The Test

Elspeth

Hollis Pike has stopped wearing his boots.

I notice it on Monday, in the corridor, at ten past nine, when a man I have heard coming for five weeks arrives without a sound. His heels no longer drop on the vinyl, two beats a second, like a metronome. He is in soft-soled sneakers, black ones, the kind a man buys when he has decided that the thing he's carrying should not be heard approaching.

"Morning, Ms. Reeve."

He says it warmly. That is the second thing.

For five weeks, Hollis Pike has spoken to me as one speaks to furniture that might bite. Today he holds the door for me. He says my name as if it were a favor. He walks one pace behind my left shoulder, where I can see him only if I turn my head, and I do not turn my head, because Dahlia Reeve wouldn't.

"Dr. Kestrel says it's a nice day for a walk," says Hollis. "Says you've been good. Says you should get some air."

Kestrel said no such thing. I know, because I had breakfast with the doctor's voice on the intercom at seven-forty, and it said Good morning, Dahlia, and nothing more.

"Oh," I say. "That's kind."

"The conservatory's open." He's smiling. The heavy face has learned how to do it from a picture. "Heated. Plants and all. Nice and quiet."

I look at the floor. I fold my hands over my stomach.

"Thank you, Mr. Pike."

Inside my chest, a small and extremely cold part of me starts to count.

…

The conservatory is at the north end of the grounds, a Victorian glasshouse that a Marrow ancestor built to grow oranges, and that Aldenmoor has kept, by some quirk of the endowment, in a condition of faded splendor. Iron ribs. Curved panes. A tiled floor in black and white, like a chessboard that has lost its game. The heat comes in clanking pipes along the walls.

It is a world of green. After five weeks of white, the color hits me like a drink.

Palms. Ferns the size of armchairs. A lemon tree in a tub, with two sick yellow fruit. Rows of terracotta pots with the dried stalks of something that died last summer. In the middle, a stone bench beneath a fan palm, beside a potting table covered in trowels and twine.

"You sit," says Hollis. "Enjoy the plants. I'll be back in a few."

"Are you leaving?"

"Got to take a call." He pats his pocket. "Won't be a minute."

He goes out through the south door, with a gust of cold. The door swings shut behind him, and then, after a moment, as if it's thought better of it, swings open again.

An inch. Two.

I do not look at it.

I sit on the stone bench with my hands in my lap and let my eyes travel over the plants like a woman who loves them. I count them, naturally. There are forty-one. I count the panes. There are three hundred and six on the south face. I count the cameras.

There is one.

It sits in the apex of the glass roof, a black dome on a bracket. And it is pointing at the wall.

Not at the room. At the wall. Someone has turned it a hundred and eighty degrees on its bracket so that it stares serenely at an iron rib and a patch of whitewashed brick, and from the angle of its housing I can see it has been done by hand, recently, with a ladder. A little snow lies melting on the bracket.

My pulse does not move. I make it not move.

Observation one. The camera has been turned.

Possible explanation. Maintenance. Rejected: no ladder visible, no tools, no log. Bridget would have mentioned it. A man with a ladder doesn't turn a camera to face a wall unless he wishes the wall to be recorded.

Possible explanation. Someone wants me unobserved.

Someone who is not the doctor. The doctor's cameras are his lifeblood. He doesn't turn them.

I breathe in. I keep breathing. And I look, very slowly, with only my eyes, at what else is in the room.

…

On the potting table, beside the trowels, lie three objects that were not there when I came in.

A set of keys on a steel ring. Eight keys. One of them, longer than the rest, with a green plastic cap, the kind that opens a service door.

A phone. Cheap, black, a prepaid flip phone of the sort a person buys at a pharmacy for forty dollars and throws away. It lies on the potting table next to the twine, with its screen lit. As I watch, the screen dims, and brightens again, as if somebody has just touched it.

And on the hook by the south door, where a gardener might hang an apron, a woman's wool coat. Navy. My size. With a pair of men's rubber boots beneath it, size seven, too large, but better than slippers.

The door is open two inches.

I count the distance from the bench to the door. Eleven steps. From the door to the gravel path, three. From the gravel path to the service road, a hundred and eighty yards, downhill, through snow. From the service road to the county road that runs beside the tin-colored lake, four hundred more. I can run four hundred yards in the time it takes to say my name to a state trooper.

There are four seconds of silence, and in the middle of them I do something I don't plan.

I let myself want it.

I let myself have the whole thing, once, entire, the way a drowning woman might allow herself to see the beach.

The phone. I know three numbers by heart. Miriam Castellane's office, which I dialed a hundred times in the course of four years of litigation over a client's vendor fraud. Dennis's cell, which I would give a decade of my life to hear ring. And a number in Poughkeepsie that belongs to a cold, careful journalist named Tamar Quinn, who once gave me her card at a conference and said, If you ever find something rotten, call me before you call anyone else.

