“So why wasn’t she?”
The doctor frowned, as if annoyed. “That is a question most appropriately addressed to Mrs. Wyman.”
“But since she is not alive to answer it, I’m asking you.”
“Because Angela was an embarrassment,” Werther replied, even more annoyed. “Because, in certain families, people who go into mental hospitals do not come out. Because Angela could not bring herself to defy that dreadful old woman.”
“Did Angela ever ask to be released?”
“No, she never asked. So in the end, when she could bear it no longer, she ran away. And that was how she died.”
As he spoke the misery in his eyes clarified into what perhaps it had always been—a grieving love that could never be acknowledged, even to himself.
. . . . .
It was December, on the last Friday before Christmas, and the weather reports were full of storm warnings. The last time anyone on the staff saw her alive was at five o’clock when Angela walked Mrs. Linden out to the parking lot, as she did every Friday afternoon, and told her to have a nice weekend. She waved goodbye, smiling. Mrs. Linden didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
Angela did not show up for dinner, but there was nothing unusual about her skipping a meal. She had her own room in the main building and, although she was subject to bed checks, no one looked in on her that night. No one looked in on her most nights. She had been so quiet for so long that most of the staff treated her as one of themselves. It was simply difficult to remember she was a patient.
She might not have been missed before Monday morning, when Mrs. Linden returned, if she hadn’t received a package in the Saturday mail. Someone took it up to her room and noticed that the window had been left open. By the middle of the afternoon they knew she was gone. She had gone over the wall Friday night, a fact confirmed more than a week later by one of the inmates, who had seen her from his second-floor balcony, walking away into the darkness, bundled in a tan shearling coat that reached almost to the ground.
“Are you quite sure it was her?” he was asked.
“Oh yes. I saw her face when she turned to look back at the building. She knew I was there. She meant for me to see her.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m there most nights at about that time, and she knew it. What doesn’t she know, our Angela? If she hadn’t meant to be seen, why else would she have come that way? You’ll never bring her back here.”
And they never did. By late Saturday afternoon a furious snowstorm had developed, the worst anyone could remember that early in the winter—twelve inches in as many hours, and more to come. It was days before anything like an organized search could be mounted. And by then they were pretty sure she was dead.
It stood to reason. There were no reports of any stolen cars, even presuming Angela knew how to drive. The bus only came through Quincy once every three days. You bought your ticket at the drug store, where Mr. Mayfield the pharmacist didn’t recognize her picture. Beyond that, Quincy was the sort of town where strangers were noticed, and there was nowhere else to hide.
That left the hills, which were under waist-high snow by Monday morning, and that was where a troop of cub scouts found her in the late spring.
She was at the base of a sixty-foot cliff, from which she must either have fallen or jumped because her face had been smashed in on the rocks below. Besides, by then the animals had been at her. On the basis of a general physical description, along with the shearling coat, the county coroner made a tentative identification, which was later confirmed by a forensic technician from the FBI, who had been able to take a few fingerprints from the tattered corpse.
“She had not mentioned going home in over a year,” Dr. Werther said. “This alone should have alerted me. Yet I could not disguise my astonishment when she disappeared. She was not a fool, Mr. Kinkaid, and there was a clock radio on the night table in her room. She had heard the same weather reports as everyone else. I can only conclude that she meant to die.”
“Where was she buried?”
“At Sherman’s Crest—they have their own cemetary. She is buried there.”
In a seemingly unconscious gesture, the Doctor brought his right hand up to touch his chest, as if to say, “and here, in my heart.”
20
The next morning Kinkaid did look up the coroner who had performed the initial autopsy, but he wasn’t very helpful.
“She was a mess. The fall just about pulverized her face. She was so broken up there was almost no chance of identifying her through dental records. And the badgers had been at her hands. The FBI man who did the fingerprint work was a genius—he injected the pads with water and managed to get two partials. But it was her, that I can guarantee you.”
