Asylum (32 page)

And it had a syringe in its hand. My knees buckled at the sight.

Violette’s arm came around my shoulders again, and it felt warm and strong. “Stand,” she hissed.

“Yes, stand up,” agreed Robert. “Well, well. Annie’s adopted sister! What a pleasant surprise this is.”

Violette didn’t answer him; presumably she wasn’t finding the encounter as pleasant as he seemed to be. She kept looking the other way, down the tunnel, in the direction she’d been dragging me.

A door slammed somewhere behind us, off in the other direction, and a shout. “What was that?”

Julian’s voice—I thought it was Julian’s voice—came echoing up toward us. “Robert Carrigan! SPVM!”

Carrigan had turned to face the sounds, peering into the darkness, and Violette wasn’t wasting any time. “Now,” she hissed again, and this time we managed a pace that might have put a two-year-old to shame. “This way.”

Behind us, suddenly, a loud bang, echoing, and a sharp exclamation of pain. “What was that?” I asked again.

We could hear voices, swearing, and then the sound of footsteps echoing behind us—a whole barrage of them, it seemed to me. The echoes in the steam tunnel seemed to pass us and then doubled back until they surrounded us with whispers of sound, fading and returning again. Auditory hallucinations, no doubt, but the footsteps sounded real. Violette gasped and pulled me off to the side, as far aside as she could, and we fell together against the brick wall of the steam tunnel and Violette began pulling me underneath a giant steam pipe.

I looked back toward Carrigan’s little operating theater.

The bright lights behind the men down the tunnel showed them in silhouette, dark and flickering and very scary. Robert Carrigan saw what was waiting for him, presumably, and decided to get out. There was a moment of hesitation and then he was running, running down the tunnel, seemingly straight at us.

Just as Robert came up even with us in the tunnel, his vision fixed on his escape and not on anyone cowering underneath the steam pipes, I stuck out my leg. It caught him right on the shin, and he went down, loudly, swearing as he did. It sounded like a herd of—something. My brain was still struggling with what was and wasn’t real.

Now we had him and I had no idea what to do next.

It was moot: he wasn’t moving. Later I learned that the syringe he’d been carrying had stuck into his shoulder; he must have flung his arms forward to break his fall, and fell right onto the needle instead. He wasn’t getting up without help, and neither Violette nor I felt inclined to offer any. Imagine that.

I looked at Violette. “Did you see that? I did that!”

“You did,” she assured me.

“I’m a hero,” I said.

“Come on, hero,” Violette said crisply. She’d clearly had enough of me. Together we stumbled along a widening section of the steam tunnel, Julian’s voice echoing behind us, others joining in.

We went through a door and up a short flight of stairs. The stairs were challenging, and my legs felt like rubber. I was having a hard time with the perambulation and it felt like Violette was dragging me, which I didn’t understand. Why the rush? The last I’d seen Robert Carrigan, the police were taking quite good care of him. It would have been nice to just sit down for a while. Besides, this whole dragging thing seemed incredibly silly when you considered our disparate ages.

A door opened ahead of us and we were suddenly bathed in more light, flashing blue and red. “You’ve got her?” A different man’s voice.

“Just barely,” said Violette. “Here, she’s all yours. I’ve never managed anyone so difficult.”

“Well done!” Stronger arms now. “Madame LeDuc, come on, we’re going to the hospital.”

I blinked. “This
is
the hospital.”

“Not for you, it isn’t.” Another man, another syringe, and after that, nothing but black.

This isn’t my story, but I want to add why it is I have these papers, and it seems appropriate, somehow, to append it to this journal.

I was sitting in the foyer waiting for Dr. Desmarchais to take me home—and what a word that was, home!—when one of the older girls, someone I may have met before but really couldn’t remember, came through.

There was something about her. I don’t know what it was. Something furtive. Something scared. And something surprised, too. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her, my voice holding the wonder of it all, told her that I was going away, that Dr. Desmarchais was adopting me as his own daughter. I was to call him Papa now.

“Annie,” she said then, as if just remembering my name. “Annie, you have to help me.”

