Ashes Beneath Her: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  Abe frowned.

  “Actually, we think that’s very unlikely. So do the police. They’re investigating this as serious missing person’s case. A woman who is possibly in grave danger.”

  “Well, she’s not here,” the receptionist clipped. “We have a logbook of every patient who comes through these doors. The police contacted us days ago inquiring about the girl. She’s never stepped foot in this hospital.”

  “What about a Jane Doe? A woman who didn’t remember her name?”

  The woman rolled her eyes.

  “This isn’t network television. We deal with real problems here. Schizophrenia, suicidal behaviors, manic depression. This girl isn’t in the asylum. Whoever told you otherwise was pulling your leg.”

  Abe set the picture on the table.

  “I’d like to leave this here. Maybe you could show it around. There’s no tip too small.”

  “I’ll give you a tip. Send someone to the beach in California.”

  * * *

  Hazel

  Hazel found Miranda in the back room of the Moon Wisdom Bookstore.

  “Knock, knock,” Hazel called, shaking the beaded curtain as she stepped through.

  “Hazel,” Miranda bubbled, stepping away from the shelf to grab Hazel in a hug. “The anniversary of your mother’s passing. I drew a card for you this morning. The four of swords, time for some rest and recuperation.”

  “Thanks, Miranda,” Hazel told her. Miranda had known Hazel’s mother, who’d visited her for tarot readings for years. Miranda had joined Hazel to stand vigil at her mother’s deathbed three years before.

  “How can I support you today, honey? Has there been any news on Orla?”

  “Nothing on Orla, and I am here for help, but not about my mom.”

  “My pleasure, honey. Let’s go to the tarot room.”

  Hazel followed Miranda into the store and through a heavy maroon curtain.

  The small room was dimly lit, with a round table in the center butted by two chairs. A tarot deck lay on a silver scarf. On one side of the room, a long, narrow table contained a jumble of polished stones and porcelain figures of saints, goddesses, and even the horned figure of the Devil from the tarot deck.

  Hazel sat down. Miranda lit several candles before dipping her fingers in a small basin of frankincense oil and brushing it along her temples and third eye.

  “Tell me,” Miranda said after she took a seat.

  “I was in Milly’s Bakery this morning, and I saw a woman on the docks.” Hazel paused, remembering the girl’s distinctive t-shirt. She’d looked at the Missing poster enough to recognize her face. “She’s one of the missing women.”

  “One of the six?” Miranda asked. Since Abe’s article, everyone in town knew about the missing women of summer.

  Hazel nodded.

  “You believe one of them is alive?”

  Hazel shook her head.

  “I hope Orla is still alive, but I saw Susan Miner.”

  “The girl from Petoskey?”

  Hazel nodded.

  “And I realized I saw her more than a week ago. It was late at night, after Calvin and I ate dinner at Leone’s - the first night Orla didn’t come home. I’m sure it was her, and now again today. She was there, and I sort of panicked, and when I looked again, she was gone.”

  “You’ve seen her spirit,” Miranda murmured. She touched the tarot deck, fanned the cards out, flipped one over. The Queen of Wands, and then a second card, the Moon.

  “There is a woman,” she said after gazing at the cards. “She has a connection to the dead.”

  “A connection?”

  “She sees spirits. Her mother was a gifted medium, though not publicly. I believe she now denies the abilities, but her daughter remains… open.”

  Miranda stood and left the room. She returned a minute later with a Moon Wisdom business card. On the back, she’d written the name Hattie, and an address.

  “Do you have a phone number?”

  Miranda shook her head.

  “It’s best if you approach her directly. If you call, she might get spooked.”

  * * *

  Abe

  Abe walked to his car, gazing over the spacious grounds. The property looked more like an English boarding school than a haven for the mentally ill. Along the back of the property, hundreds of acres of dense state forest loomed as a picturesque backdrop to the magnificent hospital.

