And then she opened her eyes.
She sat up with a jolt, and pain shot through her numb hands and wrists. They’d been bound behind her back, and she must have rolled, crushing them beneath her body. Her hands prickled, and she flexed and unflexed her fingers, gazing around the nearly empty room.
It was an old house, the same house she’d been in the night before. Gray wood floors and faded beige wallpaper gave the room a drab, colorless appearance. The bed Crystal had slept on had an iron frame painted black with a thin twin mattress. A wool blanket lay crumpled on the floor as if Crystal had kicked it off in the night.
As feeling returned to her hands, Crystal scooted her legs off the bed and planted them on the floor. She wasn’t groggy anymore. The drugs had worn off, but her head ached, and her mouth felt fuzzy and dry.
She stood and walked to the single curtainless window. Someone had covered the glass in the exterior with opaque plastic. The window revealed only a blurred image of what lay outside. Grass and trees, and the sunlit blue of sky.
She returned to the bed and sat, concentrating on the squeeze and release of her lungs.
Fear sat beside her, his shadow long and threatening. He wanted to get closer, climb inside, but she refused him.
“Just breathe and trust. Breathe and trust.” She repeated the words, and the sound of her voice soothed her.
She thought of the day before, struggled to piece it all together and slowly she remembered Greta’s words. She’d been talking about a man who had loved her until Crystal came along.
“Weston,” she murmured.
Greta was Weston’s secret.
It was late afternoon, the sun in the western sky when Greta unlocked Crystal’s door.
“Drink,” she said, holding a glass of water to Crystal’s lips.
Crystal slurped the lukewarm water and her stomach clenched painfully.
She wouldn’t throw it up; couldn’t throw it up. She closed her eyes as the nausea swam through her.
“Time for fresh air,” Greta told her, smiling strangely.
She grabbed Crystal’s bicep hard and pulled her up, forcing Crystal ahead of her as they walked down a shadowy hallway to a flight of wood stairs.
The old farmhouse was mostly empty, but it was not derelict. The walls and floors were in good but worn shape.
Crystal followed Greta into the woods. Beneath the dense trees, the high grass and vegetation thinned out. They started up a high hill, the ground soft and poked by huge gnarled roots.
She wanted to run. She could turn and throw herself down the hill, but her hands were bound with zip ties, and Greta had drugged her water. The drug already seemed to be streaming along the blood pathways in her body, distorting the world around her.
They came to the top of the hill and walked through an opening in the trees to a grassy field.
The ground looked oddly bumpy. Crystal’s eyes fell upon the raised mounds, grass covered, some flecked with flowers, and she frowned.
Though no tombstones marked the graves, Crystal saw the place as Greta had as a young girl. A place to hide bodies.
“It’s a graveyard,” Crystal breathed.
“Daddy marked them with a single rock,” Greta murmured. “Even Maribelle’s. But I added to hers over the years.”
Greta led Crystal to a raised mound, long overgrown and swallowed by the earth, barely a lump anymore. A pile of stones stood at one end. The rocks were small and gray, with bursts like ashen fireworks on the hard surfaces. Petoskey stones.
Crystal thought of Bette and her father discussing the stones during their various summer trips to Lake Michigan. Just found another three-hundred and fifty-million-year-old fossil, Bette would call out each time she found a Petoskey stone.
Greta stared blankly at the grave and walked on, looking back sharply to let Crystal know she expected her to follow. Crystal considered running again, fleeing into the woods, and letting the steep hill tumble her down.
Instead, she followed Greta through another thicket of forest that opened onto a grassy mantel.
Far below them, Crystal gazed at huge white buildings with peaked roofs topped by sharp dark points. Beyond the buildings, Crystal could see all the way to a small city and beyond that, a large body of water.
“Where are we?” she mumbled.
Nothing in East Lansing looked like this place. Of that she was sure.
Greta stopped beside her, staring at the buildings below.
“The Northern Michigan Asylum.”
Crystal searched for the place in her mind.
Traverse City. It was the mental institution in Traverse City. The other city where Weston lived.
“It’s fading, this place,” Greta said, and anguish filled her voice.
“The asylum?” Crystal asked.
Greta didn’t answer.
Just above the treeline, the blue sky, cloudless, lay across the world like the watchful eye of the mother. The mother of the world, but Crystal saw her own mother in that sky. So close.
She lifted her face and closed her eyes, imagining the sun as her mother’s hand caressing her cheek.
A wave of nausea rose through her belly, and Crystal’s mouth filed with saliva. She tried to fight it away, but her resistance only intensified the sensation. She stumbled forward, too close to the edge. Her foot slipped, and she started to fall.
Greta’s hand closed on her hair.
A sharp jolt of pain ripped across the back of her skull as the woman yanked her back.
Crystal’s eyes watered, and she fell to her knees. She threw up on the grass, her stomach spasming. The nausea came again. She puked a second time. Whatever was in the water had made it into her bloodstream, but not all of it.
“I used to watch them,” Greta said, as if Crystal hadn’t just gotten sick. The woman’s stormy gray eyes gazed toward the asylum. “The men in their black suits and the doctors in their white coats. They came at night. The brotherhood. They brought patients right down that hill into that black hole, the mouth of the forest. Sometimes I hid in the trees and saw the patients. Sometimes the patients saw me. Not with their eyes. Never with their eyes.”
Crystal didn’t understand what Greta was referring to. She lay with her face in the grass, her hands resting on her back as she struggled to calm her churning belly.
“The caretaker knows everything,” Greta continued. “That’s the way with these places. The doctors didn’t hide the brotherhood from Daddy. He knew more about the origin of this land than any of them ever would. They were merely servants to that darkness, and my father was a steward, a keeper of the balance of things. If too many months went by without a meeting, my father brought a sacrifice of his own to the forest. A nobody, a drifter or a prostitute. Someone the world was better off without.”
Sweat coated Crystal’s forehead. She felt feverish and wanted to sleep. She couldn’t imagine standing and trekking back through the forest and up the stairs of that old house.
Greta grabbed her arm and jerked her up.
“Better move quick,” she muttered. “Fall asleep out here and the ground will swallow you up.”
39
Now
“Sheriff Montgomery?” Bette asked when a silver-haired man appeared in the small lobby of the police station.
“Yes. How can I help ya?” He spoke with a slight accent; one the locals called it a Yooper dialect.
“I’m Bette Childs,” Bette offered, holding out her hand.
He shook it and waited for her to explain her reason for being there.
“I wondered if you had some time to talk about Matt Kelly and Peter Budd?” she went on.