The House of Memory (Pluto's Snitch Book 2) Page 6

  When Zelda noticed that another passenger on the trolley, a young man in a business suit, was more interested in our conversation than anything else, she put a finger to her lips. “Enough of that talk. Look, there’s the high court where Daddy’s a judge.”

  As we continued through the heart of Montgomery, Zelda and Tallulah pointed out the sights. By the time we hopped off at the stop near the parked car, I felt I knew a bit about the state capital, and I had to agree with Judge Sayre’s assessment that Montgomery was a booming young town.

  We returned to the Sayre house, and I could barely suppress a series of yawns. The big meal, two glasses of sherry, and July heat had wilted me into a puddle of uselessness. I excused myself for a nap and fell on the bed in the guest room, where a breeze stirred the lace curtains at the open window. Outside songbirds called to one another, lulling me into a light sleep.

  When I woke up, I realized something was off. My eyes refused to open. It felt as if the muscles no longer worked. Panic bloomed in my chest. I didn’t need my sight to know someone else was in my room. It took a few moments for me to remember where I was. At last I forced my eyes open and felt the air leave my lungs. A young girl stood at the foot of my bed. Her curly blonde hair fell about her shoulders, and her china-blue eyes regarded me with deep sadness.

  “I’ll be good,” she said. Blood slowly leaked from her head, tracing down the side of her nose and finally dripping off her chin. “I’ll be good. Please don’t hurt me.”

  The nightmare closed around me, paralyzing my body. At last I sat up in bed, my heart thrumming. I looked around my empty bedroom. Could my brain have somehow combined the horror of Camilla’s potential surgery and the missing girl from Autaugaville into a dream that depicted the horror of both young women?

  I washed my face in the basin on the dressing table, straightened my clothes and hair, and hurried into the parlor in the hopes of finding a companion. Until I shook off the desperation of my dream, I didn’t want to be alone.

  Judge Sayre dropped us at Union Station the next morning as dawn cracked the sky. Zelda sat on the depot bench, her eyes closed and her forehead gripped in both hands. “The heat here is intolerable. I can’t wait to return to New York and Scott.” For the first time since I’d met her, she sounded small and lonely.

  I didn’t blame her. Scott Fitzgerald was a handsome pilot, a man who’d been stationed at nearby Fort Sheridan during the war. I’d read his novel, a gift from my uncle, before I left Mobile. The world he’d created between the pages made me long for a glamorous life I’d never experienced, and I had no doubt that Beatrice O’Hara shared more than a few of Zelda’s character traits.

  I sat beside Zelda, recalling the very public story of her romance with the writer. While I tended to shield my private moments, Zelda and Scott sought the limelight, living their golden romance and showering spectators with wild behavior. Scott had met Zelda at a Montgomery dance, the pair igniting a flame that threatened to burn them and the whole city down. Zelda, in true belle form, refused to marry Scott until he could support her in the manner she’d become accustomed. His answer had been a book, This Side of Paradise, that had rocketed him to fame. It had been published March 26, and he and Zelda had married on April 3 at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

  “When will you return to the city?” I asked.

  She lifted her head and stared at the empty train tracks. “As soon as I can. I’ll make the introductions with Camilla, and then I’m returning to Montgomery on the evening train. Scott will call me, and I must talk to him.” She stood up and stretched, avoiding eye contact. “You’ll think me a coward, but I can’t stay at Bryce Hospital for long. I feel like I’m trapped there, unable to get away. Like I might die there.”

  My body reacted with a chill. I’d pushed the idea of actually spending time at a mental facility far, far into the back of my thoughts. I’d seen newspaper photographs of some asylums, and the complete desperation, the sense of humans lost in their own misery, was staggering.

  Once upon a time, according to Uncle Brett, Bryce Hospital had been the exception. It was built on the Kirkbride Plan, incorporating “moral architecture,” and was considered to be in the top tier of psychiatric hospitals around the world. In the years since the Civil War, though, state funding for the facility had dried up, and Uncle Brett had warned me the hospital was overcrowded and understaffed. Would I be able to handle what I might see?

