Louis picked up the visitors’ log, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
“Why didn’t you pick up her remains when Hidden Lake called about relocating her?” Louis asked.
Rodney turned back to his stew. “Are you a religious man?” he asked.
“What?”
“Are you religious?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Once, when I was in my thirties,” Rodney said, “I ended up in Goa, India, this beautiful place with beaches, palm trees, great hotels, discos. Everything a dissipated trust fund baby could want.”
He paused to shake in some pepper. “I met this woman there, an Indian woman. She tried to teach me about Hinduism, tried to get me to change my evil ways, I suppose. It worked, to a point. I stopped putting shit up my nose.”
Louis was trying to decide how far to let this wander when Rodney spoke again. “Now what does this have to do with my poor dead sister Claudia, you are asking yourself ?”
“Yeah, in fact, I was.”
“Well, while I was busy burning out my sinuses, something happened in my brain. Some of the religious stuff just sort of . . . stuck there.” Rodney gave him an odd smile. “When I finally dragged my sorry ass home, I began to study it. Now, all these years later, I guess you could call me a born-again Hindu.”
“I thought you were Catholic,” Louis said.
“Mother is Catholic. I gave it up for Lent.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” Louis said.
“I’m getting to it,” Rodney said, not turning around. “Well, the thing is, Hindus have a rather different take on death. They believe that the body is unimportant, that the soul lives on to inhabit a new body.”
“Reincarnation,” Louis said.
Rodney nodded. “They also believe that when a loved one dies, if you grieve too much or too long, the negative energy keeps the soul from making its transition.”
When Rodney turned back around, his watery eyes took a second or two to focus on Louis. “My sister’s soul is gone. Neither she nor I have any use for her body,” he said.
Louis stared hard at him for a long time. “You know something, Rodney?” he said, standing up. “That’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve heard in years.”
The barest smile came to Rodney’s lips. “Well, then, perhaps you’ll believe a simpler truth. Mother would not allow it. It’s that Catholic thing, you know.”
Rodney moved to pick up his wineglass but knocked it over. It fell to the tile floor, shattering. He shrugged and brushed the shards away with his velvet slipper. He swayed as he went to the cabinet and pulled down a new glass.
“Time for us to take a little trip to the cellar,” Rodney said, turning to Louis. “Come with me, why don’t you?”
Louis didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want Rodney falling down the steps. He followed him through a pantry and down a narrow stairway.
At the bottom, Louis paused. It was a large basement, with stone walls and a smooth concrete floor. It was dimly lit, very clean, and Louis could see the gargantuan bulk of an old furnace in the corner. There was one door in another corner, and Rodney led him to it.
Rodney held up a hand. “This is where I keep her,” he whispered.
“What?”
Rodney pulled open the door.
Louis felt a rush of cool air, and his eyes picked up the glint of something, but it was too dark to make anything out.
A light came on. Wine . . . racks of bottles, floor to ceiling. Louis looked back. Rodney was standing at the doorway, his hand on a switch, a huge grin on his face.
“You should see your face,” Rodney said. “You were so hoping she was in there, like that detective in
Psycho
, you really thought you were going to find that I was hiding away some decaying corpse.”
Rodney was laughing as he moved past Louis into the wine cellar.
“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a Medoc by the toe,” Rodney said, his finger traveling across the nearest row and stopping. He slipped a dusty bottle off the shelves and produced a corkscrew from his pocket. Holding the bottle between his knees, Rodney uncorked it, brought the bottle up to his mouth, and took a long drink.
Louis turned away, his eyes wandering out over the basement. Even down here, he could feel it. There was a disquieting aura about every part of this ugly old house, like nothing was in balance.
“I hate this house.”
Louis turned. Rodney had come up behind him. He was leaning against the door of the wine cellar, gripping the bottle.
“It is a hateful house,” Rodney said thickly.
Louis moved aside and Rodney came out into the basement. He stood there, swaying slightly, his eyes coming back to Louis but not really focusing on him.
“This is where it happened,” he said, pointing at the concrete floor. “Right here. This is where my father shot himself.”
Slowly, Rodney raised the bottle and began to pour out the wine. It fell in a thin stream, splashing on the concrete and over Rodney’s slippers.
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.