Asylum Read online

  Ivan didn’t say anything. I took a deep breath. “And a lot of worse things happened to the babies. They were mostly institutionalized—put in these orphanages that were run by the Church. Oh, it wasn’t just babies born to single mothers. Everyone had these huge families, and when you couldn’t feed all your children, then you had to do something with them, so they went into the orphanages, too. Or if the father of the family died and the mother couldn’t remarry or support her children, they went into the orphanage.”

  Ivan was watching me, his eyes concerned. He didn’t know where this was going, but he knew it was hurting me; he knew that I was very aware of my Church’s historical failings and that I still tried to love it. I took a quick swallow of wine. “And so there were these tremendously big orphanages, hundreds and hundreds of children in them. And then sometime in the 1950s the Church, probably through Duplessis himself, found out that they could get more money—you know, federal grants and support money and all that—from the Canadian government for kids in asylums than they could for kids in orphanages.”

  “Wait,” said Ivan. “Duplessis wasn’t part of the Canadian government? I thought you said he was premier—”

  “He was a premier of Québec, of the province,” I said. “There was also a Canadian premier. But you know there’s this weird coexistence between Québec and the rest of Canada.”

  “Don’t I ever,” said Ivan with feeling. Massachusetts had never been this complicated.

  “So the federal government decided that it was more expensive to support people in asylums than it was to support just regular kids in orphanages, and they upped the entitlements, so pouff! Suddenly a whole lot of the orphans were mentally ill, too. It was a very deliberate move. You went to sleep an orphan, you woke up an insane person. Just so the Catholic Church and the local government could save some money.” Another swallow of wine. “They either renamed the orphanages as asylums, or took the kids from the orphanages to the asylums. And a lot of these kids were mentally ill, there’s no question; but a lot of them weren’t, most of them weren’t, only they were all locked up together anyway. It’s a wonder anyone stayed sane.”

  Ivan was watching me. “And the Church was in charge?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral. Like Violette, I married a Jew. It’s sometimes been an issue between us; Ivan’s criticisms of the Catholic Church have nearly always resulted in fights.

  “Yes,” I said wearily. “The Church was in charge.” I hesitated, torn between not wanting to expose more of Catholicism to Ivan’s critical tongue, but wanting to share what I was finding with the only person in the world who knew me, who could comfort me, who could help me think it all through. “You have to understand, chéri, back then, the Church ran a lot of things in Québec. Schools. Hospitals. I’m not saying that it was all bad…” My voice trailed off.

  Ivan was gentle; he had picked up on my fear. “I’m sure it wasn’t,” he said. “Bad things happen, sometimes, for the best of reasons. So you’re not telling me what happened?”

  I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to know. What had happened should never have happened. What had happened was a nightmare. “So the orphanages became asylums,” I said, “because Québec could obtain more federal funds for healthcare facilities than for schools and orphanages. So orphans magically became mentally ill: they labeled everybody either crazy or mentally deficient and locked them away. They were called the Duplessis orphans, because this all happened under his watch and probably with his collusion, though the practice far outlived him. He died in office in 1959, but the asylums kept taking in orphans all through the sixties.”

  I was feeling a little queasy. I had read Caroline Richards’s reports, awakening in me the memory of the original articles, the protests, the lawsuits, when the surviving orphans, now adults, had started coming out with their stories. Straitjackets. Electroshock therapy. Hydrotherapy. Excessive medication. Lobotomies. Any doctor who wanted to try something out had as many human guinea pigs available as he needed, and there would be no one to complain if the experiments failed. Better still, the medical schools were paying for the corpses. It was a win-win proposition for everyone involved.

  I felt a wave of revulsion, but tried to focus. It wasn’t as if Québec were alone in this. Nazis in Germany had experimented on people. Human experimentation in the United States wasn’t unknown, either—Tuskegee, the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study, even infants injected with herpes: none of this was new. But it had happened at home, my home.

