by S. T. Joshi
Item, Daniel Upton freely professed pulling the trigger but refused to sign a confession, and was himself slated for psychiatric assessment, because he insisted he’d shot someone else, Derby having died a day earlier.
Item, dental records confirmed that viscously corrupt human remains, shoveled from Upton’s vestibule on the morning of the shooting, belonged to Derby’s wife Asenath, née Waite. This bombshell was unceremoniously tacked on, connected only by proximity to the foregoing text.
Item, police discovered the semblance of a disturbed grave in the cellar at Derby’s address, with traces of decomposed human tissue within and around it. Derby’s former servants were being sought for questioning.
Meg clucked at this textbook classism. Was Derby’s pedigree so rarefied as to suspend him above the law? Why wasn’t he a “person of interest,” deceased or not, who’d wound up in 44 by dint of guilt or angst over slaying and cellaring the wife, assuming those graveside traces were hers? How her liquefying residue had traveled to Upton’s doorstep was beyond Meg, especially as Derby had been hors de combat that evening—but did that justify the kneejerk association of some poor laid-off domestics with a capital crime?
All water under the bridge now, she shrugged, and irrelevant, what with ample scuttlebutt to sell the director on Derby as the tragic specter in the cell, whether positing a love triangle or not behind madness and double murder. During Meg’s departure through the lobby, the receptionist piped up, “Any luck, Ms. Kilduff?”
Without pausing, Meg half turned and riposted, “That’s Doctor Kilduff.” Why was her title so difficult to swallow, most lamentably among women, who ought to applaud the loudest at gender-barrier breakthroughs in male-overrun careers? That is, unless the receptionist was feigning cretinism out of petty jealousy . . .
When Meg had typed up her findings, tendered them along with an oral summation, and joshed, “From what I’ve gathered, then, you’d have to pin Cell 44’s unpleasantness on Edward Derby’s ghost,” the director, to her chagrin, didn’t act a bit amused. He drummed his fingertips in series on the desk, his expression dour, disappointed, coyly patronizing. Was he about to upbraid her for unseemly frivolity? Or assert the reality of this Amityville bushwah from his bully pulpit?
Oh, for a hidden tape recorder as he prattled, “Derby? He fancied himself among the smart set. No, Doctor, you’ve neglected to account for the apparition likened by three witnesses to Svengali, someone entirely dissimilar to Derby.” Meg hunted in vain for any telltale body language to signal he was joshing her back. On the contrary, he enjoined her to trawl deeper into basement and municipal archives. And a positivity in his manner conveyed that he more than suspected occult activity in 44, that he was principally eager for her to duplicate his own findings.
A quaver broke into his equipoise, though, a crack in his executive façade. Without budging, he appeared to shrink away, to cringe from remembered distress, reprising that same routed aspect he’d worn after exiting 44. He stood up a tad unsteadily, as if unused to his own weight, a gesture plainly announcing the interview was over, but wherein she also decoded a vibe of supplication, a mortified plea to prove he wasn’t crazy. Too bad she was itching to prove the opposite, and in tandem she’d gratify, maybe even exorcise, her own gauche curiosity about 44’s penny-dreadful saga.
She harbored misgivings toward becoming one more chapter of that saga herself in the wake of the Christmas Eve party. The “Events Committee” had banished patients from the solarium for the duration—not that anyone gravitated there after dark, where chill airstreams whistled through rattling windows on the sunniest afternoons. Before waltzing in, she checked her makeup in the employees’ ladies room, and sure, she looked fine, but why the hell was the onus on her to “look fine” when male colleagues seldom did? There was that double standard again, and what choice but to fish or cut bait?
She always felt extra grubby after braving the humid squalor down in the “records annex,” fretting over fly-away curls and runny eyeshadow, for all that the mirror showed nothing amiss. She’d heeded the director’s request to pore over files pre- and postdating 1933, and had dredged up developments startling enough that she plowed past the roomful of cocktail klatches to brief him, scorning etiquette against shoptalk on a purely social occasion, and on a Friday yet.
