An Unquiet Grave

CHAPTER 26

The house was quiet. Louis waited just inside the door for a moment, listening for movement, but there was none. Phillip’s second car, a small silver Ford, was not in the driveway and Louis had assumed either Phillip or Frances was out, but it seemed they both were. He was surprised. The last few times he had been in a room with both of them, they hadn’t been able to look at each other. So maybe this was good.

Upstairs in his room, he pulled off his jacket and shoes, thinking about Dr. Seraphin.

He knew that what she was going to do was unethical and Louis wasn’t sure that farther down the road their little trip back through those records wouldn’t end up destroying an entire case against this guy. And he felt bad that he couldn’t tell Dalum.

All the way home from Ann Arbor, Louis had thought about the Ardmore badge in his wallet, and he had to remind himself that some of the things he had grown used to doing as a P.I. couldn’t be done here. But then he remembered how Rebecca Gruber’s thighs had looked, and how her insides had been torn up by someone jamming a piece of metal up her, and he knew he would go through with it, and that he would let Dr. Seraphin go through with it, too.

When he came back downstairs to the kitchen, he noticed a note next to the phone. It was from Phillip, a message that Joe had called. Louis picked up the phone and dialed her Miami number. It rang eight times before he heard her voice. But it was the answering machine.

“Hey, Joe,” he said after the beep. “It’s me. Just got back and got your message you called. Listen, I’ve got a lot going here right now and I still don’t know when I’ll be home. I’ve gotten involved in a case. .”

He paused for a second, always struck with the weirdness of speaking into a machine.

“This case is a tough one,” he went on. “I wish you were here so I could bounce some things off you, like we do sometimes. But anyway, if I get a chance, I’ll call later.”

Again, he paused, thinking he should say something else, but he didn’t. He hung up the phone and went out to the living room, stretching out on the sofa, watching the shadows of an early darkness move across the ceiling. It occurred to him that he still might be here at Christmas. Joe would understand, because she knew how a case could crawl inside and eat at you until it was solved. But eleven-year old Ben would not. They had plans for the holidays.

Damn it. He wanted to wrap this up. And maybe with Dr. Seraphin’s help, they could find the killer soon. But what about Claudia?

He had deliberately avoided giving Phillip any more details beyond the suggestion that maybe Claudia had been cremated in error. He hadn’t told him about those cans of ashes. And he was thinking now that maybe it was better to bring him home an urn filled with the ashes of an unknown patient and let Phillip believe what he needed to so he could grieve in a way that wouldn’t destroy the rest of his life.

But that was just another lie on top of a case filled with them, and before he did that, there was something he needed to do. He wanted to give Claudia one more chance to tell him where she was.

Louis went upstairs and pulled out Claudia’s medical folder. He flipped it open. Her photo was right on top and he gave it a long look, hoping to see something new in her face that would help him know more about her. But there was nothing but those dark holes that were her eyes.

He took the folder back to the bed and spread it open, setting the picture up against the lamp on the nightstand. He started with dated treatment notes, hoping to find the periods of isolation Millie Reuben had told him about. But after Phillip had torn the file apart, Louis hadn’t put it back together in any kind of order. Things were hard to find and he had to sort each piece of paper, trying to match it up with papers that looked similar or had the same headings.

The bedroom grew dark and he had gone through two Dr Peppers and a sandwich by the time he was able to figure out that the long gaps in any kind of treatments or medications must be the isolation periods. He wrote them down on a legal pad.

Claudia had been admitted to Hidden Lake in October of 1951, and had been put on Thorazine. But the records showed she had been taken off the drug almost immediately. There were no other treatments recorded until the late summer of 1952, when Claudia and Millie tried to escape.

Claudia had been sent to E Building right after that, and for the next few years, her treatments were frequent, alternating between ice baths and electric shock until early 1955, when the notes from the same period stated “the patient remains angry and unresponsive to therapy.”

Louis adjusted his glasses, trying to decipher the scrawled writings: Patient delusional; speaks of visits from her father. According to the patient’s family history, patient’s father committed suicide.

Louis stared at that line for a moment. He had heard things about mental illness running in families and he wondered when and how the father had done this. He scribbled a note to himself to find out and went on reading.

The insulin therapy was begun within months of the previous notation. The remarks changed from labeling Claudia as rebellious to compliant: Patient seems listless and unconcerned about her own welfare. Refuses to bathe herself. Patient also has become delusional and speaks of hearing voices.

