Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery)

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  I was never happier to hear a real voice say those words and I turned to see Ella standing wide-eyed as she looked out the window beside me. She seemed so … human in her unguarded moment. But then the sentiment vanished and the nurse in her returned, holding my evening pills in her little white cup. Why is she bringing me my pills? I wondered. What’s wrong with me going to the dispensary?

  “Thought I’d bring you these myself because I wanted to talk to you about how you’re doing.”

  I looked at her suspiciously. Someone might be trying to kill me and one of them was a woman missing a finger. It stretched the bounds of coincidence to think there could be two people missing fingers in this hospital. So simple to take me down with a drug overdose and a cringing “Mea culpa, I’m so sorry. It was an accident.”

  I eyed the pills, suddenly trying hard not to look suspicious. She could just as easily whip out a syringe and jab me with some lethal untraceable concoction. She gave me the little paper cup, and then she waited until I had tipped the contents into my mouth, before handing me a second cup of water. I turned slightly away from her, but not enough to arouse her suspicion and was doing acrobatics with my tongue, juggling the pills and sweeping them into my cheek. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and our gazes locked. There was no menace in hers that I could see. Nothing to indicate she wanted to get rid of me. Had the hand really been missing a finger? Had it really been Ella? Could I trust my own mind?

  But Ella had seen the squirrel, so my mind was functioning properly. I wondered then about calling the police, but what would I say and why would they believe a psych patient? It was my word against hers.

  “Cordi, we need to talk about Mavis.”

  She took the cups from my hand and went and threw them in the wastebasket by the door. While her back was turned I spat out the pills and stuffed them under my pillow. She grabbed the one visitor’s chair we had in the room and pulled it up near my bed. She gestured for me to sit on the mattress.

  “What about her?”

  “You seem to have it in your head that she died.”

  “She did die. And you saw her.”

  There was a fleeting look of frustration, or it could have been fear, on her face before she composed herself and said, “Sometimes people can misinterpret what they see.”

  “I misinterpreted?”

  “Yes, you did,” she said a little too eagerly. “Mavis just got very sick and had to be moved.”

  “But you know otherwise, don’t you,” I said flatly and she stared at me, unblinking.

  “I will arrange for you to see Dr. Osborn again,” she said. Then she got up and left me sitting there, but not without a backward glance in my direction, a glance that looked like a warning. I was still trying to interpret Ella’s glance when Lucy galloped into the room, flinging blonde hair out of her sapphire eyes.

  “I’ve got this great plan!” she said. “It’s going to work, too. I’m going to be a stunt woman and be the double for all the famous actors.” She blathered on about her idea, words running into words, flowing fast and furious, but when I held up my hand she stopped in mid-sentence and cocked her head at me.

  “How well did you know Mavis?” I asked.

  “You mean do, don’t you? Do know her.”

  I nodded, making a mental note to talk about Mavis in the present tense.

  “She’s okay. Schizophrenic. Had some weird hallucinations. Strange family.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Her family is the Church of Scientology,” Lucy explained. “Enough said.”

  “You mean she’s a Scientologist?”

  “Yeah, pretty much said that, didn’t I?”

  “What about her real family?”

  “Mavis doesn’t have a family. She’s an orphan, and a very rich one.”

  “What happened to her family?”

  “She killed them.”

  My face obviously looked the way I felt — stunned — because Lucy said, “No, really. She killed them. She was at the wheel of the family car with her father beside her and her mother in the back seat. The car blew a tire and she lost control. They flipped a bunch of times and landed upside down in a ditch full of water. Mavis got out but her parents drowned.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Poor Mavis.”

  “Not really,” said Lucy. “She inherited everything from her parents. Set her up for many lifetimes.”

  The conversation had tired me out and I lay down on my bed and fell asleep. They say dreams can help you sort out the nightmares of life, but my dreams were just nightmares. I did not awake refreshed or rejuvenated. My mind was a fog of ideas merging with my dreams. One thing I was sure of: Mavis was dead and there was nobody looking for the reason. Human nature says you take the path of least resistance and if it had been accidental or a suicide, alerting the authorities would have been the easiest step. But they hadn’t taken that route, whoever they were. She’d been spirited away and we’d all been told that she was alive and recuperating elsewhere in the hospital. Was that to make us feel better? It seemed like a rather elaborate thing to do. But I knew what I saw.

  I wandered down the hall to the cafeteria and the common room. There were two large lumpy sofas and a couple of recliners forming a semicircle around the TV, where I had sat with Austin. There were a couple of chairs along the bank of south-facing windows — they were for the antisocial among us or for those who didn’t want to watch TV.

  No one was watching TV when I arrived. No one was there at all and I picked up a magazine and sat down on the sofa to read. I should have known that was a bad idea for someone who was feeling rather antisocial, because someone was bound to come in and corner me. But the person who cornered me wasn’t who I expected.

