The Murmurings (15 page)

We move on to the next building in the alley and find it looks pretty much the same. I hear giggling and poke my head out to the alley. A couple a little older than us steals looks over their shoulders as they grab each other’s belt loops. He moves his hands to her back, then down. They disappear into one of the smaller buildings at the end of the street. I feel my face grow hot as I picture Evan and me doing the same thing, if we wanted to. But now that we have a clue, I can’t bear the thought of stopping, even if our make-out session at the rest stop is still fresh in my mind.

The next building we explore is larger. It’s practically a mansion compared to the other two. I can imagine women calling to men from these doorways more than a hundred years ago. These would have been the less “classy” of the prostitution houses, the younger, prettier women occupying rooms at the bordellos closer to the main street. But the larger building has maintained some of its original architecture. It looks like it’s in the wrong place, as if it slid, like the old jail, from its original address and landed here.

“Fancy,” Evan says, but his sarcasm is halfhearted. I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am. This ramshackle house with its shuttered windows and carved wooden banisters along the porch—and the fact that it even has a porch at all—make this place different. And what’s more, the walls and the roof are completely intact.

We pass over the threshold, and I hold my breath for just a moment. I’m sure I was imagining it, but my ear felt like it was about to pop, like when the pressure leaves the room and a silent vacuum sucks all the noise out with it. I’ve come to hate this feeling more than anything. The murmurs always follow.

“Sophie? Hey, you okay?”

Evan’s beside me now, the light from the narrow doorway the only thing illuminating him in the otherwise dark room. The wood plank floors are buckling in several places and echo, like it’s hollow underneath. It feels as though we could fall through them at any second.

“Yeah, I . . . I just thought I heard something is all,” I half lie.

“Easy to think that in this place,” he says, his voice quieter than when we were outside. Neither of us seems to want to disturb the silence.

“Let’s just take a quick look around and—”

“Over here!” Evan hisses with restrained excitement. He squats over a shadowy pile in the corner of the room.

“Evan, if you’re looking at something gross like a dead rat, I think I’ll pass.”

“No, come here,” he motions to me over his shoulder, but doesn’t look up. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone, pressing a button to illuminate its face.

All at once, I see what he’s staring at: a fleece blanket. The stiff, clinical kind. And it’s embroidered with the words
OAKSIDE BEHAVIORAL INSTITUTE
.

“Oh my God, they were here,” I breathe. The pressure in my ear constricts again. I swallow to try to relieve it, but to no avail.

“Yeah.” Evan gingerly picks up the blanket, shaking it out onto the ground, releasing some gravel and a few blades of desert scrub.

“I’m going to search the other room,” I say, and hurry through the other doorway.

“Hey, wait. Be careful of the floor. Maybe you should slow down a little!” Evan calls to me.

But I’m already in the next room. My heart races. “Nell, if you’re here, if any part of you is in here, give me a sign,” I whisper.

The pressure in my ear releases. A damp, rattling croak
creeps down the back of my neck. A gasp sounds like it’s struggling, like it’s climbing out of some dark hole.

I hold my breath while it inhales and exhales into my ear. I’m waiting for the murmuring to start, waiting for the wordless command. My eyes go wide in the dark.

“Sophie, are you—”

The floor creaks, then splinters. My stomach drops from under me as the floor parts.

“Sophie!”

When I open my eyes, Evan is above me, and I’m a foot lower than I was a second ago, now standing on the dirt ground beneath the floorboards. My leg is burning.

“The floor. It just . . . it just cracked open!” I stutter.

The wood underneath where he’s standing starts to bow.

“Evan, I think it’s going to—”

Transferring weight to another, sturdier floorboard, Evan puts his hands under my arms and lifts me out of the hole, but not before the splintered wood drags a second path down my shin bone.

“Ow! Damnit,” I grumble, and before I can say another word, he picks me up and hustles me out into the sunlight.

Easing me back to the ground, he squats to examine the damage. “Ouch,” he says.

I don’t want to look. With the breeze hitting it, the cut
goes cold, then burns like fire. I know it’s bad, and I can feel something damp puddling around my sock.

