Asylum (Asylum, #1)(22)

“What’s that on the table?” she asked, pointing to the rusty stain on the white sheet.

“Blood,” said Dan.

“How can you be so sure?”

I have no idea.

“It’s so sad in here.” Abby looked up at the single window in the room with the bars across it, as if anyone could actually climb through a slit that small and that high. As low as they were, the window must just barely be aboveground, if it led outside at all. “Did they really live like this?”

“This place would make anyone crazy,” Dan said with a violent shudder. “Let’s get out of here.”

He’d meant the basement altogether, but when Abby turned to lead them farther down the hallway, Dan didn’t stop her. At last, the narrow corridor opened up into a kind of small rotunda, with two closed doors at the far end of the curve.

Abby approached the left-hand door, shining her phone over it. “More offices?” she said.

“I don’t know. . . . I thought the offices were all upstairs. . . .” Dan opened the left door—unlocked—and took a step into the room. It was a mess. The contents of six—no, seven—file cabinets lay strewn across the floor. There were folders, papers, and hand-written notes heaped in waist-deep piles. Like someone had been frantically looking for something and hadn’t had time to clean up.

Dan picked his way through the mess, going to a door on the opposite side of the room and peering in. He couldn’t help smiling as he shined his flashlight into the next office—jackpot.

“What is this place?” Abby asked. “Maybe it’s storage? I mean there’s stuff tossed everywhere. . . .”

“No, come look.” Dan pushed through to the next room, Abby close on his heels. His light fell over a desk and, behind it, a high-backed chair. This room was as neat as the previous one was messy. In fact, it was so marvelously, eerily intact that a half-finished letter still lay on the desk, abandoned. A fountain pen had long ago bled its innards onto the paper. Dan leaned over the little visitor’s chair to get a better look, but whatever had been written on the paper was now obscured by spilled ink. Damn it. He felt foolish for the depth of his disappointment. What had he expected to find? Something with a subject line like those ghost emails?

Also on the desk was a small leather-bound folder. Dan picked it up and was about to look through it when Abby said, “Check this out, Dan.”

Dan slid the folder into his hoodie pocket and walked around the desk. There were a few photographs in freestanding frames lined up beside a green glass banker’s lamp. Abby had one of them in her hands and now passed it to Dan.

A row of nurses in clean aprons and masks all stood neatly posed, with the warden in his spectacles and coat seated in front. Every single one of them stared straight ahead except for the nurse at the far right; her head was cocked unnaturally to the side, as if her neck had been snapped just before the picture was taken.

Taking a step back, Dan imagined the infamous Brookline warden sitting at this desk, adjusting his spectacles and poring over research or composing a letter, maybe even this letter, the one stained with spilled black ink. A second, less rusty pair of spectacles sat on the desk near the photos. Without really being aware of it, Dan reached for them. They felt brittle to the touch and icy, but he held onto them, turning them over until the lenses caught the light and shone behind their layer of dust. Try them on, Dan. And so he did. They fit perfectly. He looked again at the photograph of the warden and the nurses, the photograph in which no one was smiling. The glass of the frame reflected his face back at him, overlaid on the photo. With a jolt he realized that he looked like the warden.

He tore off the glasses as though they had burned him.

Then something struck him. He’d seen this man—the warden—before. Twice.

“They sure look jazzed to be there,” Abby commented. But Dan barely heard her.

“Hey! Guys! Guys? I found something up here!” It was Jordan, his voice echoing down from the floor above, reaching them faintly across the stretch of corridor. Dan set the photo back where Abby had found it, going so far as to reposition the frame in the marks it’d left in the dust. He felt that the last thing he should do was disturb a place like this.

They hurried back down the hall and up the stairs, more confident now that they had made the trip once. Jordan was in the midst of searching through the alphabetized cabinets. With his cell phone tucked between his cheek and his shoulder, he was thumbing through the contents of the top drawer. It was full of yellowing index cards. “There are a ton of files in here,” he said. “It must have every single one of the patients. And get this: every single one of them’s criminally insane.”



Both Dan and Abby craned over his shoulder to see what he meant.

Jordan pulled out one of the cards, and they leaned in to study it. It was for a patient named Bittle, Frank. It had his name, date of birth, and city of origin. There was a box marked “DOA 3.13.1964” that must have meant date of admission. Surely a psych ward wouldn’t treat patients who were dead on arrival? Below that box was another that gave Dan a chill: Homicidal. There were small check boxes for Y and for N. On this particular card, the Y had been checked. Yes. Frank Bittle had been a murderer. Under the Recovered box was an N for No, he had not recovered.

Abby replaced the card and flipped through a few more. Every single one had a Y checked for Homicidal. Every single one had an N in the Recovered box.