Ashes Beneath Her: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “Good, that’s very good. And can you tell me your name?”

  Orla tried to shake her head, but again spoke. It seemed impossible not to. As if the part of her that wanted to lie still and silent wasn’t in complete control, some automatic part of her brain took over.

  “Orla Delaney Sullivan.”

  “And I am Doctor Crow. Nice to officially meet you. How old are you, Orla?”

  “Twenty. Please, I’d like to go home now. I feel dizzy.”

  “Soon,” the man told her. “Just a few more questions. You visited a young man, Spencer, at his home in Leelanau. What did you find?”

  The tooth rose in Orla’s mind, and she knew she couldn’t speak of it. If she revealed her vision, she’d be dead.

  “A tooth,” her mouth said anyway.

  “A tooth?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows.

  “Susan’s tooth,” she added. She clenched her eyes shut and ground her teeth together.

  “How do you know it was Susan’s tooth?”

  Orla wiggled her gloved fingers.

  “I see things with my hands. It’s a gift.” She laughed, and tears slipped over her cheeks.

  “You see things? Explain that.”

  “It’s like the residue of an experience, energy, I guess. Sometimes when I touch things, I catch images, experience feelings, receive information.”

  “And you found a tooth at Spencer’s house. The tooth of a woman named Susan?”

  “Someone murdered her.” Orla gasped as the words slipped out. She had revealed everything, and she couldn’t take it back.

  “How did she die?” he asked, calm, voice unmoved.

  Orla squinted. She glimpsed the image again, the brief flash of something striking Susan in the face.

  “A rock, I don’t know. Someone hit her with a rock.”

  “And did you see who killed her?”

  Orla shook her head no.

  “What happened after the rock hit her?”

  “I don’t know,” Orla whispered, and she didn’t.

  Her face ached from the effort of not speaking, but she had spoken.

  The man watched her with a troubled, and intrigued, expression.

  “We have work to do, Orla. You and I.”

  14

  Abe

  Abe pulled into the small parking lot at Birch Park’s trailhead.

  Another car, invisible from the road, was parked half in the overgrowth. Abe studied the gold sports car, surprised the owner would leave it where pine sap might fall onto the hood. It appeared as if the driver wanted to conceal the car from the road.

  Abe peered at the photo of Orla he’d taped to his dashboard. She sat cross-legged in the grass with a pile of kittens crawling in her lap. She gazed down, and grinned at the kittens, her black hair falling over one shoulder. Hazel had loaned him the photo. It made Orla real. A breathtaking young woman with a smile and a heart and a life.

  Abe stepped from his car, jotted down the license plate of the gold sports car, and walked closer. He peered in windows at the clean leather interior. Shiny clean, as if the owner had detailed the car that morning. Abe searched for personal items and spotted none. Not a pair of sunglasses or a discarded candy wrapper lay in sight.

  “Can I help you?”

  The voice startled him, but Abe didn’t react.

  He lifted his gaze, offered a smile, and nodded at the car.

  “She yours?”

  The man was around his height, six foot, with sandy hair, tanned skin, and bright blue eyes. He was handsome, clean-cut, a college boy. Abe had been a college boy too, but he had never owned tennis shorts in his life.

  The man hooked one thumb in his pocket and nodded.

  “Yeah.” He smiled, losing the hardness of his jawline for a more relaxed expression. “Got her last year. My baby.” He stepped to the car, patted the hood, and pulled keys from his pocket.

  “Hiking?” Abe asked, gesturing at the trees.

  “Actually,” the man gave him a sly smile. “I was taking a piss.”

  He got into his car, offered a salute, and started the engine.

  Abe walked backwards.

  His own car, a Rambler bought cheap the year after he graduated from college, made a sad comparison to the Corvette. He watched the car drive from the lot. The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror for half a second before he pulled onto the road and was gone.

  Abe glanced at his notebook where he’d written the license plate number.

