Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  I keep the gun pointed down as I walk. Grover Hills feels empty. I have the feeling you get when you knock on somebody’s door and you know nobody is going to answer. But I still keep the gun out. The front entrance is a pair of wide double doors. I step up onto the wooden porch and try them. The left one swings open noisily, the hinges like that of an opening coffin that’s been unearthed. The sun is so high that the angle stops it from gaining entry through the doors because of the veranda. It’s dark inside. Not nighttime dark, but the kind of dark you’d get stepping into a boarded-up church. The air inside is dry and a little cooler the further inside I go, but not much. It doesn’t feel like anybody is here, but the building doesn’t quite feel abandoned either. It feels like something, not somebody, is here.

  It doesn’t look like the kind of building you’d expect an institution to be. It doesn’t have long white corridors with doors locking them off every fifteen meters. Instead it looks like a giant farmhouse, lots of wood everywhere, a very New Zealand version of what we must have thought mental institutions looked like back then. The windows have wire grills over them. There are lots of rooms, and I can see that each one of them has a lock on it. There’s a staircase leading up to a second floor. I haven’t had much luck with staircases lately so I start with the ground floor. I follow the path of the hallway, opening doors and looking into bedrooms on my way to a large communal area where maybe there was a TV set and a Ping-Pong table. There are still couches here, all of them in poor condition, some of them facing the windows overlooking the fields. There’s a door that leads to the kitchen. There is no sign of life, but there is the feeling of being watched. It’s creepy. I can’t shake the feeling that all the dark thoughts from the patients who were locked up out here have formed some malevolent entity that’s haunting the soul of this building, and if that entity came forth my gun would do me no good. In the kitchen there’s a large fridge that looks a hundred years old. I open it up and it’s empty except for layers of mold and no light comes on. I flick one of the kitchen light switches and nothing happens. No power. There’s a long stainless-steel bench with two sinks in it, there are clearings in the dust, circles and lines where objects have been placed and then moved very recently.

  I open the rest of the cupboards and drawers and find them empty except for a dead mouse. I head back to the staircase. It’s not soaking in petrol so I take it. On the top floor I find pretty much the same as the ground floor, same layout, same kind of communal area, but no kitchen. There are lots of spiderwebs caught in every available corner and nobody tied up anywhere. Mouse shit against the edges of the walls. Sunlight angles through the windows and lights up the dust raised by my footsteps. Most of the rooms still have some furniture left in them, single beds with old foam mattresses, some chests of drawers scarred by scratches and stains. The bathrooms are full of hard enamel edges with external pipes lining the walls. One of the bedrooms is cleaner than the others, no dust on the drawers. Walking around the place it’s impossible to sense anything good ever happened here. Impossible to know how much help those who needed it really got once they came here.

  The bedrooms on the north side of the building are hot, enough sun coming through the narrow windows to heat every room, but on the south side the rooms are cold even though it’s heading up to one hundred and ten degrees outside. There are other rooms, two of them with doors that have latches on the outside of them. I open them up, the walls and ceiling and floor inside are padded.

  I head downstairs. I take the hallway in the opposite direction from before. More bedrooms. More bathrooms. I open up a door that leads into a basement. The stairs are poorly lit, and I reach out and swipe at the light switch on the side of the brick wall more out of habit than hope, and nothing happens. The stairs seem to lead down into a pit, the only light to hit them coming from behind me, my body casting a shadow. I start down them, expecting my feet to disappear in darkness, but instead my eyes slowly adjust to the gloom.

  I follow the stairs to the concrete floor. There’s another room ahead of me, this one sealed off by an iron door. A cell of some kind. The door has a small window and I look through it but can’t see much beyond. I tap my knuckle against the door and it echoes through the room. There’s a latch on this side of it that is unlocked. I swing open the door where there is even less light. There’s a dark shape against the wall that turns out to be a bed, and there’s a bad smell in here, maybe stale body fluids. I step away from the door to let more light into the room. The bed has an old mattress and a pillow that looks like it could contain about a thousand different kinds of germs. There’s nothing else in there. I step back into the main room. There’s an empty bookcase on this side of the cell, an old couch, an old coffee table. I try to imagine people being brought down here, locked in this room and kept in the darkness. Did these rooms predate the padded rooms upstairs? Or was this basement used for the worst of the patients? And why the couch, did people sit down here and relax while others were locked up? How long were people kept down here, and how many people knew about it? Is this standard practice? I can’t imagine that it is. A room like this may have been necessary. Jesse Cartman, the man who bit off pieces of his sister’s flesh, probably spent time down here. It may have been the only way to keep the others safe. As bad as this cell is, if the padded rooms upstairs were full, then there wasn’t anywhere else for those people in those moments. Only if that were the case, why not pad this cell too?

  The person who killed Pamela Deans—how much time did he spend down here?

  More than ever I feel like somebody is watching me.

