The Warden Read online

  And this was where she stopped.

  There were no more screams. Perhaps someone had tended to the unhappy girl and gotten her to sleep again. Jocelyn was practical enough to assume that meant a heavy dose of sedatives to get the job done. Her curiosity was piqued, certainly, but there was curiosity and then there was recklessness. Her first few weeks on the job had gone well—why jeopardize her position by poking around where she didn’t belong?

  Then the scream came again, longer, agonizing, twisting high and into a word.

  “Please.”

  That was more than enough motivation for Jocelyn. She set her jaw, racing down the stairs without a second thought. Surely nobody could fault her—a nurse—for wanting to give a poor soul comfort and relief. There would be sedatives somewhere. She could at least help the girl back to sleep and spare the other patients the distress of her cries.

  And spare me them, too.

  The emergency lighting grew thinner. Threadbare bulbs dangled above her head, the stairs going on and on, twisting, taking her far lower than she expected to go. Other corridors intersected, locked doors meeting up with the path downward. The air grew colder, damper, true subterranean clamminess making her sweater feel like tissue paper. Jocelyn rubbed her arms, determined but slowing, her steps less sure as she finally turned the last corner.

  It wasn’t so much a hallway as it was a very tall, long room. It ran straight forward into darkness, and the sensation of looking into a vanishing, narrow point tightened her stomach in nausea. Jocelyn passed under the archway, shivering as a sharp rush of air followed her through.

  She squinted. What could possibly be down here? This didn’t at all resemble the bright, clean storage rooms at Grace Point. She couldn’t imagine a reason to keep anything, let alone anyone, in such a gloomy place.

  Doors sprung up on either side of her, taller and more forbidding than those of the patient and dormitory levels above. Heavy, rusted hinges and grate-guarded windows, thick with grime, made her wonder if they were housing Dr. Moreau’s failed creations and not troubled human beings.

  It felt too cold, too silent to be a safe place for patients. Dead, almost.

  Then the girl screamed again, and the rending sound was only muffled by one door, maybe two this time. And that scream brought all the doors in the hall to life. They rattled, they shook, fists slamming on unrelenting metal, hinges groaning against the sudden savagery. More voices chorused with hers, cries and wails. Bellows. Laughter.

  Out of the mayhem, a coherent refrain emerged: “Help her, help her, help her.”

  Slowly, a door opened farther down the hall, a pale shaft of light spilling onto the dirty floor. Jocelyn didn’t wait to see who or what would come out. She silently cursed herself a coward, turned, and ran.

  The girl is soft. Moldable. Like Dennis. Not as eager as Dennis, I’m sure, but few are. She is defiant and arrogant, but that defiance can be harnessed. God, I hesitate to say it, but she brings to mind a younger version of myself. Not as determined, not as naturally gifted, but I see flickers of my past, reminders of where I started and how far I have come. Her talents are wasted and she knows it, and that resentment is my way in. I see the seeds of great things in her, but I will need to approach her carefully. A demonstration is in order, one that will prove beyond a doubt that sometimes sickness really cannot be cured.

  It hardly matters that the sickness is all my doing.

  I believe I am still waiting on the best candidate to propel my research forward, but this will prove an amusing distraction until that time.

  —Excerpt from Warden Crawford’s journals—late April

  What had she seen? And more important, what was she going to do about it?

  She could leave her post for good, she realized, get back on a bus and go somewhere, anywhere else. But that would mean leaving all those people behind, and she would carry around their pleas for help for the rest of her life—not to mention Madge would be inconsolable. The guilt would eat away at her. She had come to be a nurse. To help.

  And she knew exactly who to ask for clarification.

  Sometimes the best way forward was the simplest. Medicine was a straightforward, noble science. That’s what she liked about it. The goal was obvious—find the problem and then find the solution, and in doing so, help a patient return to a healthy life. The risk was great but the reward was even greater.

  Warden Crawford would know what the basement was all about. He would give her the answers she needed. Explain how what she’d seen was part of a necessary risk.

  But first, breakfast.