  “Reginald and I can manage on our own,” I told her. “Once Camilla’s aware we’ve come to help her, there’s no reason for you to remain.”

  There was no point in telling Zelda that I, too, was a coward.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As Zelda’s hired car drove through a shady lane of trees, Bryce Hospital came into view. The beauty of the building was unexpected. The Italianate edifice stood dead center at the end of the driveway, a white central building with a rotunda flanked on either side by three wards, staggered for maximum privacy. The hospital, which was a self-sufficient community, ran off the labor of the patients, and it was set amid a large acreage that offered beauty and serenity, land for farming, and untamed areas for the enjoyment of nature—all elements of a design that had been promoted by Dorothea Dix.

  A social reformer of the nineteenth century, Dix was a woman I greatly admired. I regretted that she had not lived to see the suffragette movement she’d championed come so near to ratification. Her work for the insane had made life better for hundreds of thousands of patients. As I’d learned from several trips to the Mobile Public Library, the Alabama Hospital for the Insane, later renamed for Dr. Bryce, was perhaps the facility that had, at one time, most closely followed the plan that Dix and Thomas Story Kirkbride had created to achieve the maximum help for the mentally ill.

  When we pulled up beside the fountain featuring a young woman pouring water, I inhaled several times to calm my jittery nerves. Zelda asked the driver to wait for her. It was obvious the asylum made her nervous. She practically leaped from the hired car. She, Reginald, and I walked across the limestone rocks to the front door and entered.

  The facility was open and airy and graciously designed, but peeling paint and the odor of damp and mildew spoke of neglect. The young nurse who greeted us knew Zelda, who carried more than a little weight at the hospital. I wondered if it was because of her father or because of her own notoriety. Nurse Mahala chatted as she led us to the patient. “Camilla isn’t unhappy here, but I think she’s lonely,” she said. “She doesn’t trust herself to go home, though she desperately wants to.”

  “Is she eating?” Zelda asked.

  “Not enough.” The nurse walked beside Zelda while Reginald and I followed. “Head Nurse Brady has threatened to force-feed her if her appetite doesn’t pick up.”

  “I say, is that necessary?” Reginald asked. “It’s a rather brutal tactic.”

  The nurse shot a look over her shoulder. “We can’t allow a patient to starve to death here.”

  “I’ll speak with her,” Zelda said. “Force-feeding won’t be necessary—I assure you.”

  We turned down a wide hallway, and I dropped back to look out some windows onto a rose garden in desperate need of weeding and pruning. Once it must have been magnificent, a place of respite for the troubled patients.

  The footfalls of Zelda, the nurse, and Reginald moved down the hallway as I stared outside. The whole institution seemed buried under sadness. Beyond the rose garden a woman, presumably a patient, walked in circles. Other patients sat in the shade, unmoving. They were not dead, but neither did they seem fully alive.

  A young brunette woman, really just a girl, moved through a copse of slender poplar trees some fifty yards in the distance. I caught a glimpse of her, and then she was gone, leaving me to wonder if she’d been a real patient or a ghost. Bryce Hospital was clearly a haunted place, and the energy of the departed could gather in the dark corners of the hallways and various rooms. They wouldn’t likely materialize, as the spirits at
Caoin House had done. These, I perceived, were fragments of people who’d once been. Residual energy, unable to fully incarnate and unable to let go. They were as trapped as the patients whose mental disabilities kept them from a normal life, but I didn’t sense violence or danger.

  The hallway was empty, and I hurried to catch up with my party. Sunlight struck something shiny on the floor, and I bent to pick up an earbob made of black jet. I clutched it in my hand as I ran lightly down the hall until I’d fallen back in step with Reginald.

  “Is Camilla improving?” Reginald asked the nurse. “Since she hasn’t had another episode and she hasn’t been diagnosed with a treatable illness, perhaps it’s time for her to return to Montgomery. It might be best to see what happens.”

  “You’ll have to speak to Dr. Perkins about her condition.” Mahala kept walking. “He isn’t available today. You can make an appointment for next week.”

  Lucky for us that Dr. Winston Perkins was away for a few more days, delivering a talk on his experimental surgical procedure in Vienna. That was the time frame we had to work within. Either we could help Camilla, or, upon the doctor’s return, we would lose the chance.