He was virtually the only person outside the hospital who had had any contact with Angela, living or dead.
And inside it was not much better. Perhaps it was the isolation, or perhaps it was the nature of the work, but Sherman’s Crest had a high employee turnover. Thus in a mere six years Angela Wyman had faded into legend. Only a few members of the staff had more than heard of her, so Dr. Werther’s version of her death had to stand as gospel.
It wasn’t very long before Kinkaid had run out of people to interview.
“What about the patient who saw her the night she escaped?” he asked Mrs. Linden.
“Jimmy?” There was a certain note of incredulity in her lovely voice. “You want to talk to Jimmy Carfax?”
“Why? Isn’t he here anymore?”
“Oh, he’s here. He’s one of our lifers.” She glanced down and began smoothing away the creases in her skirt, as if conscious of having committed some indiscretion.
“Then can I talk to him?”
Yes, Kinkaid could talk to him, although no one was very enthusiastic about the idea. Jimmy Carfax, it seemed, was one of those inmates who give mental institutions a bad name.
His room—or, rather, his suite of rooms, since he was very comfortably provided for—was in a locked wing of the main building. Dr. Crossman himself accompanied Kinkaid as far as the door, which he opened with his own key. They were met on the other side by a male orderly with a wrestler’s build and crewcut-length blond hair who wore his hospital whites like a combat uniform.
“Vincent here will explain the procedures, Mr. Kinkaid. Be sure you pay attention and you won’t have any problems. Vincent, Mr. Kinkaid would like a few words with Jimmy.”
Vincent nodded and crossed his bulging arms over his chest. He didn’t speak until Dr. Crossman had closed the door behind him, as if that were one of the rules.
“Do you smoke, Mr. Kinkaid?” he asked finally, without any preamble. When Kinkaid shook his head, Vincent seemed to approve. “Good. Then you won’t be tempted into offering Jimmy a cigarette or accepting one of his. Keep your distance and you’ll be fine. I’ll be right outside the door if he gets frisky, but he won’t. He’s vicious, but you’re a grown man and he’s not a fool. He doesn’t like to be hurt. Just remember, don’t give him an opening. Did Dr. Crossman tell you what Jimmy did to get in here?”
“No.”
“When he was fourteen years old he barricaded his sleeping parents into their bedroom and burned the house down around them. Keep it in mind.”
Vincent then led Kinkaid through another door, behind which another muscular orderly was lounging behind a desk, reading a paperback copy of Jane Eyre.
“Everything quiet?”
The man looked up from his book and nodded. “Like in church,” he said.
There was a steel folding chair leaning against the wall, Vincent picked it up and carried it under his arm like a newspaper as they walked down a corridor lined with doors painted a dreadful apple green. Jimmy’s was the last one.
He turned his key in the lock and opened the door a few inches. “Jimmy, you have a visitor,” he shouted. Then he unfolded the chair and sat down.
“Go on in. And remember, I’ll be right outside.�
��
He smiled encouragingly.
The instant he touched it Kinkaid knew that the door was solid metal. It swung noiselessly on its hinges and revealed a room which, save for the metal bars on the outsides of the windows and the smell of cigarette smoke, might have been the bedroom of a twelve-year-old boy. The walls were covered with posters—Spiderman, various rock stars, an unidentified woman in a French wrap swimsuit. On a small writing desk at the foot of the bed was a high-end Macintosh computer and several boxes of game software. From the ceiling were suspended by fishing leaders perhaps twenty model aircraft, each swaying and turning at a slightly different rate, depending on their relative size and their distance from the air-conditioning vent.
But the person who was seated at a polished teak worktable, putting together the pieces of an intricate appearing replica of an antique plane, was not twelve, for all that the look on his face expressed an oblivious concentration that normally does not last very far into adolescence. This person was in late middle age, with gray, riverboat-gambler sideburns, rectangular eyeglasses with thick lenses and the build of a sumo wrestler gone to the bad.
