Page 27

His was the one I could have found blindfolded. I had looked at it every day since it landed on my desk, a chart with a number and a blank space where a name should be.

But that too was missing.

I went through those files twice, and by the second pass I had stopped pretending it was an accident, because the tab was gone as well. The little plastic marker they clip to the top so a file has a place to live. Somebody had taken the file and then tidied up the hole where it had been.

Two files gone out of an entire prison.

His.

And mine.

This time my mind didn’t automatically go to paranoia, as it was too much of a coincidence for that. Which meant I spent all day questioning why those two files were missing. Or more to the point, why Dr. Halloran had been the one to take them. Part of me wanted to go find Halloran and demand answers. The rest of me knew better. As you don’t go asking a man why a file is missing when the only way you could know it was missing is if you went looking for it yourself.

What I did instead was put the saline order down on the desk and walked to the staff bathroom at the end of the medical corridor. Then I locked myself in the far stall and sat on the closed lid with my hands pressed flat between my knees until they stopped being interesting to look at.

I couldn’t stop asking myself why. Had someone heard about the ghost’s interest in me and wanted to look deeper into it? I mean that was a stretch if ever I heard one, but what else could it be?

Then the outer door banged open and two women came in already talking, in the way people do when they have been sitting on something all morning, swallowing the gossip every time somebody walked past, and have finally found a room with a door on it.

As for me, I didn’t move. Of course I didn’t move. No woman alive announces herself from inside a stall once a conversation like that has started. Not when they were talking about the one man in that building whose name I didn’t know, and whose file had gone missing along with my own.

“…eight minutes,” a woman named Debbie said, someone I knew, who worked part time as a dental assistant in the infirmary.

“Eight minutes from the whistle to the gate.” The faucet ran then so I leaned forward slightly to keep listening.

“Is he going to make it?” Another woman asked, and this time, it was a voice I didn’t recognize.

“He’s alive. He’s over at County with a guard on the door, and that’s about all anyone here will say.” A pause, and the sound of a paper towel being pulled.

“But my cousin Jen works as a nurse in the same ward he is on and she told me that he needed his jaw wired shut. As for his knee, it’s in pieces. And his elbow, well, they’re talking about pins for that one. Don’t even get me started on his ribs. The new guy certainly did a number on him, that’s for sure.” I swallowed hard at this, my mind instantly clinging to two words,

New guy.

“God.” I heard Debbie gasp and I had to hold back my own when her friend added the next part,

“Yeah, for years he’s run that wing. Years, and nobody so much as looked at him wrong, and then not even a whole twenty-four hours this guy’s been here and he takes over just like that.”

Not even twenty-four hours.

It had to be him.

“And they’re not writing it up?” Debbie asked, as clearly this was what she had heard.

“No, which is the crazy part as they’re writing it up as a fall,” she replied and my eyes widened, no doubt mirroring Debbie’s face right now.

“Jesus… a fall… from what, a two-story building?” Honestly, I would have asked the exact same question.

“Nobody saw anything.” The second voice dropped, and I found myself leaning toward the gap in the stall door like a woman leaning off a cliff.

“Yeah right, that’s bullshit,” Debbie scoffed.

“That’s what I’m telling you. There were sixty men out there and not one of them saw anything. They’re not covering for him because they’re loyal, they’re covering for him because they’re scared to death,” her friend said, lowering her voice as if the very man they were talking about was lurking in the shadows lying in wait.

“I heard he attacked him first with a shank.” Debbie said it as a question, because clearly, she wanted every frightening detail, and well at this point… she wasn’t the only one.

“He did but it didn’t matter as he snapped his wrist and took the shank. But that’s not the craziest part.” The water ran again, then stopped, and for a second there was nothing at all. When she spoke again her voice had dropped to almost nothing, and there was fear in it. The sound of a woman hearing her own words out loud and wishing she had kept them in her mouth.

“He took the shank off him and then he opened up his own arm with it, right there in front of everybody. Held his arm out and let it run and asked if anybody else wanted some.” My hand flew to my mouth just in time to stop the gasp escaping.