  But Abe had heard stories. Anyone who lived in Traverse City for more than a few years was subject to frightening tales of life in the asylum. One reporter at Up North News had lived less than a mile from the asylum. Sometimes she awoke at night to the shrill asylum alarm, warning of an escaped patient.

  Another of Abe’s friends described picking up a man hitchhiking near the hospital. As he drove the man across town, he told a story of shooting his grandfather in the back when he was twelve years old. Abe’s friend never picked up a hitchhiker again.

  And then there were the strange stories told by those who loved to give a scare. Stories of weird inhuman experiments, haunted rooms, and sinister happenings in the woods around the hospital. Abe avoided such yarns. He didn’t believe them, and he preferred not to spend time or energy on fictional monsters when the real ones were hiding in plain sight.

  27

  Abe

  Abe looked up when the bell tinkled over the door at Grady’s Diner. A big man in a plaid shirt, his stomach pushing out the fabric, lumbered in. A dark beard, spotted with gray, covered the lower half of his face.

  When he stopped next to Abe’s table, Abe looked up, surprised.

  “Can I help you?” Abe asked, wondering if he’d taken over the guy’s usual seat in the diner, and he was about to pull the macho move of demanding Abe pack up his shit and move along.

  Instead, the man smiled, his dark blue eyes crinkling at the corners, and slid into the booth.

  “I’ve got a story for you.”

  Abe sat back, folded his hands on the table, and surveyed the man.

  “About one of the missing girls?”

  “Yeah, Susie.”

  “Did you know her?”

  The man shook his head, spotted the waitress and gave her a wave.

  “Can I get a coffee, ma’am? One cream, two sugars.”

  “Pot’s ‘bout ready to pour. Give me a sec, hon,” Mona told him.

  He returned his gaze to Abe.

  “Let me get this outta the way first. I ain’t a liar. I don’t take drugs, and I only drink a couple times a month on the weekends, when my wife permits it.” He laughed and Abe joined him. “Lord, that woman is hard on me, but I love her anyway.” He shook his head, but Abe could see real affection for the wife he spoke of.

  “I have an open mind,” Abe told him, careful not to lead the man by asking him a question.

  “I drive for a livin’. Long-haul truckin’. Wife and kids are in Minnesota.”

  The man paused when his coffee arrived.

  “Thanks, doll,” he told Mona before taking a long drink and draining half the cup, which Abe imagined was a tad on the hot side. The man didn’t seem to notice.

  “Last summer, mid-August I reckon, I was heading up M-22 for Northport. You know the route?”

  “Sure, yeah. On the east or west side of the peninsula?”

  “West side, by the big lake.”

  Abe knew the journey; a beautiful, winding route that took in blowout views of Lake Michigan, towering sand dunes and dense wilderness.

  “It was late, real late, after midnight. South of Leland in that dark stretch of forest where the trees crowd in, and you’ve got a hair-pin curve every half a mile; I come around one of those curves, and about bugged my eyes outta my head, ‘cause a little blonde girl stood on the side of the road.”

  “A little girl?” Abe scrunched his brow.

  “A young woman, you’d call her, but a little bitty thing. She didn’t have a thumb out, but she watched me with eyes as big as saucers in my headlights, an
d I figured she needed help. I pulled right over and rolled my window down, told her to hop in. She did. I drove on a bit, asked her name. Susie, she told me. I asked what on God’s earth had her wandering that road in the middle of the night, but…“ He paused and leaned in. “She vanished.”

  “She vanished?”

  The man stared at him hard now, no sign of laughter in his face. Something else had replaced his look - unease, edging towards fear.

  “I looked at her seat so long, I about missed my next curve and sent that truck flying into a ravine.”

  “I’m sorry,” Abe said. “Mr.…?”

  “Name’s Jim.”

  “Okay, Jim. I don’t know if you read the story about Susie, but she disappeared three years ago, in August 1972.”

  “Oh, I read it, all right. I spilled half a cup of coffee down myself.” Jim held up his arm, where Abe spotted a shiny red welt on his wrist.

  “But you believe you picked Susie up in your truck? Are you saying she’s alive and well and hitchhiking the Leelanau Peninsula?”

