Page 86 of To Save Him

Could I do this?  Was I ready to find answers that I perhaps wouldn’t want?

For the sake of my children and our safety, Ineededto know, whether I wanted to or not.  All we knew about Brandon was what he’d chosen to show us and I needed more.  So, by the time I got to the top of the stairs, I’d steeled myself, and I only gripped the doorknob to Gabriel’s bedroom for a few seconds before turning it and pushing the door open.

I knew Dr. Cartwright could probably find answers, but how many weeks of probing would it take?  How many agonizing sessions would they have to go through before they could get to the heart of all that was wrong with Brandon?  And what would we find there?

No.  I needed to knownow…and I was ready.

I walked into Gabriel’s room—only, for the first time ever, it didn’t quite feel like my oldest son’s anymore.  It was rather stark now, and I could feel Brandon’s presence in there.  I took a deep breath, steeling myself once more, and walked over to the closet where I knew Brandon’s backpack was stored.

I opened the door and there was the backpack, just where I’d left it the last time I’d been snooping around in his things.  As before, I lifted out clothing, followed by the weird assortment of food and other items, only to reach the bottom of the backpack.

I paused in disbelief. Had I screwed up putting everything back last time?  I felt a bit of a panic, realizing a misstep like that alone could possibly give away what I’d been doing.  But I took a deep breath and started going through each item I’d removed from the backpack and placed on the bed, because it was possible that I’d maybe stuck the papers in the fold of the pair of jeans or something.

But the papers weren’t there.

Maybe I’d accidentally dropped them in my haste last time.  I got up and checked on the floor of the closet and then walked back to the bed, getting down on my hands and knees and looking underneath.  Feeling anxious, I once more looked through the items on the bed.

Where were those damned papers?

I hadn’t imagined them, had I?

I took a deep breath.  No, I knew I’d seen them.  I could practically feel them between my fingers, remembering the slippery thin texture of the pages, the acrid smell of them, the shock I’d felt when realizing for the first time that Brandon might not be the person he claimed to be.

IfIhadn’t lost them, there were a few possibilities as to what had happened.  For instance, it was possible that Brandon had dug them out—and, perhaps, after his first psychologist session, he’d been inspired to.

As though in shock, I replaced all the items in the backpack, one piece at a time, trying to figure out what had happened.  There were other possibilities, of course.  JR, for one.  My son was fascinated with this man who had, on so many levels, replaced his big brother.  I could almost see JR nosing around in his worship, wanting to find out more about his hero.  Annabel too had plenty of opportunity and might have wanted to discover more about Brandon after he’d inspired her to break off her relationship with Liam.  If she were considering Brandon as a replacement love interest, she very well might have been snooping.

Or maybe ithadbeen Brandon, as I’d first thought, who’d moved the papers—only what if his motive was more sinister than I’d initially considered?

No matter.  I needed to tap the memory centers of my brain instead.  With little conscious thought, I sat on the bed and replaced the items into the backpack one at a time.  My active brain was focused on a task:  to remember what I’d seen on those damned forms that I no longer had access to.

Where had that place been?  I knew the name of the hospital and its location had been on the top of the discharge papers.  It had been somewhere back east—southeast, if I recalled correctly.  Maybe South Carolina or Virginia.  But I knew if I could remember the name of hospital, I could search for it online.

Something about soldiers—no,veterans.  Yes, the wordveteranwas part of its name.  I was certain of that much.  Some state’s veteran hospital?  I gritted my teeth as I put the small jar of peanut butter back in the bag before adding clothing.  Why couldn’t I remember?

Virginia?

And some guy’s name, if I recalled correctly.  Something like the General Patton Veteran’s Hospital…and the address had been underneath the name, I thought.

God, this was going to drive me crazy.  I zipped up the backpack and set it in the closet, not as carefully as before.  I should have been more cautious—should have been scared out of my mind that those papers were gone—but I was busy trying to wrack my brain, rapt in trying to play detective.

I hurried out of the room and rushed down the stairs to my computer.  I’d always been a hell of a researcher, and now was the time for me to put my skills to use.  I had to find out the truth about Brandon, no matter what.

The computer was already on, so I opened my browser, went straight for a search engine, typedveterans hospitals in Virginia, and clickedenterbefore even sitting down.  By the time my butt was in the chair, the first ten results were displayed on the page.  I got plenty of links too, including two with people’s names as part of the hospital names, but neither of them sounded right.  I opened up Notepad and typed those two in case I had to come back to them, but I was going to try again, this time changing the state toSouth Carolina.

There were far more results from that search, and I had no idea why, but it was a lot like the one for Virginia.  Nothing looked familiar to me at all as I scrolled down the page…until the last result.  The Charles H. Basse Veterans Medical Center looked familiar.  It lookedright.  According to the web, it was located just outside the city of Florence.  I couldn’t remember if that was what the papers had said, but it didn’t seem wrong.

So I clicked through.  The hospital’s website seemed like the website for any medical facility—pictures of various locations on the “campus,” links to all sorts of departments, and their mission on the front page, showing a caring nurse who wasn’t quite smiling (after all, I was sure, it was deemed inappropriate because people might be suffering) but seemed approachable.  I knew, having been exposed to way too much internet marketing, that this image had to have been carefully chosen.

But I wasn’t there to analyze their choice of photos.

I spent the better part of an hour clicking links and then the back button before clicking on new links in a back-and-forth process.  The problem was I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.  Validation, to be sure—a sort of reassurance that I hadn’t imagined seeing those papers in Brandon’s backpack.

There was a ridiculous amount of information about PTSD, and it made me believe that this was definitely where Brandon had been.  It had to be.  What was weird, though, was that many of the links on the page clicked onto other websites, almost as if they were trying to pass the buck.  But they promised to help veterans who suffered from trauma-induced disorder—and it just felt like the right place.

I took a deep breath, checking the time in the lower right-hand corner of my computer screen.  It wasn’t quite three o’clock yet, meaning I could maybe get away with making a phone call before my kids or Brandon arrived home.

I had to take that chance.

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