“It’s deep, but I don’t think you’ll need stitches or anything,” Evan says, his face surprisingly close to my shin. I’ll say this for him—he has an iron stomach, despite how he looked on the switchbacks. I can’t look at my own blood, let alone anyone else’s.

“Those floors are rotted to hell in there. I tried to warn you.” He looks apologetic and protective as he squints up at me from near my feet.

“I had to see if there was anything else,” I say. He nods and gestures at my shin. “We should probably get this cleaned up. You got a first-aid kit in the car?”

I do, but I’m not ready to leave yet. There are still a few more shacks we haven’t checked. Of course, one is probably still occupied by those kids from earlier.

As though reading my mind, Evan coaxes me back toward the main road. “That was the sturdiest of all the shacks. If your sister and Adam were going to hang out anywhere for a while, that’s the one they would have stayed in. Clearly no one’s been in there for a while. You saw how nasty that blanket was. After Nell—after everything—I’m sure Adam figured he had to find somewhere else to stay.”

Evan helps me limp over the curb to the main road, then
across the street and onto the sidewalk that leads to the car. I thought answers would make me feel better. That blanket is the only bread crumb we’ve found on this trail. And we have no idea if it was left there before or after Nell died. In other words, we barely know more than we did before we came up here. I am beyond discouraged. I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. And the shin.

At the car, Evan does his best to bandage me up, and I do my best not to let him see tears pool in my eyes—from pain and loss and hopelessness and frustration. As he eases gauze over my freshly disinfected wound and affixes it with first-aid tape, I reread the poem for the thousandth time. Now I understand that Nell and Adam had planned to run away to that particular location all along—though why, I still have no idea. I’m back at the beginning.

“We should probably . . .,” Evan starts, and it’s obvious he doesn’t want to finish. He doesn’t want to admit defeat either, but the sun is starting to drop. At this rate, we could bumble around Jerome for a hundred more days without getting any closer to finding the clues Nell buried in her poetry.

“I know,” I say. “Look, can you drive? My shin is still pretty sore.”

“Not that I’m glad you hurt yourself or anything, but I’m happy to avoid sitting shotgun for those switchbacks. Even if it is easier going downhill.”

We fall into our seats, neither of us masking our sighs, and slowly pull onto the road. I turn Nell’s folded poem over in my hands. Just holding it somehow comforts me.

“You want to give that a rest?” Evan asks. From anyone else it might sound impatient, but from him, it only sounds worried.

“I will. I just don’t want to stare out the window.”

I know he knows I’m lying, but he leaves me alone and focuses on the hairpin turns.

“ ‘Holes that hold more than the mistaken treasure. Tunneled away, smuggled strife,’ ” I recite.

“What’s that now?”

I repeat the line from Nell’s poem.

“She really was good, wasn’t she?” he says, and the tenderness in his voice makes me uncomfortable. It’s as though I’m the only one who’s allowed to respect Nell’s writing on such a deep level.

“Holes,” I repeat, then look out the driver’s side window at the side of Cleopatra Hill. “I never noticed that before.”

“Noticed what?”

“How many abandoned mines there are. They’re at practically every turn. Did you see that on the way up?”

“No,” he smirks. “I was focusing on not losing my breakfast. But yeah, you’re right.”

“Evan, stop the car. Stop the car!”

Evan pulls to the left so fast that a cloud of smoke and
dirt kicks up around us. He throws the car in park, yanks the emergency break, and turns to look at me. He’s wild-eyed and sweating.

“What the hell? Are you okay?”

But I’m not looking at him. I’m still looking past him out his window.

“Sophie, what . . . ?” He follows my gaze.

There, about fifty feet from the side of the road, lies a fenced-off area enclosing what looks like a small oil rig—a mining lift. I remember seeing something like it online. They were used for lowering men into the mine towers. Spray painted on a splintering piece of wood in big block letters is
STRIFE MINE. KEEP OUT
.

I fling open my door and spill out of the car, but I’m still not quick enough to beat Evan to the mine’s entrance.

A forbidding steel door, sealed shut with rust, covers the mine pit. The surrounding fence warns us to stay back in three different languages and threatens us with fines, arrest, and certain physical danger should we try to climb the crane without express permission—permission from whom, I have no idea.

