Asylum (10 page)

She fluttered a hand. “I really do not know all the details. From the start, from the first day she arrived, Annie was considered part of the family. We were discouraged from speaking of a past that did not include her.” She paused, thinking, sorting through old memories, I thought, much as one might do with faded photographs. “It was in the 1960s, and our family was inordinately wealthy,
madame.
Well, as you can see…” Her hand fluttered again, encompassing the mansion and its contents as proof. “But we were taught that one must share what one has. We always gave to the Church and had quite a fine relationship with the cardinal, God rest his soul. So when Yvonne died, we turned to the Church. We had an emptiness in our home; but in return, we could give a home to one of God’s children who had nothing.”

“I see.” What I didn’t see was how this might relate to why said orphan was murdered fifty-odd years later. “And Annie?”

“Why, she fit in right away,
madame
. She was hungry for knowledge, as I said. Read everything and anything. My father made sure that we both went to university, though I believe Annie got more out of it than I did.” There was a slight pause and then she cleared her throat. “I had already met Monsieur Sobel, please understand, and it was—agreed—that we would be married once I graduated. Perhaps I did not pay as much attention to my studies as I might have done.” She smiled, a distant smile filled with fondness. She had liked her Monsieur Sobel, I thought.

She caught me watching her, and misread my thoughts. “He was Jewish, my husband; but my father was most farsighted, most broad-minded. It was never a problem.”

A guy who in the 1960s sent his daughters to college and encouraged one of them to marry outside his faith. I was beginning to like him quite a lot. “And Annie?” I asked. “Whom did she marry?”

“Ah, we thought for such a long time that she would not!” exclaimed her sister. “After school she traveled, she went abroad. To Paris, to London. She studied there. My father allowed it. He always had a twinkle when it came to Annie.” She paused, pondering. “She must have been thirty-two or so when she married. Back then, she was considered to be a bit of an old maid.”

Times have changed for the better, I thought. “And her husband?”

“Ah, well, there, perhaps, things didn’t work out quite so well,” said Violette, with a touch of frost in her voice. “He seemed so suitable, but … there was unhappiness. Unlike me, my sister wished to have children. But it seemed impossible. Three, four times she became pregnant, and lost the child each time. Her husband blamed her. He knew she had been adopted, of course, and he went on and on about inferior genes. It was really quite disgraceful.”

The Pekinese had abandoned his mistress and was attempting to mate with my leg. I asked for more coffee and while she was refilling my cup, I shook him off and shooed him away yet again. He hid behind her and they both looked at me reproachfully.

“Her husband died,
madame
?” I asked, accepting the coffee and trying not to be too greedy about drinking it. It really was better than anything I’d ever tasted.

“Yes, he died,” she said. “In some ways, his death was a blessing. By then Annie had returned here—to our own home. Our mother had already passed on, and Annie was able to care for our father. There was no thought of divorce, of course; that was not done. But they lived apart for some time before we heard that Louis had died. By then Annie was already using our own family name again, rather than his. She did not go to his funeral.”

An interesting story, I thought, but not particularly helpful. “What was your sister’s work,
madame
?”

“Ah, Annie’s work. It gave her such pleasure. When our father passed on, his money came to us both equally, you see. But my own dear husband had left me rather a lot, as well; so Annie and I established the Providence Foundation. We named it—well, she named it, really—for the order of nuns at the hospital where our father had worked, where she had lived. The Sisters of Providence. Annie was very eager to help those less fortunate than we were, you see. I was never very good at that sort of thing, and I had other interests; but Annie was very involved. She did research to find possible recipients of the foundation’s grants.”

“She decided who got the money?”
There
was a motive, I thought.

“Oh, my dear, no,” Violette laughed. “There is a board to take care of that sort of thing. A process to go through. No, Annie just wanted to find people who needed help.” She looked past me, out the window, but I had the impression that she wasn’t seeing anything at all. “She loved to help people,” Violette said, a catch in her voice.