  “Hi, Cordi.” I looked up from my magazine and saw my brother, Ryan. Even in winter he looked like summer, his face littered with freckles and his hair the colour of honey, tinged with red. He searched my face, looking for a clue to my mood. I smiled and the anxious look on his face evaporated. He plunked himself down beside me and we sat in silence for a while.

  We had often sat in silence and it usually enveloped us like a warm and friendly glove, but this time it seemed sterile, as though that was all there was between us — silence and nothing more. I shivered. So we talked about the farm for a few minutes and the hired hands who were running it for us, and then we talked about Annie and her constant medical appointments and treatment. And then we came to an impasse. Ryan began rummaging in his pockets as if to break the silence with motion, and I looked at him with pity. He wanted so badly for me to be well. It didn’t matter that I was well, or close to it. To relieve his anxiety, he had to believe it.

  “So what’s the doc say? Everybody wants you out of here,” he said a little too brightly.

  I smiled and almost told him about Mavis’s death, but some survival instinct stopped me. I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me, that he would think it was all a figment of my imagination, especially when I told him the hospital staff denied it. And it would worry him. So I said nothing about Mavis and the morgue and the ominous conversation I had overheard.

  “What are you looking for?” I finally asked him as he continued his search. I was aware that he was making a bit of a show of it and really wanted me to ask him what he was looking for. But he didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and began going through all his myriad pockets. He’d always been like that. He was the kind of man who, as a little boy, carried bits of string, pebbles, rocks, a pocketknife, and any other little treasure until his pockets were bulging and he had to empty them all to find what he wanted. He didn’t quite have to do that now, but he did pull some credit-card slips and some folded sheets of paper out of his pockets before he found what he was looking for. He held it up for me to see, a big grin on his face.

  I squinted at the two pieces of crumpled cardboard in his hand. He fanne
d them out. Two tickets to something. I reached out for them, but he pulled back on me. He had always done that, too, but this time it was as though he was acting his part, trying too hard. I pushed a smile onto my face and gestured with my hand. His grin got bigger and he finally handed the tickets to me.

  “Today’s afternoon’s game,” he said. “Leafs versus Montreal.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “If we leave in ten minutes, we can walk,” he said somewhat uncertainly. “You love to walk. It’s a real winter day out there, but that’s never stopped us before. And if we walk we don’t have to deal with the subway or the parking. Besides, I forgot my cellphone so we can’t use the rover parking app.”

  I looked up at him, then back down at the tickets. They must have cost him a fortune.

  “But I can’t just leave,” I said.

  “Why not? You know you’re not committed. Besides, Dr. Osborn thinks it would be a good idea for your first outing to be with me.”

  I digested that information rather slowly and he began to get alarmed.

  “Don’t you want to come?”

  I pulled myself together and said, “Yes, of course I do.” But I wasn’t sure what a vast crowd of people might do to me in my state of mind.

  Ryan grabbed my hand and pulled me up off the sofa as if we were kids again, and there was nothing for it but to go and get my coat and boots. When we opened the front door of the hospital, winter was waiting. My body was assaulted by the huge change in temperature. How vulnerable we are, I thought. Just one universal power outage shy of freezing to death. It was a beautiful day now, and we eventually ended up going east on Dundas to University and then all the way down University.

  We got as far Richmond Street before I finally blurted out my story about Mavis. I watched his face as best I could while we walked: confusion, love, pity, indecision, even fear. But not belief, at least not that I could see.

  “How do you know for sure she’s dead?” he asked.

  “Because she isn’t alive?”

  Ryan grimaced and shoved his hands into his pockets. Despite the sun, there was a biting wind.

  “And you think the authorities are hiding it so you guys won’t get scared.” It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. We were standing at a red light at King Street and I started stamping my feet, which were getting numb. Ryan put his hands on my shoulders and said, “You say this Jacques guy was with you in the morgue?”

  I nodded.

  “And he saw Mavis too?”

  I knew where he was going and I had forgotten, perhaps on purpose, to tell him that Jacques had not seen Mavis.

  “No,” I said, and he searched my face for I know not what. The light finally turned green and we walked in silence to Front Street, but this time the silence was noisy and rife with unspoken thoughts.

  We began mingling with the crowds at Front Street and moved in a stream into Union Station, its vast high ceiling and enormous arched multi-paned window at one end making it feel like a cathedral. I felt like an ant among many, following a scent to the prize. And yet, it was strangely comforting to be so anonymous.

  We finally found our way into the Air Canada Centre and our seats high up at one end, two people among some eighteen thousand. How many, I wondered, were playing hooky from school or work? But then I remembered it was Sunday.

  We all stood for the national anthem. The singer, dwarfed by the expanse of gleaming ice and the tiers of unending seats, looked too small to be the source of the booming voice that came from the loudspeakers. Then we all sat back down, the puck was dropped, and the game started. Despite the old Habs-Leafs rivalry, both teams were playing as if they hadn’t slept for a week and I began to watch the crowds. Every colour of the rainbow was represented in the clothing people wore, like a haphazard mosaic or a patchwork quilt. Many people were talking animatedly with each other and some were yelling at the players.