It was much of the same for the next four or five years. Daily doses of Thorazine. Occasional insulin shock. And the notation: Patient is unresponsive.

Louis closed his eyes for a second, and lifted his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. Then he glanced over at Claudia’s photo on the nightstand. He was up to 1959 now. Claudia was twenty-five. The prime of her life. A time she should have been getting married, having children, or starting a career.

He went back to the file.

January 1959: Patient isolated in West Isolation Ward. The paperwork gave no reason, but maybe it was written down somewhere else he couldn’t find, or maybe they didn’t even need a reason.

December 29, 1959: Patient returned to general population. Patient now self-injurious, cutting herself and burning herself.

Louis leaned closer, reading the words again.

Jesus. .

Claudia had been burned. But had she done it herself-or had she been a victim like Millie and Rebecca? If it was the latter, he had a third rape victim tied to the hospital. But the time line was different now. The earliest date was no longer Millie’s burning and rape in 1964; it was Claudia’s burn notation in 1959.

But how could something like that happen to both Millie and Claudia five years apart in a place that was supposed to be secure? How could a patient run wild and victimize women?

Louis leaned back against the headboard. Maybe the rapist wasn’t a patient. Maybe he simply dressed like one so the women didn’t know who he really was. Maybe he was an orderly, or worse, a doctor.

He reached over to take a drink of Dr Pepper and adjusted his glasses to keep reading.

Claudia was isolated again in the fall of 1961, and again in late 1963, both times for almost a year. There were no additional references to burns, but he had no reason to assume she couldn’t have been raped and burned again during those times.

By late 1969, her treatments started to dwindle off to almost nothing. The doctor’s remarks grew infrequent, almost like Claudia was no longer receiving any significant care. And he guessed by that time, the insulin had eaten away any functioning part of her brain. Then he read something that confirmed what he had been thinking:

Patient experiences long periods of depression, and at times appears catatonic and unresponsive to outside stimuli. Patient still hearing voices and no longer recognizes visitors.

Louis stared at the last line. Visitors?

He set that paper aside and started rifling through the others for something else. They kept track of visitors at prisons. Why wouldn’t they do it at this place?

Here it was.

The first entry was December 1951, about two months after she was admitted. The visitor was Rodney DeFoe. There were probably fifteen other entries on this page that went up to early 1962, and Rodney DeFoe was on every line. It looked like he visited her a couple of times a year, mostly in the spring. No one else was on the visitors’ log.

But there were ten more years of visitor logs to look at, and Louis started sifting through the papers, but he only found two for Claudia: April 1969 and the last entry, April 1972.

April 1972?

That didn’t seem right. What had Phillip said?

It was right after my fortieth birthday. I went back to the hospital and they told me she had died there a year before.

Louis knew Phillip’s birthday was December 18. And if he remembered right, Phillip was born in 1932, which meant his fortieth birthday was December of 1972. Dr. Seraphin had told him that Claudia died during a flu epidemic during the winter of ’71-’72.

But this log listed a visit from Rodney in April of 1972, four or five months after Dr. Seraphin claimed Claudia was already dead.

Louis pulled off his glasses. Something was wrong. Or someone was mistaken. Memories-especially hard ones-could be unreliable, and Phillip was having a tough enough time with all this. Or maybe he himself was wrong about the year Phillip was born. Or maybe he wasn’t remembering clearly what Dr. Seraphin had told him.

Claudia’s death certificate. That would tell him.

He hadn’t seen one in the file, but he searched again, careful to look at every piece of paper. But as he neared the bottom of the stack, he grew sure it wasn’t in this file.

Why wasn’t it? Becker’s death certificate had been in his medical file, so why wasn’t Claudia’s?

He picked up the phone and called the Ardmore station. Chief Dalum wasn’t in the office, but Louis left a message asking him to run down a copy of Claudia’s death certificate. When the officer asked him for a date of death, Louis gave him 1972, but before he hung up, he added December 1971 as well.

Louis leaned back against the headboard, his gaze moving to the mirror and the twinkle of Christmas lights outside.

It pissed him off that he hadn’t gotten her death certificate right off. If he had, this question-and maybe some other ones-might have been answered by now. There was so much in his head right now. Some things he knew-the fact that Claudia had been burned and possibly raped. But there was so much he didn’t know-like had Claudia been murdered by the rapist?

If she had been murdered, why did Dr. Seraphin lie? And where the hell was Claudia’s body?

