Room 14's Secret novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Room 14

Zachary shows Melinda the sedated woman in Room 14, his sister and her husband's first wife, and the bill is paid by her own family's foundation.

At two in the morning my door opened without a sound.

I had been lying on top of the blanket for an hour with the fourteen pills in my fist.

Zachary stood in the gap with a flashlight pointed at the floor.

"Mrs. Teel," he said quietly.

"Melinda," I said. My voice came out dry. I had not used it for anything but a murmur in nineteen days.

He nodded once.

"The camera in the hall loops every ten minutes. We have six."

I followed him.

Ward C at night smelled of floor wax and old soup.

We passed Room 13, where a woman talked in her sleep, and stopped at the last door.

The sign on it said STORAGE.

There was a second bolt above the handle, new and bright, and he slid it back with two fingers.

"Why am I here?" I asked.

"Because you're the only patient on this floor who isn't drugged. I'd like to know why."

"You noticed that in a day?"

"Your pill cup comes back wet and your pupils are the wrong size for what's on your chart." He pushed the door open. "I was a medic for nine years. Come in."

The room was small and warm.

A single bed stood under a barred window, and a small lamp glowed on the sill.

A woman lay on the bed.

She was so thin the blanket hardly moved over her.

Her dark hair had been cut close to her head, and her eyes were open, brown and slow, fixed on the ceiling.

"This is my sister," Zachary said.

I looked at him.

"Leanne Foyle. She's thirty-six. Five years ago she was in a clinic in Switzerland, and a man named Quinton Teel sent my family a letter saying she had died there."

My mouth went dry again.

"Quinton said his first wife died," I said. "He told me the week we met. He cried at the dinner table."

"I'm sure he did."

"He kept a photo of her in his desk drawer. A girl on a beach with short hair." I stared at the woman on the bed. "That's her."

"They sent an urn," Zachary said. "I was in Kandahar, so my mother buried it for me."

He crossed to the bed and put two fingers under his sister's jaw, checking her pulse.

"Last spring a nurse I used to serve with told me about a patient on this ward that nobody visited. Always sedated, always in the back room, always paid for. I asked to see the name on the bill."

"Whose name?"

"Jane Doe 14."

He walked to the foot of the bed and lifted the chart off its hook.

"I took the night job nine weeks ago. I have been cutting her doses since I got a key. A little less each week, so nobody notices."

Leanne's eyes moved.

They found me and stayed on me, and I understood that she was awake.

I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Hello," I said. "I'm Melinda. I'm married to him now."

Her hand lifted off the blanket by an inch and fell back.

Her lips shaped a word and the word did not come.

Zachary's jaw tightened.

"She's been trying to say that for two weeks," he said.

I put the pills into his palm.

"Fourteen days," I said. "I've been spitting them out."

He tipped them under the lamp and read the stamps, one at a time.

"None of these are on your chart," he said. "Whoever wrote your prescriptions wrote you something much stronger."

He took out a phone from his pocket and photographed every one beside a coin for scale.

"Keep them. Don't lose them."

"Why do you want me? You could have gone to the police."

"With what? A night orderly with a dead sister and a bad feeling, against a foundation that donated this wing?" His voice stayed low. "I need someone he can't call crazy and who is actually going to court on Friday."

"He can call me crazy. He already did. He has the video."

"Then we don't let it be only the video."

I looked at Leanne.

She watched us with her whole face.

"There are two rules," Zachary said. "Nobody hears about this room before Friday. Not a lawyer, not a friend, not a nurse you like. The wrong person tells the wrong person and she is gone by morning."

"She."

"My sister. And the second rule." He met my eyes. "You never promise her anything you can't deliver. She has been promised enough."

I put my hand over Leanne's cold one.

"Agreed," I said.

Zachary let go of the chart and it swung on its hook.

I read the card clipped to it so I would not have to look at Leanne's face.

Patient: Jane Doe 14. Attending: unlisted.

At the bottom, in a box marked BILLING, someone had typed an account name.

Garrick Family Foundation. Authorized by W. Teel.

It was my father's foundation.

My family's money had been paying for this room for five years.

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