A Child Lost

by Michelle Cox

  My God! she thought wildly. This must be it!

  It took a moment for Henrietta to fully grasp the magnitude of this. Though she had come here today with the purpose of proving Ida’s—and her own—suspicions, she realized now that a part of her hadn’t really believed it, or hadn’t wanted to believe it. It seemed like a puzzle before, trying to piece it all together, but now it didn’t seem such a game. It was chillingly real, and she was suddenly very much afraid. Somewhere in this place, a murderer walked. Oh, what should she do? she thought desperately. How could she get out?

  Before she could figure out the answers to her own frantic questions, however, she heard footsteps approaching, fast and clipped. Without thinking, she quickly stood and hastily set the bottle on the counter behind her hat, just as Nurse Collins appeared in the doorway, looking surprised.

  Henrietta breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God it’s you,” she said.

  Nurse Collins’s face was one of concern as her eyes darted around the room, resting momentarily on the hat before coming back to Henrietta. “Mrs. . . . Howard, isn’t it?” she asked. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. What are you doing back here?”

  “I . . . I was looking for you, actually,” Henrietta said, leaning a hand against the counter to support herself. Standing up so quickly had made her feel light-headed again.

  “Back here?”

  “I . . . I’m pretty sure something terrible is going on.”

  “What do you mean?” Nurse Collins asked, her voice laced with concern as she noiselessly shut the door behind her.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” Henrietta faltered, trying to steady herself. “I’ve been doing a little investigating, you might say, and it seems there have been several mysterious deaths around here.”

  “Mysterious deaths?” Nurse Collins asked, her face contorting slightly. Henrietta could see she had upset her.

  “It’s just that . . . well, take Liesel Klinkhammer, for example. You remember her, don’t you? The German woman we came here to visit?”

  Nurse Collins nodded slowly. “Yes. What about her?”

  “Well, don’t you think there was something odd about her death?” Henrietta continued, disappointed that so far nothing she was saying seemed to register with the woman she had hoped would be her ally. Was she really not aware of what was going on just under her nose? “You must have noticed . . . ?” Henrietta asked, looking at her hopefully. She thought she saw something respondent in Nurse Collins’s face, but she couldn’t read what it was exactly.

  “Let me explain,” Henrietta hurried on. “Dr. Ingesson told my husband that Liesel died from complications due to electric shock. But she didn’t! I snuck a look in the ledger when I was here the other day and found that Miss Klinkhammer didn’t die for almost a week after her last treatment. So it couldn’t have been from the electric shock!” she said triumphantly.

  “Ah. Yes, well, sometimes things aren’t recorded as well as they should be, I must confess,” she said plainly, though she looked upset as she said it.

  “Be that as it may, there’s more,” Henrietta said hastily. “You see, I happened to speak with a former employee of this place, Ida Lynde? Do you remember her?”

  Nurse Collins’s face remained very still, again unreadable. “Yes, I remember her,” she said coldly. “She was dismissed. How do you know her?”

  “She’s the niece of a very good friend of mine. It was quite by accident that I was able to talk with her. She . . . she told me some terrible things,” Henrietta said in an urgent whisper.

  “She has a record of drinking,” Nurse Collins interrupted. “You mustn’t believe anything she told you. Please, for your own good,” she said, her eyes briefly traveling to the hat again.

  Why was she so distracted by the hat? Henrietta wondered. Or had she seen her place the bottle there when she first came in? Something prickled on the edge of her mind, but she tried to ignore it.

  “But she’s not a drunk!” Henrietta instead plunged on, further upset by the fact that her conspiratorial conversation with Nurse Collins was not going as planned. “Those rumors about her were false! It was Nurse Harding that had it in for her. She was the one who made that up!”

  “Now, why would Nurse Harding do a thing like that?” Nurse Collins said, her eyes narrowed.