I don’t know what I said. I am so ashamed now, but all I could think of then was getting away. Of going home. Someplace where it was warm and there was enough food and there was no basement.

She looked around to make sure we were really alone, and then she thrust a collection of papers at me. I just stared at them, and she pushed them down deep in the pocket of my new warm coat. “Keep these,” she said.

“What should I do with them?”

“Keep these,” said the older girl. “Don’t show them to Dr. Desmarchais, please? Don’t show them to your new family, not to anybody.”

I knew what she was thinking then. She didn’t want them changing their minds, bringing me back: she couldn’t put me in that kind of danger. “Hide them and take them out again when you’re older and then you should share them with everyone. Will you do that for me?”

I remember that I nodded. I still hadn’t said much at all.

I thought she was going to cry. “And, Annie, remember my name, yes? Gabrielle Roy. Please remember it.”

“Annie!” The voice was behind us: Mother Dauphinée, who rarely put in an appearance, was there next to Dr. Desmarchais. “It’s time for you to go home, dear!”

I looked at Gabrielle, and she was already moving, already at the door. “Gabrielle Roy,” I said, as loudly as I could, and then Papa took my hand and led me out into the fitful morning sunshine and into my new life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

They kept me in the hospital—the Royal Victoria, and not the psych ward, thank you very much—for three days for observation. “You got yourself quite a cocktail in your system there,” Julian said. “They’re still trying to sort it all out.”

“But you arrested him, right?”

“Of course we arrested him. Didn’t you see? Right there in the steam tunnel. You did a great job, by the way, tripping him. He knew those tunnels better than anyone; he might have gotten away.” He smiled. “We wouldn’t have found either of you, though, if it weren’t for Violette Sobel. The old girl was amazing.”

I put my hand to my forehead: I was dealing with the absolute mother of all headaches. “How did she know?”

“Seems Annie Desmarchais left behind a lot of breadcrumbs,” Julian said. “And Violette felt guilty after you talked to her about Annie’s death, guilty she’d been so cold, so unhelpful. Violette was starting to twig on to a lot of things on her own, just because she knew her sister. Annie was smart, and she was closing in on Lansbury, figuring out what we’d figured out, about who made the money, who was behind it all.”

He turned and walked over to the window, looking out. “And Annie had this—diary, I guess you’d call it, just a bunch of papers written by this girl, Gabrielle, an orphan who was buried in the graveyard across the road from the asylum. Which apparently still
is
a graveyard—despite what the Sisters of Providence would like us to believe—under the liquor board’s warehouse. We’ll be looking into
that
. We’ll be looking into a lot of things that I’m sure my boss,
monsieur le directeur,
would just as soon not look into, but there you are; life’s simply unfair sometimes. I brought you a copy, by the way. Thought it might make for interesting hospital reading.” He tossed a large manila envelope on my bed.

I didn’t pick it up at first. “And Violette?”

He shrugged. “We guilted her into it, I guess. Or you did by way of accusing her of not caring. Anyway, Violette was remembering everything that Annie had ever told her about the asylum, trying to make sense of it. About the basement. About the experiments. She knew more than she wanted to know, and you made it all resurface.”

“I didn’t realize I’d been that rude,” I said, grimacing.

He grinned. “Seems to have done the trick, though. Once she started, nothing was going to get in her way. She retraced her sister’s research, connected the dots, whatever. And she got action. Desmarchais is almost as big a name in this town as Fletcher.” He smiled again happily. “She’d got hold of all her sister’s research, and part of that was the architect’s plans. Before, and after, as you might say. Including the warren of steam tunnels, vertical and horizontal, under the hospital. And notes that Annie had left about the basement being part of the hospital now, but the steam tunnels being abandoned and disused. Anyway, the old girl—and she’s a lot braver than she’d have you believe—did a little recon of her own, she wanted to see where the awful experiments had taken place, and stumbled onto Robert’s little setup in one of those steam tunnels.”

“When Carrigan wasn’t there,” I said, nodding.

“Obviously.” He frowned. “You’re a little slow. Must be the drugs. Anyway, anyone with half a brain could see that they were practicing some pretty bad medicine down there. She may not have recognized it as the killing space where her sister died, but she knew it wasn’t exactly Romper Room, either. And so she called me.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“And it took you this long—” I stopped. “You didn’t answer the phone,” I said flatly.