I stood up. “I’ve taken enough of your time,
madame
,” I said. Useless to ask if Annie Desmarchais had had any enemies. Useless to ask if anyone hated her enough to rape her, stab her, and leave her mutilated body sitting upright on a public bench. Useless to try and figure out any rhyme or reason to what was happening.

The Pekinese was glaring at me through the window as I walked away.

I spent my first two years at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu working the farm. I grew taller in those years, and stronger; my skin turned dark in the sun, and there were calluses on my hands where there had once been blisters.

I was tougher in other ways, too.

Alain, one of the boys, had it in for me from the beginning. I was caught off guard once: he waited until I came around a corner and hit me, hard, with a piece of wood he’d gotten from God only knew where, right across my chest.

I fell, struggling to breathe, as he laughed at me. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I saw red and pulled him down by the ankles. I was stronger than most of the boys, because of the farm. I had him against the floor, my forearm across his throat, pressing hard, watching his eyes bulging out. “Leave me alone!”

Alain turned red. I pushed harder against his neck. “Say you’ll leave me alone!”

He nodded and spluttered something, and I let him go. He scrambled away to a safe distance.

“You cannot tell anyone that a girl did this to you,” I said, seething, and Alain nodded. He already knew that. It would have been the end of him to have the others know.

Only Bobby, the boy who read the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu sign on that first morning, the one from the same orphanage as me, was a puzzle to me. Sometimes I caught him looking at me with an expression that I couldn’t decipher. Something dark, something at odds with the camaraderie that we should have shared. Once he gave me some cake he’d stolen from the kitchens. “We need to stick together,” he told me.

“Do you remember it? The orphanage?” I asked him. I was still looking for some touchstone to my past.

He shook his head. “Better to think of the future than the past, you know.”

I was cramming the cake into my mouth, fearful of getting caught. “Enough to stay out of trouble,” I mumbled.

“Stay out of trouble?” Bobby asked, and laughed. “You just watch me. I’ll have ’em all eating out of my hand one of these days, just like you’re eating that cake. You wait and see.”

I was shocked. “You can’t, Bobby. They’ll do bad things to us.”

“Bad things?” He laughed, but it didn’t sound humorous. “You don’t even know the beginning of the bad things, Gabrielle.”

“What are you talking about?”

He glanced around, a little furtively. “You just got to learn how to make them need you,” he said.

I was staring at him. “What do you know?”

“The doctors, Gabrielle. It’s all about the doctors.”

Perhaps every asylum had them. There was, after all, some pretense at least of caring for the insane. But we seemed to have any number of doctors, all men—of course—all wearing the same white coats that flapped around them like a long cape as they walked.

It might have been comical, if they weren’t so dangerous.

How did I know about the danger, at first? Was it intuition? A rumor that I caught in passing without understanding its specifics? Thinking, later, about what Bobby had said, and the cruel smile that curved around his mouth when he said it? I can’t really say: all I know is that I feared the doctors even more than the sisters.

Later, of course, I understood perfectly well why.

I only met them in passing; I knew without being told that getting too close to any of them would spell disaster. They didn’t even all speak French; English, it seemed, was their preferred language, and I didn’t understand any of that, so they were easy to ignore.

But once in a while I glimpsed something there, maybe a trick of the light, but a face would suddenly show compassion, or interest, or kindness, and I realized that under it all these doctors were human. Which, of course, left me with even more questions. If they were human, how could the rumors about them be true?

None of them spent much time anywhere but in the medical rooms on the ground floor and in the basement. When we were ill, we were taken downstairs to see them—but not all that frequently, because it was clear that whatever illness we had was interrupting whatever work they had to do, and no one wanted to go, no matter how sick they felt. Being sick, even horribly sick, was preferable to going downstairs.

It was a long time before I learned what it was they were doing down there. And when I did, I wished I had never known.

