Rag Doll Bones: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “Well, if it isn’t Max Wolfenstein! You and Jake come in to duke it out? You never did best him on Death Race.”

  Max laughed and his shoulders relaxed. A bit of his dreariness flitted away.

  “Nice shirt,” Max grinned.

  Paulie wore a Pac-Man Fever t-shirt in an orange so bright it looked hot.

  “Funkadelic, right? Eight hundred tickets and you can have your very own.” He gestured at the wall where several t-shirts hung. “This is my bread and butter right here.” Paulie tapped a finger on his shirt.

  “T-shirts?”

  Paulie guffawed.

  “Hell no! Pac-Man. Kids wait in line all day for that machine. Boggles my brain, man. Meanwhile, my favorite, Zaxxon sits lonely and cold half the day. Kids.” He shrugged.

  “Paulie, were you here yesterday when the woman across the street was murdered?”

  Paulie nodded. “Yeah. That was heavy. A kid ran back here screaming. By the time I got to the front, a dozen kids had their faces pressed to the glass up there. A few ran outside, and then the whole pack followed. Damn idgits.”

  Max nodded. He didn’t want to hear more about the shooting. He’d seen the video. He knew how it had gone down.

  “Kim was the name of the woman who got shot. Did you know her?”

  “Kim,” Paulie said triumphantly, as if he’d been searching for her name in his head. “I knew it was something like that. I kept thinking Kelly, but yeah, now I remember, Kim.”

  “You met her then?”

  “Yesterday. Unreal, right? She came in looking for a kid named Jordan. I pointed her to Donkey Kong. He’s the high scorer. Course he dropped out of school and just plays video games all day,” Paulie whispered from the corner of his mouth.

  “Is he here right now?”

  Paulie nodded. “Sure is.” Paulie pointed to a skinny kid, young but hard looking.

  His messy hair hung over the collar of his cutoff black t-shirt. Thin pale arms reached toward the controls. Max saw ink drawings of barbed wire around the kid’s scrawny biceps.

  Jordan barely glanced his way when Max paused beside him.

  “Jordan?” Max asked.

  The kid said nothing, only continued flicking the controls, eyes laser focused on the digital ape jumping from block to block.

  Max wanted to interrupt him, demand the kid talk, but he saw the hard set of his jaw and the way he’d tensed when Max walked closer. He knew kids, and this one was a runner. If he pushed him, Jordan would likely disappear out the door.

  Max stepped back, putting space between them. He fished for his wallet and pulled out a five dollar bill, an essential goldmine to a kid like Jordan.

  “I’ve got five bucks and five minutes,” Max said. “I’m going to go snag a game of Death Race. You want the money, come find me.”

  Max found the game he and Jake used to play for hours. In the years since, the other kids had bested their scores by hundreds of points. Max fed a dollar into the change machine and grabbed the quarters that popped out. He slipped one into the game, glancing behind him as Jordan approached.

  “What do you want?” Jordan asked. He thrust his hand out.

  Max took the five dollars from his pocket and laid it in Jordan’s, knowing the kid could grab the money and take off.

  “Paulie told me you were here yesterday and Kim came in to talk to you.”

  Jordan shrugged.

  “Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  Jordan nodded.

  “Sure, the dead lady.”

  Max cringed at his words.

  “What did she talk to you about?”

  Jordan’s eyes flicked toward a kid playing Atari.

  “We can go outside if you want,” Max suggested.

  Jordan recoiled and stepped back. “I’m not going anywhere with you, man.”

  Max gave him an irritated look. “I’m a teacher. Kim was my friend. Believe me, I have no interest in you beyond finding out what happened to my friend.”

  Jordan’s hand closed around the money, and he slipped it into his pocket. He stared at the door, seeming to come to a conclusion. “Fine, but I ain’t going to your car or any shit like that.”

  Max walked to the door and pushed into the humid day.

  Clouds offered a flimsy shield against the sun's intensity, but the brightness after the arcade stung Max’s eyes. He cupped a palm on his forehead and looked down at the sidewalk.

