Lancaster Green Chapter 1
Twenty-two… Twenty-three…
James’s muscles seized and he nearly dropped the free weight on his foot, dodging it just in time. This was bad. He’d been at nearly twice this many reps at ten pounds more weight before-
He sat down on the bench in front of the old floor-length mirror he’d been using to check his form, breathing heavily and only slightly wishing he was dead. He was thankfully alone in the basement gym at headquarters, having come down here as soon as he got into work this morning to avoid seeing anyone else just yet.
The old high school sweatshirt he was wearing got in the way as he tried to massage his arm. Normally he’d have lost it at the beginning of his workout, but the less skin showing right now, the better. If he’d been able to safely exercise with his gloves on, he would have. But Amelia had been firm about that and, even through his fear, he could see the safety problem. But if he sanitized at the beginning of his workout and then again at the end, he’d be fine. Maybe. It hadn’t helped last time, but it was worth trying. Not that there was really any danger here in headquarters, but anything could happen anywhere.
Was James out of his fucking mind? He tried to kill half his team in this building, of course there was danger here. It was him.
He should get up and keep going, but James couldn’t make himself move just yet. He’d been back at work for three days now and he still wasn’t sure if he’d made the right choice. Not moving to Ohio, yes. That he was sure of. Now that he had some blood flow, and a few days where he was not smoking enough weed to make himself stop thinking all day, Ohio wasn’t the answer. Just like every single person on his team had told him. Even those he’d come after with a knife, telling them he’d put it through their throats.
But he wasn’t being controlled right now, right?
James picked up his water bottle and considered it for a second. Then he tossed it across the room, the little purple body bouncing off the basement’s fieldstone wall. It was metal, so it didn’t shatter like the plates he kept throwing at the ground at home. But the noise it made reverberated satisfyingly through the room, wobbling in James’s skull. The bottle landed on the ground, then rolled under the exercise bike and out of sight.
There were footsteps on the stairs seconds later. Of course there were, that had to have echoed through the whole house. James stayed where he was. It was okay. No one would tell him to throw that water bottle, so he wasn’t being controlled.
And the same with the plates he kept breaking at home, though Graham’s patience for that approach might be running out soon if James kept it up. But he hadn’t known he was being controlled. Hell, it had never even occurred to him that that might happen. So how could he know that he wasn’t being controlled now unless he did something like that, something impulsive and unexpected?
The gym door opened and Graham walked in. “What was that?” he asked.
“Dropped my water bottle,” James said with a shrug, still trying to work out the cramp in his bicep.
Graham clearly knew it was a lie, but he wasn’t going to call James out. Instead, he nodded toward James’s arm. “You okay?”
A question he never wanted to hear again and would probably never have an answer to. But he nodded. “Yeah.”
“Amelia wants to have a team meeting at eleven.”
It was about nine-thirty now. “Great,” James said. “I’ll, um, just finish down here.”
“How’s it going?”
“Oh, bad.”
Graham laughed, adjusting his heavy gray sweater. “You were gone for a month,” he said. “Cut yourself some slack.”
That was what everyone had been telling James to do for over a month now. But even if he could somewhat grasp the idea that what happened wasn’t his fault, as every single person here had told him, he felt like the opposite approach was necessary. If he was going to survive this, he needed to jump back in as quickly and as powerfully as possible.
Except when it came to the idea of taking back the captaincy. That wasn’t going to happen. The team needed someone they could trust, not someone who would get himself mind-controlled and try to kill them. That last night of medical leave, when he finally made the decision to go back to the Foundation, that was the one condition he’d given himself. He’d go back, because if he was going to stay in Massachusetts, he still needed a job. And he knew this one. But he wouldn’t be captain.
And he wasn’t going to give it his all anymore, that was for fucking sure. He’d do what his team needed in order to keep them safe and functioning, but that was it.
“Just don’t eat anything and you’ll be fine.”
Why had he come back? He shouldn’t be here, he should be anywhere else, he should be dead, he should be-
“Hey, breathe.”
