“Pixy Stix?”
She nodded. “They’re in a cloth bag hanging up with the straitjackets. Go over there and see for yourself.”
“Shit,” he said. She could tell by the look on his face that he believed her now—about Wayne taking Norma into the hidden room, anyway. There was no way to prove he’d taken Rosemary there, too.
“Now you know why I think Wayne might have had something to do with Rosemary’s disappearance,” she said. “But I can’t do anything about it if I’m locked up in here. Will you help me get out?”
He gaped at her. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“You’re a janitor. You must have all kinds of keys.”
“I have some keys, but not all of them. And moving someone around inside the building is easier than taking someone out of it. In case you haven’t noticed, the main exits are guarded and locked. And there’s a guard at the main gate too.”
Shit. Apparently Norma was telling the truth about the keys too. “Did Wayne ever say anything to you about Rosemary disappearing?”
He shook his head. “Not much. He just wondered where she went, like everyone else.”
“Did Rosemary ever say anything to you about him?”
“Not really, nothing in particular. But I know she was scared of him.”
“How do you know?”
“That was one of the few things she did mention. And I could tell. She acted different when he wasn’t around, more at ease.”
“I don’t blame her. I’m scared of him too. He said he’s still going to make time for me, whatever that means.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “Did he act surprised when he first saw you? Wouldn’t he have freaked out if he had anything to do with Rosemary’s disappearance?”
“He acted surprised, but not really shocked. And I was thinking, what if he knows I’m not Rosemary? What if he just isn’t saying anything because he wants everyone else to keep thinking I’m her?”
“How would he know? And why would he want that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, but I keep thinking . . . maybe he knows I can’t be her because he has her locked up somewhere. But as long as everyone else thinks I’m her, they won’t realize she’s still missing. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?”
“Jesus,” Eddie said. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Will you ask him if he knows who I am?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, for a whole lot of reasons.”
“Why not? I thought you were friends.”
He let out a sarcastic laugh. “Yeah, right. I just told you, I only talk to him so I can stay on his good side. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about working here, it’s that there’s a pecking order. And the cleanup crew, that’s me, is at the bottom. No one trusts anyone else. The attendants don’t trust the nurses because the nurses answer to administration. And the nurses don’t trust the attendants because administration will hire anybody who can stand upright and talk in complete sentences. We’ve got ex-cons working here, and most of the doctors are a joke. Normal hospitals won’t hire them. Did you notice the doctors and nurses don’t touch the residents? They have the staff bring them in to be seen, then make the staff hold them and move them around so they don’t have to get close to them because they’re afraid of getting hurt or catching disease. And don’t even get me started on the criminally insane who get dumped here. Sometimes it seems like the only difference between the residents and the staff is that the staff have keys. So I just stay out of the way and try to get along with everyone.”
Something cold and hard twisted in her stomach. Ex-criminals? Bad doctors? Criminally insane residents? That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She thought about asking him why the hell he’d continue to work there, but that wasn’t important right now. Then she remembered the track marks on Wayne’s arms. “Did you know Wayne’s a drug addict?”
“Yeah. So’s half the rest of the staff. Sometimes I think using is the only way they can cope with working here. Most people don’t last long. We lose at least a dozen every month.”
“Why don’t the staff report each other? Would they report Wayne if they found out he was doing something to Rosemary?”
He hesitated. “Do you want the truth, or do you want me to make you feel better?”
“The truth.”
“No one’s going to report Wayne for doing drugs, or anything else for that matter. A lot of them party together. They buy and sell drugs at work. They screw around with each other too. They might fight once in a while, but they don’t snitch and they don’t rat each other out. Some of them find that out the hard way when their tires get slashed or their cars get set on fire, they get beat up in the parking lot, or worse. To report something, an employee would have to be able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, which is almost impossible. And everybody’s afraid of guys like Wayne. And, besides all that, it’s really hard to fire a state employee because the union backs them. I don’t know everything because like I said, I try to stay out of trouble, but I hear things. And I know things.”
His words ricocheted like pinballs inside her head. She could hardly keep up or believe what she was hearing. If the employees were getting away with doing drugs and having sex with each other at work, what else were they getting away with? Kidnapping? Murder? And who was going to listen to her if no one cared about what they already knew was happening in Willowbrook? She started to tremble, the grating edge of anxiety fraying her nerves.
“Then why do you think Wayne let you talk to Rosemary, and now me, in private?”
He shrugged. “Because I don’t give him any shit?”
“And because he wouldn’t care if you were having sex with a resident?”
“That too. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he thinks is going on in here.”
“He must not be worried that you’ll believe me either. What about Dr. Baldwin? Do you think you can convince him I’m not Rosemary?”
A frown line deepened between his brows. “He won’t listen to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because he blames me for her running away. Or whatever she did. I honestly don’t know what she was thinking. Or where she could have gone.”
She hesitated, confused. “But Wayne said Dr. Baldwin blamed him. That he almost got fired because of it.”
“That’s because Baldwin has no idea what happened, and he’s trying to figure it out.”
“So why would he blame you?”
“I don’t know.”
Sage studied him, then said, “Yes, you do. Please, you have to tell me.”
A hardness tightened his jaw that wasn’t there before. “He thought we were . . . doing things we weren’t supposed to be doing. Just like you thought it, and Wayne thought it.”
“Well, if she liked you, I don’t care,” she said gently. “Honestly, it’d make me feel better to think she’d found a little happiness in this shithole. So please . . . tell me the truth.”
“She kissed me in the hallway once, that was it. I pushed her away, but it was too late. Everyone saw it. That’s why Dr. Baldwin thinks she left, so we could be together. He thinks I’m hiding her somewhere.”