The man's shoulders slumped, his posture one of weary defeat. He gave a slow turn of his head and Starlene looked into the saddest, most empty eyes she had ever seen. The man nodded at her, then shuffled around the corner toward the west wing.
"Hey, wait!" Starlene hurried after him, her heels loud on the tiled floor. She'd lost him before, but now he had nowhere to disappear. She would drag the man down to Bondurant's office and then make Randy see she hadn't imagined the incident at the lake.
They were entering the section where Dr. Kracowski conducted his therapy sessions. Kracowski insisted on silence. Or, rather, Bondurant had, on the doctor's orders. Starlene had never met the doctor herself, and he seemed as elusive and mythical as the old man she was chasing. She reached the corner and turned anxious and breathless. The hall before her was empty.
No. Not again. He was REAL.
Something glistened on the dreary tiles. Starlene knelt and wiped with her finger. Water. Behind her stretched a trail of bare, wet footprints.
"Hey," she called again, uncertain.
A door opened. A tall, dark-haired man came out, his clipboard loose in his fingers. He wore a white lab coat, the pockets frayed. His cheeks were blue with stubble. He looked as if he'd been napping in his office. "Lose something?" he asked.
"Did somebody just come by?"
"Somebody?"
"A man. Dressed in a gown, hunched over, no shoes."
The tall man smiled. "My dear, are you new here?"
Dear? He was talking like somebody from a 1950s sitcom. "I've been working here for eleven weeks."
"That explains it."
"What explains what?"
"Look-Out Larry. Our resident specter."
"Specter? You mean-?"
"Do you always ask so many questions?"
"Only when I think I've lost my mind."
"We don't lose minds around here, we find them. Look-Out Larry is a ghost, I assume. I've never seen him myself, since I don't believe in ghosts."
"This water is real," Starlene said though most of the footprints had now evaporated.
"I see no water," the man said.
"Oh, you don't believe in water, either?"
The man smiled. "If I could make something disappear just by no longer believing in it, then I'm afraid God would have died ages ago. Excuse my manners. I'm Dr. Richard Kracowski."
He said his name with the air of one who knew his reputation had preceded him.
"Hello, Doctor. Glad to finally meet you. I'm Starlene Rogers, counselor."
"Ah, yes, Bondurant warned me about you."
" 'Warned?' Sheesh. Tell me about Look-Out Larry, because that makes twice I've seen him today, and I've never had any reason to doubt my eyes before. And I don't believe in ghosts, either. But I do believe in God."
"Oh, so you've seen God?" Kracowski looked toward the ceiling. "Actually, I have this theory that Look-Out Larry is God."
"Sir, I'd love to debate religion with you sometime, but right now I'd rather figure out if I'm going crazy or not."
"Miss Rogers, the word 'crazy' is not in the lexicon anymore. Hallucinations are one of the hallmarks of schizophrenia, or, in certain diagnoses with which I don't agree, delusional disorders."
The footprints had evaporated completely now, and Starlene was no longer sure they had even been there. "So I'm schizophrenic because I thought I saw somebody who doesn't exist?" "Either that or you're a religious visionary."
"But you said yourself that others have seen him. He even has a name."
The doctor leaned forward, conspiratorially. "Hate to tell you, but all the other people who claimed to have seen Look-Out Larry were patients"
Starlene looked both ways down the hall. "So more than one person has the same hallucination? I would think a man of science would take that as corroborating evidence."
Kracowski held up the clipboard, showing her the charts and graphs fastened to it. "Evidence is something that can be measured, quantified, proven. Surely you studied research methods in college, even if you ended up being a counselor."
Starlene didn't like the sarcastic bite that the doctor put on that last word. It was bad enough to get strange stares from the members of her church and neighborhood, but to have to endure this from someone in the same profession "Maybe it was a trick of the light," she said. "These halls are dark. I mean, if it was a ghost, and I don't believe in ghosts, then I wouldn't have seen him. Right?"
"You're sounding cured already."
"Do me a favor?"
The doctor smiled again, his eyes half-closed. "For you, anything."
"Don't mention this to Mr. Bondurant? I wouldn't want him to think his hiring me was a mistake."
"Oh, I'm sure Bondurant knew exactly what he was doing. For the good of the children, right?"
Had Kracowski said that last sentence in mockery of Bondurant and the director's tight-lipped manner of speech? "I want him to trust me," she said.
"As far as I'm concerned what happened here is a secret, between you, me, and our old pal Larry."
Starlene wanted to stuff Kracowski's clipboard into his smile. She cast a quick prayer of forgiveness, both for Kracowski's arrogance and her own surrender to anger. This was her first job, the counselor's equivalent of a combat zone, and she would be a good soldier. God had sent her here for a reason, and she didn't need to understand His purpose until He needed her to know.
"Excuse me, I've got a group session to lead." She headed down the hall to the stairwell, feeling Kracowski's eyes on her.
"A pleasure to meet you," Kracowski called when she was about to turn the corner. Starlene kept walking.
In college, Starlene had studied the phenomenon where medical students often noticed symptoms in themselves of ailments they were studying-med school hypochondria. The same was true of psychology students, though the symptoms were more nebulous. Maybe working with troubled children had snapped something loose in her own head. Were hallucinations contagious?
Sure. And mass hysteria in Salem had led to witch hangings. The human race had come a long way, and the field of psychology had come even further. Carving out pieces of people's brains in order to rid them of emotions was rarely done anymore, and even required the patient's permission. Electroshock wasn't automatic for every person who sought treatment for depression. Insanity was no longer touted as a spectator sport, as had happened at St. Mary of Bethlehem Hospital in seventeenth-century London, commonly known as Bedlam to the tourists who gave twopence for the show.
No, she hadn't seen a ghost. Because only crazy people saw ghosts, and as Dr. Kracowski had said, nobody's crazy anymore. Especially her.
And to see a ghost twice would mean she was two times crazy. She buried the idea of ghosts as she pushed open the door to Room Seven. She had children to help. She couldn't be worried about helping herself.
The room was sparse, with a desk in the corner and a dusty chalkboard on one wall. Posters proclaimed such timeless tidbits as "Hugs Not Drugs" and "A Smile Cures Everything." Out the window, the sun worked its way behind the distant, black ridge tops. The seven children sat in a ring of chairs. Two slouched sullenly: Deke the pudgy teen whom Starlene knew to be a bully, and Raymond in his ever-present drab olive jacket.
The others watched Starlene take her seat at the head of the circle: Vicky, pale and wide-eyed, whose dress hung about her as if draped from a clothes hanger; the new boy, Freeman; Mario, in too-short trousers, who rarely spoke; Isaac, who nurtured a serious persecution complex; and Cynthia, who called herself "Sin." Cynthia seemed to have recovered from her recent treatment, but a suspicious defiance sparked her eyes.