The Unseen

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Dorothea Dix was a large complex of buildings scattered over several hundred acres of gently rolling hills near downtown Raleigh. Laurel drove past a lush vineyard and a small cemetery as she wound the Volvo up the hill. The Romanesque buildings of the central compound looked more like a private university than a mental institution—until she got a glimpse of the spiral razor-ribbon wire layered on top of the abnormally tall fences.

Laurel had lucked out with her first phone call, but the formidable nurse at the reception desk—her name badge read “Delphine”—saw through her instantly.

“You’re not Miz Enright’s doctor and you’re no relative. What business you think you got with her?”

Laurel opted for the truth. “She was involved in a study at the university in 1965 that I believe might have something to do with her condition.” She held her breath, hoping against hope.

Delphine looked at her in disbelief. “What kind of study you figure would bring on catatonic schizophrenia?”

So it’s schizophrenia. Like Paul Folger. Laurel didn’t like the parallel one bit.

“I don’t know,” she said aloud. “That’s what I was hoping to find out from her.”

The nurse shook her head. “You’re not going to be getting anything out of her,” she informed Laurel. “She hasn’t talked in all the time I’ve been here.”

“Can I see her?” Laurel asked, without much hope. “Not talk to her,” she said quickly, as the massive nurse frowned. “I just want to see her.” She could not have said why, except that Victoria was a living link to the past, even if that link was broken.

The nurse looked hard at Laurel, then to Laurel’s vast surprise, she turned silently and nodded her head toward the stairwell.

Laurel followed the nurse’s regally swaying bulk up two flights of institutionally green stairs. They came out on a ward with the familiar stench of urine and the faintly goatish smell of hebephrenic schizophrenia; Laurel had done a semester of field work in UCLA’s psych ward and the memory of that smell was like an old and disturbing dream.

The doors of the patient rooms were locked and solid, with foot-square observation windows, the inset glass laced with wire.

Delphine stopped in front of a room and indicated the window.

Laurel looked in on a small, sad room. A stooped, elderly woman sat in the one straight-backed chair. She looked far older than mid-sixties… her cheeks sunken and hollow, her hospital gown hanging on bony shoulders. But her hair was still thick, with traces left of the luxurious chestnut it must once have been. She did not move, but for a moment her eyes seemed to lock on Laurel’s through the threaded glass of the window, and though her face remained still, her pupils dilated, with recognition or horror.

Laurel stepped quickly back from the window and found Delphine watching her. “I’m asking myself,” the nurse said dryly. “I’ve been here fourteen years and in all that time no one’s ever come to see Victoria. Her mama died twenty years ago. Then suddenly she gets two visitors in a month. How about that?”

Laurel stared at the nurse. “Who was the other?”

The nurse lifted her shoulders. “I wasn’t here. Only heard about it. But it had to be a relative, I’m thinking. They let him in to see her.”

Laurel herself had not been able to find any of Victoria’s relatives; neither her Google searches, nor the Duke alumni records, nor the actual alumni she’d talked to had any leads for her. Laurel’s mind raced through possibilities, something solid in the rush of confusing new information.

“Has Victoria been catatonic since 1965?” Laurel asked. Contrary to general belief, catatonia did not necessarily mean that a patient remained mute and frozen for all time—there could be phases of manic energy, or fairly normal movement.

The nurse shrugged. “Far as I know. She’s a strong one, to last this long.”

Horrible, Laurel thought. What hell… to be trapped in your own mind, in your own body like that.

The nurse fixed her gaze on Laurel and with her next question Laurel understood why the nurse had talked to her.

“What was this study that did that to Victoria?”

Laurel found herself suddenly unable to speak. “I don’t know,” she said finally, haunted. “I’m trying to find out.”

Down the hall from them, a door opened and several orderlies herded out a group of about a dozen patients. Some were clearly medicated to the gills, drooling and shuffling. One wizened old man muttered and twisted a strand of unkempt hair. A tall black man with an overbite lurched forward, with his eyes rolled up in his head. Beside him a grossly fat woman cackled with laughter.

They stumbled toward Laurel and Delphine, a parade of mad souls.

Lost… lost and mindless….

Laurel felt her stomach drop. The walls felt as if they were closing in around her and she was flooded with a sudden terror that if she didn’t get out now, she would never get out.

She inched backward toward the stairs. “I… I have to go,” she barely managed to say aloud to Delphine. “I appreciate your help.” She pushed through the stairwell door, escaping, the sound of the patients gibbering and catcalling echoing behind her.

The drive back to Five Oaks, and the Folger House, was just under an hour, and Laurel still felt the lingering, claustrophobic horror of the hospital as the houses and farms disappeared around her and she drove into the isolation of the pine barrens. The image of Victoria, locked forever behind that door, haunted her.

Committed to Dix in April 1965. Like Paul Folger. Catatonic. What had she seen, that would keep her imprisoned in her own mind for forty-two years? What had she done?

Leish: dead. Victoria: institutionalized. Rafe Winchester… Pastor Wallace… certainly unbalanced at the least. And Uncle Morgan: shattered in some way she could not explain.

She felt sick with a fear she was just beginning to identify.

Is there something in that house?

Did they see something, do something, experience something? Something that whatever it is causes—

Madness?

She saw again the parade of lunatic patients, and shivered.

We have to get out. I have to get them out.

She stepped on the gas.