Asylum Read online

  “This isn’t a democracy,” I said calmly. “There are no votes. So eat your lunch, or you’ll have the same thing for dinner.” I took a prosaic approach to meals. I had no idea whether it was good psychology or not. You didn’t eat it at lunch, that’s what you got for dinner. You didn’t eat it at dinner, it would be waiting for you at breakfast. After the first two days of howling and slamming doors, the system continued to work well.

  “I thought we were going to the crêperie tonight. You said we were going to the crêperie!”

  “And go to the crêperie we shall,” Ivan agreed. “But if you don’t eat your sandwich now, you’ll be eating egg salad at the crêperie.”

  “This is so unfair!”

  “Yes,” Ivan and I agreed in unison.

  Notre-Dame-des-Neiges—our Lady of the Snows—is one of the most beautiful places in the world, at least of the places I’ve ever been. Maybe it takes the edge off dying, if you know that forever you’ll be in this gorgeous quiet place. Comparable to Cambridge’s Victorian-era Mount Auburn cemetery, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges is the third-largest cemetery in North America and part of the historic register. People come for many reasons: to visit the graves and mausoleums, to bird-watch, to see the plant and tree and animal species, to feel calm and reflective. I come because I am a daughter.

  Maman’s stone isn’t as imposing as many of the others, but it’s in a nice place under a tree on the upper slopes of the cemetery, and as always, as soon as we arrived I put my hand on it and murmured something that was part prayer, part conversation, part incantation.

  “You miss her?” Ivan’s voice was light in my ear.

  “Of course,” I said automatically, though the reality was far more complicated than that. My connection with my mother had been intense: we’d alternately passionately loved and passionately hated each other, maman and I, all throughout my childhood; the feelings, as could be expected, gained both momentum and intensity once I hit adolescence.

  Unpleasant memories, most of them. There was no overt abuse; she never, ever laid a hand on me; but she did manage to make me feel awkward and unintelligent for most of my life. I’d had to fight it to get where I was now. Most of the time I was pretty damned successful.

  “At least,” he said, as though following my thoughts, “your relationship was never boring.” His, apparently, had been.

  “No,” I agreed. “It was never boring.” I watched as Lukas and Claudia pretended to embrace a nearby weeping statue; they were giggling, and I could almost hear what my mother would have said about that. “But she ruined kids for me,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged. “Thanks to her, I was absolutely terrified of not being an adequate stepmother, and I’m still not sure I’m getting this whole parenting thing right.” I sighed and looked past her grave, out into the middle distance. “I never told you this, but I almost didn’t marry you, because of your kids, because of those feelings.”

  Ivan shook his head. “Stop it. You’re doing better than ninety-five percent of the parents out there. You know that. Stepmothers have a difficult act to follow. By definition, you entered a house of grief. And you’ve done wonders with it. The kids love you, you get along better with Margery than I do, and you make it look easy.”

  I stared at him, aghast. “Easy?”

  He shrugged. “You bring your own style to it. You bring your own self to it. And sometimes it explodes, because that’s what parenting is all about. Just realize I know that this stepmother gig isn’t exactly a walk in the parc. And whether your mother would realize that or not is strictly irrelevant.”

  I grinned and kissed him. Some day Ivan isn’t going to say exactly the right thing at the right moment and I’m going to faint.

  Maybe.

  We got to work. The kids, easily bored, wandered off together, arguing fiercely about something they weren’t going to remember ten minutes later. The afternoon was warm, one of those long autumn days that make you believe you can hold off the winter just a little longer, that fill your heart and lungs with sunshine and hope. We trimmed and polished and put some flowers in the vase in front of the stone, then just sat there with our backs to the stone and looked off together into the distance, the city below us, each of us immersed in thought—or not. In my case, my mind was pretty much a blank, I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. “What a perfect day,” I said on a sigh.

  “It is that,” Ivan agreed. “Lucky to stay forever in such a perfect place.”

