Every Now and Then Page 19

  Mayor Kibler finally broke things up when he announced into the microphone, “Happy you enjoyed that wonderful performance, but Jim Winner needs to get home so he can wake up early to milk.” That wasn’t him getting confused again. Mr. Winner was the man who was in charge of organizing the piéce de résistance of the Fourth of July every year. “It’s time for the fireworks!”

  Frankie, Viv, and I raced across the park toward Grand Creek and, along with the other kids that could elbow their way in, we sat on the bank and dangled our feet into the water and watched the explosions paint the sky about our heads. Mr. Winner had pulled out all the stops to give us the best show ever, and the finale truly was grand.

  Soon as the last big bang sounded, like we always had, the girls and I dove into the creek, clothes and all. Frankie was a mediocre swimmer, and Viv was nothing to write home about, so they popped to the surface right away, but I’d always felt at home in the water, and flipped onto my back. I was relishing the night’s patriotic performance, thinking about the strange story that Bigger had told us, and searching the night sky for my favorite constellation—I thought of the stars on Orion’s belt as the sky’s version of the Tree Musketeers—when the park’s powerful pole lights came on and all but obliterated my view.

  Because those lights were only used when the men in town played baseball, I thought that some of them had decided to cap off the evening’s festivities by having a few more beers and enjoying America’s favorite pastime, until the sheriff’s voice came booming out of the loud speakers to inform me otherwise.

  “Attention, everyone,” he said. “Three patients have escaped from the mental hospital, and one of them is a known murderer. Go home, lock your doors, and keep watch out of your windows. You see anything suspicious, call the station immediately!”

  Chapter Twenty

  After the sheriff hustled the girls and me and Aunt Jane May down the street and into the county car, we cruised past neighbor upon neighbor scurrying down the sidewalk like characters in a horror movie fleeing monsters that’d descended on their quiet, little town.

  “Don’t worry, girls,” the sheriff said. “Like I just got done telling Eddie King at the hospital, every law enforcement officer in the county has been told to report for a search. We’ll round those escaped patients up and bring them back to him in no time.”

  He sounded so confident, but he had to have been castigating himself for not stepping on his soap box more often to pontificate about the need to shut Broadhurst down. Maybe if he had, those he’d pledged to protect and serve wouldn’t be in danger of losing their lives when a “known murderer” struck again.

  That wouldn’t happen, of course, because the sheriff had been horribly misinformed. My heart went out to him, and I very much wanted to reach over the car seat, stroke the curls rubbing against his uniform collar, and tell him that he could stop working himself into a lather. When Bigger had told the girls and me her drilling story, she mentioned that Eddie King was in charge of the second-floor patients that night and those poor souls weren’t capable of killing anyone. Not even themselves. And there was no need for a search party because they wouldn’t get far. The schizophrenic and suicidal patients were so heavily medicated that they moved slower than zombies.

  But I couldn’t tell him that, could I. Frankie understood the need for caution as well.

  When we drove under a streetlight, I saw her give Viv the “zip your lips” sign and then point to me. She wanted me to do the talking because she didn’t trust Viv any more than I did. The escape was prime gossip. In her enthusiasm to learn more, she could accidentally blurt something out that the girls and I weren’t supposed to know about the patients and the inner workings of the hospital. The sheriff would be furious, and Aunt Jane May would be apoplectic. She would inflict the severe consequences so fast it’d make our heads spin. The girls and I would have to run away and we couldn’t that night. People were counting on us.

  After we swung by Audrey Cavanaugh’s house and I gave her Harry’s note, we planned to ride over to Broadhurst. We’d meet up with Bigger in the kitchen, then go down to the basement and use Viv’s key on the Chamber of Horrors door. I highly doubted it, but if we found a bloody drill or any other evidence of wrongdoing, as promised, we’d tell Doc. He’d do the right thing. Unlike Cruikshank, he respected the oath he’d taken: First, do no harm.

