It would be after ten by the time he got there and he wasn't sure what the rules of the place would be. Did you have to call ahead and make an appointment? Could you walk up off the street? Did you have to be family to visit? He decided to give it a go anyway, and if need be, he'd find a cheap spot to stay overnight and try again in the morning.
The Jimmys were still dialoguing. Crease got in the 'Stang, gassed up around the block, drove out to the interstate and headed to New Hampshire.
The directions were perfect and went right down to the tenth of a mile when the next turn was coming up. He made it in no time, listening to an Oldies station, his mind a flat, empty lowland periodically broken by someone running by in the distance.
The group home was a converted Victorian house that on the open market would bring in one point two, one point three mil. A sign on the front lawn said it was the Sinclair Mayridge Home for the Needful. It sounded like a methadone clinic in Harlem.
Crease parked at the curb and stepped up. Several people sat on the porch conversing lazily. One guy was reading a paper, two women convened in the corner crocheting and discussing what sounded like a romance novel. A teenage boy leaned against the railing where he typed on a laptop, and a teenage girl sidled at his shoulder watching him. Nobody looked particularly needful. They all looked well-rested and happy as hell.
Crease climbed the stairs but wasn't sure what the etiquette was. If you were supposed to knock or if you just walked right in. He looked around wondering if anybody would make eye contact and give him a hint, but nobody seemed to notice him. He turned the knob and wandered inside.
More blithe folks sat in a living room watching television, pleasantly chatting. If anybody was in charge, he couldn't tell who it might be. He lit a cigarette and two middle-aged ladies playing cards told him in unison, "No smoking here."
He ground the butt out against his heel and said, "Sarah Burke?"
"Upstairs. Room twelve."
He took the stairs two at a time, feeling like a thief in the night. Strange it should be that way since nobody cared he was here. Still, he could just imagine someone leaping out of a chair and pointing at him, screaming hideously, falling into convulsions. Somebody might slip a dirty pair of panties in his pocket and send him up the river for a nickel.
Door ten was painted yellow. Eleven was green. Twelve orange. Flowers and bunnies and other cuddly creatures had been carefully depicted on each of them. Rainbows arced across the walls of the hallway, multicolored groups of children danced harmoniously across blue globes. Crease thought he could very easily bug out in a place like this.
Someone had snuck Jesus way up top, almost on the ceiling, smiling down upon the puppies and tulips. One of the needy could call a lawyer and start yelling about the separation of church and state, maybe walk out of this place with a laundry bag full of money.
He knocked on the door of room twelve. No sound from inside, and he got no sense of movement. He knocked again. He imagined the woman in there staring at the door, wishing lethal thoughts through the wood, into his head. Willing murder, demanding death, spilling blood from afar.
You could get yourself pretty jazzed in front of a closed door in a state-run facility.
He swung it open and walked in.
A forty-watt bulb burned through a smoke-stained, dust-covered lampshade, giving the room a sickly yellow pallor.
Sarah Burke was seated in a ladder-back wooden chair in the far corner, huddled inside a ratty cotton nightgown. Her slippered feet didn't quite touch the floor. It was a crazy place to be, sitting over there far away from the rest of the furniture, the windows, the closet, everything. She was drawn up into herself-her body twined against and within itself-staring out at everything else like she found it all so peculiar.
A bony, ragged face, all you really saw were her eyes.
He'd dealt with a lot of bad dudes in his time, but only a couple of them had ever given him the willies on sight. She did it to him. Plucked a nerve deep inside that you never wanted touched. Some people, you just looked at them and knew the seriously bad juju was at work. It was all over her.
Her white hair stuck out in clumps and tufts. This was a witch, a queen gone bad in the deep forest who plotted your death while she fed you gingerbread cookies. Stevie's kiddie books were filled with creepy broads like this. She was so thin that he found it hard to believe her bones didn't break just carrying out the most casual acts. Just walking across the room would cause her kneecaps to burst through her skin.
He remembered he'd thought something similar about her brother, Sam Burke. Sitting there in his living room with his anguish pulsing under his face, pulsing, like it would come crashing through his flesh at any second.
She was needful all right. What she needed you couldn't give her. If you could give it to her then you'd be as wracked across the rocks as she was.
Crease said, "I'd like to talk to you."
The woman turned her lifeless eyes on him. She stared hard, harder than most people were able to do no matter the reason. You couldn't get angry enough to glower that way. You couldn't be thoughtful enough. It was something that happened when you went so deep in the well that you couldn't climb back out again.
Yeah, the lady had taken a fall and dug in when she hit the ground. He cocked his head and studied her another minute.
We're going home, Teddy.
The fever scrambled over him again. The sweat flowed down his neck and back, his scalp prickled. Soon his hair was dripping and his face was wet, the taste of salt flowing into his mouth. If nothing else, it perked her up. Her tiny body began to churn in the chair. He did the math. Burke had said she was older than him by four years. That made her no more than maybe fifty on the outside.
She grinned at him and Crease grinned back. She drew her chin back and her wrinkled lips dropped back into place. She said, "You my new neighbor? You number thirteen?"
"No."
"They always say no. All the thirteens say no."
"I guess they were lying then. I'm not."
"What do you want from me? I don't have anything for you." She started slowly nodding, certain of something. "You're sweating. It's not hot in here. Why are you sweating like that?" Her feet began to swing, the bottom of the slippers slapping her heels with each pass. "None of the other thirteens sweated."
"I want to talk about Mary."
The name got to her.
Sarah Burke was gone but not as gone as she wanted everyone to think. Her eyes cleared and she tilted her chin at him. Her brow knotted, the bottom lip quivered and drooped. He saw a pink flash of jutting tongue. Her hands gripped the arms of the chair, and the tendons stood out in her forearms as clear as polished marble.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Tell me what happened, Sarah," he said.
"No."
He walked to the window nearest her. The shade was drawn. He tugged on it and the shade inched up over the glass. A ray of moonlight stabbed into the room and she flailed in her chair.
"Don't do that, thirteen," she told him. "My eyes, I've got a condition."
"I bet I know what it is. Tell me what happened to Mary."
"I could yell, you know. I could scream."
"You've been screaming for seventeen years. How about if you just talk to me instead?"
The condition of her eyes grew worse as the memories began to burn through her mind. He saw it happening, one small flame igniting a patch of dry woodland. The fire spreading, leaping across treetops, spanning all the hidden acres marked off with barb wire. It was alive and inescapable.
The blaze ran rampant as if on a mission. Sarah Burke sat gaping and wide-eyed with only purified, burning sparks of remembrance left behind in her head.