  “It doesn’t take that long to piss,” he murmured, looking toward the trailhead where the man had emerged. And why walk into the trail at all? He’d parked right next to a grove of dense trees. He could have stood next to his car and remained unnoticed.

  Walking the trail, Abe searched for the man’s footprints but quickly lost them in the trampled grass left by the search party. It was unlikely there was anything left to find.

  A half-mile in, a shadow passed over Abe and he gazed toward the sky to see an eagle, its white head at the tip of huge, dark wings, soaring into a tree.

  Abe cut through the trees, leaving the path to get closer to where he thought the eagle had landed. He found it. A huge nest sat high in a tree. He heard the eagle, but the leafy branches blocked the bird from view.

  Scanning the ground beneath the tree, Abe saw nothing, but continued his search squatting low, brushing the ground with fingertips, and then moving on.

  After fifteen minutes, he stood and walked back to the base of the tree. He inspected the bark, the low branches.

  He almost missed it. As he ducked beneath a branch, something wispy caught in his beard. A spiderweb, he assumed, and started to bat it away and then paused, his eye catching on the color. It was black. He reached up, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger.

  He stared at a long strand of black hair.

  * * *

  Hazel

  Hazel saw Abe’s car pull into her driveway, and she scrawled a quick note to her roommates before hurrying out.

  She climbed into his passenger seat, stepping on several Styrofoam coffee cups.

  “Sorry,” he told her, leaning over to gather them up and toss them into the backseat. “I like to call her my mobile think-tank.” He patted the dashboard.

  “I can imagine the inside of a brain looks something like this,” she admitted, glancing into the disarray of his backseat.

  “Do you know anyone who drives a gold sports car?” Abe asked, backing down the driveway and turning onto the road.

  Hazel shook her head.

  “Why?”

  “I went to Birch Park this morning and met a man who drove a distinctive gold car. I thought he might be one of Orla’s friends.”

  Hazel tried to remember the few men Orla had gone on dates with, but didn’t land on anyone with a sports car, especially a gold one.

  “No, nothing. Did you find anything else?”

  Abe gestured to his glove box.

  Hazel popped it open, but the door stuck. Papers stuffed into the small space blocked the hinge. She reached in and pulled out a paperback.

  “It’s in the book,” he said.

  She flipped open the cover and stared at a clear plastic bag. Inside, she saw a long, black hair.

  “Is there any way to know if it’s hers?”

  “Microscopic hair analysis could get pretty close to a verification, but right now, there’s no detective willing to consider it.”

  Hazel looked out the window. Sun-baked beaches speckled with bright towels and umbrellas stretched along the bay. Beyond them, Lake Michigan seemed to doze beneath the hot midday sun.

  The summer temperatures peaked in July and August. Hazel looked forward to the evenings when the sun’s intensity subsided. Still, she woke many nights sweaty, summoning a breeze that rarely arrived.

  “Do you mind?” she asked, touching the dial on the air conditioner.

  “Not at all. Crank it. The heat today is already unbearable, and it’s not even noon.”<
br />
  Hazel turned the air to high and sighed back in her seat as the cold rushed out.

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” she admitted.

  “Me neither,” he said, turning a vent so it blew into his face. “If this heat holds up, I may need to shave.”

  She looked at his beard and grimaced.

  “I’d have shaved weeks ago.”

  He smiled.

  “I woke up at 3:11 on the mark. Dead asleep, and then just wide awake.”

  Hazel frowned and stared out the window.

  “I did, too. 3:11 exactly. Two nights in a row.”

  He glanced at her.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, but I… I heard Orla. She said my name - Hazel - just like that. I opened my eyes, and sat up, but no one was there.”

  Abe looked troubled. More than troubled.

  “Did you hear her too?” Hazel asked.

  He shook his head.

  “How could I know? I’ve never met her, but no, I didn’t hear her.”

