“That’s the nut house, ain’t it?” he asked and then, after a second’s reflection, looked embarrassed. “Sorry—you got anybody up there?”
“No. It’s strictly business.”
“Well, I hear it’s a nice place.”
“That’s what I hear too.”
Indeed, it lacked nothing on the point of location. As he drove along the winding, single lane road that was Route 23, with its quaint covered bridges over streams that flowed fast through rock-walled gorges, Kinkaid had to think that, if you had to build a private mental hospital, this was the place to build it. The scenery was pretty, which could be thought to have some therapeutic value, and the patients, with whatever bad habits that rendered them intolerable at home, were safely out of the way. Some people, it appeared, were better loved at a distance.
The hospital occupied about forty acres and nothing could be seen from the road except what nature and the landscapers had put there. The property was fenced with chain link, but there were plenty of trees around to render the few strands of angled barbed wire both partially invisible and completely useless. The gatehouse was manned by a single guard armed only with his uniform. There were girls’ schools with better security.
Kinkaid gave his name and waited to be checked through. He was expected. The guard told him that Reception was straight ahead.
The road rose for about a hundred yards, crested the top of a slight hill, and then dropped back down, with the effect that the hospital buildings themselves seemed to pop up in front of you like cutouts in a children’s book. A couple of the outlying structures were of brick and reasonably nondescript, their function betrayed only by the fact that the windows were set so high up in the walls, but the main unit, which dated back to the Civil War, was entirely of limestone and about as cheerful as a Norman fortress. This was where the public relations stopped. This was not Club Med, but a prison.
Since it was a weekday, there was plenty of room in the guest parking lot. Kinkaid nosed into a space, locked the car and walked up the broad stone steps to the main entrance.
The interior of the building gave a completely different impression. The lobby was comfortably, even expensively furnished and bathed in natural light that came in through windows which were by no means obvious from the outside. As he was looking around, a woman of about fifty wearing an incongruously pretty dress came out of nowhere and asked in the sweetest voice if there was anything with which she could help him.
“I have an appointment with Dr. Crossman,” he answered, smiling in spite of himself. “My name is Kinkaid—James Kinkaid.”
A moment later a hearty, white-haired man in a blue suit, who somehow reminded one of a college president, came out and seized him by the hand.
“Mr. Kinkaid, it’s a pleasure. If you’ll just come this way. I’m Crossman.”
The hospital director had a large, cluttered office with built-in cherry-wood bookcases. He motioned Kinkaid to a large chair upholstered in crushed purple velvet and then sat down himself behind a desk the size of a billiard table. For a moment he said nothing, merely smiled beatifically, and then the woman with the sweet voice appeared once more as if she could materialize out of thin air.
“Coffee?” Crossman asked, without taking his eyes from Kinkaid’s face. “Or perhaps you would prefer tea.”
“Tea, thanks.”
“Mrs. Linden?”
It took Mrs. Linden no more for than thirty seconds to return with a small silver tray bearing two cups, one of which she put on the director’s desk and the other on a small table at Kinkaid’s right hand. Then she vanished soundlessly.
Crossman took a sip from his cup, seemed to approve it, and then put the cup back down with a ceremoniousness that just missed seeming ludicrous.
“You’ve come about the Wyman case,” he said, as if to remind Kinkaid of the fact. “It was a little before my time—I came here four years ago—but I’ve read the case history. A sad business. I take it you represent the family.”
In the center of the ink blotter on his desk was a gold, thin-barreled pen, the kind that work perfectly well as pens but are essentially symbolic. Crossman was rolling it back and forth under the tips of his fingers, as if he enjoyed the feel of it. Possibly he just wanted his visitor to notice it was there.
“The Kinkaids have represented the Wymans for four generations.”
Kinkaid allowed himself a slight nod and waited. Yes, the good doctor swallowed it. He even liked it, the way he liked expensive pens and rich patients with Anglo-Saxon names. And he was sufficiently impressed that he didn’t notice the evasion.
“Then what can I do for you?”
As a small test of a compliance that came just a shade too quickly, Kinkaid let his response hang fire for three or four seconds. He did not reply, he did not shuffle in his briefcase for papers. He did nothing.
It was an old lawyer’s trick, one to which a psychiatrist with decades of experience should have been impervious, but it worked.
The eyes were what betrayed him, their almost imperceptible waver, even as Dr. Crossman continued to smile. They betrayed an anxiety, a protective reflex, a desire to conceal something. They betrayed the fact that there was something to conceal.
“Before my time . . .” Yes, he wanted to shield the hospital, but he couldn’t resist the impulse to distance himself from any blame. That made sense now.
So there was a secret about the Wyman case—a small scandal.
Kinkaid now had his edge.
“Doctor,” he began, with a kind of ponderous gravity that he knew from experience guilty souls found unsettling, “There are points about the death of Angela Wyman—indeed, about the whole of her time at Sherman’s Crest—which need to be clarified.”
He smiled, knitting his fingers together over his chest, conveying the impression that, really, nothing needed clarifying because everything was known in advance, that he, James Kinkaid, Esq., had both the hospital and Dr. Edmund L. Crossman firmly in his grasp but that he was prepared, under the right circumstances, to show mercy. On the whole, he thought it one of his better performances.