  And that was when it hit me.

  The sheer privilege of this place, the luxury of space and beauty, the option of remembrance, of having your name on a stone, even when there was no family left to tend the grave, even when one hundred years had passed, that reminder that you had once been here, breathed this air, walked these streets.

  He was right: there was memory here.

  Something the orphans buried without tombstones would never have. No beauty, no names, no remembrance. It was as if they had never lived or breathed or suffered or died. People write books, compose music, make discoveries, become saints or murderers, and all of it ensuring that, for a little while at least, their names will not be forgotten. Parents have children so that their names, their genetic code, their fortunes will live on after them. Vast cemeteries are built so that someone walking through them can happen on a name, read the dates and the inscriptions, maybe say something out loud, and for that brief moment the person can live again.

  I looked around me at the beauty, the tranquility, the peace of all these monuments, the thousands and thousands of people whose names are still read, still remembered, still wondered about, and I thought of that unmarked burial ground by the pig farm, of those small bodies taken from the asylum morgue in the dead of night and buried together, no markers, no memories of names or faces or anything that proved they had lived short unhappy lives and died in terror and pain. The lobotomies. The electroshock. The injections. The drugs.

  “What’s going on?” Ivan’s voice interrupted my thinking, his concern clear. “Martine, are you all right?”

  I shook my head as though I could rid it of all those thoughts. “Everyone should get a chance to be buried along with their name,” I said, feeling my throat closing up. “Everyone should at least get that chance.”

  He reached over and took my hand. He didn’t say anything.

  “Whoever it is,” I said, not even realizing how savage I sounded, “I’m going to get him.”

  * * *

  Julian shared my resolution.

  “It’s about narrowing it down to a person rather than a company,” I told him after mass on Sunday. The kids and Ivan were playing Monopoly in the living room, and I was sitting on the edge of my bed, talking quietly into the telephone so no one would hear. Ivan’s one request was that the kids not know anything of what I was doing. It seemed a small enough favor. “It’s either McGill University or Lansbury Pharmaceuticals, there’s little doubt of that. But a company didn’t rape those women. A university didn’t kill those women. Someone real, someone flesh-and-blood did. But who?”

  “You’re sounding strident,” Julian observed.

  “Pardonne-moi,” I snapped. “It’s not a topic I can be completely calm about. And I find the fact that you can be so calm particularly disturbing.”

  “Stop it,” he said without heat. “You’re too emotionally connected here, Martine. Stand back. We have to be rational.”

  “I’ll be rational,” I said grimly, “when we can put this person behind bars—and expose everything, make it all public, say whatever it is they don’t want said.”

  “That’s all well and good, but there’s no particular need to make a target of yourself,” Julian said mildly. “Why don’t you say all that about Lansbury a little louder? I don’t think they can hear you all the way to City Hall. You really want to show your hand before we know what’s going on?”

  City Hall. And my job. He was right; it had to be considered.
But my job was small potatoes compared with people’s lives. “Wait,” I said. Some of my synapses were finally firing. Dancing, actually. “I know someone from one of the pharma companies! Well, that is to say, at least I’ve met him, he’s an attorney.” That City Hall association … and I remembered the amused eyes, the connection I’d felt with him. “He said his company’s a big donor to my boss.”

  “Is he Lansbury?”

  I hesitated, trying to remember. I thought he was from Lansbury, but I couldn’t remember. “Maybe.”

  “Doesn’t let McGill off the hook,” he said.

  “But listen. Think about it for a second. There’s a lot more oversight at the university. McGill’s been making a show of putting the past behind them. They need the city’s goodwill. But Lansbury’s only responsible to their shareholders.”

  “You think someone from Lansbury…?”

  “I mean, maybe.” I hesitated. “Oh, hell, Julian, it can’t be. There’s a limit to how committed anyone is to their company, right? Raping women, torturing them, posing them? Nobody would ever do that for an employer.”

