The Admirer Read online

  His hands were on her throat before he realized what he was doing. Carrie struggled out of his grip. He often forgot that she had lived a few years on the street. She was tougher than the others, and now she was angry.

  “I didn’t tell anyone. But I will. I’m not ashamed anymore. I want a real life. I wanted it with you, but if you won’t get help, I want it on my own. And there’s something else.”

  “What is it?” He swallowed his rage for a moment, folding his hands in front of him and squeezing them together. “Darling.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  The look on her face was so pathetically cheerful, like the smiling women on the pro–life billboards that lined the highway. A baby! How precious. This was a woman who had planned the amputation of her own legs a thousand times. She knew the serrated edge of a bone saw by heart. She had memorized the stages of atrophy like a catechism.

  “A baby,” he said. “Well that changes everything.”

  He spoke gently after that. He agreed. He apologized. He asked her the name of her web forum, the details of her so–called disease. He talked, and he held her, and he remembered what he had always known: Carrie Brown had to die.

  ****

  Now, in the distance, he could hear the search party, and he cursed her. She was supposed to be in South Africa with Dr. Mobuzi. Barring that, she should have been deep in the asylum well, weighted down by a bag of cement. He was usually so careful. He was not like the criminals in books who played intellectual games with the police. He did not want to be caught. He did not want to leave a judicious smattering of clues. He wanted a woman he could make and keep. He had thought it was Carrie.

  It was her fault it had gone wrong. After her confession in the room at the Cozzzy Inn, he had offered her an oxycodone. She had downed several. Once the drug began to relax her limbs, he had tipped the bottle back into her throat. She spit up several of the pills. Most went down. Then he walked her out to the parking lot while she could still stand.

  Finally, he carried her to the tracks. She was heavy. Mumbling idiotic nonsense. He couldn’t carry her far enough. That was why he made her near the bridge over Barrow Creek instead of farther down the tracks, where he could have hidden her in the forest. By the time they got to the bridge, he was stumbling. She made him weak. He was glad she had gone back on her promise, glad he’d decided to end it as he had with the others.

  He bound her to the tracks and watched the train make her his. When he went to free the body, he realized he’d left the wire cutters in his glove box, half a mile away. The zip–ties only pulled in one direction. They could not be loosened in reverse. The moon was setting. Dawn turned the sky yellow. He was about to go back for the cutters when he heard them: students out for a morning jog.

  He tried to loosen the legs by hand, but he had pulled the zip ties so tightly they cut into Carrie’s muscle. One of the bones had shattered. His hands were slippery. The ties would not yield. He was covered in blood. The students were coming. Closer. A whole choir of them. Then one voice broke off from the rest.

  “I have to take a leak.” The boy began tromping through the underbrush.

  Back on the path, the boy’s friends yelled, “We can’t see you. You don’t have to go that far.”

  He wanted to kill the boy. He glanced around for a weapon. But if he missed, if he struck the boy and he screamed, his friends would hear. There were too many of them. They would come looking.

  “I’m shy,” the boy yelled back in a high voice, like a Midwestern girl. “I can’t go with you watching me.”

  The boy was almost to the railroad tracks.

  He could not free Carrie’s legs. He needed the wire clippers. The boy would see him. He grabbed the torso, wrapped it in the green sheet, and ran.

  Panicked, he threw the bundle in one of the asylum wells. He didn’t even unwrap her and put stones in her pockets. He just pushed her in and hoped she sank. Her leather jacket was heavy. That was the only thing holding her down. Then he washed himself in the creek and drove the back roads for hours until his clothes dried.

  ****

  Now he leaned down and ran his fingertips along the metal rail that had been Carrie’s executioner. He touched the ground that had absorbed her blood. He felt the need rekindled. In the distance, the search party moved through the forest. He caught a glimpse of the new president: Ivers. She picked her way through the tall grass, her face serious. She was pretty, although her long legs repulsed him. So spindly. So quick.

