Haunted Rayne

19 | Alluring Attire

On Saturday morning, Doctor Henry McGowan sat in his office chair with one leg crossed, supporting the pages of his little flagged booklet on the back of his knee. He nodded as Bianca Hawthorne spoke cheerfully about her recovery, but there was something ominous in her gaze. Perhaps it was the way her smile failed to wrinkle the corners of her eyes. Or, perhaps it was the way she referred to him as "Doctor McGowan" instead of "Red," as many of the other students had taken to as of late.

Had she always had green eyes? He couldn't remember.

"You know," Bianca began, "Doctor Shaw never made me stay this late on a Saturday. There something on your mind?"

"I just want to make sure you're well," Doctor McGowan replied. "You fell ill shortly after Doctor Shaw—"

"—vanished into the trees?" Bianca supplied smoothly.

"The trees?" Doctor McGowan made a sound, somewhere caught between a cough and a laugh. "Oh, Miss Hawthorne, I believe the phrase you're looking for is 'vanished into thin air.' "

"No," she corrected, her smile as vacant as her gaze. "I meant the trees."

"Ah, then." He hesitated. "I suppose what I mean to say is that ever since Doctor Shaw left us, you have been having trouble . . . adjusting . . . and that's okay."

Bianca nodded.

Doctor McGowan pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. "Bianca, why do you say that she vanished into the trees?"

She looked out the barred window. "Tonight is Homecoming."

"Yes, it is," he agreed, following her gaze to the rain-slicked windows, framed by iron bars. He had worked longside Doctor Shaw for several years, both committed to their mission of preventing campus suicides. It surprised him that she would have left so suddenly. The uptick in on-campus deaths over the last two decades should have been preventable, and they had wanted to prevent it together.

Or so he thought . . .

So where was she? Why didn't she tell him that she was leaving?

Doctor McGown looked back at the young girl before him. He had felt this same uneasiness during every single one of his last encounters with troubled students just before they did something dreadful.

He had felt this way with Doctor Shaw three days before her disappearance, too.

Bianca met his eyes, and for a moment, he was concerned that she could read his thoughts. It was an irrational worry, and yet, it was not the first time he had imagined this during his four years of employment at this institution. Swiftly, the psychiatrist subdued the thought and regulated his emotions, as he had been trained to do for decades.

"You're really bad at this," Bianca whispered, smiling.

Doctor McGowan wrinkled his brow. "You think so?" He closed his book. "At what?"

"Talking to women."

"Well, it's a good thing you're a child then."

"You prefer them young," she said, her voice dripping with malice. He knew better than to react to such a provocative statement. He folded his hands over his booklet and waited for her to continue. "They intimidate you in different ways," she went on. "The boys . . . the girls . . . You don't know how to talk to women, and that's why they scare you. As for the boys, well . . . you just don't seem to know how to be a man," she said, her smirk falling into an open-mouthed, mocking click of her tongue, "and that is why they scare you, too."

He cocked his head to the side. Were he sitting before any other student, he might have thought that she was simply projecting. But those eyes . . . God, he knew them.