“Well, Adam’s not hiding out in the mine, that’s for sure,” I say.

Evan chuckles, but it doesn’t sound like his usual breeziness.
“Kinda hard to get a WiFi signal down there, I bet.”

I look at him and crinkle my brow.

“For blogging,” he explains, and now it’s my turn to laugh uncomfortably.

But the momentary excitement of seeing the sign with the same words from Nell’s poem has quickly faded upon seeing the mine itself.

“I was sort of expecting something else,” I confess.

“I know what you mean,” Evan says as he drags his hand along the diamond cutouts in the chain link. “If only it was a cave or something. And when we went inside, there he’d be with his little fold-up table, typing away on a laptop.”

I stare for another minute at the antiquated machinery, the door covering the hole to the depleted treasures below the ground, and I say what we’re both thinking.

“Maybe she wasn’t talking about a place where they were going to hide out. Maybe she was talking about actual strife—a feeling, not a place. Just words in a poem.”

Evan envelopes me in his arms, and we stand that way, looking at the mine lift for another moment before succumbing to the same defeat we felt leaving the Cribs district.

As we turn to go, I see something I hadn’t noticed upon our approach. Tucked behind the rusted lift, set back several yards from the enclosure, sits a squat portable building
with brown siding that can’t measure more than a hundred square feet.

And in its single window, I swear I see the flutter of a dirty white shade.

“Did you see that?” I ask Evan, pulling him to my side so he’s looking in the same direction as me.

“See what?”

“In the window of that building. I think I saw something move.”

“Not a chance. I’m sure that thing’s been locked up tight since the fifties,” Evan says, but he’s walking toward it in step with me.

“I’m sure you’re right. Probably abandoned like the rest of this stuff,” I say as we approach the building with a little more speed.

“I’ll bet folks have forgotten all about these old buildings. Half of them are boarded up anyway.” He squeezes my hand tighter. Pretty soon, I understand why.

The door looks boarded up, but not well. Almost as though it was rigged to
look
like it’s boarded up.

I point to the door with my chin, and Evan lifts an eyebrow.

Shrugging, I reach for the board. It’s so easy to pull away, I almost fall backward, expecting more resistance.

Propping the board against the flimsy siding, I raise my hand to knock.

“Hello? Anyone home?”

Our only answer is a faint creaking from inside.

Evan tenses beside me. I grab his arm.

“Well,” I say louder than I need to, “guess nobody’s here. You were right.”

Evan shakes his head and starts to say something, but then he catches on, and responds, “Yup, guess so. Got a long trip back to Phoenix.”

Another creak from inside, and the faintest shuffling.

“Told you it’s all crap. There’s no such thing as the Insider. Just some psycho looking for his fifteen minutes of fame,” I shout.

Silence is all that follows. Desperate, I turn to my last resort.

“I guess Nell was just making it up.”

The door flies open and I scream. In the same instant, Evan has my hand and is edging between me and the doorway, but not enough to block my view of the person standing in it.

His closely shaven black hair nearly skims the ceiling of the room behind him, and he has to duck under the doorway. He is perhaps the tallest person I’ve ever seen. Maybe seven
feet tall, like a basketball player, and just as lanky. His hands are huge. His knobby knuckles bulge at the joints. In fact, his entire body looks that way—spindles connected by huge bolts. It’s so unlike Evan’s muscular proportions. This guy’s face is also long, and his ears push outward, as though trying to fill him out and give him width. Black eyes, set deeply into his head, are fixed on me in the most unsettling way.

“Everything she said was the truth,” he says quietly. “You know it and I know it. The question is, What are you going to do about it?”

E
VAN AND
I
SIT SQUEEZED
together on a bench that folds out from a half wall. A narrow table folds out from a perpendicular wall, locked in place by a bar below. Adam sits across from us on another fold-out bench, but he sits in a sideways sort of way, his legs too long to fit underneath the table with ours. Everything about this ramshackle building is too small for him. Even his clothes look wrong for him, faded red cotton shorts and a tan T-shirt that looks about three times too wide. It’s as if he plucked his clothes from a clothesline when no one was looking. His whole appearance would be funny if it weren’t for his eyes. Never in my life have I seen eyes so dark they look black.