Forever Lost Read online

  I sighed, shaking my head. It was no use sitting back down in that miserable chair; I was wide awake now. I decided to walk down to the nurses’ station and see whether they could find Dr. Klaus, the doctor who’d treated Frank in the emergency room. I could ask him about this sedative business and find out how long he planned to keep my brother unconscious. And then maybe I could run back to the B and B where I was staying and grab another couple hours’ sleep before coming back to the hospital.

  Just as I exited Frank’s room, though, my phone beeped. I pulled it out, wondering if it was some kind of urgent message from ATAC headquarters. But instead, the name that flashed on my incoming text message was DETECTIVE RICHARD COLE.

  WE NEED TO TALK. MEET ME AT MY OFFICE.

  Detective Cole wasn’t one for exaggerations—so this sounded urgent.

  Dropping my phone back into my pocket, I headed to the exit, wondering what could possibly happen next.

  The Lion Sleeps Tonight

  “Isn’t this nice?” Chloe asked me as we snuggled together on a crude wooden raft, the water from the river sloshing gently against the sides. I sighed and closed my eyes. It was nice—a little weird, but nice. Above us, a crystal blue sky was dotted by the occasional white, puffy cloud. And cute little cartoon birds flitted around, singing . . . singing . . .

  “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”?

  “Whee dee dee dee oh whee dee dee dee we um weem a way . . .”

  The raft rocked gently as we floated downriver. I don’t know how much time passed—it felt like time had slowed down somehow, like we’d always been floating on this raft together. Chloe squeezed my hand and I opened my eyes to smile at her.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said, looking at me with concern in her eyes. “I was worried about you. I want—”

  Just then, a loud sploosh drew my attention to the water, and I sat up, my mouth dropping open in surprise. There, in the water, clinging to the side of the raft hand and holding out two tuna sandwiches in plastic bags, was a soaking-wet Alice. She still wore a pale pink nightgown and her princess tiara, and she looked a little disappointed in me.

  “Are you awake yet?” she demanded of me, her blue eyes huge in her small, worried face. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  My eyes flipped open to reveal a dingy white ceiling. I heard machines bleeping and blooping, and smelled the stark, antiseptic smell of institutional cleaner. I blinked a couple times, then glanced sideways, where I spotted a very surprised—almost frightened-looking—Chloe, perched in an uncomfortable-looking plastic seat. In her hands she clutched a beat-up copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, open to the middle. On a small white Formica table, a portable radio pumped out staticky oldies.

  “Whee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee . . .”

  I took a deep breath.

  I was in a hospital.

  Why?

  But as soon as my brain asked the question, my body answered it. Pain. It was vague and dulled, but my arms still felt sore, like they’d been buried under a pile of bricks. And my head pounded. Above all, though, I felt so, so sleepy. I blinked again and shook my head, trying to force myself awake.

  I turned to Chloe, who was still watching me curiously, like I was an animal in the zoo. She looked nervous.

  “Where am I?” I asked, reaching up to rub my eyes. My left hand had a needle sticking into it, feeding in purple liquid from a hanging IV. The bag was almost empty. “What happened?”

  Chloe sprung to her feet, looking unsure of what to do. For some reason, my question seemed to make her even more uncomfortable. “Um,” she said, her eyes darting around the equipment that surrounded me, looking everywhere but into my eyes. “Hey, Frank . . . how do you . . . feel?”

  She picked up a small white plastic object from the table next to me and began rapidly pressing a button. Was she calling a doctor? I shook my head again, fuzziness spreading into the edges of my vision. Where was I?

  “I feel like . . . like I’ve been hit by a truck,” I replied slowly, the words feeling strange and unwieldy in my mouth. I looked around the room: definitely a hospital room. But what had happened to me? Why did my arms hurt? Why was—I noticed now—why was my left arm and wrist in a cast? “Where’s Joe?” I asked finally, desperately wishing my brother were here to explain things.

  “Oh, Joe’s . . . around,” Chloe replied, rapidly hitting the button a few more times. “You know. He had some sort of errand to do. In town.”