He was immense. His face was so bloated with fat that the lobes of his ears were pushed out at nearly right angles. His eyes seemed lost in their sockets, so that it was difficult even to tell their color. He must have weighed more than three hundred pounds—he seemed half crushed by his own weight, so much so that even across the room one could hear his labored, wheezy breathing. His fingers were so thick that Kinkaid was astonished by the delicacy of his movements as he fitted the tiny landing gear to the undersides of the right wing.
There was a cane, made of dark wood and at least an inch thick, leaning against the edge of the table. Clearly moving around such a vast bulk required assistance.
“Mr. Carfax—Jimmy.” Kinkaid waited eight, perhaps ten seconds, until he saw the man’s head jerk up, as if he had been startled from a trance. “I wonder if I could speak with you.”
“You’re the lawyer,” Jimmy answered in a lisping, childlike voice. “You’re the one who’s been nosing around about Angel.”
Then he smiled. He tilted his head back slightly, so that the lenses of his glasses glared yellow from the overhead lights, and smiled in triumph. That’ll teach you, the smile said.
“You’ve caused a lot of excitement,” he went on. “I’ve heard all about you. I hear everything. But I’m forgetting my manners. Please, sit down.”
Aside from the one taken up by Jimmy, which was really a sort of bench, there were two other chairs in the room, a matched pair with no armrests and a seat upholstered in red leatherette. One was beside the door and the other was across the table from Jimmy himself and therefore within reach of the cane, should he decide to pick it up and use to crack his visitor’s skull. The choice was important apparently, a test of sorts, since Jimmy had studiously avoided indicating which chair he meant Kinkaid to occupy.
Kinkaid took the one next to the table.
“You look nervous, Counselor. Did they tell you that I bite?”
“They told me all kinds of things,” Kinkaid answered, with a brief smile.
“Well, every word of it is true. I’m afraid I was always something of a problem child—at least before I turned into such a wreck. Have a chocolate?”
Jimmy picked up a rectangular box, about two inches deep, and held it out to Kinkaid. Of the few remaining pieces most had already been chewed at and left for dead.
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
“You’re sure?” He shook the box, making the empty paper doilies rustle dangerously. “See’s. They’re not available around here, but I have three pounds flown in from California every week—a friend of mine put me onto them. I like the caramels best. Oh well . . .”
He set the box down again and immediately reached down to open a drawer that was out of Kinkaid’s line of sight. He came up again with a pack of cigarettes and a butane lighter. There were two large ashtrays on the table and they were both nearly full.
“I’m not supposed of have these,” Jimmy said. “At first they were afraid I’d burn the place down, which was just a little unreasonable of them, but now they’re only worried about the state of my lungs. So I’m forbidden to smoke. But, you know, it’s a funny thing—you leave a twenty-dollar bill out in plain sight in the morning and by the afternoon there’ll be a carton of Carlton menthols hiding under your pillow.”
He smiled again, not very nicely. He wanted it understood that he was in control here.
“Did you know Miss Wyman well?”
The question seemed to amuse him. The eyeglasses began flashing again as he shook his head.
“It’s a tough question, Counselor. The answer is, not as well as I would have liked to but better than anyone else around here. Or maybe anywhere else, for that matter. Angel wasn’t the confiding type, but I think we understood each other.”
“Tell me about her?”
“Tell you what, Counselor?”
“Anything you like, provided it’s the truth. And my name is Kinkaid. James Kinkaid.”
“Same as me—isn’t that sweet.” He laughed, making a kind of gurgling sound deep in his chest, and then stopped short, as if he had just remembered something.
“But wait a minute. There was another lawyer named Kinkaid, if memory serves. Came around every few years to check on Our Lady of Transcendant Psychosis. Any relation?”
“The name of the firm is ‘Kinkaid & Kinkaid’. We represented the Wyman family.”
“Past tense? Did they fire you?”
“There aren’t any left.”