  The escape wouldn’t alter our plans, but as our designated mouthpiece, my job was to get all the information I could from the sheriff. Since it was important not to seem too eager or give anything away—that’d make him suspicious—when he pulled onto our cobblestone driveway I asked him as casually as I could, “So who escaped?”

  When he looked to Aunt Jane May for permission to answer, I thought she’d puff up and go prickly, but she told him, “Go ahead. They’re going to find out soon enough. But let’s get in the house first.”

  She must’ve had the jitters before her performance at the park, because she’d forgotten to switch the globe light on above the back door. The night was still and dark, and there were leafy bushes to hide in alongside the house. Even though I knew we weren’t in any danger, I couldn’t blame her for worrying that one of the patients would jump out at us. I startled even harder than she did when the county car’s radio suddenly crackled to life.

  “Sheriff? You there?” came out of the tinny speaker.

  He grabbed the handheld microphone off the hook on the dashboard and said into it, “What’s going on, George?”

  “Ted Withers just called the station. He heard his dogs barking and when he went to investigate, he saw someone disappearing behind his barn. The back boundary of his place borders the highway, so it looks like the patients are making a run for it. I’m waiting for the rest of the county deputies to check in, but this is our town, and on your say-so, me and Joe and Willie are going over to the Withers’ place and start searching for them.”

  Frankie, Viv, and I shot confused looks at each other because the second-floor patients mustering up enough energy to shuffle out of their rooms and make it across the county road to the Withers’ farm was out of the question. Ted Withers must have been blind drunk.

  But clearly relieved that the escapees weren’t anywhere near Summit proper, the sheriff brought his shoulders down from where they’d been parked around his ears and told his deputy, “Roger that, George. I’ll be out there shortly. Remember, one of those patients is criminally insane. Keep your weapons drawn, and shoot if you have to.”

  After he replaced the handheld, the sheriff cocked his head toward our aunt, showed her his dimples, and said, “See, Janie? There’s nothing for you and the girls to be concerned about.”

  We weren’t, but she asked him to go into the house first anyway, and after she flicked on the lights in the kitchen, her finger was trembling when she shook it at us. “Ya see now why I’ve been telling you girls to stay away from that hospital?” It was the kind of thing I’d expect her to say, but she wasn’t really thinking straight. When Frankie, Viv, and I sat down at the kitchen table in the same clothes we were wearing when we jumped into the creek after the fireworks, she didn’t say anything about us catching our death of cold. Instead, she went to the study, brought back Doc’s whiskey, and proceeded to pour Uncle Walt a glass.

  “I’m on a duty,” he reminded her as he pulled a chair out from the pine table. “You all right? You don’t look too good.”

  After Aunt Jane May sat down and wiped her brow with one of her big lace hankies, she said to him softly, “I’d feel a whole lot better if before you go out to the Withers’ you’d tell me what went on at the hospital tonight. I don’t want to have to spend the whole night frettin’ about you.” She looked at Frankie, Viv, and me, turned a color of pink that I’d never seen before, then took a sip of the whiskey she’d poured—and that was a first, too.

  The sheriff needed to join his deputies out at the Withers’ farm, I figured he’d shoot down Aunt Jane May’s request for more information abo
ut the escape, but he nodded and took a seat next to her. “I don’t have time to go into it all, so in a nutshell, Eddie King called the station tonight a little after eight. Joe had a hard time understanding most of what he said except that he needed Doc and me to get out to the hospital immediately. Three patients escaped, the lights were out, and he didn’t know what to do because Cruikshank and Holloway were out of town.”

  So that’s where the Buchanan brothers were going in a big rush earlier—not to respond to an accident one of the juvenile delinquents had out on Highway C.

  “Eddie was waiting for us when we pulled up in front of the hospital,” the sheriff said, “but he wasn’t making much sense. We had to wait until whatever drug Doc gave him to calm down took effect before he could tell us more. According to him, everyone working that night had planned on watching the fireworks together from a third-floor window. When it started to get dark, he went to fetch the nurse who was watching the patients on the first floor, because she was new and didn’t know her way around. But when he got down there, she was nowhere to be found. Eddie thought she must’ve gone up to the third floor without him. When he got up there, he saw that the locked door on the criminal ward was open, so he called out. When no one answered, he figured they’d already gone to the other side of the building to get the best view of the fireworks. But on his way to join them, he noticed that one of the cell doors was wide open.”

