Asylum (15 page)

Here I was, looking at one of my family’s worst transgressions, its abandonment of its own code regarding the sanctity of life. Unborn children are supposed to have rights, at least in my church’s view, but apparently the ones that
had
been born through “sin” had none. I took a deep breath. The guilt would have to wait, I told myself: the injustice had to be righted first. No matter where it led.

Where it led, I decided, was to McGill. That’s where the experimentation started, not in the wretched dark orphanages–cum–torture chambers, but in the laboratories where fortunes were being made—or not made—when a drug proved itself to be effective.

McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry lived in a massive gothic building called Ravenscrag on McTavish Street that would be scary even if you
didn’t
know what had happened inside. I’d looked it up online when I was in my office and had found all sorts of interesting—and probably irrelevant—information about the place.

Everything in the photos looked green and beautiful: the manicured lawns that sweep down the flank of the mountain, the trees behind the edifice, the very permanency of the building itself, solid and imposing, with its tower and craggy windows and bits of additions peppered throughout. It hadn’t been built to be a psychiatric hospital, I knew: it was a mansion, a castle meant to impress—but to me it screamed out that it was an asylum, belonging to the “pauper’s palaces” school of architecture.

Ravenscrag had been originally built in the late 1800s by Sir Charles Allan, one of the shipping magnates who were Montréal’s first
nouveaux-riches.
There had once been a sumptuous interior—a place for laughter and parties, girls giggling prettily behind fans, men taking port and smoking cigars in the library. There had been a greenhouse, a ballroom, a billiards room, and bedrooms enough for the nineteen servants the Allan family employed as well as the family and any guests who might be staying with them at any given time. It was the magnate’s son who donated the property to the Royal Victoria Hospital, and it didn’t need the rumors of ghosts to make it seem haunted after that. Frankly, it gave me the creeps.

But reading ghost stories wasn’t going to help me: I needed to find out from the university itself what it was willing to tell me. I stopped by the mews to pick up my car and headed west.

My first stop was the department of psychiatry downtown on McGill’s main campus. Parked illegally, of course. Maybe I should invest in a moped.

I smiled at the receptionist. “I’m Martine LeDuc,” I said in the informal manner of the city’s English speakers. “I work for the tourist department, and I’m doing some historical research.”

She was blandly pleasant. “How can we help you?”

“Well, it’s just information for a brochure … I understand that back in the 1940s, McGill was doing a lot of pharmaceutical research, working in cooperation with the Americans. It sounds like something important, something that would be a feather in the city’s cap, so to speak.” I’d heard Ivan using that expression, but she was looking at me blankly, so maybe I hadn’t used it correctly. I tried again. “We’re trying to promote Montréal’s role in scientific work.”

“Oh, of course,” she said, clearly still not catching on, but brightening as a thought occurred. “I know! You’ll want to talk to Dr. MacDougal. He knows all about that.”

“Great!” I said, my voice as perky as I could manage. “How do I get in touch with him?”

She consulted her computer. “He’s got postdocs all day,” she said, her voice doubtful. “That’s at his office here, just upstairs and down the hall. Maybe you could try and catch him in between them this afternoon? Or would you like to make an appointment? I can get his secretary on the phone for you.”

Neither option seemed useful. I didn’t want him to be able to dismiss me because I was there at an inconvenient time; but neither did I want to make an appointment and give him time to put on a public face.
If
this was the guy I was after, which was by no means certain. “What time’s his last student today?” I asked instead.

She scanned the monitor. “It looks like five thirty.”

I frowned. “That’s not good for me. You know, I left my appointment book behind. Can I have his secretary’s number? I’ll call myself, tomorrow.”

“Sure thing.” She gave me the number and a sunny smile. “Have a nice day!”

Five thirty, I reflected as I left the building, would do just fine. I couldn’t wait to see what Dr. MacDougal had to say.

I cannot even begin to recount how many different sorts of people lived there, hundreds of them. The vast majority were children with nothing wrong with them other than that no one really cared. A few still had families; a few still had visits; and if we thought that the visiting parlor at the orphanage had been constructed for show, it was nothing like the show that went on when someone’s family came here to see them.

There were adults, too, who mostly lived in different areas of the building from us, different floors, different wings, and they were the ones who were truly insane, who stripped naked in the dayrooms and dribbled on the furniture, who ran screaming down the hallways and caught you up to ask, breathlessly, “Are you the king?”

And, as is true, I think, in any place where a lot of people live together, be it city or asylum, there were the strong who preyed on the weak.

We’d all been through it, our first few days and weeks and months there: food stolen, blankets stolen, and no one to complain to. There was more gratuitous violence, as well: bare toes stepped upon, hair pulled, arms twisted. Later, there was even more, darker things, deeper pain, and even though I understand that people do what they feel they must do to survive, I found some of what happened difficult to forgive. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that we’d have had the sense to all band together against our common enemy, the sisters and the orderlies and the doctors; but we did not, and what we did to each other was in its own way as bad as what they did to us.

Back from the farm and working in communications, I listened to Régine and learned from her, and I obediently took the elevator when I was sent to Sister Lise. If you didn’t know where someone was, there was a chart in Sister Marguerite’s office; but since I couldn’t read it, I had to ask her for help.

“Sister Lise,” Sister Béatrice said, and looked sharply at me. “That’s down in the basement. Have you been there?”

“No, Sister.”

“All right then,” she said. “You have to take the elevator in the east wing; that staircase doesn’t go down to Sister Lise’s department.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“There will probably be an orderly around when you step off the elevator. If there isn’t, then just stand there and wait by the desk. Under no circumstances do you go anywhere in the basement alone, do you understand?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Very well. Off you go.”

