The Fate of Mercy Alban (25 page)

“Your grandfather was a large benefactor of ours,” he began. “You may know that he built a wing of this hospital to simulate his own home, the home where your aunt grew up.”

“I do know that now,” I said.

“What you might not know is that he built it in the 1940s, when your aunt was still a child,” he went on. “It was all very hush-hush, but I don’t believe in keeping secrets, even longstanding ones, when it comes to a patient’s health and well-being.”

A chill began to wrap its way around me and I had the urge to hang up the phone, to not hear what the doctor had to say. But I knew I had to hear it, no matter how unpleasant. “I agree,” I said, my voice a rasp. “Please go on.”

“As I said, he built the wing for her when she was just a child, because he suspected she’d be coming here someday,” he continued.

“I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head and trying to focus on what he was saying, but I just wasn’t grasping it. “I had never met my aunt before she arrived here unannounced just a few days ago, but by all accounts, she was fine—perfectly normal—until something happened here at Alban House during a summer party in 1956, and the stress or trauma of it apparently drove her into a kind of madness and she ended up with you. So … what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would my grandfather have gone to the trouble to build an entire wing on a psychiatric hospital for her a decade earlier?”

“A psychiatric hospital?” asked Dr. Baptiste. “Is that what you think we are?”

“Well …” My mind was reeling. “Aren’t you?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” he said. “But not strictly. Miss Alban, we are a private facility for the criminally insane.”

I pulled out the desk chair and sat down hard.

“All of our patients, Miss Alban, have been the perpetrators of violent crime,” the doctor went on. “That’s who we serve here. As I said, we’re a private facility. Families turn to us to care for their loved ones who simply cannot function in society.”

My thoughts were going in several directions at once. “I’m sorry to keep repeating this, Dr. Baptiste, but I don’t understand. A private facility …”

“We are located in Switzerland, as you know, where the extradition laws for various countries are rather ambiguous. When a family brings a patient here …”

His words trailed off, but I was beginning to see his point. “Do you mean to tell me that people—rich people—arrange somehow to have their family members who have committed violent crimes—”

“Exactly,” he said. “I’m only telling you this because you are an Alban, and your family has been one of our most trusted benefactors throughout the years. Sometimes circumstances arise … situations happen, shall we say … and families don’t want their loved ones spending time behind bars or in one of the ghastly institutions you have in the States. Or they don’t want the whole scene to be played out in the newspapers. So they come to us. Their loved ones ‘disappear’; they are no longer a danger to the family or to society at large, and the family is spared the embarrassment of dealing with the situation in a public way.”

“Spared a trial?” I managed to squeak out.

“Exactly,” he said quickly. “We provide their loved ones with the highest quality of care, while making sure they are no longer a danger to society, themselves, or their families. Our facility is quite secure.”

“And yet a reporter waltzed right out of there with my aunt.”

“And that,” said Dr. Baptiste, “is under serious investigation, as I have said.”

Just then, Jane came back into the room and held my gaze, a concerned look on her face.

“This must be coming as quite a shock to you,” the doctor said, his voice taking on a gentle, yet forceful tone. “Let me suggest this. You get her back on her medication today. I can put a nurse on a plane this afternoon so she can be returned to us and simply bill you for the cost. This is the best place for your aunt, Miss Alban. This is her home. It’s what she has known for fifty years and she is happy here. It’s a safe place for her to live out the rest of her days—her father saw to that, leaving us a trust for her care. We will correct the security breach that allowed her to leave, believe me.”

What he was saying made sense. I held Jane’s gaze and mouthed: “Send her back?” She gave me a quick nod.

“Make the arrangements and let us know when the nurse will get here,” I said to him. “You can feel free to talk with Jane Jameson, who works for me. Let her know the specifics. I’ll give her to you now and she’ll relay the information about where to send my aunt’s prescriptions.”

I held out the phone to Jane, but then heard the doctor’s voice, small and far away, from the receiver. “Miss Alban?” I put it back to my ear. “Until our nurse gets there, I ask you to keep your aunt sequestered, if possible. I cannot say this strongly enough. You need to watch her.”

Another chill ran up my spine. “Why do you say that?”

“She is fixated on your family,” he explained. “You may have already learned that she is firmly planted in the past, believing it’s still 1956, the year she came to us. She is reliving it, day after day.”

“There was a death here at Alban House,” I told him. “It was a suicide.”

He was silent for a moment. “Miss Alban, you need to take precautions and protect yourself. Without her medication, I’m afraid her hallucinations will return. She will begin to hear voices and—”

But I didn’t let him finish. I thrust the phone at Jane and raced out of the room and down the hallway, knocking on the door of Amity’s room until she opened it.

“Mom?” she said, rubbing her eyes, still in the throes of sleep. “What’s the matter?”

“Do you think you could sleep at Heather’s tonight?” I said, my voice low.

She yawned. “I don’t know. Why?”

“I just talked to Aunt Fate’s doctor, and because of several things he said, I want you away from here. The hospital is sending a nurse to come and pick her up and take her back there. But I don’t want you around here until she’s safely gone.”

“But why? You said she’s harmless.”

“Honey, for once, just don’t ask questions,” I whispered. “Just trust me.”

Heather stirred and blinked at me. I turned my gaze to her. “Heather, do you think Amity could spend the night at your house tonight?” I asked her. “I’ll call your parents to make sure it’s okay.”

Heather nodded. “Sure.” She shot Amity a sleepy smile.

“Great,” I said. “I’d like you both to go right after breakfast. Pack an overnight bag before you leave this room—both of you, pack up. And take those bags with you when you go down for breakfast. I don’t want you coming back up here.”

“Wow, you’re really trying to get rid of us,” Amity said with a long stretch.

