Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery)

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  “I’m going to die,” Leo said again. “I’m having a heart attack!” His voice was wild with fear, his frightened sunken eyes beseeching the nurse, who was trying to calm him, but it was like trying to talk a moth from the flame.

  Leo’s fear was contagious. I felt it crawling up my spine, and when I looked up and saw Jacques and Austin, I saw fear reflected in their faces. But the nurse was calm, matter of fact, weirdly so, as if this wild thing that was happening was as harmless as a rabbit. She told Leo to breathe deeply and began counting the breaths for him. He looked like hell and I wondered why the nurse hadn’t called for the doctor. Maybe he was having a heart attack. But no, the nurse continued to talk to him in soothing tones for about five minutes, and Leo seemed to revive enough for the nurse to get him on his feet and walk him to his room.

  Lucy was standing in the hallway near where Leo had been, her eyes stitched wide, unsure of what had just happened.

  “Did you see that?” she asked.

  I was unable or unwilling to talk to her. Maybe both.

  “I’ve never seen a panic attack before, have you?”

  I stared at Lucy, my mind wrapping itself around Leo’s illness. I shook my head and turned my back on her. I didn’t feel like talking. In truth I was shaken. So many people with so many problems. It seemed insurmountable.

  Immediately after Leo’s panic attack, the powers that be rounded us all up and herded us into the cafeteria, where we were given a very brief announcement that someone had taken ill and we were to stay in the cafeteria, or the north wing of the unit, while they dealt with the situation. The south wing and all rooms were out of bounds.

  The patients had coalesced into small groups that had congregated around the tables, but I didn’t feel like joining any of them. There was only one other table left and it was occupied by Bradley, the guy in his late teens who sat staring into space, a vacant look on his scary-pale face. Up close his scraggly black beard looked a little more robust than it did from a distance. I pulled my chair up and said hello, but he didn’t respond. Not even his eyes blinked. He seemed so vulnerable, so young, too young to be here.

  “He won’t be talking to you,” Jacques said in a deeply soothing voice. He was leaning back against the next table.

  “Bradley doesn’t talk much,” he added. Mavis had said something similar to me. “He’s schizophrenic. Lives in his own world most of the time.”

  Just like Mavis, I thought. I thought back to the interaction Bradley had had with Mavis, trying to remember if he had talked. He had certainly interacted.

  I looked back at Bradley, hoping Jacques would leave me alone and hoping he wouldn’t. He intrigued me.

  “I guess you’ve never seen a dead person before, eh?”

  I didn’t feel the need to respond to that.

  “But you got it wrong,” he added.

  I must have involuntarily tensed my face or something, because he said, “You didn’t get it wrong?” The emphasis was on didn’t.

  He went on, “You were there first. You saw her. Is she dead or not?” I looked at Jacques more closely then. His voice was so insistent.

  “I thought she was, but I’m not a nurse, and the nurse said she wasn’t dead,” I replied reluctantly.

  “Typical,” he said.

  “What do you mean by that?” I said defensively.

  “Well, would you want to tell a bunch of potentially suicidal patients that someone had succeeded in offing themselves right under their noses?”

  I hadn’t seen that coming. “You mean she lied to me?”

  “Easier than facing the music with us.”

  “Yeah, but I’d already yelled out that she was dead,” I said, intrigued by his theory nonetheless.

  He smiled. “You’re a patient. Who’s going to believe you?” The look in his eyes was difficult to fathom, like deep bottomless pools hiding the unknown. It was disconcerting.

  “Which leaves us with the question of how she died, if she died,” he said with a flourish of his hand. “Was there anything suspicious about her death, that is, if she is dead?” He seemed unable or unwilling to keep the drama out of his voice.

  “What do you mean by ‘suspicious’?” I could feel a pang of distinct unease steal over me, along with a quiver of interest. It was actually a good moment for me, to feel interest in something, even if it was so negative and fleeting. And suddenly it occurred to me that maybe Leo was right and she’d died of some contagious disease, and they were covering it up. And that made me very anxious and very scared. I didn’t want to die and I knew this awful feeling would never go away until I learned the truth about Mavis.

  Jacques laughed and turned away from me, but as he did so he said playfully, “What if Austin’s right? That she was murdered? That is, if she really did die.” It was a devil’s advocate sort of thing to say. Which made me even more anxious.

  That and the scarf around her neck.

  I stared at him then, not able to capture the urge to engage him over that last question, even though it alarmed me. I mean, why would anyone want to murder Mavis? Why would Austin have even said that? Did he know something I didn’t?

  Jacques smiled and then pushed away from the table and left me alone with Bradley. I watched him go, his easy fluid gait making me think of a lion on the prowl. I turned back to Bradley, pulled my chair closer, and cradled my head in my hands, mimicking his posture. She was dead. I knew it. I had seen her.

  On a whim I said, “I found her,” keeping my voice low. Bradley stared at me blankly.

  “She was lying with her arm dangling.” Bradley seemed to be in another world, not taking in anything I said, and I found I needed to say a lot to someone who would not repeat my fears.