  Zelda was as good as her word. She found Camilla in the dayroom, introduced us, kissed her friend, and left.

  We were seated in a sunny room with a piano, several sofas, a few rocking chairs, and bookshelves. Camilla wore a cool lawn dress, an older style. Her long hair had been pulled up into a bun, a look more suited to her mother’s generation than her own. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to conform or if she simply hadn’t thought about her appearance.

  The nurse left us with a long, speculative look. When she was gone, we drew two chairs close to Camilla. She was a beautiful young woman with large brown eyes and lush, dark hair. With her milky complexion and air of calm containment, she reminded me of one of Jane Austen’s heroines.

  “Don’t think poorly of Zelda for leaving like that,” Camilla said. “She’s brave in so many ways, but illness terrifies her. She said that you wanted to help me. How do you plan to do that?”

  Her directness set me back, but it also made me like her. “We’re not certain, exactly,” I said. “First we need to find out from you what happened.”

  “I tried to kill the man I love,” she said, her gaze never wavering from mine. “I don’t know if I’m crazy or a monster of some kind.”

  “Perhaps neither,” Reginald said softly. “There are other possibilities, you know.”

  “Such as?” She leaned forward. “For the past three weeks, I’ve done nothing but think of other possibilities and come up empty-handed. Either I am mentally unstable or there is a buried part of me that is angry and ugly and wants to harm people. Either way I can’t risk returning to Montgomery.”

  “But you’ve attacked only your fiancé,” I pointed out, electing for the blunt approach myself. “Has he harmed you in any way?”

  “David?” She laughed. “He’s one of the kindest people you’d ever hope to meet.”

  “A nice dodge,” I said. I didn’t know this woman, but I couldn’t waste days of my life and Zelda’s money. “Answer my question.”

  “He’s never harmed me,” she said. “But I’ve tried to cut his throat.”

  “Tell us what you remember,” Reginald prompted.

  “I’ve told it so many times already.” She seemed to withdraw a little.

  “Please tell us again,” he said. “We haven’t much time, Miss Camilla. Your doctor is away, and I lied to your mother about why we came to see you. When she finds out the truth, I’ll be thrown out of here on my ear. So please, please help us to help you.”

  She nodded. “The first time anything strange happened, David and I had gone to the house he’d purchased for us to live in. Workmen were renovating, but no one was there that day but us. I didn’t know about the house. I’d never dreamed that I would live in our own estate, and such a beautiful place. It was built before the Civil War, at a time when crown molding made from plaster and horsehair was shaped in hand-carved forms of original design. The paneling is tiger oak, and the floors are three-quarter-inch planks. I’d always dreamed of such a home, and David had bought it for us.”

  “We hope to see Roswell House in a day or so,” I mentioned.

  “I think about going back there as David’s wife.” She swallowed and blinked back tears. “I cling to those dreams.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather go to New York? To be independent for a little while?”

  Camilla’s smile was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. “A month ago, I wanted to be independent, just for a few weeks. My mother is . . . very controlling. She’s told me what to say, what to think, what to wear, what to eat, how to eat it. I wanted, for a few weeks, to be my own person. Zelda and Tallulah would have watched over me. Mama almost cast a kitten.” She smiled. “See, I was learning the proper slang.”

  What struck me was the lack of agitation in Camilla’s voice. She’d been relentlessly pressed and shaped into a package, yet she didn’t sound angry. “We met your mother.”

  “Then you can understand. I wasn’t going to do anything wild or wanton, just laugh and go to some Broadway shows, get dressed up and walk down the street, window-shopping.”

  Reginald exchanged a look with me. We were both thinking what a true innocent Camilla was.

  “But your mother refused,” Reginald said.

  “Of course. She went insane when I proposed the trip, though David wanted me to go. He has relatives in the city, and he offered to make an introduction.”

  “So you truly want to marry David?”

  “More than anything.” She leaned forward in her chair. “I don’t care all that much about going to New York anymore. I just want to be David’s wife. One thing about spending nearly a month in a place like this, where so many patients don’t have the freedom to walk outside. It puts a completely different perspective on what’s important.”