  Jordan stopped near the door, as if he wanted to stay within arm’s reach. “She wanted to know about this dude in a van,” Jordan said.

  “Okay.” Max spread his hands in a that’s all gesture. “What dude and what van?”

  Jordan pulled a pen from his back pocket and started to draw a crisscross of barbed wire lines around his left wrist.

  “Kim was livin’ with my mom at Ellie’s House.”

  “The women’s shelter?”

  “Yeah. My ma told her I almost got nabbed by some freaks last winter. Kim wanted to know what had happened.”

  Max blinked toward the tangle of ink lines. “Can you tell me about it, please?”

  “Yeah, whatever. I was just walking out by the train tracks. Doin’ nothin’, and this black van pulled up.”

  “Black,” Max murmured. It was not a question.

  “The door opened, and this guy threw a blanket over my head and dragged me inside.”

  Max’s head slowly rolled up to Jordan’s face. The kid was unnaturally pale, but as he told the story, two matching blots of pink appeared on his cheeks as if he were embarrassed.

  It stunned Max that it was embarrassment rather than terror on the kid’s face.

  “I figured they were a couple of faggots trying to get me to do weird shit. My dad taught me how to fight. I started kicking and punching. I bit the guy who’d grabbed me, and then I pulled the blanket off.

  “The driver started swerving all over the place, reaching back. But the guy who’d pulled me in hadn’t latched the door. It was sliding open and closed as we went down the road. I punched the guy who took me as hard as I could right in the nose. That’s how you put a man down. Right here.” The kid tapped a finger on his nose, and Max ached at the tough way he spoke, as if he’d had to defend himself other times, many times.

  “I hauled ass out the door of that van. We weren’t going too fast, but I skinned my elbow pretty good and the side of my face. I didn’t stop. I was up and running before they even knew I was out. Lucky for me we were driving by the woods near the pit. I ran like hell into those trees. I knew the woods. I didn’t stop to see if they were coming. I ran a mile before I caught my breath.”

  Max sagged against the building. “Did you call the cops?”

  Jordan sneered. “The pigs? Fuck no. The only thing the pigs ever did for me was throw me in foster care. And they’d do it again.”

  “Jordan, did you see anything in the van? Anything that would help identify the people who took you?”

  Jordan had returned to his barbed wire. He clicked the end of the pen and stuck it back in his pocket.

  “Yeah. There was a little plastic card hanging from a metal string thing. The guy who’d grabbed me wore it around his neck. I ripped it off. It said Dr. Lance and under that the Northern Michigan Ass.”

  “Northern Michigan Ass?” Max asked skeptically. It was far-fetched enough the man was wearing a badge identifying him as a doctor, but Northern Michigan Ass.

  Jordan shook his head. “A-S, not ass. It was an abbrevi-what’sit. You know where you shorten the word.”

  “Abbreviation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where do you live right now, Jordan?” Max asked, glancing at his watch.

  “Here and there.”

  Max lifted an eyebrow. “Where’s your dad?”

  “Not here. Can’t say I blame him.”

  “And your mom lives at Ellie’s House?”

  Jordan narrowed his eyes. “Don’t even try to pull that ‘save the kid’ shit, man. I see how y
ou’re looking at me, and the only thing I ever get for that look is trouble. I’ll see ya around.”

  Max walked to his motorcycle. Halfway there, he made the connection.

  “Northern Michigan Asylum,” he said aloud.

  36

  Max opened his door to find a vaguely familiar woman standing on his stoop. It took a moment to place her.

  “Martha,” he said, remembering the director from Ellie’s house.

  “Hello, Mr. Wolfenstein. Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes?”

  The woman’s face looked haggard beneath a layer of powder a shade darker than her skin. She sat at Max’s table and folded her hands in front of her.

  From the other room, Max heard a light thud.

  Martha glanced toward the doorway. “Is someone else here?”

  He shook his head.

  “I haven’t slept well since Kim was taken,” she confided. “I’ve lost other women at the house. It’s the burden we accept when we work with survivors of domestic violence. A burden I know all too well.”

