An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)

by P J Parrish

  Rodney’s voice wavered when he spoke. “I was eleven when it happened, away at Cranbrook. The director took me out into the hall and said I had to go home. No one would tell me what happened. Finally, Mother told me my father had a heart attack. She was lying, of course. But I didn’t find out the truth until a week later when I heard the servants talking about having to clean up the mess in the basement.”

  Rodney shook his head slowly. “He’s exiled, like Claudia. Buried in some cemetery way up near Port Huron instead of at St. Paul’s. To this day, Mother still insists he died of a heart attack.”

  His eyes came up to Louis’s face. “I don’t have many memories of him, that’s the hard part. The vacation house in Saugatuck, he took Claudia and me there in the summer, and I remember skipping rocks on the lake and him playing a ukelele on the porch.”

  Rodney sighed. “I suppose that’s a better memory than Claudia had.”

  “Because she was so much younger?” Louis asked.

  “No,” Rodney said. “Because she was the one who found him. Found him lying here, dead. She was only five.”

  Louis looked back at the floor, watched the wine trickle into the drain.

  “I believe that’s when it started,” Rodney said. “When she began to crack.”

  Louis was quiet.

  “Mother never took her to any doctors,” Rodney said. “Claudia grew up hearing Mother’s lies about the heart attack, but having another completely different memory of her own.”

  “Let’s go back upstairs,” Louis said.

  Rodney didn’t move. “I thought when she went to Hidden Lake, I thought maybe she would get the help she needed. I thought she would get better.” Rodney’s voice cracked, then dropped to a rasp. “Instead she got worse.”

  Louis thought about what he knew about the hospital. What he had read in Claudia’s patient file about the drugs, treatments, and burns. A part of him thought Rodney should know about it, but it seemed cruel to tell him now. But what was more cruel? Letting him spend the rest of his life blaming himself, like Phillip?

  “It’s not your fault,” Louis said.

  “What do you mean?” Rodney said. “I turned my back on her. It’s all my fault.”

  Louis pulled in a breath. “I need to tell you some other things, things that happened to her while she was in Hidden Lake.”

  Rodney took an unsteady step back, then stopped, his gaze coming up to Louis in slow motion. Louis tried to read the look, hoping to see some strength in Rodney’s eyes.

  “Tell me,” Rodney said.

  “Let’s go back upstairs.”

  “Tell me.”

  Louis started with the treatments. Rodney stood perfectly still, arms at his side, listening. As Louis moved onto the rapes and the burns, Rodney’s face started to change, the twisted look of disgust hardened to horror. Then, suddenly, anger.

  Rodney spun away, throwing the bottle. It crashed somewhere in the darkness. Louis reached for him, but Rodney threw off his hand, bolting toward the wine cellar. But then he spun back.

  “Get out!” he shouted.

  “Rodney.”

  “Get the hell out of my house!” Rodney came to him, pointing to the stairs.

  In the dim light, Louis could clearly see his face. Tears lined his cheeks. He was afraid to leave him like this.

  “Get out. Get out now!” Rodney screamed.

  Louis started to the stairs, then turned to look at Rodney. He had disappeared into the wine cellar. A second later, he came out carrying a bottle and the corkscrew. He walked to the center of the basement, then half fell to the floor. He sat there on the wet floor, then slowly began to wind the corkscrew down into the top of the bottle.

  Louis watched him for a moment more, then went up the stairs.

  CHAPTER 28

  Louis sat in the Impala, motor running, heat on high. He had arrived at Hidden Lake at 7:45 to wait for Dr. Seraphin. Through the foggy windshield, he watched a couple of security officers coming across the grass. They wore black rain slickers and hats netted in plastic and they gave him a nod as they passed.

  On the drive over, he had considered confronting Dr. Seraphin about his theory that Claudia had been murdered and the hospital had covered it up. But he knew she would only deny it and he would end up losing her as an ally. She was the only one who could get him suspects quickly. He had to keep her on his side—at least for now, until he had something concrete. Then maybe he could convince Rodney to go after her and Hidden Lake.