“That’s the idea.” I smiled. “Now do as I say and head down to the dining room. I’ll have Jane get something for you for breakfast.” I winked at the girls and closed the door behind me as I left the room.

Back in the master suite, I saw Jane sitting at the desk, holding the phone’s receiver, writing information down on a note pad.

“We’ll pick up those medications today,” she said, nodding her head. Looking up, she saw me. “And now here’s Miss Alban again.” She handed the phone to me.

“Dr. Baptiste, please forgive my abrupt departure, but I have my daughter here in the house with me, and when you told me about my aunt Fate’s condition, I felt the need to get her out of the house until my aunt is safely back in your care.”

“That’s wise,” he said. “She’s especially fixated on—” and then he stopped short and was quiet for a moment. “What did you just say, Miss Alban?”

“I was talking about my daughter and getting her out of the house until my aunt is safely back with you.”

“I believe you also said your aunt
Fate
,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

He was silent for another moment. “Why did you call her that?”

I wasn’t quite getting the point of his question. “Because that’s her name …?”

“I think we’re having some sort of misunderstanding,” he said slowly. “You must know—I believe you know—that the woman who has lived here since 1956, the patient whose care we have been discussing, is Mercy Alban.”

I stared at Jane, holding the phone in one hand and shaking my head. After a few false starts, I finally said: “I’m really at a loss here, Doctor. The woman who arrived here a few days ago has identified herself as Fate Alban.”

“I’m not surprised about that. Mercy is fixated on her sister and, at certain times, insists that she
is
her sister. It’s one of the things we have been working on over the years in terms of her care. Without her medication—”

I interrupted him. “But Mercy died when she was a young child.”

Hearing me say the name “Mercy,” Jane sat down hard on the bed, her face ashen, her mouth agape.

“No, Miss Alban,” he said. “Mercy has been living here with us since 1956. Mercy is the reason your grandfather built the entire wing onto this hospital. Did you not notice the name of our facility? It was changed to Mercy House when she came to us.”

The room felt cold, as though an arctic chill had suddenly blown through it. “So what you’re saying is that Fate Alban has not been in your facility, not at any time?”

“No,” he said. “Our patient, the patient who has lived here for five decades and who left here unsupervised more than a week ago, is
Mercy
Alban.”

“But—” I started, but didn’t quite know where I was going with the thought.

“Miss Alban, I hate to cut this conversation short, but I have patients to see,” Dr. Baptiste said. “I’ll be in touch with Mrs. Jameson about when to expect the nurse to pick up Mercy. Tomorrow, the next day at the latest, depending on flight schedules. And do make sure she gets her medication between now and then. It’s vital. I’ll prescribe a sedative also. Please call me if you need anything. I want to be in closer touch with you as we move forward.”

“Yes,” I said, staring out the window into the garden. “Yes, I will.”

And he hung up. I sat, cradling the phone in my hands.

“What was that about?” Jane asked, her eyes watery, her voice cracking.

I just looked at her for a moment. “Jane, it’s the oddest thing,” I began, the words sounding strange and otherworldly as they slipped from my tongue. “The doctor told me that the woman upstairs on the third floor is Mercy Alban.”

She shook her head, smiling slightly, a chuckle on her lips. “That’s impossible.”

“That’s what the doctor said.”

“But Miss Grace, that’s
impossible
,” Jane repeated, still smiling. “Mercy died, right here in Alban House, when she was ten years old.”

“I don’t understand this any more than you do, but apparently, she didn’t die back then,” I said, finally hanging up the phone. “That’s Mercy up there, Jane. The doctor said my grandfather built a
wing
on that hospital for Mercy when she was a child, and she came to live there a decade or so later. Why would a father build a wing on a hospital
for the criminally insane
for his daughter—who was a child? Why would someone do something like that, Jane?”

Her mouth was a tight line, her spine rigid. “But it’s Fate Alban who disappeared that night.”

“How can you insist that when the doctor tells us different?” I shot back.

“The doctor wasn’t here all those years ago,” she cried. “I was!”

“But you weren’t there at the hospital for the past fifty years,” I said. “They even named the facility after her, because my grandfather gave so much money for her care. It’s called Mercy House.”

Jane shook her head slowly. Her eyes were focused on me, but I knew she was looking into the past, back to a rather chaotic night a half century earlier.

“And, here’s the other thing, Jane,” I went on. “Say the woman upstairs right now, the woman who lived in that hospital for the past five decades, is indeed Fate Alban. Why would her father have built a whole wing on that hospital to mimic this very house
ten years or more before
the night she disappeared? Fate wasn’t insane as a child. Was she?”

Jane shook her head. “Ach, no. Never more a sunny girl than your aunt Fate. Sweet and dear and funny until the day she disappeared.”

“So why then would her father, my grandfather, have built a wing at a hospital for the criminally insane for her, thinking she’d end up there someday? It doesn’t make any sense, Jane. It just doesn’t.”

“He wouldn’t.”

I watched Jane’s face morph from defiant to ashen to stone as something, a realization, took hold of her. She leaned across the desk between us and, uncharacteristically, took my hand.

“Miss, I want you to listen to me carefully,” she said slowly, holding my gaze with her steel-gray eyes. “If it’s truly Mercy up there, I think it’s best that you and the girls don’t spend another night under the same roof with her.”

“I’ve already arranged for Amity to stay over with her friend,” I said, pulling free of Jane’s grasp and walking across the room toward the window. “And it’s no problem for the lads to move back into the gardener’s house. But Jane, you and I have been here for days with Fate—
Mercy
—whomever. You’re going to the pharmacy to get her meds today. The doctor said he’s going to prescribe a sedative as well, so I think she’ll be pretty harmless. Don’t you? I certainly don’t want to leave.”