has made a complete revolution and is now sinking down over the trees, breaking up into watery streaks of yellow and orange. It reminds me of the poached eggs my mother used to make me when I was sick as a small child, how the yolk would seep across the plate, a vivid and startling gold, and I feel a sharp stab of homesickness. I’m not even sure whether I’m missing my mother, or simply the old routine of my life: a life of school and playdates and rules that kept me safe; boundaries and borders; bath time and curfews. A simple life.