A Madness So Discreet

by Mindy McGinnis

  Of my new life I will say little and of Thornhollow even less. You know the deal that was struck in order to facilitate my escape, and I fear you disapprove. What then would you think if I were to tell you that I have already proven myself not only useful but also a keen student of this dark enterprise into the criminal mind? I would say that the work is distasteful, but only because that is what you want to hear. In truth I find myself looking forward to the next opportunity to sharpen my skills and must remind myself that in order for that to happen, someone must die. If it was darkness you feared I would turn to while in his employ, fear not. The darkness has long lived inside me, sown if not by my nature then by nurture.

  Grace’s pen faltered as she lingered over the closing. How was she to end a letter written in the sunshine to a man who would receive it in darkness with the death of another still on his breath? She settled for a simple, Always, and left off signing it altogether.

  Even though she was confident that Reed would spirit the letter to Falsteed and it would be destroyed soon after, Grace did not put her name to it. The enclosed letter needed to be written with even greater care, worded so vaguely that curious adults would spot only child’s play.

  Dearest Alice—

  I hope this letter has found you well. You may think it odd to receive a letter from someone you thought no longer existed, but I assure you that imaginary friends never cease to be, even when we have outlived our usefulness. Much like real people, we look for the right time to make ourselves known.

  If you would like to leave a message here for me, the fairies will spirit it away during the night. But remember—fairies can only come when good girls are asleep, so do not watch for them. They shall not come if you do.

  Do not let them tell you I am gone, for I am always here.

  Fair Lily

  Grace signed the name of her sister’s imaginary friend with a relish, using the same loopy scrawl she’d employed when they were younger. Her fingers trailed over the paper, reluctant to fold up and enclose it with Falsteed’s so quickly. That Alice’s small fingers might touch the same place as hers sometime soon left a happiness in Grace’s heart so fragile she refused to examine it more closely.

  Falsteed might deem it too dangerous for her to contact Alice. Reed might refuse the delivery. Rain and sun might ruin the letter before her sister happened upon it. But there was still a chance that she would receive it and find solace from the same hand that had given it so many times before, though she would not know the source. Grace pressed the letter to her heart before folding it, hoping that somehow her unspoken emotions would seep into the paper and flow back out to Alice, even if it was the only reunion the two could ever know.

  SEVENTEEN

  “We got our man. Or rather, they were competent enough to. And it was a woman, after all. So ignore my first statement.” Thornhollow sat on the arm of a chair in his office, staring moodily at the floor by his feet.

  “You don’t seem particularly happy about it,” Grace said, welcoming the freedom to speak after another day of feigned inability. Having Nell beside her made talking unnecessary and walking with Elizabeth usually consisted of companionable silence, both enjoyable in their own ways. But Grace’s voice grew in power every day as she discovered the joys of speaking her mind, and she never missed an evening in Thornhollow’s office to share her opinions.

  “I’m not,” Thornhollow admitted. “How can I teach you anything without a more complex crime than a jealous wife?”

  “Careful what you wish for,” Grace said, thinking of her words to Falsteed in her letter. “That opportunity means someone’s death.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “But we didn’t even get to use the blackboard.”

  “What would you write on it if we had?” Grace asked, carefully handling him as if he were Alice in a fit of pique.

  “Oh, the basics,” he said, lackadaisically rising from his seat, approaching the board, and drawing a neat line down the center of it. “I suppose we can have a lesson even if there is no object at the moment.” On the left-hand side of the board he wrote Planned; on the other, Impulsive.

  “A killer may be able to remove evidence from a crime scene, hide the murder weapon, clean up spilled blood, and take any number of steps necessary to cover their tracks. Yet even by doing this they are giving us clues as to who they are—or rather, who they were.”

  “What do you mean by that? Who they were? Aren’t we more interested in who they are?” Grace asked.

  “We are, all of us, the sum total of our life experience, Grace. Everything that happened to you as a child, from the geography of your birthplace to the social status of your family, even the order of your birth, can be read in your actions today.” Thornhollow tossed the chalk from hand to hand as he warmed up to his topic.

  “If I told you we had a victim who had been stabbed multiple times and there was little blood on the scene or under the body, what would you learn from that?”

  Grace closed her eyes, picturing a faceless body in a dark street, cold hands lying still on the cobblestones that remained clean despite the fact there should be blood spreading. “The body was moved,” she said, opening her eyes.

  “Very good,” Thornhollow said. “But what else?”

  “I . . .” She pictured the scene again but could see no more.

  “Let me rephrase the question—what does the fact that our fictitious body was moved tell you about the killer?”

  Grace again imagined the clean street beneath the hand, so different from the bricks reddening with blood under the man whose wife had killed him. That killer had been in a rage, her passions driving her to murder, and the panic that followed her action chasing her from the scene, unable to hide anything about her identity as she fled.

  “They knew they had to protect themselves,” Grace said slowly. “For someone to move a body indicates a clear head at the time of the crime.”

