“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.”

I never made it that night. As I lay in my bed, singing Clash songs in my head for inspiration, I told myself it was because of Missy. She was restless again. It was too dangerous to get caught this late in the game. Missy was a little restless, going to the bathroom a couple of times, but I could’ve gone if I’d wanted to, if I’d had the guts.

The next morning, Bebe sidled up to me in the cafeteria, dropped a note on my tray and left.

V got caught in Clayton’s office last night. Missy told Sheriff that you’d been sneaking around, so they did a stakeout. V’s back on Level One. They might press charges against her! I saw her in the bathroom. She said she hid the pass key in her slipper while they questioned her, and then hid it back in the plant. She said to tell you that she is sorry. What now? Are we screwed? It was the second time V had taken the fall for me. And once again, I was angry. But this time it was me I was pissed at. I’d allowed V to claim responsibility for my breakout and now I’d hesitated in following through with my grand plan. V didn’t hesitate. She marched into risk. And willingly paid the price for it.

Right there in the cafeteria I made a decision: I would go into Clayton’s office, not that night, when everyone would be looking, but that day. I would go in because I had a right to be there, and the walls were only plaster and brick. I would get our files. I would make copies of them during dinner and I’d have them back before dark. Soon they’d change the key or lock the files or do something to keep one of us from striking again. Now was my window, and I had to leap through before it closed.

Clayton saw students in the morning and then again in the late afternoon, and she left Red Rock in between. I just had to sneak off the quarry and into her office, hide the files somewhere for Laurel to copy, and replace the originals, with no one the wiser. It was the equivalent of a commando mission behind enemy lines in broad daylight, with no camouflage and no backup. But it was what I had to do.

As soon as the door clicked closed behind me, I shuddered. Even though the rest of Red Rock had lost much of its intimidating veneer, Clayton’s office still had an ominous atmosphere. It felt like she was there, looking over my shoulder, though I’d checked to make sure her car was gone. I hated Clayton’s office more than any other room at Red Rock. It was like a cave housing all my deepest fears. I took a deep breath and reached for her file cabinet. It was unlocked.

An odd calm came over me as I went through the files, plucking out WALLACE, JONES, LARSON, HOWARTH, and finally, HEMPHILL. I knew I had to work fast—get in, get out—but holding my file in my hand, I couldn’t resist. I flipped it open, and phrases like “denial” “idealizing iconoclastic characteristics,” “narcissism” “in common with mother,” “paranoid schizophrenia” glared at me in Clayton’s neat print. There was also a sheaf of Xeroxed letters my dad and grandma had sent, including some from Jed. And then there was a letter I’d never seen. It wasn’t a copy. It was the original, on what looked like a brown paper bag in handwriting I knew all too well. I dropped the rest of the files and sank to the floor.

My dearest, darling ever-lasting lovey Brit:There are some mornings I wake up and it’s almost like I’ve forgotten the years that have passed. I see you so clearly—you in your pajamas, twirling scarves on the lawn, your feet wet with morning dew. You’re just a blur of color, all brightness and joy. I’m inside, making breakfast, watching you, thinking, how is it that I made this? How is it that this came from me? Call it life, call it a miracle. I just call it you, my biggest and best contribution to the world.I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened. I’m so sorry for being taken away from you. I count it a blessing that most of the time I don’t even know I’m sorry. But every so often comes a day like this when the chase stops, and for a moment, I’m free. It’s like at home in the winter, when just for a day, the gray goes away, and the sky is so clear you can see the mountain perfectly. Today is one of those days.It won’t last. The clouds always return to the sky and my own clouds come back to reclaim me. But I write this for you now as a testament—a sign that I was here, that I was your mom once, that I still am. When I finished reading, my tears were blinding me and I’d dampened the letter. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t move. But then it was like some invisible force pulled me out of that office, away from the dark room where all my worst fears lived.