Asylum (19 page)

She raised her eyebrows. “Logical, Mrs. LeDuc?”

“In view of Annie Desmarchais’s own past.”

There was a moment of silence. “I’m not sure I understand,” Elizabeth said, more stiffly.

I exhaled in exasperation. “Why is this the best-kept secret around? Honestly, you’d think it was something that everyone’s ashamed of! Ms. Romfield, Annie lived for the first ten years of her life in a mental institution, one where mental health was the least expected outcome. Children there were little more than test subjects for some sort of shadow medical establishment. And she got out of there, and she managed to get an education, she managed to do well, and give back to others. That’s something that she—and everyone who knew and cared about her—should have been trumpeting from the rooftops! And instead, everyone’s acting like it’s something awful, something to be ashamed of. If there’s something here that I’m not understanding, I’d appreciate it if you’d explain it to me.”

She stayed quiet for a moment after my outburst, and in the silence, the old man behind me dropped a book. I’d forgotten his presence altogether.

Elizabeth smoothed her skirt again. “Mrs. LeDuc—may I call you Martine? So much easier … You have to understand, that’s a part of Québec’s past that we’d all like to forget.”

“I know the rhetoric,” I said. “Believe me, I know. Don’t forget that I’m the
directrice de publicité
: I even helped write part of it myself. So don’t bother going through the paces with me now.” I leaned forward. “You say that you were her best friend. Then do something for her now, Elizabeth. Find out why she died. Make sure that whoever did this to her pays.”

A flicker of a glance over my shoulder, so quick that I might have imagined it. But I hadn’t. “Annie didn’t like to discuss her past,” she said quietly. “It was a horrible experience that she did her best to eradicate from her memory.” She looked directly at me. “You seem to know what was going on in the asylums. If that had happened to you, would you want to remember it? Or even think of it again? It’s the stuff of nightmares.”

“The nightmares caught up to her,” I said.

A sharp intake of breath. “Surely that had nothing to do with her death! I read in the newspaper that they’ve arrested the killer.”

“They’ve made an arrest,” I acknowledged. “Did Annie participate in any of the lawsuits against the government? Was she part of any of the orphans’ groups?” She hesitated, and I added, as gently as I could, “It’s a matter of public record, you know. I’ll find it out anyway—you might as well tell me.”

Again that flicker, no more, of attention to the man who was now silent behind me. For all I knew, he’d gone to sleep, or died, or I was getting paranoid. I cleared my throat and Elizabeth Romfield made her decision. “Annie spoke rarely of her past,” she said, as though acknowledging a defeat at chess. “It was, for her, like looking back into a dark cave. An apt simile, as I’m sure you’ll agree.” She smoothed her skirt again. “When she was adopted, she was given tutors. Round the clock, practically; all she remembers is studying. And doctors, doctors of all sorts, asking interminable questions.”

“It seems extraordinary that she could have caught up like that,” I murmured, since she seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

“It was,” she agreed. “Annie Desmarchais was an extraordinary woman.”

She examined her nails for a moment. I reread my notes. No one in the room moved or made a sound. Finally, she spoke again. “Her father was himself a doctor,” she said. “He had inherited wealth, so he had no need to work. But he was fascinated by mental illness and how it could be overcome.”

I stared at her. “Then adopting Annie was a kind of
experiment
?” I asked, aghast.

She shrugged, looking at her hands as though not knowing what to do with them. She ended up clasping them in her lap. “I cannot speak to his motivations,” she said, still looking at her hands, her voice precise and careful. “There had been a death in the family. That seemed reason enough to adopt. I’m sure that he meant nothing but the best for both his daughters.” She looked up at me. “He arranged for their education. He arranged for good marriages for both of them.”

“He
arranged
for their marriages?” I asked. “Wasn’t that a little old-fashioned?” A man who sends his daughters to college but arranges their marriages, I thought. Was I the only one who found that a little weird?

She tipped her head, considering. “Perhaps. But the old families have old-fashioned values. It certainly didn’t seem to shock anyone at the time.”

I looked at her sharply. “At the time? You knew Annie then?” I’d assumed they’d met through the foundation.