CHAPTER EIGHT

By the time I got back to my office, I’d reached the conclusion that Julian had disappeared. For someone who was supposed to be watching the watcher, he was doing a particularly bad job. I left messages on his voice mail both at his desk and on his mobile phone, then thought about the fact that I was apparently on my own.

Fine. I might as well close the circle and find out about Caroline Richards.

I called out to Chantal that I’d be gone for a while. With any luck, I could get out of the building before my boss decided he needed to see me: this case was starting to get serious press, and I didn’t want to have to update him on every tiny detail until I had something to report that might actually
change
that press coverage, none of which was currently particularly friendly to the mayor or the city. And for which,
naturellement
, I would be blamed.

I ran into four different people with pressing questions for me on my way out, and dealt with them as quickly as I could. I was turning away when I walked right into someone entering the hall and my purse went flying. Opening en route, of course. “Oh,
pardon
—”

“Madame LeDuc.” The voice was amused. “Allow me to help you.” He bent down to pick up the sheaf of papers and I recognized the pharmaceutical lawyer I’d met at the police station. “
Merci, monsieur.”

He straightened up and gave them to me. “
Voilà
. And how are you,
madame
?”

“Bien, bien, merci.”
I couldn’t resist. “And yourself? Making yourself busy working for the mayor?”

He didn’t mind the sarcasm. “Ah, yes, as is standard fare in the business of politics. And you? I trust that you are making progress?”

“Making progress,
monsieur
?” I was trying to stuff things back into my purse.

“In making sure that the current crimes do not affect the positive public relations of the city,” he said smoothly. “The mayor is anxious that this not hurt his chances of reelection.”

Of course he was. And any lobbyist worth his salt wanted him to stay in office, too. My boss, friend to Big Pharma. I paused and met the amused—and, damn it, still attractive—eyes. “Always,
monsieur
.”

“Then I will leave you to it.” I felt his gaze following me all the way out of City Hall.

The Montréal office of the newspaper was happy to cooperate, the general editor, Francis Russell, assured me. “Such a loss,” he proclaimed, making a wide gesture that included the newsroom, the city, perhaps even the world.

“What kind of reporting did Caroline Richards do?” I asked. The name was familiar, but the byline was not; I rarely read English-language newspapers. Ivan or Chantal usually told me anything I needed to know, and I read the
Gazette
—in French—religiously.

Russell was signaling to someone out of my line of sight. “Caroline? Oh, you know, she had a number of interests.”

That sounded a little too vague. “What stories has she covered this year?” I tried again.

A harried-looking young man in horn-rimmed glasses appeared in response to the editor’s hand signals. “There you are, Mark,” Russell said comfortably. “This is Mrs. LeDuc, Mark, from the mayor’s office. She needs to see Caroline Richards’s archives.”

Mark ducked his head, turned, and disappeared, a little
à la
White Rabbit. “Mark will see that you get them,” Francis assured me. “In the meantime, you can sit at Caroline’s desk while you wait.”

“Her position hasn’t been filled?” I was surprised. It was a major newspaper, and Caroline had been dead for almost three months.

Francis ushered me ahead of him and pointed to an empty desk, a computer monitor forlornly off to the side. “Oh, her position was filled,” he said. “But no one has wanted to—um—”

“Sit where a dead woman sat?” I supplied, amused. Superstition, it seemed, was alive and well in Montréal.

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Francis without answering my question, and then he was gone.

The room was immense and incredibly loud. Voices talking on telephones, in person, computer keys clacking—I couldn’t imagine what it must have sounded like in the old days, when typewriters were used. It was bad enough now. No one was paying any attention to me, so I eased open the top drawer of Caroline’s desk. Just to see.

It was a mess: paper clips, staples, pencils, random keys, all the minutiae of paperwork were strewn in the front part of the drawer. In the back, paper, all of it, to my disappointment, blank. I closed the drawer and eased open the next one down.