by P J Parrish
Louis picked up the crumpled photograph of Claudia and put it in his pocket. He left, pausing outside to dig the car keys out of his jacket. The door opened behind him, but he didn’t turn.
“Wait!”
Louis glanced back. Rodney was coming toward him. Louis ignored him, opening the Impala’s door and getting in. Rodney grabbed the door before Louis could shut it. He looked down at Louis with reddened eyes.
“Tell Phillip I’m sorry,” he said.
Louis jerked the door closed. He started the car, revving the engine, and Rodney stepped away. As Louis headed down Provencal Road, he looked up at the rearview mirror. Rodney was still standing there in the driveway.
“Silent Night” was playing softly, emerging strained and tinny sounding from the old radio and fading away into the shadows of the basement. Louis sat at the bar, a warm beer in front of him. He was waiting for Phillip to get out of the shower and he’d been down here maybe fifteen minutes, sometimes rolling a walnut between his fingers as a way to pass the time. And a way to keep from looking at himself in the mirror.
He had caught a glimpse of himself when he first sat down and hadn’t liked what he had seen. He looked older, and defeated, the shadows in his face hard. Even his eyes were a deeper shade of gray like there was something opaque behind them now.
He heard the water cut off, and the rushing sound in the pipes above his head faded to a drip. He rolled the walnut across the bar, watching it flop end over end until it came to a stop next to the bowl. When he heard Phillip’s footsteps on the stairs, he drew a breath and took a drink.
Phillip wore a red-and-green striped sweater and black slacks, his wet hair slicked back. Louis waited while he grabbed a beer from behind the bar and settled onto a bar stool.
“Are you going to tell me you’re leaving?” Phillip asked.
“No,” Louis said.
Phillip looked down, turned his bottle slowly. “So what is it then?”
“Claudia was pregnant when she was sent to Hidden Lake.”
Phillip said nothing, didn’t move except for a slight slump of his shoulders.
“She had the baby and it was put up for adoption by her mother,” Louis said.
Still Phillip didn’t speak or look up. Louis let the silence lengthen. He picked up the walnut and set it back in the bowl, catching another glimpse of his face in the mirror. Then his eyes moved to Phillip’s face. Phillip’s eyes were closed.
“Rodney knew,” Louis said. “Says he’s sorry.”
Phillip finally looked up. “Sorry?”
Louis nodded.
“He takes my child and he’s sorry?”
Louis again nodded, not knowing what else to say. Phillip drew a breath so deep and hard that Louis could hear it, and it seemed to bring some rigidity back to Phillip’s posture.
“Can we find this child?” Phillip asked.
“I don’t know,” Louis said. “It depends on how it was done. If they left a paperwork trail. If it was even legal.”
“It wasn’t legal. It couldn’t be. I never signed anything.”
“I know. But it’s real easy to cover something like this up. Falsify the mother’s name. Fake a birth certificate. A shady attorney.”
Phillip touched his arm. “Will you try?”
“I don’t know,” Louis said.
Phillip looked away, his mind suddenly on something else, and Louis was grateful he didn’t ask more about finding the child. He wanted to help Phillip, and he knew that if it were his child, he’d want to find it. But there was something else to finish first.
“The child would be thirty-six, Louis,” Phillip said.
“I know.”
“Did you ask if it was a boy or girl?”
“No,” Louis said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Phillip said. “It’s all right.”
Phillip slid off the bar stool and started back up the stairs. Louis watched him, surprised at the sudden change in his face—and his step. It was resolve or acceptance, or maybe a mix of both.
“Phillip,” Louis said, “where are you going?”
“To see Frances,” he said. “This is something I need to talk over with her.”
“Don’t you think it will make her even angrier?”
“I don’t know,” Phillip said. “I just know I need to talk with her.”
“Jesus, Phil,” Louis said, “aren’t you angry?”
“Of course I am,” Phillip said. “But I don’t have to stay that way. You’ve given me something I never thought I’d have. You’ve put everything into focus for me.”
“Wait a minute,” Louis said. “What are you going to tell this kid when you find him or her?”
“I’m going to say ‘I’m your father,’” Phillip said.
“‘And I made a mistake.’”
Phillip disappeared up the steps and Louis turned back to the bar. He didn’t understand how Phillip could be happy about confronting a long-lost, grown-up child when it would be so painful and hard. He didn’t understand how Phillip could ever expect Frances to accept this on top of everything else. And he didn’t understand why Phillip wasn’t furious.
He should be. Not only at Eloise DeFoe and Rodney, but at Seraphin and everything she had done to Claudia.
Claudia . . . something was coming back to him, something Charlie had said about the apple babies, and suddenly he knew that what he thought in the tunnels was only half right.
Claudia and Phillip’s baby . . . that was what had started it all. Someone had probably paid good money to Seraphin for that baby. And that was what had given her the idea.
Use women patients for breeding. Use Ives to impregnate them. A scheme to create healthy, white infants that Seraphin could adopt out to wealthy couples.
Seraphin’s voice came back to him:
The hospital had so little funding, so money was always a problem. . . . I was instrumental in correcting many deficiencies.
