Authors: Thomas Cater
“If Elinore married,” I said, “there ought to be some
kind of record at the courthouse.”
Virgil allowed for the possibility with a nod. “It’s
possible, but she could have been married in another county.”
My next stop, I decided, would be the courthouse. I
left Virgil on the porch, forgot all about my cup of fresh perked coffee and
drove back to town. Inside the courthouse, I asked the clerk about marriage
records. She said they had them going back to the Civil War.
“We were lucky,” she said. “The Confederates
threatened to burn the courthouse down, but Dr. Farnsworth stood on the
courthouse steps and dared them to ‘strike our colors’. ‘Not only will we drive
you out of the county,’ he said, ‘but we will drive you back into the
dismal
swamp
from whence you were conceived.’ I guess he said it with enough contempt to
convince them he meant business,” she said.
I asked her where she learned the direct quote and she
said 'the annual pageant’ and ‘it’s enacted every summer.'
“The rebels rode right on through without firing a
single shot,” she said.
Yes, I thought, that sounded like the stuff of local
pageantry. She led me into a room crammed full of cloth bound books.
“I am particularly interested in marriages that may
have occurred in the early 1920s, or 30s.”
“What name are you looking for?”
“I only know the girl’s maiden name,” I said and told
her.
She thumbed through the book repeating the name.
“Is that the Elinore Ryder who used to live in
Elanville on Scary Creek?”
I admitted her into my confidence with a nod.
“She was a maiden lady. I don’t think she ever
married.”
“I would appreciate it if you would check,” I
insisted.
She returned to the book. “Here is Elinore Ryder,
married to Frank Harmon on April 10, 192
3
.”
“May I?” I asked, not believing my luck. I nearly
knocked her down trying to get to the ledger and the entry.
“Is there anything else about Frank Harmon or where he
worked?
“There’s nothing else,” she said. “They didn’t ask too
many questions then. People were farmers, or miners or wood hicks. There
weren’t too many jobs then.”
“What about the name? Are there many Harmons in the
area and what kind of work do they do?”
She was thoughtful, actually causing a thin shallow
line to form across her brow, a mini-fault of contemplation.
“I’ve heard the name before,” she said. “I’m sure
there are Harmons around. It is a common name in the neighboring county. More
than likely, they all worked in the mines or in the lumber business. They seem
to prefer living in the outdoors.”
I took a deep breath. I could comb through the phone
book later and see how many Harmons I could find. If there were too many, I
could call and see if any had distant relatives named Frank in the past.
I thanked her and made another entry in my notebook on
Elinore Ryder: Married, April 10, 192
3
. The more I thought about the date, however, the more
I realized something was wrong. According to what I read, she was either too
young to marry or the dates were incorrect, or confused. I was reluctant to celebrate
my newly found discovery. I was not convinced I was making progress. I may not
be getting closer to resolving the problem at the Ryder House, but I was beginning
to feel better about my bouts with skepticism.
With that documented bit of knowledge under my belt
and a slight feeling of confidence, I headed for the hospital and Constance. I
wanted to tell someone about my find. I also hoped she was as anxious to see me,
as I was to see her. Within sight of the hospital, my ears began to ring, which
I took as a sign of rising blood pressure, or tintinnabulation, or something
about the hospital was having an effect on me. I blamed it on the cold and the
humidity. An institution’s reputation couldn’t possibly have that kind of an effect
on a person. Still, the pressure never lessened for a minute. It was not
painful, only uncomfortable, as if I had descended to a psychic depth mortal
men should ignore.
I entered the parking area. Constance was leaning out
an open window and calling my name. The sight and sound of her made me feel as
if I still belonged to the human race; even the pressure inside my head abated.
I scrambled up the stairs to the office that once provided space for an entire
cadre of secretaries, but now promised asylum for only one. It was a strange
feeling to see her sitting there among a fleet of empty desks and covered office
machines. She had chosen the largest one for herself. It was an executive’s
desk with space enough to land a helicopter. She came out from behind it to
greet me, like an officer piping a visitor aboard. We were both shy about
touching each other.
“You’re lookin’ fine,” I said.
She smiled, almost threatening to annihilate me in a
blitz of brilliant white teeth.
“You’re lookin’ pretty good yourself.”
I thanked her, claimed a kiss on her cheek and
squeezed her until I felt her body flattening submissively against mine.
“Take it easy,” she said, “I’ve got maniacs to inspire.”
I had decided a long time ago not to take anything too
easily. The good doesn’t last long enough, and the bad is always unendurable. It
didn’t take long to find out that 'taking it easy’ is always hard on me.
“How about going to Florida with me this winter?” I
asked.
Her smile flared before it quickly cooled.
“What was that all about?” I asked, referring to the
rapid change of expression.
She walked back to the desk and sat on its edge. Her
feet were nearly six inches off the ground and her knees were poking out from
beneath her skirt.
“I’m glad you asked,” she said, “but then I’m also
sorry to hear you’re still planning to go.”
“The only sense I can make out of that is to assume
you don’t want to go,” I said.
“I can’t go with you,” she said petulantly. “I have a four-year-old
son, and a mother who worries about me. I can’t go with you.”
“We could take them along,” I said lamely.
She vetoed that suggestion with a look. “Not this year;
maybe next year, or the year after, but not this year.”
She slipped off the desk’s edge, opened a drawer and
laid a brown folder at my fingertips.
“Everything you always wanted to know about insane
asylums, but were afraid to ask,” she said.