  “Didn’t you listen to my story? She got in my truck and disappeared. She ain’t alive and well.”

  Abe tried to erase the skepticism huddling at the back of his mind.

  “You think it was her ghost?”

  “I ain’t no candy-ass, but I had goosebumps the size of golf balls that night. She had on a yellow t-shirt with a red mouth on it, dark shorts. My wife doesn’t own those clothes, my kids don’t either. If I imagined her, I’d sure as shit like to figure out how I came up with that weird shirt. And another thing, she was only wearing one shoe.”

  Abe frowned.

  Susan’s parents weren’t sure what she’d been wearing, though Liz had insisted a yellow Rolling Stones t-shirt was missing from a stack of clean laundry she’d put in her room, as well as her white tennis shoes. Missing posters included the possibility of the yellow shirt and shorts, but not the missing shoe. Kids had discovered Susan’s shoe in a wooded area near her home, four months after her disappearance.

  “You’ve got a pretty good memory of what she wore.” Abe’s palms grew sweaty. If the man knew about the missing shoe, it implied something very sinister indeed. Some criminals confessed cryptically, and others liked to put themselves in the middle of an investigation. Was this their man?

  “My headlights lit her up like a Christmas tree. Sure as eggs is eggs, I remember. I’d been looking at trees for hours and it was a dark night. That’s not the kind of thing you forget. Especially a young girl missing a shoe.”

  “Did you tell anyone about the girl that night? Call the police?”

  “Hell, no.” Jim shook his head as if he could hardly believe the question. “Not five miles down the road, I pulled off and got a room. I’d been driving eighteen straight hours. I thought maybe…”

  “Your mind was playing tricks on you?”

  Jim nodded.

  “But now, a year later, you’re convinced you saw Susie?”

  Jim put his large hands on the table and leaned in.

  “I know it. You hear me, kid? It was her. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on her picture in the paper.”

  “Jim, can you tell me where you were on the day Susie disappeared, August 27th, 1972?”

  Jim drained his coffee, slapped a dollar on the table and stood, not giving Abe a second look as he strode to the parking lot.

  Abe studied the large hauler truck parked at the edge of the lot.

  When Jim climbed into the cab, Abe hurried out the door, staying out of sight of Jim’s mirrors. He wrote down the license plate number.

  * * *

  Abe listened to his messages, several tips with return call numbers. The fourth call made him stop cold.

  “Hello? I’m calling for the reporter - Abraham Whatever. I just want to tell you that Susie girl isn’t dead. I nearly hit her on M-22 - not two weeks ago, in the middle of the night. She was hitchhikin’ like a nitwit. If I’d a known she was causin’ all this grief, I would have picked her up and taken her to the cops.” The woman rattled off her phone number and hung up.

  Abe continued to play his messages, but scarcely listened.

  He rewound back to the fourth call and played it a second time and then a third.

  The woman answered on the third ring.

  “Mullers’ residence.”

  “Shannon Muller?”

  “Yes!” She huffed.

  In the background, Abe heard a small child crying.

  “I’m sorry, am I calling at a bad time?”

  “It’s never a good time around here. Got both my grandkids clawing at each other like pack wolves over some nonsense toy from a cereal box. Who thought putting a toy in there to begin with was a good idea? Timothy,” she barked. “You let go of your sister’s hair this instant, or I’ll paddle your bottom and throw that toy in the trash.”

  More crying, followed by a thump, and the line quieted. He waited, wondering if she’d hung up.

  “Sorry. Shooed ‘em out the door. My daughter’s raising downright heathens.”

  “I’m calling because you left me a message, Mrs. Muller. I’m Abraham Levett with Up North News.”

  “Yes, well, I’m not sure I can add more. Just figured you all should know the girl you’re so worried about is hookin’ her thumb on the peninsula. Probably doesn’t wanna go home and do her chores.”

  Abe planted a hand on his table and imagined Liz Miner, her drawn face, the haunted look in her eyes.

