12

Parrish checked the wires again. He wasn’t sure if he had it right, but he certainly didn’t want to consult anyone else on this critical part of the conditioning. He could hardly tell someone what he was up to. He could hardly say, “I am trying to drive a crazy person farther around the bend.”

Parrish got up and walked out of his office and down the hall to the dayroom. The ward cat, Alice, was sleeping on the sofa, and Parrish reached down and picked her up. He looked at his watch. It was ten-twenty. Group would be out in another ten or fifteen minutes, and he would be seeing Bobby Starne in his office at eleven. Plenty of time.

Whispering in the cat’s ear, Parrish walked back to his office. He put the drowsy animal on the chair where Bobby Starne would be sitting. He petted the cat and cooed over it. “Good Alice,” he cooed, scratching its ears. The cat purred, stretched, and curled into a tight black ball. Satisfied that the cat wasn’t going anywhere, Richard carefully moved away from the animal. He waked over to the light switch near the sofa. He waited a moment, then flicked the switch. The cat leaped into the air, magically levitated, and darted across the room. It ran in small, frenzied circles, mewed piteously at the door, and finally skulked under the sofa. A coppery smell that reminded Parrish of childhood train sets lingered in the room.

Parrish grinned broadly. Not bad for a guy whose electrical expertise had formerly extended only to the changing of light bulbs, the replacing of frayed electrical cords.

He went over to the closet and took out the movie screen and projector. He took the film canister out of his briefcase and carefully threaded the film into the projector.

He drew the blinds. He sat in the dark and watched a cartoon about a mouse outwitting a cat. The mouse was tiptoeing around a corner with a burning stick of dynamite when suddenly Anna’s image appeared on the screen, smiling, laughing. She was reacting to the camera, waving it away with her hand. She laughed. Then her image disappeared, replaced by the cartoon. Now the cat was locking the mouse in a trunk. The trunk, however, had no bottom.

Parrish stopped the projector and rewound the film. He was proud of himself, but not overly confident, not yet.

He hunted the cat down and took it back to the dayroom. Then he returned to his office and waited for Bobby Starne.

“I have a special treat for you today,” Richard told Bobby. “I know how you love cartoons. I thought we could watch a cartoon together. What do you say?”

“That would be okay,” Bobby said. Since Bobby’s medications had been reduced, he was more wary and jittery than ever. He looked weirder too. As one of the ward nurses put it, “He looks like he’s going to blow a fuse.”

Bobby sat in the chair, but he was restless, and he grunted when the lights were turned off.

“It’s okay,” Parrish said, and he started the cartoon. Bobby was soon laughing, a heavy, huh, huh noise, and gripping the arms of his chair.

Anna’s face jumped on the screen, and Parrish flipped the light switch and Bobby jolted out of the chair.

Parrish calmed Bobby down, returned him to the chair, and they continued to watch the movie.

But the third time Anna’s face appeared, the third time Bobby Starne felt his body invaded by hissing, electric serpents, there was no calming him down. Parrish turned the projector off and turned on the room lights.

Parrish hugged the boy on the sofa. Bobby Starne was shivering, mumbling.

Parrish smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes, that’s right. Baby Lisa. She’s getting stronger. I think it’s time to do something, don’t you? I think we have to kill her quickly, or it will be too late.”

When Bobby Starne was taken back to his room, shaking and whining incoherently, Richard told the orderly that Bobby’s session had been traumatic, and that he should be isolated from the other patients for the rest of the day while he quieted down. No, he was not to be medicated heavily.

After the orderly left, Parrish locked his office, turned the projector on again and watched Anna’s laughing face. The camera moved away from her to reveal her surroundings, the rushing water, the sun-white pines. He remembered the day they had gone to the Yurman River and he had filmed her. That had been a fine, inviolate day. Anna had been flattered by his attention.

He rewound the film and put it back in the canister and replaced the canister in his briefcase. He methodically dismantled his “electric” chair and then he walked to his desk and called Anna at work.

“I want to play hookey,” he told her. “I’m sick of work today. I know you get off at one. What do you say I meet you at our river? Around two, okay?”