  Headlights shimmered in the mist. They grew larger, then cut off as Dr. Seraphin’s Volvo cruised to a stop next to him. Louis gave her a moment, then grabbed the envelope with the crime scene photos and an umbrella and got out.

  Dr. Seraphin’s driver threw open his door and walked around to the passenger door, popping open an enormous black umbrella. Dr. Seraphin stepped out under it and looked at Louis. Her hair was slightly softer—the tiny spikes lying almost flat. And she wasn’t wearing her usual expensively tailored clothes. Instead, she wore a waist-length jacket of red leather and jeans with a razor-sharp crease.

  “Good morning, Mr. Kincaid,” she said.

  “Good morning, Doctor.” He had to struggle to keep his voice neutral.

  Dr. Seraphin started across the grass toward E Building. Her driver kept a steady pace next to her, his thick hand holding the umbrella as his eyes were roaming the grounds. At first Louis thought he was taking in the creepiness of the asylum as most did when they saw it for the first time. But there was something else. He had a tight walk and the alert eyes of a cop or a security officer. Or, more likely, a bodyguard. Suddenly Louis was sure that’s what he was. He wondered whom Dr. Seraphin felt she needed protection from. Muggers? An ex-husband? Former crazy patients? A murderer and rapist?

  “Have you told anyone we’re here?”

  “No, ma’am,” Louis said.

  She dug into her purse, withdrew a small handkerchief, and patted the spray of rain from her face. Her eyes drifted over the buildings and he knew she had to be full of memories right now. It occurred to him that she probably lived with some pretty strange images, just as he did in some ways.

  “It’s not so pretty anymore,” she said.

  “Nothing like that nice postcard of yours,” Louis said.

  She pointed to the scrubby brush that fringed the far trees. “There used to be rows and rows of lilacs that were bright purple in the summer, and you could smell them from anywhere on the grounds.” She sighed. “Well, let’s get this over with.”

  As the red brick of E Building took shape in the mist, Dr. Seraphin paused. She was staring at the young security officer standing on the steps.

  “You said no one would see me,” she said.

  “I can’t do anything about him,” Louis said. “We suspect the killer goes in and out of E Building, and we keep someone here all the time.”

  Dr. Seraphin did not move.

  “He won’t even care who you are, Doctor,” Louis said.

  She continued forward. Louis stepped ahead of her and pulled out the Ardmore badge, even though he and the guard knew each other by name.

  “Good morning, Zeke,” Louis said.

  “Morning, Mr. Kincaid.”

  “We need to look around inside,” Louis said.

  Zeke unlocked the door and stepped aside. “You going to be here long?” he asked.

  “A while,” Louis said.

  “Can I take a few minutes to go get some coffee? I’ve been out here in the cold for a while now.”

  “Sure,” Louis said, glancing at Dr. Seraphin. “Go ahead.”

  Zeke handed him the keys. “If you leave before I get back, lock up and leave the keys with the guys over in the admin building.”

  Zeke walked off and Louis let Dr. Seraphin and her driver go in ahead. She stopped in the foyer, her shoulders rising and falling with a deep sigh.

  “I should have warned you,” Louis said. “The upstairs has been vandalized, too.”

 
; “It looks like the staff just abandoned it.” She shook her head and moved down the hall, her heeled black boots clicking on the terrazzo floor. Then she turned back to her driver.

  “Oliver,” she said, “why don’t you check out the building while we do this?”

  Oliver hesitated, either miffed to be asked to act as a security guard or because he didn’t want to leave her. But he finally turned and started up the staircase, the same one Alice had taken Louis up.

  Dr. Seraphin and Louis moved on to the records room and unlocked the door.

  She stared at the stacks of boxes. “I had no idea there would be so many,” she said softly.

  “We think he may have raped as early as 1959, so we start there.”

  “And you’re basing that on what this Millie Reuben told you?”

