She turned back to the entry from June 18th and let her gaze linger on that one sentence: ANY RELEASE OF OXYTOCIN WILL TELL THE ’SCALE IT’S FOUND A SAFE HOST. She folded the notebook shut, slapped it against her thigh, and put it in one of the drawers . . . then, after a moment, took it out again.
The drop ceiling was made of big white squares of particleboard. She had to stand on a chair to reach them. Harper lifted one ceiling tile and pushed the notebook up and out of sight. Not as good as hiding it inside an anatomical model of the human head, but it would do for now.
She could not have said who she was hiding it from. Perhaps it was only that Harold had been hiding it himself, which meant he thought there was someone who would take it away if he or she had a chance.
As she was pushing the chair back where she found it, she noticed blood on her knuckles, staining the fingers of her right hand. Tom Storey’s blood. She washed it off in icy water, watched pink swirls chase one another down the drain in candy-cane stripes.
Father Storey slept on his back, the top of his head bandaged in a cap of clean white gauze. The dusty windows above let in milky rays of sunshine. Like Father Storey himself, the daylight seemed tired out, hardly there. But the sheet was tucked under his chin, not pulled over his face. He had lasted the night. That was no small triumph.
Harper was woozy with exhaustion, but the baby wasn’t going to let her sleep. The baby was hungry. What the baby wanted was a deep, warm, buttery bowl of Cream of Wheat, drowned in maple syrup. Food first, sleep after.
As she walked over the snow along a path of wobbling pine boards, through knee-high mist, she tried to remember what she knew about oxytocin. It had a nickname, “the cuddle hormone,” because it was released when a mother held her baby—released in mother and child alike. Harper thought about crawling through that smoke-filled drainpipe and singing to the infant she hadn’t seen yet and how it had shut down the ’scale.
Your brain gave you a fix of oxytocin when you hugged, when you received a round of applause, when you sang in harmony with someone and the singing was good. Strong communal experiences produced it like nothing else. You could get a dose from a good experience on Twitter or Facebook, too. When lots of people retweeted something you said or favorited a photo, they were throwing the switch for another squirt of oxytocin. Why not call it the social-networking hormone, then? That was better than “cuddle hormone,” because—because—
She couldn’t remember. There was something else about oxytocin, something important, but it had been too long since she had done the reading. For some reason, though, when she shut her eyes, she was picturing soldiers in desert fatigues and jackboots, cradling M16s. Why that? Why did oxytocin also make her think of crosses burning in the Mississippi night?
The cafeteria was padlocked from the outside and there was plywood nailed up in the windows. The place looked shut for the winter. But Harper had helped out enough in the kitchen to know where the key was hidden, hanging on a nail under the steps.
She let herself into the spacious, dusty dimness. The chairs and benches were all turned upside down on tables. The kitchen was gloomy, everything put away.
Harper found a tray of biscuits in the oven, covered with Saran Wrap. She took a tub of peanut butter from one of the cupboards, and was crossing the room to fetch a butter knife, when she almost stepped through an open trapdoor into the cellar. A slanted wooden ladder led down into a darkness that smelled of earth and rodents.
She was frowning at the open hole when she heard a curse from below, followed by a soft thud, as if someone had dropped a flour sack. A man groaned. Harper stuck a biscuit in her mouth and started down.
The basement was crowded with a lot of cheap steel shelving, plastic jugs of vegetable oil and sacks of flour packed onto them. Set into one wall was a walk-in freezer, the thick metal door open about half a foot and light shining out. She called “Hello,” but didn’t manage much more than a croak, had a throat full of dry biscuit. Harper crept to the massive door and poked her head inside.
The convicts were on tiptoes against the far wall. They were handcuffed together, the chain looped over a length of pipe located almost seven feet off the floor, so they had to stand there, each with an arm raised, like students trying to get teacher’s attention.
She had seen one of the prisoners before—the big man with the queer yellow eyes—but the other was new to her. The second man could’ve been as young as thirty or as old as fifty, rangy and awkwardly built, with a high forehead that brought to mind Frankenstein’s monster and a close-cropped cap of black hair, threaded with strands of silver. Both men wore thick woolen socks and the school-bus-colored jumpsuits.
The man Harper had met the night before grinned to show pink teeth. His upper lip was split open in a nasty gash and still drooling blood. The room had a rank stink of meat gone bad. Pools of gore had dried on the concrete, beneath rusted chains that had once suspended sides of beef.
Ben Patchett sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, his head between his knees. He looked like someone trying not to be sick. A battery-powered lamp sat on the floor next to a lumpy dish towel.
“What’s going on here?” Harper asked.
Ben lifted his head and stared at her as if he had never seen her before.
“What are you doing here? You ought to be tucked into bed.”
“But here I am.” She was surprised at the mixture of aloofness and calm she heard in her own voice. It was not a tone she used with friends, but the one she reserved for irksome patients. “These men are suffering from exposure. Hanging them from a pipe wouldn’t be my recommended course of treatment.”
“Oh, Harp. Harper, you have no idea what—this guy. This guy here—” Ben said and gestured with his gun. Harper hadn’t noticed until now he was holding it.
“Me?” said the prisoner with the bloody mouth. “Oh, yeah, me. I might as well ’fess up. I got sick and tired of dangling from this fuckin’ pipe while shithead here shouts at me. I let my bad mood get the better of me and tried to attack his gun with my face. It’s a shame you had to interrupt us. I was just getting ready to assault his boot with my nuts.”
Ben glared. “I didn’t do a thing to you wasn’t self-defense.” He looked at Harper. “He kicked me to the ground. Tried to stomp my head in, too.”
“Self-defense, huh? Is that why you brought the towel full of rocks down here? You anticipated you’d have to defend yourself with ’em and your thirty-eight wasn’t good enough?” said the bleeding man.
Ben blushed. Harper had never seen a grown man blush so hard.
She sank to one knee, folded back a corner of the towel on the floor. It was full of white rocks. She looked up, but Ben wouldn’t meet her eyes. She peered over at the man with the busted mouth.
“What’s your name?”
“Mazzucchelli. Mark Mazzucchelli. Lot of guys call me the Mazz. Lady, no offense, but if I had known this was what you meant when you said you were going to rescue us, I think I would’ve said thanks but no thanks. I was dying just fine where I was.”
“I’m sorry. None of this should’ve happened.”
“You got that right, Harper,” Ben said. “Starting with the moment this fella decided to bash in Father Storey’s head and run. Couple of guys found him trying to boost one of our cars, blood all over him.”
“Old blood. Christ, it was old blood. Anyone could see it was old blood. Why would I attack this Father of yours anyway? Dude just saved my life. What would I get out of killing him?”