Louis put the file back together, feeling a small wave of weariness. He slid off the bed and stuck Claudia’s folder back in the dresser. She was a tough one to be around, like a black-sheep relative filled with so much need that it drained all the emotion of everyone around them. And every time he put her away, she left him with a faint sadness that took days to shake.

He checked his watch, wondering where Phillip was. It was almost nine now. Too late to expect Frances would be fixing anything for dinner. He headed downstairs to rummage up something. He had his head in the fridge when it hit him.

Maybe there wasn’t a body.

He straightened.

If Claudia had been murdered, why not just put her mutilated body in a casket and drop it in the ground?

Louis closed the fridge.

But someone buried rocks. And he had the feeling that it wasn’t as Dr. Seraphin had theorized: that Claudia had been cremated in error and some grave digger had buried a rock-filled coffin just to cover up his mistake.

There was no body to bury. But it was because Claudia had been murdered just like Sharon Stottlemyer. And just like Sharon, she had been left in a shallow grave somewhere out there-the cemetery, the woods, the apple orchards-never meant to be found.

It was a cover-up. Hidden Lake buried rocks not just to cover up Claudia’s murder but to cover up the fact that they couldn’t find her body. He could almost understand it, given the hospital’s need to protect its reputation and the prominence of Claudia’s family. Hidden Lake had faked Claudia’s death certificate and then buried the rocks just in case anyone in the family ever came to visit.

And someone did. Rodney.

But that still didn’t explain the visitors’ log. No matter how Claudia died, why should there be any question about when?

Somebody was wrong. Or somebody was lying.

If Dr. Seraphin had been involved in the cover-up, there was no way she was going to tell him anything. There was no one at the hospital who could help now. Rodney DeFoe’s name was on that visitors’ log. And only Rodney could explain why he was visiting his sister who had supposedly died four months earlier.

The sound of a key in the front door made him look up, and Louis headed up the short staircase to greet Phillip and Frances. But Phillip was the only one on the landing and he turned to Louis slowly. He looked lost, and very alone. Louis didn’t speak, waiting for Phillip to say something.

“She left me,” Phillip said softly. “Fran went to her sister’s in Brighton.”

Louis put out a hand to Phillip’s shoulder. “I’m sorr y.”

Phillip eased away from him and moved down the stairs to the living room. Louis followed him. It was dark, but Phillip didn’t turn any lights on. He sank into a chair, his jacket still on, head bowed.

“Fran told me to take the time I needed and maybe when I’m finished, maybe then. .”

Louis let his words hang, then glanced to the kitchen. “Can I fix you something to eat?”

“No,” Phillip said. “Maybe a beer.”

“Sure,” Louis said.

“Grab yourself one, too. I want you to bring me up to date. You haven’t told me anything in days.”

Louis didn’t reply. When he came back, he handed a beer to Phillip, then sat across from him on the sofa. The only light came from the kitchen and the room was full of shadows and the shimmering of tiny white Christmas lights winking behind the frosted windows.

Louis took a sip of his beer. He knew it was time to tell Phillip everything he had found out. But he searched now for the right place to start.

“I met a woman named Millie Reuben,” Louis said finally. “She was in the same ward as Claudia in 1952.”

Phillip was quiet, almost invisible in the deep chair.

“She told me Claudia spoke of you,” Louis said.

Phillip took a drink and Louis heard him sigh with a sadness that reminded him of how he had felt when he closed Claudia’s file a few minutes ago.

“Tell me more,” Phillip said.

Louis did, taking him from Millie Reuben, the isolation periods, the insulin and shock therapies, the cremation cans, and eventually to the rapes, the burns, Sharon Stottlemyer’s bones, and Rebecca Gruber’s torture and murder.

And the longer Louis talked, the more he sensed Phillip was sinking deeper into himself. Louis finished up with what he was planning to do next-go through the E Building records to narrow down the hundreds of possible suspects.

“So you think. .” Phillip whispered. “You think Claudia was murdered by this man?”

“I don’t have any proof. Nothing I can use to make any accusations. But that’s the way I’m leaning.”

Phillip gave out a small sob, and his hand came over his face. Louis stared at the carpet, fingers tight on the bottle, his throat so dry he couldn’t swallow. He had comforted many people before, men and women alike. But this was Phillip, his father in so many ways, and it seemed so strange to be the stronger one.

Louis rose and moved to him, kneeling down in front of the chair. “Phil,” he said. “None of what happened to her was your fault.”

Phil leaned forward, into him. Louis held him.