An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries) (15 page)

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Authors: P.J. Parrish

BOOK: An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)
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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.”
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.

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