Asylum Read online

  “Yes, he died,” she said. “In some ways, his death was a blessing. By then Annie had returned here—to our own home. Our mother had already passed on, and Annie was able to care for our father. There was no thought of divorce, of course; that was not done. But they lived apart for some time before we heard that Louis had died. By then Annie was already using our own family name again, rather than his. She did not go to his funeral.”

  An interesting story, I thought, but not particularly helpful. “What was your sister’s work, madame?”

  “Ah, Annie’s work. It gave her such pleasure. When our father passed on, his money came to us both equally, you see. But my own dear husband had left me rather a lot, as well; so Annie and I established the Providence Foundation. We named it—well, she named it, really—for the order of nuns at the hospital where our father had worked, where she had lived. The Sisters of Providence. Annie was very eager to help those less fortunate than we were, you see. I was never very good at that sort of thing, and I had other interests; but Annie was very involved. She did research to find possible recipients of the foundation’s grants.”

  “She decided who got the money?” There was a motive, I thought.

  “Oh, my dear, no,” Violette laughed. “There is a board to take care of that sort of thing. A process to go through. No, Annie just wanted to find people who needed help.” She looked past me, out the window, but I had the impression that she wasn’t seeing anything at all. “She loved to help people,” Violette said, a catch in her voice.

  I stood up. “I’ve taken enough of your time, madame,” I said. Useless to ask if Annie Desmarchais had had any enemies. Useless to ask if anyone hated her enough to rape her, stab her, and leave her mutilated body sitting upright on a public bench. Useless to try and figure out any rhyme or reason to what was happening.

  The Pekinese was glaring at me through the window as I walked away.

  I spent my first two years at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu working the farm. I grew taller in those years, and stronger; my skin turned dark in the sun, and there were calluses on my hands where there had once been blisters.

  I was tougher in other ways, too.

  Alain, one of the boys, had it in for me from the beginning. I was caught off guard once: he waited until I came around a corner and hit me, hard, with a piece of wood he’d gotten from God only knew where, right across my chest.

  I fell, struggling to breathe, as he laughed at me. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I saw red and pulled him down by the ankles. I was stronger than most of the boys, because of the farm. I had him against the floor, my forearm across his throat, pressing hard, watching his eyes bulging out. “Leave me alone!”

  Alain turned red. I pushed harder against his neck. “Say you’ll leave me alone!”

  He nodded and spluttered something, and I let him go. He scrambled away to a safe distance.

  “You cannot tell anyone that a girl did this to you,” I said, seething, and Alain nodded. He already knew that. It would have been the end of him to have the others know.

  Only Bobby, the boy who read the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu sign on that first morning, the one from the same orphanage as me, was a puzzle to me. Sometimes I caught him looking at me with an expression that I couldn’t decipher. Something dark, something at odds with the camaraderie that we should have shared. Once he gave me some cake he’d stolen from the kitchens. “We need to stick together,” he told me.

  “Do you remember it? The orphanage?” I asked him. I was still looking for some touchstone to my past.

  He shook his head. “Better to think of the future than the past, you know.”

  I was cramming the cake into my mouth, fearful of getting caught. “Enough to stay out of trouble,” I mumbled.

  “Stay out of trouble?” Bobby asked, and laughed. “You just watch me. I’ll have ’em all eating out of my hand one of these days, just like you’re eating that cake. You wait and see.”

  I was shocked. “You can’t, Bobby. They’ll do bad things to us.”

  “Bad things?” He laughed, but it didn’t sound humorous. “You don’t even know the beginning of the bad things, Gabrielle.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He glanced around, a little furtively. “You just got to learn how to make them need you,” he said.

  I was staring at him. “What do you know?”

  “The doctors, Gabrielle. It’s all about the doctors.”

  Perhaps every asylum had them. There was, after all, some pretense at least of caring for the insane. But we seemed to have any number of doctors, all men—of course—all wearing the same white coats that flapped around them like a long cape as they walked.

