I can’t remember if his file even had a date, but I’m willing to take the chance. I pull out my file and he’s already got his open. He’s pointing to a date written just above the green sticker. I look at my admissions paperwork and the day written there is actually a week earlier than Joe’s.
“So? That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Well, it proves I was lying to you the other day.”
“That just means you’re a liar, Joe.”
“It proves I’m telling you the truth now.”
I shake my head, and I can tell he’s beginning to feel defeated. Th way his mouth is slightly agape makes me wonder if he plans to talk, but he doesn’t say anything else for a bit. I snatch the file out of his hands and put both of them back in their proper place, because I don’t want to get caught. I already know what these people can do here.
He stands, taking the chair I’d been sitting in back to the other side of the desk, and then he sits in the rolling chair again by the computer and starts looking in drawers. “Anna, did you ever think maybe that’s why they did ECT on you yesterday? Made sure you took your meds today? Not because of me—but because Don caught you acting more like a normal person?”
I pause as I close the drawer, letting my mind wander back. What Joe says makes sense. Don had been doing something on his phone until I spoke to him, and he’d seemed almost surprised when I had. But I’m still so angry with Joe, it clouds my emotions. “So what?”
He sighs. “If we can get in the computer, I might be able to prove I’m not lying to you now.”
I repeat something I heard Harley say the other day. “Knock yourself out.” After a few more seconds, I ask, “Did they even give you meds? Were you lying about that?”
“They supposedly gave me sugar pills and vitamins so I’d look like the other patients regularly taking meds. But, after a while, I think they were slipping in real stuff, like what they gave you. It’s why I stopped taking them.”
“And what about all the other stuff? The sessions, the trouble you said you got in, all that stuff?”
“Let’s just say that only one person, maybe two, knows why I’m here, meaning I’m fair game to everybody else if I piss them off.”
I peek through all the drawers in this first cabinet and discover that letters A through Z all fit in these four drawers. So what are the other two cabinets for?
When I open the next one, there are files that are similar, but these folders aren’t the manila kind. They’re instead a mahogany color and they’re bigger. I open the first one. It’s simply labeled Aaliyah. There’s a picture in here, too, but it’s not like mine or Joe’s or James Harrison’s. Instead, opposite the picture is a list that includes height, weight, hair and eye color, build, and country of origin? There’s a date after the letters DOA, followed by even more letters—in this case, JT, and the word Cheyenne.
What does this even mean?
I grab the next folder, and it’s the same thing for a woman supposedly named Abigail. Another date with the letters TY and Boise. And on and on it goes.
“Joe, take a look at this. This feels creepy to me somehow.” He slides his chair over and I hand him a few of the files. “What do you think? These aren’t patients like us.”
“Yeah, they don’t seem to be.” He pauses, looking straight ahead. “Wait a second.” He hands me back the files and turns around to roll the couple steps back to the desk. “There’s a folder like that in this drawer that was locked.” When he finds the file, he pulls it out and opens it. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
He hands me the folder. “That girl look familiar to you?”
The young woman in the photo appears to be sixteen at most—but she’s stunningly beautiful. Long dark hair, haunting black eyes—and her makeup in the photo enhances her full lips and high cheekbones. The name on the file says Raquel. To answer Joe’s question, I say, “Maybe.”
“That’s Zombierella.”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I force my brain to move backward to the first day I can remember. According to Joe, this young woman is the catatonic girl who’d been on the couch in the living room. “So why does she have a different folder? A strange file? What makes her different?”
“I don’t know,” Joe says, frowning, but now he stands and pulls out a huge stack of folders. He opens one file at a time, looks it over, and then hands it to me to put back. I look inside, too, just to see if there are any major differences.
“Wait a minute,” he says after he’s gone through most of the stack.
“What?”
“This woman,” he says before pausing to look at the label, “Claire. She was one of us about a year ago.”
“Seriously? Did you ever talk to her?”
“No, not really. She was another Zombierella. She was here a couple of weeks and then gone. Some people come and go and you don’t realize it till later that they’re not there anymore.” He hands me the stack, except for Raquel’s file, and turns back to the desk.
I decide to continue opening the files to look before putting them back, and the next one I open jolts me so badly, I hold on to the cabinet so I don’t topple over. Finally, I say, “Oh, my God.”
By this point, I think we’re shellshocked. Rather than asking anything, Joe simply looks up, waiting for me to talk.
“This girl,” I say, handing him the file.
“Claudia?” he asks, reading the label.
“Yes.” I take a deep breath. “Did I ever tell you about that dream I had? That one where the girl was trying to talk but just screamed?”
“I think so.”
“That’s her.”
“Are you sure? It’s not a girl who looks like her but it’s literally her?”
“Yes, Joe, it’s her. I know my memory’s not the most reliable, but I promise that—”
“But it was a dream, Anna, not a memory.”
I get ready to argue, but he’s right. “That’s even weirder. How am I connected with her? With these women?”
He shakes his head. “This is weird, too.” He hands me Raquel’s file, the woman he called Zombierella, and says, “What about her file is different from the others?”
I scan and it doesn’t take me long to notice. “There’s no DOA date or initials or city.”
“Yeah. I wonder if they mean Dead on Arrival.”
“Did that Claire woman die? Is that why you think that?”
He shrugs. “Just grasping at straws.”
At this point, I know I could look through these files all night and probably not figure out anything else. “Maybe we need to talk to Raquel.”
“Good idea.”
I look through the last filing cabinet. It’s full of what appear to be reports, mostly financial and insurance related. When I turn, I tell Joe, “I don’t think we’re going to find anything else in here—unless you were able to get into the computer.”
“I couldn’t find a password anywhere.”
“Even if you could, we’d have to know what application to use and how to use it. It might not be easy to figure out.” I lean over to look at the monitor because there are a couple of sticky notes on it, thinking maybe they have passwords, but they don’t seem to be. One seems to be a reminder of an upcoming meeting and the other looks like a small grocery list.