First off, there was a striking absence of material. Though police had, according to the Advertiser, remanded Daniel Upton to the sanitarium for evaluation after shooting his “best friend” and then claiming him an impostor, no dossier on Upton came to light, neither where it should have been nor wherever Meg second-guessed it had been misfiled. Had Arkham’s old-boy network expunged the family disgrace of paperwork regarding madhouse internment, or had it altogether circumvented the formality of an evaluation and criminal prosecution? Unbelievable but not surprising!
More momentous were those siftings from the 1920s in which she gleaned the surname “Waite,” doubtless kin to Asenath Derby “née Waite,” a denizen of 44, naturally, and in for psychosis, delusion, and “dementia praecox,” no less. Curiouser and curiouser, he was labeled “late of Innsmouth,” someplace unfamiliar, though Meg grew up a townie and swore she knew every jerkwater statewide, till some trivia bobbed to the surface of her memory: yeah, Innsmouth was that hamlet smashed to flotsam by the Hurricane of ’38, MIA like Atlantis.
As for this “Ephraim Waite,” of age vaguely “over 65,” Meg was agog to learn he’d died of heart failure after several days under restraint, ranting nonstop how he was really Asenath, how his “own father Ephraim” was going to kill him. Here was a mind-boggle an order of magnitude beyond one overbred Brahmin blasting another.
Meg struggled to marshal the facts. An elderly father dies raving he’s his own daughter. A few years pass, and the father’s son-in-law, who if Dad’s rants were to be humored hadn’t really married Asenath because she was dead already in the guise of Ephraim, is murdered by his “best friend” on the grounds he, in turn, was “someone else.” Meanwhile Asenath, or at least her physical portions, had fetched up, execrably decomposed, on Upton’s doorstep.
And what of that “someone else” whom Upton snuffed? The “Rasputin” or “Ayatollah” tormenting latter-day patients was, by default, a match for Ephraim, also ensconced in 44. Was he the culprit the director had cajoled her to track down, whose postmortem influence the director wanted her to validate, independent of his inspired hunches or Ouija-board sessions?
If so, his high-strung, aversive behavior in the context of 44 insinuated he despaired as much as hoped that she’d fulfill his expectations. Bringing up Ephraim might well do a number on him, undermine his beleaguered faith in rational causality, render his leadership eminently impeachable should he act upon what he patently deemed wrong with 44. Therefore Meg was dying to collar him at the party, hit him with information to widen the cracks in his veneer of stability, inaugurate the glorious process of ousting him.
But in the seconds she expended crossing the solarium, the director, as if on to her nefarious designs, ladled two cupfuls of eggnog, set his back against the wall by the nearest doorway, and pressed a cup upon her as she approached and opened her mouth. She hated eggnog. Her finger hooked reluctantly around the cup’s glass handle as if around the ring of a grenade, and her meticulously phrased come-on misfired, her tongue tripping clumsily over upstart substitutions.
“Doctor, doctor,” he chided, with unsober lapses in modulation, “let’s not be workaholics. Nothing’s so urgent you can’t save it till after the long weekend.” Had what she’d said even registered? His eyes roved hither and yon as if surveying terra incognita. She hadn’t begun to regroup when he lunged at her quick as instinct and grabbed her free hand in his, gingerly yet tenacious. “Relax, let your hair down, don’t be too anxious to dredge up the past.” He slurped some eggnog with a gusto that begged the question of how much he’d already had.
Did people change when they drank or become more bluntly who they were? From Meg’s posi
tion the issue was academic, as she more crucially debated whether he was evolving into a father-figure or a lech. Or both? Either way, his was now a grayer, more overbearing presence, in contrast to the mealy-mouthed yuppie.
Suddenly psychoanalytic musings were over, as he dumbfounded her with a curt but impactful kiss, the tip of his tongue sketching lightning-strokes across her upper and lower lips. And before she could jerk away, he’d flicked his tongue as rapidly around the inner rim of her ear. The hell of it was, his transgression smacked of clinical efficiency, as if it were exploratory and not amorous, to identify the taste of her lipstick, her earwax.
Then lo and behold, personal space lay between them, and he’d unhanded her. She’d been unaware of breaking free, but her cup was half-empty and a white splotch at her feet further insulted the downtrodden blue carpet. Her skin crawled with the cold eggnog that had sloshed over her fingers, adding drop by drop to the obscene spatter.
