The Third Hill North of Town

by Noah Bly

  He said this with as much certainty as he could muster, but in truth he was furious with his staff, and himself, for allowing something like this to happen.

  What a brainless fiasco, he was thinking. What a stupid, careless, miserable fuckup!

  The Bangor State Hospital had recently hired a local remodeling company to spruce up the smudged white walls of the dementia ward. Painters had arrived mid-morning and requested permission to wedge open the fire door for a brief time, to allow them access to their truck and their materials. Two hospital orderlies had been posted—one at the entrance to the corridor that led to the fire door, the other next to the open door itself—to ensure that none of the patients would be able to slip out as the painters unloaded their supplies. The door was open for barely five minutes, and was guarded, and nothing untoward should have happened.

  But it had.

  Deputy Oakley flipped a page in his pocket notebook and scribbled something in it. “So what exactly is this condition of hers?”

  Edgar sighed. “She’s suffering from a severe schizophrenic disorder of some kind, but I fear we haven’t progressed much beyond that in our diagnosis. She’s only been with us for less than a month.”

  Oakley’s pen hovered over the page. “She’s been here for a month and you still don’t know what’s wrong with her?”

  Edgar bridled. “The human psyche isn’t a car engine, Deputy,” he said curtly. “We can’t just pop the hood and poke around with a screwdriver to figure out why things aren’t working.” He settled back in his chair and moderated his tone. “Suffice it to say, though, this is quite serious, and she shouldn’t be out among the general population.”

  He rummaged through his desk drawer for a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Oakley before helping himself. He was running low on cigarettes; the full carton he’d just purchased that morning was now in Julianna’s possession, along with Edgar’s Edsel and several full bags of junk food—the loss of which, incidentally, upset him almost as much as the theft of his car.

  Edgar was a bald, portly man with heavy jowls and a big, bristling mustache; his brown eyes were watery and he had a large mole on his left cheek that looked like a teardrop. His hands were short-fingered and pudgy, but his fingernails were impeccably manicured and the silver cufflinks on his shirtsleeves were polished and elegant.

  Oakley shook his head, declining the offer of a cigarette. “Is she dangerous? What did she do to get put in here?”

  Edgar lit his cigarette before answering. “A few weeks ago she set fire to her neighbor’s garage.”

  The police had found Julianna perched on a log near the twenty-foot-high blaze, her hands held toward the flames as if she were sitting beside a campfire. A box of matches and a can of kerosene were at her feet, and she was humming “Kumbaya.”

  Oakley raised his eyebrows. “On purpose? Why’d she do it?”

  Edgar shrugged. “We don’t know yet. She’s never done anything remotely like that before, and what set her off is a mystery.” He rubbed his ear. “By all reports, Julianna is a lovely person, Deputy. And until a month ago, she was as normal as you or I. But something traumatic appears to have happened to her, and she’s now experiencing a variety of complicated delusions we haven’t been able to control or lessen whatsoever.”

  Even with extremely high doses of Thorazine, he added somberly to himself.

  He lifted a folder from a stack on his desk and opened it. Julianna’s picture smiled up at him from the commitment order signed by her son.

  “For instance,” Edgar continued, “she now believes it’s 1923, and that she’s a fifteen-year-old girl living on a farm in northern Missouri. She has absolutely no recollection of anything that’s happened since she actually was fifteen years old, and if you try to tell her that she’s now a middle-aged grammar school teacher with a grown son and a charming little two-story house in Bangor, Maine, she thinks you’re teasing her, or that you’ve gone crazy yourself.” He took a long, satisfying drag on his cigarette and continued speaking with his lungs full. “She also sees things that aren’t there.”

  Oakley smirked. “Like little green men and flying saucers?”

  Edgar blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling in irritation. “Certainly not. Her delusions are entirely non-bizarre. But she doesn’t really see what’s in front of her. She superimposes images from her past on almost everything and everybody she encounters.” He picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “For instance, she thinks I’m her family doctor from the Missouri town where she was raised, and her son is a blacksmith named Lars Olsen.”