  Because the sheriff was hearing the call of duty, he was machine-gun talking. I thought I must’ve misheard him, or maybe he’d misunderstood what Eddie King had told him.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but you just said … did Eddie tell you that one of the patients on the third-floor escaped?” I couldn’t give away too much, so I added, “We heard that’s where they keep the criminals.”

  Frankie nodded and said, “You sure Eddie wasn’t mixed-up because of the shot Doc gave him?”

  When the sheriff shook his head and said, “I saw the empty cell myself,” I almost fell out of my chair, and so did the girls, because that changed everything.

  I was running through my mind the men confined to the top floor—the Blackjack Scalper, Wally Hopper, and the one that I thought was Leo—when Viv squeaked out, “It wasn’t the child killer, was it?”

  “Eddie works part-time and never on the third floor, so the only thing he knew was that whoever broke out of that cell was a murderer,” the sheriff said. “He was scared to death and ran back down to the first floor to call the station and get a cattle prod from where they’re kept. That’s when he noticed that a couple of the room doors down there were open, too.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask Jimbo or Albie who escaped?” Frankie asked him. “They know every patient and—”

  “What about that new nurse?” I asked, cutting her off because I wanted to hear as much of the story as I could before the sheriff took off for the Withers’ farm and he kept checking his watch. “Where was she the whole time?”

  The sheriff stood and said, “I found her locked in a supply closet. She was bordering on hysteria and we couldn’t get much out of her other than it was her first night on the job and someone snuck up behind her, took her keys, and shoved her in. She thought it was a woman, but it happened so fast she couldn’t be sure.”

  “So if Eddie didn’t know and the nurse was incapacitated, how did you find out who escaped?” Aunt Jane May asked.

  “Doc checked the files in the office. The cell on the third floor belongs to a patient by the name of John Johnson,” the sheriff replied as he edged toward the screen door. “But he couldn’t recall ever treating him, and there wasn’t anything else of use in his file, so all we know about him at this point is that he’s as dangerous as they come.”

  Except that he wasn’t.

  Albie had told us that afternoon at Earl’s that John Johnson was the name on the file of the man on the third floor who insisted his name was Leo. That’s how Frankie had remembered it, too, when I asked her earlier at the park.

  That was a big load off my mind, because I would have been worried to death if Uncle Walt was hunting down Wally Hopper or the Blackjack Scalper in the woods at the Withers’ place. But Harry Blake wouldn’t have pleaded through the wrought-iron fence, “You gotta help …” or passed me a note that said, “They’re going to kill Leo” if he was a criminally insane monster. Nothing and no one could convince me that our dear friend, who told us stories about the Mondurians and loved Aunt Jane May’s shortbread cookies and fashioned cute hats out of tinfoil, would ask us to help a dangerous killer, and I wasn’t alone in that belief. My little voice was backing me up.

  I asked the sheriff, “Who escaped with John Johnson?”

  “Harold Blake and Ernest Fontaine.”

  That’s what I thought he’d say. It only made sense that Harry, who’d been so worried about harm coming to Leo, would be at his side. I had no idea why they’d bring along Ernie, but I was grateful they had. He seemed like a nice, sad kid, and now we no longer had to honor Viv’s promise to help him out. Or deliver the note to Audrey Cavanaugh.

  “Eddie told us that Blake isn’t violent, and Ernest Fontaine is just a boy,” the sheriff said, “but we have to find John Johnson before he kills again.”

  “You didn’t leave the rest of the patients unattended when you came back to town, did you?” Jane May Mathews, RN, asked him.

  “Eddie was woozy from the shot Doc gave him, so he said he’d call the usual third-floor guard”—he reached into his uniform pocket, pulled out a little red book, and flipped over a few pages—“Mitch Washington, and stick around until he showed up. The nurse agreed to stay, too, but only after I told her that I’d send some deputies out there to search the hospital and the grounds.”