She was still dumbfounded when the director raised his cup with a flourish, as if acclaiming a greater power than them both, toward the mistletoe dangling from the doorway lintel behind them. And just like that she should excuse the inexcusable, on the strength of some démodé Yule custom? A toxic little twig taped to the molding granted carte blanche? Would that sexual harassment was a crime!
Yet if it were, rallying witnesses would have been a thorough bust. The party carried on oblivious to his liberties. At least nobody acted the wiser. The in-house microclimate of austerity conferred a free pass; rank-and-file whistleblowers were shoo-ins for downsizing. She retrained her sights on where the boss had been, but he’d repaired to the punchbowl, sparing them both the effort of pretending nothing had happened. She ditched her cup behind a tabletop poinsettia and unsullied her knuckles with a candy-striped paper napkin. Deliberately or not, the smarmy SOB had sidestepped her opening salvo.
Her purported “holiday weekend” was a stint in limbo, tinder-dry Xmas turkey with the folks, bachelorette quarters by her lonesome. No biggie, she didn’t need a man underfoot to feel complete, he’d only pose a distraction, an impediment to her career trajectory. She’d have preferred clocking in Monday, furthering her agenda, instead of stewing at home over how the boss had violated her, how dealing with his phantasmal hobbyhorse was in effect marginalizing her. The longer she was absent from her therapeutic rounds, her supervisory role, the better his case for touting her redundancy, how everyone got along splendidly without her.
Maybe that wasn’t his premeditated endgame, but to presume the lightbulb of opportunism wouldn’t brighten above his head was totally naive. Beneath his bonhomie, he couldn’t have liked her any more than she liked him. To get the goods on him first was only prudent. What’s more, his physical advances were also in themselves a bid to marginalize her, weren’t they, to devalue her credentials and talents, reduce her to an object of exploitation? It wasn’t even as if he desired her. There was manifestly no “chemistry” between them.
True to cynical prediction, Meg uncovered neither police nor courthouse records referring to Derby’s murder after Upton’s arrest, or to Asenath’s presumptive murder at all. The longer she tilled that fallow soil, though, the more damning a waste of funds she’d rack up to convince the Board of directorial incompetence. Which wasn’t to say her pulse didn’t quicken at learning an Edward Derby Upton had posted bail for Daniel Upton, that surname’s final official mention for the decade. The surety bond listed Edward Derby Upton as son, clearly an adult son, if just by a year or two.
And so it was. Edward Derby and Daniel Upton really must have been best pals, for Upton to name offspring after him. That offspring’s DOB would have been 1912 or earlier, putting his dad’s DOB circa 1890 at the likely latest; Meg didn’t bother chasing down a death certificate for Daniel, who’d be in his nineties anyway. But his son? She may have hooked a live one here, a mere septuagenarian who might be around to shed some clarity on this sordid mess.
Praying the apple had rolled no great distance from the tree, she consulted property tax rolls in City Hall. God’s unparalleled, or perhaps ironic, level of cooperation floored her. Edward Derby Upton had paid his first-quarter bill for 1982, then sold posh Saltonstall Street digs, with a forwarding address at the Pickman Wing, Arkham Sanitarium. Her buoyant “aha moment” instantly deflated. On the face of it he couldn’t have been more accessible, had escaped her attention only because the Pickman Wing maintained its own semi-autonomous files and bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, it did so because it specialized exclusively in long-term geriatric and dementia care, in essence a nursing home within an asylum. He resided a minute from her office, but very possibly nonverbal light-years away. For the Pickman to cultivate a separate identity, to foster the pretense that nobody was consigning dotty Grandpa to the nuthouse, made good business sense. To that end, different entrances served “nursing home” and “nuthouse,” but the two were otherwise peas in one brick-and-brownstone pod, aside from the Pickman’s profusion of wheelchairs and arrhythmic pings of monitors and infusion pumps.
