The Sleeper in Room 4

The fog came off Whitlow Lake at dusk the way it did every evening that October, rising from the dark water in slow white sheets and drifting up the lawn toward the building until the old sanatorium seemed to float on it: three stories of yellow brick, the long glassed-in porches catching the last of the light, the cupola black against a sky going from pewter to ink.

Mara parked at the far end of the staff lot, where the gravel met the birches, and sat for a moment with the engine off.

Fifth week. Long enough that the drive north from Duluth no longer felt like a trip into a stranger's house, not long enough that the building felt like anything but one. The Whitlow Sleep Institute had been a tuberculosis sanatorium for thirty-four years, county storage for thirty-five more, and a sleep lab since 1994, and it had kept a little of every one of its lives. The front doors were automatic glass set into a limestone arch carved with WHITLOW LAKE SANATORIUM 1924. The radiators still knocked. The corridors were painted a cream so clean it looked new, but the floors under the carpet runners were the old green terrazzo, and sometimes, on the stairs, Mara's shoes found a place where the sound changed and the building felt hollow underneath.

Mara pushed a strand of auburn hair back under a knit cap, took the thermos and the bag off the passenger seat, and walked up through the fog.

The lobby was warm and smelled of floor wax and the lake. Beyond the reception desk, dark now, one lamp burned in the scoring room on the first floor, and in its doorway stood Noreen Haugland in a lilac cardigan, holding a scrapbook against her chest with both arms, the way people hold something they've been told not to drop.

"There you are," she said. "I stayed to finish the fall pages. You look cold. Everybody looks cold their first October up here." She fished in her cardigan pocket and held out a peppermint in cellophane. "Take one. They help with the drive home at seven, you'll see."

Mara took it. Noreen had been at the Institute since the day it opened, scored studies faster than anyone in the region, knew everyone's children's names by the second week, and kept the sanatorium scrapbook on the side, with clippings and photographs and floor plans going back a hundred years. She had given Mara a tour the first day, and a pan of lemon bars the second.

"Teddy's upstairs already," she said. "Otto's doing the boiler. Twelve booked tonight, one no-show. Room 4's a new one. Adult sleepwalker. Dr. Marsh wants him watched close." She tucked the scrapbook tighter. "Go on, I'll lock up down here."

Behind her, along the lobby's long inner wall, the old photographs hung in black frames in a row under picture lights: nurses and patients and porches, the building young.