Those long periods of isolation. It wasn’t therapy or to punish patients; it was to keep the pregnancies secret. Then the newborns were removed from the hospital in baskets, driven away in fruit trucks.
Babies . . . conceived by a rapist, sold to the highest bidders so Dr. Seraphin could keep her programs in place. Buy new equipment. Make a career.
Proof. He still had no real proof. There was nothing to connect Seraphin directly to Ives.
Louis stared at his reflection in the mirror, something clicking in his brain. He slid off the stool and went quickly upstairs to his bedroom. It took him a moment to find the patient file for Buddy Ives. He grabbed his glasses off the nightstand and began flipping through the files.
He found the notation he was looking for: Ives had been put in “temporary isolation” at least five times. He was about to pull out Claudia’s file to compare the dates when something on Ives’s form caught his eye.
He stared at the bottom of the form at the signature right above the typed line ATTENDING PHYSICIAN.
Dr. Rose Seraphin.
Louis pulled out other forms. She had signed them all. He slapped the file shut. Seraphin had told him she had stopped seeing patients after being promoted to assistant deputy superintendent. So why the hell was her name on every piece of paper in Buddy Ives’s file?
His eyes swung to the phone. He searched his wallet for Seraphin’s lake house number and dialed.
Oliver answered. Louis was polite when he asked for her. After a few minutes, Seraphin’s voice came on the line.
“Good evening, Mr. Kincaid,” she said. “Have you called to shout at me again?”
He took a breath, working hard on sounding contrite. “No,” he said. “I called to apologize.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I also called for something else,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I need some help.”
She was quiet for a moment. “What kind of help?”
“Personal,” he said, lowering his voice, trying
now to sound pathetic. “I lost it down there, Doctor.”
She said nothing.
“It scared me,” he said. “Scared the shit out of me.”
“And you want a session?”
“Yes.”
Again, a pause. “I’m closing up the lake house in the morning,” she said. “If you want to see me, you’ll have to come here.”
“Thank you.”
“Tonight.”
“I’ll see you around seven.”
“I’ll be waiting, Mr. Kincaid.”
CHAPTER 43
It was snowing hard by the time he started up the hill toward Seraphin’s house. He had gone only twenty feet when the Impala lost traction and stopped. He tried again but the tires spun and the car went nowhere.
“Shit,” he muttered. He looked out the windshield at the huge wet flakes caught in the headlight beams. Far up the hill, between the bare trees, he could see the front of the house in the glare of the floodlights. No choice. He had to walk the rest of the way or risk getting stuck here all night.
He got out and trudged up the hill. The driveway looked like it had been plowed recently, but there was at least a foot of fresh snow covering it now.
Seraphin’s Volvo was parked to the left of the front door. Louis went up and knocked. Oliver opened the door immediately, wearing his usual black suit.
“The doctor’s waiting for you in the den,” he said. His face was red from cold or exertion. There was a mound of Vuitton luggage behind him.
“I can find my way,” Louis said.
Oliver gave him a cold stare, then hoisted up two bags and headed outside to the car.
Seraphin was behind a desk, sorting through some papers, when Louis came into the den. She looked up and gave him a curt smile as she continued putting papers in a briefcase.
“Please, make yourself comfortable, Mr. Kincaid. I’m just finishing up here.”
Louis slipped out of his jacket and took a chair. He noticed two Vuitton duffels on the floor next to the desk.
“So, where are you going?” Louis asked.
“Florida,” she said. “I have a condo on Hobe Sound.” She smiled again. “I just can’t tolerate the cold the way I used to. The price one pays for getting old, I suppose.”
Louis had to grit his teeth at the small talk. “Yeah.”
Seraphin snapped the briefcase closed and set it on the floor near the duffels. She came forward, pushing up the sleeves of her beige sweater as she took the chair opposite him. “Now,” she said. “What exactly is wrong?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Louis said.
“Have you ever been in therapy before?”
“No,” he said.
“Well, there’s nothing to be nervous about.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Do you always sit on the edge of a chair like that?”
Louis hesitated, then sat back, draping his hands over the chair’s arms. “Is this better?”
She allowed her smile to widen. Then she, too, sat back in her chair. “You said something happened to you while you were in the tunnels,” she said.
He nodded.
“That you were scared.”
He nodded again.
“Can you tell me why you felt scared?”
“You mean besides the fact I was locked down there with a crazed, insane murderer?”
Seraphin somehow managed to keep her expression neutral. She picked a speck of lint off her beige skirt. Her eyes came back to Louis’s face and stayed there, waiting.
Louis let out a long breath. “I heard things,” he said finally. He waited, seeing a new spark of interest in her eyes.
“Go on,” she said.
“I heard things and I don’t know if they were real.”
“What did you think you heard?”
“Babies . . . babies crying.”
There was a quick flash of something across her face. Louis was sure he had seen it.
“Why do you think you heard babies?” Seraphin asked.
“Why do you think I heard babies, Doctor?”
She uncrossed her legs and sat up straighter in the chair. “I would guess it was your guilt,” she said.