  The thought struck him suddenly: Carrie had been a mule. She was not much better than the whores in Battambang. He had wanted to keep her, but why? He was no longer the weak boy Father had tied to a chair and beaten, not any more. He deserved someone better, a woman of quality, like Mother. He deserved a woman like Helen Ivers.

  Chapter Eleven

  “A lady in the woods?”

  Helen leaned against the stone wall of the asylum, frozen. For a moment, she thought she hallucinated. A figure emerged from around the corner. It looked like an animal wearing a bowtie and coat. Then she realized it was a tiny man, so wizened he looked smoked, his shoulders barely reaching her waist.

  In one hand he grasped an aluminum cane, which he waved when he saw Helen. It was Dr. Lebovetski, the emeritus history professor.

  “Do not be afraid,” the shrunken professor said. He had a slight Polish accent. “I was just exploring the grounds when I discovered I was not the only one who took an interest in the asylum today.” He blinked at the bright sunshine, then extended his hand. “I have frightened you, as well you should be frightened. Have you done your homework?”

  He was teasing. Helen tried to smile.

  “Ms. President, our fearless leader. Did you know I have walked these grounds every day since 1965?” He took his cane in two hands and rocked back on his heels. “I met my wife while walking this path. Even in the winter of 1980, every day, I walked this path, out of the history building over the Barrow Creek and to the asylum.”

  Since 1965, Lebovetski had perfected his delivery. Now his story flowed like water down a hill, one sentence pouring into the next.

  “That year the snow was up to my waist,” Lebovetski continued, still rocking on his heels. “The students thought I was mad to go out.” He chuckled. “You know these asylums were closed communities for many years. They farmed their own food, wove their own clothing. When the patients died, they were cremated and buried right here on the grounds. Some asylums even had bowling alleys and playing fields. Not unlike the college, except your husband can’t throw you in college for believing in spiritualism.”

  He paused for effect, not long enough for Helen to interject.

  “What I’m interested in now are those burial practices. We don’t examine the burials of the unclaimed.” He pointed one finger in the air, clearly warming to a favorite topic. “Buried Practices: The Unclaimed Dead of Kirkbride Asylums from 1855 to 1955.” That’s what I am working on. You know, there is a mausoleum just over there, covered in ivy. It is invisible like their deaths, but I know where it is, and now you do too.”

  Helen regained her composure and jumped in to end the lecture. “The asylum is not safe, Dr. Lebovetski, especially now.”

  “Ah, the legs. An administrative issue for you to untangle in your first months. How intriguing.”

  “It was a crime, Dr. Lebovetski.”

  “Dr. Ivers is right.”

  Helen turned at the familiar voice. Drummond had appeared, as if out of nowhere.

  “Dr. Lebovetski, it is so good to see you, but I must ask you to retire to your office.”

  “Am I in danger?” A smile cracked his leathery face. “Is there a mad man loose in the woods? It would not be the first time, although it’s hard to say whether the madmen wore white coats or straitjackets.” He had made that joke before; Helen was certain. “Where have you looked? Perhaps I can help you.”

  “We have a team of students and the police at work,” Drummond said, putting a han
d on Lebovetski’s shoulder and gracefully turning him toward campus. “You must leave, Dr. Lebovetski. For your safety.”

  “All right, I go. I leave the asylum to the students.” He began to hobble away. “I suspect my beautiful Addie is at the forefront of that army. If this doesn’t have her name all over it, I am lost in the woods.” He waved a gnarled hand toward the students. “They will remember this search for the rest of their lives. How alive they are today! There is nothing like a little memento mori to give our lives significance.”

  When Lebovetski was several paces away, Drummond said, “You’re looking a little peaked. May I drive you back to campus?”

  She hesitated.

  “You’ve made your impression,” he added with a bit less gallantry. “You and Wilson.”