“I didn’t call her back until evening,” Julian said. “Last night it was. And then I saw
you’d
called, and I listened to your voice mails.”

I remembered that second frantic call. Hiding in the confessional, every shadow in the church a threat, and the real threat at the end of it all. I swallowed and didn’t say anything. I had a feeling it would be a long time before I could think about last night without feeling sick. I wondered how long it would be before I could go back to the basilica.

“So we thought, he’s not going to keep her in the church, no way, that’s too public. And Violette had this feeling she couldn’t explain, that somehow she was being led to the steam tunnel, and was on and on about that’s where you’d be.”

“Maybe she
was
led.” I wasn’t beyond believing anything.

“Maybe.” Julian was more prosaic. “I think the impromptu science lab more than tipped her off. By the time Violette got out to the old asylum, Dr. Strangelove there had arrived with you in tow. But don’t believe for a moment that you were in real danger,” he added stoutly. “We were there, waiting in the wings. I’d have taken him, syringe and all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“In the meantime, in case you were wondering how I’ve been spending
my
time, I’d been persuading both my boss and yours that Lansbury Pharma needed looking into. We got the Sureté in on the act and apparently they had a productive conversation with the powers-that-be over there. Persuaded them it would be a good idea to call their boy in for a little meeting. They were the ones who fingered Carrigan, actually.”

“The phone call that saved me,” I said, remembering Robert’s disappointment when he’d answered.

“Well, them and us. My boss was standing next to them when they called. That was Violette’s idea, actually, too.”

“She was amazingly brave,” I said in wonderment. So many brave women in this story. Isabelle, Caroline, Annie, Danielle, Violette … Juliette Hubert, who’d gone over the wall … and a lost little girl named Gabrielle, whose journal I would read as soon as Julian left.

“Seems to have run in the family, bravery,” Julian said. “Oh, and you’ll be happy to know, Carrigan had picked out your bench. Wrote it all down, along with sketches of you, deceased, sitting on it. He was going to put you over at Parc Lafontaine.”

“Now that’s something I didn’t need to know.”

Ivan spent the three days I was at the hospital by my side. Being Ivan, he didn’t give me any lectures on my irresponsibility or ultimatums about never putting myself in harm’s way again. Being Ivan, he was just there. With his computer tablet and his English-language news sites.

I had a lot to be thankful for.

*   *   *

Two weeks after I left the hospital and was back to the more or less usual insanity of my job, Violette Sobel came to my office. She was perfectly dressed, perfectly coiffed, and seemed vaguely embarrassed by her role in having saved my life. “I’m pleased that you’re well, Madame LeDuc,” she said formally.

“Thanks to you, Madame Sobel.” I didn’t really know what to say. How do you thank someone for
that
?

She made a brushing-away gesture with her hands. “I came by to tell you something we thought you’d want to know. I’m going up into Montrégie on the weekend,” she said. “It seems that
détective-lieutenant
Fletcher has located the half sister of Gabrielle Roy.” She glanced at my face and smiled. “Her name is Annette Latour. She only learned of Gabrielle’s existence when their mother died five years ago, and knows nothing of her life. She is eager to learn more. I thought she should have the journal.” She hesitated. “And I thought you might wish to come with me.”

“Yes,” I said, stifling thoughts of too little, too late. But I’d read Gabrielle’s journal, and anything to honor her, to keep her name alive … “Yes,” I said with more conviction. “I’d like that very much.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Much of what my fictional protagonist Martine LeDuc learned about Montréal’s past is, unfortunately, true.

The Allan Memorial Institute—sometimes colloquially referred to as the Allan—now houses the psychiatry department of the Royal Victoria Hospital, part of the McGill University Health Centre. Although currently a respected psychiatric hospital, the institute is also known for its past role in the CIA’s MK-Ultra project. The agency’s initiative to develop drug-induced mind-control techniques was implemented in the institute by its then director, Donald Ewen Cameron, from 1957 to 1964.