Asylum (24 page)

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

Dan leapt to his feet, tossing the notebooks off him as if they carried a disease. All these notes … on his desk … under his bed … No wonder it had seemed like he had a stalker everywhere he went. He’d written these notes—“delivered” them himself.

“
Mild
dissociative order,” Dr. Oberst had said. “Harmless lapses in memory,” she’d said. What did she know? She was no better than the doctors who’d been at Brookline fifty years ago. At least their treatments had gotten results.

Now Dan was faced with the fact that he was blacking out for long stretches of time, forgetting text messages, notes, even pictures with his best friends. And, oh yeah, who could forget the little fact that every time someone had been attacked, there’d been a mental gap he couldn’t account for—unconscious in the basement when Joe had been killed, napping in his room when Yi was knocked out, and sending ominous text messages when Felix was nearly bludgeoned with a crowbar.

These lapses in memory seemed far from harmless to him.

But Dan wasn’t ready to believe that he was a cold-blooded killer. He was channeling the warden, not the Sculptor, and as strange as it was to find comfort in that fact, Dan had to admit he’d rather find creepy notes in his possession than a garrote any day.

But what about the birth parents?

Officer Teague’s questions still reverberated in his ears. He’d been so sure that Dan was related to the cruel warden, that it had something to do with why Dan was here. Dan had let his mother cast it off as a coincidence, but he knew that nothing about this summer had been coincidental. Being here was his destiny. It was his destiny to solve the mystery of what happened to the warden, and the Sculptor, and Lucy.

Dan remembered that Abby had visited the old church and found Lucy in the records. Maybe the records could work the same magic for him. Occam’s razor or whatever the hell you wanted to call it.

It couldn’t wait another minute. He refused to accept another restless night, another nightmare-riddled sleep.

Grabbing his flashlight and the closest thing to a weapon he had—a pair of scissors—Dan stepped outside and into the night.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER

N
o
 32 

N
ot only was it beyond dark outside, the perpetual mist had turned into an oppressive drizzle. Dan felt the dampness soaking through the cuffs of his jeans. That, combined with the ever-refreshing clarity that came with distance from Brookline, made Dan pause. Would the church even be open at eight o’clock on a Thursday?

But he felt like he had to try. He needed to know if he was crazy, possessed, or the victim of an elaborate framing job, and right now his only lead was his possible connection to Warden Crawford.

Rounding a curve in the path, Dan was relieved to see there were lights on in the church. Off to the right was the dense tunnel of trees through which Dan’s cab had driven on that very first day.

Dan broke into a jog as the drizzle became a steady rain. There was a tiny awning over the front doors of the church, and Dan huddled under it as best he could, first trying the door handles, and then, when they were locked, pounding loudly with his fists.

“Coming! Coming!” came a faint voice.

The doors swung inward to reveal a kindly-looking old man in a suit and tie. He came up to about Dan’s shoulders, and he smiled warmly even though Dan had clearly just interrupted him.

“Well come in, come in, I can’t have you catching your death on the church doorstep.”

Dan stepped into a small vestibule with just enough room for a few long tables. He could see the open sanctuary through the arched doors beyond.

“Now what brings you to Camford Baptist on this rainy Thursday, young man? I don’t think I’ve seen your face in Sunday service.”

“No, I—I’m a summer student up at the college. I mean, I’m still in high school. I’m in the college prep program.”

“Ah, NHCP,” he said, enunciating each letter to show he was in with the lingo. “I know it well. My granddaughter just attended the program a few years ago now.”

“Oh, cool,” Dan said. He felt sort of awkward barging ahead with his questions, but the man seemed content to stand here in the entrance and talk. “Well, sir, I’m sorry to bother you so late, but a friend of mine was here a couple days ago, and she said you helped her find some stuff about her aunt?”

“Ah, you must mean Abby. Yes, lovely girl. Reminded me of my granddaughter, actually.”

“Well, I was sort of hoping you could help me with the same thing, I guess. I used to have family in Camford, too.”

“Is that so?” The pastor eyed Dan strangely, like maybe he didn’t believe him. Dan decided he should take a page from Abby’s book and just put everything out in the open.

“The thing is, I’m not sure, to be totally honest. I was a foster kid for a while and then I was adopted by my current parents, but there have been some weird things this summer that make me think I might have stumbled on my birth relatives here in Camford.”

“Let me guess—Daniel Crawford?” The pastor’s demeanor had turned solemn, almost icy.

“Dan,”
he said defensively. “How did you know?”

“It’s a small town, Mr. Crawford.” And then, when Dan simply continued to look at him, he added, “Mr. Weathers is in my parish.”

It took Dan a second to realize he meant
Sal
Weathers.

“Oh, that. Yeah, my trip to his house didn’t go very well. But Sal—Mr. Weathers—thought I was playing a joke on him or something, and I wasn’t, I swear. My name really is Dan Crawford, and I really did want to know about Brookline.”

“I believe you,” the pastor said placatingly, his mouth a grim line. “But I think to Mr. Weathers, the idea that you might not have been joking would be even more frightening.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Do you? How much do you know about what really went on up at Brookline?”

“I know a lot more than they’re telling us,” Dan said defiantly.

“Indeed.”

It was almost like they were in a poker game, each of them trying to guess at what the other already knew. Finally, the man sighed; if their talk was a game, he was folding.

