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Then Kelly disappeared back into the hall. Hanna remained where she was, staring at the figure on the bed. Graham’s monitors beeped steadily. His chest rose up and down. Then, his eyelids fluttered and his lips parted.
Hanna leaned over his bed. “Graham?” she whispered. “Are you there?” Did you see A? she asked silently.
A puff of air escaped between Graham’s lips. His eyelashes fluttered once more, and then he went motionless on the pillow. Hanna pulled away from the bed, her heart still pounding hard. Graham was going to wake up soon. She could feel it.
A high-pitched giggle came from the vents. Hanna stiffened and looked down the hall. Patients lay motionless. Mop water gleamed on the floor. Everything was so still and quiet that for a second Hanna felt like she was dead.
She shuddered. If she and the others didn’t find Ali and her helper soon, she might be.
11
Family Bonding Time
As soon as Emily stepped into Saks Fifth Avenue at the King James Mall, a pin-thin girl appeared with a flower-shaped glass atomizer. “Want to try the new Flowerbomb?”
“Absolutely,” Iris insisted, pushing Emily out of the way and holding out her impossibly skinny, blue-veined wrist. “Now you, Emily.”
Emily shrugged and complied. After the perfume girl sprayed the fruity liquid on her wrist, Iris glanced at someone behind them. “You should try it, too, Mrs. Fields!”
Emily whirled around. Her mom stood in the entrance, peeling her plastic, see-through rain hat from her head. “M-mom?” Emily stammered. “What are you doing here?”
Mrs. Fields stuffed the hat into her quilted purse. “Iris invited me. And since it was on my way home from CVS, I figured, why not?” Then she stuck out her wrist for some Flowerbomb and gave Iris a warm smile.
This whole Iris thing was freaking Emily out more every second. For one thing, Emily kept waiting for The Preserve to call up and say, Um, have you stolen our patient? For another, she hated, hated, hated that Iris had to stay at her house—sometimes without Emily supervising. After Emily had returned from the panic room yesterday, she hadn’t known what to expect. What if Iris had decided to tell her parents everything? What if Iris had flipped out and gone after them with a kitchen knife?
But instead, she’d found Iris and her parents sitting on the living room couch watching Jeopardy! and drinking tea. Somehow, that was even more terrifying. Iris was acting like she was just a member of the family. “I’m sure Iris is tired, Mom,” Emily had blurted out in horror. “She’s had a long day, and she probably wants to go to bed.”
“What are you talking about? I’m wide awake!” Iris had said eagerly, moving a little closer to Mrs. Fields on the couch. She had been eating, Emily had noticed, one of her mom’s Rice Krispies treats. No one ate those things—they always came out hard as rocks and way over-buttered. Mrs. Fields, of course, had looked thrilled.
Now, Emily poked Iris’s side. “Why did you invite my mom?” she murmured.
Iris shrugged innocently. “She’s cool.”
Yeah, right, Emily thought, waiting for Iris to roll her eyes and say something nasty. But she didn’t. Instead, Iris turned, checked to see that the perfume girl’s back was turned and Mrs. Fields’s attention was occupied by a free makeup sample offer, and scooped up a Flowerbomb perfume box from a display table and slid it up the sleeve of the baggy sweatshirt Emily had lent her. Emily reached forward to stop her, but Iris just gave her an I-know-what-I’m-doing look. This was the reason they were at the mall, after all. Steal lots of shit from Saks was number sixteen on her list of Things I Want to Do During My Time Off from The Preserve. Maybe there were bonus points for doing it in front of Emily’s mom.
She trailed after Iris down the sweet-smelling corridor toward the Contemporary section. As Emily passed the handbags, someone yanked her arm. Spencer was crouched behind a table full of Marc by Marc Jacobs satchels. “Psst,” she whispered.
Emily ducked down beside her. “What are you doing here?”
Spencer’s eyes darted back and forth. “I special-ordered shoes for prom at Saks.” She peered down the corridor at Iris, who was now posing in front of a three-way mirror. “Has she told you anything yet?”
“Not since you last asked,” Emily grumbled. “We’ve been too busy.”
“Doing what?”
Emily gazed at a perfume ad across the aisle. The girl in the picture looked a little like Jordan, which made her heart ache. “Well, after I signed her out of The Preserve and before I met you at the panic room, Iris made me go to the city so she could make out with a Ben Franklin impersonator. And then, this morning, I had to drive her to her old school. Iris wanted to climb a rope in the playground and ring a brass bell at the top.” She’d looked like a spider on that rope, all spindly arms and legs, the jeans Emily lent her held up by a child-sized belt.
“It turns out high school kids hide pot up that pole,” Emily went on. “Iris came down with a huge bag. So now I’ve got an escaped mental patient and pot at my house. My parents will freak if they find out.”
As soon as she said it, she realized how ridiculous it sounded. Her parents would freak even more if they found out Emily was keeping the secret that Aria had stolen a priceless painting. And helped shove a girl off a roof. And everything else.
Spencer shifted her weight. “So she’s told you nothing about Ali?”
Emily looked around for Iris, finally spotting her blond head by a rack of miniskirts. “I’m working on it.” She’d asked Iris for an Ali tidbit last night, but Iris had said that Emily hadn’t done anything to really deserve information yet—she would have to prove herself. When Emily asked Iris what, specifically, she had to do to receive a blessed piece of information, Iris had tossed her hair, shrugged, and said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