“Of course,” she said. “Annie and I were in school together. She was enrolled starting in sixth form; I remember us all thinking that was a little odd, but she only said she’d been abroad. And we accepted that, of course.”

I readjusted my thinking to accommodate this new information. “Did she ever discuss her past with you?”

A shadow crossed Elizabeth’s face. Annie had talked about it, all right. “Occasionally,” she said, flicking an imaginary piece of lint off her sleeve. “Once we were adults. But mostly we talked about the future.”

“What about her father? You said he was a doctor; was he a psychiatrist?”

She looked pained. “I don’t see how sullying his memory is going to do any good!” she exclaimed. “Martine, really, I want to help you, but—”

“Then help me,” I said. “Help Annie.”

Another stretch of silence. “He
was
a psychiatrist,” she conceded at last. “He was in private practice, but he had some sort of affiliation—don’t ask me, I honestly don’t know what—with the asylum where Annie had been living. And with the Allan Institute, through some work he’d done at McGill. Even when she was in her teens, he still went back there occasionally. Maybe regularly.” She looked again at her pristine fingernails. “Please understand, this was the seventies. We are all a product of our times.”

Just get on with it, I pleaded silently.

She took a deep breath. “We were, all of us, very concerned about what was happening in the Soviet Union, about the spread of Communism,” she said at last. “Dr. Desmarchais was passionately anti-communist. Well, so many people were in those days, weren’t they? He felt that we should all do our part to help keep the free world free.”

“And what was his part?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. I thought I already knew.

She shrugged and used my own expression. “You can make the inferences.”

“He was involved with the experiments,” I said. “With the mind-altering drugs.”

She nodded. “He thought that there could be some use for a drug that would incapacitate a subject’s ability to think and to remember. It was all so very convenient. You see, no court of law can rule against psychological warfare because of the difficulty in prosecuting psychologically induced states of mind as proof of assassinations and other orchestrated events.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, you know, everyone back then was so concerned about what was happening in the United States,” she said. “Take Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Let’s face it, nobody just picks up a gun on some sunny day and decides that all of a sudden they’re going to start shooting people. The precision and cold, calculating nature of the shooter has to be thoroughly ingrained into a subject with rigorous conditioning and mind control.”

“Uh-huh,” I said again.

She looked up then and met my eyes, sensing my withdrawal. “It’s irrelevant, anyway,” she said briskly. “He wasn’t the only one doing the experiments, and he died a long time ago. I cannot see that this has any connection with a murder that happened over half a century later.”

“Was Annie one of his subjects?”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “I don’t know.”

I shook my head. “With all due respect, Elizabeth, I don’t believe you. She was your best friend for years. You can’t tell me she didn’t tell you.”

“She didn’t know!” Her hands went into a frenzy of straightening her already-perfect clothing. “She didn’t know. Once she was older, once she went to university and started understanding what he’d done, she wondered, yes. She asked him! But he denied it, he always denied it.”

“She came to his attention for some reason,” I pointed out. “Why did he adopt
her
, out of all the children in that place?”

“We wondered that, too,” Elizabeth replied. “Annie was sure that there was something dark behind it all; but her parents would never tell her, and Violette was too young to know, so she never found out.”

“Maybe she did,” I said.

The look she gave me was pure anguish. “I hope you’re wrong,” Elizabeth Romfield said. “I pray to God that you’re wrong.”

When I looked to see what had become of our audience, the old man was gone. There was no one there. I wondered if there ever had been.

*   *   *

I grabbed a coffee and a sandwich at the closest St. Hubert, and headed back to the Old Port. Chantal was typing, Richard’s door was closed, everything was fine. “You’ve had three calls from Ottawa,” Chantal said. “You know that smartphone the office bought you? You’re supposed to keep it turned on.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Don’t know. Someone named Elodie Maréchal. Said you’d know who she was.”

I was already looking at the pink slips. “Thanks, Chantal,” I said. “Can you get her on the phone for me now, please?”

I shut my door and waited at my desk for the call to go through. I knew that I’d upset Elodie. Let’s see if anything had come of it.

