Sisters in Sanity
Page 22

I explained what I felt we needed to do. Cassie, because she was getting out soon, would have to have the least risky job. She’d do an informal survey, find out what every girl at Red Rock was in for. How many sexual deviants, how many kleptos, druggies, or none of the aboves. And how many girls were on medication.
“Be careful, Cassie. Don’t take any risks.”
“I got it covered, Brit.”
I assigned Bebe to get into the medical files—find out how many girls might have had suspicious “accidents” like Martha’s or been sick. We needed a list of cases that stunk of typical Red Rock staff neglect.
I gave V what I thought was the second-hardest job: Getting the goods on the staff and finding out how many of them didn’t even have the minimum qualifications to dole out advice and meds. She rolled her eyes. “Please, that’ll take me all of five seconds. What else you got?”
“The insurance part. If we can prove that Red Rock ‘cures’ girls as soon as their insurance runs out if their families can’t keep paying, that will help make our case.”
“Done. And what are you doing?”
“I’m going to break into Clayton’s office. Get our files. Compare notes. See if they’re making stuff up. And I’m also going to go online, or have Jed do it, to find some graduates who can tell their own torrid tales. I’ll bet there are a lot of girls out there who would happily spill their guts about this place.”
“It all sounds a mite dangerous,” Cassie said.
“I’m afraid so, darling,” Bebe agreed. “You know I love the whole Mission Impossible idea, but however are we going to get access to all this stuff? You act like we can just waltz around wherever we please.”
I was beginning to understand that we could do just that. I didn’t want to risk the girls getting busted, especially Cassie, but in my few nights of sneaking around, my confidence had been growing. Red Rock had us all so scared, so convinced that they were lurking around every corner, that we all stayed in line (at least most of the time). But the reality was that Big Brother was mostly in our heads. Red Rock had some half-assed security system, and one measly nap-loving guard at night. The Sisters had been sneaking out for meetings for almost a year and no one was any the wiser. I’d been caught when I broke out, but that wasn’t because any of the staff had nabbed me so much as that someone on the outside had seen me in my uniform and called Sheriff. I was starting to realize that the most effective restraint at Red Rock wasn’t the locked doors or the alarms, but our own fear. And only we could unlock that. I tried to explain that to the girls, but at the same time, I didn’t want my theory to be their downfall. Cassie and Bebe still looked a little dubious, but it was V who stepped up and saved me.
“Brit, congratulations. You have just discovered the secret of this place.” She had a sad look on her face, but I could see that it was tinged with pride.
“I have?” I asked.
“You have. The only thing we have to fear—okay, maybe not the only thing, but the biggest thing we have to fear, with props to FDR—is fear itself.”
Bebe took in a gulp of breath. “Oh, what the hell. I’ll infiltrate that infirmary if I have to break my leg to do it.”
“I’m in too,” Cassie said. “And I’ll get Laurel to play sidekick. She works in the office and can make us photocopies if we need ’em.”
“I thought you and Laurel were already playing sidekick,” Bebe teased, making Cassie blush as she turned to me. “See, Brit? We’ve got your back.”
“It’s down to you, V,” I said.
V stared at me, and then the stern mask of her face broke into a sad smile. “Of course, I’m in. There’s no question.”
“So, darling,” Bebe asked. “What happens once we’ve dug up all the dirt we need?”
I had no idea. But I figured by the time we got there—if we got there—I’d figure it out.
Chapter 24
For the next two weeks, the four of us were a hive of activity. We hardly saw one another except to check in, share what we’d found, and stash evidence in a hole that Cassie had dug on the edge of the quarry. All of us were totally invigorated—giddy even—the happiest we’d been since we thought we were getting a spa day with Bebe’s mom all those months ago. Except no one else could take this excitement away from us because we were generating it ourselves. Unless, of course, we got caught.
But we didn’t get caught, even as we grew more brazen. Bebe successfully called on her acting lineage and faked an epic case of stomach flu, willing herself to barf. “All I have to do is think about the time we were driving in Mexico and my brother puked on me—I just start to go,” Bebe said. “I think Mother would call that method acting.” She ended up spending three unaccompanied nights in the infirmary, where no one bothered to lock the files, and she left there, cured, with a bunch of names: In addition to Martha Wallace, there were Gretchen Campbell, Natalie Wiseman, and Hope Ellis. Each of the girls had suffered a suspicious setback. Gretchen had broken her leg, Natalie had come down with scurvy, and someone—the file didn’t say who—had broken Hope’s nose. We couldn’t be sure that any of it had to do with Red Rock’s neglect, because Helga, the awful nurse who cavity-searched me, wasn’t exactly writing down “student suffered broken nose after fighting with a counselor,” but Bebe said that in a lot of cases you could read between the lines. Like scurvy. That could easily have come from a vitamin deficiency brought on by Red Rock’s horrendously unbalanced meal plan. And heat stroke? It wasn’t hard to imagine girls like Martha being forced to stay in the quarry or complete a death march when conditions were unreasonably hot.