  Helen did not have the energy to protest. She let Drummond lead her back to the clearing, where his gray Bentley was parked on the grass. She was grateful for the car’s air conditioning and relieved to evade the reporters. Still, she scanned the side–view mirror, staring long after the asylum was obscured by trees. It was only after she decompressed in her office that she realized who she’d been looking for: beautiful Adair Wilson. They won’t find her. Not out here in the open. How could she be so certain?

  ****

  About half an hour later, Patrick appeared with two cups of coffee and a sheaf of papers.

  “Bet you hoped the murders would wait until you’d had time to balance the budget. Coffee?” Patrick held a cup out to Helen.

  “Thanks.”

  Helen’s phone rang for the third time since she’d returned. She set down her coffee and silenced the ringer.

  “We’ve got a little problem.” Patrick shuffled the papers. “Eight students have already withdrawn, six incoming and two returning. I’ve had calls from about forty panicked parents.”

  “They’re calling me too.”

  Helen pulled her Blackberry out of her pocket and scrolled through the messages. “I got a hundred and forty emails this morning.”

  “Well,” Patrick said. “I asked Media Services to put an update banner on the website. That will at least field a few questions.” He hesitated. “Mr. Drummond went out again. And your car registration renewal got sent here by accident. I filled out the papers and mailed them back to the DMV.” He looked pleased with himself.

  “Anything else?”

  Helen motioned to one of the gold wingback chairs that dominated her office. The furniture was too Louis XIV. “Come in for two minutes, drink your coffee with me?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” Patrick plopped down in one of the chairs. “So the shit hit the fan, didn’t it?”

  “Yep.” Helen liked Patrick. A good secretary should not be cowed by the people he worked for, and Patrick exuded self–confident efficiency.

  “Can I help?” he asked. “I mean more than I have already.” He grinned over his coffee cup.

  “Tell me about Adair Wilson.”

  “She’s crazy,” Patrick said.

  Helen swallowed too quickly, coughed, then set her mug on an ornate end table.

  “I’m kidding,” he added. “She’s my best friend, but she’s that friend. You know what I mean.”

  Helen did not.

  “You know. You’ve got all your friends from high school, college and work, but there’s always one that’s larger than life.”

  “All your friends,” Helen repeated. Eliza had not left time for all those friends. “How long have you known her?”

  “Senior year in high school. I got a scholarship to the Aster Campbell Institute in New Hampshire. It’s a private prep school. Worst thing that ever happened to me. Those kids were so rich. They owned horses. They drove Miatas. You could buy anything. A test. A professor. A woman. Forget cocaine; they did it at lunch in front of the library. And there I was, this blue collar kid from Manchester on scholarship.” Patrick folded his arms over his chest. “Those kids were so mean. Adair was as rich as any of them, but she wasn’t mean like that. It wasn’t in her bones.

  “When she got into Smith, I didn’t know what to do. She was the only friend I had who was going to college, and she picked a girls’ school, so I applied to UMass because it was down the road. She was smarter than I was, or better at it, or maybe she bought her grades. I don’t know. It almost didn’t matter for rich people. They ‘got’ how to be smart, like it was a game. If they bought the answers to a test it was just because they didn’t feel like they wanted to learn them.” He smiled. “God, she was insufferable. She wouldn’t hang out with me unless I had done my homework. Can you believe that?”

  He took a swig of coffee.

  “I think she understood that I needed that degree in a way she didn’t, but if you had told me that back then, I would have said she was just an asshole.” He shrugged, apologizing for the swear and dismissing it all in one gesture. “It was hard to take her seriously.”

  Helen raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Oh, she wasn’t always Mr. Butch Dyke. I guess she had her own stuff to work out too. When I met her, she was one of those girls who carried a purse that probably cost more than my car and no pen. She had long blonde hair and weighed about eighteen pounds.”

  Helen tried to square Patrick’s story with the woman who’d cornered her in the woods. “And now?”

  “I was here first.” Patrick pointed his finger in the air. “I want you to know that. She followed me to Pittock.”

  “What’s she like to work with?”

  “Hmm.” Patrick shrugged again. “She’s my best friend.”