Chantal buzzed her through almost immediately. “Martine?” Elodie asked plaintively. “When are you going to learn to answer your mobile?”

I sighed, cradling the telephone against my shoulder as I removed my shoes. “
Et tu, Brute
,” I murmured. “I was busy.”

“So it seems. Okay, here’s what I’ve got for you. This guy is willing to talk, but
only
if you don’t know who he is.”

“Talk about…?”

“The drugs. The experiments. The whole thing.”

I could feel my heart rate quicken. “Does he know of a connection between that and the murders?” I asked.

“If anybody knows, he will,” Elodie predicted. “He’s high up, Martine. I mean,
really
high up.” There was a burst of static. “Can he call you tonight?”

This was a call that I didn’t particularly want to be traceable to my home telephone, and after last night, I wasn’t staying late at the office for a while. Besides, I had plans. “I have to go to a wake tonight, Elodie. Can he call tomorrow?”

“I’ll check.” She sighed. “You may have opened a big can of worms here,
mon amie
.”

“Better to have left it a secret?” I countered.

“You make a good point. Be in your office in the morning,
chérie
. I’ll tell him you’ll be there.”

“Thanks, Elodie.” I knew that if this all blew up, heads would roll, and hers could well be on the chopping block. She probably knew it, too.

“Yes, well, let’s wait and see how it all shakes out.” Oh, yeah: she knew.

I sighed and called Julian. No answer. He was starting to become as elusive as the ghosts we were chasing.

Ivan, on the other hand, was at his desk. “I’m going to Danielle Leroux’s wake tonight,” I told him. “Can you come along?”

He thought about it. “Bad guys going to be there?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Okay, sure. Let me just put out a couple of fires here and I can get away. Want to get a bite to eat first?”

“Is that an invitation?”

“Of course.” He yawned. “Gotta go play some poker, babe. Where and when?”

I thought quickly. “Meet me at La Raclette on Saint-Denis at six-thirty. Can you? That’s close enough to the funeral home to walk over after.” And I hadn’t had fondue in ages.

He groaned. Ivan has a very American approach to walking: he doesn’t do it much. “That means it’s about sixteen blocks away,” he said.

“Ah, but every one of them in my scintillating company,” I reminded him. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

“No problem. Watch yourself until then, okay?”

“Doing my best.” I hung up and wondered if that were true, then eased back into my shoes. It was time to go talk to the police director, and see if he’d extracted a confession from his prisoner.

I fully expected that he had.

I worked with Régine, but my closest friend at the asylum was Marie-Rose. She’d come with me from the orphanage, on the same bus even, but we really only got to know each other once we’d worked on the farm together. She was younger than me, though by how much—who could say? As I said before, we didn’t celebrate birthdays.

We didn’t celebrate anything at all.

Marie-Rose and I contrived to have beds next to each other in the dormitory, which gave us the opportunity to whisper together when Sister’s back was turned. Those conversations, I have to say, kept me going for a long time. They assured me that I was not, in fact, going crazy myself.

It was an easy enough belief to espouse. People were mean and then said they did it to be kind. People treated one like an animal and then said it was for one’s own good. People hurt other people—children, even—and then said it was to make the world a better place. Who wouldn’t sometimes feel a little crazy?

“Maybe we’re the crazy ones,” said Marie-Rose.

“No!” I said it fiercely; but sometimes, in the night, it was something that I wondered, too. Who was crazy here?

Sometimes as I went about my work, bringing notes to disparate parts of the building, I caught a glimpse of the occasional—and rare—visitor being ushered into the large bright parlor that the sisters reserved for outsiders. What did they think of the place, I wondered. What did they think of the scrubbed walls and gleaming floors, the fresh flowers that were always in the entrance hall, the smiling faces of the sisters who met with them? Did they think that good things happened here?

Once I carried a message to the sister in the hydrotherapy room. Here they tried to make people less crazy by putting them in baths of cold water, adding ice cubes to make sure it stayed cold, keeping them there for hours. I was no doctor, I said once to Régine, but I didn’t see how cold water made crazy people less so. She did her usual quick scan around to make sure that no one could hear us. “They only send the women there,” she said.