The Unseen (36 page)

But Rafe Winchester/Pastor Wallace did make it out of the house.

Or did he, really? Certainly he may not have made it out intact. Not with his whole mind. There were years on the streets, drugs, degradation … and then apparently a turnabout at some point—a return to religion.

But not to sanity. He may have made himself a place in the community, but there was nothing right about him.

He had seen what had gone on in the house, had experienced it; he might know details of Leish’s death, and details of Uncle Morgan’s …
breakdown? Shattering?

Laurel was certain that the timing of the pastor’s visit and the “manifestations” in the great room were not coincidental.

She felt a powerful need to find out more about him, and a sense that it couldn’t wait. The pastor knew a lot about the house, and he wasn’t right in the head. If he was lurking around, and even possibly had a key to the house, she wanted to know as much about him as she could find. She forced herself to think through the specifics of what he’d said.

Perversity. A young woman alone with her unstable brother.
Laurel flinched at the thought, but it provided a motive for a murder/suicide, if there had been one, and the pastor had confirmed the story of Caroline Folger taking in and caring for a schizophrenic Paul.

And then that strange statement:
“The hospital claimed more than one.”

The hospital.

She sat at a round table, pulled Tyler’s iPhone out of her pocket and called information again, this time asked for and was connected to Dorothea Dix Hospital.

“I’m Dr. MacDonald, from Duke Medical,” she said, then took a breath and took the plunge. “I’m calling about a patient.” She mentally crossed her fingers and said the name.

And maybe it was the Duke reference that did it, or maybe she was just lucky, because the receptionist actually answered her, with a bit of information that floored Laurel … at the same time that she had been completely, utterly sure that she would hear it.

Victoria Enright was committed to Dix mental hospital in April of 1965 and had resided there ever since.

______

There was no one in the upstairs hall, and Katrina’s bedroom door was closed, as Laurel took an outwardly leisurely walk back toward her room. Inside her thoughts were racing.
Front stairs or back? How do I get out without drawing attention?

Brendan was likely still in the great room, obsessing over the pool in the living room, which made the back stairs a safer bet. Then Laurel’s stomach dropped as she realized:
If he’s at the monitors, no matter which stairs I take he’ll be able to see me walking down the hall. He’ll know I’m leaving.

She stopped at her bedroom door and stepped into the room, found her purse on the writing desk, and reached into it for her wallet and keys. Then she put the purse under the bed, slipped her wallet and keys and Tyler’s phone into her pant pockets, and pulled a sweater on over her head to conceal the bulges in her pockets.

She opened her door and shut it behind her, and walked down the hall toward the back, again affecting an idle stroll. She moved through the den, pausing to browse at the titles of books on the shelf, and selected one without actually registering the title. It was all to show Brendan that she was not going anywhere. And the feeling of being watched was overwhelming; she felt as if she were a rat in a maze in a lab.

She strolled out of the den with her book and walked down the short set of stairs to the last part of the hall. The door of Tyler’s room next to the kitchen was shut, as she had left it. She moved casually into the kitchen and took a minute there to rummage in the random snack food spread out on the table. She selected a green apple and bit into it, looking contemplative. Then she turned and walked down the stairs, again, with apple and book, pausing to look out the window at the landing, gazing out over the back garden …

Then she walked down the last stairs to the back door, bracing herself for Brendan to call her name—but not a word.

Fuck the house quarantine,
she thought grimly.
We’re getting some answers today.
She eased the back door open, stepped out of the house, and hurried down the gravel drive toward her car.

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.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The wispy fog of the morning had thickened to soup. When Laurel drove back through the stone gateposts, there was a fog beyond them that rendered the entire landscape insubstantial.

She motored slowly on the road, past the rail fence and the crape myrtles, all shrouded in mist. The gray pebbled path wound in and out through trees; there was no sign of the house in the fog.

And then suddenly it was there, in front of her, the porch so close that Laurel slammed on the brakes and the car came to a jolting stop beside Tyler’s Maserati.

The house was silent as she let herself in. Walking into the entry felt like being swallowed.

Why? What’s changed?

It was so quiet.

She walked across the first entry, and into the second, with the hearth and the family painting …

Not a sound.

She found Brendan and both students in the great room. They had placed chairs at some distance around the pool of water, which seemed exactly as it had been when Laurel had left, and the three were seated in a circle, each holding a clipboard poised in their lap, just watching the pool. Someone had taped three straight parallel lines of duct tape on the floor beside the pool and marked each tape with inches, like a ruler. There were notations handwritten in marker at various points along the scales. Brendan and both of the students held clipboards, and they did not move when Laurel stepped through the archway.

“What are you doing?” Laurel said, her voice hollow in the room, and was unnerved when for a prolonged beat, not one of them looked up. “Professor Cody?” she asked, more loudly, her heart beating faster.

Brendan finally pulled his gaze from the pool and looked at her blankly, without speaking.

“What are you doing?” she asked again.

“It keeps coming back,” he said, and his voice was alarmingly vague. “We’ve wiped it up three times now, and each time it wells up again.” He waved a hand toward a plastic tub with several sopping towels piled up in it. “It comes up from the floorboards. It takes forty minutes for the entire pool to appear, and then it stops growing. It doesn’t get any bigger than seventeen inches in diameter—it just stops at exactly seventeen inches.”

Laurel noted with unease that Tyler and Katrina had not looked up during Brendan’s entire speech—they remained fixed on the pool. She had the sudden feeling that they were playing with her—that it was all an elaborate joke.

“So … you’ve been doing this all day,” she said, her voice brittle.

“Yes,” Brendan said, puzzled. “Of course. This is what we’re here for, Dr. MacDonald. It’s a demonstrable anomaly, a classic manifestation. We have it recorded, too.” He waved toward the monitors without looking away from the pool. “And the EMF readings are three times normal levels: they’ve been fluctuating between eight and nine-five for three hours.”

Laurel looked toward the archway of the great room, and then toward the dining room. “The house is built on inclines,” she said, keeping her voice even. “We’ll need to check with a structural engineer or a geologist. It’s very possible there’s a perfectly explicable structural cause.”

Brendan’s eyes darkened with anger. “Of course,” he said stiffly. “I’ll make some calls tomorrow.”

“I need to talk to you,” she said, and glanced at the students. “Tyler. Katrina,” she spoke more sharply than she intended. Again, the two did not look up. “Tyler. Katrina. You’ve been at that long enough.” Suddenly it was very important to get them to look away from the pool.