An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries) Page 11

  Louis took the file. Dr. Seraphin extended a hand to Louis. “Good-bye, Mr. Kincaid,” she said.

  Louis shook her hand. Her palm was soft, creamy, but ice cold. He watched her walk to her car and slip inside. The Volvo pulled away, and he stood there for a moment, clutching Claudia’s file to his chest.

  CHAPTER 15

  “I need to see the mortuary.”

  Alice stared at Louis for a long time through the open driver’s-side window of her car. Without a word, she reached back to get her tote bag, got out of her car, and shut the door. When she turned back to face him, there was such a look of distress on her face that Louis regretted just blurting things out before she even had a chance to get into the building.

  He could almost read her thoughts. That he wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain to help Charlie. That he was some ghoulish voyeur no better than that damn reporter Delp. That she had been wrong about him and shouldn’t have trusted him.

  “Alice,” he said quietly, “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. I know you think I’m—”

  She held up a hand. “It’s all right.” She gave him a wary smile. “Is it okay if I go to my office first?”

  Louis followed her up the stone steps and waited, stamping his feet against the cold as she unlocked the door. Inside was almost as cold as outside.

  “Oh no, they must have shut down the boiler,” Alice said. “We’re going to be without heat from now on, I’m afraid.”

  “When do you have to be out of here?” Louis asked.

  “December thirty-first.”

  “Then what?”

  “The demolition people come in. They’re going to start on the western side of the compound and work eastward toward the buildings over by the lake.”

  “So there really is a lake?”

  She looked at him oddly. “Of course. It’s over by the east edge of the property out by the cemetery. It is quite lovely, really.” She heaved a sigh. “I heard they are going to build condos around it.”

  Alice plopped her tote down and pulled out a huge thermos. “Coffee?”

  “Alice, I think I love you.”

  She smiled and poured out the steaming black brew. Louis was about to ask for sugar when she dug in her desk drawer and tossed out a handful of packets and little restaurant cream cups. “I steal them from McDonald’s,” she said.

  For a minute or two, they just stood sipping their coffees as the cold air swirled around them. Then Alice set her cup down and capped the thermos.

  “Let’s go get this over with,” she said, pulling out her key ring.

  The morning sun was a pale yellow smudge behind the gray scrim of clouds. Alice took him out a back door and they hurried down a cracked concrete walkway heading in the direction of E Building. They passed a small wood building with a COMMISSARY sign above the entrance, and then the power plant. Louis thought again about what Alice had told him that first day, that Hidden Lake had been a city unto itself, with a bakery and laundry, a post office and dairy, even its own farmlands where inmates picked apples and pressed cider for sale to the outside world. It was a place where a person could live, work, die, and be forgotten without ever stepping outside the iron gates.

  “That’s the hospital,” Alice said, pointing to a mammoth spired building ahead. “It’s one of the oldest buildings here and was even open to the public during the depression. They charged a dollar eighteen a night for a bed. The mortuary is in the basement.”

  The salvage crew had already stripped most of the furnishings, fixtures, and doors, and now the empty halls with their gaping door frames had the desolate look of a place waiting to die.

  Louis followed Alice down a long metal staircase and along a plain tiled corridor with many doors and overhead steam pipes. At a door with MORTUARY stenciled on the glass, she slipped in the key and stepped aside to let Louis in.

  He bypassed the outer office and headed straight into the working area. Although everything had been stripped, he could guess that this was where the bodies were washed and prepared for burial; there were still pipes in the walls, rusting drains, and holes in the peeling linoleum where tables had once been bolted. The walls were stripped of all shelving and anything that could be sold. A very old and very yellowed hand-lettered sign still hung on one wall: PRIMUM NON NOCERE.

  Louis had seen the sign in hospitals before. “First do no harm,” he translated out loud. “Strange thing to put in a morgue.”

  “Even the dead deserve respect,” Alice said quietly.

  Louis looked back at her. She was standing at the door, shoulders hunched up in her coat. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll wait out in the hall,” she said.

  Louis heard Alice’s retreating footsteps and the banging echo of a door. It wasn’t until that moment that he realized what he was going to do. He had the hope that whoever cremated Claudia by mistake had at least been decent enough to provide her an urn. And if he could find it, he was going to just take it.

  He went back to the hallway and looked around. All the signs had been taken down, so he went along, opening doors. Broom closets. Offices. Supply rooms. Another one of those heavy steel doors, this one with PASSAGE 7 painted on it but again, with no doorknob or handle.

  He moved into a large white-tiled room that he guessed had been used for embalming. There was a small door leading off it. He tried it, and it opened with a wheeze of cold musty air.

  Five wooden steps leading into a dim room. He went down two steps and peered into the gloom. Rough stone walls and some wood shelves. Another storage room. He was about to go back up when a glint caught his eye. He reached up and pushed the door open wider for more light. The wood shelves were filled with tin cans. He went down the last three steps.

  The shelves completely lined the small stone room, running from the concrete floor to the low ceiling. Each shelf was filled with the tins, each about the size of a paint can. But as Louis came closer he could see they weren’t tins but were made of copper, the once-shiny metal now dull and green with corrosion.