Graham was sitting on the bench beside him now, a hand on James’s sweaty shoulder.
“Tell me five things you see in the room right now.”
Right, this wasn’t the first time James had had what was apparently a panic attack, nor was it the first time Graham had walked him through this technique. James’s cousin Gemma had attacks like these when she was younger and he remembered being with her through a couple of them when he babysat. She’d explained how it felt, but while he’d come close to that feeling in the past, they’d never been a regular part of his life. And now here he was, falling apart and unable to help his team if they were in danger.
Adele could come back at any moment. She’d done it twice already, what was stopping her? It sure as hell wasn’t the Foundation, so there was no reason she didn’t walk in that door right there and take him back.
She hadn’t told him directly to kill Graham, but if he had to, he would have. He wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
“You should go,” James said quietly over his racing heart.
“Yeah, sure.”
Graham didn’t move, just like last time this had happened, the night before he came back. He kept his hand on James’s shoulder. “Breathe,” Graham said again.
He demonstrated, a hand on his belly as he took a deep breath in. James tried to mimic it as he looked around the room. “Exercise bike,” he said.
“Good.”
“Um, a broken door on the cabinet. Soundproofing panel. Window. Free weights.”
“Good,” Graham said. His tone was gentle, professional in a way that reflected his former career in mental health. James wasn’t sure he even realized he’d slipped into that role. “Four things you can touch.”
James ran his hand lightly over the bench. “The bench,” he said. “Um, sweat.”
“Fair.”
His hands were too exposed, if he touched anything else he might-
“Skip it,” Graham said. “Three things you can hear.”
“My, um, my heart.”
“Okay, let’s get that under control so you don’t hear that.”
James laughed, still shaky, but his mind wasn’t as messy. They kept going like this, Graham prompting him and James answering until finally his breathing was back to normal and he didn’t feel quite like he was going to splinter.
“Sorry,” he said a little later as they sat on the bench.
“It’s a marathon, man,” Graham said. “You have to remember that. Are you ready to come upstairs?”
James needed to shower before he started work. Yesterday he’d just saved his workout until the end of the day so he could go home and use his own shower. But today his shift had just started. And Amelia might let him do it anyway, but he needed to get back to normal if he was going to do this at all.
The bathroom was open when James got upstairs and he hesitated outside the door for a moment. He’d been about to kill Amelia, but she’d been able to stop him. She’d known how to trick him into forgetting that plan and doing exactly what she told him to do.
She’d controlled him too. And she felt so guilty about it even though without her, he would have killed them all.
He’d been screaming in the water. He could still feel the salt burning his eyes.
“James.”
It was Amelia this time, appearing beside him in the hallway. “Take a break, go home, and shower.”
“I-”
“Or I can stay in the room again?”
She’d done that for him the one time he showered here after the antidote sequence ended, sitting silently on the other side of the curtain while he tried his best not to scream under the shower spray. It was tempting to ask her to do it again, but she had too much to do without sitting in the bathroom with a team member who was too scared to shower alone.
“No, I’ve got it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he lied, with a smile that he knew looked fake.
“Okay. If you need me, just let me know.”
He waited for her to go back to what was technically her office now. She kept saying it was his, but not if he wasn’t taking the captaincy back.
Once she was gone, James forced himself into the bathroom and closed the door. The water was freezing and James waited for it to warm up, fully clothed and trying not to think about how the glass of antidote had been right there on the counter. Or how the bathtub had been filled and waiting.
Amelia had flinched when he touched her. Because she knew what he was just then.
And he had to get over it. At least for the next five minutes.
Heart racing, James forced himself under the shower spray. It was warm now and would have felt good in any other situation. But now he was swallowing down panic as he scrubbed his body, reminding himself over and over that this soap was nowhere near the wellness fair. Just like everything he had at home.
It hadn’t been soap anyway, it had been lotion. Adele had applied it to the outside of a wallet and planted it on the ground where she knew James would find it, pick it up, and try to return it to its owner. It hadn’t been some grand conspiracy, it was one desperate, selfish woman who couldn’t get to him anymore. At least that was what he reminded himself as he rinsed the soap off.
