Rag Doll Bones
A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel
J.R. Erickson
Contents
Author’s Note
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Also by J.R. Erickson
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2019 J.R. Erickson
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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JREricksonauthor.com
Author’s Note
Thanks so much for picking up a Northern Michigan Asylum Novel. I want to offer a disclaimer before you dive into the story. This is an entirely fictional novel. Although there was once a real place known as The Northern Michigan Asylum - which inspired me to write these books - it is in no way depicted within them. Although my story takes place there, the characters in this story are not based on any real people who worked at this asylum or were patients; any resemblance to individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Likewise, the events which take place in the novel are not based on real events, and any resemblance to real events is also coincidental.
In truth, nearly every book I have read about the asylum, later known as the Traverse City State Hospital, was positive. This holds true for the stories of many of the staff who worked there as well. I live in the Traverse City area and regularly visit the grounds of the former asylum. It’s now known as The Village at Grand Traverse Commons. It was purchased in 2000 by Ray Minervini and the Minervini Group who have been restoring it since that time. Today, it’s a mixed-use space of boutiques, restaurants and condominiums. If you ever visit the area, I encourage you to visit The Village at Grand Traverse Commons. You can experience first-hand the asylums - both old and new - and walk the sprawling grounds.
Dedication
To Karen and Ron who help care for the Honey Beast so the books can actually get finished.
1
June 1983
Ashley fell out of the tree and landed with a thud inches from Carl Lee’s rock.
She scrambled away, watching the boulder as if Carl’s blood might still stain the marbled surface. It didn’t, though she saw a line of ants march studiously up the rock’s face and disappear into a fissure at the top.
Carl Lee had blown his brains out while sitting on the rock three years before. Her neighbor, Norm Smarts, had found him and said there was nothing left of Carl’s head except a glob of red and gray mush splattered across the rock.
Now the rock held the mystery associated with haunted houses and creepy dead forests. Kids dared each other to run over and touch it. Sometimes they snuck out to the rock at night and ran home screaming, sure they’d heard Carl bustling through the trees after them.
Ashley didn’t like the rock and yet often walked to it when she played in the woods, as if it had some kind of pull. What Mr. Ferndale called a gravitational force, which was interesting enough until he started to drone on about newtons and mass and calculations, at which point Ashley wanted to crawl under her desk and take a nap. She liked science well enough, but Mr. Ferndale made even interesting subjects boring.
During their flame-resistant paper experiment the week before, Harvey Nelson had fallen asleep on his desk. They’d been using Bunsen Burners for Pete’s sake! But Ferndale still managed to put a kid out cold.
She left the boulder and started toward home, halting at an odd little chirping sound, like wind through a flapping umbrella. Squatting close to the ground, she listened to see if she could tell where the sound was emanating from.
It took her several minutes of walking in ever-widening circles. She paused next to a dead ash tree. The upper half lay fallen and decaying on the forest floor. At the bottom of the tree, she noticed a dark hollow. She squatted and peered into the opening.
There, wriggling in the tree’s empty belly, three tiny raccoons crawled and chirped, their miniature paws like sharp little hands.
Ashley smiled and cooed. She reached into the hole, ignoring the silent voice of Grandma Patty reminding her that if you touched wild animals, their mother would abandon them.
The raccoons scrambled to her fingers, nipping and sucking at the soft ends. Their noises grew louder and more desperate. One began to crawl up her arm, reaching the edge of the tree’s opening and flopping onto the ground. It landed on its back, legs pawing at the air.
“Oh, no, poor little critter. Did you fall out of the tree?”
She scooped him up and stroked his head. He was lighter in color than the other two, the mask over his eyes more brown than black.
“I guess you’re the Alvin out of this bunch, huh?”
She set the raccoon in her lap and reached in for another.
“Simon,” she murmured, gazing into his face and imagining two little spectacles over his black eyes.
The third raccoon made a rather perfect Theodore. He was fatter than the other two and slower. He started sucking on her thumb the instant she picked him up.
“You guys are hungry, aren’t you?”
Ashley had seen a dead raccoon that morning on her walk to school. She wondered if it had been the mother of the three babies.
“Ash? You out here?” Her best friend, Sid’s, voice cut through the trees.
She pushed the babies back inside the tree and jumped up to meet him.
She spotted Sid. He was still wearing the dreadful powder blue polo shirt his mother had forced him to wear to school that day. It made him look like a forty-year-old banker instead of a thirteen-year-old seventh grader. Ash kept her mouth shut about the shirt. Sid got enough teasing without adding his best friend’s voice to the mix.
