Calling Back the Dead: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “Daddy!” she shrieked, swatting him away.

  He settled on the couch next to me, and we watched Sarah plop next to Isis on the rug, peering at the old-fashioned furnishings arranged in the tiny rooms.

  “WHAT’S YOUR BOOK ABOUT?” Sarah asked, picking a red crayon from the box next to Isis and coloring in a flower.

  “Mine,” Isis announced, snatching the crayon from Sarah’s hand. “Please,” she added in the same abrupt tone.

  “Isis, remember what we talked about?” I asked her, gently removing the crayon from her hand. “If you want people to color with you, you have to share. You can’t just snatch the crayon away.”

  She stared at the crayon, reaching out, but I held it away.

  “Please?” she asked a second time, looking at Sarah.

  “Sure, go ahead, Icy, but I’m coloring the grass with this green one. Okay?”

  Isis bit her lip, staring enviously at the green crayon. Finally she huffed and accepted the red crayon, scrawling red streaks across Sarah’s newly colored grass.

  I grinned and shook my head.

  “Toddlers. Why is everything more wonderful if someone else has it?”

  Sarah looked up and laughed.

  “I’m afraid that problem extends way beyond the toddler years.”

  “True enough,” I sighed and pushed my hands through my hair, knowing I still hadn’t answered the question. “In my mind it’s about a woman who…” I paused, searching for the words.

  Sarah set the crayon aside.

  “Joins the circus? Is looking for her long-lost love? Has a sex change?”

  “Ugh.” I pressed my hands into my face. “Is it terrible if I’m still not sure what it’s about?”

  “No, you’ll get there. Just keep at it, Corrie.”

  “Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis,” I complained, stretching and wincing on the hard little sofa. “I’d like to know who designed this furniture. It’s clearly not someone who considered comfort a high priority.”

  “I’d extend that question to this whole house,” Sarah remarked. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the craftsmanship, but why on earth did anyone want to revive Gothic to begin with? I saw black wallpaper in the dining room. Black! As far as living here – no, thanks. You must really love my brother,” she laughed.

  “I do.” I smiled and slipped off the couch onto the floor, pulling my knees into my chest and rocking back and forth. “Ooh, that’s better. It grows on you,” I added

  “Me too,” Isis announced, coming to lay next to me and rolling back and forth. She giggled and climbed on top of me. “Fly me, mama.”

  I grinned and propped her on my feet, lifting her high.

  “Now you,” she bellowed hopping over to Sarah and pushing her on her back.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sarah laughed, floating Isis on her feet.

  From upstairs there came a faint creaking, as if someone had taken a step.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked Sarah.

  Sammy had gone into Traverse City for a meeting with his editor.

  She turned and shook her head.

  We both sat still. I shushed Isis when she cried out to be lifted again.

  The sound came again, like rafters sighing - or was it a footstep?

  “This is an old house,” Sarah answered, tilting her feet so Isis could lay across them.

  “I’m just going to listen in the hall.”

  I stepped into the foyer.

  Shadowy stillness hovered at the top of the stairs, and yet I felt distinctly that something lurked up there, just out of sight. I clutched the ornate banister and studied the gloom beyond the bit of colored light through the stained-glass window. The darkness seemed to draw the light in and devour it.

  “Show yourself,” I whispered, challenging the black emptiness.

  The foyer seemed too warm and airless. I held my breath, unable to look away because the moment I did, something would race down the stairs behind me.

  Suddenly I wanted to gather Sarah and Isis and run into the daylight.

  “Hey.”

  A high, horrible scream punctuated the stillness as Sarah’s fingers closed on my elbow.

  Sarah gasped and stumbled back, and I realized it was I who had screamed.

  I stuffed my fist into my mouth, shaking my head, my eyes surely as wide as hers.

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry,” I said, the sound of my words breaking the spell, the terror dissipating.

  Isis ran into the foyer, brown eyes huge in her baby face.

  “Mommy?” Isis asked, bottom lip quivering.

  I gathered her in my arms and looked apologetically at Sarah.

  “I was standing here listening and maybe imagining. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I screamed like that.”

  Sarah grinned and shook her arms out.

  “Whew. Damn, Corrie, I thought someone was up there. I was ready to run to the kitchen for a butcher knife.”

  The rigid muscles of my face softened. Isis planted a kiss on my cheek.

  “Mommy scared?”

  “No, honey-bear. Not now anyway.” I turned to Sarah. “Maybe I do find this house a tad spooky. There’s a bookstore in Northport. Fancy a trip into town?”

  Sarah shifted her wide brown eyes to the top of the staircase for just a moment.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Now

  Corrie

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, honey, but everyone is worried about you,” Sarah told me, setting a bowl of steaming tomato soup on the table in front of me. She had made a tiny sour cream heart in the center of the bowl.

  I stared at it and thought of Sammy. He and his twin were so similar it was scary, which made me laugh out loud. Scary had risen to a whole new level in my life during the previous days, and to consider a glob of sour cream scary was downright hilarious.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” she said, sitting across from me at the table and taking hold of my clammy hands. “Are you weeks away from the loony bin?”

  I shook my head and suppressed my laughter.

  “I’m sorry, I realize it’s not funny. None of this is funny.” The smile fell from my face. “Sammy’s constantly in my thoughts, and I see this little heart and it reminds me of something he would do or say, and then I’m laughing because I can’t help it. And I don’t know why it’s funny, and I don’t understand why I can’t help it...”