V, in that mysterious way of hers, had managed to get all sorts of goods on the staff. None of the counselors had advanced degrees. Two of them weren’t even through college. One of the goon guards used to be a pro wrestler, and another goon had supposedly had his license revoked for drunk driving.
“How did you find out all this stuff?” I asked her. “Are you hypnotizing people, or something?”
“I just ask, Brit. When you give them half a chance people love to talk about themselves, and each other.”
“Really? I was starting to think you practiced voodoo.”
“Not at all. I’m just all smoke and mirrors, like the security system here. I walk into a place like I have a right to be there, and people treat me like I have a right to be there. I act like I have a right to know something, and people tell me what I want to know.”
I thought about that. Just act like you had a right to be there. I wondered if I could psych myself into breaking into Clayton’s office. Breaking in there and getting our files was the big task I’d set for myself, but so far I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it. There was no camera in Clayton’s office, and her file cabinet wasn’t locked—just the door was, and I had the pass key. But it felt like the walls had eyes, like they knew everything that happened even in the dark. Just like Clayton seemed to know what happened in the dark recesses of my mind. Why else would she keep harping on about me and Mom, wanting me to accept the possibility that I was going to end up like her? That the qualities I’d inherited from my mother were really just a stop on the road to madness? Part of me thought I should just own up to it. Otherwise, I’d be stuck on Level Four forever. And maybe if Clayton’s theory was completely bogus, I would’ve pretended to agree with her by now. But I wasn’t so sure it was, and I was terrified that admitting it to her would only make it real.
So I put off breaking into her office and helped Cassie and Jed follow up on former inmates instead. I’d put Jed in charge of tracking down blogs, diaries, or diatribes from Red Rock graduates. He was on the job, happy to be able to help. It felt good to have him on board. He’d found a bunch of stuff and had emailed links to a secret email account we set up. I checked it as much as I could, but it was Cassie, who took computer classes, who insisted on checking our email account the most. This was pretty risky to do right in front of the counselors, but Cassie insisted on doing more. She’d had a shockingly easy time with her survey. Even the most circumspect girls opened up to her—even the Stockholm syndrome girls, who tended to look down on the nonbelievers like us, told Cassie what she wanted to know. Maybe it was because she was leaving, or maybe because everyone knew by now that Cassie couldn’t hurt a fly and wasn’t one to spill a secret.
I let Cassie be our computer girl until she almost got caught. One day in class, when she was printing out an email Jed had forwarded, one of the counselors snuck up behind her at her terminal. “I thought my goose was cooked,” Cassie told all of us at one of our late-night meetings.
“What did you do, darling?” Bebe asked.
“I hit the powerstrip on my computer, unplugged the whole thing and prayed. Ain’t nothin’ anyone could do. I mean a smart counselor might’ve checked my cache on Explorer, but the counselors here are all hat, no cattle if you know what I mean. Still, I was in a panic they’d see what I’d printed. Trust me, it was a long forty-five minutes.”
“I’m glad you didn’t get caught, but that’s enough Nancy Drew for you, Cassie. You can do more for us on the outside,” I said.
“I s’pose you’re right. I wouldn’t wanna get this close only to blow it.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I said, sneaking a glance at V.
After that, I took over the email correspondence. Through Jed I found a guy who’d sued Piney Creek, and he emailed that he would happily tell horror stories about Sheriff, including one about a time when Sheriff lassoed him to a chair and sat him in the sun all day. I also got a note from a girl named Andrea who’d been sent to Red Rock ostensibly for drinking. She wrote me that the real reason she’d been sent away was that her parents were fighting for custody of her, and her mom had enrolled her at Red Rock to keep her away from her dad. In the end, her father had to hire a lawyer to get her out. “We’ve both got lots of sordid things to say about Red Rock and would love to talk to you or whoever else wants to hear about it. I loathe that place with all of my being,” she wrote.
I printed out all these emails and stashed them, along with Cassie’s printouts and her survey, Bebe’s infirmary records, and V’s staff notes, in our secret hole by the quarry. After almost two weeks, we had quite the pile going.
“But our little dossier is missing one important element,” V said. “Brit, when are you going to get our files?”
“Tonight.”
“You said that last night.”
“I know. But Missy was restless. It was too dangerous.”
“You want me to go?”
“No, V. I can handle it.”
“Then do it, already. You got everyone all riled up with this. You can’t turn back now.”
“By tomorrow morning,” I said, “I’ll have the files.”