His hair could wait. It was fine, whatever.
And then he was done. There were probably still soap suds on his body as he got out of the shower, nearly tripping over the side of the tub in his hurry to get out. He dried off, then realized he’d left his clothes in the back bedroom.
It was okay, he could handle this for a moment. It was fine, James had done this hundreds of times. He wrapped the towel around his waist, draped another one over his shoulders, and hurried out of the bathroom and down the hall. There was nothing here, nothing was going to get him in the few seconds before he got dressed.
Of course Bradley was working at the computer in the back bedroom, he always worked there. Except for when he’d tackled James to keep him from killing himself on Adele’s command, then did homework in the gray bedroom with James for the rest of the night. Or a foggy night he somewhat remembered, filled with nightmares interlaced with the sound of Bradley swearing on comms with another team.
Now Bradley looked up, startled, as James came into the room. “Sorry,” James said, hurrying past him in his towel. “I forgot my clothes.”
Bradley looked away from him and pointed at James’s backpack sitting on the bed. “There,” he said.
“Sorry,” James said again.
“For what?”
Good question. Bradley went to stand up. “No, it’s fine,” James said, attempting to unzip his bag with bare, shaking hands while also keeping the towel in place. “I’ll go…”
The pink bedroom was out, Madelyn was sleeping in there. And someone had just gone into the bathroom. There was no way he could sit here naked and wait for one of them to be open, that was far too much time to be vulnerable. Leaving only the gray bedroom, where he’d spent a week sweating and hallucinating his way through treatment.
“I’m getting a coffee,” Bradley said, picking up his still half-full mug and walking out the door, closing it behind him.
***
It was very weird not running the staff meeting. It was weird enough being back, but things here at headquarters really hadn’t changed much in the month since James had left, telling himself he’d never come back. There were new locks on the doors that James made himself look at as he walked in and out. It wasn’t healthy and Amelia had already scolded him for it. But they were the same heavy duty locks that Graham had installed at home for the same reason.
They still didn’t know where she was. Amelia had sat with James on that first day back and told him, carefully, what the Foundation had and hadn’t done to find Adele in the month he’d been out. And as far as he knew, there had been no updates since then. The Foundation seemed to think she’d left the country.
Maybe she had, and this was as over as it would ever be. Maybe even if they never found her, James could somehow move on with his life.
Or maybe he’d get tricked again. He’d pick up another wallet someone dropped. Or maybe he’d touch a subway pole or a door handle somewhere. And the next morning he’d wake up right back under her control.
The gloves helped with that, at least. He had them on right now, lightweight black gloves that let him lower the chances of getting infected. As long as he wore them as often as possible when he was outside his house, James would be alright.
“Who’s excited for a new case?” Amelia said with a tired laugh as she shooed Fang, the old calico branch cat, away from the presentation screen. “This is a weird one.”
The image on the screen flickered, and after a few muttered threats from Bradley over at the computer bank, it came back on, showing a building that was weirdly familiar to James, but he couldn’t place it.
“Lancaster Green,” Amelia said. “It’s a nursing home-slash-assisted living facility in Lancaster.”
That was why he recognized it. It had been remodeled at some point in the past decade, but the facility was close to James’s childhood home and he’d driven past it hundreds of times in his life without giving it much thought.
“James, you’re from Lancaster, right?” Madelyn asked.
James nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly.
Madelyn looked at him until she finally caught his eye. She smiled and he did his best to smile back. Normal.
“And you’re leading on this one,” Amelia said.
He looked at her, surprised, and she also smiled encouragingly. “There’s something haunting the nursing home,” she continued. “Some staff and residents have reported a kind of cloudy spectral figure hovering around dying residents.”
A ghost. That was a simple one then. They’d go take all the reports, then cleanse it. He could handle that no problem.
The image changed to the next slide, which showed a smudged photo of an empty hospital room. Amelia looked at the screen for a second, then at Bradley. “What is this?” she asked.