  “But why can’t Jimbo and Albie watch the patients?” Frankie asked him.

  The sheriff had big things on his mind and was already halfway through the screen door when he answered, “Because Albie didn’t show up for his shift tonight, and Jimbo is on his way to the hospital.”

  “What happened to Jimbo?” Frankie, Viv, and I cried.

  Judging by the stricken look on the sheriff’s face, he hadn’t meant to tell us that. He looked sheepishly at Aunt Jane May and said, “I gotta go. Can you explain?”

  She nodded. “Be careful, and call me as soon as you catch them.” When the door slammed shut behind him, she put her arm around Frankie and said, “Jimbo got hurt tonight, honey.”

  Near tears, Frankie asked, “He’s not gonna die, is he?”

  “Oh gosh, no. He was knocked out, is all. The sheriff thinks it might’ve happened during the escape. Doc called an ambulance and rode with Jimbo to the hospital in Port Washington. Dell and Sally are on their way, too. They’ll make sure he gets the best of care.”

  Frankie said, “I wanna be there! You gotta take me!”

  “Us, too!” Viv and I said.

  “He can’t have visitors right now,” Aunt Jane May said. “He’s still unconscious, but Doc’ll call soon as he comes to, and when he does, I’ll come straight out to the hideout to give you the good news.” She pushed her chair out from the table and stood. “Now, I want you girls to get out of those wet clothes and say some prayers for Jimbo’s speedy recovery, and I’ll be out shortly with pie and root beer.”

  She knew that if we couldn’t be by Jimbo’s side, we needed to be in our home away from home. And she wasn’t afraid that a lunatic madman would climb the wooden steps and murder us in our sleep because the sheriff had told us the escaped patients had been seen way out on the county road at Ted Withers’ farm. But unbeknownst to all of us, they weren’t the only ones on the loose. Before that night was over, the lurking evil the girls and I had been warned about would step out of the shadows and introduce itself.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As my blood sisters and I made our way across the backyard grass, we were holding hands and reassuring one another that our beloved Jimbo would be fine.

  “He’s gonna be okay … he�
�s gonna be okay,” Frankie was telling herself.

  “He’ll be up and at ’em in no time,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Don’t worry, Frankenstein,” Viv said. “Doc won’t let anything bad happen to him.”

  Around the time the late train came rumbling down the tracks, we’d grown accustomed to it cooling down some, but that night it seemed to grow warmer with every step we took. I didn’t take heed of that harbinger at the time, but looking back at it now, I know that what Aunt Jane May had warned us about at the beginning of that hot summer was true. Satan had fled hell so fast and left the door open behind him because he knew when there were young souls available for the picking, and that was the night he was coming to get ours.

  The town had fallen into a scared silence beneath a moonless sky, and the air was so hot and thick that it dampened the crickets and frogs and the other night sounds to near nothing as well. Or maybe those creatures of God were sensing that evil was on the prowl and they didn’t want to give their hiding places away. Had the girls and I known what was about to happen, we would’ve followed their lead, but as we climbed the wooden steps that night, what was on our young minds was Jimbo lying in that hospital bed, the escaped patients, and the bizarre story Bigger had told us at the park.

  The least of my worries was Jimbo because I didn’t think that the person who’d hit him on the head meant to inflict any real damage. Soon as the sheriff mentioned that the new nurse at Broadhurst thought a woman might’ve taken her keys and shoved her into the supply closet, I suspected it was the same woman who’d set her hand on my back when she’d come to save us from Elvin Merchant in the woods. But it wasn’t until he confirmed that it was Leo and Harry Blake who’d escaped that I became positive that none other than Audrey Cavanaugh had given Jimbo a love tap on his noggin so he couldn’t stop her from setting Leo free. Only God knew where Albie was, but it crossed my mind that he hadn’t shown up for his shift because Elvin Merchant, acting as Chummy Adler’s goon, might’ve put him out of commission, too.