The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(47)

Kelly rolled his broad shoulders under the coat. “Ever feel if you walk into this kind of place, they’re not going to let you back out?”

He wasn’t being prickly; he was being honest.

“Every single time,” she replied without hesitation.

He snorted. “One day it might just happen.”

The reception area was brightly lit and friendly, more country hotel than a clinic whose residents couldn’t leave.

Dr. Eli Peterson was waiting for them. He was in his late thirties, with a little gray in his copper hair, and a couple of inches taller than Kelly. Her grandmother would have said he was a fine-looking young man. The receptionists, Madison noted, gazed at him as if he was the Second Coming. He didn’t seem to notice. From their phone conversation Madison had imagined an older man in a tweed jacket; Eli Peterson wore pressed jeans and a white button-down with a tie. He introduced himself, and they shook hands.

“Let’s go to my office; I’ll explain once we’re there.”

He punched in a code and led them through a door and down a corridor to an office wing. The inside of the Walters Institute, what they could see of it, was as pleasant as the outside, and Madison wondered if any of the people who had nodded hello to them were long-term residents or just staff.

The office of the institute’s director turned out to be the same size as the ones on either side; it was simply decorated with antique furniture and bookcases crammed with tomes. There were diplomas on a wall, but that was as far as Peterson’s ego went. He motioned for them to sit, but he himself went to stand by the tall window behind his desk; the view of the grounds ran uninterrupted to the line of firs.

He had hardly made eye contact on the walk there, and now he seemed to be struggling with whatever it was that had made him pick up the phone and call them. Madison hoped Kelly would let him come to it in his own time and heard the squeak of leather as her colleague shifted in his chair.

“I first met Ronald Gray ten years ago,” Peterson said suddenly, as if they were already in the middle of a conversation. “That’s when I started working here. Ten years ago: three as associate, five as deputy, two as director. By then Ronald had already been coming for years, of course, and inevitably we got to know each other on his visits.”

“His visits to his foster brother?” Madison asked.

“Yes.”

“Dr. Peterson, what you said on the phone earlier—”

“I spoke with Ronald the day he died—the day he was murdered—and he sounded terrified.”

“What did he say?”

No one—not at work, not one of the neighbors they had interviewed—had spoken with Gray the day he died.

“He said he was going out of town for a while and that we shouldn’t expect any visitors for Vincent. In fact, if anybody came looking for him, we should be very wary. He stopped short of saying we should call the police, because that’s not our remit here—we’re not a jail—but that is what he meant. He said I should keep Vincent inside and not let him out in the gardens. He seemed exhausted and paranoid.”

“Was that unusual?”

“Very. Ronnie was a quiet kind of person, reserved. I asked him if he wanted to come in and talk about it. He said there wasn’t time but that I should look after Vincent while he was gone.”

“Did he say why he was going away?”

“No.”

“Did he mention names, situations, someone who was after him and Vincent?”

“No. He just said he had to go away immediately and his car’s transmission was dead.”

Madison and Kelly exchanged a look: that was why Gray had been at the bus station.

“Let’s start from the beginning. You said Gray had been coming since before you started working here?”

“Vincent Foley became a resident in the 1980s; he’s our longest-staying resident, in fact.”

“What’s . . . ?”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you familiar with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale?”

“Yes.” Madison refrained from mentioning her psychology degree and that she had spent weeks writing about W.A.I.S.-III, the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test, and even the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement. As a student she had given enough tests to teenagers and adults to see the block-shaped designs even in her dreams.

“Vincent Foley, who’s forty-eight years old, was tested as a teenager and as a young man—before coming here—and his IQ score was sixty-nine, which is below average—in fact, borderline low.”

“Was he tested here?”

“No.” Peterson shook his head. “By then he couldn’t be tested. He’s not here because he has an IQ of sixty-nine; he’s here because something happened to him one day, and his intellect did not have the resources to deal with it and effectively shut down. Nobody knows what happened, and he has never been able to speak of it. He had been living his life—as best he could under the circumstances—being looked after by Ronald and with a degree of independence. Then one day Ronald got back from work and found him in a catatonic state. Vincent came out of it eventually, but he hardly spoke; when he did, he didn’t make sense, and he had fits and night terrors and suicide attempts. Ronald couldn’t look after him anymore and brought him here.”