July 4, 1985. The sun was still high in the sky, and the voices of the guests splashing around in the pool were competing with the music from the speakers in the garden. David Quinn had appeared out of the wooded area and made a beeline for Nathan, who was talking to one of the Locke cousins, a blond girl about his age. Now they were inside, the pretty girl was gone, and Nathan—still feeling generally guilty for months of neglecting his little brother—was trying to change the roll of film in David’s camera.
“It’s stuck,” David said. “I tried to do it myself, but I thought I was breaking it . . .”
“Don’t worry—let me see. Do you have a new roll?”
“Here . . .”
The roll was, indeed, stuck, and Nathan was doing his best to look as if he knew what he was doing.
“Tell me,” he said, hoping to distract David from his own clumsy hands. “What pictures did you take? Did you change the shutter speed like we talked about?”
“Yes. I took a bunch of Jack diving, and lots of other people, too: Mom talking with a lady, Dad talking with Mr. Locke, Mr. Locke and another man, Bobby being an idiot, and a whole bunch of squirrels in the woods. I got two deer, too, over by the east-side fencing.”
“Sounds good.” Nathan’s fingers managed to finally remove the roll of film. He offered it to David with a flourish and deftly inserted the new one in the camera. It clicked shut with a pleasant snap, and he gave it back to his brother. “All done,” he said.
David took it and held it. “If there was something . . .” he started. “If there was something serious, something big, and I told you about it, would you promise not to tell Mom and Dad?”
“Yes,” he said. “But if it was really serious, then you would have to tell them. Is it about school? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No, it’s not me. It’s just something . . . I don’t know . . .” He shrugged. “It could be nothing.”
“You can tell me.”
David looked around: there were too many people about, and anyone could walk in on them at any time. “I’ll tell you later.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yup.”
“Okay.”
David left, and Nathan went back to find the pretty blonde. He left soon after to join some friends back in Seattle; he missed the fireworks by the lake and never had a chance to talk to David about the phone call James had overheard. By the following morning he had left for a one-week vacation in the San Juan Islands.
Nathan Quinn lay down on his own bed and closed his eyes. He had placed the walking stick aside. In the books he had read as a boy, a walking stick might hide a dagger or a sword. The one leaning against his chair had been made in China and held nothing more than cheap manufacturing and mass production. If he was going to keep using the darn thing, he’d have to buy himself something more suitable. Something with a concealed sword, maybe. Quinn sighed and hoped sleep would come soon, deep and empty. He felt the blackness take hold and drifted toward it: as always there was the memory of singing, the memory of a hand holding his through the pain. And for an instant there was only the song; then all was darkness.
Chapter 39
Madison sat up in her bed, her brain thick with sleep and slightly disoriented. Her cell phone was ringing in the back pocket of her jeans on the floor. She managed to turn on the bedside lamp and lunged for it.
It was Sergeant Jenner from the precinct.
“I have a note here saying that you want to be notified in case of any emergency calls from the Walters Institute . . .” he said.
“What happened?”
“Emergency call eleven minutes ago. I don’t know any more than that.”
“Thank you. I’m on my way.”
Madison had had three hours’ sleep since she had left Kevin Brown. She made do with a two-minute cold shower and left the house ten minutes after the phone had rung.
At 3:00 a.m. she met no traffic to speak of, and she hardly touched the brake pedal. Her mind was a jumble of thoughts, none of them good. An emergency call could mean anything from one of the patients having a heart attack to Peter Conway’s crew breaking into the clinic to get to Vincent Foley. She tried to reach Dr. Peterson, but the call went to his voice mail.
Madison drove through the thin drizzle and hoped that someone at the Institute had simply slipped and sprained an ankle.
The journey was brief yet long enough for all the worst scenarios to present themselves to Madison’s mind.
She arrived at the Walters Institute, and through her windshield wipers she saw that the wrought-iron gates were wide open, and inside, lights blinked through the trees. She attempted to drive up the lane that led to the main building but didn’t make it all the way: a number of emergency vehicles were parked there.