  Hazel studied his jaw, where he was chewing his cheek. She felt sure he was holding back.

  “But you heard something? Right?”

  “I don’t know, Hazel. It seemed odd how I woke up out of the blue. I wondered if I heard something.”

  “Turn on Hammond,” she directed him.

  They were tracing one of Orla’s usual routes. Abe wanted to see all the places she might have ridden to.

  “The police asked me a few questions, but they haven’t been back,” Hazel murmured. “Are they doing anything?”

  Abe shook his head.

  “I work with a lot of cops. Some of them are great. When someone commits a crime, they’re on it. Unfortunately, they don’t work well with ambiguity. Detective Moore has been assigned to this case. He and I have butted heads a lot. He thinks Orla took off. When Darlene disappeared, he said the same thing.”

  “A girl running away while on vacation with her family? That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Hazel shook her head, glared out the windshield.

  “Even though everyone who knows Orla says differently? How is that okay?”

  “Because people don’t know it’s happening. It’s that simple. Until you’re a victim of a crime or know someone who is, you don’t understand the criminal justice system. And I’m not saying it’s all bad. It’s not. But there’s a lot of missed opportunity in investigations because they waste time. One issue is that most parents will claim their kid wouldn’t run away. Even if the kid runs away every other week, packed a bag, and stole a wad of cash. They’ll still insist it’s not a runaway. Cops get jaded, start seeing every missing person’s case as a runaway.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “This.” Abe beckoned toward the road. “We investigate, we figure it out. For my part, I’m writing an article that’s going to blow this thing wide open. People will be aware for the first time that we’re not talking about one missing girl, but six. Good luck finding a person who’s not terrified by that. That puts pressure on the police. They form a task force, more manpower gets assigned to the cases, more money funnels into the investigation. It’s bureaucracy, a slow-moving glacier, but once she picks up speed…”

  “So, they’ll help us if they’re getting paid more?” Hazel grumbled.

  “Not exactly, but in a way, sure. Otherwise, the administration has to allocate the funds more evenly. The job of the press is to inform the people. The people then have to mobilize, make their voices heard, put pressure on the politicians. It’s coming, Hazel. But in the meantime, we’re following the leads, because otherwise they’d get cold long before the police got to them.”

  Hazel nodded, and tried to find his words uplifting.

  “There’s a detective in Petoskey who’s been working Susie Miner’s case from the beginning. He also believes there’s a connection, though he won’t admit it on the record. He’s committed a lot of hours to this case. The problem is, he’s the only detective in the office. He’s overloaded.”

  “And you think us driving around, searching for clues, is helpful?”

  “I know it is. I’ve met people who solved the murders of family members, who found missing kids. The closer you are to the crime, the more access you have to the truth.”

  15

  The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane

  Orla

  Orla watched the young man move through the room. He was awkward, long arms past his waist. His greasy, dark hair hung over his face, shielding his eyes. He moved through the room mopping up her vomit.

  The medicine Crow gave her in the morning upset her stomach, likely a result of her refusal to eat breakfast. It was a futile, and foolish, rebellion. Starving herself would only make her weak and incapable of escape, but when Crow presented her with a bowl of mush sprinkled with raisins, she’d still turned her head away.

  He warned her the medicine would make her throw up.

  “Good,” she said. “A quick way to get it out of my system.”

  And it had been.

  The doctor cursed when she’d thrown up. Unfortunately, he’d merely returned a short time later, the smell of her vomit sour in the room, and injected the medicine into her arm.

  Now she lay dazed, not having eaten all day, the sedative effects wearing off.

  She’d noticed the man before. He’d been standing in the hallway when the doctor had rushed in, his hands shoved in his pockets, staring at the floor.

  “Help me,” Orla croaked.

  The man froze, the mop clutched in his hand. After several seconds, he returned to his mopping as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “He abducted me,” she whispered. “My name is Orla Sullivan. Please…”

  The man continued mopping in silence, lifting the mop into the bucket and then plopping it onto the tiles.