  “Yes, because the crime itself had been . . .” He pointed at the board, eyebrows raised as he silently asked her to finish his sentence.

  “Planned,” Grace said.

  “And the very fact that it was planned speaks volumes of our killer,” Thornhollow continued. “Years of talking with killers has not only been for conversational purposes, I assure you—although in one or two cases it really was quite pleasant. In speaking with other researchers like myself we’ve all discovered certain patterns that arise so consistently it is hard to explain away.”

  The chalk flashed out words in a column on the left side of the board as he went on. “An organized killer is usually intelligent, has a skilled job, is socially competent—indeed, most of their acquaintances deny it could be them based on how normal they are.”

  “Yet these are all things in their present,” Grace said. “What of your claim that the past has defined them?”

  “It has. As I said, certain themes arise when experiences are compiled. And I can tell you with some certainty that a killer who plans and executes their crime with control of their emotions is an older sibling or only child whose father had a stable job throughout their childhood.”

  “And how does that help you catch them?”

  “In so many ways, Grace. The simple fact of identifying whether the crime was planned or impulsive informs us that we are looking for an intelligent person with a steady job—and by the way, since our fake killer dumped the body it also tells us he is probably familiar with that area. These seemingly small facts narrow the populace of an entire city down to a neighborhood.”

  “And then you can use the assumption that they are an only child to narrow it down still further?”

  Thornhollow clapped his hands together, producing a cloud of chalk dust. “Exactly. Much of what we do can be described as exactly that—a narrowing of the possibilities.”

  “Until we are down to one,” Grace said.

  “Yes. And that process begins with deciding whether our killer is a planner or impulsive. The meticulous nature of the pla
nner can be misleading. If you have a killer who, say, drains the blood from all their victims, or removes the left hand consistently, the untrained want to say they are insane. But the definition of insanity—an inability to use rational thought—immediately precludes that they must, in fact, be sane.”

  “Not an easy thing for the average person to accept,” Grace said. “Most would want to believe that a fellow human being would have to be out of their mind to do such a thing.”

  “But they’re not. Far from it, in fact. Simply using the words sane and insane is a way for the population to draw a safe line through humanity, and then place themselves squarely on the side of the healthy.”

  Grace’s hands went to her temples, where her scars shined brightly. Thornhollow had taken the wrappings off a few days earlier, and the nakedness of her skin against the air had been a relief as well as a shock when she glanced in the mirror. The scars were a price she was willing to pay, but the evidence of the payment had set her back when she first saw them.

  “They will fade,” Thornhollow had said quietly.

  But she knew she would always carry them, and her fingers traced the thin webbing of smooth skin on her temples that would forever mark her as one on the wrong side of that line.

  “So are we really that different? The healthy and the ill?” Grace asked.

  “I would argue there is no difference at all,” Thornhollow said. “To me the insane are simply people who have chosen not to participate in the world in the same manner as the majority, and there are days I wonder if they’ve got the right of it.”

  “You make it sound as if hardly anyone is insane with a definition as narrow as that.”

  “Quite the opposite; my definition is too broad. I think we’re all quite mad. Some of us are just more discreet about it.”

  “Surely there is such a thing as true insanity?”

  “There is,” Thornhollow said reluctantly, “but I would argue those cases are much fewer than most suspect. These walls exist for a reason, but there is no cause for there to be so many rooms inside.”

  “Nell doesn’t belong here,” Grace said, almost to herself.

  “Certainly not,” Thornhollow agreed. “There’s nothing wrong with the girl mentally. Physically . . . well, perhaps she hasn’t told you.”

  “Elizabeth said she’s a syphilitic.”

  “That’s correct.” The doctor nodded. “Which means she receives mercury baths on a regular basis, but that’s something a physician could administer as easily as asylum staff. The true reason for her being admitted here is that she is a young woman who takes an active interest in men and feels no shame in it. The world can’t understand this behavior; therefore the girl must be insane.”

  “And Elizabeth? She believes a string dangles from nowhere beside her ear and whispers things to her.”

  “Highly unlikely. Janey told me that she sees little Lizzie hovering in doorways often. I think she’s highly attuned to detail, much like yourself. She gleans information from people, then picks up some like any busybody. But in her mind she attributes it all to String.” Thornhollow shrugged. “Then again, I could be completely wrong. Who’s to say String isn’t real?”

  “I can hardly agree with that,” Grace said. “I like her quite well, but there’s clearly something wrong with—”

  “With her brain?” Thornhollow interrupted. “What would you say, then, if I told you that I’ve dissected hundreds of brains—of both the sane and insane—and found no difference whatsoever in them?”

  “None?”

  “My brain, and yours, Elizabeth’s, Heedson’s, even our mutual friend Falsteed’s would all look the same if we ever had the opportunity of comparing them. It’s one of the reasons why I have no use whatsoever for phrenology.”

  Grace stifled a yawn. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to explain what phrenology is, Doctor.”