  “She saw the bottle!” Henrietta raced on, while a small part of her brain wondered how she could be so blind as to Nurse Harding’s true character. “The bottle of cyanide!” she exclaimed. “And look, here it is! I found it!” she said, reaching for it now. “Someone’s been murdering patients. That’s what Ida discovered. She found the bottle of cyanide and then the very next day, she discovered that a patient, a Mrs. Leary, had died unexplainably in the night. Ida began to notice more and more odd deaths over time and finally went to Nurse Harding with her concerns. A lot of good that did, as she was dismissed for her troubles. But there was a floater on that night. Do you happen to remember who it was? And it’s obvious that Nurse Harding is somehow in on it, isn’t it? Though I suppose it really could have been anyone . . .” she said, her voice trailing off in anticipation of what Nurse Collins might say.

  Nurse Collins put her hand on her forehead and looked worried, finally, for the first time. She was finally understanding!

  “This is terribly unfortunate,” she muttered, holding her hand out now for the bottle. Henrietta gladly gave it to her and wiped her hands on her dress as if they were contaminated.

  “Yes, it is! But have you really not noticed anything unusual?” Henrietta asked. “I had hoped you would be able to shed some light on this.”

  “And so you came here tonight? Alone?” Nurse Collins asked. “I barely recognized you.” She looked her up and down.

  “I . . . I dressed like this on purpose,” Henrietta answered, wondering why something this trivial mattered at a moment like this. Something wasn’t sitting well. “I didn’t want anyone below to recognize me, you see.”

  “What about at the front desk? Did you sign in? As Mrs. Howard?”

  “No! I used a different name!” Henrietta said proudly. “Mrs. Jones.”

  “I see. Well, that makes things a lot easier, then,” she said, slipping the bottle into the front pocket of her pure-white uniform, Henrietta’s eyes following it as it disappeared. Something about Nurse Collins’s tone alarmed her, and a warning signal went off in her mind. Surely . . .

  “What do you mean, easier?” she asked nervously.

  Nurse Collins did not respond but instead walked slowly to the shelves and calmly selected a piece of faded red rubber tubing.

  “Mrs. Howard, or Mrs. Jones, I should say, I fear you really are quite ill. You’re obviously suffering from some sort of delusion.”

  Henrietta’s skin prickled, and she felt a sudden rush of fear as Nurse Collins stepped toward her, the tubing held taut.

  “I really must insist you lie down until I can take care of you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Henrietta asked, panic ripping through her as she stepped backward. “What are you doing?”

  “You couldn’t just let well enough alone, could you?” Nurse Collins asked bitterly, her face twisting strangely. Before Henrietta could even think what to do next, Nurse Collins lunged toward her and swiftly wrapped the tubing around her wrists, pulling it so tightly that Henrietta cried out from not only the shock of what was happening but from the searing pain of the rubber against her skin.

  “It was you? Why? Why are you doing this?” Henrietta murmured, cold realization flooding over her, though she was flushed and perspiring.

  “Yes, of course it was me,” Nurse Collins hissed.

  “But . . . but, why? Why murder these people?” she asked, her heart beating wildly

  “Murder? Murder is a harsh word,” Nurse Collins said sweetly, which unsettled Henrietta all the more. “It’s not murder. I’m doing them a favor. Look around you. So much suffering; no one gets better, no family c
omes to visit them. Rotting away in this hellhole. Surely, you can see it as the mercy that it is?” she asked calmly. “I merely set them free. And as soon as one is removed, another slides into their place. It’s endless!” she said, her voice rising a bit now. “They don’t want to live! I am an angel of mercy for them,” she said, sickeningly reminding Henrietta of Mrs. Goodman’s very same words. “What I do is a mercy,” she repeated.

  “It’s still murder!” Henrietta sputtered. “You can’t just take life and death into your own hands! How do you know these people don’t want to live?” Henrietta fumed, even as she saw a kernel of sense in what Nurse Collins was saying. “You murdered a little girl’s mother. You took an oath!”

