Float

Original Edition: Chapter Twenty-Two

Instead of blurting out all the questions I had, I turned to peer through the car window. The hospital at Marlin Bay looked like it'd been painted white when it first opened, but had since then faded to a slightly muddy shade of cream. The building wasn't anything fancy, really, just a pair of rectangular blocks stacked atop one another—the bottom horizontally, the top vertically. There was blue trim around the windows and a blue awning out over the front sliding glass doors, but other than that, the whole structure looked pretty bland.

Blake didn't stop to park in the front lot.

Instead, he kept driving. It was only once we'd started down a little street that ran along the side of the building that I noticed the rest of the hospital, which had been completely concealed by the main building from my view back in the parking lot out front. There was another large building, just as cream-colored and plain as the first, which appeared to be connected to the front building by a fully enclosed bridge lined with glass walls.

Blake turned the Jeep down the street between the two halves of the Marlin Bay Hospital. The road was wide enough so that perpendicular parking spaces ran along both sides of the road, but two cars could still drive past one another without clipping mirrors. The two structures flanking us weren't all that tall—maybe five stories tall, at most—but if the small trees planted at the back of the front building were any indication, the buildings blocked out most of the wind.

I gripped the seatbelt across my chest with one hand as Blake slowed the Jeep. Most of the parking spaces along the street were empty, so he didn't have any trouble pulling into one. He cut the motor, pulled the keys from the ignition, and went to open his door without so much as turning to face me.

I figured I should follow him, so I popped open my own door and scrambled out of the Jeep.

And then I saw it.

I don't know why I hadn't spotted all the bright blue tarps on the sidewalk across the street, or the three ladders propped up against the wall at varying heights. But there, on the flat façade of the back building, was a gigantic, half-completed mural.

Rachel's mural. It had to be.

My feet began to move as if they had a mind of their own, and I walked around to the rear of Jesse Fletcher's Jeep so I could get a better look at the artwork. The colors were so vibrant. At least twenty slightly cartoonish children of various ages and ethnicities were depicted larger than life, laughing together and playing soccer and basketball and tennis and what seemed like every other sport offered at a public school. Each child wore a different colored shirt and a huge grin, but some of them were in wheelchairs and others had limbs missing. One of them, the farthest to the right, had a surfboard tucked under his good arm and was facing the open expanse of wall where I could make out the faint outline of seaweed tendrils and a giant sea turtle.

"Wow," I breathed.

I glanced to my side to find that Blake had walked around the back of the car to stand next to me. But he had his back to the mural, and his eyes were trained up on the other building behind me.

"Psst, Blake," I whispered theatrically, "mural's this way."

Blake didn't respond for a moment.

"Third floor, second window from the left," he told me, nodding his head up at the building behind me. "That was my room."

It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, but when my idiot brain finally processed his words, I took a couple steps until he and I were both standing away from the Jeep. My eyes flew up to the building, counting out three floors and two windows over. I waited to feel some sort of all-encompassing feeling of knowledge wash over me. When it didn't, I looked towards Blake.