An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries) Page 10

  Man . . .

  There were metal clips on each side to keep the documents in place, but the papers were loose, dog-eared and water-stained. He pulled out his reading glasses. Charts. Log entries. Prescriptions. Treatments.

  But he couldn’t make much sense of it, couldn’t even read the handwriting, except the scribbled letters THOR, which he guessed was Thorazine. He was going to have to ask Alice to help.

  Putting his glasses away, Louis got to his feet. He set Claudia’s file in the hall and started bringing the boxes back in. The room quickly filled back up, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure they were all going to fit, but he crammed the last of them up against the ceiling and scanned the floor, making sure he hadn’t lost any papers.

  Clank.

  He spun toward the rear of the building.

  That noise wasn’t the flap of loose metal grating. The broken window was near the front door. This noise came from the back. And it sounded like the slam of metal against metal.

  The hall was brushed with sunlight, and he could see clearly that it went on about twenty feet before it split into a T at the end. There were four or five more doors, all closed.

  Louis picked up his jacket and quietly slipped his Glock from the pocket, easing it from the holster. Then he waited, his eyes locked on the end of the hall. Dust motes glittered in the shafts of light and he could feel the wind from the broken window against the back of his neck.

  He moved forward slowly, shoving open each door, bracing himself for any flash of movement. But the rooms were empty, the windows closed. He continued on down the hall.

  At the T, he stopped. To his left was an exit door, chained shut from the inside. To his right, more empty rooms. He moved on to the door he knew led to the upper floors, where the stairwell was grated all the way up. The door was unlocked, but the stairwell gate was chained at the first floor. He walked on.

  One last room. A large one with double doors, propped open.

  Louis moved inside.

  The yellow walls were slashed with deep shadows that seemed to move as he did. Tables. Plastic chairs. A stainless steel sink and an old red and white Coca-Cola machine in the corner. Trash littered the floor. A Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle lay under the window. But the window was closed and barred on the outside.

  And a smell . . .

  Cigarettes. No, not cigarettes. Ashes.

  He turned slowly, his eyes falling on a single cigarette lying on the stainless steel counter. It had been set on the edge and left burning, leaving a perfectly straight line of gray ash that stretched from the edge of the counter to the gold filter.

  Louis bent and sniffed it. It was cold and stale. It could be months or even years old. And anyone could have left it, vandals, salvage men, or an employee sneaking a smoke while packing up the files.

  Louis had started to turn back to the hall when he caught a whiff of something else.

  Cigarette smoke. And it was fresh, hanging in the air like Phillip’s did after he left the patio. Louis drew in a breath, trying to get a direction on the smell, but suddenly it was gone, leaving just that dusty medicinal odor in its place.

  Louis eased back to the hall, his gun still level, his eyes lingering on the abandoned cigarette on the counter. He moved as quietly as he could, his ears still alert for anything. But there was nothing.

  He walked back to the records room, and picked up his jacket and Claudia’s file and locked the records room door. As he made his way to the main door, he glanced at the front stairwell, the one he and Alice had gone up last Wednesday.

  If someone had been in here a few minutes ago, chances were they were long gone, but still he felt the need to look. Maybe there was a stairwell he hadn’t seen.

  He pulled out Alice’s keys and headed upstairs. On each floor, he did a cursory check of the rooms and closets. He went down the same steps he had come up and left E Building, again using both hands to push the door closed tight enough to lock it.

  The cold air felt good in his lungs and he gulped in a deep breath, then another before starting across the grass. He had gone about fifty feet when he felt the urge to turn back.

  The sun was hovering just above the roof, and Louis had to squint to bring the building into focus. The glare obliterated the grating and colored the windows black, and for a moment, they looked like something in an old fifties sci-fi movie, mysterious holes that led to another dimension.

  Clutching Claudia’s records, he hurried back to the administration building.

  He was deep into copying the file when Alice came back into the office. She looked harried.

  “You found it,” she said.

  “But I can’t make much of it,” Louis said. “I’m just copying everything until you can help me—”

  “Oh dear, I can’t,” she interrupted. “Not now, at least. The superintendent is on his way.”

  “Alice,” he said, “I just need a place to start. Please.” She hesitated, then picked up the file folder. She flipped through it quickly. Her eyebrow arched as she read something; then she looked up at Louis.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  “Her attending doctor.” She held out the paper. “It was Dr. Rose Seraphin.” She waited, like she expected Louis to recognize the name, and when he didn’t she went on. “She’s a big name in psychiatric circles.”

  “So she’s still alive then?” Louis asked, taking the paper and looking at the name.

  Alice nodded. “I see her name in the journals. Last I heard she was affiliated with the medical school at University of Michigan. She would be . . . oh, in her seventies by now.”

  Louis slipped the paper in with his other copies. “Then that’s where I go next. Thanks.”

  Alice’s eyes went to the window. “Oh no, there’s the superintendent’s car. You better finish up quickly. I’ll go and keep him outside for a while.”

