Page 90 of The Diamond in the Rough

I waited.

“And found a Dr. Robert Garraway.”

I swallowed, my pulse climbing.

Hart studied me. “Do you remember a Dr. Garraway?”he asked. “He retired about three years before… the facility was shut down.”

I looked up at him, fighting to keep my voice steady as I met his gaze. “I couldn’t tell you almost anyone’s name,” I replied grimly. A dozen or so people at most. Chris, of course. A nurse named Ashley. Another nurse named Vaughn. Two of the orderlies—Daryl and Terrence. Some of the patients. Sara, Rupert, Llewellyn, Harry, Jasper, Clint, Isabella. I’m sure if I thought particularly hard about it I could come up with a few more.

But even the people I’d known hadn’t really named the doctors.The doctor needs to conduct more testsorThe doctor says that taking this will help you feel better. Rarely ever giving names.

I wondered if that was intentional, a way to keep any of us from telling family members about the people who were abusing us. Or maybe it was just an automatic part of the depersonalization of the institution. If no one had names, then they could pretend that we weren’t fully human. Didn’t deserve to have the magic we had. And it had the additional—perhaps unintentional, perhaps not—effect of turning them into more frightening monsters.

Hart nodded once. “Well, the problem is, we don’t have all the records. Just what was pulled for the criminal cases.” He sounded bitter. “The rest was left there. So we need to go back.”

My breath caught in my throat.

But Hart had already held up his hands. “I’m telling you we’re going back. And we might have something to bring to you when we’re done. I’mnotasking you to come with us.”

I could draw breath again, although there was also a strange sense of disappointment—because they weren’t asking me.

I didn’t want to go back to Tranquil Brook. There were very few things I could think of that I explicitlydidn’twant to do more than that. But I couldn’t help but think if I’d been any other contact psychic, he’d have wanted me there. Just in case.

That the only reason I wasn’t being asked to go along was because I’d been a patient…

Well, maybe it wasn’t theonlyreason.

Maybe it was because Raj hated me that much.

I was walking downone of the grey-walled halls, the cracked tiles beneath my feet cold and hauntingly familiar, their flecked grey-green-beige surfaces pocked and stained by things better not thought about. I knew these halls. Knew that the painted steel swinging doors to the left led down a hall to showers and tubs that you hoped had other people in them besides you and the orderly assigned to you, and the set to the right led to places that had black stenciled letters that read TREATMENT and THERAPY, but meant TORTURE and MANIPULATION.

I didn’t want to be here. I’d never wanted to be here, but somehow it was worse now that I knew what the world was like outside of it.

The lights around me flickered with that particular electric sound that only flickering fluorescent lights can make. The harsh brightness I remembered was dimmed, perhaps by time, these lights barely illuminating the corners of walls that had been made dingy by grime—dirt, mold, I wasn’t sure what else. The intermittent moments of darkness that washed over me when the lights cut out seemed to leave shadows in their wake, and I struggled to see to the end of the hallway, even though I knew there was a window there that looked out over the grounds.

Somewhere.

The hallway seemed longer than it should have been. Longer than I remembered, anyway, and the mismatch between my memory and what lay before me caused my heart to pound and my mouth to go dry and taste sour.

Beneath my bare feet, the tile grew slick, wet, water flowing down the hall, just enough to lap at my toes and splash up around my heels. I swallowed, knowing where the water had to have come from.

Then I had to decide whether or not I was going to find out why the baths were flooding.

I knew I shouldn’t, that I wasn’t going to want to have discovered the answer, but I couldn’t help myself.

I turned left, sloshing my way carefully down tiles that were slick, the cold water rising to the level of my ankles.

Around me, the flickering continued, the sound of water echoing off the walls and ceiling, growing gradually louder as I approached the long room with its rows of tubs.

The facility had been built in an age when hydrotherapy was all the rage, and bathing for the sake of cleanliness definitely wasn’t. They’d made sure to schedule only patients of the same gender to bathe at the same time, since you were going to be naked in an open room with one another.

The gender of the nurses or orderlies who ‘helped’ you was apparently irrelevant. Whether they actually helped—or just observed—or not depended entirely on the person. While most of the nurses and orderlies probably did want to help or were at least apathetic to our existence, there were always too many who were driven by the power they had over us.

Power they could exercise in many small and large ways.

Flashes of memory pushed against my awareness, but I shoved them away. I didn’t have time to deal with them now.

I hesitated outside the closed double-doors, the remnants ofthe thick black letters above the doors reading HYDROTHERAPY just barely legible, a smaller black plastic sign on the wall reading BATHS providing the room’s more modern usage.