by Lisa Gardner
Dodge reached into his breast pocket, flipped out a notebook. Charlie took that as a sign of encouragement, and briskly unfolded a piece of notebook paper he had clutched in his hand. His fingers trembled slightly, but his voice remained strong.
“You know much about the hospital workings?” he asked the two detectives.
“No, sir.” Detective Dodge spoke up. “At least, not as much as we’d like.”
“We had eighteen hundred patients when I first started working,” Charlie said. “We served patients age sixteen and up, all races, genders, socio-economic classes. Some were admitted by their families, a lot were brought in by the police. East side of the complex was for chronic care; west side, where we’re standing now, for acute. I started out in admitting. A year later, I was promoted to Charge Attendant and moved to the I-Building, working the I-4 unit, which was maximum security for men.
“We were a good facility. Understaffed—lotta nights it was just me and forty patients—but we got the job done. Never used strait-jackets, tie downs, or physical abuse. If you got yourself in trouble, you were permitted to use a hammerlock or full nelson to subdue the patient until backup arrived, at which point a fellow AN would most likely administer a sedative.
“Mostly, ANs were in charge of custodial care, keeping the patients calm, clean, healthy. We’d administer medications as prescribed by the doctors. I received some training in IM—intramuscular—injections. You know, jabbing a needle loaded with sodium amytal in a guy’s thigh. Definitely, it got hairy at times—I lifted a lotta weights just to survive. But most of the men, even in maximum security, simply needed to be treated as human. You talked to them. You kept your voice calm and reasonable. You acted as if you expected them to be calm and reasonable. You’d be amazed how often that worked.”
“But not always,” Sergeant Warren prodded.
Charlie shook his head. “No, not always.” He held up one finger. “First time I almost lost my life—Paul Nicholas. Nearly two hundred and thirty pounds of paranoid schizophrenic. Most of the time, he was kept in seclusion—special rooms that only had a barred window and a heavy leather mat for sleeping. Rubber rooms, you’d call ’em these days. One night when I came on duty, however, he’d been let out. My supervisor, Alan Woodward, swore Paulie was doing okay.
“First few hours—didn’t hear a thing. Gets to be midnight, I’ve retired to the first-floor office to do a little studying, when suddenly I hear pounding upstairs, like a freight train roaring down the hall. I knock the phone off the hook—sending the signal for help—and race upstairs.
“There’s Paulie, smack-dab in the middle of the Day Room, waiting for me. Minute he sees me, he takes a flying leap. I roll to the side, Paul lands on the couch, flattening the sucker right out. Next thing I know, Paul’s grabbing chairs and hurtling them at my head. I run behind a Ping-Pong table. He gives chase, and ’round and ’round we go, like an old cartoon of Tom and Jerry. Except Paulie gets tired of this game. He stops running. Starts tearing apart the Ping-Pong table. With his bare hands.
“You think I’m exaggerating; I’m not. Guy was pumped up on rage and testosterone. He started with the metal trim on the table, ripped it back and then went to work on it chunk by chunk. Right about now, I’m realizing I’m dead; Ping-Pong table’s only so big, and Paul’s making good progress. Lo and behold, I look up to see two of my fellow ANs finally arrive in the doorway.
“ ‘Get him!’ I yell. ‘We need sodium amytal!’
“Except they’ve gone wide-eyed. They’re standing in the doorway, watching Paulie go to town, and if you’ll pardon the expression, ma’am, they’re shitting their pants.
“ ‘Hey!’ I yell again. ‘For God’s sake, man!’
“One of them makes a choking sound. It’s enough for Paulie to turn. Minute he does, I jump across the table, onto his back, and get him in a hammerlock. Paul starts roaring, trying to toss me off. My fellow ANs finally spring to life and help me tackle him. It still took fourteen grains of sodium amytal and two hours to calm Paulie down. Needless to say, he didn’t get out of seclusion for a while after that. So there’s one name for you. Paulie Nicholas!”
Charlie looked at the two investigators expectantly. Detective Dodge obediently scribbled down the name, but Sergeant Warren was frowning.
