Asylum Read online

  I looked at her face, hearing the matter-of-fact tone in her voice, trying to stifle my astonishment that someone so young, with hands so gentle, could see nothing wrong with what she’d just said. But there was nothing to be read there, and I went back to the dayroom, tired and aching and feeling despair as I had never felt before.

  They put me to work soon after that, and I didn’t have time, not really, to contemplate life at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.

  If I had, I’d probably have killed myself.

  It seemed that the more we protested that we didn’t belong in the asylum, the more we were tied up and isolated. Until we learned to stop protesting.

  It was easy to feel alone, the only sane person in the midst of so much insanity, so much cruelty. I tried to make friends with the other children, because it was the only connection I had to a world where people weren’t tied down, where people weren’t made to make the terrible noises I’d heard when I was on the punishment ward.

  Those of us who had come from the orphanage naturally gravitated together whenever we could. It was so overwhelmingly big, the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, easy to get lost, easy to feel lost. There were other children there, too, from other orphanages—I was surprised to learn that others existed—and then, of course, the masses of people who really did belong in the asylum. Probably hundreds of us in all.

  So I looked for familiar faces, and just seeing them, sometimes, felt like a lifeline. Not just a lifeline back to the orphanage, but in some twisted way they connected me to my mother, to my memories of my mother. And now the worst had happened. I had left the only point of connection I had with her. She knew where the orphanage was.

  What if she came looking for me, and I wasn’t there?

  I tried to put it out of my mind as I adjusted to my new life. The work at the asylum was, at first, a lot like the work at the orphanage. Here too was a whole farm, cows and sheep, pigs and chickens, and all of them needing to be serviced in some way or another. I know all of this rather more intimately than I would have liked, because when I was first released from restraints I was placed on farm detail. They did that, I discovered, to all the potential troublemakers. You couldn’t get in too much trouble if you were exhausted all the time.

  It never mattered how little sleep one had gotten: if one worked the farm detail, one was pulled from bed at four o’clock in the morning, before even the sisters were up for the day, when it seemed that the world itself was asleep …

  Except, of course, for a barnful of cows, all wanting to be milked at the same time, loud and demanding. Then the straw was to be changed, the chicken feed put out, the eggs gathered in, the pigs fed … my days felt as though they should be half finished by the time we trooped in for breakfast.

  To tell the truth, I treasured my time with the animals, my mornings and evenings spent tending to their basic needs. The soft breath of the sheep on my hands, the pigs’ delighted grunts when you massaged their backs and shoulders, the cows’ gentle eyes. They were kinder and more communicative than the people at the asylum, and I missed them when I was working the fields.

  There were men out on the farm, too, and some of the girls and boys sent there were scared of the men. One of them grabbed me once, but let me go with a laugh. “I’ll wait till you’re hatched,” he said, and I didn’t understand, but I ran away.

  I quickly found places to hide, and on my third day I came across the graveyard, rows of stones with sisters’ names on them. None of the farmworkers ever went there, so I felt safe, even when I was sitting among the dead. I wasn’t afraid of ghosts: ghosts couldn’t hurt me any more than the living already had. And after that, when I needed to get away, when I needed a moment of peace, I hid among the graves and memorized the names of nuns long dead.

  There were always new ones there, too, but they never got stones. I never really thought about why.

  And so the first spring moved into the first summer, and by the time the air turned crisp and the wind whirled yellow and crimson leaves around us, I had learned. I had learned to stand up for myself, to snatch back food that was stolen from me, to find a blanket and defend my possession of it. Most especially, though, I had learned to never, ever talk back to the sisters or staff.

  I had learned the only lesson that mattered: I had learned how to survive.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Isabelle Hubert, high-end call girl, had no relatives that the police had been able to locate. She had paid her rent through the end of the year, however, so her apartment had been left as it was when the crime scene people had finished, two months ago.

  Two months of no one living there, of dust settling, of ghosts sighing. Two months of emptiness, of silence. The floors creaked under our feet. It felt like at any moment we might hear a voice, catch a whiff of perfume, know that someone had been there … once.

  Julian loosened the shutters, and the afternoon light streamed in. Isabelle, like Danielle, had favored bright colors and an eclectic decorating scheme. In the bathroom was a litter box. “Julian!” I called, thus reminded. “What happened to her cat?”

  “I already told you, I don’t know,” he said, his voice muffled. He was looking under her bed.

  In an alcove off the living room was a desk and on it, a laptop. Since this appeared to be my area of expertise, I booted it. “No password required,” I said happily, and waited to see what Isabelle Hubert had committed to her hard drive.

  Julian came to stand behind me. “Any luck?”

  “Not yet,” I said distractedly. “She has a big Mormon genealogy program.”

  “Mormons? Why? Was she one?”

  I shrugged and continued to look through files while I talked. “No, of course not. You don’t have to be Mormon to use the program, they just make the best ones. It’s part of their religion. They believe that you have to convert all your ancestors. You know, sort of retroactively make them Mormons, too. But to convert them, you have to find them. Every member of the church does genealogy, it’s required. Go back generations—you’re admired if you can go back farther than anyone else.” I’d once dated a Mormon.