  “No, no. Don’t let me keep you up. I tend to go on once I’ve got my teeth in a subject, and sometimes I forget that my audience may not be as keen as I am on the matter of dissecting brains.”

  Grace glanced at the clock. “Explain phrenology, and then I’ll take myself to bed. I don’t mind being kept up when it’s the only time I am allowed to be myself.”

  “Very well.” Thornhollow returned to the board and drew a caricature of a human head, dividing it into uneven sections with a few slashes of the chalk. “The idea behind phrenology is that the brain is divided into certain parts, each part with a specific purpose. Within these parts are smaller areas that control certain functions that determine your personality.” He made smaller crosshatch marks within the sections.

  “So, for example, in a particularly brave person the part of the brain that handles courage would be overdeveloped. That section would be larger than others, pressing against the skull and reshaping it to create a subtle bump there. The theory is that a person trained in phrenology—as I am—would be able to feel the bumps and ridges of a person’s skull and intimate from them what their characteristics are.”

  “That’s utterly ridiculous,” Grace said. “I’d sooner ask Elizabeth’s string.”

  “And get a more accurate reading,” Thornhollow agreed.

  “Yet you are trained in this pseudoscience. Why?”

  “Because there are those who swear by it. I’ve gained access to a few killers for some stolen moments of questions by offering my services as a phrenologist to law enforcement. Although the vast majority of the people whose skulls I’m brought in to read are thoroughly innocent and utterly terrified of being proved otherwise.”

  “And what do you do then?”

  “Gather information from them, once they’re calm enough to provide it. Analyze the facts, starting with the first and largest step—the one I’ve taught you tonight. As with our made-up killer who planned his crime and dumped the body somewhere familiar to him, I use the crime to paint a portrait of the killer. When faced with an accused innocent, the best possible defense is to find the guilty.” Thornhollow wheeled back to the board, pointing at the series of words he’d written. “That one who . . . I spelled sibling wrong.”

  Grace smothered a smile with her hand.

  “It’s all very well for you,” Thornhollow said irritably as he wiped the offending word away with his sleeve. “You don’t have to be concerned about your intellect slipping.”

  “I very much doubt yours is slipping,” Grace said as he flung himself into a wing chair. “You are simply overtired, as am I.”

  Thornhollow tented his hands over his eyes. “That I am. I can’t serve my new patients if I don’t know anything about them, but their histories make for long and occasionally disturbing reading. What about yourself? How are you finding your new residence?”

  Grace thought for a moment, aware that she could never verbalize the feeling of safety that enveloped her as she slept, the ease of companionship she found even among those who could only stare blankly. “I am content,” she said.

  “Ah, contentment,” Thornhollow said. “A wholly underrated feeling.” His suddenly blank gaze was drawn back to the floor. “Go to bed, Grace. I’ll wake you if there’s a murder.”

  EIGHTEEN

  There was no murder. Not that night, or any of the following. Days stretched into weeks, the fine webbing of skin that knit itself into scar tissue on Grace’s temples softening into a smoothness that her fingers sought out for comfort or while in thought. As a child she had sucked her thumb, and the habit had been hard to break. Her mother had scolded her about ruining the shape of her mouth, but the threats of the future had been nothing against the terror of the present, and young Grace had found solace in the action while harsh words crept down the hallway from her parents’ room.

  In truth, she could easily resort to sucking her thumb again, Grace thought while helping Nell in the garden. No one in the asylum would care at all, shape of her mouth be damned. But touching the smooth flesh of her scars brought its own kind of comfort, and the movement itself be
came an involuntary action when she was deep in thought. The doctor had noticed during their weekly lessons and hadn’t discouraged it.

  “The movement may help you recover information,” he’d said, the third time her hands had gone to her temples the night before.

  “What?” Grace jerked her hands down, distracted. The chalkboard had been cloudy with words: new theories vied for space against old ones, with Thornhollow’s opinions sprinkled liberally between them.

  “Touching your scars,” he explained. “If you perform an action while learning something, re-creating the action may help you recall it later.”

  Her fingers went to them again as she worked beside Nell, heedless of the dirt on her hands. Visually she could recall scenes in intricate detail, but to catalog theories and counterarguments as to their usefulness was a different animal altogether, and she wanted to tame it.

  “Sometimes I can’t keep me ’ands off meself, either, though I’m not usually ’avin’ a go at me own ’ead,” Nell said, playfully bumping hips with Grace.

  Grace pushed back gently, winning a smile from the Irish girl. “You’ve gone an’ muddied up that nice skin of yours,” Nell chided, licking her own thumb and rubbing Grace’s face clean. “Don’t want a pretty lass like ye lookin’ like a field hand when your doctor comes around.”

  Grace grimaced at Nell and shook her head, yanking at a weed with more force than necessary.

  “Dinna worry yerself about it,” Nell said, shaking off the wordless chiding. “Anybody that’s been around the two of ye fer more than five minutes knows there’s nothing between yer bodies. It’s yer own minds that ye each find so fascinatin’, odd as that is.”