Asylum (11 page)

“Mrs. LeDuc?” Startled, I closed the drawer guiltily as young Mark appeared by the desk. “I have printouts here from the last month that Ms. Richards was with us,” he said, as if she had quit or gone on vacation somewhere. A permanent vacation. “But it’ll be a lot easier for you to go back further if you use the computer.”

I was all for that. “That would be great,” I said.

“Excuse me.” He reached down below the desk and booted the machine that was neatly out of sight. “I’ll get you onto the network; you’ll need a password,” he explained as we waited for the computer to check itself and make sure everything was in place. I always compared computers starting up to baseball players, touching everything they owned before heading up to bat.

Having decided that it was ready to roll, the computer asked what we wanted of it. Mark mumbled an excuse again and leaned in front of me to access the keyboard, and then I was on the newspaper intranet and Mark was scrolling through lists. “Here it is,” he said. “It’s all arranged chronologically, but you can go by subject line, too. Everything Caroline ever wrote.”

“Thank you,” I said; then, as he seemed about to depart, “Did you know her, Mark?”

To my astonishment, he blushed. “Aye,” he managed to say, betraying his own origins as being somewhere in the Maritimes. “Aye, I knew her. She was wonderful.” And then he did the White Rabbit thing again. I stood up so I could see over the cubicle, but he had disappeared into the warren. I sighed and applied myself to the computer.

Caroline Richards may well have been wonderful, but it became clear almost at once that not everybody could have shared that sentiment. She did investigative reporting, uncovering things that people did not want uncovered, asking the questions that no one wanted to answer. Of my boss, I noted with wry amusement, on more than one occasion. Odd that her path and mine had never crossed; I made a mental note to ask Richard about her. He did most of the direct work with the press; had he known Caroline?

In the months leading up to her murder, Caroline had reported on financial wrongdoing in the meatpacking industry. She had covered the trial of a reputed mobster and had found that the crown prosecutor wasn’t asking the right questions because his wife had not so mysteriously disappeared on the eve of the trial. Caroline had raised so much public outcry when the body of a prostitute was discovered and no one was able to identify the woman that the government relented and offered a free DNA database to sex workers so that if they were killed, they would at least be identified. She did a follow-up on a story that she had originally reported nearly ten years previously about the Duplessis orphans, complaining that there still had been no compensation to survivors. She wrote about …

Stop. Back up. The dots were getting closer to being connected. Caroline Richards had done a story that was sympathetic to prostitutes; Isabelle Hubert had been a prostitute. Caroline Richards had done a series of stories on the Duplessis orphans; Annie Desmarchais had been an orphan.

Okay, so maybe I was reaching. I checked my watch. Nearly seven; Ivan was working late tonight. But the casino had such excellent restaurants …

He wasn’t in his office when I got there, so I wandered through the poker rooms, listening to the quiet riffling of clay chips, the occasional chitchat among the players. There were two tables of no limits, and I paused and watched for a few minutes, fascinated. It is a sad fact that I cannot play poker to save my life. Ivan despairs of my ever learning. It must be the math, I tell him. It’s your face, he always responds.

He was deep in conversation with one of the supervisors, but smiled when he saw me. “Martine!”

“Is it a bad time?” I asked, kissing him chastely on the cheek.

“No more so than any other,” he responded, and turned back to the man in the elegant suit. “We’re fine on that?”

“Yes, Mr. Petrinko.” He turned away and began talking very quickly to one of the dealers. I watched him. “Problem?”

“Of course there’s a problem. It wouldn’t be a normal day if there weren’t any problems.” Ivan took my arm. “You want to get something to eat?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Behind me, voices were raised slightly, then the pit boss who had been talking to Ivan intervened to settle whatever argument was flaring. Regulars at the casino get annoyed when they’re treated like everybody else; I recognized the signs.

We sat in Nuances, the casino’s nicest restaurant, and didn’t talk until we’d ordered: chicken Marsala and a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape. Ivan has become French enough that he does not consider a dinner complete without wine. It’s only taken me five years of marriage to get there. “So what’s up, pumpkin?”