  “An oath to ease people’s sufferings,” she said calmly, pulling on the tubing that held Henrietta tight. “Which I am doing. But other people don’t see it that way, I know, like your friend Ida. I thought I had dealt sufficiently with her, but I see I was wrong. Well, I won’t make the same mistake twice,” she said, her brow furrowed now as she looked Henrietta over. “It will be fast. You won’t even feel anything.”

  “No! Please,” Henrietta begged, her heart exploding in her chest as she tried to twist away. “I won’t tell anyone—”

  “Too late for that. You’re altogether too nosy for your own good. Come,” she said, pulling the bottle of cyanide back out from her pocket. “Obviously I can’t force you to drink this, so I’ll have to make up an injection.” Her voice trailed off as she rummaged in one of the drawers with one hand, presumably to find a syringe. “You can’t just kill me!” Henrietta cried. “I’ll scream!” she threatened. Without waiting for a response, Henrietta let out an ear-piercing scream. “Help!” she screamed. “Help!”

  “You can scream all you want,” Nurse Collins said unmoved and not even looking up from the syringe she was filling. “No one will hear. Or care. After all, this is an insane asylum. It’s full of screams of the already dead.” She pulled Henrietta toward her, who continued to struggle to push away.

  “You can’t get away with this! They’ll find my dead body!” Henrietta said in a shrill voice. “Clive will find me,” she said, hot tears forming. She felt dizzy, and the light on the edge of the room was beginning to dim.

  “No he won’t. There’s plenty of places to hide a body here. The whole place is one big tomb,” she said, which were the last words Henrietta heard before she sank to the ground.

  Chapter 21

  “So as I was saying,” Bennett said from the far end of the boardroom table where he stood with various charts arranged on easels behind him, “we really should consider divesting ourselves of Kalamazoo. We’ll be digging our graves in Detroit if we don’t. It’s too much of a financial drain. We’ve been carrying them for too long without a profit.”

  “Agreed,” said another man halfway down the table, as he tapped the various papers splayed out in front of him into a neat stack. “I think we should vote. Any objections to putting it up for a vote, Mr. Howard?”

  Clive’s face was taut. “Before we vote, I’d like to hear more about the economic implications for the families that would be affected. If we shut down Kalamazoo, where will those—two thousand, did you say?—men find jobs?”

  “Mr. Howard, with all due respect,” said another man, “that is none of our concern. We have to think of our shareholders. We can’t keep the Kalamazoo plant afloat much longer without seeing some sort of profit.”

  Clive glanced over at Bennett.

  “I think what Mr. Howard is saying,” Bennett said, clearing his throat, “is that we might consider an alternate employment opportunity to—”

  Bennett was then interrupted by a loud buzzing from the large black telephone sitting on the table in front of Clive. Clive frowned at it. Mrs. Novotny, the secretary he had inherited from his father, knew she was not to interrupt board meetings.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, irritated, and picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Howard,” the high-pitched voice of Mrs. Novotny came through. “But there’s a telephone call for you.”

  “Mrs. Novotny, I told you to hold my calls.”

  “This one says it’s urgent,” Mrs. Novotny responded dully.

  Clive bit the side of his cheek and tried to push down his sense of dread. He had been distracted all day, feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Unfortunately, Madame Pavlovsky’s parting words to him the night he had carried Henrietta out of the schoolhouse in a faint still haunted him. “She is in grave danger,” Madame Pavlovsky had said in a voice laden with theatrical effect. He had snarled some response to her at the time, thinking that it was an easy, cheap prediction on her part, considering the situation. Since then, however, he had frustratingly not been able to completely shake her words from his mind, a fact that annoyed him to no end. He had of course not related any of this to Henrietta, and he chastised himself for so weakly falling prey to Madame Pavlovsky’s quackery. On this particular morning, though, his sense of unease lay heavily on him for some reason, a feeling which had increased as the day went on, so much so that he was even tempted at one point to telephone home just to make sure everything was okay. Before he could, however, Bennett had wanted to review some figures with him before the afternoon meeting, and he let it go.