  “Exactly,” said Julian.

  I ignored him. I was on a roll. “But what if it is Lansbury, and they hired someone to actually do the—you know, to do it for them? Think about it: if I’m right, then we’re hitting all the high notes. Everyone says that you’d have to be a psychopath to do this kind of violence, right?”

  “Hmm.” There was still an undercurrent of objection in his voice.

  “Well, so maybe Lansbury has a very rational reason to want the women out of the way, and it’s really just coincidence that it’s all women, but that works in Lansbury’s favor, because now they can hire this murderer-rapist-psychopath to carry it out. Just because a crazy person did it doesn’t mean that there’s not a sane reason behind it.” My words were all tumbling together and I wasn’t at all sure I was making myself clear.

  “And Lansbury doesn’t want anyone to know about their role in MK-Ultra?” asked Julian. “Hate to tell you, but that ship has sailed. It’s pretty much common knowledge.”

  “For anyone who knows about MK-Ultra,” I agreed. “But seriously, how many people do? Who cares anymore? Who’s even heard of it? I hadn’t, not before this all started. I’ll bet you hadn’t. Nobody who knows is talking, and every year it gets more and more remote, it’s ancient history, it’s over, we’ve all moved on. It’s of academic interest. And, anyway, that’s not the worst part, not from Lansbury’s PR point of view.” I knew a thing or two about PR myself: this was familiar territory. “There’s that crossover between MK-Ultra and the asylums, and that part’s trickier because there’s money involved. Restitution money. Money and reputation. Nobody wants the headlines to point out that the friendly company that makes your pain reliever also assisted in strapping down children and injecting them with drugs. The social networks would be all over this if it ever came out.”

  “Perhaps,” Julian conceded. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Martine. If Lansbury’s really behind this, then why go to the risk of killing anyone? Why go to the risk of a court case? They could just pay everybody off and make it go away without publicity.”

  “I don’t think Annie Desmarchais or Caroline Richards were looking to get paid off,” I said. “Oh, my God, Julian, that has to be it. Isn’t that how this all started? Remember what we said at the beginning, that something changed this summer, something that made it necessary to start killing now? The only reason that he had to make his move, whoever he is, was because something changed. And that’s what changed. It was all this interest from people who weren’t susceptible to getting paid off.”

  “I still think it’s implausible that a corporation was willing to put out a hit,” he said.

  “Maybe the corporation didn’t—put out the hit, as you say. Maybe just a couple of people knew. Maybe some others turned a blind eye. Or maybe they just said to shut the women up and didn’t care how it happened. We’ll have to find out.”

  “Okay,” Julian said. “I give in. You’re right: we’ll have to find out. Who’s this guy you know?”

  I’d been thinking about that. “Carrigan. Something Carrigan. Richard, was it?” I wondered out loud. “But I can’t talk to him. Not about this. He’s connected to my boss, and I’ll be called out before I’ve had time to ask one question.” It was an impasse. I swore eloquently in French.

  “All right. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll find out who’s in Lansbury’s Montréal office,” said Julian. “We’ll narrow it down from there. We’ll ask questions. We won’t give up.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But I still don’t see it happening. You’re off the case, Julian, you can’t be asking official questions.”

  “Leave that to me,” he said comfortably. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “When? What?” But he’d already hung up.

  Huddled underneath our sheets that night, Marie-Rose and I consulted. “Sister Béatrice told me, the next time, to draw a line through the names where there’s a family,” I whispered into the darkness. “They’re only interested in children who don’t have anybody.”

  Marie-Rose shivered. “What does that mean?”

  I took a deep breath. “I think it means there’s nobody who will come and ask questions if something bad happens to them,” I said. I was scared out of my wits.

  “What bad things will happen?”

  I remembered that scene in the basement. “I’m scared,” I said instead of answering.

  “I am, too,” Marie-Rose whispered. “Jean-Loup works in the basement sometimes.”