  The staff cafeteria abutted the one where the more stable, low-risk patients ate. Jocelyn’s eyes followed nurses zooming away from their bacon and eggs at a moment’s notice to respond to some flare-up or scuffle in the other cafeteria, their white coats flapping like wings behind them as they went.

  Across from her, Madge wolfed down an impressive stack of pancakes.

  “I just have one of those bodies, you know,” she said in between bites. “I can eat anything and never gain a pound.”

  “Mm.” Jocelyn didn’t mean to be rude, but she was firing on about two cylinders—which Madge had noticed, of course.

  “You know what works so, so well?” she chirped, picking up her unused spoon and showing it to Jocelyn. “Stick some spoons in the icebox overnight, in the morning you put the round part on your eyes and voilà! No more puffiness.”

  “Subtle.” She didn’t share Madge’s gusto for breakfast—or ordinarily she might, but this morning her mind was elsewhere. A few bites of oatmeal and a gulp of orange juice were all she could manage.

  Madge scooted a cup of black coffee across the table.

  “For if the spoons don’t wake you up,” she whispered with a wink.

  “You ladies look chipper this morning.”

  Jocelyn glanced up from the coffee, her stomach souring in anticipation of its taste. The orderly she had caught sleeping in the dispensary was there, setting down his tray next to Madge. Setting it down very close to Madge’s tray.

  “Good morning, Tanner.”

  She shot Madge a look, eyebrow raised, as if to say, That was fast.

  Madge gave a tiny, one-shouldered shrug and blushed.

  “Joss, this is Tanner. Tanner, this is, well, Joss.” She laughed, adorably, and Tanner started to turn red, too, as if they were even now laying the groundwork for some future inside joke. He certainly looked like a Tanner—tall, with sandy blond hair swept meticulously to the side, an Ivy League athlete’s body. . . . But there was a sweet sleepiness to his grayish blue eyes that convinced her he didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.

  Jocelyn took a long swig of coffee and nodded. “I’ve seen you around, but it’s nice to finally meet you properly.”

  “You, too. Welcome to Brookline,” he said with a sigh. “It can be tough adjusting to life around here, especially if this is your first posting. If you have any problems, any questions, I’m always happy to help out. Some of the doctors get real grumpy if you ask for too much help. They like to seem up to their ears in work.”

  “Aren’t they?” Jocelyn asked. She added a smile, not a convincing one, but he didn’t notice.

  “Oh sure,” he replied. “But there’s a hierarchy, you know? The warden is the warden, the doctors are the doctors. Almost like, um, almost like the army, in a way.”

  She nodded. She had sensed that already, but his words only confirmed who she needed to speak with first.

  “I’m wondering if I should go darker with my hair,” Madge mused aloud, looping a perfect coil of blond hair around her finger and quite effectively bringing the conversation back her way. “Jackie looks so dramatic with that black hair. So mysterious.”

  “Jackie?” Tanner had finally started on his breakfast and then abandoned it again to gawk at Madge.

  “Kennedy, dummy.”

  “Oh, sure. Of course.”

  “Anyway, what do you think, Tanner? I think maybe I’
ll try to find a salon in town. Do you think Camford even has one?” She laughed, slicing the last of her pancakes into perfect triangles.

  “That would be a shame. I thought blondes had more fun, but . . . ,” he said, far more interested in Madge’s profile than he was in his scrambled eggs.

  “They have more work, too,” Madge said, frowning, flashing them both a delicate wristwatch. “Time for our shift. Wish us an easy one!”

  “They’re never easy,” he said.

  Eager to get started, Jocelyn popped up out of her seat, hoping nobody noticed that she had barely eaten her food or touched her coffee. Tanner’s arm shot across the table, his hand catching around her wrist and holding until she made eye contact.

  “What are you—”

  “Hey, don’t worry. Sleeping will get easier,” he said firmly.

  “What?” She knew there were circles under her eyes, but was it that obvious? Had he seen her sneaking around in the lobby? She had slept fine before; it was just the sudden screaming that made her look and feel like hell warmed over.

