When she entered the dining room, Sapph saw she was almost the last to arrive. Only Lance and Pat were missing from the group around the large table. Gwen and Amari had already finished and were talking quietly over cups of coffee, while Knox, Vincent, and Scottie were deep in a discussion of something or other. Given the pastry Scottie was holding, it was probably about food. Her bodyguard never admitted how much he enjoyed baking, and she’d never reveal his secret.
Make sure you get the recipes, she said, passing them on her way to the pile of pancakes, sausages, and bacon on the sideboard.
He didn’t respond.
Sapph took her plate of food, held expertly away from Bear’s inquisitive nose, and sat with Amari and Gwen. “Gwen, you said you’d started going through the records,” she said, after having greeted them. “Was this always a TB institution?”
“As far as I can tell, yes,” Gwen said, reaching out for a battered notebook covered in scrawl that was either arcane rituals or someone spasming when they wrote. Gwen, however, apparently had no issue deciphering it. “Dr. Broadwell was working with the theory that several native cures might explain why the local tribes weren’t as susceptible to TB than the white folks. I’ve found some interesting notes. Why?”
“I don’t know.” Sapph fed Bear a small piece of bacon. “It just doesn’t feel like it.”
“How are TB asylums supposed to feel?” Amari asked.
“It’s hard to explain,” Sapph said. “I mean, it’s not that I’ve been in a lot of abandoned asylums. Truth be told, I’ve only been in a few hospitals, but…” She paused, trying to find the right words. “When I was very young, I visited an older relative in a hospice unit. The person in the other bed was dying of lung cancer. I could feel her struggling to breathe - it was like all the oxygen in the room was being sucked out. Wouldn’t TB be like that?”
“That’s a good question.” Gwen flipped a few pages in her notebook. “I haven’t come across anything else saying otherwise, but we’ve barely scratched the surface.” She cocked her head at Sapph. “You said things can move in the Ghostlands. Do you think you might be able to see what it was like in the past, so we can find the records we actually need?”
“I don’t know,” Sapph said. “I’ve never tried choosing a time to shift into.” She chewed another piece of bacon while she thought. “It would be an interesting experiment.”
“I’ll pencil it into the schedule,” Amari said, grinning. Sapph threw a piece of sausage at her, which she caught and popped into her mouth. “Hey, do you pay in sausage? I would work for that.”
Sapph’s retort was cut short by the appearance of Lance and Pat in the door to the dining room. In fact, their appearance stopped everything in the room.
“What the hell did you fall into?” Gwen finally said, the first to recover her tongue.
Pat grinned at her. Despite being absolutely filthy, with a lump over his right eyebrow and at least two scratches across his chin, he looked ebullient. “A foundation! To another morgue!”
“We think it’s a morgue,” Lance corrected. He also looked smug, and dirty. His teeshirt was ripped in several places, with dark spots Sapph was pretty sure was blood around them. “It’s set up the same way the morgue is in the main hospital, but this one is behind the barn.”
“And you found it by falling in, I assume,” Amari said. “What were you doing behind the barn?”
“Looking for a camera, actually,” Pat said. He started over to the sideboard.
“Not a chance,” Knox said, intercepting him. “You two go get cleaned up before you get near the food. I am not spending a week in the bathroom because you contaminated something.”
They protested, but in the end, they gave in. In twenty minutes, clean and in unripped clothes, Lance and Pat rejoined them.
“Okay, so you were looking for a camera,” Knox said, after the two had piled food on plates and sat down. “Why were you looking for a camera? Which one?”
“One of the cameras we’d set up in the barn for a test wasn’t transmitting this morning when I was testing the DVR system,” Pat said. “The one by the back door. Lance was up, so we decided to go and find out why.”
“When we got out there, the mount was intact, but the camera was nowhere to be seen,” Lance added. “So we started following the wires.”
“Why didn’t you walkie in first?” Knox asked. “If you had been hurt, we might not have found you. You know the procedure, Pat.”
Pat flushed. “I forgot, honestly,” he said. “I figured it had just fallen somewhere, and we’d be back in no time. But the line went out the back door, and into a tangle of vines and pricker bushes. I was just turning to say to Lance that we should go back and get a machete when the floor fell out underneath me.”
“It took us forever to pull ourselves out,” Lance said. “But it’s definitely a room.”
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