  That sounded weird. Joe didn’t do “errands,” and it wasn’t like him to leave his unconscious brother alone in a hospital bed. Maybe he was working on something for a . . . case? Were we working on a case?

  “You’re awake.” A sharp, deep voice invaded my thoughts. I looked up in time to see a dark-haired man in a white lab coat enter the room and stride purposefully toward the bed. Strange: He appeared to be a doctor—my doctor?—and yet he didn’t seem happy about my being conscious at all.

  I squinted at him. “Who are you?” The guy looked strangely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He didn’t answer me, though, just checked my IV (still connected, still dripping) and frowned more deeply.

  “I thought I told you to give him the full bag of purple fluid,” the doctor said, glaring at Chloe. “That should have kept him asleep for at least two more hours.”

  “I did!” Chloe insisted, jumping to the doctor’s side like she was afraid of him. “And I’ve been playing music, reading to him, trying to be soothing, but he woke up anyway.”

  I leaned back against my pillow, my mind wandering. Whatever was in that purple IV, it was definitely making it hard for me to focus. Mysterious IVs . . . sedatives . . . Alice . . . Suddenly images started flooding my brain, and I sat straight up as it all started piecing together.

  Alice. The facility underground. I was kidnapped from our campsite and . . .

  “You were there!” I cried suddenly, using all my strength to point an accusing finger at Chloe. “In the underground bunker with me! You saw what was happening to all those kids, being drugged and sedated! Where’s Alice?”

  Chloe looked stricken. I could tell from her immediate reaction that she knew exactly what I was talking about. She paled, and her mouth fell open as she looked to the doctor for assistance. All at once I remembered his name too. Dr. Carrini. He’d been treating Justin, the kidnapped boy who’d mysteriously reappeared in town with no memory of the last twelve years. Justin was the reason ATAC had sent Joe and me to Misty Falls, Idaho. We were supposed to be getting to the bottom of what happened to him. But so far, every discovery we’d made had just led to another cluster of unanswerable questions.

  I was so busy watching Chloe that I was startled by two hands clasping the sides of my face and pulling me close to Dr. Carrini.

  “You’re talking nonsense,” he told me, his voice low and gravelly. “That’s why I asked to replace Dr. Klaus as your doctor. When you were being treated in the trauma room, you were babbling incoherently about what you’d supposedly seen. You’ve clearly been given some drugs that are producing false memories. An underground bunker where kids are kept hostage? Mysterious medical treatments and drugs? That would make an excellent science fiction movie. But it’s not real,” he scoffed.

  Memories. That’s why Dr. Carrini had been treating Justin: He was some sort of nationally recognized expert on memory and recovering repressed memories. Since Justin claimed to remember nothing, Dr. Carrini had been called in to help. But he was especially concerned about “false” memories, which he’d cautioned that Justin might be reporting in an effort to please his parents.

  I tried to sit up. “It was real!” I insisted, looking desperately at Chloe. I knew that for sure: My memories were not false. You were there! “I remember! I—”

  But before I could finish, Dr. Carrini pulled a hypodermic needle out of his chest pocket and violently jabbed it into my arm. I stiffened, stunned, wanting to fight him off, but I was too weak from whatever was in the purple liqu
id to move quickly, and within seconds, a warm, deadening sensation ran through my veins, making it impossible to do anything but go limp against the pillows.

  “That’s it,” I heard Dr. Carrini say as the fight went out of me. “Just calm down. This will put you out for a good, long time.”

  But I don’t want that! I want to be awake, I want to find Joe, I want to find out what happened to . . .

  Before I could even complete the thought, though, the room went dark, and soon Chloe and I were drifting off on the raft again.

  Intervention

  I called a cab to take me to the Misty Falls police station, which was in downtown (if a stoplight and a couple of stores qualified as a downtown) Misty Falls and a few miles away from the hospital. When I walked in, the young man working the reception desk gave me an odd look—part suspicious and part sympathetic.

  “Detective Cole’s waiting for you down the hall in the conference room,” he said, gesturing to the hallway on his right.