  Gabriel Dapper had come to visit his mother every weekend since she’d been a patient at the hospital. He was a big, gentle man who was devastated by Julianna’s break with reality. She kept asking him about the metal buggy he was building for a mule called Floppers, and whenever he addressed her as “Mom,” she would blush and giggle, and beg him to stop being silly.

  Oakley made a sour face. “Wonderful. So she’s not only a firebug, she’s also a lunatic.” His expression made it clear he believed psychological disturbances only happened to people who lacked moral fiber. “How in God’s name did somebody like that sneak past your orderlies?”

  Edgar’s temper flared again. “This isn’t a homicidal maniac we’re discussing,” he snapped. “Julianna is neither violent nor suicidal, which is why she’s in the dementia ward instead of the insane asylum.” He jabbed a thumb toward the window, indicating the maximum-security wing of the hospital, which was reserved for criminally insane patients. “She needs to be institutionalized, but I assure you she doesn’t require an armed guard and a straitjacket.”

  He knew he sounded defensive, but he couldn’t help it.

  Oakley snorted. “Yeah, she sounds like a real princess.” He jotted something else in his notebook and his voice dropped to a mutter. “I just hope to hell she doesn’t find any fucking matches in your glove box.”

  Edgar glared at the top of Oakley’s head. “As I said before, Deputy . . .”

  Oakley interrupted, still writing. “I believe you were getting ready to tell me how this firebug of yours got past your orderlies.”

  Edgar fell silent. He needed to regain control of this interview, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. He stared out the window at the blue sky and chewed on his lip in frustration.

  “I’m told they thought she was someone else,” he muttered at last.

  Oakley looked up, instantly suspicious. “Come again?” He narrowed his eyes. “Do your orderlies have schizophrenia, too?”

  Edgar took another drag on his cigarette to stall for time. He didn’t want to go into detail about Julianna’s escape with Oakley, because he was quite sure the man would just use it as ammunition against him. Besides, how Julianna had gotten away wasn’t really pertinent to the police investigation; he believed the deputy’s only interest should be in catching and returning her to the hospital.

  Oakley was waiting for an answer.

  Edgar rested his cigarette on the lip of an overflowing ashtray, then opened another drawer of his desk and dug through it until he unearthed a bag of butterscotch drops. A bite or two of something sweet always made him feel calmer when he was under stress, but he only kept a small stash of candy in his office, for fear his staff might suspect him of an eating disorder if they knew how much he craved such things. With a pang he remembered the heaping bags of goodies sitting on the floor of his missing car, and knew if Julianna wasn’t captured soon he would have to return to the grocery store to replenish his dwindling home supply.

  Oakley cleared his throat impatiently.

  Edgar sighed in surrender. He supposed there was nothing else for it but to attempt an explanation.

  What a miserable fuckup, he thought again.

  Coincidence loves insanity.

  Several hours earlier that same morning, Julianna Dapper had risen and breakfasted, then proceeded under supervision to the nurses’ station to get a caplet of Thorazine, just as she’d do
ne each day since her arrival in the dementia unit. A prune-faced intern handed her the medication and a small paper cup with water, then watched as Julianna popped the caplet in her mouth and swallowed. Julianna stopped on her way out the door afterward to admire a potted African violet on the windowsill, just as she had done each morning since being committed to the hospital.

  “Oh, my, you’re a pretty little thing,” she cooed, stroking its leaves and glancing over her shoulder at the intern, who was ignoring her. Julianna continued to caress the plant and her fingers drifted casually to the soil of the pot. “Momma would just love to get her hands on a pretty little thing like you!”

  In truth, the African violet was a marvelous representative of its variety: It had recently nearly doubled in size, seeming to very much appreciate the daily dose of anti-psychotic medicine Julianna had been administering to it for the past twenty-six mornings. Julianna had no idea what the big orange pills they kept giving her were for, but she didn’t feel even the teensiest bit sick and thought it was ridiculous to take something she clearly didn’t need. This being the case, she had just palmed her medication and pretended to swallow it—yet again—in front of the negligent intern, and was now busy planting, with considerable stealth, Thorazine caplet number 27 in the violet’s soil.