  “Her face was so grey, so gone, so not there anymore. It scared me because it hit like a punch to the gut that youth is no antidote to dying. Do you know what I mean? So why are they saying she’s not dead? I know what I saw and what I saw was death. So why are they hiding it?”

  I looked at Bradley and saw myself in the darkness he was inhabiting and I shivered, because the tendrils of that evil place were still willowing inside me. Would Bradley ever emerge? Maybe Mavis had been depressed and maybe she hadn’t emerged. But she hadn’t seemed depressed. Maybe she had hidden it and had killed herself somehow with the scarf, the blackness of mental illness so full of death and despair and its victims often so fatally good at hiding it. Poor Mavis would become just another statistic. Or so I thought at the time.

  My inertia came in waves, so that in between I was able to operate more or less normally. Which was how I realized that I had not used the washroom since the night before and had to go really badly, but we were still confined to the cafeteria. The problem was that the women’s washroom was on the corridor right across from where Mavis lay. All the patients were clustered in the cafeteria and there were no nurses in sight. I looked down the corridor and saw no one, so I loped down and ducked into the washroom. I was still trying to get Mavis’s death face out of my mind, but I was failing miserably.

  On my way back to the cafeteria I got a clear view of my room. They had Mavis on a gurney, her crossword PJs a taunting reminder of the life they had once held, her crimson scarf wrapped around her neck as if she had been tossing and turning. The sight of her ashen face, eyes and mouth now closed, made me gasp. Mavis’s helpers turned around at the sound, including Ella and Dr. Osborn, who’d been hovering over the body.

  Ella hastily grabbed me by the arm and thrust me ahead of her and down the hall, without saying a word. I turned once to look behind me and saw Dr. Osborn staring after me, a look of sadness, and something else, flickering across his face. Even in my confusion over their cover-up, it made me wonder how nurses and doctors do it, how they manage to cope with so much pain and death. Osborn’s look made me realize that sometimes they didn’t. And it made me realize to what extremes t
hey will go to protect their living patients. Like getting Mavis’s body to the morgue without anyone on the floor realizing she was dead.

  Except I knew.

  And because I knew I couldn’t stop thinking about her. How had the scarf got there in the first place? There were definite rules on the floor. There were no blinds in our room, no lamps with cords, the TV was covered in Plexiglas — its cord was run through a plastic tube — we ate with plastic cutlery, drank from plastic cups, no glass, and we had to check in with the nurses if we brought anything onto the floor that could be used for self-harm, including computer and cellphone powercords.

  Was Austin right? Could it have been murder? And if so, why?

  Chapter Five

  Mavis didn’t come back and her bed remained empty. It had been Austin’s thin insistent voice that had got me to thinking about murder as a definite possibility, that and Jacques. I mean, why not? It can occur anywhere, with anyone, at any time. And I could still see the scarf wound around her neck. Could she have accidentally strangled herself? Surely not. She would have awakened. And so would we. Or maybe not. The drugs I was on could put a horse to sleep. Maybe it was the same for Lucy and Kit. Suicide was more likely, but if it was murder or some awful disease, I needed to protect myself so that I didn’t become the next victim. And in order to do that, I needed to find out what had happened. How had she died?

  I felt a quickening in my brain and a surge of energy. I sought out Austin. He was slouched down in the saggy old sofa in the common room, which was open concept with the cafeteria. He had managed to monopolize a weak little shred of sunlight that was sneaking through the winter-stained window onto the couch. His chubby face was tilted up into it as if he was trying to get a tan. When I sat down beside him he looked over at me, but there was no real interest in his face, just a slightly vacuous look. I wondered why he was here at the hospital, what was wrong with him. He repositioned himself in the sunbeam.

  “Do you remember earlier when you said Mavis had been murdered?” I asked.

  He glanced at me again, and again looked away.

  “What did you mean?” I said.

  He had closed his eyes and was resting his fledgling double chin on his neck, in the pose of a man getting ready to sleep. I was frustrated and was about to prod him again when he said, “Aren’t we all murder victims?” Which sounded like a non sequitur and a cop-out to me, and didn’t appease my frustration one iota.

  “But you said she was murdered,” I persisted. “Who murdered her?”

  He laughed a snarky little laugh and said, without once opening his eyes, “People take over our minds and souls all the time. Politicians, doctors, journalists, nurses. They twist our minds to their liking. If that isn’t murder I don’t know what is. Mavis was infected by them.” Suddenly he opened his eyes and stared right at me, but it felt as though he was looking right through me.

  “Did she show you the article they wrote about her?” he asked.

  I shook my head. He ran his hands through what little hair he had and said, “It was all about split personalities, even though she stressed that that is not what schizophrenia is. We are not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We sometimes argue with perfect fluidity from the wrong premise, making it sound believable, if you believe the premise. Ours may be a false reality. But it’s real to us, even if it’s false to everyone else.”

  Austin was an enigma playing out his own scenario. Based on the premise that politicians and doctors can manipulate people, he seemed believable, but the premise that manipulation means murder was a little hard to swallow. Still, almost reasonable and I wondered if this was because his meds were working. But then I remembered that just the other day he had plotted with Lucy to become a politician and win the same seat.

