Nora sat down on the edge of the sofa close to Gretchen. The heavy fragrance of talcum powder came from her. “We weren’t waiting specifically for you, but it was only a matter of time before people started wondering about that family and the house. You couldn’t have been inquiring about any other. Besides, we’ve seen you in the neighborhood. You’re the ones who are restoring the Swilling house.”
“Please tell us what you know.”
As it turned out, Nora Wade’s mother had lived her entire life in the home they were in at the moment. Gretchen didn’t think a single piece of furniture had been replaced during all those years. And the drapes must have been drawn to keep natural light from exposing layers of grime and the sorry condition of the furnishings. Dust danced in the lamplight.
“I remember when Flora disappeared,” Bea said, speaking slowly and softly. Gretchen again strained to hear. “The family had so many tragedies, one right after another. You’ve known families like that, I’m sure, where everything goes wrong for them.”
“Yes, I have,” Gretchen said.
“The family had a long history of mental issues, but Richard had the most serious of the lot. Rachel was one year younger than Richard, and he hated her from the day she was born. He was a willful, jealous child, and when Rachel was ten, he tried to smother her with a pillow.”
“Shocking,” Nina said.
Gretchen and Nina exchanged concerned glances. If psychic ability ran in families as Nina believed, then Gretchen had a little of her own and was feeling it now. It wasn’t warm and fuzzy. She felt as cold as one of Aunt Gertie’s Michigan winters, as if her veins had turned to ice and were slowly freezing her arms and legs.
“His mother stopped him in time,” Nora said. “But he became more and more dangerous as he grew. Richard started along his violent path in the same way many people with mental problems begin. He was horribly cruel to animals. His poor sister would tell the most awful stories about him.”
“A lot of whispering went on in the neighborhood,” Bea said. “I tried to tell Flora about the danger her son posed, since we were friends, but she wouldn’t listen. The entire community was afraid of him. Finally when he was a teenager, the family sent him to a special place for people like him. What a relief for the entire neighborhood’s sake.”
“Did he ever return?” Gretchen asked.
Bea shook her frail head. “No. Rumors came and went about what happened to him. Some said he existed in a vegetative state after a botched lobotomy. Others thought they spotted him on the streets of Phoenix periodically. I always suspected he was dead. Then that woman from California showed up here looking for Rachel and strange things began to happen.”
Gretchen sat up straight. “Did you meet Allison Thomasia? Did you speak with her?”
“My mother didn’t,” Nora said. “But I met her while I was out on one of my daily walks. She was standing in front of the Swilling house, staring at it. I asked her if she had a special interest.”
“When was this?”
“A few months ago. When was it, Mother?”
“About then.”
A few months ago? Had Allison been in Phoenix all that time? Or had she made two trips?
“She was tracing her family history,” Nora said. “She said she was related to the Swilling branch. I gave her as many details as I could, like I’m doing now. Recently that young woman was found dead in the cemetery.”
“Yes, we know,” Gretchen said. “She designed dolls.”
“She had a nice doll with her. Kind of strange for my taste, but you could tell that she had talent even if it wasn’t my cup of tea.”
Gretchen asked Nora to describe the doll. Flowing hair, fairy wings, ivy on the doll’s leg. It was the same one found in the cemetery.
“She said she was going to give the doll to the next relative she met,” Nora said. “She liked to do that, give away dolls, she said. The dear never had a chance.”
Gretchen was pretty sure that Allison had found her next of kin. But the doll had been discarded along with the dollmaker’s body. “Do you know why Rachel didn’t live in the house anymore?”
“Too much misery,” Bea said. “Flora’s daughter had mental problems of her own.”
“Well,” Nora said, “we don’t know that for a fact. But she had more than one side to her, that’s for sure. Not that I’d speak ill of the dead.”
“Of course not,” Nina said.
Gretchen remembered Flora’s metal-head doll and her travel trunk. “One more thing,” she said. “I have a picture.” She found it in her purse and handed it to Nora. “Flora’s doll trunk fascinates me. Do you know how she got the travel stickers? Did she really visit all those wonderful places?”
Nora got up and took the picture over to her mother. “That’s Flora. The memories this picture brings back!” Bea said. “Mr. Swilling, Flora’s father, was an archaeologist. He traveled to foreign locations to participate in digs and always returned with stickers.”
That explained the exotic locations represented by the doll trunk’s stickers. Cairo, Jericho, Rome. Cities with important archaeological significance.
“Did you find Mr. Swilling’s rock collection in the house?” Nora asked.
“No,” Caroline said. “But we found the doll Flora is holding in the picture.”
“If I were you,” Nora said, “I’d stay away from anything having to do with that family. The house and the family, if anyone’s left, are cursed.”
“Really?” Nina said, showing more interest than previously. “A curse?”
“She meant that figuratively, Nina,” Gretchen said. They didn’t need a ghost and a curse. She shot her aunt a warning glance and projected out, No ghost stories, please.
It didn’t matter whether or not Nina picked up the unspoken signal to refrain from telling her own ghost theory, because Nora stood up, signaling the end of their conversation.
“Go home now,” Bea whispered, appearing more shrunken than ever. “You’re pretty girls. You don’t want to be next.”
34
Gretchen and Caroline worked side by side at one of the library’s computer workstations. Expanded search strings had failed to produce information on Richard Berringer.
Caroline typed in a search string. Insane asylum patient lists.
Thousands of pages of records came up for institutionalized patients throughout the country.
“This is going to take days,” Gretchen said, scanning page after page. “And we can’t be sure his records were ever computerized.”
“And once we find the records, they won’t give us information about the present. We still won’t know where he is.” Caroline rubbed her neck. “The best we can hope for is a better understanding of mental disorders, so we know what we’re dealing with. Here it says that the Insane Asylum of Arizona dates back to the 1800s. Thousands of patients were committed to it against their will. But then during the human rights movement, a bill was passed. It stated that a person had to be dangerous to themselves or others to be confined.”
“Before that, no one needed a reason to commit another person?”
Gretchen was shocked at the facts regarding sanatoriums, at the absence of any kind of patients’ rights. She was developing a new appreciation for how much society had changed in regard to mental health laws.
Gretchen pulled up a lengthy list of patients and their diagnoses from an asylum that had been located on the East Coast. Insanity conditions, according to the charts, ranged from hallucinations to dementia, incoherency to delirium of grandeur.
“Delirium of grandeur?”
“Same as delusions of grandeur. In my day,” Caroline said, as though she were an ancient artifact, “families could band together and institutionalize another family member. It was a convenient way to remove dangerous people from society, whether the threat was perceived or real. If your relatives thought that you might harm yourself or someone else, off you went. Of course, some people took advantage of the law and abused their power. Patients were sent away because they were afflicted with diseases or had certain disabilities that their families couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with.”