He usually only calls me pumpkin when I need reassuring. I wondered if I looked as scared as I was feeling. “Something’s going on,” I said. “And I think it’s not about what everyone else is thinking. I don’t think that it’s about sex, or about some psychopath who’s out there picking random victims. And I think that we’re playing right into their hands by going forward with this serial killer idea.”

“So what’s really going on, then?”

I hesitated, and then said it. “Okay. This may be just a feeling, but … I think it’s about the Duplessis orphans scandal.”

Ivan raised his eyebrows. “The what?” I had to remember that he’s only been in Canada for six years.

I took a deep breath, unwilling to begin. The Duplessis scandal was something from our collective past, something that my province and my country have tried hard to forget, even to deny ever happened. A dark shadow cast across our modern world. “Years ago, there was this guy, Maurice Duplessis, who was premier of Québec,” I said. “That’s a little like a governor of a state, though the premier has more power than a governor. I think.” My knowledge of American government is hazy at best.

“When?” Ivan is nothing if not exact.

“In the 1950s and sixties,” I said. My recollections weren’t on a par with his. “Elected in the fifties, anyway. He was a social conservative. You know the deal, a return to
family values
”—I sketched air quotation marks around the term—“an emphasis on the Church, with low social spending, suppression of labor unions, that sort of thing.”

“In the States, that would be called a Republican.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

“Whatever,” I said. I didn’t really understand American politics; keeping up with Québec—which was, after all, my own bread and butter—was more than enough most days. “The point with him, really, was that the Catholic Church was front and center,” I said. “He gave it a lot of power, and a lot of latitude.” Pull it together, Martine, you’re wandering. “Anyway, what happened was that Duplessis and the Church were in each other’s pockets. And the Church was running these orphanages, or asylums, or a mixture of the two, and it was—well, it was pretty horrible, Ivan.”

The waiter came and uncorked the wine, Ivan went through the tasting ritual, and we were left alone again. “Tell me,” Ivan commanded, pouring wine into my glass.

It seemed sacrilegious to drink liquid rubies like these when I had such a horrible story to tell. “You have to understand, in the 1940s and even through the end of the 1960s,” I was trying to keep my voice steady, not looking at him at all, “it was a sin here in Québec to have a baby out of wedlock. I mean, a social sin. We were a kind of traditionalist place, especially upriver. A lot of bad things happened to the mothers.”

Ivan didn’t say anything. I took a deep breath. “And a lot of worse things happened to the babies. They were mostly institutionalized—put in these orphanages that were run by the Church. Oh, it wasn’t just babies born to single mothers. Everyone had these huge families, and when you couldn’t feed all your children, then you had to do something with them, so they went into the orphanages, too. Or if the father of the family died and the mother couldn’t remarry or support her children,
they
went into the orphanage.”

Ivan was watching me, his eyes concerned. He didn’t know where this was going, but he knew it was hurting me; he knew that I was very aware of my Church’s historical failings and that I still tried to love it. I took a quick swallow of wine. “And so there were these tremendously big orphanages, hundreds and hundreds of children in them. And
then
sometime in the 1950s the Church, probably through Duplessis himself, found out that they could get more money—you know, federal grants and support money and all that—from the Canadian government for kids in asylums than they could for kids in orphanages.”

“Wait,” said Ivan. “Duplessis wasn’t part of the Canadian government? I thought you said he was premier—”

“He was a premier of Québec, of the province,” I said. “There was also a Canadian premier. But you know there’s this weird coexistence between Québec and the rest of Canada.”

“Don’t I ever,” said Ivan with feeling. Massachusetts had never been this complicated.

“So the federal government decided that it was more expensive to support people in asylums than it was to support just regular kids in orphanages, and they upped the entitlements, so
pouff!
Suddenly a whole lot of the orphans were mentally ill, too. It was a very deliberate move. You went to sleep an orphan, you woke up an insane person. Just so the Catholic Church and the local government could save some money.” Another swallow of wine. “They either renamed the orphanages as asylums, or took the kids from the orphanages to the asylums. And a lot of these kids
were
mentally ill, there’s no question; but a lot of them weren’t, most of them weren’t, only they were all locked up together anyway. It’s a wonder anyone stayed sane.”