  Conference room? It seemed a little odd that Detective Cole would require such a large room to meet with just me, so I wondered if there might be a couple of other people involved. When I turned the corner to enter the conference room, sure enough, my breath caught. On one side of the table sat a tired and frustrated-looking Detective Cole; on the other side, sitting all in a row like a firing squad, were Jacob Greer, Justin’s father; Donna, his young, pretty girlfriend; and Michael Smith, the arrogant private investigator they’d recently hired to find the missing Justin.

  “Well hello, Joe,” Detective Cole greeted me with weariness in his voice.

  I stepped into the room, nodding, as Jacob, Donna, and Smith all turned to glance at me. Jacob openly scowled. Donna just watched me blankly. And Smith smirked, shook his head, and looked back at the table. Last I saw him was the night before, when I’d sort of maybe been kind of stealing his motorcycle, which I later crashed, so I guessed I could understand his not rolling out a welcome mat. The apparent scorn of Jacob and Donna, though, was a little more surprising.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Detective Cole cleared his throat. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the chair next to his.

  I sat, getting an eyeful of what Detective Cole must have been facing for the last few minutes: three very challenging, unimpressed faces.

  “It seems,” Detective Cole began, “that Jacob, Donna, and Smith have some concerns about how I’ve been handling their case.”

  Jacob snorted, pulling his flannel shirt tighter around him. He was tall and bearded, with salt and pepper hair, and at the moment, he looked like an angry lumberjack. “That’s an understatement.”

  I frowned. “Why are you upset?” I asked, honestly not getting it. “We had a major breakthrough in the case last night. We found my brother, coming out of some sort of hatch in the woods. He told us about the system of underground tunnels where he’d been taken from our campsite—and he saw some of the Misty Falls Lost there!”

  Jacob glared at me, and Michael Smith openly scoffed. “An underground system of tunnels, eh?” he asked, smirking at me like the very idea was ridiculous. “Some kind of underground laboratory where eight children could be kept undetected for over a decade? And so that whoever’s keeping them could—do what with them?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “That’s why we have to find where this hatch led to, and ask my brother for more information when he wakes up.” I glanced at Detective Cole, explaining, “They’ve got him sedated right now, under orders from his doctor. Maybe later you and I could go over there and—”

  “Excuse me,” Jacob broke in, slamming his hand down on the table. “I think I came in here to talk about my missing son. Can we please focus on my missing son?”

  I turned to look at the gruff, angry man. Since we’d met him a week ago, Jacob had struck Frank and me as a little rough around the edges—awkward, easily angered, even a little mean. I still wasn’t sure whether this was because Justin’s reappearance was stressing him out so much, or because he had something less savory to hide. According to Justin’s mother, Jacob had never been an ideal father, and their relationship had dissolved soon after Justin went missing. As far as I could tell, though, Jacob truly loved his son—he just had an incredibly awkward way of expressing it.

  Detective Cole reached out his hand toward Jacob. “Listen, Jacob,” he said soothingly, “nobody’s forgotten about Justin. Getting him back safely to you is my number one priority. But I truly believe that what we saw in the woods last night could be the key to—”

  Smith cut him off with a snort. “And what exactly did you see in the woods last night?” He looked challengingly at Detective Cole, then me, almost daring us to answer.

  “Well . . .,” I began, but Detective Cole held up a hand to stop me.

  “As I’ve already told you,” the detective told Jacob in the same calm, controlled voice, “Joe saw his brother emerge from a trapdoor in the ground, and approximately one hour later, when my officers and I arrived on the scene, there was an explosion. The trapdoor and the tunnel Frank described below were destroyed. But from what Frank told us—”

  “So there’s no evidence,” Smith cut in again, glaring at Detective Cole.

  Detective Cole waited a beat before responding. “There is . . . there is a hole dug out by the explosion,” he insisted.

  Donna snorted now, twisting her mouth into an angry smirk. “But what connects that hole to Justin?” she asked, looking from Detective Cole to me. “Just the ravings of some druggie kid. No offense.” She shrugged in my direction.