  “Can you describe the incident for me? The time and date, and what she was wearing?”

  “Sure. It happened July 10th, a Sunday. I remember because I don’t make a habit of drivin’ after dark, but my sister in Thompsonville had a potluck. By the time we got the dishes washed, it was after ten p.m. I drove home real slow. My eyes don’t work too well in the dark. I come around a curve, just past Sapphire Lane, and there she stood on the side of the road, wearing nothin’ but a yellow t-shirt and shorts, and only one single shoe. If I hadn’t been lookin’ so hard, I’d’a run her right over.”

  “Why are you so sure it’s Susie? There are a lot of young blonde women who live around there.”

  “Oh, I figured you’d say that. I knew because of that yellow t-shirt with the red lips and tongue stickin’ out. Not somethin’ I ever would have let my daughter out of the house in.”

  Abe jotted down her comments. Liz had told him Susie went to a Rolling Stones concert in Detroit during July 1972, a little over one month before her disappearance. She had bought the t-shirt there. Liz had not been a fan of the shirt, but respected her daughter’s right to wear what she wanted. Abe suspected Liz’s dislike of the shirt helped her realize it was absent after Susie went missing.

  “Is it possible that another young woman was wearing the same shirt?” He knew it was. Eyewitnesses were rarely reliable, but he didn’t say so.

  “I’m sure all kinds of young women wear that hideous shirt, but no. This was the same girl from the paper. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “Can you remember what else she wore?”

  “Just what I told you. Blue shorts, and one sneaker. I thought she must have gone mad.”

  Abe stared at the words, the same description the trucker had given.

  “Did you speak to her? Did she wave?”

  “No. She likely had her thumb stuck out, but I had no intention of pickin’ up a hitchhiker in the middle of the night. I drove on by.”

  “Did you see anyone pick her up after you passed her?”

  “No. I looked back and didn’t see her in the mirror, but it was dark, so I didn’t expect I would.”

  28

  Hazel

  “My goodness,” Liz smiled as she walked into Hazel’s yard.

  Tables crowded the yard, loaded with donated household items, clothes, tools, and even furniture.

  “A lot of people donated.” Hazel beamed. “Everyone loves Orla.”

  Liz smiled and picked up a glazed black and orange vase.

&nb
sp; “That was my mother’s,” Hazel told her.

  Liz frowned.

  “You’re selling it?”

  Hazel nodded.

  “The attic is filled with her stuff. Next week will mark three years since she died. It’s time to let a few things go.”

  Liz stepped to Hazel and wrapped her arms around her.

  “I’m approaching three years without Susan. I haven’t parted with so much as a sock. You’re a stronger woman than me.”

  Hazel hugged her back, resting her head on her shoulder.

  “Weird, in a way,” she murmured. “You lost a daughter three years ago, and I lost a mom.”

  Liz pulled back, studying Hazel’s face.

  “Perhaps that’s why we’ve been brought together,” Liz said. She sighed and gazed at Hazel’s garden. “If only it could have been under happier circumstances.”

  She reached into her pocket and withdrew a small pearl bracelet.

  “This was Susie’s.” She handed the bracelet to Hazel. “Can I ask why you want something that belonged to her?”

  Hazel took the piece of jewelry, the fake pearls shining in the sun, and thought of the girl standing on the dock.

  “I read the tarot. I wanted to do a reading about Susie, and it helps to use a memento. I promise I’ll return it.”

  Liz gazed sadly at the bracelet.

  “It has no value. Susan didn’t wear much jewelry. Jerry bought it for her to wear with an Easter dress during grade school, and she took a liking to it. The last couple of years before she disappeared, she mostly wore it on her ankle.”

  “I’m partial to ankle bracelets myself,” Hazel told her, tilting her leg so Liz could see the hemp anklet she wore beneath her long skirt.

  Calvin pulled into the driveway and jumped from his car, followed by an explosion of yellow balloons. He held the ribbons clutched in his hand.

  “Nearly lost the bunch of them in the parking lot,” he announced.