  Jean-Loup was another one of “our” orphans. “What does he do? What did he tell you?”

  “He has to take dead kids to the morgue sometimes. They do operations, but a lot of times the little kids don’t survive. They die, and he takes them to the morgue, and sometimes he takes them out to the farm to bury them. Right turns his stomach, it does.”

  I thought of Bobby, whose stomach didn’t turn anymore. He reassured the children, I remembered him telling me. He kept them calm.

  I lived with the names, all the time, the names of children, some of them older than I was, many of them younger, and each name represented a person, someone like me, someone who breathed and thought and cried and felt things.

  I swallowed hard against what was rising in my throat. “What are we going to do?” I asked her.

  “I’m going to be good,” said Marie-Rose. “I’m going to be so good that they’ll never want to punish me. I’m going to make sure they never send me to the basement.”

  “It’s not about being good,” I whispered. “It’s about no one knowing what happens here. Do you have family, Marie-Rose?”

  “What?”

  “Did anybody come to visit you at the orphanage? Do they send you cards for Christmas?”

  I could feel rather than see her nod in the darkness. “I have my uncle Théophile,” she said. “Sister Louise used to read his letters to me. He lives on a big farm.”

  “Then you’re safe,” I said. It was the first time I’d actually articulated what I knew in my heart to be true. I paused, the enormity of it crushing me. “I’m not.”

  “Of course you are, Gaby! They need you, don’t they, to keep the records?”

  “Only until they teach somebody else to do it.” I knew I wasn’t safe, yet something compelled me to ask questions. Jean-Loup was of little help, as horrified as he was about what he saw downstairs. “It’s not just the operations,” he said to me when I consulted him a few days later. “It’s the room where they’re in restraints.”

  “Like we are, sometimes,” I said, nodding.

  He gave me a somber look. “Nothing like us, Gabrielle,” he said. “They give the kids shots, with needles, and watch them to see what they do. Sometimes they put electricity through their bodies, and sometimes they do it too much and I have to take them to the morgue, too.”

  Electricity through their bodies? “I don’t understa
nd. How is it they let you see all this? They’re always careful when I go downstairs.”

  “They know that I know I could be next,” he said simply. “Besides, who am I going to tell? Qui? I never see anyone from the outside, and everyone inside already knows.”

  And that was the end of that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  As it turned out, I was the one to get into Lansbury Pharmaceuticals first.

  Sunday night we drove the kids to the airport, said good-bye, and watched them through the gate.

  “It could be worse,” said Ivan philosophically. “Claudia could be vegan.”

  “Funny man.”

  “Glad you noticed,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

  We got the car out of the airport’s short-term parking and weren’t going anywhere near home. “Um, Ivan, you do remember where we live, right?”

  “Ah, but we’re not going there.”

  My eyes widened as I saw the casino sign. “No. You’re not going to work. You’re not taking me to work with you.”

  “Of course I am, my little butterfly. But observe how I’m not dressed as the director of poker tonight.” True enough: Ivan never went to work in jeans.

  “I have a feeling I’m not going to like this.” I find gambling intensely boring, poker more so than anything else.

  “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, love of my life,” he said. “This trip’s entirely for you.”

  I was still grumbling when we got there. Montréal’s casino looks like a giant spaceship decked out in bright, colorful neon lights perched precariously on the edge of the St. Lawrence. I always felt I should be putting on dark glasses when I got there.

  Ivan took my hand and we went, perhaps predictably, to his office. He shut the door behind us and offered me a seat. “The tapes?” I asked, trying to make some connection. “The guys in the suits from the funeral?” I’d completely dismissed them from my mind, as they didn’t fit in with our theory. I think Julian forgot about them, too.

  “Don’t think they’re the problem,” Ivan said, his voice distracted. “They left for New York that afternoon. Nothing to do with you—but something for the casino to worry about. They were at the funeral because of me. Sorry for the dead end. But I think I can just about make it up to you here.”