  For about five minutes.

  Julian whistled. “Convert your ancestors? What’s that about?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a theological discussion. “Some other time, when you get me drunk enough, I’ll tell you all about it. The point is, they create really great detailed genealogy programs, and Isabelle clearly knew it. Look. She was writing, too. A couple of short stories here … Wait, Julian, wasn’t someone else writing?”

  He checked his notebook. “Annie Desmarchais. She was working on a novel.”

  “Maybe that’s a connection.” I kept looking. “Finances. Good God, she was making serious money!”

  “The expensive ones do,” Julian said dryly.

  I swiveled around to scowl at him. “The expensive whats?”

  He had the grace to look uncomfortable. “Um—you know. Hookers.”

  I looked back at the screen. “Hookers don’t make a thousand dollars an hour,” I said. “There has to be another name for the profession when that kind of cash is involved. Hey, who was that client on the Plateau, the one she saw the night she got killed? You said he was a regular, right? He saw her once a week? How do people afford this kind of thing?”

  “A matter of priorities, no doubt,” said Julian, who probably had never had to budget anything in his life.

  “Thanks,” I said sourly. “That really does help put things in perspective.”

  “We aim to please. What else—”

  A thought had struck me. “Merde, Julian, what time is it? I’m late. I’ve got to go let your boss tell me how fantastic he is and how close he is to catching the guy. Merde, alors.”

  “I love a woman who knows how to swear,” he said comfortably. “Don’t worry, Martine, I’ll get you there on time.”

  I’d been afraid of that. “Alive, too?” I asked as we locked Isabelle’s door.

  “You want everything,
don’t you?”

  * * *

  “The profiler,” said François Desrocher, a hint of annoyance in his voice, “tells us that these crimes were committed by the same individual.”

  I waited, but he didn’t continue, so I prompted him. “And…?”

  “And what, madame? We have made some progress.”

  I sighed. “Monsieur le directeur, forgive me, but hadn’t that already been concluded? Perhaps it comes as no surprise that this one, too, was killed by the same individual as the others.”

  He frowned. He was not happy. He rustled some papers and sighed. Finally he decided to surrender something further. “The profiler says that he is white, between thirty and sixty, and probably educated.”

  He’d just defined about a third of the inhabitants of Montréal. It was time to up the ante, or I was going to be here all night. “Monsieur le maire is anxious to find out if you are closer to identifying this individual,” I said, trying to sound threatening. “He says that time is running out; there may be another victim before you have made an arrest.”

  He blew out his breath in exasperation. “These things take time, madame.”

  “Perhaps this is time that another woman in Montréal does not have,” I said sweetly.

  He looked as if he were hoping that woman would be me. “All the relatives have been looked at. All the friends. All the coworkers. We are forced to conclude that this individual did not know any of his victims personally.” He glowered at me. “What the mayor might not understand is that this is the most difficult killer of all, for the police. He is choosing women randomly to rape and kill. We have no descriptions of him. We have no evidence that he has left behind. All we have is his signature, that is what it is called: that he leaves his victims posed carefully on public benches. This is strange, yes. This is unique. We are working with what we have.”

  “Well,” I said, capping my pen and standing up, “that was all I needed to know. I will tell this to the mayor, monsieur. And I look forward to speaking with you again tomorrow.”

  His glance assured me that he was looking forward to seeing me roast in hell. I smiled and escaped while I still could.

  They all wrote, I thought as I drove over to City Hall. Novels, short stories, poetry. Reports on research. Foundation grants. Somehow, they were tied together through paperwork.

  “Everyone writes something,” Ivan said that night when I shared my hypothesis with him. “There’s paperwork involved in every job nowadays.”

  “Not every job,” I said, thinking of Jacques Leroux. “But I concede your point.”

  He went into the bathroom, started brushing his teeth, came out again and tried to talk around the toothbrush. “But that’s the only connection you’ve found?”

  I sighed, slipping under the duvet, considering adding a comforter: nights were already feeling chilly. “Three were Francophones; one wasn’t. They were all employed, but at incredibly different jobs and in different parts of the city. Three lived alone; one didn’t. Maybe my lord Desrocher is right, maybe it’s just completely random. Maybe I’m wasting my time.”

  Ivan had retreated back into the bathroom and I could hear him rinsing. He turned off the light and joined me in bed. “No,” said my husband softly. “You’re honoring their lives by trying to find the person who killed them. Not exactly a waste of time.”

  Ivan always knows the right thing to say.

  * * *

  Mrs. Violette Sobel answered the door on the second ring. “Ah, you will be Madame LeDuc,” she said graciously, as if I had been invited to tea. “Please come in.”

  Julian was right: here was a woman who was managing to hold her age at bay big-time. Her hair was white, perfectly coiffed; and what one noticed first about her face was its liveliness, not its wrinkles. She was wearing a slim skirt, a soft cashmere sweater, and pearls. I felt as if I ought to check under my fingernails for dirt.

  The Desmarchais/Sobel residence was a world away from the other two apartments I had visited the day before. Large rooms with crown molding and high ceilings, ornate mirrors over painted fireplaces, and every room filled with antiques, Oriental rugs, objets d’art. Here, too, were original oils; but I was pretty sure that in this case the artists would be recognizable.