  “Actually, no,” Louis said. “We’re basing it on Claudia DeFoe’s file.”

  Dr. Seraphin’s eyes swung to his face. “Claudia DeFoe? The woman whose remains are missing?”

  “Yes,” Louis said. “Millie Reuben told me about isolation periods and said that’s when she was raped. Claudia was also isolated three times, the first in 1959. When she was returned to the general ward afterward, she was listed as having burn marks on her.”

  Dr. Seraphin studied him for a moment. “Tell me, were you able to determine why Miss DeFoe was put in isolation?”

  “No,” Louis said. “Maybe you can tell me why these women were isolated for months at a time.”

  Dr. Seraphin stiffened her jaw. “Did you drag me out here to question the way I practiced psychiatry three decades ago?”

  Louis hesitated. “No, I’m sorry. I was just curious as to the reasoning at the time.”

  She relaxed some, but she still took her time answering. “There would have been two reasons,” she said. “One would have been for safety. Certain people were isolated after an incident of violence against another patient or staff member.”

  “And the other reason?”

  “It was something new I was trying with the patients suffering from severe depression,” she said. “They were isolated in an effort to gain their total dependency. Once we had that, we treated them with various stimulation therapy.”

  “And drugs?”

  “To keep them calm, yes.”

  “Sounds rather superficial.”

  “It was,” Dr. Seraphin said. “But the idea was to try to teach the brain to process images and emotions differently, not unlike today’s theories of positive thinking.”

  “Did you see any success in it?”

  “Some,” Dr. Seraphin said. “But we didn’t know then that depression is a chronic chemical deficiency. Nowadays, very few need inpatient treatment and most live perfectly normal lives with Prozac and its sister drugs.”

  Dr. Seraphin fell quiet, but she didn’t look away from him and he had the feeling there was something she had left unsaid and he thought he knew what it was.

  “Doctor, you remember Claudia DeFoe, don’t you?”

  Dr. Seraphin drew a shallow breath. “Yes. I knew the name that first day you walked into my office. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t really tell you anything then.”

  “Can you now?”

  Dr. Seraphin looked up at him. “I will only tell you that if we had had the treatments then that we have now, I believe she would be living a normal, happy life.”

  Louis pushed the door open wider and Dr. Seraphin went inside the records room. Louis found an old stool in the hallway and brought it over. Dr. Seraphin dusted it with her hand before sitting down.

  “Did you bring the police file?” Dr. Seraphin asked.

  “Yes,” Louis said, handing it to her.

  She started looking through the reports and photos while Louis dug for the box labeled 1959.

  “He has no respect for women,” Dr. Seraphin said.

  Louis dropped a box in the corner. “That’s pretty obvious. Most sexual predators don’t.”

  “Why do you think he burns his victims?”

  Louis shoved aside another box. “Torture. I think he gets off on their pain.”

  “You think he gratifies himself while he burns them?”

  “Probably.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “The burning is not sexual, despite the placement of it on the thighs. It’s a brand.”

  “Like cattle?” Louis asked.

  “Yes. It’s his symbol of ownership, done after the rape.”

  Louis shoved a box to the side and looked at her. “So this guy rapes his victim, then while having an after-sex smoke, he makes his mark?”

  Dr. Seraphin nodded, her head bent back over the reports. After a few more minutes of reading, she looked up again.

  “You didn’t tell me Rebecca Gruber was raped with an object.”

  “We don’t know what it was.”

  “Did you find any semen?”

  “No.”

  “Your man is impotent,” Dr. Seraphin said.

  Louis shook his head. “Millie Reuben said she was raped. She said she felt him.”

  “Millie Ruben’s rape occurred in the sixties when the man was young and healthy. And he didn’t kill her,” Dr. Seraphin said. “He’s changed since then. He’s grown angrier over the years and if he’s become impotent recently, his anger is magnified by his inability to perform.”

  “You see anything else that will help?” he asked.

