“And you did,” I finished, remembering the final pages of the book when he awoke in the night to see Ann crossing his yard in the rain, moving toward his front door.
“In the book, yes, I summoned Ann back. In real life, no. She stayed buried. Because that is the truth of life, Corrie.”
“I don’t believe you,” I told him, studying the way his eyes avoided mine.
He smiled.
“Of course, you don’t. But that’s not because I’m lying. It’s because you want to believe the alternative. But where is she, Corrie? Where is my beloved Ann? Search my life. You will find no trace of her after July 7th, 1991, when she drowned in Moosehead Lake.”
CHAPTER 29
Now
Corrie
“I know it’s real, Fletcher. I can feel it in here,” I touched my chest, “in my blood, in the marrow of my bones. Maybe not everyone qualifies, but Sammy-”
“Who’s Sammy?” Fletcher interrupted.
“My husband,” I whispered, feeling the tears rising. Strange how they seemed to start deep in the stomach, the far-off rumble of a storm, then passed into your lungs, contracting up to your throat, and finally hovered at the back of your eyes with the same energy of an oncoming squall.
“And he died?” Fletcher dropped his voice and offered me the sympathetic smile I saw everywhere I turned.
“He was murdered.”
Fletcher opened his eyes wide and gave me a pained expression.
“I’m terribly sorry for your loss, Corrie. I truly am. I get it, not your exact feelings, but my own horrid version of them. I wish I could offer words to help, but we both know words are useless in cases such as these.”
“But words are magic too,” I murmured, quoting his book - a particular section when he wrote of the summoning spells spoken when drawing someone back from the other side.
He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Corrie…”
“I’ll do anything, Fletcher.”
“So much for a relaxing drink with a beautiful woman,” he complained, draining his beer. He signaled for a second.
I waited, holding my breath, knowing in the stretch of his silence something had shifted, a sliver of consideration.
“My book tour ends this weekend. I can’t dredge all this up while I’m working. It’s too distracting. When it’s over, I’ll tell you a story.”
“Does your tour end in Michigan?”
He nodded.
“Petoskey tomorrow, then Harbor Springs, with the grand finale of a lecture in…” he trailed off, pulling a little notebook from his leather bag. “A signing in Marquette. Then, voila, another six months travel-free. I’ll come back here to Traverse City on Sunday, and we can have a proper conversation about this.”
“After that you’ll return to Maine?”
“The one and only.”
I stared at him another moment, searching his eyes for any clue he was lying. What if he finished his tour and hopped a plane back home? What if he would say anything in this moment to get rid of me?
He cocked his head to the side and smiled.
“You wear your every thought, Corrie. You must be a terrible poker player. I won’t ditch you. You have my word. May I ask what happened to your hands?”
I looked down. I’d forgotten to keep my sweater pulled over my hands, and the bandages showed.
“An accident in the kitchen,” I murmured, the crow’s black eye rising in my memory.
He stared at my hands for another moment and nodded.
“A dangerous place, the kitchen.”
Sarah
SARAH TURNED DOWN THE LONG, empty road that led to the Northern Michigan Asylum, once a hub of activity, now a sprawling reminder of the withering effects of time. The asylum occupied more than one hundred acres of lawn and forest.
Sarah had never explored the asylum. Growing up south of Traverse City, in a rural town with a population of less than five hundred, meant that instead of vandalizing the asylum as teenagers, she and Sammy threw rocks at old barns. When their parents relocated to Traverse City, Sammy and Sarah had passed the age of sneaking into the abandoned asylum with a can of spray paint and a bottle of Boone’s Farm strawberry wine.
The asylum carved a foreboding chunk out of the blue sky. It was an architectural marvel in the Kirkbride style, which Sarah had studied briefly during her graduate program. She preferred modern - straight clean lines, minimal embellishments - but Kirkbride asylums took an opposing view. Beauty is therapy, they said. Pointed spires rose sharply from the highest and most elaborate building.
As she turned down a small side road, she pushed deeper into the old hospital grounds, buildings rising up decayed and crumbling, eerie in their grandeur. She parked along a dirt drive facing several smaller buildings, still large, the size of huge old plantation houses complete with balconied porches shadowed by rusted metal screens.
Sarah stepped from her car, unable to draw her eyes from the crumbing edifice, where brown vines and overgrown bushes clawed up the side of the brick face.
“Hey.”
The voice startled Sarah, and she dropped her keys.
“Jesus, Will.” She braced a hand on the hood of her car. “You scared the crap out of me. Where have you been? I looked everywhere this morning.”
“I told you I’d meet you here.”
“I know, but I had a meeting I’d forgotten about, and…”
He watched her, eyebrows raised.
“Forget it,” she murmured, looking beyond him to the soaring limestone buildings, their paint yellowed and grimy.
“Welcome to the Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane,” Will said as he followed her gaze.
“Are they doing construction here?” In the distance, Sarah heard the sounds of an active construction site with heavy equipment and the voices of men.
Will nodded.
“The city sold the institution to a restoration company. In a few years, you’ll be sitting here sipping a latte.”
Sarah grimaced.
“Unlikely.”
“They’re working on Building Fifty,” Will said, pointing toward the spires she’d passed. “The cottage we want is this way.”
“These look awfully large for cottages.”
“They called them that, probably to make them seem quaint and homey when obviously they were anything but.”
“Where‘s Maurice?” Sarah asked, looking at her watch.
“Come and gone about ten minutes before you arrived.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry, he pulled through. Dr. Evil, who Maurice said we should call Dr. K, is waiting for us.”
“Why Dr. K?”
Will shrugged. “Maybe his name starts with K. Then again, maybe Maurice pulled it out of thin air.”
Sarah stuffed her hands in her pockets and gazed at the buildings left so long in abandon, they‘d taken on a mythical, spooky quality.
“PLEASE TELL me this isn’t our entrance,” Sarah muttered, pausing at the overgrowth that mostly blocked a smashed-out basement window in one of the decayed buildings.
“Unless you know how to jimmy a deadbolt.” Will squatted down and kicked the remaining glass from the frame. It rained onto the cement floor and shattered.
Sarah leaned down and peeked inside. A mass of dirty blankets lay in a corner. Graffiti covered one entire wall. Will moved her aside and climbed in, laying his jacket over the frame to shield against glass shards. His feet hit the floor, crunching into the broken glass. Sarah stood and glanced behind her.