  “And if she wasn’t?”

  “I’d say she was… demanding, stubborn, moody. She doesn’t take no for an answer. She won’t do paper work. She doesn’t go to meetings.”

  “She thinks she’s better than her job?”

  “She is better than her job, but that’s not it. She loves her students. She’s passionate about the theater. She’s just… Adair. She’s different.”

  Different. That was one way to describe a woman who searched the woods at twilight, alone, for a body. A woman who claimed to know the outcome of a search before it was over. A woman who knew secrets she couldn’t tell the police. I need to talk to you about a student named Carrie Brown and a woman named Anat Al–Fulani.

  She’s crazy, Helen thought. It was Eliza all over again: the delusions, the paranoia, the conviction that only Helen could be trusted. And yet, Patrick in his purple polo, purple lanyard, and matching purple Bluetooth headset, seemed the most stable person on campus. If she could rely on anyone, it was Patrick.

  “I have to talk to her,” Helen said. “I have to see her again.”

  Chapter Twelve

  An irrational fear seized Helen as she stood at the door to the Ventmore Theater. Patrick had informed her that Wilson was back, and she had set off across campus in the late afternoon light. Situated on the edge of campus, the Ventmore was one of the few “modern” buildings at Pittock. The architect had designed it to look like an Elizabethan theater, though it was built in 1970. Since then, years of neglect had grayed the plaster and left the painted beams flaking.

  There was something menacing about the building, like a drawing in a Grimm’s fairytale, the old version where the witch boils the children alive. It reminded Helen of a low–budget amusement park they’d visited when she and Eliza were children. Her mother had commented on what a wonderful trip it was, her voice growing shrill in the family’s silence. All Helen remembered were Eliza’s bizarre rantings, as if the strange surroundings had aligned with Eliza’s inner world, and she was relieved to see her visions manifest.

  Helen shook her head and pressed her fingers to her temples. This was the kind of fantasy Eliza had entertained. She walked resolutely up to the side door and pulled it open with such force it swung back and hit the wall, adding to a sizable hole in the plaster.

  Inside, Helen’s eyes adjusted to the dark. Up front, on the stage, Wilson sat in a large, red armchair surround
ed by students. Floor lamps cast a warm glow on the ensemble. However, the theater’s acoustics carried their voices, and Helen could hear their anxiety buzzing like high tension wires.

  “Is she really missing?” A girl’s whisper.

  “Do you think it was Carrie? I mean, could you tell?”

  “Who’s going to play her part if she doesn’t come back?”

  “Shut up.” Two students said in unison, then, “The show must go on?” It was a question.

  Wilson leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her head bent as if in prayer. “Has anyone heard from Carrie?” she pleaded.

  There was silence. Helen waited for someone to notice her, but the darkness shrouded her, and she felt like an interloper. The girl sitting nearest Wilson scooted closer and rested her head on Wilson’s knee. Wilson stroked her hair absently. Though the touch was maternal, Helen briefly wondered if she was sleeping with the girl. The professor was young enough to be attractive to her students, but her pulling power would be waning. She was thirty–some to their twenty–some. She was no longer “one of them.” She would miss that perhaps.

  “Dr. Wilson?” The girl at Wilson’s feet looked up at her. “Are you okay?”

  The students fixed their attention on Wilson. Helen felt the high wire crackle.

  “I don’t know,” Wilson said. “I don’t know.”

  Helen cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she called out.

  The students started, as though they had heard a gunshot. Wilson just raised her eyes, finding Helen immediately.

  “Go on,” Wilson said to her students. “Get out of here, get something to eat, and go together. Don’t go out there alone.”

  Like a choreographed dance, the students rolled, ran, and leapt off the stage into the wings. In a second, they were gone. Wilson sat alone in her crimson armchair, like a Shakespearian king. Helen thought of elegant, ineffectual Richard II. Then Wilson rose and Helen thought, no. She was one of the warring kings. “Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars…”