  He looked briefly around the room at the men assembled there, hating the idea of having to stop the meeting for a personal reason, but knowing that he was going to have to.

  “Who is it?” he asked brusquely into the receiver, trying to mask his nerves.

  “Says it’s Adolph Fritz. Claims to be your chauffer,” Mrs. Novotny relayed, as if she hadn’t a care.

  At her words, however, Clive felt as though someone had just punched him in the gut, and he hastily stood up. Henrietta. It must be Henrietta. He leaned a hand on the table and tried to slow his racing heart by telling himself that it could be something as simple as a flat tire, though another part of his brain told him that Fritz would never telephone him for something that trivial. No, something was definitely amiss.

  Since his marriage to Henrietta he had instructed Fritz to be a bodyguard of sorts for her, going beyond the role of simple chauffer as a set of eyes for Clive. Frequently, Clive had called him into his study for a private chat to this effect. Fritz was an older, wiser servant who was perfectly suited for this role, at least in Clive’s mind. Fritz knew when to remain silent, allowing Henrietta to dictate where she went and when, believing herself to be wholly independent and unobserved, and when to report back to Clive. For example, unbeknown to Henrietta, even to this day, Fritz had reported her trip to the Melody Mill in the city where she had borrowed a gun from Rose. Fritz, of course, had not witnessed the actual handoff of the gun, but had judged that the brevity of Henrietta’s visit to such an establishment, not to mention the neighborhood, was worrisome enough to warrant a report to Clive later that night in the study.

  Clive therefore was used to the occasional evening report, but Fritz had never actually telephoned him, the fact of which nearly crippled Clive now. Something must be seriously wrong.

  “I’ll take it in my office,” Clive snapped and hung up. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said hurriedly without looking at anyone but Bennett, who held his gaze until Clive pulled it away and strode quickly out of the room. He almost ran to his office, passing by Mrs. Novotny’s desk and barking out, “Which line?”

  “Two,” she said, slowly filing her nails.

  Clive burst into his office and picked up the receiver without even taking the time to turn on the lights.

  “Hello? Fritz?” he said.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Howard, but I thought you should know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She went into Dunning over an hour ago, and she hasn’t come out, sir. Don’t like the feel of it.”

  “Jesus Christ. I’m on my way,” Clive said and banged down the receiver.

  Without Fritz or a car at his disposal,
Clive was forced to take a cab, which painfully inched north in the late afternoon traffic. “Hurry up, man!” Clive said, slamming his hand on the leather seat. “I could run there faster than this!” he grumbled, throwing himself against the back seat.

  At one point, he considered flagging down a patrol car, but he knew from experience that he would not be taken seriously. After all, it wasn’t a crime for someone to walk into an institution such as Dunning for a visit, nor was it cause for concern, especially as only an hour had passed. Likewise, he did not have the power to commandeer a squad car. Damn it! he thought, as he fretfully ran his hand through his hair and looked out the window at the buildings on Irving Park Road slowly passing by. He attempted to calm himself by running various scenarios through his mind, formulating a plan for each. Why had she gone to Dunning? he thought miserably. It obviously had something to do with this woman, this former nurse she had met at the Hennessey’s party . . . Ida was her name? Based on what Mr. Hennessey had told him, Clive had dismissed her ramblings about finding cyanide and patients being murdered as fantastical. He had thought Henrietta understood that when he explained it, but obviously she had not. Oh, why was she forever going off on wild-goose chases? he thought irritably, though a small part of his brain reminded him that she was right more often than not. Damn it! he fumed again. Why had she gone alone? And why was he so worried? So what if she had gone into Dunning? If he really didn’t think there was anything to these wild theories, then why did he feel so uneasy?

  The farther north they went, the blessedly faster they were able to go. The sky was aglow with smears of pink and orange, like a child’s painting, as if nothing at all were wrong in the world. Once they turned onto Oak Park Avenue, Clive spotted the Daimler parked on the side of the road, just down from the entrance.