“Sid,” she yelled, waving her arms wildly. “Look what I found!”
Sid hurried over, his face flushed.
Ashley led him to the tree and squatted down.
He got on his knees and peered into the hole.
“Whoa,” he murmured. “They’re so little.”
“I know, and I think the mom died. They seem really hungry.”
Sid used the end of his shirt to wipe off his thick glasses and then returned them to his nose, leaning in closer.
Ashley reached a hand in and scooped out Alvin.
Sid re
coiled and shook his head.
“Maybe you shouldn’t touch them, Ash.”
“Well, it’s too late now. Plus, this one practically jumped into my lap. I’m telling you, they’re starving. If we don’t help them, they’ll die.”
Sid sighed, a sound Ashley knew well. The sigh marked his surrender to Ashley’s plan despite his obvious desire not to.
“What do you think they eat? Like bugs?” Sid asked.
Ashley rolled her eyes.
“They eat milk, stupid. They’re babies.”
“Oh, and what? You’re a raccoon expert now?”
Ashley cuddled Alvin against her chest.
“We need a bottle.”
“A baby bottle?” Sid asked, scratching his chin. “Who do we know with a baby?”
Ashley bit her lip.
“The Potter’s have a new baby, but I don’t think they’d offer a bottle up for the raccoons,” she thought out loud. “A medicine dropper!” she announced, imagining the tray of medicines that had stood next to Grandma Patty’s bedside for the last six months of her life. Ashley’s mother had bought medicine droppers by the dozen. Not only had Grandma Patty needed them for medicine; near the end of her life, she’d also taken water and bits of meal replacement shakes through the droppers as well.
Ash put Alvin back into the tree. “Okay, medicine dropper and milk. Anything else?”
Sid shrugged. “A blanket? It might get cold in there at night.”
Ashley nodded in agreement. “Yeah, good idea. Dang,” she paused. “We might be out of milk.”
“We only have skim,” Sid told her, rolling his eyes. “My mom won’t buy anything unless it says low fat.”
Ashley wrinkled her nose. “Skim tastes like white water.”
“I know,” Sid grumbled.
Ashley stood and waved at Sid to get up. “Okay, let’s go.”
They hurried through the woods, and Ashley forced her legs to slow as they walked through the neighborhood back to her house. She wanted to sprint home, grab the milk and medicine dropper, and return to the woods. But if Sid did so much as a single jumping jack, he’d start sweating buckets, and then his mom would throw a hissy fit because he’d soiled his new shirt.
“Yes!” Ashley cheered, when she opened the refrigerator. A new gallon of whole milk sat on the top shelf. “My mom must have gone to the grocery store before work.”
Sid opened the freezer door.
“Fudge pops too,” he said, his eyes gleaming.
“I hope she got Ding Dongs,” Ashley said, glancing toward the pantry. “Last time she bought Twinkies. Those taste like cream filled cardboard.”
Sid got a faraway look in his eyes. “I love Ding Dongs and Twinkies.”
“I know you do,” Ashley said, filling a glass jar with milk and sticking two medicine droppers in her back pocket. She pulled an old blanket from the hall closet. “Grab us a couple fudge pops and let’s go.”
When they returned to the woods, the raccoons were where they’d left them, still scrambling around and making their little mewling-chirping sounds.
Ashley opened the jar of milk and nestled it between two large sticks on the ground. She filled her dropper with milk and plucked Alvin from the tree.
Sid held two fudge pops in his hands. His own, mostly eaten and Ash’s half-eaten one, which she’d given to him as soon as she spotted the tree.
She held the tip of the dropper near the raccoon’s mouth and depressed the rubber ball sending a trickle of milk over his little black nose.
“Open up,” she whispered, nudging the dropper against his muzzle.
It took a few tries, but when Alvin opened his mouth, he hungrily bit at the dropper. Some milk went into his mouth, but most of it streamed down his face into the grass.
Sid finished Ashley’s fudge pop and set the sticks on the ground. He filled up a medicine dropper and reached into the hollow of the tree.
“That’s Theodore,” Ash told him.
“You named them after Alvin and the Chipmunks?” Sid asked, grimacing as the little raccoon pawed against his hand. “Their claws are sharp,” he complained.
“Because they’re hungry,” Ashley told him.