  It might have been comical, if they weren’t so dangerous.

  How did I know about the danger, at first? Was it intuition? A rumor that I caught in passing without understanding its specifics? Thinking, later, about what Bobby had said, and the cruel smile that curved around his mouth when he said it? I can’t really say: all I know is that I feared the doctors even more than the sisters.

  Later, of course, I understood perfectly well why.

  I only met them in passing; I knew without being told that getting too close to any of them would spell disaster. They didn’t even all speak French; English, it seemed, was their preferred language, and I didn’t understand any of that, so they were easy to ignore.

  But once in a while I glimpsed something there, maybe a trick of the light, but a face would suddenly show compassion, or interest, or kindness, and I realized that under it all these doctors were human. Which, of course, left me with even more questions. If they were human, how could the rumors about them be true?

  None of them spent much time anywhere but in the medical rooms on the ground floor and in the basement. When we were ill, we were taken downstairs to see them—but not all that frequently, because it was clear that whatever illness we had was interrupting whatever work they had to do, and no one wanted to go, no matter how sick they felt. Being sick, even horribly sick, was preferable to going downstairs.

  It was a long time before I learned what it was they were doing down there. And when I did, I wished I had never known.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  By the time I got back to my office, I’d reached the conclusion that Julian had disappeared. For someone who was supposed to be watching the watcher, he was doing a particularly bad job. I left messages on his voice mail both at his desk and on his mobile phone, then thought about the fact that I was apparently on my own.

  Fine. I might as well close the circle and find out about Caroline Richards.

  I called out to Chantal that I’d be gone for a while. With any luck, I could get out of the building before my boss decided he needed to see me: this case was starting to get serious press, and I didn’t want to have to update him on every tiny detail until I had something to report that might actually change that press coverage, none of which was currently particularly friendly to the mayor or the city. And for which, naturellement, I would be blamed.

  I ran into four different people with pressing questions for me on my way out, and dealt with them as quickly as I could. I was turning away when I walked right into someone entering the hall and my purse went flying. Opening en route, of course. “Oh, pardon—”

  “Madame LeDuc.” The voice was amused. “Allow me to help you.” He bent down to pick up the sheaf of papers and I recognized the pharmaceutical lawyer I’d met at the police station. “Merci, monsieur.”

  He straightened up and gave them to me. “Voilà. And how are you, madame?”

  “Bien, bien, merci.” I couldn’t resist. “And yourself? Making yourself busy working for the mayor?”

  He didn’t mind the sarcasm. “Ah, yes, as is standard fare in the business of politics. And you? I trust that you are making progress?”

  “Making progress, monsieur?” I was trying to stuff things back into my purse.

  “In making sure that t
he current crimes do not affect the positive public relations of the city,” he said smoothly. “The mayor is anxious that this not hurt his chances of reelection.”

  Of course he was. And any lobbyist worth his salt wanted him to stay in office, too. My boss, friend to Big Pharma. I paused and met the amused—and, damn it, still attractive—eyes. “Always, monsieur.”

  “Then I will leave you to it.” I felt his gaze following me all the way out of City Hall.

  The Montréal office of the newspaper was happy to cooperate, the general editor, Francis Russell, assured me. “Such a loss,” he proclaimed, making a wide gesture that included the newsroom, the city, perhaps even the world.

  “What kind of reporting did Caroline Richards do?” I asked. The name was familiar, but the byline was not; I rarely read English-language newspapers. Ivan or Chantal usually told me anything I needed to know, and I read the Gazette—in French—religiously.

  Russell was signaling to someone out of my line of sight. “Caroline? Oh, you know, she had a number of interests.”

  That sounded a little too vague. “What stories has she covered this year?” I tried again.