  I knew I was out of my league with Austin. I didn’t really know what I was dealing with. My only knowledge of mental illness came from reading books and from my own depression. So I was in the dark in more ways than one. And I really wanted to find an answer to the problem that was Mavis.

  “So you don’t know exactly who murdered her?” I asked.

  He just sat there and stared at me, his forefinger beating out a rhythm on his pudgy knee.

  I tried a different tack. “Did you like Mavis?”

  “You mean, did Mavis like me,” he said.

  I felt as though we were talking around each other, like two circling boxers, but just what we were circling around I had no idea. He had turned away from me and had picked up a motorcycle magazine. I thought about trying to continue the conversation, but decided against it. His murderers were all in his head.

  I thought about Mavis and how she had been spirited off the ward, and I even found myself doubting my own eyes. I had seen her, not once, but twice, in death, hadn’t I? Murder or suicide, she was dead. But why had no police come to interview us? I feared that a successful cover-up would mean her death would go unnoticed and someone else might die. I figured I owed it to her and to all of life’s lost to get to the bottom of it. Just how I was going to go about doing that I wasn’t sure, but I felt I had been given a new lease on life, and I felt stronger than I had in months.

  Because suddenly I had a purpose.

  The nurses, in their daily talks with me, had suggested I attend some of the classes set up for patients to help them cope. I hadn’t wanted to go and no one was forcing me, but suddenly I was interested. Perhaps I could find some answers to Mavis. I left Austin and went and sat in on a CBT class — I knew the letters stood for “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” — and it was a class that had been postponed a couple of hours because of Mavis. I had seen such classes on TV, of course, where you talk about what’s bothering you and find out ways to prevent it from consuming you, ways to see how your thinking has been distorted. Lots of them were touchy-feely sessions that left me feeling uncomfortable at how the public probing of a mind can seem like a violation. But CBT was goal-oriented and problem-focused, or at least, that was what I had read in the course description Ella had dropped on my bed, so I had high hopes. You were allowed to choose what classes to take, but once you were with a group, you stayed with that group.

  There were only seven other people in the group, including the instructor, which increased the chances of my having to participate, so I started to leave. But the instructor would have none of it. He was a nondescript man with a bland, clean-shaven face that would get lost in a crowd. There was nothing unusual about him except his age. From the deep creases on his face, he looked eighty, but the energetic way he walked around the classroom pegged him at about sixty or younger. He deftly held out a chair for me and asked me to sit. What could I do? I realized with some dismay that the class had already started, so I sat. Austin made me feel much better when he made a later appearance than I had and took his time finding a seat.

  We were in a large, square room with a mishmash of sofas, institutional-type metal chairs, and tables of various heights and designs, along with a bunch of yoga mats and a treadmill. It was obviously a room shared by many different instructors, who moulded the room to their specific needs. Our instructor had chosen the sofa as a focal point and everyone had pulled up a chair of some description to inscribe a circle, more or less. Lucy and Kit were there, sitting side by side on the sofa, leaning into each other. Jacques and Austin sat beside each other in two armchairs, leaning away, and Bradley sat alone with two empty chairs on either side of him. Leo was perched on a chair closest to the door. There were two other people I didn’t know, although I had seen them in the cafeteria. For my and Austin’s benefit the instructor introduced himself as Joe and asked us our names.

  He then pointed to his whiteboard and said, “Jacques has identified a situation where he lost his temper when his ex-wife used his alcoholism as a reason to get her sole custody of their children, while trying to get more financial support from him. That it has left him feeling guilty, afraid, frustrated, but mostly angr
y.”

  It actually made me feel quite good that Jacques wasn’t married.

  The instructor turned to Jacques and said, “Tell us what your automatic thoughts are? What first flashes through your mind about yourself and your situation?”

  “That I hated her. That she didn’t understand what an alcoholic has to go through to stop drinking. Unless you’re a smoker or some other drug addict, it’s impossible to know the depth of the loss when you quit. Try imagining having to give up your very favourite food — chocolate, steak, chips — and then multiply that unrequited hunger a hundred times over and you might feel something similar to what an alcoholic feels when faced with a future without alcohol.”

  The instructor waited for Jacques to say more but he didn’t.

  “Do you have any other automatic thoughts, besides hating your ex-wife?” It seemed kind of cold to just ignore most of what Jacques had just said, but maybe that was just part of the process, not to dwell on anyone’s diagnosis.

  “That our kids are not pawns. That she was taking me to the cleaners. I’d go bankrupt before paying her a cent.”

  “So of those three statements, which rankles the most? Which is the hot-button statement?”

  Jacques thought about it for a moment, for actually quite a long moment, but finally he said, “That she was taking me to the cleaners and using the kids as pawns.”

  “Okay, let’s look at the first one first, that she’s taking you to the cleaners. How would you challenge that thought? Is it reasonable?”

  “She is taking me to the cleaners.”

  “Do you think this is based on fact or an inaccurate perception based on how you feel?”

  Jacques blinked.

  “You need to challenge your negative thoughts. For example, there are laws preventing her from forcing you to pay more than you can. Do you think your anger at your ex-wife is getting in the way of rational thinking?”