Down there, a few feet away, was the body of Nick Loudon.
She knew it.
If she found him, she had all the proof she needed. She pointed the shovel at the ground and put her foot on top of the back of the blade. She just needed to push down and turn the dirt away. It wouldn’t take long, but the shovel felt heavy in her hands. She found herself sweating, and she was dizzy at what she had to do.
Find the body. Bring him back.
“Oh my God, what are you doing?”
The voice startled Lisa. She dropped the shovel to the ground and spun around. On the sidewalk near the trees, two teenagers stared at her, open mouthed. Two girls, both young, probably no more than sixteen. One girl wore a white bubble coat down to her knees, and the other was dressed in a heavy army jacket with a rainbow-colored wool cap pulled down below her ears.
“It was you!” the girl in the multicolored hat screamed at her. “I saw you!”
“What?”
“You put that body in the ground!”
“No!” Lisa took a step toward them and held up her hands. “No, you’re wrong!”
“Get away from me! I’m calling the cops!”
“No, wait!” Lisa shouted. “Don’t do that! Stop, I need to talk to you!”
But the first girl didn’t listen to her. She ran, stumbling through the snow and abandoning her friend. Lisa watched the teenager slip-sliding through the rows of tombstones, heading for the road. The clock was ticking now, leaving her no time to uncover the body. As soon as the girl called the police, Denis Farrell would be here. Nick Loudon would disappear for good. The evidence would be gone. They’d have Lisa in their hands, and soon enough, they’d have Purdue, too.
“Wait, listen to me!” Lisa called after her again. “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m trying to help!”
But the girl was already gone.
The other girl, the one in the white bubble coat, simply looked at Lisa with a curious expression. She didn’t seem afraid, and she made no attempt to run. She was tall, with long blond hair and earmuffs over her head. Her hands were in the pockets of her white coat.
“It wasn’t me,” Lisa told her. “I didn’t do this.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do?”
“Sure. I know who you are. You’re Lisa Power. The writer. I’m a friend of Willow’s. That’s why I’m here. She told me all about what happened the other night, so I figured I’d check it out for myself. I mean, somebody burying a body in a cemetery in the rain at midnight? That’s pretty wild.”
“What about your friend?” Lisa asked.
“Oh, don’t worry about her. I told her Willow’s story. She freaked when she saw someone out here.”
“She can’t call the police,” Lisa said. “I know that sounds strange, but it’s not safe.”
“I’ll text her and tell her to knock it off. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding. She’ll listen to me.”
“Thank you.”
“What are you doing here, anyway? What’s with the shovel? Is there really a body buried there? I mean, duh, sure, there are like a thousand bodies out here, but Willow said she saw someone actually digging a hole in the ground. That’s pretty creepy.”
“I know it is. And yes, I think someone’s buried out here who’s not supposed to be here, and I think I know who it is. That’s what I came out here to do. Find the body.”
“Like in your book?” the girl asked.
“Yes, just like in my book.”
“Is that where the boy came from?” the girl asked. “Was he in the ground? That was in the book, too, right?”
Lisa had to stop herself from jumping across the space between them and grabbing the girl by the shoulders. “What do you know about the boy?”
“Well, I don’t know who he is or anything, but a lot of the kids were talking about him at school yesterday.”
“What did you hear?” Lisa asked. “What were they saying about him?”
The teenager shrugged. “A woman on the other side of Pennington came across a boy wandering around the trailer park two nights ago. The park’s not far from here. It’s an easy walk from the cemetery. Anyway, this kid was hurt. He said he didn’t know who he was. He didn’t remember anything, his name, where he came from, nothing like that. So the woman took him over to the hospital to get him checked out. But the boy kept saying people die in hospitals, that he was going to die if he stayed there. He wouldn’t get out of the car.”
Lisa closed her eyes. Purdue.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“Well, that’s the weird part. A doctor came out of the hospital, and the woman flagged her down. The doctor got the boy calmed down and said she would make sure he was okay. She told the woman to go back home, that she had everything under control.”
“So the boy went into the hospital with the doctor?” Lisa asked.
“I guess. Except the woman called the hospital the next day to see how he was doing, and there was no boy. He was gone. The hospital told her they had no record of him ever being there at all.”
34
The hospital.
Somehow Lisa had always known that the road would take her back to the hospital. Sooner or later, that was where she had to go. She’d gone through those doors thousands of times in her life, and now she would have to go through them again. That was where she’d find the last piece in the puzzle about Purdue.
She sat in the Camaro in the hospital parking lot. The one-story brown-brick building sprawled over a flat lot in the middle of empty fields. It was night, but the parking lot was crowded, and people came and went through the doors. Emergencies didn’t punch a clock. She’d worked the graveyard shift as a nurse for years, and there were nights when she’d have hours of boredom where she could take out her laptop and write, and there were nights when she’d spent the whole shift literally running from room to room to keep up.
Lisa waited for the right moment. It didn’t take long. Two SUVs pulled up near the ER doors, and a crowd of people piled out of the vehicles, including a teenage girl who’d obviously injured her leg in some kind of high school sports accident. Several of the people with her were teenagers who wore uniforms from the local team, the Prowlers. Two adults carried the girl inside, two other adults called for help, and everyone else flooded into the hospital lobby with them, triggering what Lisa knew would be a chaotic scene of confusion and noise.
She got out of the Camaro and hurried across the snowy parking lot to slip into the hospital in the wake of the crowd. No one noticed her. The attendant at the desk was busy. Lisa put her head down and walked into the main corridor that led past the waiting room and into the treatment areas of the facility. The soft brown wood and ochre color on the walls was supposed to be soothing, but Lisa felt her heartbeat take off like a thoroughbred out of the gate. She could feel it beating madly in her chest, and to her ears, it sounded like the electronic beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor. She knew that sound only too well.
A nurse approached her from the other end of the corridor. Lisa knelt down, letting her hair fall in front of her face and fiddling with one of her shoelaces to avoid being seen. She made the mistake of looking up too soon and found the nurse staring right at her. The woman’s brown eyes widened with recognition. The nurse didn’t say anything or sound an alarm, but her shoes squeaked on the floor as she moved quickly away.