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Authors: P.J. Parrish

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BOOK: An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)
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Alice stopped her sorting for a second, and when she resumed she didn’t seem to be looking at the files. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been letting him sleep in one of the old beds, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to him when we lock the doors.”
A phone rang somewhere. Alice’s eyes went down the empty hallway. Finally, the phone stopped, the ring echoing in the hallway.
Alice looked back at Louis. “Please don’t tell anyone,” she said.
“Tell anyone what?”
“That I let Charlie stay here.”
When Louis didn’t answer, she bent down and got another empty box. She began stuffing the box with the files she had just sorted. For several minutes, they were both quiet, Louis watching her as she finished filling the second box. Then she picked it up and started toward the stack of boxes at the far wall. Louis picked up the other box and followed her.
She looked up at him in surprise when he deposited it next to the others.
“Phillip Lawrence, the man I’m working for, he’s my foster father,” Louis said. “He was in love with Claudia DeFoe. They were going to elope but Claudia’s mother interfered. Claudia tried to kill herself and her mother sent her here.”
Alice was quiet.
“She was only seventeen,” Louis added.
The phone began to ring again. This time Alice didn’t even look down the hall. She was looking hard at Louis, those keen blue eyes searching for a reason to trust him.
She walked back to the nurse’s station. Reaching behind for a coat, she put it on. “I can’t give you the records,” she said. “But if you want to see E Building, I’ll show it to you.”
CHAPTER 8
 
Alice walked quickly, head bent against the wind, one hand holding the lapels of her wool coat closed.
“That was originally the tuberculosis sanitarium,” she said, pointing to a building on their left. “After the TB epidemics subsided, it was transformed into a laundry and sewing department.”
Louis glanced at it. Like all the buildings, it looked deserted, front door chained, windows dark.
“The smokestacks are the power plant. Everything was steam heated in the early days, and somewhere around the late twenties, it was reconstructed to provide heat, lights, and hot water to the whole institution.”
Louis paused for a second, turning almost a full circle. “How big is this place?”
“A hundred and eighty acres,” Alice said. “Over there was the bakery and kitchen, and beyond that, the fire-house and police station.”
“A police station?” Louis asked.
“Not like you would imagine,” she said. “More of a security force. They were trained to deal with the patients and, well, to be honest, the hospital didn’t want outsiders coming in unless they had to.”
They passed another brick building, three floors with dark, meshed windows. Alice saw him look up.
“That’s the POG building. It was a dormitory for the homeless men who wandered in every winter. In the old days, Hidden Lake would take in the homeless and let them out every spring. They called them POGs.”
“Pogs?”
“Poor Old Guys.” Alice walked on, her shoes crunching on the frosted grass. Louis followed, his eyes still scanning the grounds as he tried to imagine living inside the iron fence with no contact with the outside world, your mind muddled with drugs or sadness or unseen demons. And he thought about the soothing curl of the waves on the gulf and the endless shimmer of blue that he looked out at every day, and suddenly he could not imagine being without it.
“That’s E Building up ahead,” Alice said.
It was four stories and like the others, red brick with high chimneys, fronted by a plainer version of the administration building portico. All the windows on the second and third floors were barred, but the ground-floor ones were covered with heavy steel gratings. As they got closer, Louis could see that some of the ground-floor window gratings had been pried loose.
“Vandals,” Alice said as they went up the steps. “This building has been closed for over two years.”
She paused at the door and shifted her ring of keys to find the right one. It appeared to Louis that the original door might have been wooden but its replacement was heavy steel, with peeling paint that looked like some of the doors he had seen in prisons.
He glanced back. They were about a quarter mile from the main building and closer now to the heavy trees that abutted the back of the property. On the wind, he caught a hint of water and wondered if the lake was nearby.
“It’s stuck,” Alice said.
Louis used both hands to pull on the door and it opened slowly, the bottom scraping on the concrete. He followed Alice inside. She drew to a stop in the lobby.
“Oh my,” she said softly. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”
The cold air was thick with mildew and dust and something else that smelled medicinal, but aged. The only light came from two front windows, a feeble spray of gray that washed over a small desk. The grimy terrazzo floor was littered with paper. There was a streak of black spray paint on the wall.
Louis’s gaze drifted down the dark hallway. He could make out two elevators and farther down, double steel doors.
Alice turned to a stair well on her left, tilting her head up. “The elevators don’t work,” she said. “We’ll have to walk.”
Again, he followed, listening to the echo of their steps, inhaling that thin scent of medicine in the air. Alice paused at the landing between the first and second floors. She just stood there, a slight frown on her face.
“What’s the matter?” Louis asked.
She walked slowly to an exit door and peered out the small window. “Oh, nothing, really. Just something I remember,” she said.
She was still looking out the window, so Louis came to her side and glanced out the small grated window. It overlooked an exterior staircase and a weed-choked parking lot.
“I was a nurse when I first came here in 1982, and I was assigned to this building for two months,” Alice said. “I was new and this wasn’t the kind of place where you asked a lot of questions. But I remember one day, the head nurse told me to take a patient to this landing and wait with her.”
“What were you supposed to wait for?” Louis asked.
“I didn’t know. But I did as I was told and for ten minutes we just sat here on these steps, not moving or talking.”
“Then what happened?”