“You said this patient, Paul ‘Paulie’ Nicholas, stayed in seclusion?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And when not secluded, I’m betting he was fairly heavily medicated.”
“Oh yes, ma’am. Guy like him, there was no other way.”
“Well, I understand, Charlie, that Nicholas was a threat to you and the rest of the staff. But given how he was regimented, I would think it unlikely he was ever turned loose to wander the grounds.”
“Oh no. Paul was maximum security. That meant full lockdown, twenty-four/seven. Those patients didn’t ‘wander’ around alone.”
Sergeant Warren nodded. “The person we are looking for, Charlie, would have to have access to the grounds. A lot of access to the grounds. Were any patients allowed out, or by definition, does that mean we should focus on staff?”
Charlie paused, frowned, reviewed his list. “Well, I didn’t want to start with it, but there was an incident.…”
“Yes?” Warren prodded.
“Nineteen seventy,” Charlie said. “See, there was a reason the head nurse, Jill Cochran, liked us college boys. We were strong, sure, that definitely helped. But also … we were fresh, optimistic. We didn’t just take care of the patients, we genuinely cared about them. Myself, I already knew back then I wanted to be a minister. A mental hospital is a good place to start if you want to reach troubled souls. I got to learn firsthand what a difference the right word at the right time can mean for a person. But I gotta say, it’s a place where no one should linger, not even the staff.
“The older guys, the ‘experienced’ ANs who hung around for decades … hell, some of those guys grew loonier than the patients. They got institutionalized themselves, forgot what life was beyond the hospital walls. When I first started in reception, there was a patient with a filthy bandage on his leg. First night, I asked the Charge Attendant what was with the bandage. He had no idea. Hadn’t even noticed the patient had a bandage on his leg. So I enter the patient’s room, ask him if I can check out his leg. Minute I remove the bandage, a stream of pus shoots across the room. And then, right in front of my eyes, maggots pour out of the wound.
“Turns out, the poor guy got an ulceration on his leg two months before. Doctor bandaged it up. No one ever checked it again. Not a single AN. They’d been looking at the patient for months without ever seeing him.
“Well, that was bad enough. Neglectful. But sometimes things got a little worse.”
Charlie broke off, looking uncomfortable again. Both Warren and Dodge were listening intently now. From my vantage point, slouched low in Dodge’s car, I could tell both investigators were hanging on Charlie’s every word. I know I was.
The retired minister took a deep breath. “So, one night I get a call from the nurse at the residence for female patients. Keri Stracke. She asks me if so-and-so is on duty. I say yes. Keri asks me where he is. Well, I do a little walkabout of the I-Building but don’t see him. I tell her he’s out, maybe gone for dinner. There’s a long pause. Keri tells me, in a very peculiar voice, that I need to come over right now.
“Now, I’m the only one around. I can’t just leave I-Building. I try to explain this, but she tells me again, in that funny little voice, that I don’t have a choice. She means right now! What can I do? Now I’m really concerned. I go over. Keri meets me out front and without a word escorts me upstairs. She stops in front of the closed door of a patient’s room. I look through the window, and there’s my fellow AN, in bed with a patient. She’s seventeen years old, real pretty, and catatonic. I’ve never wanted to hurt a fellow human being so badly in my life.”
“What did you do?” Detective Dodge asked quietly.
“I ope
ned the door. Minute Adam heard the noise, he looked up. You could see on his face he knew it was over. He climbed off her, zipped up, walked out of the room. I escorted him back to the I-Building, to the office, where I called our supervisor. Adam was fired on the spot, of course. I don’t care what stories you hear about patient abuse, that kind of behavior was never condoned. Adam was done; he knew it, too.”
“Adam’s last name?” Dodge asked.
“Schmidt,” Charlie sighed.
“They file a police report?” Sergeant Warren asked, more sharply.
Charlie shook his head. “No, management wanted to keep things quiet.”
Warren raised a brow at that. “You know what happened to Adam?”
