The Piper

TWENTY-SIX




Olivia settled Teddy and Jamison in front of the television set with a movie, an old favorite of Teddy’s, Return from Witch Mountain, while she and Amelia and McTavish huddled around the sunroom table looking at the screen of her laptop.

The Waverly had a website. And webcams up and down the dark corridors of the old empty buildings. Amelia was hunched over Livie’s laptop, scrolling. ‘This place is all over the Internet.’ She began to read aloud.

‘“The Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky is known as The Holy Grail of the Paranormal.”’ Amelia looked up at Livie, then back down to the screen. ‘It looks like the land was bought for a school and named for Scott’s Waverley novels. Evidently the hospital kept the name when they opened in 1910.’

‘The place is massive,’ McTavish said, looking over Amelia’s shoulder. ‘They had beds for over four hundred patients.’

‘They treated thousands of tuberculosis patients, over the years,’ Olivia said, reading. ‘They called it the white plague. Almost none of them survived?’

‘No antibiotics then,’ Amelia said. ‘Look at the treatments they had. Fresh air and bed rest. Good nutrition and diet. Heliotherapy. So basically they kept the windows open even in the winter and sat the patients outside to soak up the sun. Looks like they used sunlamps too.’

‘But didn’t they get pneumonia or something?’ Olivia said.

‘Keep reading, it gets better.’ Amelia squinted at the screen. ‘Their cutting edge surgical treatments were brutal. Collapsing parts of the lung. Removing rib bones, one or two at a time. Sweet Jesus God, they’ve got pictures of the doctors performing this stuff.’

Olivia looked at the pictures. Tiled rooms and men draped in white bent over patients who did not have a chance.

‘It looked like Frankenstein’s lab without the technology,’ McTavish said looking over her shoulder.

‘Medical science in the dark ages,’ Olivia said.

Amelia covered her eyes with her hands. ‘I’m not sure we’re any less barbaric today.’

‘Listen to the part about the Body Chute, guys.’ McTavish put a hand on Olivia’s shoulder and squinted down at the screen. ‘It was an underground tunnel for transporting bodies so the living patients wouldn’t be upset. They went under the hospital and down the hill and the hearses were waiting for them when they came out. Five hundred feet long, and it wasn’t wired, so there was no electricity.’

‘Five hundred feet in the dark?’ Amelia said.

‘I guess they had lanterns,’ McTavish said. ‘And some kind of rail and winch system to get the bodies through.’

Olivia closed her eyes, imagining the dark tunnels, the echoes. Then she looked up at McTavish. ‘What does the Waverly have to do with all those names upstairs? What does this have to do with Jamison and Chris?’

‘What I know is kind of hazy, Liv.’ McTavish ran a hand through his hair. ‘Remember how little you and I were at the time, right? But Jamison talks about it sometimes, he has nightmares. From what I can piece together, from things Jamison has said to me over the years, they went there. Jamison, Bennington and Chris.’

‘There? At Waverly Hills? And who was Bennington?’ Olivia asked.

‘He was one of the guys on the Bearden High School wrestling team. They were the stars, you know, the A-Team. There were eight of them that made the trip. It was for the National High School Wrestling Championships – which were pretty new then, but now they’re the crown jewel of high school wrestling. I mean, these days, they cover it on ESPN, and bring in wrestlers from all over the US and Europe.’

‘But what’s that got to do with the Waverly?’

‘They went there, the three of them. Snuck out of their hotel room because they were teenage guys and goofy, and thought it would be cool to see the notorious haunted sanatorium. These days you can go on a ghost tour, but back then it was strictly No Trespassing.

‘Jamison talks about the Body Chute sometimes, when he has bad dreams. The impression I get was that he was actually in there. That the three of them went down some kind of vent shaft to get inside the tunnel. Something bad happened, I just don’t know exactly what. Jamison never really makes sense when he tries to talk about it.’

‘But what’s the big deal?’ Amelia said. She was clicking her way through the website. ‘Did it make them freak out and lose the wrestling match?’

‘No, just the opposite. Championship wins for all three. They all got big fat scholarship offers from the NHSCA.’

‘Look at this,’ Amelia said. ‘It’s a web cam, set up at the edge of the Body Chute. There’s stuff written on the walls.’

‘They’d have graffiti in hell,’ McTavish said. ‘For a good time call six six six.’

Amelia peered close at the screen. ‘What is that? Decan Ludde. Is that a name?’

McTavish sat forward. ‘Does it really say that? Decan Ludde?’

Amelia pointed. ‘See, right there, at the edge of the screen.’

‘How weird. Jamison used to say that over and over, in his sleep.’

‘Decan Ludde,’ Olivia whispered. Thinking how close it sounded to Duncan Lee. ‘Google it, Amelia.’

But Amelia wasn’t listening. She twisted her head sideways, staring at something on the screen. ‘So did they get their scholarships, and go to college and—’

‘Live happily ever after?’ McTavish said. ‘Jamison didn’t. He had his car wreck two days later, went through the windshield, closed head injury. It’s taken fifteen years of daily therapy just for him to be able to walk, and talk, and live on his own. For Jamison, after the accident he had, being able to hold down a job stacking shelves at Long’s Drug Store, and volunteering at the animal shelter are genius level. This for a guy who had it all. A star athlete who scored in the ninety-ninth percentile across the board. I mean, he was going to have a future. Now he has a life.’

‘What about Chris?’ Amelia asked.

Olivia shook her head. ‘No, he didn’t take the scholarship, and my parents were furious with him, I remember a lot of arguing.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because. The night they came back. That was the night that Emily disappeared and our whole family just fell apart. Chris didn’t want to go to college until they found her. He said he wouldn’t go until she came home. My parents tried threatening him, then they moved to bribes, they even promised to buy him a car if he’d go. But he wouldn’t. He just dropped out of everything – barely finished his last year of high school. Stayed home and around the house for the next couple of years. Lost about eighty pounds. I could show you pictures.

‘But then he came out of it. We all did. We got counseling. We moved on. Chris went to UT and got a degree in science and education and started teaching at Bearden Middle School, even coaching the wrestling team. He married Charlotte and had three little girls. He was really okay, until about a year ago. When he started acting weird and losing all that weight again.’

Amelia rubbed the back of her neck. ‘Why don’t you—shit. Do you see that? On the screen?’

‘What is it?’

‘There. You see how there’s something kind of dark, standing at the edge of the camera? Never mind, it’s gone. Probably my imagination. I’m getting seriously creeped out with this Waverly stuff.’ Amelia logged off the computer. Put the screen to sleep.

‘So what about this Bennington?’ Olivia said. ‘And McTavish, do you have any idea who Allison is? And why their names are up there in my ceiling?’

‘Not a clue. But I’m a cop. I could find out who they are. Why the names are up in the ceiling is anybody’s guess.’