“Aren’t there now. Then what are you doing here?”
The smile on Jimmy Carfax’s broad, rubbery face seemed to stretch the skin so tight that he looked in danger of splitting straight across from ear to ear. Did he want an answer or was he just seizing an advantage?
“A little unfinished business,” Kinkaid said, making it clear that that was all the information he was prepared to give.
But it seemed to be enough. Jimmy finally lit his cigarette, giving the impression he had lost interest in everything else.
“I sometimes wish I hadn’t killed the folks,” he breathed out with his first puff of smoke. “Then I could have been a lawyer. It would have been so gratifying to a nature as vicious as mine.”
“When you saw Angela that last time, did you know what she intended to do?”
“To escape? Oh yes! I can’t think why, though. This place is paradise.”
“Apparently she didn’t agree.”
“Well, Angel’s was a rather complicated nature. Not like me. I’m a simple soul who lives for pleasure. I get all my toys through the magazines, and UPS Ground will see to it that I don’t perish from hunger. Cigarettes and sex I can get without leaving the room—the staff here is very obliging. What more could you ask for? Pure bliss. I knew it would be like this when I torched my parents.”
“We were talking about Angela.”
“Well, maybe you were . . . .”
Jimmy snorted with laughter and waggled his head from side to side, just to prove he was only having his little joke. His enjoyment of it was somehow a profoundly repulsive spectacle.
“Yes yes, all right. I’ll be good,” he went on at last, after his amusement had worn a bit thin. “Yes well, Angel, silly girl, wanted out.”
“Did she ever tell you that?”
“Oh good heavens no! She wasn’t the chatty sort. And, besides, she didn’t like me.”
He pretended to be hurt by this and stuck out his lower lip in a pout, causing his massive, bloated face to sag like bread dough hung over a stick. Kinkaid tried his best to ignore it.
“Then how do you know?” he asked.
“How do you know that Pee Wee Herman is queer? You just know. Besides, nobody is that goody goody unless they want to bolt.”
Kinkaid raised his eyebrows, as if acknowledging the justice of the observation. It was, in fact, a good point, but that didn�
��t really matter. What mattered was that Jimmy Carfax was more than a little vain about his insight into the Human Condition. What mattered was to keep him talking.
“Was she that? Goody goody, I mean . . .”
“Oh God, yes! She had them all fooled—listening to the staff around here, you’d have thought she was Mother Teresa and Grace Kelly, all rolled up into one. But inside, where they couldn’t see, she was coiled like a spring.”
“But she didn’t have you fooled.”
“Not me, the little precious. But it takes one to know one.”
“One what?”
“I think you know what, Counselor. That’s why you’re here.”
The cigarette was nearly finished so Jimmy stubbed it out in the ashtray, somehow giving the impression that he had grown disappointed with it. Then he sagged ponderously to one side to retrieve his cane, which he then laid across the table, within easy reach. He sat quietly, his hands folded across his belly, his tiny eyes narrowed in speculation, as if interested to see how the implied threat would be received. When it was ignored he seemed to lose interest.
“You don’t spook easily, Mr. Kinkaid,” he went on at last, in the tone of someone making a perfectly neutral observation. “Would it surprise you to learn that most people are frightened of me?”
“No, that wouldn’t surprise me.”
“What frightens you? Death? Disgrace? The truth?”
“All three.”
Jimmy Carfax seemed to consider this answer for a moment, and then he nodded.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said, his gaze fixed on a point just above Kinkaid’s right shoulder. “Once there was a delightful young lady named Angel who got a trifle excited one night and slammed her grandmother around a little—or so my snitches tell me. And for this offense they dumped her in the loony bin, not just for a while but for life. Do you like that story, Mr. Kinkaid? No? Neither do I. It seems a bit excessive, doesn’t it. I mean, after all, whose grandmother could be that much of a bad sport? You know what I think our Angel did to get herself put away here? I think she whacked somebody.”
Angel Page 20