The coat. The key. The open door. The running of the lake in the light.

I want it so badly that my teeth ache.

And then I look at the bench, where there is a curl of something dark that I had taken for a root. It is a cigarette end, flattened, still faintly wet.

Hollis Pike does not take calls in the cold. He does his smoking in the lee of the building, behind the service door, where a hard man in a long coat might stand in the snow and watch through a gap for a woman to come out.

Because that is what this is.

This is not an escape. It is a trap that has been baited with everything I want.

Listen: If I run, I am a lucid woman, plotting, capable, in possession of her faculties and a map. I'm Elspeth. Hollis is waiting by the door with the camera pointed at a wall, so there will be no tape. And a patient with a diagnosis who bolts across a snowfield in November, wearing the wrong clothes, with her pills in her hem, has not simply escaped. She's wandered off. Into a lake. Her body will be found in March.

If I stay, I'm Dahlia. And Dahlia sits.

I sit.

For seventy-one seconds by my pulse, which is slow and steady and does not know it's afraid, I look at the lemon tree. I count its leaves. I do not go near the coat.

Test. Not mine, though. His.

The fourth thing I understand is the best of them. Because if I'm right, there is a way to turn it.

…

When the south door swings wide and Hollis comes back in, with a swirl of snow and the smell of cigarettes, I am sitting exactly where he left me.

I have the keys on my lap.

I have the phone beside me on the bench, closed. I have the coat folded over my arm. I have put the camera, with a small trembling gesture, behind me. And I've placed my hands, one on top of the other, over the keys, with the long one uppermost.

I look up at him with the face of a woman who is on the verge of tears.

"Mr. Pike," I say. "I found these."

His face does a series of things in a very short time. I watch it, as an auditor watches a man's expression when he's asked about the inventory.

Confusion. Then calculation. Then something like a cold bubble rising to the top of a glass.

"What are you doing with those?"

"They were on the table." My voice shakes. It's not difficult. "I didn't know whose they were. I was afraid someone would think I'd taken them. I don't want to be in trouble, I'd never..."

"You didn't try the door?"

"The door?"

"It was open."

"I didn't want to go out." I stare at him. My eyes are wide and wet and entirely sincere. "Dr. Kestrel says it isn't safe for me to go out alone. He says the cold would hurt me. I wanted to wait for you. I didn't want to go anywhere without you."

He says nothing.

I have seen men in my professional life who were told that their scheme had been discovered, and I have seen the way light goes out of a face. I'm looking at one now. It's not anger, not yet. It's the beginning of the grayness that comes before.

"I think someone has been careless," I say. I look at the keys. I look at the phone. "I think perhaps someone is in trouble. Shall we take them to Dr. Kestrel? I'd like him to know I didn't touch anything. I'd like him to know I was good."

"We can just put them back."

"Please." I clutch the keys. "Please, I'd feel better if he knew."

"Ms. Reeve..."

"Mr. Pike." I stand. I let a thread of that vagueness leave my voice, so that it comes out clear and flat, with a trace of old steel. "I would like to see Dr. Kestrel now."

Hollis Pike looks at the camera on the apex of the glass, facing the wall. He looks at the open door. He looks at me.

There is no way for him to say no. He cannot tell me not to report. A man who set a test cannot admit he set it. A patient who obediently asks to report a found object to her doctor is behaving exactly as a patient should, and if he stops her, he is the one who is out of order.

I watch him come to the end of the logic.

"Fine," says Hollis.

It is very soft.

…

Kestrel looks at the objects on his blotter for a long time.

I have told it the way a child tells it, in a rush, out of order. The conservatory. The plants. Mr. Pike going out for a call. The keys on the table, the phone, the coat. The door. How I didn't touch the door. How I stayed on the bench.

He listens without moving. He is in his chair with his hands steepled under his chin, and the seven clocks tick behind his head, and the light from the window turns the lenses of his gray eyes to something like mercury.

Hollis stands against the wall by the bookcase with his arms folded and his jaw set.

"Show me the phone," Kestrel says.

I pass it across the desk with two fingers.

He opens it. It is a cheap phone, but it has a contacts list, and the list has one entry, saved under two letters. He looks at it. Then he turns it, slowly, so that the screen faces Hollis, and I see the letters over his wrist, bright blue on gray.

C.M.

The room is entirely still.

I feel it in the skin of my arms. Not triumph. Something more dangerous: a closeness to the edge of a ledge. I haven't said the name. I did not even look at the screen.

"Mr. Pike," says Kestrel. His voice is so soft it could have been used to put a child to sleep. "This is a prepaid handset. It has one number in it. Would you like to tell me what it is doing in my conservatory?"