  Too bad robbery hadn’t been the motive.

  A Georgian silver coffee service awaited us in the front room, where dour people stared out of dark paintings and a small, incredibly ugly Pekinese immediately launched itself into my lap. “Voyons!” Mrs. Sobel remonstrated with it. “Let Madame LeDuc be!”

  I was all for that, too. I’ve never been what one might call a dog person, and the Peke had bad breath. “Just ignore him,” she said to me, comfortingly if improbably, and proceeded to pour coffee. “Sugar?”

  “Thank you, madame,” I said as I tried shooing away the beast. It yipped excitedly and attempted to lick my face.

  “Well,” she said, having handed me my coffee and settled back—as comfortably as one can on a Louis Quinze chair—with her own. “You wish to know about my sister.”

  I set down my cup so that I could pull my notebook out of my bag, dumping the dog in the process. “Sorry, I need my lap,” I said to its owner, who looked appalled. “He’s very friendly,” I offered, trying to make amends. The horrible little thing hid behind its owner’s legs. Serves you right, I thought.

  I cleared my throat. “What can you tell me, madame?”

  She lifted the creature into her own lap and stroked it as she talked. “Annie was a warm person, a generous person,” she said. “That is my fear, you see; that she was approached by someone needing help, and thus was lured to her death. She could not pass street people without giving them something, some loose change, a dollar or two.”

  Great, I thought, writing it down. So far, our guy had picked on nobody but saints. People who gave money to panhandlers. People who remembered their landladies’ birthdays.

  Violette was still stroking the dog. “She was very intelligent, very cultured. More so than I, who came from a better background. I always admired that about her.”

  I looked up from my notes. “Excuse me? I’m not understanding. How did your background differ from hers?”

  “Ah, of course. I always forget to say.” She reached around the dog and sipped her coffee. I had already come to the conclusion that it was very possibly the best coffee I had ever tasted. “Annie was adopted, you see. When she was quite old—well, as such things go. She was … I think that she was ten at the time. I’d had another sister, a younger one, who contracted tuberculosis and died, may God rest her soul. I think that in some ways my parents were attempting to replace dear Yvonne when they adopted Annie.”

  I didn’t write anything down. I said, “Please tell me how this came about.” It could be nothing, I told myself, but it was a piece of information that the police didn’t have … Somehow, I was starting to see myself in competition with them.

  She fluttered a hand. “I really do not know all the details. From the start, from the first day she arrived, Annie was considered part of the family. We were discouraged from speaking of a past that did not include her.” She paused, thinking, sorting through old memories, I thought, much as one might do with faded photographs. “It was in the 1960s, and our family was inordinately wealthy, madame. Well, as you can see…” Her hand fluttered again, encompassing the mansion and its contents as proof. “But we were taught that one must share what one has. We always gave to the Church and had quite a fine relationship with the cardinal, God rest his soul. So when Yvonne died, we turned to the Church. We had an emptiness in our home; but in return, we could give a home to one of God’s children who had nothing.”

  “I see.” What I didn’t see was how this might relate to why said orphan was murdered fifty-odd years later. “And Annie?”

  “Why, she fit in right away, madame. She was hungry for knowledge, as I said. Read everything and anything. My father made sure that we both went to university, though I believe A
nnie got more out of it than I did.” There was a slight pause and then she cleared her throat. “I had already met Monsieur Sobel, please understand, and it was—agreed—that we would be married once I graduated. Perhaps I did not pay as much attention to my studies as I might have done.” She smiled, a distant smile filled with fondness. She had liked her Monsieur Sobel, I thought.

  She caught me watching her, and misread my thoughts. “He was Jewish, my husband; but my father was most farsighted, most broad-minded. It was never a problem.”

  A guy who in the 1960s sent his daughters to college and encouraged one of them to marry outside his faith. I was beginning to like him quite a lot. “And Annie?” I asked. “Whom did she marry?”

  “Ah, we thought for such a long time that she would not!” exclaimed her sister. “After school she traveled, she went abroad. To Paris, to London. She studied there. My father allowed it. He always had a twinkle when it came to Annie.” She paused, pondering. “She must have been thirty-two or so when she married. Back then, she was considered to be a bit of an old maid.”

  Times have changed for the better, I thought. “And her husband?”

  “Ah, well, there, perhaps, things didn’t work out quite so well,” said Violette, with a touch of frost in her voice. “He seemed so suitable, but … there was unhappiness. Unlike me, my sister wished to have children. But it seemed impossible. Three, four times she became pregnant, and lost the child each time. Her husband blamed her. He knew she had been adopted, of course, and he went on and on about inferior genes. It was really quite disgraceful.”

  The Pekinese had abandoned his mistress and was attempting to mate with my leg. I asked for more coffee and while she was refilling my cup, I shook him off and shooed him away yet again. He hid behind her and they both looked at me reproachfully.

  “Her husband died, madame?” I asked, accepting the coffee and trying not to be too greedy about drinking it. It really was better than anything I’d ever tasted.