  “So it turns out that she—Caroline, this reporter—was particularly interested in the experiments they were doing with chlorpromazine.” I was turning my wineglass round and round in circles on the tablecloth. “In the States, you call it Thorazine,” I said. “There was this guy who was working for McGill, this doctor, a psychiatrist. His name was Ewen Cameron. He was famous for doing human experimentation, combining drugs, electroshock therapy, and lobotomies.” I swallowed. “Caroline wrote that he was working for the CIA, that he was part of that whole program where they used people to see what effects drugs like LSD had on them, back during the Cold War.”

  Ivan frowned. “So you’re saying the CIA was involved with experimenting on children in Canada? And you think there’s a tie-in between these stories and the murders?” he asked. “I don’t know. It sounds like you might be stretching it, babe. I mean, I’m not saying that wasn’t horrible, and I’m not saying that Caroline didn’t make herself some enemies by writing about it, but that sounds a little too much like a conspiracy theory to me. Next thing you know, you’ll be saying that the CIA had something to do with all this stuff that’s happening now, with Montréal and the murders—”

  “It’s a possibility,” I said defensively. The waiter arrived with our dinners and I looked at my plate with some dismay. I wasn’t all that hungry anymore. Thinking about torture has that effect, I guess. “It’s as good as the current sex fiend theory.”

  “Hmm.” Ivan took a swallow of wine and held it in his mouth for a moment, tasting, before swallowing it. “It’s a lot to take in,” he said neutrally. “What does your detective friend Julian think about all this?”

  “I have no idea. He’s MIA.” I sighed, frustrated. “Maybe you’re right, maybe there’s nothing here.”

  But, as it turned out, there was.

  After a year on the farm, it appeared that I had worked my way back into the sisters’ good graces. At least that was how it was expressed to me when I was brought before Mother Andrée and told that I was to begin working in the main building. “We feel that you can be trusted, Gabrielle,” she said sternly, watching me closely for any signs of untrustworthiness. “You are quick and intelligent, and we will try and find tasks more suited to you henceforth.”

  I missed the soft breath of the animals, their warmth on cold winter mornings, the easy camaraderie that I’d shared with them and the other farm workers, all of whom were there because of some transgression or another; but there was nothing about those dark icy early mornings that I missed, nothing at all.

  To my surprise, Mother Andrée hadn’t been lying: I wasn’t sent to scrub toilets or clean dormitories or wash dishes; instead, I was sent to the busy front office, where I was to be a messenger. The buildings at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu were large, with long shining corridors wherever one looked; and if notes needed to go from one end of the building to another, it was one of the orphans who carried the note.

  In this case, me.

  I was given a new set of clothes, a light cotton pinafore for summer and a woolen one for winter, and an older girl I’d not met before showed me what I had to do.

  “You’ll remember it all soon,” Régine assured me as we sped down a flight of stairs. “All the corridors look alike at first, so always look for the letter before you leave the stairwell. Can you read?”

  “No,” I acknowledged. The orphanage hadn’t found reading necessary.

  “Never mind,” said Régine. “I’ll show you the le
tters you need to know, and just connect them on the stairwells, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Always the stairs? What about the elevators?” These were large noisy affairs that included two metal gates that needed to be fought into place before the elevator would move. I was quite afraid of them.

  “Only if you’re carrying something heavy or fragile,” Régine said. “Not for the likes of us, the elevators aren’t. So on each floor there’s a sister in charge, and usually she’s the one that gets the message you’re carrying, yeah?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed, nodding.

  “Or else she’ll tell you where to take it. Or else they’ll have given you other instructions. But if you ever don’t know what to do with something, find a sister in charge of the floor, and ask her.”

  Régine’s accent was nonexistent, not like some of the upriver accents that I struggled with out on the farm. Along with the troublemakers, they’d sensibly put children who came from farms out there to run things, and it had taken me months to understand some of them. “Where do you come from?” I asked her.

