“Smart girl,” Grimmel said. “If you’d have come back here saying you were Sophia’s daughter people would have clammed right up - ’cept me of course.”
“That sounds very interesting, photo journalism,” Shirley commented, setting the spaghetti in the center of the table on a hot pad. “How did you get into that?”
Jude briefly explained her experience of viewing another world behind the camera and then cut off her story wanting to ask Grimmel a question.
“Grimmel, our mother escaped from the asylum almost two weeks ago,” she said.
His eyes widened.
“She escaped?”
“Yes, and they’re looking for her. They may even try to blame her for another murder though they’re calling it an accident, so I doubt they will charge her for it.”
Hattie twisted an endless spaghetti noodle around her fork but left it uneaten on her plate.
“Good grief! Where is she?” Grimmel stood as if they’d pile in the car and go to her that minute.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you have any idea where she would go? Did you ever have any family around Traverse City, someone she might go to for help?”
He shook his head, sitting back down.
“She’s lost?”
“The woman who helped her escape last saw her five days ago running into the woods. She didn’t have a vehicle, money, identification.”
Grimmel sighed and looked at his wife, who squeezed his hand.
“Our childhood home, but we’re three hours from Traverse City and I don’t know why she’d go there.”
“I’d like to go the cabin,” Hattie blurted looking back and forth between them.
“What cabin?” Jude asked, not following the sudden change of subject.
“Where Rosemary died.”
Grimmel shook his head.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Hattie. It’s a disturbing place considering what went on in there.”
“I can find it on my own,” Hattie cut in before he could finish.
Jude studied the determination in her younger sister’s eyes. She was not a girl to make demands, and this was a demand.
“Why do you want to go there?” Jude asked.
“I can’t explain it. I just need to, okay?”
Both Jude and Grimmel understood that Hattie felt compelled as part of the ‘gift’ Sophia had also possessed.
“I’d like to see your childhood home, and who knows, maybe she’s there. I’m at a loss for where to start. Could you take us tomorrow afternoon?” Jude asked as if were settled.
Grimmel sighed, clearly losing the argument.
“Yeah. Meet me here around five. I’ll leave the store early.”
Hattie nodded eagerly, and Jude tried to trust the earnestness in her sister’s face, but a slow uneasiness settled over her.
Chapter 26
September 1965
Damien
“Hi Katherine. How are the boys?” Damien asked the nurse who greeted him at the records office.
“Little heathens,” she laughed, smoothing out her coiffed bun. Large, fashionable spectacles magnified her otherwise beady brown eyes, and she giggled though he hadn’t said anything funny.
Damien knew women found him attractive. Many of the women in the hospitals and in his classes paid him special attention. They grew clumsy around him, dropping pens and notebooks, flipping their hair back and forth and blinking their long eyelashes as if performing a modern-day mating call.
He liked women, always had, but found their attraction dangerous in his profession, and preferred to work with male patients knowing they wouldn’t color their stories to please him. He had read about Carl Jung and the far-reaching consequences of his affair with his patient, Sabina Spielrein. He admired the Swiss psychoanalyst and referred often to the man’s theories in his work; however, he found the affair in poor conscience and strove to never have a similar experience himself.
Damien thought of Jude and Hattie and shook his head to banish their images. Ever since he’d agreed to Kaiser’s request to meet the girls, he’d been spiraling further away from his good sense.
First a one-night stand with Jude, and now he courted Hattie like he wanted to marry her, which unfortunately he did. They weren’t his patients, he reasoned. He was merely doing Dr. Kaiser a favor and he happened to fall for one of the girls - or was it both of them?
“Dr. Ross?”
Damien looked up. Katherine regarded him with a small, questioning smile. A few of the nurses called him doctor despite not having yet received his degree.
“Sorry. I’ve a lot on my mind.”
“That’s quite all right,” she said, touching his arm. “If you ever need to talk-”
“No, thank you. I’m short on time if you could just grab those files for me.”
“My pleasure,” she told him covering her disappointment with a smile. “Which patient?”
Damien glanced behind him ensuring the doorway was empty.
“Sophia Gray,” he said, looking toward his watch a second time.
“Oh, you’ll have to ask Dr. Kaiser for those files,” she told him, frowning. “He always keeps her files at his office. A lot of work that one. Course now that she’s gone…”
“Do you know anything about that, Katherine? How she escaped?”
Katherine glanced over his shoulder, also checking for eavesdroppers and then took a step closer to him.
“Some of the nurses say she killed an orderly and got out with his key, maybe even wore his clothes.”
Damien nodded, frowning.
“Any other rumors?”
“Well the patients are more kind. They claim the orderly helped her escape and the hospital killed him as punishment. They’re not exactly right in the head, though are they?”
“Did you know her? Sophia?”
Katherine pursed her lips and shook her head.
“I work on the second floor and they relegated her to Hall Five. I saw her a handful of times, but the stories were enough to keep me away. She was quite a handful. Kaiser kept her in solitary most of the time. It wasn’t safe to put her with other patients.”
“Because she was violent?”
“Well she looked soft as a lamb to tell you the truth, but she told them things, weird spooky things that set the patients off.”
“Like what?”
Katherine leaned in. Damien felt the warmth of her breath, it smelled like she’d been eating black licorice.
“About dead people. She told a patient on my floor that her dead son was with her husband now. The woman didn’t even know her husband had died! She wailed for three days.”
“Had her husband died?”
Katherine widened her eyes and nodded.
“Killed in a car crash that very morning.”
Hattie
Hattie touched everything. Her mother had lived here as a child and she wanted the little energetic impressions left behind. Now and then she glimpsed her in her mind’s eye running to the chicken coop with breakfast scraps or climbing the branches of the enormous oak tree behind the barn.
“Nobody’s lived here in a few years,” Grimmel told Hattie and Jude, kicking the post of a fence that had probably once corralled a horse. “A handful of people tried their hand at farming out here, but ever since people started buying their potatoes from Mexico, ain’t no money in it. Not that we grew potatoes,” he laughed, “but you get my point.”
Hattie only half heard him. He and Jude had begun to talk about factory farming and the entire world getting poisoned. She drifted away, walking into an old barn, a splintered staircase led to the second floor. She walked up the stairs staring at the walls and the ceiling searching for signs of her mother.