  And that was when I saw him.

  He was sitting ten seats to my left and three rows down. Shock of white hair. Early forties, handsome. Osborn. What were the odds?

  He was sitting beside one of the young patients from my floor. My opinion of him went way up. I thought it was awfully nice of the doctor to take a patient to a hockey game. I watched him for a while, and when a fight broke out on the ice, I was happy to see him glower and grip his companion’s shoulder.

  I turned my attention back to the game and watched two grown men, gloves off, punching each other to try to get revenge for some wrong, perceived or real. The fans booed and cheered. Whatever happened to sportsmanship? If all the world conducted its business, solved its problems the way hockey players do, we’d be living in a bloodbath.

  At last, the fight broken up by the refs, the game resumed. And when one player made a breakaway, outsmarted the goalie, and scored, all was forgiven. The fans roared, almost as much as they did during the fight. Cripes, even hockey was getting me down. But at least it was all real, the sights, the smells, Ryan beside me. All real. All mine.

  We took a taxi back to the hospital because I was so cold. The sun had set and it was snowing by the time we reached the hospital. Ryan didn’t walk up with me, which I took as a good sign. I didn’t feel like going to my room and there was no one in the common room, so I went back to the same sofa and found the same magazine.

  “Warmed up yet?” I looked up to see Jacques hovering above me, his blond hair swept loosely back off his forehead. He was gripping a toothpick between his teeth. I wondered again if he was a smoker. Did he chaw down on his cigarettes as hard as he did the toothpick? And was the surrogate working for him?

  I smiled up at him. “No. Still chilled.” I wondered what he was thinking. We had shared a strange moment together. And had his hug been more than just him trying to warm me up? I was very aware that he had never actually seen Mavis’s body and we had no photo to prove she was dead. Did he still believe me?

  As if he was reading my thoughts he said, “Too bad I didn’t get the photo.” Noncommittal.

  “Yeah,” I said intelligently.

  “But you said you saw her on the slab.”

  “Yeah,” I said again, wondering where this was going.

  “I believe you,” he said. Just like that. I was taken aback and as I studied his impenetrable face, my neck spasmed from all that looking up and I grabbed it with one hand to rub it.

  “Did you hear me?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you believe me?”

  He looked a bit nonplussed as he sucked in some air and stroked his chin, the kind of chin that needed shaving twice a day. His hair had fallen over his eyes and he swept it back again with one hand as I thought about him being an alcoholic smoker. An addictive personality. That could mean any number of problems. Dangerous footing. Yet he seemed so in control.

  “I think you’re not as sick as they say you are. That you are quite capable of telling the difference between a dead body and a living one. That someone is messing with you.” He hesitated, as if he had something more to say, but then thought better of it. I had the impression that he was hiding something from me. I really didn’t want to just ask him, so I tried a new tack.

  “She has no family,” I said. “No one to look into her death. If they’ve covered it up, no one will ever know.”

  “That’s why we have to do something.”

  It was sweet to hear the “we.” I didn’t feel so alone.

  “Okay, so what do we know so far?” I asked.

  Jacques sat down beside me and my heart did a little twirligig as his leg pressed against mine. To distract myself from his presence — and it was a presence — I answered my own question. “Mavis died and there was a scarf wound around her neck.”

  “We know the nurses would never have let her have a scarf, so where did it c
ome from? Who smuggled it in?” asked Jacques.

  I shrugged as he shifted his weight closer to me, and the shrug turned into a shiver.

  “So it could be the murder weapon,” he said. It felt creepy to hear those words in all their starkness, and I pictured Mavis dead on the bed, the scarf wrapped around her.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Someone could have strangled her with the scarf.”

  “Or she could have,” said Jacques. I gave him a look and he threw his hands up in the air.

  “All right. All right. Hard to do that. We’ve been there before.”

  “So, murder it is?” I said.

  “Murder it might be.” And then he reached over with his right hand and squeezed my knee.

  I left Jacques and went back to my room. Mavis’s death had not resulted in our being evicted from our room, for which I had mixed feelings. All sorts of questions were storming my brain, and not all of them were about Mavis. Jacques was becoming a serious distraction and I didn’t know if that was good or bad. It had been well over a year since Patrick and I had gone our separate ways and I wasn’t really looking for a new relationship. Especially not when I’d been hospitalized with a mental health issue and so had Jacques.

  No one was in my room. I put my coat and boots away in the closet and sat down on my bed and stared at Mavis’s bed. Now empty. All that was left of her life was a bed made up neatly with hospital corners and a thin beige velour blanket. So ordinary. Just an empty bed. Had she known she was going to die?

  I looked out the window, hoping to see the squirrel, but all I saw was a swirl of snowflakes beating themselves against the glass. The sun had set, but the snow still glittered in the ambient light of the city. Suddenly I felt a need to be outside again, in the cold early-evening air, but on my own, with no one looking after me. I pulled on my coat and boots and left with such a sense of urgency that it wasn’t until I reached the front entrance that I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. I’d also forgotten to sign myself out.