“Not really. But …” That hesitation again. “I saw him several more times. On the grounds. Twice from a distance, but I was pretty sure it was him. Third time, I caught up to him, asked him what the hell he was doing. He said he’d had to take care of some paperwork. Given it was nearly ten p.m., that didn’t make much sense to me. Next day, I followed up with Jill Cochran. She didn’t know anything about it. We kept an eye on the female patients for a bit. No one talked about it, but we were on guard. I didn’t see Adam again, but this is a big property.”
Dodge frowned. “You guys patrol the grounds, make any attempts at better securing the property?”
“We locked the gates at night, staffed the facility twenty-four/seven. But … in the odd hours of the morning, ANs like me were hardly wandering the grounds. We had patients to tend, we stayed in our offices.” Charlie shrugged. “It’s possible someone could’ve been coming and going, and we wouldn’t have seen a thing. It had happened before, you know.”
“Before?” Warren asked sharply.
“We had a murder on the grounds, a female nurse in the mid-seventies. I understand one of the ANs looked out a window of the admitting building and spotted the body first thing in the morning. Ingrid, Inga … Inge. Inge Lovell, I think it was. She’d been raped and beaten to death. Terrible, terrible tragedy. The police were called, but didn’t have any witnesses—none of the other attendants had seen a thing.”
Warren was nodding now, Charlie’s story apparently having sparked her own memory of the event. “No arrest was ever made,” she said.
“Rumor mill was that a patient had done it,” Charlie supplied. “In fact, most folks thought Christopher Eola did it. Wouldn’t surprise me. Eola was admitted after my days as an AN. I ran into him once or twice, however, when I came in on Sundays. Scary customer, Mr. Eola. The cold side of crazy.”
Dodge was flipping through his pages. “Eola, Eola, Eola.”
“The hotline,” Warren murmured.
Both of them snapped to attention.
“What can you tell us about Eola?” Warren asked Charlie now.
Charlie tilted his head to the side. “You want the straight story or the version with the gossip mingled in?”
“We’d like to hear it all,” Warren said.
“Eola came to us a young man. Admitted by his parents, that’s what I was told. They dropped him off and hightailed it back to their mansion, never to return. Rumor was, Eola had had an inappropriate relationship with his younger sister. His parents discovered them together, and that was that. Bye-bye, Christopher.
“Eola was a good-looking kid. Light brown hair, bright blue eyes. Not big. Maybe six feet, but slender, refined. Maybe even a tad effeminate, which is why most of the ANs didn’t consider him a threat right away.
“He was also smart. Very social. You’d think someone with his privileged upbringing would hold himself apart. Instead, he liked to hang out in the Day Room, playing music for his fellow patients, holding a reading hour. More important, he’d roll cigarettes—I know that’s all considered evil now, but back in those days, everyone smoked, the doctors, the nurses, the patients. In fact, one of the best ways to guarantee cooperation from a patient was to give him a cigarette. It’s simply how things were done.
“Well, most of the cigarettes were roll-your-own, and some of the patients whose motor skills were impaired by various medications had a hard time getting it done. So Christopher would help them. That’s what he was doing the first time I saw him. Sitting in the Sunroom, cheerfully rolling cigarettes for a line of patients. It’s funny, but first time he looked up and saw me, I knew I didn’t like him. I knew he was trouble. It was his eyes. Shark eyes.”
“What did Eola do?” Dodge interrupted. “Why was he considered such a menace?”
“He learned the system.”
I perked up. I couldn’t help myself. Sitting in the nearby car, my ear glued to the cracked open window, I had a sense of déjà vu, of my father talking, of a shadowy man named Christopher Eola taking the same notes I once did. It gave me a chill.
“The system?” Dodge was asking.
“Hours, shift changes, dinner breaks. And, more important, medications. No one put it together until after poor Inge’s murder. But as management started asking more questions, it came out that some of the ANs had been falling asleep on their shifts. Except it wasn’t just one guy or one time. It was everyone, all the time. Well, this got the head nurse’s goat. So one night Jill did a surprise inspection of admitting. She found Eola in the office, mixing something into the AN’s brown-bag dinner. He looked up, spotted her, and, quite suddenly, smiled.