At first glance, Edward Derby Upton looked okay. Meg would have been taken aback, given his relatively tender age, had he been hooked up to machinery. The nurses’ station yielded a basic history of commitment by his lawyer, pursuant to instructions in a living will. Edward was unmarried, no instate relatives, no visitors, period. His chart described rapidly progressive Alzheimer’s. Nightstand and dresser were devoid of keepsakes, books, photos, the slightest personal touch. The weak sheen of winter daylight from the window lent the furnishings their closest approximation to particularity.
Edward’s façade of normalcy, his ruddy complexion, Waspy Izod apparel, dignified posture in his Scotchgarded armchair, filled Meg with malaise when she realized he was beaming through her, not at her. Leaning in, she also realized his underwear needed changing. She toughed it out, though, gently persisting that afternoon and twice more that week at chipping past his opacity—in part, she owned bleakly, because his remove from her, his unresponsiveness, promoted the awful feeling she wasn’t there either.
She sure as hell didn’t go to the director for advice, or even fess up about the younger Upton’s existence. No guarantees the boss wasn’t a step ahead of her, of course. Nor was it incumbent on the nurses to keep tabs on his unscheduled comings and goings. Meanwhile, she’d gotten nowhere fishing for Upton’s lucidity with the bait of his name, former address, a tally of kinfolk, front-page news from his youth. When a swing revival band, replete with crooner, commenced blatting in the refectory opposite Upton’s door, Meg was tempted to cry uncle: swing was about as irksome to her as intractable catalepsy.
She couldn’t picture amplified hokum, or chamber music for that matter, exerting a salutary effect in her more volatile wards, and what arrant spendthrift had rubber-stamped this extravagance? She was further skeptical about the unvetted good of “music therapy” among the frail and vegetative, and aghast at the crooner’s poor taste in mauling “Thanks for the Memory” in front of dementia patients.
But loath as she was to embrace anecdotal evidence, how not to marvel, even if it were coincidence, at droopy eyelids popping open like window shades, palsied lips trembling to break the seal on long-hoarded answers? “Dad never rested too easy about killing him.” Huh? Here was a glaring non sequitur in relation to the memories she’d tried evoking, but damned if it wasn’t a gold strike, and she gratefully ran with it.
“Who? Edward Derby? Your dad killed him?”
Upton’s focus drifted as if in confusion at whether she meant him or his namesake. Then he huffed, “No, no. Ephraim. Would a bullet in the head finish him? That fool Derby kept on ticking in his wife’s remains after he split her skull himself. And it was Ephraim put him in Asenath’s corpse and took over Derby’s body in the booby hatch, where Dad put Derby.”
Meg squelched a graceless urge to ask where Upton thought he was, if not in that selfsame “booby hatch.” Branding him a “two-faced Yankee” was off the mark, said more a
bout her prejudices than about him. But he was the study subject here, and to hear him tell it, round-robin metempsychosis had bedeviled his dad’s social circle. Well, as group hysterias went, it was original enough, unless it were wholly Upton’s unhinged invention. “So you’re telling me Ephraim possessed his son-in-law’s body after the son-in-law had murdered Ephraim’s daughter Asenath? And then your dad killed Ephraim, inside Derby’s body?”
“Or did he?” Upton retorted, rather archly for a senile codger.
“Who else could Ephraim possess? Your dad?”
“Hah! Dad swore they’d never get him within a mile of the booby hatch again, and it cost him dear to swing that. Didn’t begrudge a penny of it either, not as events panned out. It was quite the public secret how the lunatics left Derby’s old cell a damn sight worse than they went in. The whitecoats got sick of it, blocked it up, and should’ve done sooner. They wouldn’t own up that Ephraim was still around, though the schoolgirls had a jump-rope ditty to that effect.”
“Did anybody in the cell claim to see Ephraim?”
“Nope, but he was somebody who’d haunt a house, a great one for whammies and hoodoo. Nobody’d look him in the eye when he came to town. He was supposed to have died in the asylum ages before, but people fancied that was just his body, and his spirit lived on in his daughter.” Meg had nodded politely through plenty of elaborate delusions, but this one’s convolutions were giving her a headache.
“Wait a second,” she enjoined, hard-pressed to retain her footing in the slipstream of blather. “We’re talking about personalities jumping from body to body. But where was Ephraim’s personality when the cell was empty? Why didn’t he stick with any of the inmates when they left the cell?”