“Who was he talking about?” John said.
“I don’t know; he must have heard me outside the door and changed the subject.”
“His baseball bat?” David asked.
Jimmy nodded.
“And he wasn’t kidding? He wasn’t, you know . . .”
“No way. He was dead serious.”
The Rock, the restaurant owned by their fathers, had been in their lives for as long as the boys could remember.
“Has anything happened at the restaurant?” David looked at John, who just shrugged.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything.”
“And you’re sure he meant business?” David asked Jimmy.
“No doubt about it. He sounded really mad.” What Jimmy didn’t want to say was that his dad had also sounded a little scared, and that had frightened him more than anything, though he couldn’t say that to the others, either.
They mulled it over for a moment—three boys with their T-shirts stuck to their backs trying to work out if some real, grown-up, honest-to-goodness violence was going to happen. Jimmy drew shapes in the dirt with his stick. What they all knew without saying was that anything to do with The Rock involved them all.
They walked on, because moving was better than standing still, the heat suddenly more oppressive than before. The ground rose and fell, and normally it would be one of the day’s joys to scramble up and down the ditches and gullies and pretend they were alone in a wild and unexplored land. Today, though, the mood had turned to muted worry: they were familiar enough with the usual middle-school disputes—mostly resolved by trash talk and the occasional lunch-break standoff. This—one of their own fathers talking about hurting somebody with a baseball bat—this was a foreign land.
“I say we just keep our eyes and ears open and see what happens.” Only David could manage to make the only possible course of action sound like a smart plan. Yet once there was a plan in place, everybody felt better.
The inmates in the D Wing of KCJC were hollering a call-and-response chant, the guard telling them to cool it and shut it. In his cell, John Cameron breathed in warm July air and felt the heat of the sun on his cheeks.
Chapter 25
Dr. Eli Peterson had slept badly, and the drive to the Institute did little to improve his mood. The previous day’s rain had morphed into drizzle so pervasive that it was like mist; it took the edge off all the colors, especially the greens. Through the driver’s-side window, the grass was washed out to a dull gray, and for a moment he wondered if that dullness wasn’t exactly the outcome of most of the meds his patients were given. Was he seeing what they saw every day?
He parked and walked to the main entrance without bothering with an umbrella. The receptionist gave him his mail, his messages, and a smile that would have sent a diabetic into shock. He didn’t notice—he never did—but it didn’t stop her.
He was about to swipe his card, when he picked up and unfolded the small yellow square of paper with his deputy’s scratchy handwriting. He read it once, then read it again. Somehow he managed to use the swipe card and push through the door and run to his office without dropping anything. He dumped all he carried into the armchair in front of his desk, dug into his pockets, and found what he was looking for: a key ring with three small silver keys.
One of those fit the lock in the bottom drawer, and he opened it. He grabbed a single key, which rested on a plastic folder, and locked the drawer again.
At the end of the corridor was a windowless room with a tall dresser that had been outfitted with thirty-nine drawers, one for every patient. The yellow scrap of paper had told Eli Peterson that the last time Ronald Gray visited Vincent Foley—the previous Thursday—he had placed something in Vincent’s box. The box had been empty for over twenty years. Peterson fumbled with his master key and finally managed to get it open.
Madison’s day off had started with Carl Doyle’s call as per their routine. She sat at the table in her living room gazing out at the water. The view was blurry, and she felt a little blurry herself—maybe another bad dream; she couldn’t be sure.
“How is he?” she asked Doyle as she took a sip of nuclear-strength coffee. “He” was Nathan Quinn—no need to explain.
“Quiet,” he replied. “He’s been really quiet since last Wednesday.”
The night of the televised appeal, Madison thought.
“Not that he’s particularly expansive at the best of times . . .” he continued.
And this was definitely not the best of times, Madison thought.
“Everything’s progressing: the blood work looks good; whatever spleen he has left is working to compensate for the part that’s gone. He’s getting restless. Will you be going to visit Cameron today?”