  Alice grabbed her coat and was gone. Louis went back to copying, keeping one eye on Alice, who was steering a fat man in a gray overcoat away from the front door. Louis was down to the last few papers when a picture caught his eye. It was old, a faded black-and-white photograph clipped to what looked like an admitting form.

  Good God . . .

  Louis quickly pulled his reading glasses out of his jacket, and when he put them on, Claudia DeFoe came to life before his eyes.

  It was a head-and-shoulders shot, and she appeared to be wearing a hospital gown. Her hair was a white blond, hanging lank and uncombed over her white face. Her head was cocked to one side and there was a mark on her cheek that could have been a bruise or a smear of blood.

  Her eyes . . .

  God, her eyes.

  Dark, wide, with a beseeching stare. Dark desperate eyes in that blank white face, like something trapped inside fighting to get out.

  Louis took off his glasses. He could see Alice and the superintendent coming back toward the door. He stuffed the original papers back in their folder and left it on Alice’s desk. He gathered up his copies and slipped on his jacket, stashing the copies under his arm. He started for the door, but stopped.

  He went back to the folder, pulled out the picture of Claudia, and slipped it in his pocket.

  CHAPTER 14

  Louis hurried across the quadrangle, weaving through the throngs of students. He hadn’t been back to University of Michigan since his graduation eight years ago, and as he looked up at the cloisterlike stone buildings he had a fleeting thought that time seemed to stand still here. Nothing had changed.

  As he was about to emerge onto South University, his eyes strayed upward. For a second, he was back in his dorm room.

  And she was back, too . . . Kyla.

  But there was no time right now. He had to get to Dr. Seraphin’s office. It had taken only a phone call to the medical school to locate her. She was a professor emeritus affiliated with the department of psychiatry. He had discovered she was also on the board of the state psychiatric association.

  It took him nearly an hour to
find the right building in the sprawling maze of the medical school complex. A receptionist directed him to the fourth floor and he walked the hall, searching for the right door. There it was . . . and it was ajar.

  He pushed it open quietly.

  She was seated at a desk, her head bent over a thick book, her slender hand resting on the edge of the page. She wore one ring, something old and silver, silver as her short spiky hair.

  “Dr. Seraphin?” Louis said.

  Her eyes zipped to his face, and for a second he sensed she might have been expecting someone else.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m not taking any more applications.”

  Louis stepped into the office. “I’m not a student, Doctor. My name is Louis Kincaid. I’m a private investigator.”

  Dr. Seraphin rolled her chair back a few inches, crossed her legs, and studied him. She didn’t look anywhere near seventy. She was a striking woman, dressed in a stylish quilted black suit jacket, black wool pants, and black boots with a spiked heel. The only color came from a red scarf around her taut neck.

  “What are you investigating?” she asked.

  “Missing remains from Hidden Lake Hospital.”

  She couldn’t hide her surprise this time and she tried to cover it by turning away from Louis and closing the book. When she said nothing, he went on.

  “My client is someone who wanted to relocate them, but the casket was filled with rocks.”

  She swung her chair back to face him. “Rocks? How can that be?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “I left Hidden Lake a long time ago,” she said.

  “I know that,” Louis said. “She was a patient of yours by the name of Claudia DeFoe. I was told she died in 1972.”

  Dr. Seraphin’s lips pressed together as her eyes dropped to the folder in Louis’s hand. Her finger stroked the edge of the desk.

  “Is that her medical record?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Again, she was quiet for a moment. “What do you want from me?”

  “Anything you can remember about Claudia DeFoe.”

  “I can’t tell you much. That’s all confidential.”

  “Can you at least tell me what she died of?”

  “It’s not in the file?”

  “Not that I can find.”

  Again, Dr. Seraphin’s eyes moved to the file in Louis’s hand. Then she thrust out a hand. Louis wasn’t sure he wanted to give the file to her, but if she was going to help at all, he had to trust her.

  He gave her the file, and she opened it on her lap. She pursed her lips, then slipped a tiny rubber thimble on her forefinger and started flipping through the pages.

  “Pneumonia,” she said, looking up. The fluorescent light caught her face, paling it, and suddenly he could see a thousand fine wrinkles.

  “Winter, seventy-one and seventy-two,” she added. “I remember now. We had a flu epidemic. I recall we lost almost twenty people that month.”

  “Twenty people died from the flu?”

  “Actually, most would have died of pneumonia and other forms of respiratory failure. The conditions in the wards weren’t the best. They were damp and cold, and all the patients were confined to the indoors, which can take its toll on the elderly.”

  “Claudia DeFoe was only thirty-seven when she died.”

  Dr. Seraphin gave a small shrug. “Anyone with a compromised immune system can be susceptible.”

  “Okay,” Louis said. “But why wasn’t she in her grave?”

  Dr. Seraphin ran her nails through her short hair, then closed the folder, keeping it on her lap. “I can only speculate,” she said.

  “Please.”

  “Patients did most of the menial labor at the hospital. It was part of their therapy,” she said. “They would cook, clean, tend some of the elderly, do lawn work, or work in apple orchards, things like that. Some dug graves in the cemetery.”

  Dr. Seraphin fell quiet, and he gave her a second to travel back. When she started speaking again, her voice was gentler.