  Labels . . .

  Maybe half the cans had labels, but they were frayed, peeling, or water-spotted. Louis groped for his reading glasses and picked up one of the few cans that had a piece of a legible label.

  Large black letters: HIDDEN LAKE HOSPITAL.

  And below that in faded typing: 4/12/34 ANDREW. The rest of the label and the rest of the name was gone.

  Louis felt a grab to his gut and he threw out a hand to grip the shelf.

  These were . . . people.

  His eyes came up from the can in his hand, and moved over the shelves. Rows and rows of them. His chest drew tight, and the air was suddenly thick with the smell of dirt and decay.

  He swallowed back a rush of nausea, but still he could not draw a full breath. He spun away from the shelf and was halfway to the door before he realized he still held a can in his hand.

  He stopped and looked down at it, then gently placed it back on the shelf. He turned and left the room, his footsteps growing faster as he made his way back up the steps to the entrance.

  Alice was standing outside on the grass. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  He pulled in some cold air, trying to find the words. His head was still thick with the smells of the room, and his thoughts were jumbled.

  “Louis,” Alice said, “talk to me. You look sick.”

  He told her what he had seen and when she said nothing, he explained what Dr. Seraphin had said about the possible mix-up in bodies and how he had hoped Claudia would be among the cremated remains.

  “I need to go back down there,” he said. “I need to make sure she’s not down there.”

  Alice grabbed his arm. “No, Louis. Let it be.”

  “Alice, I have to—”

  “No, not now. You don’t have to do anything right now. You’re going to come back to my office with me and I am going to call John Spera. He will come and get them.”

  Louis looked back at the hospital. “
If she’s down there, Alice, I have to do something—”

  “Let Mr. Spera do his job. Then you can go to him and see if she is there.”

  Louis felt Alice’s firm but gentle tug on his arm. He reached up to wipe his brow. His hand was shaking.

  “Come on,” Alice said softly.

  He walked with her back across the frozen grass.

  CHAPTER 16

  Alice hung up the phone and leaned back in her chair. “Mr. Spera wasn’t there, but his son said he would make sure his father knew about the cremated remains as soon as possible.”

  Louis was slumped in a chair across from her desk and nodded woodenly. “How can something like that even happen?” he asked, almost to himself.

  “I don’t know,” Alice said.

  They were quiet for a long time. A banging sound drew Louis’s gaze to the window. Some men were loading doors onto one of the salvage trucks. He shivered, wrapping his arms around himself. When he looked back at Alice, she was watching him closely.

  Suddenly, she opened a drawer and pulled out a thick manila folder, setting it on the desk between them. Louis recognized it as Claudia DeFoe’s original medical file.

  “I took a look through this yesterday,” Alice said. “Did you get a chance to go through it yet?”

  “Just a quick glance. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

  “Well, maybe I can help.”

  Louis sat up straight, scooting the chair closer. Alice flipped the folder open and studied the various forms for a long time before looking up at Louis.

  “Most of this looks pretty normal to me,” she said, sifting slowly through the papers. “It’s just the usual progress reports from her doctors, logs of the therapies she underwent, routine nurses’ notes.” Alice went back to reading, then looked back up at Louis. “Maybe if you could tell me what it is you’re hoping to find . . .”

  Louis shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess I just want to know her.”

  Alice’s expression had just a hint of pity in it. “Some of what you find in here might be a little hard to take, Louis.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. He jammed his hands in his coat pockets, waiting while Alice read some more papers.

  “Maybe we could start with the intake form,” Alice said, pulling out a paper. “Claudia was admitted to Hidden Lake in October 1951 by her mother, Eloise DeFoe.” Alice hesitated. “She had multiple self-inflicted lacerations on both wrists. The doctor noted that her mood was alternately hysterical and disoriented.”

  Louis thought of the photograph of Claudia he had taken from the file, how the masklike quality of her face contrasted with the wild look in her eyes.

  “She was admitted to B Building,” Alice went on. “That’s the ward for the general women’s population.” She picked up a different form and studied it.

  “What’s that?” Louis asked.

  “Drug log. I’m just trying to see what they gave her.

  Here it is. She was on Thorazine, twenty milligrams per day.” She looked up at Louis. “I’d say that would be a routine protocol for a suicidal girl and a fairly low dosage. It would make her . . . compliant but not out of it.”

  Louis nodded.

  Alice went back to reading. “She was kept on suicide watch, but I can’t find any notes of other attempts. In fact . . .” Alice picked up the drug log again. “She was totally off the Thorazine by late November.”

  “So she was getting better,” Louis said.

  “Looks like it.” Alice sniffled. “My, it’s cold in here.

  Why don’t you pour us some more coffee?”

  Louis got the thermos and poured two fresh cups while Alice continued her reading.

  “Claudia was admitted to the general infirmary in late December, but it doesn’t say why,” Alice said. She looked back at the drug log. “Apparently, she was treated for a nervous stomach, because it says here she was given something for stomach distress.”

