Chapter 5 - Room 214
The number led them to St. Catherine’s Medical Center.
Room 214 had been closed for renovation, according to hospital records. The entire second-floor corridor was sealed behind temporary construction walls.
Benjamin obtained access through an administrator who had once worked with his father.
They entered before sunrise.
The corridor beyond the plastic barrier was not under renovation.
It was operational.
Fresh footprints marked the floor. Security cameras watched from both ends. Four rooms had digital locks, and a cart contained children’s clothing in various sizes.
Reyes examined the labels.
“None of these patients are registered.”
Elena found Chloe’s size.
Inside Room 214, the bed was empty but warm.
A glass of water sat on the table.
A drawing lay beneath the pillow.
It showed a black car, a bridge, and a woman standing beneath a clock.
The clock hands pointed to six fifteen.
Elena checked the time.
Five forty-eight.
“Chloe left this for me.”
“How could she know you’d come here?” Benjamin asked.
“She knew I found the bracelet.”
A hospital phone rang.
Elena answered.
No one spoke.
Then Chloe whispered, “Mom?”
“I’m here.”
“Don’t say my name.”
Elena turned away from the others and pressed the receiver against her ear.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Where are you?”
“In the car.”
“With your father?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
“Can you see anything?”
“Water.”
The bridge in the drawing.
“What else?”
“A big clock.”
Elena remembered the old river-terminal clock at Bellweather Crossing.
“Chloe, listen to me. We’re coming.”
“No. It’s a trick.”
“What is?”
“All of it.”
The line crackled.
Chloe began speaking quickly.
“Dad said the key would make you go to the lake. Victoria said the bracelet would make you come to the hospital. They wanted you to find the tapes because the tapes make you look sick.”
“Chloe, how did you call this room?”
“A man gave me a phone.”
“What man?”
“The man who puts medicine in my milk.”
The call disconnected.
Reyes ordered local units toward Bellweather Crossing.
Elena studied the drawing.
The woman stood under the clock, but the child in the black car was traveling away from her.
“It’s not the river terminal.”
Benjamin leaned closer.
The clock tower had a broken section at the top.
Elena recognized it from a place Marcus had once taken her for a company retreat.
Westmere Station, an abandoned railway depot forty miles north.
The clock had stopped at six fifteen after lightning damaged the mechanism.
They left through the hospital’s service exit.
A nurse in blue scrubs stepped from the stairwell.
She carried a syringe.
Reyes saw her first.
“Drop it.”
The nurse ran.
He chased her down the stairs while Elena and Benjamin searched Room 214 again.
Inside the bedside drawer, Benjamin found admission forms for six children.
Each child had been assigned a new name.
Each file described “memory reassignment,” “attachment redirection,” and “family replacement compliance.”
Chloe’s file was not among them.
But Elena found a photograph of herself taken inside the clinic.
She was unconscious in a wheelchair.
Behind her stood Dr. Rowe.
Beside him was a man Elena had never met.
The man wore a ring engraved with the crescent-and-line symbol.
Written on the back were the words:
SUBJECT E FAILED TRANSFER.
“What does that mean?” Benjamin asked.
Elena turned the photograph over again.
Before she could answer, an alarm sounded.
Smoke began pouring into the corridor.
Someone had set fire to the records room.
They escaped through a side staircase as flames consumed Room 214.
Reyes caught the nurse in the parking structure, but she bit down on a capsule hidden inside her mouth before he could question her.
She died before the ambulance arrived.
In her pocket was a train ticket.
May you like
The destination was Westmere Station.
The departure time was six fifteen.
