Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery)

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  “I could ask the same of you,” I said as he opened his eyes. I don’t know why, but I half expected them to be dim and unfocused, but they were sharp and clear.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Nobody’s trying to kill me.” He said it as a joke, but then he saw my face and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “They tried again.”

  Jacques sat upright, his attention one hundred percent on me. “What happened?” he asked, his voice insistent and urgent.

  I sat down beside him and he moved close enough to me that our legs were touching. I suddenly thought about Lucy and wondered if I should move away from him, but I couldn’t. The warmth of his leg felt too good. Instead of answering his question, I jerked my attention back to his face and said, “I saw you with Lucy.”

  I was expecting him to look guilty, but he didn’t. In fact, he laughed and said, “She’s a handful, that one. But I’m more interested in you. Tell me what happened.”

  I wanted to believe him and his interest seemed genuine. So I told him about the bridge and my descent through the tree and the hard slog through the snow as my would-be killer zeroed in on me. I didn’t mention the near miss with the car today, because, despite my fears, it may well have been an accident. I didn’t want Jacques to think I was paranoid.

  “Did you see anyone before you went over the bridge?”

  I shook my head. “My attacker came from behind. I never got a good look.”

  “Did you feel anything, taste anything, hear anything, smell anything that might help? Maybe perfume?”

  I thought back to the bridge. There was nothing to feel except the strength of the arms that grabbed me. The snow had muffled everything and my attacker had said nothing. And there had been no smell, no perfume, no deodorant, not surprising given the bitter cold and the layers of clothing.

  “Nothing,” I said, and then asked, “Was Ella on duty yesterday evening?”

  He reached over and took my hand in his. I felt a little rattled by the warmth of his hand and the fact that mine had completely disappeared in his. He cocked his head and seemed to think for a moment. “Damn it. I can’t remember,” he said finally. “I wasn’t feeling so well, so I went to bed.”

  That changed the subject for awhile, until I said, “I called the police.”

  “Good. What did they say?”

  “Inconclusive.”

  “Just what they said about the subway,” said Jacques.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “Word gets around.” He looked at me and shrugged. I was about to tell him about the footprints in the snow when he said bitterly, “Some bodyguard I am.”

  “You may have offered to be my bodyguard, but that only works while I’m on the floor.”

  “And whoever wants to kill you only tries when you’re off the floor. Strange, that,” he said, and added softly, his eyes amused, “Maybe I should follow you home.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jacques confused me. He seemed genuinely interested in my problems, but maybe he was only interested in me. Maybe he was a hustler, a ladies’ man out for the conquest. I had no way of knowing and I found that I cared. He attracted me, not just intellectually but physically, but I felt as though I was standing on quicksand with him.

  I fell asleep dreaming about his smile and what it meant when it was aimed my way, but the dreams turned to nightmares and I awoke suddenly in the night in a panic. A plaintive wail, so desolate and disconsolate as to defy even imagination, ripped through the hallways, echoing upon itself in a dreadful reminder that a mind feels pain, too. I lay in bed shivering, but the cries went on and on, until finally subsiding into sobs of despair.

  “Jesus, what was that?” said Lucy.

  “New inmate,” said Kit, the choice of word leaving no doubt how she felt about the place.

  “That’s how Mavis came in, like a fucking banshee,” said Lucy.

  “Suicidal, until she had an ECT,” said Kit.

  There was a long pause and then I asked, “Did the ECT help her?”

  “Wiped out her memory the first time,” said Kit. “She was like a lost little child. Couldn’t remember anything and then as her memories came back she swore she’d never have another one, no matter how much it helped her. She didn’t want to forget her life. Lucky her. She had a life worth remembering.”

  Silence wrapped itself around that little thought until I said, “But she had another one.”

  “Yeah,” said Kit. “That was really weird, but after she talked to Bradley one day, she decided to go ahead and try it again.” Bradley, the other Scientologist, with the long black hair and the straggley beard.

  “What did Bradley say to her?”

  “No idea, but he somehow managed to calm her down. She hated ECT.”

  “And then she died?”

  Kit just stared at me.

  “Jesus, you two. Can’t a person get any sleep around here?” said Lucy.

  After that I tossed and turned for hours, those cries of torment seared on my mind.

  When I got up the next morning and went for breakfast I passed the suicide room, the name given to the room immediately across from the nursing station. The wall on the corridor side was all glass, so the nurses could see the patient at all times. It also meant that we could see the patient, too, and as I passed, I looked in and saw a hefty woman lying on the bed, her back to our peering eyes, curled up in the fetal position underneath a thin blanket. She was lying there motionless and her curly, dark, shoulder-length hair spilled out over the bed covers. Talk about having no privacy. Whoever it was looked as though she were asleep, but she could just as easily have been wide awake, staring with unseeing eyes at the blank wall, lost in the terror of a mind torn to shreds by mental illness.