  A harried-looking young man in horn-rimmed glasses appeared in response to the editor’s hand signals. “There you are, Mark,” Russell said comfortably. “This is Mrs. LeDuc, Mark, from the mayor’s office. She needs to see Caroline Richards’s archives.”

  Mark ducked his head, turned, and disappeared, a little à la White Rabbit. “Mark will see that you get them,” Francis assured me. “In the meantime, you can sit at Caroline’s desk while you wait.”

  “Her position hasn’t been filled?” I was surprised. It was a major newspaper, and Caroline had been dead for almost three months.

  Francis ushered me ahead of him and pointed to an empty desk, a computer monitor forlornly off to the side. “Oh, her position was filled,” he said. “But no one has wanted to—um—”

  “Sit where a dead woman sat?” I supplied, amused. Superstition, it seemed, was alive and well in Montréal.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” said Francis without answering my question, and then he was gone.

  The room was immense and incredibly loud. Voices talking on telephones, in person, computer keys clacking—I couldn’t imagine what it must have sounded like in the old days, when typewriters were used. It was bad enough now. No one was paying any attention to me, so I eased open the top drawer of Caroline’s desk. Just to see.

  It was a mess: paper clips, staples, pencils, random keys, all the minutiae of paperwork were strewn in the front part of the drawer. In the back, paper, all of it, to my disappointment, blank. I closed the drawer and eased open the next one down.

  “Mrs. LeDuc?” Startled, I closed the drawer guiltily as young Mark appeared by the desk. “I have printouts here from the last month that Ms. Richards was with us,” he said, as if she had quit or gone on vacation somewhere. A permanent vacation. “But it’ll be a lot easier for you to go back further if you use the computer.”

  I was all for that. “That would be great,” I said.

  “Excuse me.” He reached down below the desk and booted the machine that was neatly out of sight. “I’ll get you onto the network; you’ll need a password,” he explained as we waited for the computer to check itself and make sure everything was in place. I always compared computers starting up to baseball players, touching everything they owned before heading up to bat.

  Having decided that it was ready to roll, the computer asked what we wanted of it. Mark mumbled an excuse again and leaned in front of me to access the keyboard, and then I was on the newspaper intranet and Mark was scrolling through lists. “Here it is,” he said. “It’s all arranged chronologically, but you can go by subject line, too. Everything Caroline ever wrote.”

  “Thank you,” I said; then, as he seemed about to depart, “Did you know her, Mark?”

  To my astonishment, he blushed. “Aye,” he managed to say, betraying his own origins as being somewhere in the Maritimes. “Aye, I knew her. She was wonderful.” And then he did the White Rabbit thing again. I stood up so I could see over the cubicle, but he had disappeared into the warren. I sighed and applied myself to the computer.

  Caroline Richards may well have been wonderful, but it became clear almost at once that not everybody could have shared that sentiment. She did investigative reporting, uncovering things that people did not want uncovered, asking the questions that no one wanted to answer. Of my boss, I noted with wry amusement, on more than one occasion. Odd that her path and mine had never crossed; I made a mental note to ask Richard about her. He did most of the direct work with the press; had he known Caroline?

  In the months leading up to her murder, Caroline had reported on financial wrongdoing in the meatpacking industry. She had covered the trial of a reputed mobster and had found that the crown prosecutor wasn’t asking the right questions because his wife had not so mysteriously disappeared on the eve of the trial. Caroline had raised so much public outcry when the body of a prostitute was discovered and no one was able to identify the woman that the government relented and offered a free DNA database to sex workers so that if they were killed, they would at least be identified. She did a follow-up on a story that she had originally reported nearly ten years previously about the Duplessis orphans, complaining that there still had been no compensation to survivors. She wrote about …

  Stop. Back up. The dots were getting closer to being connected. Caroline Richards had done a story that was sympathetic to prostitutes; Isabelle Hubert had been a prostitute. Caroline Richards had done a series of stories on the Duplessis orphans; Annie Desmarchais had been an orphan.