“This door opened,” Alice said, pointing. “And a man came through it with two little girls, about four and six. They called the woman Mommy and rushed to hug her. The woman really didn’t respond and barely raised her arms to hug them back, but the little girls didn’t seem to notice.”
Alice’s eyes drifted up the stairs. “You see, children weren’t allowed in here to visit. Their visit lasted fifteen minutes and then they were gone. I took the patient back to her bed and when I started to leave, she looked up at me and she thanked me for the children. I remember being surprised she even knew what had just happened, and I made sure I told the doctor the next day.”
“What happened to her?”
Alice’s eyes dipped to the third step. “The next day, the woman had forgotten all about her children and the family never came back. She died here a year later and was buried in the hospital cemetery.” Alice took a heavy breath. “I often think about those little girls and that moment they had with their mother.”
Alice looked directly at Louis. “But that’s really all any of us have in the end, isn’t it? Moments.”
After a few seconds, Alice started up the stairs again, unlocking a door on the second floor. “This floor was where all the therapies were done,” she said.
He saw the nurse’s station first, a large desk enclosed in thick dirty glass with slots to pass medication through. There was garbage everywhere and the smell of urine hung in the air. Alice continued down the hall, stopping at a door. Louis looked in and saw a single claw-footed bathtub in the center of the room.
“Ice baths. They were used to shock the system,” Alice said, walking away.
He followed her, catching up as she swung open another door. It looked like an examination room inside. There was one window, covered with steel mesh. A bed sat in the center, worn leather straps with large buckles dangling from each side, more leather at the foot.
“Electroshock therapy,” Alice said.
Louis stared at the straps. “How did it work?” he asked.
“It was supposed to shock the brain back into functioning normally,” she said. “They used it for everything, three and four times a week, even on things like depression. But it caused convulsions, sometimes so bad patients broke bones or their teeth.”
“And afterward?”
“The patients were postictal . . . confused, disoriented.”
Alice moved on, pushing open more doors, but Louis couldn’t take his eyes off the table. Suddenly there was little he wanted to see. He was picturing Claudia DeFoe in this place and he couldn’t help but wonder again how she ended up here with people like Donald Lee Becker. He was wondering, too, how in the hell he was going to tell all this to Phillip.
He fell into step behind Alice, stopping to look into the other small rooms. Some had padded walls, others old wood tables, a few just stacks of cardboard boxes. Most of the doors had been taken off their hinges and were stacked against the peeling walls or rusting radiators. The hallway walls were marked with graffiti—obscenities, crude drawings, and a symbol Louis recognized as a devil’s pentagram.
“We’ve had a lot of trouble with break-ins,” Alice said. “Kids think this is a cool place to party.” She turned away with a disgusted snort, pulling up her coat collar against the wind whistling through a broken window-pane.
They passed a small pile of leather straps dumped in a corner and Alice saw him look down. She offered no explanation and he didn’t ask.
“I’ll show you the wards,” she said.
Alice led him to another stair well. Unlike the one on the first floor, this one was narrow, dark, and completely caged in heavy grating. Louis guessed it was because the stairs were used by the patients going down to therapy.
“The women were housed on the third floor,” Alice said, heading toward another metal door. “The men were kept up on four.”
The large room on the third floor was sectioned off by pillars, small barred windows every ten feet or so. In the dim light, Louis could count twenty metal beds, their white paint peeling, the bare springs cobwebbed and corroded. At each footboard sat a small metal locker. Off in one corner, there was a jumble of wood rocking chairs. The floors were littered with beer cans, garbage, and a couple of old striped mattresses.
“Seen enough?” Alice asked.
He said nothing, and Alice turned away from him. He knew the tour was over and he closed the door to the ward. The bang echoed through the hollow halls. Alice led him down a back stairwell and they emerged into a dark hallway. Louis was disoriented and headed toward what he thought was the exit. But it was just another plain metal door with PASSAGE 12 painted on it. There was no doorknob, no handle of any kind.
“This way, Mr. Kincaid,” Alice called out.
Back in the lobby, Alice held the door for him, and he stepped back into the cold air.
He turned to look at her as she locked the building. “Thank you,” he said.
“I hope you’re able to help Mr. Lawrence.”
“I need to know what happened to her here,” Louis said. “And where her remains might be now. I need to see her records.”
Alice’s face scrunched slightly as she stared into the gray sky.
“Please,” Louis said. “He doesn’t even know how she died.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kincaid. I just can’t.”
He nodded, and they started back to the main building. It was just before noon now, but the day had not warmed up at all. The wind was stiff from the west, the leaves skipping furiously at their feet. Alice was pulling on gloves when Louis heard someone call out. He paused.
“Did you hear that?” Louis asked.
“Hear what?”
Louis took a step toward the trees behind E Building. The wind was coming through the branches, and he strained to hear, but there was nothing.
Alice came up to him. “People always think they hear voices out here,” she said.
He looked to her. “It was real.”
They waited a few seconds, listening, but when nothing else came, they both started down the path. But the cry came again. It sounded human, but wounded. Tearful. Scared.
“I heard that,” Alice said.
Louis spun and started to the woods, but he stopped suddenly. A man . . . his tall form slowly taking shape as he emerged from the deep shadows. He was struggling to walk. And he was carrying something long and limp.
Louis took another step.
A body . . . he was carrying a body. A woman.
BOOK: An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)
10.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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