“Moment she saw that look, Jill knew she was dead. She grabbed the door and slammed it shut, trapping Eola inside. Eola tried to reason with her. Told her she was overreacting, swore he could explain everything. Jill dug in her heels. Next thing she knew, Eola was throwing himself at the door, snarling like an animal. A large man probably could’ve busted himself out, but like I said, Eola was all brains, not brawn. Jill kept Eola trapped for fifteen minutes, until another attendant arrived and they’d loaded up some sodium amytal.
“Later, they determined Eola had been stealing thorazine capsules from his fellow patients and mixing the powder into the ANs’ food. Furthermore, he would encourage his fellow patients into various disagreements, creating situations upstairs. When the AN rushed up to handle the problem, he’d slip into the office and go to work. Of course, Christopher never admitted to anything. Anytime you asked him a question, he’d just smile.”
Warren and Dodge were exchanging looks again. “Sounds like Eola had plenty of opportunities to wander the grounds.”
“Guess so.”
“And what year was this?”
“Eola was admitted in ’74.”
“How old?”
“I believe he was twenty at the time.”
“And what happened to him?”
“He finally got caught.”
“Doing what?”
“Organizing the patients into a revolt. Somewhere along the way, he’d commandeered one of the leather mats from an isolation room. Then he recruited the more ‘with it’ patients into creating a disturbance. When the AN appeared upstairs, the patients charged him with the mat, knocked him out cold. But Eola had made a slight miscalculation. We had another patient here at the time—Rob George. Former heavyweight champion. He spent his first two years in the hospital catatonic. But just three days earlier, he’d walked all the way to the Day Room by himself. The AN on duty got him back to bed without incident, only to find him sitting up an hour later. Clearly, he was coming ’round.
“Well, the night of Eola’s revolt, the whole unit got hopping. And apparently this got our boxing champion outta bed. Rob appeared in the middle of the Day Room. He looked at the AN, unconscious on the ground. Then stared at Christopher, grinning back up at him.
“ ‘Good news, man—’ Eola started to say.
“And Mr. George pulled back his fist and knocked Christopher out cold. Good solid left-hand hook. Then he went back to bed. One of the other patients went down to the office at that point and took the phone off the hook. Without Eola, no one knew what to do.
“The ANs arrived, got everything in order. Next morning, Rob woke up and asked for
his mother. Six weeks later, he was released. According to him, he never remembered the events of that night. I understand from the doctors, however, that upon emerging from a catatonic state, most patients’ first movements are reflexive, a matter of muscle memory. Like sitting up. Or walking. Or, I guess, if you’re a former boxing champ, a solid left hook.”
“So what happened to Christopher?”
“His fellow patients ratted him out, and given his history, Admin had enough to transfer him to Bridgewater, which handles the criminally insane. I never heard about him again. But Bridgewater is like that. This place here”—Charlie pointed to the ground beneath his feet—“was a treatment facility. Bridgewater … once you go in, no one expects to see you again.”
Sergeant Warren raised a brow. “Charming.”
Charlie shrugged. “Just the way things were.”
“But he could’ve been released,” Dodge prodded. “By the late seventies, weren’t patient populations shrinking everywhere? Deinstitutionalization didn’t just close Boston Mental, it affected everyone.”
Charlie was nodding. “True, true. Damn shame, if you ask me.” He cocked his head. “You know what kept me here? Working for four years, volunteering for six years after that? I’ve told you the scary stuff, the stories people want to hear about a mental institution. But truth is, this was a good hospital. We had patients like Rob George, who, with proper treatment, emerged from a catatonic state and got to go home to his loved ones. Second guy who almost killed me was a street kid named Benji. He was a good-looking kid, handsome Italian stock, but feral as they came. Police brought him in. First week, Benji stayed in a seclusion room, stark naked. He’d painted the wall and his body with his own feces. All you could see were his white eyeballs glowing in the dark.