Just like the ones in her dreams.
Cree felt suddenly weak, and her stomach tightened in a deep, sick clench. She flipped the page and found another drawing similar to the first: faces emerging from patterns of light and shadow. On closer inspection, she saw again the deliberate variation of character: One seemed noble, one brutish, others cruel, cowering, pathetic, wise. The only affect that ran through all of them was suffering.
Cree dropped the book, feeling utterly out of her depth. Her head ached with each pounding heartbeat. Everything was going around, dizzying, her thoughts hyperanimated and chaotic. And she'd been so engrossed that she'd ignored something cruciaclass="underline" The noise in the hall wasn't right. There was a shifting sound now, the quiet sound of cloth moving against cloth.
She switched off the flashlight and inched toward the door, afraid to look into the hall, afraid to stay where she was. Afraid to breathe. She forced herself to the doorway, made herself push her face around the edge of the frame.
23
"Lynn! Good Jesus, you startled me!" Cree felt a flood of relief at the sight of the nurse, standing twenty feet away in the dim green light with arm outstretched, hand against the wall. She looked like a person who had been startled while listening or waiting for something. Cree wondered how long she'd been there.
"As you did me. Oh, my!" Lynn blew out a breath and fluttered a hand against her chest. Then she came toward Cree, trailing her fingers against the corridor wall. "I thought you might be here, but I got a little worried when I found the door open. And no lights on."
Cree backed into the dorm room. "I couldn't sleep. So I figured I'd come and look at Tommy's drawings and things. Before the other kids got back."
Lynn Pierce came through the door and switched on the overhead lights. The tubes flickered and hummed and then came on garishly bright. She took in the room before locking her disconcerting eyes on Cree's. "In the dark?" she asked expressionlessly.
"I borrowed your flashlight."
"I know. I heard you go into the office." A clever expression fled quickly across her face and was banished. "So you still hope to be working with him?"
"It'll probably come down to getting his grandparents' permission. If there's any chance I can, I figured I should make use of the time. Get to know him better."
Lynn looked at the open notebook on Tommy's desk, the bureau drawer Cree had neglected to close. "Finding anything interesting?"
"I think so."
" Like-?"
Cree went to the desk, flipped the notebook pages to one of the drawings of faces. "This, for example. Do you know if it's from life-a real place? Or is it a made-up place?"
Lynn Pierce came to her shoulder to consider the drawing. "It looks like the walls of the mesa. Oh, sure-it's that spot about, oh, maybe a mile north of here. It's the deepest gully on this side, the rock formations are pretty distinctive. Picturesque, I guess you'd say. The art teachers often take classes there before the cold weather sets in. What-the faces?"
"Do they mean anything to you?"
Lynn shrugged and shook her silver head once. "A teenage boy with an active imagination."
Unaccountably ill at ease with Lynn so close to her shoulder, Cree left the desk and went to sit on the end of Tommy's bed. "Did you want to talk to me? Is that why you followed me here?"
Smiling minutely, Lynn turned to face Cree and half sat against the edge of the desk. "Mind if I smoke? Strictly speaking, it's not allowed, but with the kids gone… " She rummaged in her pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a little foil ashtray folded into a half circle. She opened the ashtray and smoothed out its creases before setting it on the desk. She lit a cigarette and drew on it hungrily. When she exhaled, she carefully blew the smoke away from Cree, toward the hall door.
"My one vice," she apologized. "Down to five a day. And never in the infirmary, God forbid." Another deep suck that made the ember spark, and then her gaze wandered cautiously from the floor to meet Cree's. "I was wondering what kind of psychologist you are."
"I got my Ph. D. in clinical psychology from Duke."
"But you specialize…"
"Didn't Julieta tell you my focus?"
"She's the boss. She tells me only what she thinks I need to hear. I guess I didn't need to hear the details this time."
"It's hard to explain, Lynn. There's really no name for my field of specialty."
"Not 'parapsychologist'? On the Internet, that's the term that seems to come up." Lynn blew another gout of smoke toward the door and with an air of apology swished at it with one hand. "I did a search on you this evening."
"Does that bother you?"
"I can't decide. The strictly orthodox professional in me disapproves. But Tommy… it's baffling. I can't imagine what's going on with him."
"Any thoughts you want to share?"
She startled Cree with a direct bolt of her blue-bronze gaze, then tapped ash into the foil tray before answering. "Did you know I was married to a Navajo? Sixteen years. My Vern died fifteen years ago." She hesitated, clearly stumbling over that obstinate fact without meaning to.
"I'm sorry, Lynn."
"Yeah. Well," the nurse said reflexively.
"I know that 'yeah, well.'" Cree smiled. "I lost my husband, too."
The look Lynn returned had a surprised, grateful quality to it. But it lasted only an instant before she half shook her head, refusing the sympathy or resisting the impulse to remember. A drag on her cigarette seemed to help her find her train of thought again. "It took a few years for his family to accept me, a white Midwestern girl, but eventually I got to know them pretty well. The older people told stories about this kind of thing… Once we went to a Way sung for one of his nephews. The boy had started having what a mainstream doctor would've diagnosed as grand mal seizures. The Hand-Trembler said he had a ghost in him. That he had offended an ancestor. The family hired a Singer to do the Evil Way."
"Do you believe it? About the ghost?"
"It's completely at odds with my medical training…"
" But-" Cree prompted.
Lynn smiled crookedly. "But after the Way, his symptoms were much less extreme."
Cree smiled with her. Despite her unease, she found herself intrigued by this odd, tense, smart, apologetic woman whose aura glinted with the sharp silver flashes of well-concealed anger.
"I guess I'm credulous enough to be curious what a parapsychologist would do about Tommy," Lynn continued. "I was also very impressed with the way you handled him when we were playing cards-responsive but not condescendingly sympathetic. I admire that. Refreshingly unlike our beloved but distinctly overindulgent principal. He respects you now, you could tell by the way he opened up to you during softball. That'll help." She took a last, long drag on her cigarette, blew out a blue-gray plume, stabbed out the butt. Obviously a practiced clandestine smoker, she folded the ashtray like a clam around the remains and returned it to her pocket. "That is, if the doctors at Ketteridge or his grandparents let you work with him."
Despite Lynn's efforts to disperse the smoke, the acrid stink rasped in Cree's lungs. She got up to look again at the drawings over the bed. In the brighter light, the skill of the rendering was more apparent: The old man looked alive.
"You've worked here for, what, two years?"
"Three."
"So you must know her pretty well. Julieta." The old man seemed to be looking over Cree's shoulder, as if watching Lynn on the other side of the room.
"In some ways, maybe."
"She's a remarkable person, isn't she?"
A hesitation. "She certainly is."
"I mean, she's dynamic, she's intelligent, she's beautiful enough to turn any woman green, she's passionate-"