  On the way back up the stairs I notice the dark stains. They look like oil stains, dark patches on the stairs. I reach down and push my finger against it, whatever the stain is it’s dry, but my fingertip comes away with a red powdery film across it. Could be blood. Could be tomato juice. There’s lots of it.

  I head outside and am thankful for the heat of the sun. I lean back against the car and stare at the building. No sign of Cooper. No sign of Emma Green. No sign of whoever killed my cat. Just furniture and benches with spaces in the dust and what could be blood on the basement steps, which could be a day old or five years old.

  I pass Schroder on the way back into town while still on one of the narrow nowhere streets. He’s parked on the side of the road with another detective, they’re standing outside with a map sprawled out over the hood, two patrol cars behind him. That means he’s going to Grover Hills with the idea he’s going to find Cooper Riley. He looks up as I drive toward him. He sees it’s me and shakes his head slowly. I give him a small salute. He rolls his eyes and grins for about two seconds before the frown slips back into place. He looks down at the map and I drive past, ribbons of dirt coming off the tires and flooding the air, a wall of it between him and my rearview mirror as I find my way back to the highway.

  I drive back past the same paddocks. The same guys in the same tractors are plowing the same fields and moving the same bunches of animals back and forth. I pass the prison and don’t feel any sense of longing. There’s a dead cow just off the side of the road covered in flies about a hundred meters past the big Christchurch sign. I drive down Memorial Avenue where the houses are big and cold-looking and the trees out front are even bigger, this part of town screaming family money, women weighed down with jewelry sitting on front porches ordering the gardeners about. Traffic is thick and the air-conditioning in the rental keeps me sane. When I get into town I find a parking space opposite the museum where approximately forty Asian tourists are standing next to a bus taking photographs of each other, all smiles and waves, unaware the police might end up going through their photos later in the week to figure out what happened to one of the group who went missing. I load up the parking meter and three bucks gets me an hour’s worth of parking, putting the council’s greed on a par with that of the criminals. I walk the thirty meters to the entrance of the Botanical Gardens, the front of it lined with a green iron-bar fence bolted into rock and
mortar and streaked in bird shit. I buy a newspaper on the way, tear off the front page, and toss the rest in a recycling bin.

  The Gardens is the one place in the city you can guarantee the plants are getting watered as it’s a pretty big drawing card for the tourists. The gardens cover thirty hectares of land, the Avon River winding through it like a fat black snake. Say what you will about Christchurch, but this is easily one of the most beautiful places in the country. Every direction is blanketed in color with flowers in full bloom, some pathways lined with tulips, others with evergreen bushes, trees and flowers and shrubs and ducks all living in peace, nature getting along.

  There are plenty of people enjoying the day, most of them sitting in the shade. There are couples lying in the grass, men lying on their backs in the soft lawn, straddled by women, lots of bumping and grinding going on beneath the flowing skirts. Kids in kayaks are paddling up the Avon, splashing water at their friends and having a good time. I make my way to the small tourist center. A severely overweight woman behind the counter who isn’t aware that wearing a tight tank-top is a crime against humanity tells me where I can find Jesse Cartman. I follow her instructions to a giant glass house in the middle of the gardens, home to about two thousand ferns with an offshoot room that houses dozens of cacti. The air surrounding the ferns is thick and warm and moist and a few breaths inside make me sleepy. There’s a concrete rectangular walkway within the enclosure surrounding the plants, with a second level of the same thing above.

  Jesse towers over me by about twenty centimeters but looks thin enough to slip under a door. He looks the same in some ways since I last saw him, but vitally different in many others. When he was seventeen he was diagnosed with depression, at nineteen he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, at twenty his parents made an urgent call to the police for help. We got to the family house to find his father pinning Jesse against the floor, and his mother cradling his dead sister. He’s thirty-five now, and in the years between he’s been medicated and something must have worked, because now he’s clean-shaven with his hair neatly combed and, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t tried to eat anybody since his release. His clothes are tidy with his sleeves rolled up revealing darkly tanned forearms. He turns off the hose and turns toward me when he senses somebody staring.

  “I know you from somewhere,” he says, “you’re either a doctor or a cop.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” I tell him.

  “You were there when I was arrested,” he says, and I’m impressed with his memory. “Officer somebody, right?” he says, smiling, and for a creepy moment I think he’s about to offer his hand, the same hand that dug into his sister to pull out the soft meat. He doesn’t.

  “It’s detective now,” I tell him, figuring if I’m going to lie, I may as well give myself a promotion at the same time. “How you doing, Jesse?” I ask.

  “Good. Things are good now,” he says, and they seem to be. The darkness that was in his eyes when we arrested him is gone, replaced by a light that the magic pills are giving him. “You know, the meds keep me in shape. Problem is the better they make me feel, the worse I feel about what I did to my sister, and that makes me want to stop taking them.”