  As he pushed the bucket toward the door, wheels squeaking, he glanced at Orla.

  For an instant their eyes connected.

  His widened and then darted away.

  Orla lifted her fingers, reaching, but he’d already slipped from the room.

  16

  Liz

  Liz waved at Patrick as he entered the diner.

  “Abe, this is Patrick Sullivan. Patrick, Abe Levett. Abe’s a reporter at Up North News.”

  Patrick narrowed his eyes.

  “I thought that paper mostly wrote fluff about left-leaning political heroes.”

  Abe shrugged.

  “What paper doesn’t write those?”

  Patrick nodded.

  “I see your point.”

  Liz patted an empty chair, and Patrick sat down, eyeing the other patrons in the restaurant wearily.

  He looked tired, skin sagging beneath his blue eyes, lips turned down. If he’d showered and changed his clothes that day, you wouldn’t know it.

  Liz remembered those days, the first weeks after Susie disappeared when showering was an afterthought. Sometimes she’d climb into the shower at two a.m. and let the water rush over her. A few times, she fell asleep beneath the hot spray and woke up shocked when the water had turned cold.

  “How’s Fiona?” Liz asked, signaling to the waitress to bring another coffee.

  “Wound up like a ten-day clock. If I sneeze, she practically jumps into the ceiling.”

  “It’s hard,” Liz recalled. “Every sound could mean…”

  “She’s home,” Patrick finished. “But she’s not.”

  Patrick held an envelope in his hand. He opened it, and several photos spilled out.

  Abe leaned over the table for a closer look.

  “The many faces of Orla,” Patrick said, touching one of the pictures.

  She was a beauty - dark hair, bright blue eyes like Patrick’s. Her long, sinewy frame looked strong, like an Amazon woman.

  “She loved her bike. Rode it everywhere. For her sixteenth birthday, she didn’t beg for a car. She wanted a new bike. The Schwinn Super Sport in lemon y
ellow.”

  “Nice-looking bike,” Abe said.

  Liz studied the young woman’s face.

  In one photo, she sat on a paisley couch next to a boy about her age, with a shock of red hair and a freckled nose.

  “That’s her cousin, Liam. My sister’s son. He lives in Detroit.”

  Orla smiled in the photo, but not a big, toothy grin. Instead it was a small smile, as if she and Liam had just shared an inside joke the photographer was unaware of.

  “This is the most recent.” Patrick pointed at the last picture.

  Orla stood next to a small woman with a pinched smile.

  “That’s my wife, Fiona,” he told Abe.

  A distance separated the two women, despite Orla’s long arm draped over her mother’s small shoulders.

  “It was Fiona’s birthday. Orla took us out to dinner at Paulie’s. She’d just started a new job and was excited to have extra money to treat us.”

  “What was the new job?” Abe asked.

  Liz watched him pick up his pen. His eyes drifted back to the photos for an instant, a sadness gathering, but then he shifted, looking at Patrick dispassionately.

  “Waiting tables at a cafe called Zander’s. They serve funny food, like raw sandwiches or something. You couldn’t pay me to eat there, but these younger generations.” Patrick waved a dismissive hand. “It’s not a long-term option. Orla takes classes at the college. She teaches sewing, makes costumes for the playhouse shows. She’s an unusual girl, gets bored easily. She makes handbags and sells them at the farmer’s market, among other things.”

  “Did she mention anyone from the cafe? Anyone who made her feel uncomfortable? Or anywhere else in her life?”

  “I wish I could tell you, but you’re barking up the wrong tree. Orla doesn’t talk to me or her mom much about personal stuff. She hasn’t lived at home for a year and a half. Her girlfriends would know those things. And Liam.“ Patrick picked up the photo of Orla with her cousin. “My sister and I call ‘em bacon and cabbage.”