Dear Old Dead(14)

Julie tried the door at the east end of the corridor, expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t. She stood back and looked through into the corridor beyond. The corridor reminded her of the hallways in the old apartment buildings in the neighborhood. It was dark and painted green and ringed with nearly black wood doors. Julie wondered what went on up here. These couldn’t be apartments for the staff. The staff had rooms in the west building. Even Dr. Pride had his main residence in the west building, in spite of the fact that he spent half his nights sleeping in his office. At least, they had thought he had. Julie thought about all the newspaper stories and felt as if she wanted to cry. She didn’t care what Dr. Pride did for sex in his free time, as long as he didn’t patronize a prostitute. She did worry that he would get the kind of disease there wasn’t any cure for. She worried more that he would get knocked out of the center by Them. Julie didn’t have a coherent definition of Them. She couldn’t have described Them in concrete terms if her life depended on it. She just knew Them when she saw Them.

“This is where they have the day-care center in the mornings,” Karida said, coming onto the corridor past Julie at the door. “They open all the doors and stick a gate thing in the stairs and let the kids wander around. Sister Kenna set it up. It’s kinda neat. All the different rooms are different ideas. One of them’s a jungle room. One of them’s supposed to be a castle. Skeera Hoyt and I came over here one night and got all the doors unlocked and looked around.”

“You had to be crazy.”

“Not everybody thinks like you,” Karida said. “Not everybody just smiles and croons whenever some nun says she’s done a good day’s work. I don’t like those nuns. I think they’re weird. I mean, no sex, for God’s sake. It’s got to do something awful to your insides.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what. I just know it’s got to do something awful.”

There was nothing blocking the stairs now. Julie came onto the corridor and let the bridge door close behind her. She went to the stairs and started down. Beneath her in the stairwell, she could see the harsh lights of office overheads. They were just like the office overheads in the west building, probably because the center bought all its light bulbs in bulk. Julie stopped a little way down the stairs and listened. There was a man down there somewhere, talking. She couldn’t hear anyone talking back, so she supposed he must be on the phone. Whoever he was was pacing as well as talking. She could hear the scuffle of shoes on carpet.

“There’s someone down there. What’s on that floor?”

“Offices,” Karida said promptly. “All the really important offices. Father Donleavy’s. Dr. Pride’s.”

Julie listened again. “It’s not Dr. Pride. It’s not Father Donleavy, either. Who else is down there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know everybody who works here.”

Julie went a little way farther down the stairs. What she really wanted was to turn right around and go back to her own dormitory room. She had a history book there she hadn’t finished reading. She had some work to do she had promised Sister Augustine to finish before morning. Her mother had never given ten seconds thought to what happened to her. Why should Julie give ten seconds thought to what happened to her mother?

Julie went down more stairs, almost all the way to the bottom. The corridor there was much better lit than the one on the floor above. Most of the doors that opened onto it were in fact open, with more light spilling out of them from desk lamps and auxiliary reading lights. Julie stepped off the bottom stair and edged her way toward the voice. It was coming from the door of the office she could now see was clearly marked as Dr. Michael Pride’s—there was a big sign on the wall next to the door jamb, ragged enough to make Julie think it had been hand stenciled by someone at the center—but the voice was most definitely not Dr. Pride’s. That’s an old man, Julie thought, and then wondered why the sound made her so uncomfortable. She was having a very hard time making herself not squirm.

“Hey,” Karida said in an exaggerated whisper. “What are you doing? You’re going to get caught.”

“I just want to see who it is.”

“Who cares who it is?”

This, of course, was perfectly sensible. Julie knew it. She couldn’t stop herself. She edged closer and closer to the door.

“I want you to have it ready for me to sign tomorrow morning,” the old man was saying. “I’ve pissed around with this long enough. I’ll be at your office at eight fifteen—”