"I found it on the lawn."

"And the camera?"

Hollis doesn't answer.

"I had my technician check the conservatory feed on the way down," says Kestrel. "The housing has been rotated on its bracket by a hundred and eighty degrees. Someone used a ladder. The ladder is in the groundskeeper's shed, wet at the feet. The groundskeeper tells me you borrowed it at eight."

His hands have not moved. He still looks, in that moment, like a man who might be about to give a lecture.

"The service door was left open. A coat was left on a hook. Keys that unlock the east gate were left on a table. A patient in my care, with a documented history of dissociation and paranoid ideation, was put alone in a room with an unobserved exit and a way to call out. In winter." A pause. "You understand what you've done."

"I was running an errand," says Hollis, thickly. "For a person who's got more right to run it than you."

"I'm aware whom you run errands for."

The words fall like a coin on marble.

I keep my eyes on the blotter.

"You have been in my employ for nine years," says Kestrel. "I have never asked what you do with your Sundays. I have never asked whose cash goes into your account. It is none of my affair, so long as it does not touch my patients. This does."

"Doctor..."

"You're dismissed."

"You can't do that." Hollis's face has gone a dark red, and I see with interest that his hands are trembling. "You can't. I'll call her. She'll have you out of here by dinner."

"Then call her," says Kestrel. "Call Mrs. Marrow, and tell her you were fired for turning a camera to face a wall in a psychiatric hospital for the purpose of staging an escape. Tell her you did it without my knowledge. Tell her I have the footage of the ladder. Tell her the patient reported it, and I'd be glad to put that in writing." He lifts his head. "I'd be curious to hear her answer."

Hollis stares at him.

It is the stare of a man who has found out, in the space of one sentence, that the rope he thought was hanging off the dock is a snake.

He cannot go to Cordelia. If he does, he must say what he was doing. And if he says what he was doing, he must say who told him to do it. A woman who sets traps for her own physician's patients in her own hospital is not a woman who wishes to see the trap described.

"This isn't finished," says Hollis.

"I think it is."

"You'll want to watch her." He jabs a finger at me. It shakes. "You'll want to watch that one. She's not what she looks like."

"No," says Kestrel. "She is a good deal better."

Hollis looks at me.

I look back at him with a wide, tearful, uncomprehending face. I let my lip tremble. I make my hand creep, a little ashamed, to my chest.

Hollis Pike leaves the room without another word. His sneakers make no sound on the carpet.

…

Kestrel is silent for some time after the door has closed.

He takes a pen out of his pocket and puts it back. He lines up the keys on the blotter, then the phone, then the coat, which I've laid across the arm of his chair. His hands are quite steady. But there is something in the arrangement of his shoulders that tells me he has not been so angry in ten years.

Not at Hollis. At the board. At a woman with a smoked voice who sent a thug into the hospital he built, with its cameras and its codes and its careful sleep, and tried to test his patient.

"Dahlia," he says.

"Yes, Doctor?"

"You did exactly right."

"Did I?" I look down at my hands. "I was so frightened. I thought, if I touched the door he would be angry. I thought, if I touched the phone..." I let my voice break. "I wanted to call someone. I don't know who. I don't know anyone to call."

I let a tear fall. It lands on the back of my left hand.

"You have me," says Kestrel.

It's a quiet voice, very warm, with something in it that is not a technique.

I look up at him. I don't have to try. The words go through me like a blade through water. You have me. Said by a man whose pulse rose to eighty-eight under my fingers. Whose hands, a moment ago, were quite steady. Whose wrist I would know blindfold.

I think: This is the moment.

Not the confession. Not the scheme. This is where the arithmetic changes.

Because before this room, Dr. Ambrose Kestrel was an adversary I was studying. But I've just seen a man discard, in one sentence, nine years of unspoken arrangement with the woman who owns his building, because a patient wept over a set of keys. I've watched him choose me.

He has chosen the doll over the dynasty. He doesn't know it yet.

"There's a library," he says. "On the first floor. It hasn't been opened to patients in years. I think you might like it." He smiles, the broad shaky one. "You are a reader, I imagine. You have the look."

"I think I was."

"Then I'll have the key sent to you."

"Thank you, Doctor." I rise. I smooth my gown. "I'll try to deserve it."

At the door I stop, as a woman might who has just remembered something.

"Dr. Kestrel?"

"Yes?"

"Who is C.M.?"

I say it very simply, the way a child asks which of two doors goes to the kitchen.

He looks at the phone on the blotter. At the two letters on the screen.

He doesn't turn the cufflink.

"No one you need to be afraid of," says Kestrel.

It is the first time he has lied to me without touching it.

I take it as the first sign that he no longer thinks he has to.