Free The Night Season by Chelsea Cain

Susan said. “I’ll catch up with him.”
    The nurse hesitated for only a second. She had work to do, and Susan knew it. Susan grabbed the Tupperware out of her hands and took off out of the ER.
    She knew Emanuel Hospital. Her father had died there. Like all hospitals, it was a labyrinth of hallways and exits and entrances. She headed for an interior arterial corridor in the hopes of catching sight of Robbins. Ralph’s ulna rattled in the Tupperware as she ran.
    As soon as she got to the corridor, she spotted Robbins’s dreadlocks swinging down the hallway to the main entrance.
    “Hey!” she shouted. “Robbins!”
    He stopped and turned.
    A woman pushing a kid in a wheelchair gave her a dirty look.
    Robbins walked toward Susan. The hallway was entirely glass on one side, looking out onto the children’s garden. It was still raining.
    Susan lifted the Tupperware. “You forgot Ralph’s ulna,” she said.
    Robbins dropped his head. “Shit.”
    “Crack team you’ve got there,” Susan said.
    He reached her and took the plastic tub. “It’s a sixty-year-old skeleton,” he said. “Not a top priority. Want to know what’s going to happen to Ralph? He’s going to end up in a box somewhere. Until someone accidentally throws him away.” He said it matter-of-factly, and not without regret.
    Susan, deflated, left Robbins and started trudging back to the ER. She hadn’t made it far when her phone rang.
    She recognized the ringtone and her stomach clenched—it was Ian, her editor.
    She picked it up anyway. “Yeah?” she answered.
    “Tell me you’re in the building,” he said.
    She was pretty sure she wasn’t in the building he hoped she was. “I’m at Emanuel,” she said.
    “What the fuck is wrong with you? Channel Six had a photograph of you standing next to Archie Sheridan on a gurney, and I just read a wire report that you were one of the two people who found Henry Sobol.”
    “I was going to report it,” Susan said. “I’ve been busy.”
    “Are you dead? Are you mentally incapacitated?”
    “No.”
    “Then get your ass into the office.”
    He hung up on her.
    “I don’t have a car here,” she said to no one in particular. She had ridden to the hospital in Henry’s ambulance. Ian hadn’t even asked how Henry was, how Archie was. Nothing. He didn’t care.
    She dropped the phone back in her purse.
    She could call a taxi. If she could get one in this weather.
    Then she gave it some thought. Rain slid in sheets down the huge glass windows.
    Screw Ian.
    It wasn’t even ten P.M. He could hold the presses for hours on the next day’s edition.
    Let him stew a little.
    She turned a corner and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. The elevator opened onto a hallway overlooking the atrium. Susan took a right turn and headed down a hallway that led to the physicians’ offices.
    The photographs were still there, framed and hung on the light blue wall, one every third door. The black-and-white images were part of a permanent exhibit sponsored by the Oregon Historical Society. A black man in a fedora carrying a blond little boy through waist-deep water, past cars flooded to their roofs. An aerial view of dozens of apartment buildings that had been lifted off their foundations and clumped together, water up to the top floor. Rescuers holding hands, forming a chain, reaching out to save people.
    She’d first seen the photographs when she was a teenager with a dying father and a lot of time to kill in the hospital. That was the first she’d heard of Vanport. You could grow up in Portland and never hear the name. It had been wiped out. Not a trace left behind. Even her teachers didn’t know much. The death toll was murky. The official count was fifteen. Some said thousands. There were rumors of a conspiracy to cover up the real numbers.
    Maybe she’d stretched it in her column, looking for connections where there weren’t any. Ralph probably hadn’t died at Vanport. But other people had.
    Susan had