“The photo they sent over,” Bradley said. “Supposedly someone in the room could see the figure right then, but the camera didn’t pick it up.”
That happened often enough. Sometimes the ghost would be clear to everyone, other times the camera didn’t pick it up at all. There were all kinds of implications to be studied there, James was sure.
And the quality of the image didn’t help. Before now, he might have said something about it. But the less attention he drew to himself, the better. So he stayed silent.
“So you and I are going to go over there today,” Amelia said to James. “Bradley’s on comms for that one. Madelyn, you’re going to finish up Turner’s today. God, I hope you’re finishing Turner’s today.”
James wasn’t quite sure what Turner’s was. It was a shop, he knew that. But he had missed the details of the case.
Amelia smiled at him again and he did his best to smile back. This was good. This was him getting back into it, getting back to normal. The past couple days, James had been either in-house or on a few cases with Amelia in charge. It was almost like he was in training again, basically shadowing her as he remembered how to do this. But he was in charge of this one and, with his nearly fifteen years on the job, the nerves in his stomach were actually unexpected.
“The nursing home itself was built in the seventies. It was a pretty institutional, boxy looking place, but they renovated it a few years back,” Amelia said.
James actually remembered the renovation. It had caused traffic backups all through the quiet country streets surrounding Lancaster Green. At one point, an accident between a couple of construction trucks had caused traffic to be rerouted past James’s parents’ house several blocks away. His dad said he’d stood in the front yard with his morning coffee and just watched these lines of traffic coming down the street, something that rarely happened out there near their family’s condo.
“-floors and a staff of approximately fifty-five.”
Shit, Amelia had been talking. Had he lost time again or had he just been distracted? There was no way he would know if he’d lost time, but if he was being controlled again, he probably wouldn’t snap the pencil he had in his hand right now.
Snap.
“James, you okay?” Amelia asked.
“Fine,” he said, looking down at the two halves of pencil in his hands. “Sorry, how many floors did you say?”
“Two,” Amelia said, still looking concerned.
From the corner of his eye, James could see Bradley looking at his hands and he wanted to hide them. “So it won’t be bad,” Amelia continued. “We can’t put cameras in the residents’ rooms, of course. But there’s a few hallways that already have surveillance that we can look at, plus interviews and sensors. I’ve got some new sensors we can stick in the rooms and keep there overnight. They’re cool, but there’s not a lot of them and the battery life isn’t great. But it’s worth a shot.”
“Maybe the first useful tech the Foundation has sent us in months,” Madelyn added, smiling at James in a clear attempt to get him to smile again.
“So that’s that one,” Amelia said. “Any questions?”
“Do you need research on the area?” Madelyn asked.
Amelia looked at James and he realized Madelyn was speaking to him. “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” he said quietly, too aware of everyone looking at him now. “I know the area pretty well and I’m sure interviews and documents from the site will be enough to get by. If it’s the land, I’ll ask about it when, um-”
He shook his head. “When Gabriella’s in. She might have some ideas then.”
How did they possibly feel safe sitting in this room with him right now? He’d attacked Madelyn and she’d had to defend herself by hitting him with her cane. And now she was sitting across from him, in the same seat she’d been in then, the same cane resting beside her, asking so casually about research needs. It didn’t make sense.
“Next up is Market Basket,” Amelia said. “Graham, you’re on that one. They have no fucking clue what the night guard found in their deli the other night. So that’ll be a fun one. Here’s the picture.”
Bradley moved the slideshow to the next slide, but James was distracted again. He said he’d stick a knife in their throats. Right there on the stairs, they’d been hiding from him and he said that to the people he trusted most in the world.
“James?”
He blinked and looked over. Amelia was sitting at the front of the room, just like she had been, but the others were gone. How long had he been here?
“The meeting’s over,” she said.
“I-”
“You’re fine,” she said before he could say or do anything. “You’re distracted, that’s all.”
“Where did they all go?”
“To do their stuff. Now we’re going to do ours. Come on, grab your coat.”