  “Hush, tais-toi, we’re not supposed to speak of such things,” she said, alarmed, lowering her voice and looking around her. “No personal conversations.”

  There had been plenty of personal conversations across the road on the farm. “Tell me anyway,” I urged her.

  She looked seriously alarmed. “I am from Montréal,” she admitted. “Do not say any more now! We’ll be in bad trouble.”

  I was lighthearted. Bad trouble, to me, could only mean going back to the farm, and as I’d done that for a year already, it held no fears for me. She was a city girl, I thought kindly, so of course she’d be afraid of the threat of the farm.

  Little did I know that she was afraid of something far worse. I had no idea, then, how bad “bad trouble” could be.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I went in to the office the next morning. Richard was handling everything with his usual smooth competence; I hadn’t expected anything else. I found him at his desk, talking quietly into the phone, smoothing the ruffled feathers of yet another resident concerned about the proposal to make Duluth Street pedestrian-only. “I assure you, madame, that the mayor’s office is aware of that concern. No, no one wants it to become a place for loud parties at night.” He caught sight of me and grimaced. “Yes, perhaps you should write a letter to the editor. That would be most appropriate. Good-bye, madame.”

  I grinned. “She never thought to call the city councilors themselves? They’re the ones debating it, not us.”

  He sighed. “Everyone seems to think it’s a ploy on our part to make Montréal more of a tourist haven,” he said.

  “We are that devious,” I agreed. “Can I see you in my office?”

  We settled in and I buzzed Chantal for coffee. “Did you talk to the police yesterday?”

  He nodded. “Filling in background, they called it,” he said. “I got the impression that they’d have loved to find out I was the killer. Right race, right gender, and so on, and best of all, I work for you.”

  “Yes, well, don’t worry so much about the profile. I’m not so sure that this one fits the profile.”

  He slanted a sharp glance at me. “You sound like one of them,” he said, his voice neutral, only the hint of a question in it.

  “Maybe.” I waited until Chantal had delivered the coffee and closed the door behind her. I sipped; it was, of course, disappointing. Office coffee always is. Office coffee, after what I’d drunk at Violette Sobel’s house, was abysmal. “Richard, I have to ask you this: did you and Danielle talk much about her work?”

  He stirred his usual horrifying four cubes of sugar into his coffee before replying. “Sometimes. Not much. We talked, bien sûr, but not of work.”

  “I was in her office on Monday,” I said. “She was doing some historical research, wasn’t she?”

  Richard frowned, thinking. “I think so,” he said at last. “But it was something on the side, I’m thinking, something she was doing as an extra project. It wasn’t for anybody at UQAM.”

  “I thought that was who she worked for,” I objected.

  “Yes, bien sûr, but there was someone from McGill there a lot, these last weeks. I met him once, when I went to take her to dinner. He didn’t speak much French, I remember that. An Anglophone, and a man of a certain age. I teased her,” he said and swallowed audibly, “about going over to the enemy.”

  More than you knew, I thought. “Do you know his name, this guy she was working for?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Why? Is it important?”

  I gave him my best all-purpose shrug. “I don’t know. It might be. What was she researching for him, do you know?”

  He leaned back in the chair, concentrating. “Let me see. We did speak of it, briefly, though not at that time. It was later … We were talking about human rights violations. I think that he was interested in some of the First Nations issues, and perhaps others, something that the Church had done in the 1960s.”

  I tried not to sound too excited. “Was it about the insane asylums? The orphanages? The Duplessis scandal?”

  “Yes, yes, that could be it, Martine,” Richard said. He was sounding tired. “I cannot remember exactly. You know how one listens to that sort of thing; it is a matter of courtesy only, really. But it is possible that it was about the Duplessis orphans, oui.”

  I was going to have to find those notes—and that mysterious older gentleman from McGill. “Richard, you don’t know her computer password, do you?” I asked.

  He surprised me by immediately tearing up. “It is my name and my birthday,” he said.