I opened the file: The first thirty pages of the complete
and unabridged medical history of Elinore Ryder. Every admittance record and every
treatment she received, including comments from every doctor and nurse who had
ever ventured an opinion or a diagnosis.
“Where did you find this?” I asked.
“Just around,” she said. “I can’t tell you how an
administrative secretary operates or knows where to look; a lot of it is …
magic.”
“What else have you got,” I asked, delving a little
deeper into the sheets of paper.
I examined Elinore’s record and a computer printout on
earnings regarding the Alberichs.
“The hospital went on-line in the mid-seventies, but I
also found older tally sheets and pay records. The Alberichs have been working
officially for the state since the 1940s, but I also found undated pay chits on
old forms I’ve never seen before. They’ve been here a lot longer than I have.
Look at their wages, thirty dollars a month! You know how long that has been
going on? No less than fifty years! Thirty dollars! It’s no wonder people
aren't making waves. They pay people more to 'stand around and drink coffee’ in
this place. They’re probably deathly afraid the Alberichs will ask for a raise
retroactive to the time the minimum wage law went into effect, with interest!
It would cost the state a fortune. They have probably got them identified as
rehabilitative out patients. Can you believe that?”
There was very little I had trouble believing anymore.
Wages were not even a small consideration.
“So how do they get their pay?”
“Just like everyone else, I guess; direct deposit.”
“I wonder if they know, or even care, about their
salary.”
She shrugged. “I can make some inquiries.”
“Do you know their first names?”
She shrugged again and shook her head.
“Anything else?” I asked.
The next page was something of a trauma. It was a
picture of Dr. Ezekiel Grier. I would have preferred not knowing what he looked
like. I would have imagined him entirely different. He had a round face, dark,
thin hair and a narrow little mustache. His eyes looked a little weak or myopic,
and he was definitely cock-eyed. His lips appeared to be pouting and I would
have guessed by the slope of his shoulders, the size of his head and his overall
appearance that he was probably about five feet three inches tall.
“So this is the notorious, mind-boggling
psycho-surgeon of Vandalia,” I murmured.
Constance studied his features. “He doesn’t really
look capable of driving cold steel into people’s brains, does he?” she asked.
She could find nothing amusing in what I thought was a
very comic appearance.
“They probably said the same thing about Hitler and
Sadam,” I warned, and took another long, hard look at Ezekiel Grier. “Do you
see any similarity between them?” I asked.
“Between who?” she asked, confused.
“Zeke and Adolph?”
Her eyes widened, seemed to penetrate beyond the
picture’s flat two-dimensional image and went fishing in a greater depth.“Do
you think they may be related?” she asked.
“We’re all related,” I replied, “especially when it
comes to cruelty. Here is a man who made his living sticking sharp objects into
people’s brains. So did Hitler and
a few
other tyrants
. Go figure.”
She tried to be diplomatic. “It wasn’t as bad as you
think,” she said. “It was helpful in many cases, and it is coming back as a
prescribed medical treatment for obsessive types.”
A chill ran up and down my spine. “Can you imagine the
nightmares that poor bastard had to endure: lunatics with black and bloody eyes
invading his sleep every night; zombies wandering in and out of his thoughts. Cripes!
I’m glad I never amounted to much. I don’t think I could live with that kind of
success.”
I thumbed my way through Grier’s personal file. “Been
in a lot of different places, hasn’t he
:
New York, Sweden, Germany, Russia and Washington DC,
my old hometown. I wonder what he was doing there. Probably teaching at St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital. He has more degrees than a thermometer. He was certainly
well qualified to do whatever it was he was doing to those unfortunate
bastards.”
In the back of the folder, there were a number of
printed pages torn from a magazine and stapled together.
“What this?”
“You wanted to know if anyone had ever written a paper
on the Alberichs. I found this in one of the old filing cabinets, one I suspect
Grier wrote. He even gave their condition a name. He called it ‘Geonlinger’s
Disease’. I also found some personal items,” she said.
She opened her desk drawer and produced four
leather-bound books.
“I think these are his…personal journals. All the
entries are in his handwriting, which is a little hard to read, and there is an
entry for almost every week he was here. I haven’t read it; I just browsed and
thumbed through several pages. I did read a few comments and entries about his
patients. How they responded after surgery, did they progress, or continue on
the same path. I guess he was trying to make some kind of value judgment, but
how can you? Especially after you’ve just carved your initials into someone’s
brain.”
I stared at the old volumes. “You found Grier’s
journals?”
Holding them in her arms, she smiled and nodded.
“That’s remarkable,” I said. “I can’t believe no one
ever came after them.”
“I guess not,” she said. “They were in the same room
with all the other records, only cleverly disguised.”
I took them from her, handling them with tender loving
care. “Oh, God, I hope he didn’t write like most doctors, a blurred scrawl.”
“His handwriting is small and neat, but its faded,”
she said, “You won’t have much trouble reading it, just in a few places. The
more technical it gets, the smaller the handwriting.”
I opened one book in the middle and read down a page.
Everything was small, but legible and coherent. It was his log and personal
notes that did not enter a patient’s file.
The patient I was reading about was male,
approximately 43 years of age, and after five years of depression had requested
a lobotomy. Requested? He really had to be desperate to wish that upon himself,
I thought. According to Grier, after surgery the patient no longer showed signs
of depression and had recovered from the operation with a minimum of
resipiscence. I had only just scratched the surface and already encountered a
word surfeit with mystery. I closed the book and pressed it to my chest.