P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

Zeke handed him the keys. “If you leave before I get back, lock up and leave the keys with the guys over in the admin building.”

Zeke walked off and Louis let Dr. Seraphin and her driver go in ahead. She stopped in the foyer, her shoulders rising and falling with a deep sigh.

“I should have warned you,” Louis said. “The upstairs has been vandalized, too.”

“It looks like the staff just abandoned it.” She shook her head and moved down the hall, her heeled black boots clicking on the terrazzo floor. Then she turned back to her driver.

“Oliver,” she said, “why don’t you check out the building while we do this?”

Oliver hesitated, either miffed to be asked to act as a security guard or because he didn’t want to leave her. But he finally turned and started up the staircase, the same one Alice had taken Louis up.

Dr. Seraphin and Louis moved on to the records room and unlocked the door.

She stared at the stacks of boxes. “I had no idea there would be so many,” she said softly.

“We think he may have raped as early as 1959, so we start there.”

“And you’re basing that on what this Millie Reuben told you?”

“Actually, no,” Louis said. “We’re basing it on Claudia DeFoe’s file.”

Dr. Seraphin’s eyes swung to his face. “Claudia DeFoe? The woman whose remains are missing?”

“Yes,” Louis said. “Millie Reuben told me about isolation periods and said that’s when she was raped. Claudia was also isolated three times, the first in 1959. When she was returned to the general ward afterward, she was listed as having burn marks on her.”

Dr. Seraphin studied him for a moment. “Tell me, were you able to determine why Miss DeFoe was put in isolation?”

“No,” Louis said. “Maybe you can tell me why these women were isolated for months at a time.”

Dr. Seraphin stiffened her jaw. “Did you drag me out here to question the way I practiced psychiatry three decades ago?”

Louis hesitated. “No, I’m sorry. I was just curious as to the reasoning at the time.”

She relaxed some, but she still took her time answering. “There would have been two reasons,” she said. “One would have been for safety. Certain people were isolated after an incident of violence against another patient or staff member.”

“And the other reason?”

“It was something new I was trying with the patients suffering from severe depression,” she said. “They were isolated in an effort to gain their total dependency. Once we had that, we treated them with various stimulation therapy.”

“And drugs?”

“To keep them calm, yes.”

“Sounds rather superficial.”

“It was,” Dr. Seraphin said. “But the idea was to try to teach the brain to process images and emotions differently, not unlike today’s theories of positive thinking.”

“Did you see any success in it?”

“Some,” Dr. Seraphin said. “But we didn’t know then that depression is a chronic chemical deficiency. Nowadays, very few need inpatient treatment and most live perfectly normal lives with Prozac and its sister drugs.”

Dr. Seraphin fell quiet, but she didn’t look away from him and he had the feeling there was something she had left unsaid and he thought he knew what it was.

“Doctor, you remember Claudia DeFoe, don’t you?”

Dr. Seraphin drew a shallow breath. “Yes. I knew the name that first day you walked into my office. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t really tell you anything then.”

“Can you now?”

Dr. Seraphin looked up at him. “I will only tell you that if we had had the treatments then that we have now, I believe she would be living a normal, happy life.”

Louis pushed the door open wider and Dr. Seraphin went inside the records room. Louis found an old stool in the hallway and brought it over. Dr. Seraphin dusted it with her hand before sitting down.

“Did you bring the police file?” Dr. Seraphin asked.

“Yes,” Louis said, handing it to her.

She started looking through the reports and photos while Louis dug for the box labeled 1959.

“He has no respect for women,” Dr. Seraphin said.

Louis dropped a box in the corner. “That’s pretty obvious. Most sexual predators don’t.”

“Why do you think he burns his victims?”

Louis shoved aside another box. “Torture. I think he gets off on their pain.”

“You think he gratifies himself while he burns them?”

“Probably.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “The burning is not sexual, despite the placement of it on the thighs. It’s a brand.”

“Like cattle?” Louis asked.

“Yes. It’s his symbol of ownership, done after the rape.”

Louis shoved a box to the side and looked at her. “So this guy rapes his victim, then while having an after-sex smoke, he makes his mark?”

Dr. Seraphin nodded, her head bent back over the reports. After a few more minutes of reading, she looked up again.

“You didn’t tell me Rebecca Gruber was raped with an object.”

“We don’t know what it was.”

“Did you find any semen?”

“No.”

“Your man is impotent,” Dr. Seraphin said.

Louis shook his head. “Millie Reuben said she was raped. She said she felt him.”

“Millie Ruben’s rape occurred in the sixties when the man was young and healthy. And he didn’t kill her,” Dr. Seraphin said. “He’s changed since then. He’s grown angrier over the years and if he’s become impotent recently, his anger is magnified by his inability to perform.”

“You see anything else that will help?” he asked.

“Your killer is a man who probably held no job, had little or no contact with his family, someone who came to Hidden Lake at a young, impressionable age.”

“Stereotypical profile,” Louis said.

“You’ve done some profiling?”

“A little.”

“When did you say this Stottlemyer girl was killed?”

“A little over a year ago.”

“Just about when the news that the hospital would be torn down made the papers.”

“You think that’s why he came back?”

“Yes,” Dr. Seraphin said. “He has made the prodigal journey home, Mr. Kincaid. Like we all we do when we are feeling a little lost.”

Louis was quiet, his gaze drifting back to the stacks of boxes.

“You’re still very young,” Dr. Seraphin said. “Perhaps you can’t quite relate to that need to return to something you associate with security.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

She was watching him as he moved boxes. He could feel her eyes on his back.

“Tell me,” she said. “Where did you grow up?”

“Here and there,” Louis said. He finally saw the box for 1959. It had two more on top of it.

“That doesn’t sound very stable,” she said. “And as children, we do need stability. That’s how our image of home is formed, be it good or bad.”

Louis pulled out the 1959 box and slid it to the center of the floor.

“How do you remember your childhood?” she asked. “Good or bad?”

“With all due respect, Doctor,” Louis said, “that’s none of your business.”

She sat very still, watching him, and for a moment, he felt they were in some kind of standoff and that she was debating whether to get pissed off and leave. But she smiled instead.

“My apologies for prying.”

“Apology accepted.”

He took the lid off the box and dropped to his knees. The box was stuffed with manila folders, some of the names handwritten, some typed, most so faded he had to pull out his glasses to read the tabs.

“One thing, Mr. Kincaid,” Dr. Seraphin said. “No matter how you remember your childhood, you can change that. Any time you want.”

“You can’t change what happened in the past.”