  “I had trouble sleeping through the night when I first got here, too,” Tanner added, releasing her wrist. He laughed, bitterly, shaking his head. “Damnedest thing. Kept thinking I was hearing things, but it went away after a while. If it keeps up, talk to Warden Crawford. He can give you something for it.”

  “What kind of something?” she asked, listening to Madge sigh with impatience behind her.

  Tanner shrugged, turning back to his breakfast. “Didn’t catch the label. Anyway it worked, and he’s the doctor, right?”

  Most people hated the smell of hospitals, but not Jocelyn. In a way it was almost an absence of scent. Scrubbed air. The opposite of the exhaust-pipe-and-hot-dog-stand funk she was forced to gulp down in Chicago. She breathed the specific mix of cleaning agents—crisp, devoid of anything sour or musky—and let it fill her whole body with that calming sense of right. That smell meant miracles were happening all around her, and here, at Brookline, those miracles weren’t hemorrhages being stemmed or heart medicine prescribed—here it meant ferrying patients from a broken mind to a whole one.

  That almost seemed like a kind of magic.

  Jocelyn forced herself to focus as their supervisor, Nurse Kramer, went over dispensary protocol with them in great detail. Apparently medicines were coming up short, and she wanted to give everyone a refresher on marking out what was used and what was thrown away. Soon after they would be released to work their shifts, but Jocelyn was alert, looking for an out. She wanted to speak to Warden Crawford alone, but she worried that what Tanner had said was true—that the warden wouldn’t have time for her now that she was just one of the many worker bees in his hive.

  So she trained her eyes on Nurse Kramer’s plump, baby-smooth face and listened as she reviewed the hospital’s system for tracking medicines and sedatives distributed to patients, where to drop off samples, charts, notes. . . . Her skill for memorizing that kind of minutiae had proved useful in training, and it would prove useful again, she realized with a sigh, watching Madge twinkle her fingers at a passing Tanner.

  “Nurse Fullerton, are we going to have a problem today?”

  Madge snapped her head around, using the same big, fluffy lashes she used to ogle boys. “Charts there.” She pointed. “Mark down each and every dosage with dotted i’s and crossed t’s, and Dr. Aimes has been having a bad reaction to dairy, so no milk if he asks for coffee.”

  “I didn’t say anything about Dr. Aimes.” Nurse Kramer’s bubbly cheeks rippled with irritation.

  Shrugging, Madge tucked her hands meekly behind her back. “Just a hunch.”

  “Nurse Fullerton is incredibly observant,” Jocelyn put it mildly.

  “Yes. So am I.”

  The girls went silent, falling into step behind the older nurse as she led them out of the tiny, many-cubbied room to the reception area and then the lobby. A nervous couple sat waiting near the magazines, holding hands but staring straight ahead. They flinched at the sight of the nurses, as if Jocelyn and her colleagues were a firing squad come to summon them to execution.

  Nurse Kramer breezed by them with a placid smile fixed in place.

  Mere steps from the corridor leading to the visitation and diagnosis rooms, they were intercepted by Warden Crawford, his large frame blocking the hall as he precipitously headed them off. Nurse Kramer jumped and squeaked in surprise, then collected herself just as quickly. But Jocelyn noted the way she flushed, and the way that her eyes began to dart along the fringes of her vision. Odd. She would bet money that Nurse Kramer’s heart rate had elevated, that her pupils were dilated.

  Fear? Excitement? Why exactly did Nurse Kramer have so much trouble meeting his eye?

  “Good morning, Nurse Kramer. Nurse Fullerton. Nurse Ash.” He turned to Jocelyn, snapping his heels together as he did so. In contrast to his office, his clothes were immaculate. His patent leather shoes practically glowed. “I need to steal Nurse Ash momentarily. I trust that won’t be a great imposition.”

  “N-no. No, of course not, sir. Nurse Ash, you will go now, please.”

  Her tone had taken a sudden dive into severe, almost challenging, as if she expected Jocelyn to refuse. Which Jocelyn didn’t. This was exactly what she wanted, after all. But now that he was looming in front of them, the full force of his attention trained on her, she began to lose confidence in her plan. The future of her job rested in his hands, and if she caused a fuss she could be out of work by the afternoon.