  “Ta-ta for now!” Julianna sang to the plant as she successfully finished her morning ritual and departed the nurses’ station. The attendant in charge of escorting patients was at that moment trying to prevent an elderly gentleman from urinating in an ashtray in the waiting room outside the nurses’ station, and Julianna—considered by the hospital staff to be both “high functioning” and “highly cooperative”—was ordered to proceed by herself back to the common room of the dementia unit. Julianna agreed without complaint, skipping out of the waiting room and humming to herself as she entered an empty hallway, delighted to be left to her own devices.

  Finding herself truly alone for the first time in weeks, she slowed to a walk and gazed about her with a puzzled expression. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she didn’t like it; the plain white walls on each side of her made her feel depressed and the reek of ammonia everywhere she turned gave her a headache. An office door that had been left ajar caught her attention, and Julianna ambled over to look into the office thus revealed, noticing at once a bright-green dress, a checkered headscarf, and a white sweater hanging on the coatrack; on the floor next to the rack was a lovely pair of black pumps. She then glanced over at the desk by the door, and happened to see a daily calendar, open to the day’s date. The lettering was large and easy to read (though upside-down from her perspective), and her eyes lingered on the page for nearly a minute.

  “June twenty-third,” she whispered at last, and the quiet syllables seemed to echo off the sterile, cold walls surrounding her. A sudden, imperative desire gripped her.

  Time to go home.

  Without hesitation she stepped into the office, shut the door, and changed into the dress, headscarf, and pumps, believing them to be hers. The pumps were a bit too small, as was the dress, but not terribly so. She exited the office immediately after dressing with the sweater draped over her forearm, hiding her wristband, and she glided smartly down the corridor and vanished around the corner at the precise moment the bathroom door across from the office opened and Nurse Helen Gable appeared.

  This was a bit of good timing for Julianna, but she would not have made it much farther than that were it not for the fact that Nurse Gable wasn’t feeling well that morning. The previous evening she had sought solace in a bottle of tequila, and was dealing with a ferocious margarita hangover. (Binge-drinking was out of character for Nurse Gable, but her nerves had needed calming after a vicious fight with her husband over whose fault it was that Sparky, their beloved guinea pig, had been eviscerated by Plummy, their equally beloved Siamese cat.) No sooner had she emerged from the bathroom than her stomach rebelled again, and she spun around on the spot to scurry back to the toilet.

  Thus occupied, it would be another fifteen minutes before she discovered the formal clothes she had intended to wear to a conciliatory dinner that night with her husband were missing from her office, replaced by a patient’s gown and a pair of institutional white slippers. The gown was folded on a chair, the slippers lined up next to each other on the floor.

  Meanwhile, Julianna rounded the corner to find herself faced with a choice. The hallway to her left was empty and led back to the common area for the dementia ward; the hallway to her right had two orderlies in it, standing guard at each end as three painters laid plastic down on the floor between them. The orderly at the far end of the corridor was next to an open door, with sunlight streaming in behind him.

  Home is that way, Julianna thought.

  She spun toward the sunlight and marched up to the first orderly in her path. She recognized him at once as Clyde Rayburn, her next-door neighbor from Missouri. Clyde could be ill-tempered and bossy, but she knew from experience that if she was pleasant and direct with him—and didn’t allow him to bully her—he could also be quite decent.

  “Good morning,” she sang out, presenting him with her warmest smile. “How are you today?”

  The slouching orderly she had mistaken for Clyde nervously returned her smile, said hello, and told her he was fine.