  “Some of the higher-functioning patients, those we could trust with tools, had other jobs. They worked in the carpenter shop and built tables, and shelves and caskets.”

  Louis didn’t know where she was going with this, but he stayed quiet.

  “Of course, in the mortuary, we had orderlies to do the work,” Dr. Seraphin went on. “Their job was to clean the bodies and prepare them for burial. And in the wintertime, it was also their job to keep the bodies organized, tagged, and cold enough to prevent decomposition.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Dr. Seraphin looked at him, and it took her a second to understand his question. “The hospital had so little funding, so money was always a problem,” she said. “Until the late seventies, we didn’t even have any mechanical equipment and all the graves were dug by hand. We couldn’t bury anyone in the wintertime so remains were stored in a cooler from around mid-December until April.”

  Louis turned away from Dr. Seraphin, a sourness in his throat that he knew showed on his face. Dr. Seraphin was quiet for a moment, and he could hear papers rustling and the squeak of her chair as she rocked. Then her voice.

  “That December, with the flu outbreak, anything over five or six bodies would have been more than we could store.”

  “So what happened to them?” Louis asked.

  “I am sure we cremated as many as possible,” she said. “We had the permission of the families, of course. It was routine admission procedure that families signed a form about disposition of remains should their loved one pass away while institutionalized. Some chose burial, some cremation.” Dr. Seraphin hesitated. “Given the state of our workforce and our storage problem that winter, it is possible a few remains were cremated by accident.”

  Louis pointed to the file still in the doctor’s lap. “What does it say about Claudia DeFoe?”

  Dr. Seraphin knew right where to look. “It says burial.”

  When Louis said nothing, Dr. Seraphin went on. “My guess would be that someone made a mistake and cremated her along with the rest of the flu victims. Not wanting to lose his job, he probably put rocks in a casket before turning it over to the grave diggers to bury.”

  Louis drew in a tight breath.

  “The grave diggers would not have known the difference,” Dr. Seraphin said softly. “They were barely functional.”

  Louis rubbed a hand over his face. He had known from the moment he walked into E Building that whatever he found out about Claudia was going to be tragic. He hadn’t even told Phillip about E Building yet. How in the hell was he ever going to tell him this?

  There was one shred of hope here. “Doctor,” Louis said, “I didn’t see a mausoleum in the cemetery. Where did they keep the cremated remains?”

  “The place you’re thinking of is not called a mausoleum,” she said. “It’s called a columbarium. We kept the cremated remains in a vault in the mortuary.”

  Dr. Seraphin was quiet, her eyes steady on face. He had the feeling she was evaluating him, trying to read something into his questions or the expression on his face.

  “You think we were monsters,” Dr. Seraphin said.

  Louis wanted to say, no, I don’t think that. I know you did the best you could. But there was a part of him that did think what had happened to Claudia and the others was inhuman.

  Dr. Seraphin rose suddenly and picked up her coat. As she slipped it over her slender shoulders, she looked back at him.

  “In some ways, it was barbaric, just as much of medicine was,” Dr. Seraphin said. “But we did the best we could with what little money we had. We learned and we found better ways of helping people.”

  When Louis still said nothing, Dr. Seraphin picked up her briefcase and motioned to the door. “I’m sorry but I have an appointment. Will you walk out with me?”

  She picked up Claudia’s
file and they started down the hall toward the stairs. Dr. Seraphin spoke as they walked.

  “People always focus on the horror stories,” she said. “But we had many other benign therapies you don’t hear about—relaxation techniques, audio and visual stimulation. We used to try to treat depression by having the patients watch love stories, and episodes of shows like I Love Lucy.”

  She paused and turned to him. “People did get better at Hidden Lake. Many, many people went home better than they came in.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and Louis held the door for her. She stopped to slip a pair of sunglasses from her pocket. They were large and black, covering her eyes completely.

  “How long were you at Hidden Lake, Doctor?” Louis asked.

  “Nearly twenty years,” she said, as she started walking again. “I rose up through the ranks and I was instrumental in correcting many deficiencies. But there was only so much I could do as assistant deputy superintendent. As third in command, I had no real power to move the board toward more progressive treatments. And as a private institution, we were always strapped for funds.”

  Again, Louis was quiet. They were walking toward a shiny black Volvo. There was a man standing next to it. Beefy and tall, and wearing a dark suit and hat.

  Dr. Seraphin suddenly stopped, about ten feet from the Volvo. Louis could see the driver watching them intently.

  “May I ask your background, Mr. Kincaid?” Dr. Seraphin asked.

  “Nearly three years a private investigator and before that, a cop. Why?”

  “You have that look of someone who is dealing with mental illness for the first time.”

  “And what kind of look is that, Doctor?” he asked.

  “Appalled, somewhat fearful.” She smiled when she saw his disbelief. “Please, it’s perfectly normal to feel that way,” she said gently. “I’ve worked with the mentally ill all my professional life and I learned a long time ago the line between what is real and what is not is very thin. Sometimes it is even invisible.”

  Dr. Seraphin held out the file. “We all fear what we can’t see.”