  You know what you saw. You deserve an explanation. The patients deserve one.

  “Right away, sir, lead the way,” she said brightly, channeling Madge but feeling anything but sunshine on the inside.

  Jocelyn stared at the porcelain head sculpture on Warden Crawford’s desk. The regions of the brain were mapped and labeled, neat black script painted across the top of the skull, borders clearly defined as if the mind were a series of nations.

  Her gaze strayed back to him as he touched his fingertips to his temples and rubbed. His office looked marginally cleaner today. Perhaps a maid had been in to straighten.

  “You needed to speak to me?” she prompted, stiff. Her skin prickled with cold; it was like being called to the head of the class, scolded, shamed. . . . But why would he scold her? She hadn’t done anything wrong.

  You know why.

  Warden Crawford fixed her with an unblinking stare, deepening her conviction that she was about to be unceremoniously sacked. The thought ought to unnerve her more, but a thin strain of reason insisted she would be glad to be away from this place. Except that would be selfish—something was wrong here and she would be a coward to turn her back.

  “This may seem premature, Nurse Ash. . . .”

  Jocelyn braced. Here it was. She was definitely getting fired.

  “But I’m selecting you for a special program. An experimental program.”

  She blinked at him robotically in response. Either she was hearing things or she wasn’t getting fired, she was getting a kind of promotion. “I . . . beg your pardon, sir?”

  He laughed, a warm, curious laugh that reminded her of being a child, of being affectionately indulged. The warden plucked off his spectacles and then rubbed them on the bottom of his white coat. Pulling a small tin from his pocket, he flicked it open with his thumbnail and popped a mint into his mouth.

  “Want one?” he asked, offering the tin to her across the desk.

  Jocelyn shook her head, still a little dazed. So that was where the sharp, spearmint smell came from. His office smelled different from the rest of the floor, free of that clean, antiseptic hospital smell she liked so much.

  “No, thank you. I’m still . . . I guess I’m still wondering what you mean by special program? What exactly would that involve? I mean, I haven’t even gotten into a routine here.”

  Warden Crawford put up a hand, tucking the mints away and nodding. She could tell from the soft sucking sounds and the distortion of his cheeks that he was flippi
ng the mint around in his mouth. “Sit, please. I sprang that on you too soon, I know.”

  She did sit, grateful for the grounding presence of the chair underneath her.

  Propping his elbows on the desk, he sat, too, the porcelain skull with its territories of the mind centered between them as if there to mediate or observe. “Do you know how one comes to be in charge of a place like this?”

  Jocelyn did, in the vaguest sense. She had studied the career path herself, dreaming a dream she knew was utterly ridiculous in the eyes of most. The Warden didn’t need to know that. Damn. He was drawing her away from the topic she actually wanted to discuss. But maybe accepting this new position would make her more valuable in his eyes. If she could become a trusted employee, then maybe he might be more amenable to addressing the strange situation in the basement more openly.

  “I do,” she said, risking: “But we’re not exactly encouraged to strive for that ourselves.”

  “Ah. You mean as a young woman. Yes. I quite understand. Archaic, really, that manner of thinking. Most of our colleagues would insist a woman’s compassion makes her immanently suited for caretaking professions, but we both know this work demands a degree of coldness, of distance that stands directly at odds with that belief.”

  Jocelyn couldn’t help but agree, remembering the last, painful days with her grandmother, when implementing that kind of distance was the only thing that had gotten her through. She nodded slowly, hoping he wasn’t drawing her into a trap, making her trip and stick her foot in her mouth. Maybe he wanted to know if he had uppity, defiant girls operating in his institution.

  She said, “There will always be patients who are beyond our help, even if it’s awful to say so.”

  His eyes seemed to glow at her words, and he lowered his head slightly, sighting her like a predator might their prey.

  “You honestly believe that?” he asked.

  “I . . .” Jocelyn trusted her gut, straightening and saying firmly, “Yes, I do. Some people cannot be cured. Not really. And it’s a misuse of hospital resources to insist otherwise.”