“YOU?”
It’s all I get out before Gibbs starts pounding and screaming, “Open this door!”
As Wallace pulls me away from it, I tell her, “She killed Mary Pell.”
She nods. “You need to go. Now,” she says, hustling me through the naked Unit patients and down the dark hall till we reach the door to the Unit’s vestibule. Wallace starts to unlock it.
“Why are you helping me,” I ask, “against her, risking—”
“No other course of action to take … now that I know what you are.”
“What’s that?”
“A time traveler,” she says, opening the door and walking toward the Unit’s entry gate.
“How … how long?”
“Have I known? Not long. At Hanover, more than a few patients think they’ve been sent here from the future. Or the past,” she says, unlocking the gate, then pulling me down the dark east-west corridor toward the main building. “You didn’t strike me as any different. The things you’d mumble about while groggy—being someone named Bix Parrish, sent from the future in a time machine to get a doctor’s help fighting some illness you called the Guest. It all sounded like the usual patient babble. Even that day I gave you back your pennies in the lobby. I thought for a second I saw the date 2021 on one of them, but I dismissed it.”
“So what changed your mind?” I ask.
“Ernest Hemingway,” she says.
“Huh?”
“Weeks ago, I overheard you telling Alice and the other Unit patients seated around you some wild tale about the author surviving two plane crashes in Uganda in a day, turning up alive even as obituaries were being written about him. You remember?” the nurse asks.
“Yes.”
“I thought it was just another delusion. Till a couple days ago when the news exploded with headlines about Hemingway showing up alive in Entebbe after miraculously surviving two plane crashes. The exact same story you told Alice.” Wallace glances behind us to make sure no one’s coming. “But time travel, it’s a lot to wrap one’s head around. I was still trying to accept it when you showed up this morning with that deputy. No husband, just a note from him asking us to readmit you to the Unit. I knew that moment it was all true—and that you’d come back to speak to Mary Droesch. Dr. Pell.”
“So you knew who Mary was?” I ask.
“I’d heard the gossip: lady biologist from Fort Detrick who’d suffered a psychotic break, accusing the army of some germ warfare cover-up, then attacking her boss in a delusional fit of rage.”
“Did you have any idea Mary was faking being a catatonic?” I ask.
“None,” she says. “But I figured if you were risking reentering the Unit, you might know something I didn’t. And need assistance.”
Assistance. Wallace was the unseen hand in all of this. “So you were the one who helped keep Gibbs and her partner away so Mary and I could speak?” I ask.
She nods. “As a veteran, I find Miss Gibbs’s brand of patriotism hard to stomach.”
“Were you the one who convinced Mary I was from the future?”
Wallace grins—which is jarring, the sight of a smile on that dour face. “I made sure a newspaper with the headline about Hemingway was ‘left’ on the chair next to her this morning.”
Then it occurs to me: “That tray of surgical instruments you put on the table in the treatment room—”
“Did I place it close enough for you to reach the scalpel? What do you think?”
When we reach the door to reception, the nurse turns to me. “Were you able to get the information you needed from Mary in the dining hall … before Gibbs—”
“Yes,” I say, trying to ward off the tears.
“Good.” She opens the door. We’re halfway to the exit when we hear voices—
And retreat back into the tunnel. Wallace gestures for me to follow her down a side hallway to a door she unlocks marked TOWER STAIRWELL.
The staircase must have really been something once. A grand carved wood affair gracefully ascending to the upper floors. But at some point, the people in charge of this place sacrificed beauty for safety and fenced in its center. Now it’s a bleak tunnel, curving upward, all steel mesh and dimmed hopes.
“These stairs service the main hall—lobby, doctors’ offices, and the tower. It’s deserted at night. You should be okay,” Wallace says, flipping through Lester’s keys. She doesn’t ask me how I got them. Quickly picks out one with a T on it, unlocks the stairs’ entry gate, and hands the keys back to me. “That key with an L on it unlocks the lobby door.”
“Thank you,” I say.
She nods stiffly. “Good luck.”
I nod, then sprint up to the next floor. Unlock the staircase’s gate and door and enter the lobby. Wallace was right: the place is empty. To my left are the main entrance doors. The same ones I strode through a week ago on the arm of my fake husband. I run for the doors and unlock them, about to disappear into the snowy night.
But then I hear the double click of a revolver’s hammer being cocked. And Stokes’s voice instructing: “Turn around.”
I do as he says. Find him pointing a .38 at me. “Was waiting here for Sherman to come tell me he’d finished dumbing you down when the lights went out. Knew right away it was you. Your persistence has really gotten tedious, Beatrix. It wasn’t long before I heard voices in the stairwell.” The lights come back on, Joe’s blackout over. Stokes clocks the bloodstain on my borrowed nurse’s uniform, then points his gun toward the tower stairwell. “Let’s go.”
We begin climbing the steps, Stokes’s gun at my back. “What are we doing?” I ask.
“That blood on your nice new uniform, whose is it, the friendly attendant with the shears?” I don’t answer. “No … You went back for Pell—but got there too late to save her from Miss Gibbs and her fellow spook. Am I close?”
“Fuck off.” Seeing Stokes’s cocky assholeness unfiltered and free makes it clear just how gifted an actor he is to have pulled off the role of gentle and caring Paul Frasier in 1954.
He chuckles behind me. “Amazing the lengths you’ll go to convince yourself you can be that person.”
“What person?” I ask.
“Someone good,” he says. “Really can’t blame you. I thought the same—that you could be domesticated. But you couldn’t change, even with half the voltage in the state sent through you. It’s your nature. And you can’t fight nature, it’ll surface eventually—like yours is beginning to, Beatrix.”
Ignore his mind-game bullshit.
Keep him talking. And look for an opportunity.
“As long as we’re asking questions,” I say, “why are you here?”
“Same reason as you. Getting the location of that rat virus sample from the esteemed Dr. Pell.”
“What use does a cult that believes its members will be saved by God have for Mary Pell’s sample?” I ask, glancing back at him.
He smiles. “I managed to snag a look at Dr. Pell back in November, on that tour of the Unit I convinced Sherman to give me before I saw you in his office. There she was, drooling in her soup. Looked like a complete vegetable. I was sure she wouldn’t be telling anyone where her viral sample was before she died. The last hope for a cure, gone. A low point. That left just one job for me in 1954. Tie up loose ends.”
“Kill me.”
He nods. “Kameron had wanted a violent, painful, public end for you in 2035. But he’s practical, all about the big picture. Said keep your death here small and forgettable. No flags raised. No timelines fucked with. So I came to that office armed with—”
“Those doctored photos of us,” I say, “to convince me you were my loving husband.”
He laughs. “Convince you, my crazy wife no one’s gonna listen to? No. I just needed to convince Sherman. So he’d give me a few minutes alone with you to use the other item I came with: a syringe of penicillin.”