“Well, I admit I was just a boy myself when Warden Crawford took over the asylum, but the rumors of what happened under his regime are legend. Inhuman conditions at the best of times, tortuous experiments at the worst. Not exactly memories we townsfolk are eager to relive.”

Dan slumped, feeling chastised.

“I
do
remember the warden’s family, though,” the pastor continued, and Dan snapped to attention. “Oh yes, he had a family. No wife or kids of his own, but the Crawford boys were Camford natives, and Daniel was the oldest of the three. By the time he returned from medical school to take on the role of warden at Brookline, his younger brothers were set up here as an auto mechanic and a clothing salesman. Daniel always was the smartest child.”

The pastor was staring off into the middle distance, recalling these details from a long-forgotten place.

“The mechanic, Bill, had a wife who’d just had a baby boy when the asylum was closed. That would have been in, let’s see, ’72? Wasn’t long after that before all the Crawfords left Camford, run out of town in shame.”

“Why?”

“Oh, it was a regular witch hunt. Daniel was put on trial, of course, and the more details that came out during the case, the more people were calling for all the Crawfords to leave. Like they had bad blood or something.”

“And what happened to—to Daniel?”

“Well, he tried to plead insanity there for a while. And he had a compelling case, too—some of the things he did in that dungeon, some of the reasons he gave … People were outraged, of course. But in the end it never came to a verdict. One of the other inmates got into his cell and killed him. Sounded like the locks on those cells weren’t as tight as they could have been.”

Dan was stunned. “Wow” was all he managed to say.

“Terrible thing,” the pastor said. He still stood barring the entrance to the sanctuary, until Dan started to get the feeling that the preacher wanted him to leave. “Anyway, I can tell you right now you’re not going to find any of the Crawfords on our baptism registry. They were crossed off our records long before I became pastor here.”

“I guess I can see why,” Dan said, though he found it curious that the pastor already knew that information. “Well, I guess I’d better go, but do you mind if I ask you one more question first?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s about Dennis Heimline. The Sc-the
Sculptor
,” Dan stammered. “I’ve heard some people say that he died the year Brookline shut down, but Mr. Weathers said that no one knows for sure what happened to him.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Weathers is technically correct there. We all assume Dennis Heimline died, of course, given the nature of the things he must have endured at the asylum. But while all the other patients were eventually accounted for, Heimline’s body was never found.”

Dan shuddered. Then, with a mutter of thanks, he turned to leave.

“Oh, and Mr. Crawford?” the pastor said, catching Dan by the elbow. “I hope you won’t blame Sal for any grief he caused you. I think you can see why he would’ve gotten upset talking about all this.”

“I definitely can. Thank you for all your help, Mr.… ?”

“It’s Bittle,” the pastor said, and his eyes looked grim. “Ted Bittle.”

Dan left the church feeling more distraught than when he’d arrived. He’d gone there for
proof
, a confirmation, but all he had now were more possibilities. His grandfather had
possibly
been an auto mechanic. Warden Crawford, who was
possibly
his great-uncle, had died in prison, while the Sculptor was
possibly
still alive. And if Dan wasn’t totally imagining the patient card Jordan had found in the basement, the Camford Baptist pastor was
possibly
related to another of Brookline’s homicidal patients.

He was only too happy to leave the church behind.

But if it was raining before, it was absolutely pouring now. The gravel road outside the church was slushy and treacherous. Dan tried to point his flashlight ahead of him and run at the same time, but he kept twisting and slipping on loose rocks. He’d barely made it to the main path when he decided it was foolish trying to get all the way back in this weather. He ran off the side of the road to the dense protection of the forest. Two steps in, and already the deluge was reduced to a few scattered drops that found their way through the limbs overhead, which crowded together like a tangle of fingers. Now Dan just had to wait for a break in the downpour.

A branch snapped behind him, loud even over the sound of heavy rain.

Dan turned just in time to see a deer darting through the maze of trees not ten feet away. He let out a heavy sigh.

Just a deer, Dan. Calm down.

But when he aimed his flashlight at where the deer had been, Dan saw a glint in the darkness, like a reflection on steel. At first he thought it could be some kind of animal trap or a path marker … until he saw the rope tied around it, pulled taut and stretching into the shadows, and realized that it was a metal stake driven into the tree.

“Hello?” Dan called, imagining a hunter who’d been stranded in the rain. But that was ridiculous—who would be hunting this close to the school?

“Anyone there?”

Dan pulled out the pair of scissors from his pocket. They hardly made him feel any safer. Carefully, he stepped over fallen limbs and riots of underbrush. He reached the tree with the stake in it, then shined his flashlight down the length of the rope.

He still expected to find a net at the end, waiting to catch an unsuspecting animal.

Instead, he found a human hand.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he jabbered, shaking uncontrollably as he tried to take in what he was seeing in the careening beam of his flashlight.

It was a man, his hands connected by ropes to two neighboring trees, pulled slightly behind him so that he was forced into a forward bow at the waist.

“Are you all right?” Dan called, though he was already sure of the answer.

He got up as close to the man as he dared. He was afraid to touch him, so sure that he would spring up and grab him or bite him like some zombie. But he forced two shivering fingers onto the man’s neck. He waited for a pulse. Nothing.

“Oh my God, oh my God.”

He moved to cut the ropes with his scissors, but then stopped himself. This was a crime scene, and he’d better not disturb it.

At this proximity, Dan could finally make out the details of the man’s face. He recognized this man.