  She pulled up her sleeve to reveal puckered white and pink flesh.

  “My ex-husband tried to burn me alive. He threw gasoline on me and held his cigarette to my blouse.” Martha stared at the scar, tracing her finger over the raised flesh. “One of the women at the house once asked if I’d ever considered plastic surgery to remove this scar. I told her no, never. This was mine, all mine, my emblem of survival, a reminder of what I had endured, and why I do what I do.”

  Max held his mug of coffee, staring at the woman’s arm and remembering Kim’s scars. A white pucker of flesh on her back that looked like a cigarette burn. A ring of half-moons near her left breast that had resembled teeth marks. He shuddered.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I wish I could have done more. I think I screwed everything up the day I went to Kim’s apartment. I put her in the path of death.”

  Martha shook her head. “Survivor’s guilt. She married death when she was eighteen years old. When a man commits to killing his wife, only fate can intervene. My fate,” she shook her wrist at him, came in the form of a neighbor with a wet blanket and a golf club. “I believe in God, Mr. Wolfenstein. God saw fit to take our Kim, but before he did, he let her live one last time, love one last time.”

  Martha bent over and pulled a plastic grocery sack from her purse.

  “She didn’t have much. There’s more in her apartment, but of course that’s evidence for the state until Denny Watts is prosecuted. She received a letter after her death from a woman in Washington. You knew Kim. You were helping her with Nicholas. I want to give you her things in the hope you will continue her search. There’s no one else now. You understand?”

  He nodded, his coffee suddenly cold beneath his fingers. He looked at the mug and lifted it to his lips to be sure, and yes, the coffee had gone from piping hot to frigid in seconds.

  He glanced toward the living room where the copy of Heart of Darkness lay on the floor.

  “This letter came for her today. I read it, but I’m afraid I don’t understand the implications. I thought you might.” Martha handed him an envelope.

  Max took the letter from the envelop and read it silently.

  Dear Joan,

  Thank you for reaching out. Yes, Percy is my brother, my only sibling, and I regret that I could not see him more in the two years he has been institutionalized. After he returned from South America, he was a different man. He started to write and call me about a terrible conspiracy. He claimed a doctor at the asylum was kidnapping children and performing experiments with them. As you can imagine, I was immediately concerned for my brother’s mental health. I was unable to see him before he was institutionalized after appearing at the hospital with a gun.

  I have visited him several times in the two years since. He is highly sedated due to paranoid delusions. The doctors believe he suffered a psychotic break during his time in the Amazon.

  I believe there is no merit to his claims. He is merely a sick man.

  Best of luck in finding your son,

  Jody Hobbs

  Max folded the letter and looked at the return address on the envelope.

  “Washington State?” he wondered.

  Martha nodded.

  “There’s a phone number for the woman in Kim’s notebook. I do hope you can help, Max. And thank you.”

  Martha stood and patted Max’s arm before leaving.

  Max opened Kim’s notebook. She’d filled the pages with dates, musings, and little notes about groceries. Twice he saw his own name. The date he first met Kim was listed next to the words Saved by Max.

  He studied the words until they blurred.

  “Saved by Max. No, doomed, not saved, but how could she have known that at the time?” he asked no one.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the number listed next to Jody’s name in Kim’s book.

  A woman answered.

  “Hi, is this Jody Hobbs?”

  “Speaking.” She spoke in a high, clear voice.

  “My name is Max Wolfenstein. I’m a good friend of Kim Phillips. I believe you were corresponding with her?”

  “Yes, though corresponding implies a long communication and in fact I only spoke with her on the phone once and received a single letter. I wrote back to her as well, but haven’t heard back.”

  “That’s because she’s deceased,” Max told her, staring at the hairline cracks in the plaster beside his phone.

  “Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Jody, I’m curious to know why Kim reached out to you. Her son has been missing for several months. I’m assuming from your letter that Kim came across something pertaining to Nicholas.”