  * * *

  Julian caught up with me at the UQAM library. “You got the password?”

  “Yes,” I said, turning away from the front desk where I was still waiting for someone to notice me. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Investigating,” he said, tapping the side of his nose. I wondered which late-night police show he had gotten the gesture from.

  “Me, too,” I said tartly. “You might have mentioned that you were going to disappear, by the way.”

  He leaned against the counter, his smile boyish. “Tell me you missed me.”

  “Hardly. Does anybody work here, do you think?”

  Julian winked and wandered off. He was back almost immediately, with a flustered female graduate student. “Je m’excuse,” she said hastily, slanting another look at him, worship in her eyes. “I’m so very sorry. You wished to go see Mademoiselle Leroux’s office?”

  “Yes, please,” I said. I was trying to ignore the fact that she and Julian were doing everything but exchange telephone numbers on the spot.

  “This way, please, madame, monsieur.”

  The office was as I’d left it on Monday, and yet subtly changed, as well. It couldn’t possibly have accumulated dust in the meantime, yet it felt dusty, as though realizing that its former occupant would not be returning. There was an emptiness that hadn’t been there on Monday.

  Julian was still out in the hallway talking to the grad student. If he didn’t get a date out of it, I’d be disappointed in him. There was nothing left to do but look at Danielle’s life and see if I could figure out why she’d died.

  I booted the machine and waited; I got the password—Rousseau and the birth date—right away. I hadn’t realized how close they were. That felt sad, too.

  I’d been right: Danielle and I shared a number of software preferences. I looked at her computer dock and located them at once: iCal, address book, the Apple Mail client, iPhoto, Quicken. I pulled up iCal first.

  On the day she died, Danielle had eaten lunch with someone named Hélène; she’d had an appointment at three with someone called Dr. Belanger, and had noted to herself that she needed to pick up tomatoes at the market. The words blurred in front of my eyes. I wondered if she’d ever gotten her tomatoes, and what recipe she had needed them for.

  I’d leave the address book for Julian, I decided; he’
d know best how to deal with that. I wasn’t about to go into Danielle’s photo album. The e-mail needed an additional password, but this time, my deputy’s first name was sufficient. I dabbed at my eyes, took a deep breath, and dug in.

  It has to be said: reading someone else’s daily correspondence is less than thrilling. By the time Julian joined me, I was clicking through slowly, my elbows on the desk, the atmosphere in the room starting to get to me.

  “Find anything?”

  I didn’t bother looking up. “Nothing yet,” I said. “Did you get her number?”

  He laughed, pushing folders out of his way and hitching one hip onto the desk. “Can’t blame me for trying.”

  I stopped looking at the monitor and sat back in my chair. “What do you know,” I asked, “about the Duplessis orphans?”

  His eyes widened fractionally. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

  “I don’t know much yet,” I said in frustration. “But Caroline Richards was doing a series of stories on them for the newspaper—the asylums, and the experiments, and digging up that old cemetery that belongs to the provincial liquor board now. And Annie Desmarchais was an orphan—she was adopted when she was ten by Violette’s family who had lost a child; plus she’s the right age to be part of the Duplessis scandal. And now Richard says that Danielle was doing historical research about that period at the behest of someone from—wait for it—McGill. Which is pretty weird freelancing, since McGill and UQAM don’t generally play well together. But there’s more. McGill’s psychiatric department was called the Allan Institute, and she’s got all these notes—newspaper clippings, too—about a connection between the Allan and the Duplessis orphans. Is it a coincidence? That’s a lot of connections that don’t have anything to do with sex.”

  Julian nodded. He cleared his throat. “Isabelle Hubert was doing genealogy work, remember? The Mormons, and all that?” After I nodded, he went on. “Well, I looked at her stuff. Turns out, Isabelle’s mother was in the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu asylum. The only reason she didn’t end up with her brains fried, or worse, is that she escaped.”