“I’m pretty sure they’d be sharp even if they weren’t hungry,” Sid retorted.
“Quit talking and feed him,” Ashley said.
After several minutes, Ashley returned a damp Alvin to the tree. She pulled out Simon.
She glanced toward Sid and her mouth dropped open. He held Theodore cradled in his palm. The little raccoon clutched the dropper with both hands, and he drank the milk as if it were a bottle.”
“How’d you do that?” she asked.
Sid shook his head.
“I didn’t do anything. He did it. I guess he was hungry.”
They put a blanket in the tree and nestled the raccoons in before heading for home.
“Shit,” Sid sputtered, staring down at his shirt.
A smear of chocolate lay in the center of his chest.
“Dang, you’re in for it now,” Ashley agreed.
She left him at his road and walked another block to her own house.
She read the note her mom had left on the kitchen table.
Sandwich stuff in the fridge. I’ll be home late. Love you -Mom
Ashley flopped on the worn sofa, searching in the dusty cavern beneath for her copy of Interview with the Vampire, which was on loan from Sid, who had stolen it off his father’s forbidden bookshelf the week before.
Sid’s dad insisted he was too young to read horror novels. Little did Sid’s dad know, the kids in town had an entire network of books, magazines, and VHS tapes they passed between them, most of which came from Sid’s dad’s very own bookshelf.
Ash found her page, eager to find out if the child vampire, Claudia, had truly killed Lestat.
Wednesday afternoon idled by the same as most afternoons.
Her mother was waiting tables at The Rainbow Trout Grill. She’d pop in to change her clothes and then head to Sunny Meadows, an elderly care home downtown, where she’d work the midnight to eight am shift emptying bed pans, wiping wrinkled, old asses (Ash called them that, not her mom), and mopping piss from the sticky linoleum floors.
Ash ate toast for dinner, gulped a glass of milk for her mother’s sake, and gazed out the window into the warm, almost summer, evening.
In two weeks, school would let out for the summer, and Ash had never been so ready to pound down those cement steps outside Winterbury Middle School. It had been a rough year.
A few of the girls in her grade had gotten their periods, almost all of them had started wearing bras, and Ashley, ever-flat chested and frankly not interested in colored lip gloss and hair permanents, walked into school each day feeling like a daddy long-legs spider in a field of monarch butterflies.
She’d also gotten stuck with Ms. Fleming, the seventh grade teacher referred to as Ms. Flem-face, who gave demerits if you walked into class seconds after the bell rang. She lectured in a steady drone, putting you to sleep within two minutes of sitting at your desk. She only smiled on days when she was giving a pop quiz. Students of Flem-face knew if their teacher looked happy, they should not.
Ash had liked elementary school. She’d shared classes with Sid, her best friend. The teachers had been nice. Kids in elementary school went out for recess, had snack time, celebrated holidays with decorations and cupcakes. Middle school was a slap in the face after elementary.
Now they spent all day every day staring in dull contemplation at the white words chalked across the blackboard. Algebra and Shakespeare and the Civil War.
Each night when her mother came home from work, Ash offered a lie about her day, and her mother absently patted her head before falling into bed to sleep until the following morning.
Ash laid back on the couch, propping her feet on the end.
“But now we have raccoons,” she murmured, smiling. “Raccoons and summer vacation.”
2
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sp; “Hi, Mr. Wolf,” Tara Hanson called, peeking her head into his classroom. Her girlfriend, Kim, followed by Debbie, also stuck their heads through the doorway.
“Hi girls,” he said, offering them a distracted smile as he graded the last of the day’s five question quizzes. He put the quiz out every Wednesday. Four questions related to the coursework, which that week included an analysis of chapter seven in Jane Eyre, and one question was for fun. Today he’d opted for What are you afraid of?
“The Swirly Cone is doing two for one ice creams until Saturday for the last week of school,” Tara went on.
“That so?” Max asked, chuckling at Donnie Cleppinger’s answer: My ma’s undies.
“Yeah and their flavor of the week is cherry. That’s my favorite,” Tara added.
Her friends giggled, and Max looked up to find all three girls blushing.
He set his pen aside and wondered what he could say to send the girls skedaddling. They were nice girls, sure, but he had ten papers left in the stack beneath him, and over his dead body was he taking the damn things home to grade when he already had to appear at his mother’s Wednesday night dinner. On top of that, he’d rented Poltergeist the night before and he still had an hour left and wanted to watch it before the video store tapped him for another night at two dollars a pop.
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