Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (14 page)

Chapter Twenty

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

“I’m sorry . . .” I clutched my purse and rose up out of her chair, as if puppet strings lifted me.

“You’re trying to locate a relative,” the woman said. She clicked the door shut behind her. The sound was ominous.

My heart slammed. What should I do?
Run? Cry?
Was she going to call security on me? I found my voice. “The woman at the desk said I had to come back Tuesday, but I can’t. I don’t have time. It’s hard to explain . . .”

Her eyebrows rose.

“I’m desperate,” I said.

“Okay.”

“My brother doesn’t want me digging into the past. He’s telling everybody I have a mental illness. Schizophrenia. He’s threatening to have me committed.” The words were gushing out. I ignored the churning in my gut and the blaring alarm bells in my head and let them gush.

“But you don’t? Have schizophrenia?”

“No,” I said as emphatically, but calmly, as I could. “I don’t.”

“So, your brother’s a liar. And an ass.”

I nodded. “That about sums it up.”

She made a little
harrumph
sound. “My brother’s an asshole too, for whatever it’s worth. But he hasn’t tried to have me committed. Not yet. That’s low.”

I managed a weak laugh.

“Well, I’m not a doctor,” she added. “But I’ve got to say, you don’t seem like any schizophrenic I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m not crazy, I swear.”
Not yet, anyway.
“I just want to know the truth.”

She stared at me for a minute, and I could see the gears turning. “What’s your name?”

I hesitated.

“Just start with your name. We’ll go from there. I’m Beth.” She offered her hand and I took it.

“Althea. Althea Bell.”

Her eyes flashed in recognition. “Bell. You mean, as in Wynn Bell? The guy running for governor?”

“Yes.”

She whistled. “Wynn Bell is trying to lock you up?”

“I know it sounds crazy.” I shook my head. “But yes.”

“Interesting.” She regarded me for a moment, her eyes narrowed, then brushed past me and scooted up to the computer. “Would you mind telling me her name? Your relative’s?”

I straightened. “Collirene Crane.”

She tapped at the keyboard.

“But I’m also looking for my mom. Trix Bell. She died in 1987.”

“Hm. Yeah,” she said after a while. “Collirene Crane, I see. No Trix Bell here, though.” She regarded me through the black-framed glasses. “I’m sorry. She was your mother, right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure she was here at Pritchard?”

“Not exactly. She was . . . There are conflicting stories.”

She tilted her head, gave me a sympathetic look. “Not surprising.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even as recently as the eighties, there was a stigma attached to being hospitalized. Some families wanted it kept quiet, so they’d bury the paperwork.”

“The hospital would let people erase records? Just like that?”

She pressed her lips together. “You have no idea, the things that have gone on here. Pritchard was known for being a place where a lot of things were overlooked. Accurate records, for example. So . . . Collirene Crane.” She tapped again. “1962. Here she is. Buried in . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just that—” She leaned forward. Adjusted her glasses. “It says she’s buried in Historic Number Four. The black cemetery.”

My stomach lurched. “I don’t understand. She was white. Is that normal?”

When her eyes met mine, I saw that it wasn’t. That a white woman being buried in the black cemetery was, in fact, very strange. Panic rose in my throat again, and my hand pressed against my purse. I pictured the Lortab and Dilaudid buried at the bottom.

“It’s . . . unexpected,” the woman said, at last. “I’ll say that.”

“Could it be a mistake?”

“There’s no other record of her being buried in any of the other cemeteries.”

“But why would she have been buried there?”

She drummed her fingers on the desk distractedly. “I don’t know. But I tell you this, I’d sure like to find out.”

“You would?” I said. “What do you mean?”

She bit her lip.

“You can trust me, I swear.”

“Your brother,” she said. “He came here, to Pritchard, not too long ago.”

“My brother was here?”

“When the memorial committee toured the hospital. While the historic preservation guys walked through the wards, your brother sat in the main office. Like he didn’t want to catch crazy-person cooties.” She folded her arms. “I introduced myself. Talked to him for a minute or two, about the memorial. He was . . . unhelpful, to say the least. I got the distinct impression he didn’t appreciate my questions.”

I held my breath.

“I’ll admit, I was grilling him on some things. Specifically, if the committee planned to include some kind of acknowledgment of the lost patients.”

“Lost patients?”

“Most of the old state mental institutions had their share of lost patients, especially during the early 1900s, before the government cracked down and enforced the new regulations. They were the patients who ‘went missing,’ who died as a result of abuse or neglect. A lot of them had no family. Or had the misfortune of being black. I’ve been researching, reading these horrific accounts. Anyway, it’s something of a pet project of mine.”

I felt cold. “Do you think my grandmother is one of those, the disappeared?”

“I don’t know, but we’re sure as hell going to find out.”

Beth and I rode in one of the hospital’s utility vehicles through several wood-fenced fields. The paved road led through the fields, past a broken-down barn and smaller outbuildings that were in various stages of rot. We turned left onto faint dirt tracks, which led into the woods. We wound our way through the trees and then, with no warning at all, Beth hit the brakes.

“This is it.”

I climbed out. Rain pelted the spreading canopy of leaves above us, but we stayed mostly dry. She led me down the hill to a large cleared area of about an acre, ringed by a makeshift wall of piled stones. There was no sign. Nothing announcing the resting place of hundreds of souls.