  “Yes, well, she described it as chasing white rabbits, unfortunately. She knew I was likely a dead end, but wanted to follow every lead that came her way. She found an article published two years ago by Abe Levett, a journalist for Up North News. He interviewed my brother about a trip he took to the Amazonian jungle. My brother unfortunately suffered a mental breakdown of sorts and started down a delusional path, which culminated in his appearance at the Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane. He was in the possession of a pistol and threatening a doctor there. Percy is a very sick man.”

  “I see. Did Kim believe your brother was connected to Nicholas in some way?”

  The woman sighed.

  “As I mentioned, she knew it was likely a dead end. I’m afraid I can’t be of more help, sir. My husband just pulled in to the driveway and I have to go.”

  Max thanked Jody for her time and disconnected the call.

  He dialed zero for the operator.

  “How can I connect you?”

  “I’d like the number for the newspaper, Up North News, in Traverse City, please.”

  “Connecting you now,” the woman said.

  “Up North News,” a gruff voice barked into the phone.

  “I’m trying to reach Abe Levett.”

  “Hold,” the man snapped.

  A younger man came on the line. “Abe Levett here.”

  “Abe, Hi. My name is Max Wolfenstein. I’m calling about an article you wrote for Up North News almost two years ago. You interviewed a man named Percy Hobbs.”

  Abe didn’t speak for moment, and Max heard muffled talking as if he’d covered the phone with his hand as he spoke to someone.

  “Max, I do remember Percy Hobbs, but I’d prefer to call you back from my home phone. I’m on my way out the door in five minutes. Can I call you back in twenty?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Max rattled off his number, wondering if the reporter was giving him the brushoff.

  Twenty-five minutes later, the phone hadn’t rang and Max paced back and forth in his kitchen.

  Seeking a target for his anger, he cursed Abe Levett under his breath. He opened a cupboard and grabbed a cup, slamming the glass on the counter too hard. The shattering glass was drowned by the ringing of his telephone.

  Max stared, dazed at the
shards of glass flecking his gray and white checked counter.

  The phone rang a second time, and he snatched it up, still stunned at the shattered glass.

  “Yes?” Max said, half-expecting the voice of his mother or Jake to be on the other end.

  “Abe Levett here. Is this Max?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” Max sighed, lifting his phone and drawing out the cord as he walked to his table and slumped into a chair.

  “Percy Hobbs called me about claims of a child abduction by a doctor at the Northern Michigan Asylum.”

  “And was it true?” Max asked, thinking of the stories by two separate unrelated witnesses of a black van with ties to the Northern Michigan Asylum.

  “I could not substantiate those claims,” Abe admitted. “But if you want my gut. I think there was a kernel of truth. Was the whole elaborate story true? That’s hard to say.”

  “Can you tell me about them?”

  “Hold on,” Abe told him. He spoke to someone on his end of the line.

  “Orla, can you grab my notes on Percy Hobbs from the December 1981 file?”

  Max waited, listening to rustling in the background.

  Orla, Abe had said, a unique name and one Max remembered. He’d read about her in the newspaper. She’d been one of the women abducted by the serial killer from the Leelanau area. Abe Levett had broken the case wide open. He’d also written a long series of articles about corruption at the Northern Michigan Asylum.

  Abe cleared his throat, murmuring out loud to himself for a moment.

  “Okay yeah, yeah. I remember. He was rather clandestine about the whole thing. He’d found something while traveling in the Amazon, something other worldly he’d claimed, and a doctor from the asylum had stolen it. The doctor was kidnapping children in order to use this thing. He wouldn’t give me specifics, but he wanted attention brought to the doctor and the children. The doctor, as you can imagine, was furious and sued us for liable. My editor’s a maverick, but he didn’t want to take this one on.

  “I tried to corroborate Percy’s story, but he went into the institution right after this all went down. I couldn’t validate any of his claims. He did travel to the Amazon, and he lost two traveling partners. I could trace that information through flight records and a few interviews with the family of his colleagues who were lost in the rainforest.”