  “Why don’t you speak with your mother about returning to Montgomery and Dr. Abbott’s treatment?” I asked. “Reginald and I will work with you to figure out what happened to you, but you don’t have to stay here.” The hospital was one of the most depressing places I’d ever been, and if Camilla’s problems stemmed from a haunting at Roswell House, we’d need to address it there with her.

  “No. I’ll go home cured, or I won’t go home at all.” Her voice broke, and she brushed a single tear away. “I could have killed David, and I have no memory at all of my actions.”

  “He wasn’t hurt,” Reginald pointed out.

  “Only because he moved quickly and avoided the knife. From what he told me, I changed into someone else. Something else.”

  Camilla was shaken to the core of her being by what she’d done. What David Simpson told her she’d done, I amended.

  “Both instances occurred when you were alone with David.” Reginald took her hand as he talked. “Correct?”

  She sighed. “And both times we were at Roswell House, my new home. If I marry David.”

  She’d marry the banker if Maude Granger had her way, even if Camilla had been reduced to the mental awareness of a rutabaga. I couldn’t tell her that, though. Not yet. She had enough to contend with.

  “Zelda told you we work with spirits?” I didn’t want to give her false hope, but I had to get a sense of her willingness to work with us. “We’re looking into Roswell House. If your behavior stems from a location, an angry spirit remaining there, we may truly be able to help.”

  “I’m not sure my troubles come from a haunting.”

  “We’re not sure either,” I said. “But we intend to find out. We have until your doctor returns from his presentation. Will you work with us?”

  “Absolutely.” She had no hesitation.

  “Then we’ll begin.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The afternoon sun slanted through the window, falling just short of the chair where Camilla sat, her hands folded in her lap. “When David took me to Roswell House, it
was a complete shock. He’d refused to say where we were going, only that it was a surprise.”

  “What was your first reaction?” I asked.

  “We turned down the drive, which was overgrown with volunteer scrub oaks and pines. Some of the shrubs had grown to mammoth proportions and almost blocked the driveway. I couldn’t imagine where David was taking me, but he was laughing and had this air of adventure, so I didn’t care. We were together, and that was all that mattered.”

  “And the house?” Reginald asked.

  “When I first saw it, I realized where we were. It was a place we came as schoolchildren, daring one another to run up the porch and knock on the door. It had been abandoned for at least a decade then and said to be haunted. My first reaction was to be a little afraid.”

  “Why was the house left to sit empty?” I asked.

  “The Roswell family died out, I guess.” Camilla was unsure. “The Roswells were once powerful and acquired thousands of acres of land, some said by pressuring people into selling.”

  “Did you know the family?”

  “No, Roswell House has been empty as long as I can remember. I know a bit about the house because David told me.”

  I nodded for her to continue.

  “Back before the war, Ramsey Roswell acquired a fortune selling timber to the steamboats and railroad for fuel. With his money and what is said to be brutal and unethical tactics, Ramsey bought a large tract of land. He was betting big that the city of Montgomery would be built on his land. It didn’t happen that way, though. Montgomery was located to the north.” She fell silent.

  I gently encouraged her to continue. “Uncle Brett says land speculation is a gambler’s delight.”

  Camilla’s fingers plucked at the material of her dress. “Ramsey wasn’t a man to accept defeat. He realized that the land he’d bought had access to a valuable resource, a navigable creek. He built the original Roswell House near Tonka Creek and began raiding and robbing both Rebel and Union stockpiles, hiding his stolen spoils up Tonka Creek and sailing them downriver to Mobile for a handy profit. Soon after building his big house there, he learned that the creek was prone to flooding. The higher ground next to his plot of land had been purchased by a family that lived out of state. Ramsey couldn’t bribe or threaten them into selling. It wasn’t until after the war, after the Yankees burned Ramsey’s house to the ground, that the Peebles family, who owned the high ground, arrived in Alabama to homestead. Like so many others, they had hard luck, and Wick Roswell, Ramsey’s young son, bought the land from them and built the current Roswell House.”