And off I went, down the creaking and shuddering elevator and into the basement. I felt a wave of relief when the elevator stopped and I could wrestle the two screeching metal gates open and step out of the infernal machine.

There was no one in the basement to greet me, and I heeded Sister’s words, staying precisely where I was. The elevator opened into a lobby of sorts, an ill-lit one with a particularly low ceiling; there was a desk and chair and lamp, and three of the walls held closed doors.

At first, nothing happened. I stood and waited. The electric clock on the wall ticked loudly.

One of the doors burst open, thrown against the wall and with a loud thud, bounced back—it was made of steel, so it suffered no ill effects. An orderly, wearing the white shirt and trousers of his profession, his hair cut short close to the skull, came through and yanked a drawer completely out of the desk, grabbing something inside. A pair of handcuff restraints.

I moved then, and caught his eye. “Yeah?”

“I’m here with a message for Sister Lise,” I said, trying to look anywhere but at the restraints. More than two years since I’d last been in them, and there were still scars on my wrists. Automatically, I tugged at my cuffs to cover the marks.

“Stay here,” he said, and went back through the door, pulling it closed behind him. A moment later I heard a scream, horrible in its intensity, long and drawn out, a sound no human should make.

The door opened again, more gently this time. A nun came through, briskly, pushing the door shut behind her. “You have something for me?”

It was as though nothing had happened. As though we were conversing on a normal day, in a normal set of circumstances. “Yes, Sister.”

No mention of what I’d heard. No mention of the blood I’d seen on the sleeve of her habit. I wrestled with the accordion doors on the elevator, desperate to put as much space as possible between myself and that place.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The McGill corridor wasn’t so different from the ones I remembered from my own days at university—long, dusty, with professors’ offices lined up on either side. This wasn’t where the labs were, I noted, reviewing my campus map; just where offices and classrooms were located, where academic discussions took place.

Well, I was up for one of those.

The afternoon sun slanted in through the two windows at the end of the hallway, making dust motes dance in the air; and, taking my cue from the few students around, I sat down cross-legged on the floor and pretended to study my notebook. I was still wearing the jeans from my unfortunate interview with Violette Sobel; with any luck, I, too, could look like a postdoc student. Or so I fervently hoped.

From the tone of the voices within, it sounded like Dr. MacDougal and his current student were winding down. I thrust my notebook into my bag and stretched, ready to spring when the door opened. It did at last, two long shadows casting themselves across the corridor, and I clambered ungracefully to my feet. The student was speaking. “Thanks, I’ll get back to you with those results.”

“Best of luck with them.”

I waited until the younger man had departed and turned to the professor. MacDougal was tall, with red hair and freckles and a puzzled look about him. “Hello? Can I help you?”

I stuck out my hand for him to shake. “Professor, my name is Martine LeDuc. I work for the city’s tourism board.”

He shook my hand, bemused. “Pleased to meet you,
madame
. What can I do for the tourism board?” He was not, I noticed, inviting me in.

“I was told you were the best person to talk to about some of the experiments that were going on at Ravenscrag in the 1970s,” I said.

“Really? You were told that?” He looked vaguely amused. “Do I look old enough to have been a faculty member in 1970?”

“You look old enough to try to deflect my questions.”

This time the smile was condescending. “Well, Martine LeDuc, you should probably make an appointment. Why don’t you leave me a card?” He waited while I fished one out of my purse. “It will be interesting to understand precisely why the tourism board wants to talk about old history.”

“It’s an old city,” I said.

“With some old stories that are best left buried,” the professor warned. “Good day, Martine LeDuc.”

I could almost hear my husband’s voice.
That went well …

*   *   *

Ivan was working late at the casino so I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and curled up with a novel. Maybe a connection would come to me unconsciously if I didn’t concentrate so hard.

Or maybe I just wanted to get my mind off the investigation.

The phone rang at nine: Julian, my partner in crime. “What are you doing right now?”

“You sound like an obscene phone caller,” I said. “Next you’ll ask what I’m wearing. I’m enriching my mind, that’s what I’m doing. What’s up?”

“Checking in on your visit to the corridors of academia.” He listened to my narrative of my oh-so-brief encounter at McGill. “Bullshit,” he said. “I’ll take his picture over to UQAM, I’ll bet you anything that’s the guy your deputy saw.”

“Where did you get his picture?” I asked, curious. Police procedures still baffled me.

“He’s published articles, his face has got to be somewhere. I don’t know all that much about it but I’ll have someone do a search through our databases. If that fails, there’s always Google. Maybe you can show it to Mr. Rousseau, too. But in the meantime, let’s assume that he’s the guy we need.”

“I think that’s reasonable,” I conceded.

“He’s clearly scared, otherwise he wouldn’t have fobbed you off like that. Maybe you need someone with a little more pull to get him to talk.”

“Not my boss,” I said immediately. “If this is a real lead, Julian, then the mayor is in over his head. He postures nicely, but the reality is that McGill has clout, and not just in the city or the province, and he knows that: he’s not going to do anything to alienate them. We need somebody bigger than McGill if we want to put pressure on them.”

“Right,” said Julian. “I know what we need. We need entrée into the federal government. That’s what we need. Someone in Ottawa.”

I smiled; I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t thought of going that way; but now that Julian had pointed it out, the next step was obvious. “I know just the person,” I told him.

As soon as we hung up, I called the capital; and thirteen hours later I was in our Volvo, driving west and aware of a growing sense of dread in the pit of my stomach.

Julian called before I was even out of the province. “It’s MacDougal,” he confirmed. “He and Danielle working together, they were the ones doing the research. Wow. McGill and UQAM working together, who would’ve thought? Talk about sleeping with the enemy!”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I reminded him. But part of me wished I could see where this all was going.

Because it was going higher than any of us had ever imagined.