P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“All right,” Louis said, slipping in the car. “I’ll do what I can.”

“I’ll give you an acknowledgment in the book.”

Louis jerked the car door closed and started the engine. Delp tossed the cigarette to the dirt, gave Louis a small wave, and hurried back inside the restaurant.

Louis took a drink from the can of Dr Pepper, careful not to take his eyes off the twisting road. The last sign he had seen said DEXTER 6 MILES. He passed under an old stone railroad bridge, and started seeing a scattering of Victorian houses set back among the trees. He passed a sign for the Dexter Cider Mill; then the town came into view and he slowed.

The row of storefronts were painted in rusty reds and shades of gray. There was a small Victorian clock tower set on an island in the middle of the street. Beneath it, huddled on a green bench, were two old men in checkered flannel jackets and leather caps with earflaps.

Farther along, he passed a weathered wooden gazebo. Inside the gazebo were two teenagers who, in between kisses, were watching workers string a banner from the streetlights that read A VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS.

He took a right at Apple Orchard Lane, and less than a block later, he saw the house that Millie Reuben had described to him on the phone, a pale pink Victorian with a wraparound porch. He pulled in behind a blue sedan, picked up the thin manila folder off the seat, and walked to the door. He knocked.

When he had called, he had told Millie Reuben that he wanted to talk about Hidden Lake, and after a long silence, she had agreed, without even asking him why.

There was a white lace curtain over the door’s glass inset. It moved suddenly, a pair of eyes appearing. Then the door opened.

He knew Millie Reuben was in her midfifties and he had been expecting a hollow-eyed, broken woman. But Millie Reuben had loose, brown curls and was wearing a leopard-trimmed, velour pantsuit. Her face was lightly lined with a brush of rose at her cheeks, but she wore no mascara or eye shadow. She didn’t need to. Her deep-set, thickly lashed eyes were flecked with yellow and green, and he knew instantly they had once been her most beautiful feature.

“Millie Reuben?” he asked.

“You must be Officer Kincaid.”

“Yes. May I come in?”

Millie stepped back and let him inside, then led him to a living room filled with sunshine from a large bay window. The place was pine-scented with an undernote of something sweet he thought he knew but couldn’t quite imagine in this old house.

Millie motioned for him to sit and he propped himself on the corner of a hard-tufted couch. Millie started to sit down, but her eye caught a shadow behind her and she turned.

“Go stir the stew, Ruthie. He’s not here to see you.”

The shadow disappeared and Millie reached to an end table and opened a silver box, taking out a cigarette. “My sister,” she said as she lit the cigarette with a red Bic from her pocket.

She grabbed an ashtray and came to sit across from Louis. “I’m sorry,” she said, waving her cigarette. “Does this bother you?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “Not that it would make any difference to me. Ever since I got out of that place, I’ve made it a point to do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it.”

“I understand.”

“So,” she said. “Why do you want to know about that place? Is someone suing them?”

“No,” Louis said.

“You writing a book?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Miss Reuben,” Louis said, “I realize this might be hard for you-”

Millie shook her head quickly. “I used to talk about this stuff every week with my shrink. I saw the same one for years and trust me, he got memories out of me about that place I didn’t know I had. I’m fine with all of it now.”

She reached over and opened a drawer on the end table. It was full of brown prescription vials.

“Really, I am,” she added.

Louis wasn’t so sure. Maybe it would be best if he started with something other than Donald Lee Becker.

“Do you remember Claudia DeFoe?” he asked.

Millie closed the drawer and sat back, blowing out smoke. “Nice little rich girl,” she said. “Not that having all that money ever helped her any. Money didn’t do you a damn bit of good in that place.”

“When did you meet her?”

Millie had to think for a minute. “Right after I went in,” she said. “Let’s see, my father committed me in the summer of 1952. She’d been there awhile by then.”

“May I ask why you were committed?”

Millie’s eyes swept back to Louis quickly and he was sure she was going to tell him it was none of his business. “I was a heroin addict,” she said. “My boyfriend got me hooked, and when my father found out, he had me arrested. I stabbed a police officer with a kitchen knife and then stabbed myself.”

Louis looked down at the folder in his hand.

“I was high,” she said, stiffening. “I never would have hurt myself or that cop without that crap in me.”

When Louis said nothing, Millie went on. “They detoxed me and a month or so later I was bunking next to Claudia in that place. She was the saddest person I ever met, I think.”

“Sad, how? Suicidal?”

“Oh no, not like that. I never heard her talk about hurting herself.”

“She slashed her wrists. That’s what put her there.”

“I know. But she told me she didn’t even remember doing that,” Millie said. “Like I didn’t remember much about stabbing the cop or myself, either. Besides, that one thing didn’t make her a lunatic.”

Louis opened the folder and reached for the photograph of Becker, but Millie was talking again.

“She used to cry all night,” she said. “I never heard someone cry so much.”

His next question popped into his head and he almost thought about not asking it. “Did she talk of anyone?” Louis asked.

Millie’s lips turned up in a sad smile. “She was a romantic, that one was. She talked of a boy named Phillip. And how they were going to get married, and how she and him and their children would live in this beautiful house on Lake Michigan.”

Louis lowered his eyes, but they fell on the mug shot of Becker. He closed the folder again. “Did she ever seem to get better?” he asked.

“Better?” Millie asked. “In that place they didn’t want anyone to get better. They only wanted you to comply. And if you didn’t you went to E Building.”

“That’s where she went after you and she tried to escape, right?”

Millie seemed surprised he knew, and she took a second to stab out her cigarette in the ashtray and then gave him a long look. “If you know that, then you know what they did to her in that place. They say she died of the flu, but it wasn’t that. It was that place. It killed you in ways you didn’t even know you could die.”

Louis didn’t want to go back into this, but Millie kept talking and he had the sense that outside of her therapist, she didn’t have anyone to talk to about this. Or at least anyone who wanted to hear it.

“Do you know about the therapy they gave her?” Millie asked.

“I know about the shock and insulin treatments.”

“And about the isolation periods?”

“No,” Louis said. “I haven’t read the whole file yet.”

“She would disappear for months at a time, and when I’d ask, they’d tell me she was on punishment and in isolation and if I wasn’t good, that’s where I’d end up, too.”

He knew what effect long periods of isolation had on convicts in maximum-security prisons. He could not imagine the effect on a young woman already under the influence of drugs and suffering from depression.