“It was, as you say, a sad business, Doctor, but we live in an imperfect world. Everyone recognizes that, and no one wishes to be vindictive. All anyone wants is to arrive at something like the truth.”
“The truth?” Crossman shook his head and allowed himself one brief, voiceless syllable of laughter. “I’m under the impression that the truth was pretty well established at the time. No one saw fit to question the coroner’s verdict . . .”
“No one questions it now.”
“Then what . . ?”
He looked genuinely bewildered and Kinkaid could hardly blame him. The lawyer for the family of a long-dead patient arrives and, as the administrative head of a hospital, Crossman is certainly prepared for the possibility of a malpractice suit. Yet at once the threat of litigation is withdrawn. Not absent, since it would not do to make anyone too comfortable, but certainly placed at a distance. Of course the doctor is surprised. Perhaps, since everyone loves a little excitement, and since the implied malpractice did not take place on his watch, he is even a trifle disappointed.
Well, just maybe another kind of melodrama can supply its place.
“I take it, Doctor, that you never met Mrs. Wyman.” Kinkaid smiled, as if on the verge of sharing a professional confidence.
“You mean the mother?”
“No, the grandmother.” He spread his hands, seeming to measure the distance between them. “The mother died in Paris the year of Angela’s admission—we know nothing of any father. Mrs. Wyman took the girl in, but she never publicly acknowledged the true character of the relationship. Tell me, do you have any record that she ever visited her granddaughter here?”
There was a table against the wall directly behind Dr. Crossman’s desk. Kinkaid had noticed it when he first entered the room because it was littered with thick manila file folders, and, as he had hoped, the doctor now swiveled around
in his chair and picked up one of them. Without thinking about it, without ever realizing the crucial significance of his act, he had entered into the conspiracy. He was now sharing information.
He placed the folder in the middle of his desk blotter and opened it. Kinkaid’s heart nearly stopped when he saw the photograph of Angela stapled to the inside cover.
“No, there is no record of the grandmother on any of our lists.” He paused, and flipped back to the first page. “Now here’s something interesting. The commitment forms were signed by a lawyer—a James Kinkaid.”
Kinkaid smiled. He felt a sickening giddiness spreading through his chest, but he smiled.
“My late father,” he said. “The third of four generations.”
“Yes, well . . . it appears that our patient was better served by her lawyer than by her own family, since he seems to have been her sole contact with the outside world. We have him down for three visits, spaced at yearly intervals.”
“It is probable that, aside from Mrs. Wyman herself, he was the only person who even realized Angela was here.”
It was too much. It was simply too much. Although he continued to smile blandly, Kinkaid could feel the sweat beginning to break out on his face. He felt as if he were about to fall out of his chair.
And yet he went on. Somehow, he contrived to go on.
“In fact it has only been quite recently, since Mrs. Wyman’s own death, that what happened to Angela has come to light. I didn’t go into partnership with my father until a few years ago, so I myself knew nothing of it until I began to review Mrs. Wyman’s papers . . . .”
There was a look that floated briefly across Dr. Crossman’s face, something almost like suspicion, to which Kinkaid responded with a faint shrug.
“I was still in college when Angela first came here, Doctor, and by the time I took my law degree she had already been dead for a year. Wyman family business is important to us. And Wyman family secrets are protected. On a matter as sensitive as this my father wouldn’t have told me any more than I needed to know, which, as it happened, was nothing.”
“Why?” Crossman smiled with a certain faint malice. “Are you indiscreet?”
“No—and neither was my father.”
The doctor seemed to consider this for a moment, as if unsure whether to feel rebuffed or reassured. The issue was still in doubt when he spoke again.
“And now you serve another Wyman,” he said. “One with presumably different interests?”
“All Wymans are interested in discretion,” Kinkaid answered, having chosen to interpret the question as something different. “I am here for no other purpose than to clarify the history of Angela’s last few years of life. I have no desire to achieve that end by turning this into a court case, and if I have your coöperation I will gladly provide you with written assurance that nothing I learn here will find its way into any civil action taken against Sherman’s Crest, by the Wyman family or by anyone else. That amounts to as comprehensive a guarantee as I am legally entitled to give you.”
That was it. He had shot his bolt, and now all he could do was to sit back and see if his promise of immunity—and the implied threat that it contained—would be enough.
Crossman began rolling the gold ballpoint pen beneath his fingers again, which presumably meant that he was thinking the offer through. Then suddenly he picked up the pen and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.
“There is, of course, the question of patient confidentiality,” he said at last.
Kinkaid forced himself to keep from smiling, because he knew now that he had won.
“If I speak to Angela’s doctor I’ll abide by any restrictions he puts on the conversation.” He shook his head, seeming to dismiss the very idea that he would intrude further. “You can remove whatever you think proper from her records before you show them to me. Beyond that, it might be useful if I talked to some of your hospital personnel. The last thing I want, Doctor, is to cause any awkwardness, either for you or for your hospital.”
“Well, in that case . . .” Crossman reached over to his telephone and pressed a button. Almost at once Mrs. Linden came soundlessly back into the room, and he turned to her with his college president’s smile.