  It took me a minute to figure out her meaning. Druggie? Wait a minute. . . .

  I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it. “Ma’am . . . no offense to you, but my brother is about the furthest thing from a druggie you could imagine. He won’t even take medicine for a cold because it makes him drowsy.”

  Smith folded his arms, turning to face me. “I suppose that’s why the hospital says he had five different drugs in his system when he was admitted.”

  I glanced at Detective Cole. Was that true? The detective nodded slightly, with a little shrug. Well, that’s not Frank’s fault, I thought.

  “He was being held captive,” I said, responding to Jacob now. “He says the people down there gave drugs to the kids to keep them quiet and manageable.”

  “Either way, why should we trust him?” Donna asked. “He was still high as a kite. Who knows if what he remembers was real?”

  I took a deep breath. “Really,” I said, “my brother is one of the most trustworthy—”

  But Jacob cut me off, holding up his hand. “All right,” he said. “Let’s look at what your brother is saying. What is that?”

  I swallowed, thinking back. “He . . .” Well, the truth was, Frank himself wasn’t terribly sure what he’d seen in the underground bunker. When I’d first asked him where he was coming from, his response had been I have no idea. “He said it was an underground bunker of some kind. He was kept alone in a small room for a long time, being fed sandwiches through a slot in the door, with no outside contact. Finally he befriended a little girl, Alice, who he believed to be one of the Misty Falls Lost. And eventually, when he got out of the room, he saw that other Misty Falls Lost were living there too—including Justin.” I paused. “He said there were different medical personnel there too, including a big guy they called Baby Doc. . . .”

  I trailed off. Jacob was rolling his eyes now, Smith was staring down at the table, shaking his head, and Donna snorted again. I sighed, wishing it all made more sense. But I knew it was true. I trusted Frank. Even under the influence of whatever drugs they’d had him on, he wouldn’t make something like this up.

  “Is there a problem, Jacob?” Detective Cole asked. I could hear the frustration in his voice, and I felt it too. Here we were, so close to finally finding out what happened to Justin, and Jacob was questioning it. Why?

  Jacob shifted in his seat, stamping his foot onto the floor w
ith a bang! that made us all jump. “You’re darn straight, there’s a problem,” he replied, looking from Detective Cole to me. “Underground bunkers? Kids being held for years, for no reason? Mysterious doctors, doing . . . who knows what? Handing out cocktails of drugs to children?” He shook his head. “This isn’t an episode of Lost, men, this is my son’s life. His life.”

  He paused for a minute, and Detective Cole began, “We understand that, Jacob—”

  Jacob slammed his hand down on the table, cutting the detective off. “No you don’t! No you don’t,” he insisted, glaring at Detective Cole. “Do you have kids, Detective?”

  The detective looked surprised. “No,” he said after a moment. “No, but—”

  “Then you can’t possibly know how I feel,” Jacob continued. “I’ve lost my son. My son. Not once, but thanks to you and your sorry excuse for a police force, twice.”

  Detective Cole winced.

  “And now,” Jacob went on, pointing at the detective, “you’re trying to sell me some two-bit science fiction movie to explain where my son went from that hospital. Well, I’m not buying.” He stood up, glancing at Donna, who quickly followed suit. Smith stood up too, smirking vaguely, and all three glared down at us.

  Jacob frowned at the detective for a few more seconds, then nodded at me and silently stalked out. Smith shook his head in my direction—I gulped, remembering his wrecked bike from the night before—and then all three walked out of the station.

  There was silence for a minute as the detective and I thought our private thoughts.

  “I saw it,” Detective Cole said finally. When I looked up questioningly, he went on, “I saw that hatch, son. I believe your brother is telling the truth.”

  I nodded. “So do I,” I agreed. “But for some reason, Jacob doesn’t even want us to look into it.”

  Cole stood up. “Well, we most certainly are looking into it,” he insisted. “I’ve got a team of officers out there right now, looking for clues in the rubble. But we need more information. We need to talk to Frank.”