“Those are my friends down there,” I said, yanking away from her grip. “I have to let them know where I am.”
I heaved at the sash, but it was either nailed or painted shut. The group on the lawn turned and began to march away toward the cast-iron gate.
“No!” Desperately I scanned the room, plans firing off in my head. I raced over to the piano, snatched up the small bench that sat before it, and ran with it back to the window.
“Miss Randolph, no!” Lila shouted. But it was too late.
With a grunt, I swung the bench as hard as I could into the window. The shattering sound was as loud as a car crash. Splintered wood and shards of glass rained down on the lawn. I dropped the shattered remains of the bench on the carpet and leaned out the ruined window. Mac, Collum, and Phoebe stopped in their tracks and whipped back around as I screamed, “I’m here! Collum! Phoebe! I’m here!”
Phoebe saw me first. Snatching up her long skirts, she raced across the lawn until she was standing just below. “Hope! Oh, Jesus! We tried to get in to see you, but they turned us away! Have you seen Doug? Are you both okay?”
“I haven’t seen him since they took us—”
Strong arms wrapped around my waist and lifted me off my feet, hauling me backwards. Kicking, I fought against my captor. “No! Let me go!” I cried. “Phoebe! Collum! Help!”
“Be quiet, miss,” a low voice growled in my ear as a beefy hand clapped over my mouth. “It’s Sergeant Peters. I want to help you, girl. But if you don’t keep quiet, you’ll bring down every guard in the place. Or Carson himself will come, and trust me, that’s the last thing you want.”
From the window I could hear shouts. Phoebe screeched my name, then Collum bellowed as other voices joined theirs. Men shouted, ordering them to leave the premises at once.
“If I let you go, do you promise to be quiet?” Tears of frustration burned my eyes as I nodded.
Peters’s hand left my mouth. He set me down gently, took my elbow, and tugged me to the far side of the room next to the now-benchless piano. His coarse face serious, he began speaking, low and urgently. “Listen to me. I want to help you get out of here, Miss Walton.”
My eyes went wide at that. Peters only nodded solemnly as he went on. “I been working here goin’ on four years now, and I seen things that . . . well . . . that no true Christian should see.” Peters drew out a handkerchief and swiped at his forehead. “I always try to do right and protect the poor patients best I can. But I can only do so much. It wears on a man, witnessing that kind of evil day after day, do you take my meaning, miss?”
I nodded. “Yes!”
“Last night, after they brung you in, I was making my rounds at the fence. Your people stopped me and offered more coin than I could make in ten years’ time if I got you out.” Sergeant Peters flushed to the roots of his iron-gray hair as he mumbled. “I’d a done it for free. Carson, he does the devil’s work and that’s the truth of it.” Bleary brown eyes rose to meet mine. “Only . . . it ain’t easy for a man of my years to get a job these days. The landlord just went and upped the rent. And I’m still payin’ on my Selma’s burial and . . .”
Peters went on but I barely heard. A feeling like helium mixed with sunshine had begun to fill me. I gripped the side of the piano to keep from flying up to bump the ceiling.
“Please, Sergeant Peters,” I told him. “You don’t have to explain. Take the money. Trust me, they have plenty. But what about my friend Douglas? We have to get him out, too.”
“Yes. The both of you. The lad’s in Ward D on the men’s side. He’s the only occupant as that’s new construction. It must be soon ’cause Doc Carson, he—” Peters shifted and cast an uneasy look at the door, then at the cluster of women who watched from across the room. They stared back. Only Annabelle seemed oblivious that something unusual was happening.
“He said he’d convinced the head doctor at Bellevue to come watch him perform some ‘procedure.’ Said it was like what he did to that poor Miss Allen. But that he wouldn’t have to cut through the skull no more.”
A shiver skimmed across my shoulders as every piece of research and information I’d shoved back the night before roared into my head. Articles and pictures and reports. Flashing and flashing.
He’s talking about the transorbital lobotomy. That’s it, isn’t it? Oh dear God.
They’d called it a miracle cure. Almost a fad. The young field of psychiatry had blown up and been ablaze with the news of the new phenomenon.
Tens of thousands of the procedures had been performed.
The inventor was even considered for the Nobel freaking Peace Prize.
People with haunted eyes lined up in a hallway, awaiting their turn.
Black-and-white image of a supine patient. Men in old-fashioned suits gather around, watching as a surgeon prepares to drive his mallet down onto the slender steel protruding from the patient’s eye socket.
A magazine cover, upon which an aproned wife with rose-painted cheeks serves pie to her family, the ad inside promising a permanent cure for “moodiness,” “female maladies,” and “disobedience.”
Close-up of a twelve-year-old boy, his eyes blackened and swollen shut, his mouth stretched wide in a scream.
But I knew, I knew that the procedure was not due to be invented for another fifty years. Fifty years.
Suddenly everything began to lock into place.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
The needle mark in Doug’s neck. Carson’s insistence on taking the two of us with him. Locking us up.
He was one of them. A Timeslipper. Or . . . at least involved with them in some way. Had he been here this whole time? If—?once contact is made—?time runs on parallel lines, from 1983 to the present was more than thirty years.
And now he was . . . what? Stealing credit for what would one day be a banned and barbaric procedure, fifty years before its true creation?
Of course he is, I realized. Because it will make him famous. It will make him rich.
“Time’s running short, Miss Walton. We should be going.”
I looked up at Sergeant Peters’s lined, earnest face. I tried to swallow, but my throat had gone dry as bone. “Of course,” I managed. “Let’s go.”
Lila was watching me. I could see the hurt and betrayal forming in her eyes, and I knew I couldn’t just leave them here to fend for themselves against that monster. I hurried to her and whispered quickly. “Listen, I’m going to find a way to get you out of here,” I told her. “All of you. Who can I contact? Tell me, please.”
Lila looked away. “Just go,” she snapped. “You don’t know us. You owe us nothing. Just leave.”