“Sometimes there is no explanation,” I said.
“Anyway, she didn't put up any resistance whatsoever. We took her in quietly”
“It was a huge story though,” Madeline said.
“That's true. Put Derby Line on the map for about a week. Hope it doesn't happen again now”
“Did either of you see Mary after she was committed?”
Both Lapierres shook their head. Decades of marriage had clearly linked them.
“I don't know anyone who ever visited her,” Madeline told me. “It's not the kind of thing you want to be reminded about, is it? People like to feel safe around here. It wasn't that anyone turned their back on her. It was more like . . . I don't know. Like we never knew Mary in the first place.”
Mary, Mary
Chapter 110
VERMONT STATE HOSPITAL was a sprawling, mostly red- brick building, unassuming from the outside except for its size. I had been told that almost half of it was unused space. The women's locked ward on the fourth floor held forensic patients, like Mary Constantine, but also civilly committed patients. “Not a perfect system,” the director told me, but one borne of small population size and shrinking budgets for mental health care.
It was also part of the reason Mary had been able to escape.
Dr. Rodney Blaisdale, the director, gave me a quick tour of the ward. It was well kept, with curtains in the dayroom and a fresh coat of paint on the concrete-block walls. Newspapers and magazines were spread on most end tables and couches: Burlington Free Press, The Chronicle, American Woodworker It was quiet - so quiet. I'd been on locked wards many times before, and usually the general noise level was like a constant buzz. I had no idea until now how oddly comforting that buzz could be.
It occurred to me that Vermont State had the still, slow- moving quality of an aquarium.
Patients seemed to come and go in response to the quiet itself, barely speaking, even to themselves.
The television was on a low volume, with a few women watching the soaps through what looked like Haldol-glazed eyes.
As Dr. Blaisdale took me around, I kept thinking about how vivid a scream would be in here.
“This is it,” he said as we came to one of many closed doors in the main hallway I realized I had stopped listening to him, and tuned back in. “This was Mary's room.”
Looking through the small observation window in that steel door, I found no clue that she had ever been there, of course. The platform bed held a bare mattress, and the only other features were a built-in desk and bench, and a stainless- steel blunt-edged shelf mounted to the wall.
“Of course, it didn't look like this then. Mary was with us for nineteen years, and she could do a lot with very little. Our ow-n Martha Stewart.” He chuckled.
“She was my friend.”
I turned to see a tiny middle-aged woman standing with one shoulder pressed against the wall opposite us. Her standard-issue scrubs indicated she was forensic, though it was hard to imagine what she might have done to get here.
“Hello,” I said. The woman raised her chin, trying to see past us into Mary's room. Now I saw that she had ragged burn scars up and down her neck. “Is she back? Is Mary here? I need to see Mary if she's here. It's important. It's very important to me.”
“No, Lucy I'm sorry she's not back,” Dr. Blaisdale told her.
Lucy looked crestfallen. She quickly turned and walked away from us, disconsolately trailing one hand along the concrete-block wall as she went.
“Lucy's one of our few really long-term patients here, as was Mary It was hard for her when Mary disappeared.”
“About that,” I said. “What happened that day?”
Dr. Blaisdale nodded slowly and bit into his lower lip.
“Why don't we finish this in my office.”
Mary, Mary
Chapter 111
I FOLLOWED BLAISDALE through the locked door at the end of the ward and down to the ground floor. We entered his office, which was high-end generic, with brass in boxes and pastel-colored mini-blinds. A poster for Banjo Dan and the Midnite Plowboys was framed on one wall and definitely caught my attention.
I sat down and noticed that everything on my side of his desk was several inches from the edge, just out of reach.
Blaisdale looked at me and sighed. I knew right away that he was going to soft-sell what had happened with Mary Constantine.
"All right, here goes, Dr. Cross. Everyone on the ward can earn day-trip privileges.
Forensic patients used to be prohibited, but we've found it therapeutically unconstructive to divide the population in that way As a consequence, Mary went out several times. That day was just like any other.“ ”And what happened on that day?" I asked.
“It was six patients with two staff, which is our standard procedure. The group went to the lake that day Unfortunately one of the patients had a meltdown of some sort.”
Of some sort? I wondered if he knew the exact details, even now Blaisdale seemed like a hands-off administrator if I'd ever seen one.
"In the middle of the hysterics, Mary insisted she had to go to the rest room. The outhouse building was right there, so the counselors let her go. Mistake, but it happens.
No one knew at the time that there were entrances on both sides of the building."
"Obviously Mary kne<' I said.
Dr. Blaisdale drummed a pen on his desktop several times. “At any rate, she disappeared into nearby woods.”
I stared at him, just listening, trying not to judge, but it was hard not to.
“She was a model patient, had been for years. It took everyone very much by surprise.”
“Just like when she killed her kids,” I said.
Blaisdale appraised me with his eyes. He wasn't sure if I had just insulted him, and I certainly hadn't meant to.
"The police did a major search - one of the biggest I've seen. We left that job to them.
Of course, we were eager to have Mary back, and to make sure she was all right. But it's not the kind of story we go out of our way to publicize. She wasn't -" He stopped.
“Wasn't what?”
“Well, at the time, we didn't consider her any danger to anyone, other than herself perhaps.” I didn't say what I was thinking. All of Los Angeles had a somewhat different opinion of Mary - that she was the most vicious homicidal maniac who ever lived.
“Did she leave anything behind?” I finally asked.
“She did, actually iou'11 definitely want to see heT journals. She wrote almost every day Filled dozens of volumes while she was here.”
Mary, Mary
Chapter 112
A PORTER, MAC, who looked as though he lived in the basement of the hospital, brought me two archive boxes filled with tape-bound composition notebooks, the kind a child raised in the fifties might have used in school. Mary Constantine had written far more in her years here than I would ever have time to read today I could requisition the whole collection later, I was informed.
“Thanks for your help,” I told Mac the porter.
“No problem,” he said, and I wondered when it was, and how, the response “you're welcome” seemed to have disap peared from the language, even up here in rural Vermont.
For now, I just wanted to get a sense of who Mary Con- stantine was, particularly in relationship to the Mary I al ready knew. Two archive boxes would be enough for a start.
Her cursive was tidy and precise. Every page was neatly arranged, with even, empty margins. Not a doodle in sight.