  In the cafeteria I picked up my tray and helped myself to some pancakes and a juice, while simultaneously looking to see where I might sit. As usual Bradley was at a table all by himself, Leo hadn’t arrived yet, and Lucy, Kit, Austin, and Jacques were sitting at a table for six. I went and sat right across the table from Jacques and beside Austin, who hunched over his food as soon as I arrived, as if afraid I’d take it.

  “She tried to jump off a bridge,” said Lucy suddenly as she flicked her head in the direction of the suicide room.

  “How do you know that?” asked Jacques.

  Lucy shrugged. “She’s on suicide watch.” As if that answered his question.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “What do you think it means? Just what it says,” snapped Lucy. “They’ll just keep an eye on her until the meds kick in and then she’ll be out with the rest of us.”

  “How long does that usually take?”

  “Not long. The meds usually work to some extent or other and the docs don’t want us to linger here for very long,” said Lucy. “Long stays are discouraged, and so they fill us with meds, stabilize us, and discharge us before we’re ready. It’s not their fault. It’s too expensive to do more. That’s one of the reasons why the streets are full of mentally ill people.”

  We ate in silence for a while and then I said, “So Mavis was suicidal, was she?”

  “Aren’t we all?’ said Austin. “Comes with the territory. If life is hopeless and you are helpless to do anything about it, what else is there?”

  “Mavis came in on an overdose,” said Kit, “and on the day she died she was scared shitless, almost as if she knew.”

  “Knew what?” said Lucy.

  “Knew that she would either get better or get worse.”

  “Duh,” said Lucy.

  I quickly changed the subject.

  “How do you know that woman tried to jump off a bridge?” I asked, repeating Jacques’s query and tilting my head in the direction of the suicide room.

  Lucy eyed me like I was some sort of pinned insect.

&nb
sp; “Ever heard of the nurses’ station? You should try hanging out by their door sometime. Lots of juicy stuff.” I looked at her and wondered if she knew I had done just that. Then I looked at Jacques and he winked at me.

  “So what about the scarf?” I asked, hoping to startle an answer out of someone by bringing it up out of the blue. If you don’t ask the questions you don’t get the answers. And maybe the nurses had been talking.

  “Nothing, just that they said it was wound around her neck, but then, you knew that already,” said Lucy. Austin made a noise as if he had been startled, and I looked over at him and caught his eye. He looked away hastily and I wondered what had bothered him.

  “You mean, they said it strangled her?” I asked.

  “Why would they say that? She isn’t dead.”

  I wasn’t listening to Lucy anymore. My mind had swung back to the morgue, to Mavis’s body. The image of the tiny silver cross was clear in my head. There had been no marks on her smooth white neck to indicate that she had been strangled by a scarf.

  After I’d eaten I took my dirty tray to the kitchen area, and on my way back I passed Bradley’s table. He was hunched over, writing something in a notebook and I noticed that he had dropped a piece of paper on the floor. I stooped to pick it up and held it out to him. He pretended not to see me, so I put it on his table and said, “You a writer?”

  His pen stopped moving and his whole body stilled as he digested my question. I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but suddenly he blurted, “Writing is a calling. It’s something I have to do. It consumes me.”

  “Is that a good thing?” I asked, because it actually sounded like a burden.

  “It’s just a thing. My thing. It can be good and it can be bad and it can be awesome, but it belongs to me and nobody has a right to take it away from me.”

  “Who would take it away from you?”

  He looked at me, gauging something, as if wondering if he could trust me.

  “ECT.”

  I mentally whistled, not sure what to say.

  “You’ve had ECT?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But my doctors tell me it will help me.”

  “But you don’t think it will?”

  “I’m afraid it will hurt my writing, and I couldn’t bear that,” he said.

  “You seem to have convinced Mavis to try again,” I said, taking a chance.

  He looked up at me so abruptly that I almost jumped back. But he said nothing for a while, neither confirming nor denying, as if Mavis’s name had never come up.

  “Do you know Ernest Hemingway?” he finally asked.

  I nodded politely.

  “He killed himself because he said ECT had ruined his career by taking away his memory. Do you know what he said?”

  I shook my head.

  “He said, and I quote, ‘Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.’”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, either.

  “He’s not alone, you know. Lots of people with mental illness fear losing their ability to write or create. It seems so unfair to be thrown a choice: more madness or lose the only thing you value.”

  “But Dr. Osborn says ECT really does help some people. The memory loss is temporary.”

  “For most people,” Bradley said. “Osborn your doctor?”

  He asked this in a way that made me feel funny, so I didn’t answer him. Instead I said, “Did you write the poem outside the nursing station?”

  He refused to look at me, but there was an almost imperceptible nod of his head and he went back to scribbling in his book.

  “I liked it,” I said, but he was lost to his writing. Something didn’t quite jibe about his writing, or about him, or both, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I left him then and went back to my room, where I fell asleep. When I awoke I tried to decide whether to go to the spirituality group or cognitive behavioural therapy. I was torn. They were both interesting in their own right, but in the end I opted for the spirituality group because it was less focused and more free flow. As before, the lights had been dimmed around a circle of chairs, though the whiff of incense wasn’t quite as strong this time. Why is it that dim light, the stuff of demons and twilight, can soothe a mind, as well as terrify it? There was no doubt that it was soothing, but so many of my nightmares took place in twilit places of terror. So why was it soothing? Why did cocooning in soft, low light make us feel safe, when in the hands of horror-movie directors it was anything but?