  “So why did she end up in E Building?” Louis asked.

  “Good question,” Alice murmured, her head bent over the records. She had five different forms spread out on the desk now, trying to piece together Claudia’s history. It was quiet. Louis could hear the salvage guys talking and laughing out in the yard.

  “All right,” Alice said quietly. “She was moved to E in September of 1952. It looks like she had some kind of breakdown.”

  “Is that normal?” Louis asked.

  Alice looked up, a sad smile tipping her lips. “Normal? That’s not a word we use a lot here. Let’s just say it happens. People can be fine one day and you think they are getting better. Then something snaps inside them and they fall back down into these . . . holes. A few, with the right help, climb back out. But some just can’t. Some are just . . . I don’t know, too fragile.”

  Louis was remembering the story Alice had told him about the mother visited by her two children who had a moment of clarity, then slipped away forever. He wondered if Alice was thinking about it, too, because there was a far-off look in her eyes as she sipped her coffee.

  “Can you tell much about what happened to Claudia after she went to E?” Louis asked.

  Alice went back to the forms. “She was back on the Thorazine at a much higher dosage.” Alice shook her head slowly, pulling one of the forms closer. “Things went downhill from there. Ice-bath treatments several times a week. Apparently that didn’t work so they tried electroshock therapy.”

  Alice let out a long sigh. “It looks like she broke her arm during one of the treatments.”

  Louis shut his eyes against the image of that heap of leather straps he had seen in E Building. When he opened his eyes, Alice was looking at him.

  “Go on,” he said quietly.

  “By the summer of 1953, they were using insulin shock therapy on her,” Alice said.

  “What in God’s name is that?”

  Alice hesitated. “The patient would be strapped down and injected with enough insulin to bottom out the blood sugar. The patient would go into severe convulsions or seizures. It was looked at as safer than electroshock. They didn’t realize until years later that they were killing the patient’s brain, leaving holes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Patients were often left worse off than when they came in. The long-term effects could be anything from mild delusions to incoherent babble.”

  Louis rose slowly and went to the window. The salvage workers had driven off with their plunder.

  “This is odd.”

  Louis looked back at Alice. He almost didn’t want to hear anything else.

  “It looks like Claudia tried to escape once,” Alice said.

  “Escape?” he asked. “How?”

  “It was late summer, 1952, about ten months after she arrived, before she was sent to E Building.”

  Louis moved back to the desk. “What’d she do?”

  “Claudia and another young patient by the name of Millie Reuben snuck out of the ward after dinner and climbed over the fence behind B Building.”

  “The fence with the razor wire?”

  “It would not have had razor wire then. It would have been fairly easy for a young girl to get over.”

  “How far did they get?”

  “A half mile or so,” Alice said. “They were found in the middle of an apple orchard by a local farmer who recognized the hospital dresses and called the police. They were returned in less than an hour. The nurses wrote that Claudia was hysterical and incoherent and that restraints were necessary.”

  Alice fell quiet, reading down the page. Louis edged closer, but the handwriting was small, and he couldn’t read it upside down.

  “That night,” Alice went on, “she was transferred to E Building and received her first ice bath. I guess that is your answer as to why she ended up in E Building.”

  “Did she ever try to escape again?”

  Alice’s head came up. The tip of her nose was red from the cold. “She would not have had the chance once she wen
t to E Building.”

  Louis sank back into his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. He could see them, two young women, running through an apple orchard, desperate enough to want to be free yet incapable of finding their way. And for an instant, his image of Claudia changed to something prettier and brighter, as if her run through the orchard was the last real moment she would have before they took it all away.

  “Alice,” he said, “is there any way you can get to Millie Reuben’s file?”

  Alice’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I should.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m sorry. It was different with your friend. But there’s still confidentiality to consider.”

  He didn’t press it. Alice’s gaze turned to the window. The pane had a thin layer of frost on it, blurring the trees outside. He wanted to leave, but he knew Alice expected some information from him on Charlie. But he had nothing to tell her. He hadn’t yet made it to the Ardmore Police Station to even speak with him.

  The phone rang and Alice glanced at it, then lifted the receiver slowly. Louis could hear a man’s voice on the other end. Strong, but slow. Alice listened for a minute; then her face started to change as her eyes came to Louis.

  “Yes, Chief,” she said. “Yes, I understand.”

  She hung up.

  “What’s wrong?” Louis asked.

  “That was Chief Dalum,” she said. “They’ve found some bones.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The bones had been buried in a shallow grave on the north end of the cemetery. John Spera and his crew had been working nearby, exhuming grave number 978, when a brownish-colored human skull tumbled from the claw of the backhoe. Spera had promptly stopped and called Chief Dalum.

  Two of Dalum’s men borrowed spades from Spera and carefully dug a wide hole around the area where the skull had been found. It didn’t take long for them to uncover a rib cage and right arm bone. Dalum immediately called the county for the crime scene investigators. No one was sure if this was a crime scene, but Dalum wasn’t going to take any chances.