P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

The bedroom grew dark and he had gone through two Dr Peppers and a sandwich by the time he was able to figure out that the long gaps in any kind of treatments or medications must be the isolation periods. He wrote them down on a legal pad.

Claudia had been admitted to Hidden Lake in October of 1951, and had been put on Thorazine. But the records showed she had been taken off the drug almost immediately. There were no other treatments recorded until the late summer of 1952, when Claudia and Millie tried to escape.

Claudia had been sent to E Building right after that, and for the next few years, her treatments were frequent, alternating between ice baths and electric shock until early 1955, when the notes from the same period stated “the patient remains angry and unresponsive to therapy.”

Louis adjusted his glasses, trying to decipher the scrawled writings: Patient delusional; speaks of visits from her father. According to the patient’s family history, patient’s father committed suicide.

Louis stared at that line for a moment. He had heard things about mental illness running in families and he wondered when and how the father had done this. He scribbled a note to himself to find out and went on reading.

The insulin therapy was begun within months of the previous notation. The remarks changed from labeling Claudia as rebellious to compliant: Patient seems listless and unconcerned about her own welfare. Refuses to bathe herself. Patient also has become delusional and speaks of hearing voices.

It was much of the same for the next four or five years. Daily doses of Thorazine. Occasional insulin shock. And the notation: Patient is unresponsive.

Louis closed his eyes for a second, and lifted his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. Then he glanced over at Claudia’s photo on the nightstand. He was up to 1959 now. Claudia was twenty-five. The prime of her life. A time she should have been getting married, having children, or starting a career.

He went back to the file.

January 1959: Patient isolated in West Isolation Ward. The paperwork gave no reason, but maybe it was written down somewhere else he couldn’t find, or maybe they didn’t even need a reason.

December 29, 1959: Patient returned to general population. Patient now self-injurious, cutting herself and burning herself.

Louis leaned closer, reading the words again.

Jesus. .

Claudia had been burned. But had she done it herself-or had she been a victim like Millie and Rebecca? If it was the latter, he had a third rape victim tied to the hospital. But the time line was different now. The earliest date was no longer Millie’s burning and rape in 1964; it was Claudia’s burn notation in 1959.

But how could something like that happen to both Millie and Claudia five years apart in a place that was supposed to be secure? How could a patient run wild and victimize women?

Louis leaned back against the headboard. Maybe the rapist wasn’t a patient. Maybe he simply dressed like one so the women didn’t know who he really was. Maybe he was an orderly, or worse, a doctor.

He reached over to take a drink of Dr Pepper and adjusted his glasses to keep reading.

Claudia was isolated again in the fall of 1961, and again in late 1963, both times for almost a year. There were no additional references to burns, but he had no reason to assume she couldn’t have been raped and burned again during those times.

By late 1969, her treatments started to dwindle off to almost nothing. The doctor’s remarks grew infrequent, almost like Claudia was no longer receiving any significant care. And he guessed by that time, the insulin had eaten away any functioning part of her brain. Then he read something that confirmed what he had been thinking:

Patient experiences long periods of depression, and at times appears catatonic and unresponsive to outside stimuli. Patient still hearing voices and no longer recognizes visitors.

Louis stared at the last line. Visitors?

He set that paper aside and started rifling through the others for something else. They kept track of visitors at prisons. Why wouldn’t they do it at this place?

Here it was.

The first entry was December 1951, about two months after she was admitted. The visitor was Rodney DeFoe. There were probably fifteen other entries on this page that went up to early 1962, and Rodney DeFoe was on every line. It looked like he visited her a couple of times a year, mostly in the spring. No one else was on the visitors’ log.

But there were ten more years of visitor logs to look at, and Louis started sifting through the papers, but he only found two for Claudia: April 1969 and the last entry, April 1972.

April 1972?

That didn’t seem right. What had Phillip said?

It was right after my fortieth birthday. I went back to the hospital and they told me she had died there a year before.

Louis knew Phillip’s birthday was December 18. And if he remembered right, Phillip was born in 1932, which meant his fortieth birthday was December of 1972. Dr. Seraphin had told him that Claudia died during a flu epidemic during the winter of ’71-’72.

But this log listed a visit from Rodney in April of 1972, four or five months after Dr. Seraphin claimed Claudia was already dead.

Louis pulled off his glasses. Something was wrong. Or someone was mistaken. Memories-especially hard ones-could be unreliable, and Phillip was having a tough enough time with all this. Or maybe he himself was wrong about the year Phillip was born. Or maybe he wasn’t remembering clearly what Dr. Seraphin had told him.

Claudia’s death certificate. That would tell him.

He hadn’t seen one in the file, but he searched again, careful to look at every piece of paper. But as he neared the bottom of the stack, he grew sure it wasn’t in this file.

Why wasn’t it? Becker’s death certificate had been in his medical file, so why wasn’t Claudia’s?

He picked up the phone and called the Ardmore station. Chief Dalum wasn’t in the office, but Louis left a message asking him to run down a copy of Claudia’s death certificate. When the officer asked him for a date of death, Louis gave him 1972, but before he hung up, he added December 1971 as well.

Louis leaned back against the headboard, his gaze moving to the mirror and the twinkle of Christmas lights outside.

It pissed him off that he hadn’t gotten her death certificate right off. If he had, this question-and maybe some other ones-might have been answered by now. There was so much in his head right now. Some things he knew -the fact that Claudia had been burned and possibly raped. But there was so much he didn’t know-like had Claudia been murdered by the rapist?

If she had been murdered, why did Dr. Seraphin lie? And where the hell was Claudia’s body?

Louis put the file back together, feeling a small wave of weariness. He slid off the bed and stuck Claudia’s folder back in the dresser. She was a tough one to be around, like a black-sheep relative filled with so much need that it drained all the emotion of everyone around them. And every time he put her away, she left him with a faint sadness that took days to shake.

He checked his watch, wondering where Phillip was. It was almost nine now. Too late to expect Frances would be fixing anything for dinner. He headed downstairs to rummage up something. He had his head in the fridge when it hit him.

Maybe there wasn’t a body.

He straightened.

If Claudia had been murdered, why not just put her mutilated body in a casket and drop it in the ground?

Louis closed the fridge.

But someone buried rocks. And he had the feeling that it wasn’t as Dr. Seraphin had theorized: that Claudia had been cremated in error and some grave digger had buried a rock-filled coffin just to cover up his mistake.