Page 73 of Lovely Darkness

Hell if I know. It’s not my house, but he says, “Sasha and Nate are cooking dinner, Maggie and Indie are in the garden with Wendy, and I do not want to do it here.” He eyeballs Donovan. I have to agree with that. “Let’s go upstairs to my room.”

I’m too disoriented to disagree, so I follow him back down the front breezeway, across the main living room, and up the grand staircase. I haven’t been in the attic, so when we get up there, I take a moment to look around. It’s a nice room. A little bit claustrophobic with its long, narrow layout, but it’s not cluttered like most attics. Books line a series of built-in shelves around the window and the bed is tucked into a dormer, giving it a very cozy feeling. There’s also a fireplace. And when I think about the layout of the house, I realize that this fireplace chimney must be connected to the one down in Donovan’s hospital room.

Nick plops the box down on the bed without fanfare and pulls the top off.

“Files, huh?” I ask.

“No. Not just files.” And then he proceeds to fill me in on what they found in town.

I picture it as he talks. The cages, the dead rats, the basement.

When he’s done, the only thing I can think to say is, “What the fuck?”

“I think Pearl Springs was Carter’s base. I think if we look a little harder, we might find more.”

“Do you think there’s more in that print shop?”

He shakes his head. “No. I don’t know what that place was. But I don’t think Donovan, or Carter, is dumb enough to put everything in one place. Not in some random town where his friends might find it. I mean, Indie said she knew about the office. What was stopping her from poking around and finding out all his secrets?”

I state the obvious. “Mind control.”

“Maybe.” He bobs his head a little. “Probably.”

“Nick, there’s a real possibility that Donovan-slash-Carter was using Indie and she’s been completely compromised. Like unrecoverable. Like… she’s not coming back from this. Like—”

“All right, I get it. Stop.”

“Someone has to prepare Adam and McKay. I don’t know if this is gonna work. And I don’t care what that nurse says, Donovan woke up. They were both talking to me.”

Nick shoots me a dubious look. “You were asleep, Merc. I saw you when I came in the room.”

“That can’t be right. I had a recording. I was listening to it. There was a note in the chart if you don’t believe me.”

Nick waves a hand in the air. “Never mind that. And speaking of charts”—he points to them in the box—“these are what I found in the basement. But I’m not sure what they’re referring to. Could be the rats, but maybe not. We need to look through them.”

“What are we looking for?” He hands me a chart and I take it.

“Anything that will shed some light on what he was doing.”

I open my chart, fully expecting to decipher what this study pertains to in the first few seconds, and then let out a sigh. “What the hell is this?”

“Pedigrees,” Nick says. “No names, just numbers.”

“Hmm. Doesn’t look like a human chart.”

“No,” he says. “It doesn’t.”

“I mean, I just looked at Donovan’s and that’s what a human chart looks like.”

“Agreed.”

“But… then again, if you’re doing animal trials, wouldn’t you need the same kind of information? Species, weight, sex—right? Shit like that?”

“Yep.”

I hold up the chart. “So where is that stuff?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, genius.”