  Okay, so maybe I was reaching. I checked my watch. Nearly seven; Ivan was working late tonight. But the casino had such excellent restaurants …

  He wasn’t in his office when I got there, so I wandered through the poker rooms, listening to the quiet riffling of clay chips, the occasional chitchat among the players. There were two tables of no limits, and I paused and watched for a few minutes, fascinated. It is a sad fact that I cannot play poker to save my life. Ivan despairs of my ever learning. It must be the math, I tell him. It’s your face, he always responds.

  He was deep in conversation with one of the supervisors, but smiled when he saw me. “Martine!”

  “Is it a bad time?” I asked, kissing him chastely on the cheek.

  “No more so than any other,” he responded, and turned back to the man in the elegant suit. “We’re fine on that?”

  “Yes, Mr. Petrinko.” He turned away and began talking very quickly to one of the dealers. I watched him. “Problem?”

  “Of course there’s a problem. It wouldn’t be a normal day if there weren’t any problems.” Ivan took my arm. “You want to get something to eat?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” Behind me, voices were raised slightly, then the pit boss who had been talking to Ivan intervened to settle whatever argument was flaring. Regulars at the casino get annoyed when they’re treated like everybody else; I recognized the signs.

  We sat in Nuances, the casino’s nicest restaurant, and didn’t talk until we’d ordered: chicken Marsala and a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape. Ivan has become French enough that he does not consider a dinner complete without wine. It’s only taken me five years of marriage to get there. “So what’s up, pumpkin?”

  He usually only calls me pumpkin when I need reassuring. I wondered if I looked as scared as I was feeling. “Something’s going on,” I said. “And I think it’s not about what everyone else is thinking. I don’t think that it’s about sex, or about some psychopath who’s out there picking random victims. And I think that we’re playing right into their hands by going forward with this serial killer idea.”

  “So what’s really going on, then?”

  I hesitated, and then said it. “Okay. This may be just a feeling, but … I think it’s about the Duplessis orphans scandal.”

  Ivan raised his eyebrows. “The wh
at?” I had to remember that he’s only been in Canada for six years.

  I took a deep breath, unwilling to begin. The Duplessis scandal was something from our collective past, something that my province and my country have tried hard to forget, even to deny ever happened. A dark shadow cast across our modern world. “Years ago, there was this guy, Maurice Duplessis, who was premier of Québec,” I said. “That’s a little like a governor of a state, though the premier has more power than a governor. I think.” My knowledge of American government is hazy at best.

  “When?” Ivan is nothing if not exact.

  “In the 1950s and sixties,” I said. My recollections weren’t on a par with his. “Elected in the fifties, anyway. He was a social conservative. You know the deal, a return to family values”—I sketched air quotation marks around the term—“an emphasis on the Church, with low social spending, suppression of labor unions, that sort of thing.”

  “In the States, that would be called a Republican.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

  “Whatever,” I said. I didn’t really understand American politics; keeping up with Québec—which was, after all, my own bread and butter—was more than enough most days. “The point with him, really, was that the Catholic Church was front and center,” I said. “He gave it a lot of power, and a lot of latitude.” Pull it together, Martine, you’re wandering. “Anyway, what happened was that Duplessis and the Church were in each other’s pockets. And the Church was running these orphanages, or asylums, or a mixture of the two, and it was—well, it was pretty horrible, Ivan.”

  The waiter came and uncorked the wine, Ivan went through the tasting ritual, and we were left alone again. “Tell me,” Ivan commanded, pouring wine into my glass.

  It seemed sacrilegious to drink liquid rubies like these when I had such a horrible story to tell. “You have to understand, in the 1940s and even through the end of the 1960s,” I was trying to keep my voice steady, not looking at him at all, “it was a sin here in Québec to have a baby out of wedlock. I mean, a social sin. We were a kind of traditionalist place, especially upriver. A lot of bad things happened to the mothers.”