“I wonder if you’d be good enough to take Mr. Kinkaid in charge? See to it that he has everything he wants.”
18
Marshal Cheffins must have driven straight on through the night, because Angela Wyman was admitted at five-ten on the morning of Friday, May the 11th. He let a couple of orderlies deal with the patient. He didn’t come inside, so no one remembered him except as a man sitting in a dark car. No one could remember whether or not he had been wearing a policeman’s uniform. Somebody brought him a cup of coffee and eventually somebody had to be sent out to fetch the keys to the handcuffs Angela was wearing, but it was raining heavily that morning so no one was inclined to be especially curious.
Mrs. Linden, however, remembered the lawyer quite well.
“Your father struck me as a very refined sort of person,” she told Kinkaid, ten years after the event. “He seemed genuinely distressed about the girl.”
“What did he say had happened?”
“I’ve no idea, but it ‘ll be in the admitting physician’s notes. Angela never said and, of course, I never asked.”
The case file, which was about an inch and a half thick, was resting on the table between them. They were sitting in the Records Room, where the walls were lined with similar thick manila folders, hundreds of them. They were quite alone, and the sense of isolation was heightened by the presence of so many chronicles of misery.
“You got to know her then?”
“Oh yes! Quite well.” Mrs. Linden, whose beautiful voice was capable of the most subtle shades of emphasis, seemed surprised by the question. “She worked for me, here in Records, for two years. She was such a perfect young lady . . .”
But it was a very different Angela Wyman who arrived in the driving rain that May morning. “Subject unresponsive” was the laconic note on the admission form. “Vital signs normal. No restraints required.”
She was sitting on the back seat of Marshal Cheffins’ car, wrapped in a blanket, and she had to be carried inside. It wasn’t until the beginning of the physical examination that anyone noticed she was handcuffed.
“Responsible party (J. Kinkaid, Esq., family attorney) states that subject violently attacked her grandmother, lapsing into present catatonic state almost immediately afterward.”
The signature on the report was indecipherable, but when Kinkaid showed it to Mrs. Linden she recognized it at once.
“That would be Dr. Meckler,” she said. “He was on the night shift here until he got his practice established over in Rutland.”
“Was he a psychiatrist?”
Mrs. Linden shook her head. “No—I believe he was a dermatologist.”
There was no further notation in the case file for nearly two weeks.
“Is that usual?”
“Oh yes. She was on the wards. Unless there’s something urgent, the doctors like to give a patient some time just at first.”
“Is that policy?”
“It’s the general practice.”
“On what sort of ward?”
At first Mrs. Linden seemed puzzled by the question, and then unsure if perhaps she shouldn’t be offended.
“I mean,” Kinkaid went on, when he perceived the danger, “do you have a particular ward to which you assign new patients?”
“Oh no! Why ever would we do that?” She laughed faintly, having decided at last to be amused. “We always have a number of patients in Angela’s condition.”
Angela’s condition, as defined by a specialist in cold sores sometime in the small hours of the morning, just as he was finishing his shift and beginning to look forward to a twenty-mile drive through the rain. If the diagnosis was correct it would have been purely by accident, but it was enough to get her shipped off to some gulag full of wallflowers where,
if she wasn’t crazy already, she would have learned her trade fast enough. The goods were labeled and put away, warehouse style. This was how you ran a hospital from which nobody was ever expected to come home.
But eventually, one assumed, a less preliminary diagnosis would have been attempted. Kinkaid flipped through the case file, finding the same signature, large and easy to read, on page after page: M.L. Werther.
“Dr. Werther treated her?”
“Yes—I believe for the entire time she was here.”
“Would it be possible to speak to him this afternoon?”
“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Linden shook her head, as if she were breaking the news of someone’s death. “Dr. Werther is retired.”
“To Florida?”
“Good heavens, no!” Once again she offered a specimen of her breathless laughter. “I saw him just the other day at the Food Mart.”
Careful to try no one’s patience, Kinkaid left the hospital at five and drove the half-dozen or so miles back to Quincy, the nearest settlement, which consisted of a single main street and, if the road atlas was to be believed, some six hundred souls.
Once in his room at the Whisper Quiet Motel, he covered about three pages of a yellow legal pad with notes—people get nervous watching a lawyer take notes and, besides, you miss too much of the unspoken side of a conversation if you’re busy writing it down, so Kinkaid had trained himself to listen and wait. When he was finished he decided he was hungry.
The motel only had a Coke machine, but the manager directed him to a restaurant called the Surf ‘N Turf. “You drive straight through town, take the bridge over the river, and it’s just about the last building on your left. The steaks are pretty good, but stay away from the seafood.”
“How far is it?”
“Maybe half a mile.”
Kinkaid decided to leave his car in the parking lot and walk.
It was depressing to eat alone. Once you had read the menu, which came with a tassel but consisted of only two pages, one for meat and one for fish—and on the principle that it is always wise to follow local advice Kinkaid didn’t even glance at the fish side—there was nothing to do except eat. The restaurant was surprisingly large, which somehow made it worse.
Angel Page 18