  Austin was already there, head down, tapping his foot to a beat all his own — it certainly wasn’t to the music that was playing. He didn’t look up and so I gave him his privacy and took a seat across from him. The minister came in and gave me a kind smile that was a little bit sad. I wondered yet again what it must be like to try to help the mentally injured.

  Others began to trickle in. Lucy, Leo, then Bradley and Austin, and two other patients I didn’t know, other than seeing them in the hall. Jacques shuffled in and took a seat beside Lucy. Kit came sidling through the door as if it would bite her. She came and sat down beside me, and Lucy smiled at her, the same sad smile that the minister had given to me. The kind of smile that said, everything is okay but everything isn’t, and maybe it will be okay one day, and maybe it won’t.

  The minister went and closed the door and then came back to the circle and sat down. She asked if anyone had anything to say to start the group off. Everybody’s eyes flickered all over the place, but no one said anything. She let the silence grow. I could hear Kit breathing and Jacques’s stomach rumbling. Into the silence Austin said, “Sometimes I don’t know what is real and what is an hallucination.”

  He stared at the minister, daring her to say something. When she didn’t he said, “I keep seeing a woman. She always wears a silk sari that swirls around her in a fluid graceful motion. She is not Indian, but she has long dark hair and dark brown eyes, and she is stunningly beautiful. She holds me under her spell. She never tells me what I should do. She tells me what I shouldn’t have done. I know she is not real, because my friends have told me they can’t see her, but she is real to me. If she let me, I would hug her, but she won’t. And I want to, so much, but she always finds fault with me and keeps me at a distance.”

  He looked around the room at all of us in turn and said, “Each of you has your own little hell. Mine is knowing that there are alien entities out to get me, and my beautiful woman can’t help me. I know this because they communicate with me through my cellphone. And she makes me very anxious by telling me they will get me. But she never says how I can escape.”

  I wondered what the minister was going to say to all this. I knew enough to know that she would have been coached to not support the delusions and hallucinations, but to support the emotions that surrounded them. I had read that somewhere in a book when I was trying to diagnose myself.

  “That must be very disturbing for you,” she said to Austin.

  His mouth fell open and he laughed, and so did Bradley. They played off each other, their laughter cold and sterile and full of hopelessness.

  When Austin finally composed himself he said to the minister, “You’re good at understatement, aren’t you?” He snorted and then added, “Have you any idea of the fear and the terror associated with knowing alien creatures are stalking you? It tears at your guts, strangles your mind, and suffocates your heart. What else is left? It doesn’t matter one whit that you don’t think it’s real — and I know you don’t because I have seen it in your eyes, everybody’s eyes, in fact — because it is real to me and that’s all that counts. It’s as real as all of us sitting here, including my brown-eyed lady.” He looked pointedly at the empty chair beside me and we all followed his gaze.

  “I think maybe I shouldn’t hav
e come.” The voice came from my right. Leo. He was trembling and gripping his knees hard with his bony hands.

  “Are you all right?” asked the minister with some concern.

  “I know that if I believed that aliens were out to kill me, I’d have a panic attack before they could even touch me.”

  “But they aren’t,” said the minister in a firm tone.

  Leo ignored her and looked at Austin. “I would never survive your illness. I’d have a panic attack at the first hallucination. It would kidnap my mind, hold it hostage. And I don’t always need a trigger. The anxiety is paralyzing, physically and emotionally. I can’t think rationally. I can go from being told my girlfriend is going to be late for dinner to thinking, Why is she going to be late? to, Oh, no! Is she meeting someone else? to, Oh, my God, is she cheating on me? to, I don’t want to lose her and I have to stop her at any cost!”

  He stopped suddenly, a look of fear creasing his face. No one spoke, but everyone was thinking about what Leo had said. I couldn’t help but wonder if such intense anxiety could drive a person to do something violent, out of sheer desperation to get rid of the anxiety.

  “At any cost,” repeated Jacques. “Sometimes I think I would do anything to get a drink.” There was a long silence as everyone swung their attention from Leo to Jacques.

  “But you’ve been sober for how long?” asked the minister finally.

  “Two weeks, forty days, what does it matter? It is its own agony. It festers like an open wound in my mind.” He scanned all our faces and said, “Have any of you ever been addicted to anything?”

  I saw Austin squirm and Bradley crossed his arms, hugging his chest. We weren’t supposed to ask questions like that.

  “If you have then you know it is a physical force that takes over your body and your mind. You think, I’ll just have one drink. Can’t hurt. Oh, but it can and it does. Because it feels so good to have a drink, to let all your cares evaporate with the fumes of the liquor or whatever your poison is.”