'Trust," Freeman said, as if spitting. "Isn't that one of your special little words?"
Freeman and Vicky went up the landing and entered the building. Starlene started after them, then hesitated. She hurried down the stairs to the basement. The lock did look new, not a scratch or speck of rust on it. Sawdust, steel shavings, and crumbled masonry lay in small piles on the ground. The hardware had been recently installed.
"Is that to keep us out, or to keep them in?" Bondurant smiled down at her from the top of the stairs. Without waiting for an answer, he said, "You've seen them, haven't you?"
"Them?"
"The ones who live in the walls." Bondurant took a staggering step down. His face was bright red, his eyes wild. He slapped the stone foundation of the building. "The ones that God wouldn't let into heaven."
"I–I'd better get going. I have a group session after lunch."
Bondurant fumbled in his pocket and came two steps nearer. He brought out a key. "Don't you want to look?"
He lost his footing, and Starlene thought for a moment he was going to tumble down the steps. But he grabbed the handrail and regained what he could of his balance. The smell of whiskey filled the cramped alcove beneath the landing. Wendover's director was as drunk as a lord.
"Mr. Bondurant, you look like you're under the weather. I think you ought to go lie down."
"I'm afraid I'll go to sleep if I do that." He was nearly all the way down the stairs now, and Starlene considered bolting past him. She'd never quite trusted him, even though he knew some Bible verses and professed faith in Jesus. But this man could crush her career with one negative reference. Though he looked out-of-his-mind insane- purple welts under his eyes, hair oily and mussed hands trembling-he still carried a lot of influence with the state's behavioral health care system.
"And, please, call me Francis," he said, mushing his sibilants. He'd dropped his careful manner of speech. She moved aside as he tried unsuccessfully to slide his key in the lock. "Damned red tape."
He gave her a bloodshot look, and his gaze crawled down her body like a spilled basket of snakes. "It's bad enough to get regulated by the state. Now the federal government says 'Do this and mat.' And all this talk about children's rights, like we 're the bad guys."
He licked his lips, and Starlene saw why the children compared him to a reptile. "We do the best we can," she said.
"Goddamned right we do." On the fourth try, the key slid in the lock and the hasp popped free. "We're in service of the Lord but all these layers of deception get in the way of the real work. You know what that work is?"
"Healing. Loving. Caring."
He banged his foot against the door and it swung open. "Hell, no. The real job is about looking good on paper. That's what brings in the money. That's why Kracowski is the best thing that ever happened to Wendover."
Bondurant shouted up the stairwell. "You hear that, Kracowski? You're the best goddamned thing that ever happened."
Starlene stood clear of Bondurant, who swayed and leaned against the doorjamb. She couldn't resist looking past him into the dark basement.
Bondurant held out his hand and gave a wiggly grin. '"Fraidofthedark?"
More afraid of YOU, she wanted to say, but this might be her only chance to see inside the basement. Vicky and Freeman had been trying to tell her something, but she'd been unable to cut through her own educated biases to listen. Maybe her faith was a bias, too. Now the door was open. It was up to her to walk through.
"She smiled at me," Bondurant said spraying her with his liquor spittle.
"Who?"
"The woman. The woman in the wall."
Starlene barely heard him, because she saw a glow emanating from inside the basement. It was an eerie, diseased half-light. She felt herself being drawn forward almost against her will. Behind her, Bondurant pressed close against her, his stench as repellent as his body heat.
"She's here," he whispered and closed the door behind them. Starlene knew this was dangerous, that the drunken fool might do something embarrassing, but her fears were overwhelmed by what she saw before her.
The metal tanks themselves would have been cause for wonder, set in rows with coils and wires around each. The wiring that Vicky had tried to describe circumvented the ceiling, and several sizes of conduit ran overhead. An array of expensive-looking machinery lined the walls behind the tanks. The technology was a vivid contrast to the musty gray of the stone foundation, but that wasn't what caused Starlene's blood to freeze in her veins.
An old woman, Bondurant's "woman in the wall," stood in the glow of the generator components.
The woman had an ugly scar across her forehead her facial wrinkles so deep that it looked to be the work of several hundred years of gravity. The woman's eyes were set back in her skull like the openings of small caves, holes that allowed no light to enter. From the tattered condition of the woman's robe, she looked severely neglected.
Starlene's first instinct was to help the woman. "What are you doing here?"
The woman's mouth opened, as slow as dust. Bondurant had pulled a flask from somewhere and was busy assaulting his central nervous system. "She lives here," he said, after removing the flask from his lips.
"Here?" Beyond the tanks set in the middle of the room, a series of dark corridors broke off from the main floor area. Starlene saw a few doors that promised even deeper shadows.
"When she's not in the walls, I mean," Bondurant said.
The woman's lips moved again, slowly, and Starlene thought the woman had spoken. Maybe sound wasn't what the woman emitted, because the top of Starlene's spinal column tingled and the words "A white, white room in which to write" flitted across her head and were gone. Except the voice had been a man's, not an old woman's.
Bondurant put his arm around Starlene, the gesture more boozy and paternalistic than sexual. "We got plenty down here. They're the best kind of patients you could think of. Don't have to feed them, they never complain, and no Social Services bastards breathing down your neck."
"You mean they stay down here?" The cobwebs, the stained concrete floor, and the wet smell of corruption made the basement seem more suited for a colony of rats.
"They don't stay here all the time. They used to, then they got in the walls. And now, sometimes, they get out." Bondurant waved his hand toward the ceiling, indicating the rooms above them.
They took it by hook and by crook.
The words were there, inside Starlene's head, like voice-over edited into a movie soundtrack. The woman's lips hadn't moved, but Starlene was sure the words had been the woman's.
I got half a mind to tell somebody about it, what they did. But I only got half a mind.
Maybe Freeman had been telling the truth. He'd exhibited some remarkable guess work during his session with her. But mind reading was a little too loopy, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something God would never allow. Yet so were old men who walked on water and disappeared. And shadowy secret agent types making deals with doctors. And expensive equipment bidden in an underfunded children's home.
"Who are you?" Starlene asked the woman.
The woman said nothing, just turned her stooped body and shuffled back towards the shadows. It was only after she'd reached the throat of the widest corridor that Starlene's legs obeyed her brain enough to follow.
"You don't want to go back there," Bondurant said.
"She needs help," Starlene said, angry. "How could you stand it, knowing she was living down here in this filth?"
Bondurant's drunken laughter bounced off the stone walls. "I don't think 'living' is the right word."
Starlene paused in mid-stride, and stood breathless in the center of the metal cylinders. Ahead of her, the woman had faded to nothing.