  Jeptha Morgan was freckled, pimply, and very new to the ward, having started a mere twenty-six hours prior to this encounter. Two weeks earlier—and only a day after dropping out of junior college—he had been fired for lipping off to a supervisor at the Happy Valley Nursing Home (his exact words to his former employer were “Oh yeah? Why don’t you suck my balls?”), and soon thereafter his parents, whom he still lived with, had threatened to expel him from their house if he dared to pull the same kind of stunt here. (His choleric father’s exact words were “Your skinny ass will be out on the street so fast it will make your pointed little head spin around like a fucking Frisbee!”) This being the case, Jeptha had concluded he should play it safe at this new job at all costs, since he had no intention of paying any kind of rent for years to come.

  Jeptha was still meeting the patients in his care, and had not yet been introduced to Julianna. He also didn’t know the administrators in the ward any better than he did the patients, and what he saw as she stood before him was a tall, elegant woman in a stylish green dress who looked nothing like what he believed a resident of a dementia ward should look like. Her manner, too, was purposeful and assured, and he assumed she was somebody important. He straightened up and did his best to appear alert and earnest.

  She indicated the open door at the end of the hall with a nod of her head. “Will I be in the way of these painters if I go out that way?” she asked.

  “Nah, you should be fine,” he said politely. “It’s too bad it’s not open all the time, ain’t it? It’s way closer to the parking lot than the front door is.”

  Jeptha hoped she noticed how well he already knew his way around the place. The best way to climb the hospital food chain ladder, he believed—and to keep his parents off his back—was to kiss the right people’s asses. And this imposing woman, who was now beaming at him in appreciation, was clearly one of the right people.

  Like hell I’ll pay for some shitty little apartment, he thought.

  “Thanks very much,” Julianna said. She stepped past him, keeping close to the wall so as not to disturb the plastic sheet the painters were fussing with. She teased the painters as she passed, inviting them to come put a new coat or two on her house when they’d finished there, and one of them chuckled and said that sounded like a fine idea, if she’d agree to provide the beer. She laughed and promised to do just that.

  And then she was face-to-face with the second orderly, and what should have been the end of her excursion.

  Connor Lipkin was both smarter and more experienced than Jeptha Morgan. In May he had graduated (summa cum laude) from the University of Maine with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and the next fall he had been
accepted at Yale to begin his master’s. Connor had worked at the state hospital in Bangor every summer for the past three years, and his life’s ambition was to be a famous psychologist, just like his hero, Carl Jung. (He even fancied he bore a physical resemblance to Jung, and he cultivated this resemblance as much as he could. The balding head and stocky body came naturally to him, but the thin black mustache and distinctive wire-rim eyeglasses like those Jung had worn as a young man were recent additions to Connor’s developing persona.)

  Julianna’s luck was now bordering on the miraculous, however, because that very morning Connor, who was nearsighted, had gotten his new, Jung-like glasses knocked off and rendered unwearable in a scuffle with an unruly patient. Thus impaired, he was forced to squint in an attempt to get a clear look at her features as she approached.

  Connor had seen Julianna Dapper many times over the last month, but he had never seen her in a formal dress, and from a few feet away her face was still a blur. The ease with which she had passed Jeptha and the painters made him relax his guard, though, more than he would otherwise have done, and gave him no reason to believe she was a patient. After taking into account her height and her checkered headscarf, which he was sure he recognized, he decided this woman coming toward him must be none other than Nurse Gable.

  This initial impression shouldn’t have lasted longer than a moment, of course. And when Julianna finally drew close enough for him to see who she really was, there should have been, by all rights, a much different outcome to the day’s events. But in the split second before Connor’s straining eyes could detect her true identity, yet another quirk of fate came galloping to her aid.

  “Morning, miss,” he said, ducking his head.

  It just so happened that Nurse Gable figured into all of Connor Lipkin’s private sexual fantasies. She was a torment to him, and had been for years. Most of his fantasies were a variation on the same theme: Nurse Gable, in her uniform, massaging his back with her naked feet. He had never seen her naked feet, of course, but he was quite sure they would be large, perhaps even a bit mannish, and high-arched, with finely painted toenails. This secret desire of his made it impossible for him to look the woman in the eye, and so he always ducked his head when he was around her. He was convinced she would see right through him unless he were to keep his head averted in her presence.