“What do I have to feel guilty about?”
“That you couldn’t save that poor woman. I would guess that it was her cries you heard in your imagination.”
Louis shook his head slowly. “No. It was babies.”
She tilted her head as she looked at him. “Do you have any children of your own, Mr. Kincaid?”
“This isn’t about me.”
“Of course it is.”
Louis sat forward in his chair. “I know what you did. I know you used Buddy Ives to impregnate patients and that you sold the babies. You isolated the women and then shipped their babies out in apple baskets. For money.”
Seraphin didn’t move.
“How much did you make, Doctor?” Louis pressed. “Enough to build a new infirmary? Enough to pay off the nurses? Enough to get appointed to the state board?”
Louis stopped. He couldn’t believe it. Seraphin was smiling.
“That’s quite a story,” she said. “You believe it’s real, don’t you?”
He could feel the balance shifting back to her, but he wasn’t going to let it happen. “I know Claudia DeFoe was real,” he said. “And I know she was pregnant when she came to Hidden Lake.”
A small crack in Seraphin’s smile.
“Rodney DeFoe told me everything,” Louis said. “And Claudia’s mother told me she signed adoption papers. You took her baby and sold it. That’s how you got the idea for all this.”
Seraphin rose slowly, walking a slow, deliberate circle. “You’ve taken this one tragic incident and made it into this preposterous black market baby conspiracy.”
“So I’m right,” Louis said.
“Right?” she asked.
“About the babies.”
“You seem to need me to confirm something you already know.”
“Just tell me, damn it. Am I right?”
Seraphin hesitated. “Did you read that book by Dr. Laing I gave you? He identified a state called ontological insecurity. It means lacking a sense of selfhood and personal identity.”
“I know who I am,” Louis said.
She studied him for a moment. “But your experience in the tunnel may have altered that. Dr. Laing said that when people are in a threatening situation from which there is no physical escape they can dissociate—their mental self splits from their body and what they experience is like a dream.”
“I read part of that damn book,” Louis said. “He also said being threatened can make your thinking extra sharp.”
Another small smile, as cold as the air. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”
She was still putting it back on him. Making him believe he already had the answers to his questions. But he didn’t.
“Where is Claudia DeFoe?” he asked.
She stared at him. It was a cool, long look that he could read nothing into. For several seconds, neither spoke. Then a sound behind Louis made Seraphin’s eyes swing up.
“Yes, Oliver?”
“The snow is getting worse. We have to get going, Doctor, or we won’t make it out of here,” he said.
“Right,” she said. “Take those bags and finish loading the car. I will be along shortly.”
Oliver picked up the two duffels sitting by the desk and left.
Seraphin looked back at Louis. “I’m afraid our time is up, Mr. Kincaid.”
She turned off the nearest lamp, then went to her desk and picked up her briefcase.
Louis stood up. “Where is Claudia DeFoe?”
Seraphin was at the doors leading to the deck. She gave them a hard tug to make sure they were locked. She turned to him.
“Dead,” she said. She switched off the floodlight. The backyard went black. She looked at him.
Louis didn’t move.
“You’re not going to lea
ve until you hear this, are you?” she asked.
“No.”
“Claudia committed suicide,” Seraphin said. “She got out one night and just walked into the lake.”
“How do you know it was suicide?”
Seraphin paused, seeing the look on Louis’s face. “She left a note for Rodney,” she said. “I have it in my office in Ann Arbor. I’ll show it to you.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the family the truth?”
“You know their history. It would have been cruel. And there would have been other . . . repercussions.”
Louis sat back in the chair. He understood what she was saying. And he wanted to believe her about the way Claudia died. But . . .
“What happened to her remains?” he asked.
Seraphin sighed, taking a moment to answer. “She was cremated by mistake. You can find her remains in the columbarium. There are small numbers imprinted on the tops of the cans. It was done as a precaution in case the labels were lost. Look for number 926. There is a file somewhere in E Building that holds the cremation log. You’ll find her name there.”
She held up her hands as if she wanted to say something else, but then she just dropped them to her sides. “I probably should have told you all this a long time ago, but I was hoping to spare everyone,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
He was quiet. Unmoving. In the reflected light from the desk lamp, Seraphin’s face looked suddenly old and deflated. The hardness that always seemed to be there was gone.
Louis picked up his coat off the chair.
“Good-bye, Mr. Kincaid,” she said.
He left the den. Out in the foyer, he paused to put on his coat. There were still three large suitcases sitting next to the open front door and a trail of wet footprints leading outside.
Leaving the door ajar, Louis stepped out into the snow. The Volvo was parked to the left of the entrance. There were two suitcases sitting back near the closed trunk. Louis turned up his collar and started back down the hill.
The snow was up to his calves and he walked slowly, his mind locked now on Claudia and her baby. He had his truth now. Claudia was dead. He had his truth now about the baby—from Eloise DeFoe and now Seraphin. But that was all that seemed real. Everything else that had happened at Hidden Lake might as well be a damn dream for all the chance he had of proving it.