  Before I can say anything, he holds up his hand, full of calluses with dirt packed into the wrinkles in his palms. “Don’t worry, I know how that sounds, and I owe it to her to keep taking them. I owe it to my whole family to feel bad about what I done. Back then things were so different. There were so many voices and I could never sleep because they always kept me awake, so many I could never focus on them. Now the only voice I hear is my own. So why are you here? My therapist ask you to check up on me? I only missed the appointment because it was my sister’s birthday and I had to, you know, spend the day out at her grave.”

  “I’m here to talk to you about Grover Hills.”

  “Why?” he asks, for the first time sounding defensive.

  “You recognize this guy?” I ask, holding up the sketch from the newspaper.

  He nods. “That’s my dad,” he says. “He died a few years ago. Why do you have his picture?”

  “It’s not your dad,” I tell him. “It’s a sketch of a man I’m looking for.”

  “No, it’s definitely my dad. I recognize him.”

  I fold the sketch back into my pocket. “Jesse, I want you to tell me what happened at Grover Hills.”

  “I was sick when I was sent there. The doctors made me better.”

  “What about the basement?”

  He turns the hose back on and starts watering some of the plants. Water splashes off the ferns back toward him. It soaks into the plants and the soil and a string of water runs back down from the tip of the hose onto his hand and down his arm. Cartman tries whistling but he can’t do it, can only blow air hard through pursed lips. I fold the newspaper page into my pocket, then I pick up a section of the hose and bend it in half to kill the flow. He turns toward me and looks defeated, his eyes cast downward.

  “The basement, Jesse.”

  “What . . . what basement?” he asks. “I don’t remember the basement.”

  “It had a cell in it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, refusing to look up.

  “Is that where you got locked away when you couldn’t be controlled?”

  “That’s . . . that’s not what the basement was for.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You remember talking to Cooper Riley?”

  He nods. “He wanted me to tell him about my sister and why I hurt her. He wanted to know what it was like for me growing up. He had lots of questions about my parents, the kind of questions that told me he thought part of my problem was them. I didn’t like him much.”

  “You ever tell him about the basement?”

  “Of course not. Nobody was allowed to mention it. Nobody would have believed me anyway, and if I had told him I would have been sent down there.”

  I keep pressing him. “What went on in that room? You were forced to sleep in there, right?”

  “Sometimes, but only a couple of times for me.” He wipes at some tears hanging on the edges of his eyes then sniffs loudly.

  “Were you beaten down there?”

  “In a sense.”

  “What else happened?”

  “What do you think?” he asks. “Some of us deserved it, I guess, for what we did. What happened down there, they were the kind of things we’d done to other people.”

  “Please, Jesse, it’s important you tell me everything.”

  “I’ve been reading the news and I know what you want. You’re looking for Cooper Riley and he never knew anything about the Scream Room,” he says, “and . . .” He stops talking, realizing what he’s said. “Shit,” he says. “Please, please don’t tell anybody I told you.”

  “The Scream Room?”

  “I have to get back to work,” he says.

  “Jesse, this is important. If you’ve been reading the newspapers, then you’ll know I’m looking for a missing girl.”

  “I know,” he says. “That’s what we called it. That room. We called it the Scream Room.”

  “You were sent down there and tortured?”

  “Sometimes we were sent down there just as punishment. The room was to keep us in line. But other times the Twins would take us down there.”

  “The Twins?”

  “They were a pair of orderlies. They were identical in the way they liked to make people hurt,” he says. “A place like that, there were lots of people, you know? And the room wasn’t always a Scream Room, it’s like you said, it was used mostly to control people. The Twins used to charge people. They’d find relatives of those the patients had hurt and they’d offer them the chance for revenge. They’d make money on our pain. Other times they’d just take us down there for . . . for what I think passed as fun. At least for them.”

  “How often did this happen?” I ask.

  “You don’t
believe me.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t need to. I can see it in you.”

  He’s right. I don’t believe him—but I do think he believes himself. Going out and finding family members and charging them for the thrill of revenge just doesn’t work in any kind of reality. Too many people would have to be pretty bloody fantastic at keeping such a big secret. None of this is getting me closer to finding Emma Green.

  “Convince me,” I tell him. “How often did this happen?”

  He shrugs. “All the time. People were always dying down there. A patient would be taken down there for an hour and come out dead on a stretcher.”

  “And nobody knew?”

  “Of course people knew, but nobody cared. It’s not hard to believe,” he says, but he’s wrong—it is hard to believe. “If it was your sister I’d killed and you had the chance to make me hurt for a hundred bucks or whatever it is they charged, wouldn’t you jump at it?”

  I don’t know. It would depend on whether the person had faked their illness to get away with murder, or if they really were sick. That’s how I look at it now. Under the circumstances, who knows? Others would call the police or the health-care system. A story like that couldn’t get shut down no matter how hard everybody worked to contain it. It would spill out into the media, and a story like this would have been pure gold. It would have made all the papers across the country and been picked up internationally. It would have been big headlines.