A dull dread washed over me but I suppressed it and walked past Beth, stepping over the low stone wall and into the sea of graves. Some were marked with clover-shaped iron crosses, the letters
PIH
engraved on them.
Pritchard Insane Hospital.
The rest were marked with bricks sunk into the ground. There were no paths, no grass, no flowers. Just the blanket of slick, brown leaves.

“In the old days they used to mark the graves with wooden crosses,” Beth said behind me. “Then they started using iron ones. They used the stones starting around 1940.” She looked down at her papers. “If I’m right, your grandma’s number would be in that section.” She pointed to our right.

I couldn’t move.

Beth tilted her head. “Althea?”

I wanted to say I was afraid, but I didn’t. I couldn’t say something like that, out loud, to a stranger. But I could feel myself slipping. Jay was gone. My father and my brother had turned against me. I was the only one left who could figure out what had really happened to the women in my family. The search began and ended with me.

“Will you help me find it?”

In answer, she walked past me, up the row, head down, reading. I followed her, avoiding the bricks. There was something unbearably sad about their simplicity.

She was standing just a couple of yards down the row when she pointed down. “Althea.”

“You found it?”

I hurried to her, my face a question. “You see here? There’s 4627, 4628, then 4630. She should be here, right in this area. But . . .” She glanced around.

“Where is she? Could they have put her somewhere else?”

“Maybe.” She looked doubtful. “Possibly on the end of a row.”

We scanned every row—up and down, multiple times—even the ones that were nowhere near the sequence. After we’d been at it for more than thirty minutes, I had to accept that patient 4629 wasn’t going to be found.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, making spots of color flash across my field of vision. My mother was lost to me, and now my grandmother too. Maybe finding Collie here wouldn’t have answered any questions, but I’d hoped that at least seeing her final resting place would have given me a sense of resolution. And maybe the glimmer of an idea of what to do next. But it appeared she wasn’t here. And I had no idea where she might be. So what was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to learn anything if all these women’s lives were nothing but vast blank spaces?

And there was the issue of Wynn. I had no idea where he was; he could be following me right this minute. Waiting for me to make one wrong move so he had a justifiable reason to lock me up.

Tears pooled in my eyes, and my throat burned. Then I heard Beth’s voice behind me.

“There are some documents,” she said softly. “I haven’t read them all as thoroughly as I’d like, but . . .” I felt the tap of cardboard on my shoulder. A brown expanding file, secured with an elastic band. She must’ve slipped it into the utility vehicle’s cargo box before we left.

She handed the file to me. “You’re supposed to fill out a Disclosure Consent Form—”

“I’ll do whatever,” I said.

“—and then typically it has to go through channels.”

I ran my fingers along the edge of the flap, as if the contents inside were radioactive.

“It’s everything I could find,” she said. “Her admittance information, a visitor log, and some doctor’s notes. Not much, but it’s the best I could do. I haven’t reviewed them myself. So”—she shifted her weight and lowered her voice—“just don’t tell anyone.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s okay. I don’t know why she was listed as being buried with the black patients. She might’ve actually been housed with them for some reason. I imagine . . .”

“What?”

“That, if she had, it might’ve been some form of . . . punishment. A warning, maybe.”

“Or it could’ve been another way to hide her,” I said. “To keep anyone from finding out what happened to her.”

I looked out across the cemetery into the woods. Ropes of dead vines had choked the low branches of the scrub trees that ringed the clearing. They made the place look even spookier. There should’ve been flowers here, with these forgotten people, instead of more death.

I glanced at Beth. “She would’ve been fine here. It’s a nice spot.”

“Yes, it is.” We both gazed across the peaceful, damp clearing, then she gave me a brief nod. “I’ll be in the car.”

I stood where Collie’s grave should’ve been until it started to grow dark, the closed file in my hands, rain misting down over me.

On my way out, as I passed the looming old hospital, I slowed to a stop. I studied the massive door through the rain-smeared window. It didn’t make any sense, I knew, putting myself in the place where my mother and grandmother had spent time and expecting it to shed light on their situations. It was loopy, new-age-style thinking. But maybe I wasn’t so opposed to loopy anymore. Maybe this was worth a try.

I grabbed the file and scurried through the sheeting rain to the vestibule. The massive door gave way when I pushed it, so I slipped in and shut it behind me. It clunked with a finality that sent a shiver down my spine. I walked into the center of the hall. Gray light shone weakly through the dirty windows. The floor had once been white marble—it was spiderwebbed now with cracks and stained brown, large chunks of it missing. A giant brass chandelier festooned with cobwebs, Mardi Gras beads, and a couple of bras and grungy underpants.
College kids,
I thought,
breaking into a haunted insane asylum for kicks.

I looked up. A soaring staircase—marble laid with a faded red runner—rose up from the center of the hallway and then split, leading the ways to the opposite wings. Strips of mildewed wallpaper hung from the graffiti-sprayed walls. I stood as still as I could, tried to ignore my thumping heart, and listened.

There was no one here. And yet, the place seemed crowded with life and sorrow and death. A million stories.

I dropped down on a marble step and opened the file. The first sheet was a copy of Collie’s visitor log. There were only two names: David Crane and Lindy Wade. David, Collie’s husband, my grandfather. He’d visited once, on June 12, 1962, and he’d stayed for an hour. Lindy Wade had visited exactly seven days later, June 19, 1962. She’d come in the morning and stayed all day, signing out at nine o’clock that night. Beside her name, in the spot labeled “Description,” was written
Friend
.