  “Your killer is a man who probably held no job, had little or no contact with his family, someone who came to Hidden Lake at a young, impressionable age.”

  “Stereotypical profile,” Louis said.

  “You’ve done some profiling?”

  “A little.”

  “When did you say this Stottlemyer girl was killed?”

  “A little over a year ago.”

  “Just about when the news that the hospital would be torn down made the papers.”

  “You think that’s why he came back?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Seraphin said. “He has made the prodigal journey home, Mr. Kincaid. Like we all we do when we are feeling a little lost.”

  Louis was quiet, his gaze drifting back to the stacks of boxes.

  “You’re still very young,” Dr. Seraphin said. “Perhaps you can’t quite relate to that need to return to something you associate with security.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  She was watching him as he moved boxes. He could feel her eyes on his back.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Where did you grow up?”

  “Here and there,” Louis said. He finally saw the box for 1959. It had two more on top of it.

  “That doesn’t sound very stable,” she said. “And as children, we do need stability. That’s how our image of home is formed, be it good or bad.”

  Louis pulled out the 1959 box and slid it to the center of the floor.

  “How do you remember your childhood?” she asked. “Good or bad?”

  “With all due respect, Doctor,” Louis said, “that’s none of your business.”

  She sat very still, watching him, and for a moment, he felt they were in some kind of standoff and that she was debating whether to get pissed off and leave. But she smiled instead.

  “My apologies for prying.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  He took the lid off the box and dropped to his knees. The box was stuffed with manila folders, some of the names handwritten, some typed, most so faded he had to pull out his glasses to read the tabs.

  “One thing, Mr. Kincaid,” Dr. Seraphin said. “No matter how you remember your childhood, you can change that. Any time you want.”

  “You can’t change what happened in the past.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Dr. Seraphin said. “But you can change how you remember it.”

  “If you change how you remember it, then it’s no longer accurate now, is it?”

  She smiled again, a smaller one. “Who’s to say it isn’t? It’s your memory.”

  He pulled out a file
and held it out to her. Dr. Seraphin accepted it and flipped through the pages, then set it aside. He handed her a second and a third, glancing up at the door for the driver, wondering what he was doing.

  “I have a name for you,” Dr. Seraphin said suddenly. “Do you want to write them down?”

  “Yes,” he said, pulling a small notebook from his pocket.

  “Michael Boyd.”

  Louis wrote the name down. “Any record of him burning or torturing anyone?”

  “No, but he may not have done those things early on.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You asked for suspects, Mr. Kincaid, not their his-tor y.”

  “I need a little something more.”

  Dr. Seraphin looked annoyed with him, but she answered. “He came in at age fourteen. Raped his baby sister with a pencil.”

  Louis started to write again, his pen pausing over the paper at the image her words gave him. Then he went back to pulling files.

  Ten minutes later, she spoke again. “Stanley Veemer. Killed his mother at age fifteen, then set the house on fire.”

  He kept handing her files, occasionally taking time to read some of them himself. But he didn’t know where to look to find their crimes or the reason for their commitment, and most of it was foreign to him.

  She was quiet for a long time after that, the stack of nonsuspects growing so tall it tipped toward the boxes, then spilled. It occurred to Louis how pissed Alice would be if she knew they were here, looking at this stuff and making a mess.

  They finished with 1959 well into the next hour and started on 1958. He could hear the rainy wind whipping at the windows and suddenly the lights started to flicker. He looked up.

  Dr. Seraphin laughed softly. “Can it get any more dramatic?”

  Louis slid the box to her and stood up, stepping out into the hall. The corridor was lit only by the faint gray light from outside, the pale walls alive with the thrashing shadows of branches outside.

  “I have another,” Dr. Seraphin called out.

  Louis went back inside the room and picked up his notepad off the box.

  “Buddy Ives,” Dr. Seraphin said. “Came in at age eighteen. Sexually assaulted his grandmother, then killed her.”

  “Why didn’t a guy like that end up in prison? Why here in a hospital?”