Ivan was watching me. “And the Church was in charge?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral. Like Violette, I married a Jew. It’s sometimes been an issue between us; Ivan’s criticisms of the Catholic Church have nearly always resulted in fights.

“Yes,” I said wearily. “The Church was in charge.” I hesitated, torn between not wanting to expose more of Catholicism to Ivan’s critical tongue, but wanting to share what I was finding with the only person in the world who knew me, who could comfort me, who could help me think it all through. “You have to understand,
chéri
, back then, the Church ran a lot of things in Québec. Schools. Hospitals. I’m not saying that it was all bad…” My voice trailed off.

Ivan was gentle; he had picked up on my fear. “I’m sure it wasn’t,” he said. “Bad things happen, sometimes, for the best of reasons. So you’re not telling me what happened?”

I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to know. What had happened should never have happened. What had happened was a nightmare. “So the orphanages became asylums,” I said, “because Québec could obtain more federal funds for healthcare facilities than for schools and orphanages. So orphans magically became mentally ill: they labeled everybody either crazy or mentally deficient and locked them away. They were called the Duplessis orphans, because this all happened under his watch and probably with his collusion, though the practice far outlived him. He died in office in 1959, but the asylums kept taking in orphans all through the sixties.”

I was feeling a little queasy. I had read Caroline Richards’s reports, awakening in me the memory of the original articles, the protests, the lawsuits, when the surviving orphans, now adults, had started coming out with their stories. Straitjackets. Electroshock therapy. Hydrotherapy. Excessive medication. Lobotomies. Any doctor who wanted to try something out had as many human guinea pigs available as he needed, and there would be no one to complain if the experiments failed. Better still, the medical schools were paying for the corpses. It was a win-win proposition for everyone involved.

I felt a wave of revulsion, but tried to focus. It wasn’t as if Québec were alone in this. Nazis in Germany had experimented on people. Human experimentation in the United States wasn’t unknown, either—Tuskegee, the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study, even infants injected with herpes: none of this was new. But it had happened at home, my home.

“So it turns out that she—Caroline, this reporter—was particularly interested in the experiments they were doing with chlorpromazine.” I was turning my wineglass round and round in circles on the tablecloth. “In the States, you call it Thorazine,” I said. “There was this guy who was working for McGill, this doctor, a psychiatrist. His name was Ewen Cameron. He was famous for doing human experimentation, combining drugs, electroshock therapy, and lobotomies.” I swallowed. “Caroline wrote that he was working for the CIA, that he was part of that whole program where they used people to see what effects drugs like LSD had on them, back during the Cold War.”

Ivan frowned. “So you’re saying the CIA was involved with experimenting on children in Canada? And you think there’s a tie-in between these stories and the murders?” he asked. “I don’t know. It sounds like you might be stretching it, babe. I mean, I’m not saying that wasn’t horrible, and I’m not saying that Caroline didn’t make herself some enemies by writing about it, but that sounds a little too much like a conspiracy theory to me. Next thing you know, you’ll be saying that the CIA had something to do with all this stuff that’s happening now, with Montréal and the murders—”

“It’s a possibility,” I said defensively. The waiter arrived with our dinners and I looked at my plate with some dismay. I wasn’t all that hungry anymore. Thinking about torture has that effect, I guess. “It’s as good as the current sex fiend theory.”

“Hmm.” Ivan took a swallow of wine and held it in his mouth for a moment, tasting, before swallowing it. “It’s a lot to take in,” he said neutrally. “What does your detective friend Julian think about all this?”

“I have no idea. He’s MIA.” I sighed, frustrated. “Maybe you’re right, maybe there’s nothing here.”

But, as it turned out, there was.

After a year on the farm, it appeared that I had worked my way back into the sisters’ good graces. At least that was how it was expressed to me when I was brought before Mother Andrée and told that I was to begin working in the main building. “We feel that you can be trusted, Gabrielle,” she said sternly, watching me closely for any signs of untrustworthiness. “You are quick and intelligent, and we will try and find tasks more suited to you henceforth.”