Anna, delighted, said she would be there, and Parrish hung up with a sense of satisfaction. Events were moving properly toward their conclusion. All that remained was for Bobby Starne to escape.

This was the part of the plan most apt to go awry, the one risky part of the business. Bobby had to “escape” from Romner Psychiatric Institute. Patients did escape occasionally, and Bobby wasn’t on a high security ward—although he would have been transferred to such a ward had Dr. Parrish failed to intervene on his behalf after the arm-breaking episode—but some precautions were still observed. Parrish waited until one o’clock when lunch was over and most patients were either downstairs in occupational therapy or in private sessions with assigned counselors. Bobby would have been downstairs with the others if Parrish hadn’t requested that he be isolated. This meant that Bobby would be locked in his room for the afternoon.

Parrish pushed through the swinging doors and walked down the middle of the corridor. This ward had the feel of a college dorm, brighter, more hopeful, with dressers, desks, carpet in each room. Bobby’s room was 118, and Parrish stopped in front of the door. He looked up and down the hall, and, seeing no one, he quickly bent and unlocked the door. Bobby was sitting on the bed, and he looked up when Parrish entered.

“Hullo, Dr. Parrish,” he said.

“Hello, Bobby. You are going to have to be very quiet now. You have to do just what I tell you, okay?”

Bobby nodded his head.

“Good. We don’t have much time. We have to kill Baby Lisa today or we will never have another chance. She will jump again, and we will never find her. We won’t know where she is until she comes looking for us.”

Bobby nodded grimly.

Parrish took the scissors blade out of his inside coat pocket and hacked at the wood around the door latch. It was the sort of latch that could be burgled with a credit card, so no one would be surprised that Bobby had managed to force it. They would wonder how he had managed to conceal the scissors (stolen over a week ago from the nursing station) through two room searches, and they might wonder how it came to be so sharp (for Parrish had lovingly honed it with a stone). They wouldn’t wonder for long; they would dismiss the mystery, for, as Parrish had observed, a certain number of inexplicable events occurred weekly at Romner, as though the craziness contained in the place worked its way out of the patients’ minds and into the walls, warping natural law.

For the same reason they would quickly cease wondering how the double doors at the end of the hall, the ones facing an expanse of rolling hills and green woods, had come to be open.

Having told Bobby what to do, and having had him repeat it, Richard peered out into the still-empty hallway, quickly slipped into the hall, closed the door behind him, and walked briskly in the direction of the nurses’ station. He was prepared to talk to the ward clerk, but as he approached, he saw her turn away to answer a phone. The orderly was slumped in a chair, reading a paperback. He didn’t look up as Parrish went by.

In the parking lot, Parrish looked at his watch again. It was one-twenty. He climbed in his car and drove off the lot. He drove slowly down Burnett Avenue and turned into the park at Burnett and Weaver. The park was named Hammet Field Park, and it had fallen into disrepair when the larger community center had been built a quarter of a mile to the south. Today, as usual, it was nearly empty except for a teenage couple sitting on a bench looking disconsolate and a fat woman dragging a small, shaggy dog behind her. The dog’s small feet pinwheeled and it leaned against a taut leash. The woman gave it an occasional ill-tempered yank.

Parrish drove past the people and down a residential street and back into the L-shaped end of the park, now scrub vegetation and twisted, tormented trees. He waited.

He waited for fifteen minutes, and the heat of the day sparked perspiration on his forehead. He felt a tickle of panic. The whole plan seemed ludicrous. Bobby had been too crazy to understand, too lost in his convoluted world.

Then Bobby lurched out of the dark woods, his head bobbing oddly, his huge chest heaving. Parrish waited, and Bobby saw him and ran to the car. Parrish reached behind the seat and opened the back door.

“Lie on the floor,” he told Bobby. “We can’t let her see you.”

“Baby Lisa?” Bobby said. Bobby scrambled in and lay down on the backseat. Parrish could hear his heavy, scratchy breathing as the car pulled out of the park and he maneuvered it through residential streets, into the busier, downtown district, then out onto the highway. He rolled down a window and let the hot summer air race in. It felt like freedom.