  “It’s okay,” she told me, giving my hands a squeeze. “I’ve laughed in church and at funerals, and even one time when I was getting fired. I’m no stranger to the awkward laughter stuff. He’s in my head too. He’s constantly commenting on things in typical Sammy fashion.”

  “Thank you,” I told her, wishing I could share with her the other stuff too - glimpsing him, feeling him near me.

  “That being said, I think you need to talk to a therapist.” She spoke the words slowly, gauging my reaction.

  “The therapist who needs therapy,” I murmured.

  Sarah nodded and tucked one of my curls behind my ear.

  “Where’d you go last night, honey? Amy mentioned you went out for a few hours?”

  I flinched away and shrugged.

  “I drove around. I needed to clear my head.”

  Guilt swirled in my stomach. I flashed on the cemetery and Sammy‘s brown eyes gazing at me in the stream. Sarah would love to see Sammy, hear his voice. Was I wrong to hide him from his twin?

  “How’s Brook?” I asked, hoping to shift the conversation.

  Sarah frowned.

  “I haven’t seen her since…”

  She paused, and I knew she’d started to say Halloween, but Halloween had become synonymous with Sammy’s murder.

  “You should call her,” I said. “She seemed nice.”

  Sarah studied me, and I took a sip of the hot soup. I wasn’t hungry, but if I wanted Sarah to relax, I had to take a few bites.

  “She i
s nice but… with everything that’s happened, dating seems trivial.”

  I nodded.

  “But it’s not. That’s how it starts.”

  For a moment, I drifted back nine years to the balmy summer evening when I first met Sammy.

  We were both walking out of a ridiculously bad horror movie. My girlfriend had dragged me along because she liked the lead actor. I’d dropped my notebook. The cover depicted a cow quoting the famous Rumi poem: “out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field...”

  Sammy, alone at the theater and wearing ripped jeans and a Creepshow t-shirt, picked it up, glanced at the image, and laughed before handing it back to me.

  When he looked at me, really looked at me, I experienced the strange pull I’d heard people talk about – love at first sight, instant attraction – and I tried to say something witty and indifferent, even though my heart had stopped beating, and I recognized in his gleeful brown eyes that he felt something too. Maybe not the same thing, how could I know? But something…

  “May I?” he had asked, taking my notebook back. He flipped to the last page, pulled the pen from the spiral binding, and wrote his name and his phone number in surprisingly readable print.

  “Will you call me?” he asked, handing my notebook back.

  I was silent and oddly breathless, but I managed a nod, and then my friend Rita dragged me away with a long glance at my future husband that seemed to say ‘she’s not usually this crazy.’

  Fourteen months later, we were married.

  “You’re staring into your soup like there’s an eyeball floating in it,” Sarah said, forcing me back to reality.

  I stirred the sour cream into a swirl and took another bite.

  “No eyeball, just memories. They’re like landmines. No matter which direction I choose, I step on one.”

  Sarah

  * * *

  SARAH SAT IN DETECTIVE COLLINS’ office and drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. Exhausted and wired, she flipped between drooping eyelids and a desire to pace the cramped office. Sammy’s death had stolen her sleep. She laid awake most nights thinking about Halloween night, scanning the faces from her memory, desperately searching for the shred of evidence that would reveal Sammy’s killer.

  “Forensics reported no evidence on Corrie’s dress,” the detective announced, not bothering with introductions.

  He swept into the room with two cups of coffee, slopped one in front of Sarah, and dropped into his chair. He fixed her with a cold stare.

  “Okay…” She struggled to sit up careful not to spill coffee on her white t-shirt.

  “There should have been bacteria from the lake, blood from touching Sammy, sweat, fibers. That dress should have told a story, and it did. It told us that someone had laundered it before we got there.”

  Sarah frowned, sipped her coffee, and then shook her head.

  “Wait, what dress? I burned the Frankenstein’s Bride dress.”

  “I’m sorry, you what?” the detective asked, his eyebrows meeting the sheaf of blond hair that rested on his forehead.

  “I burned the dress,” Sarah repeated, feeling a flush rise into her neck.

  “It was evidence, valuable evidence, and you burned it?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about your valuable evidence, Detective. My sister was half-drowned and someone had murdered my brother.”

  “I understand that, Sarah. And I’m not trying to be insensitive, but for Christ’s sakes, Corrie’s clothes could have contained important information. What she wore that night mattered as much as Sammy’s clothes.”

  “Well, it’s gone. The dress is gone.”

  He sucked in his cheeks and looked away from Sarah.

  “Why did you burn it?” he asked, his eyes narrowing on her face.

  Sarah opened her mouth and then closed it.

  “I didn’t think. After I pulled Corrie from the lake, I stuck it in the bathtub. When I went back to clean the house, it was hanging there. I grabbed it and threw it in the fire. I didn’t want it to remind Corrie. I wanted to protect her. If it was so important, why didn’t you guys take it when you were there?”

  “You failed to mention it to us, that’s why. Corrie said her dress was in the laundry room. There was a black dress hanging there, and we took that one.”

  Sarah shrugged.

  “She probably assumed that’s where I put it.”

  The detective sighed and shook his head.

  “I’m guessing this means you haven’t made any progress on finding Sammy’s murderer?” Sarah asked, irritated with the detective’s tone.

  He set his hands on the table and studied her. Sarah wished she hadn’t asked the question.

  “I’m very curious about the block of time your sister-in-law doesn’t remember. I’m also curious about her suicide attempt. In our line of work, that indicates a guilty conscience.”

  Sarah glared at him.

  “You’re wrong, Detective. And you don’t know Corrie. She loved Sammy, they loved each other. Their relationships was like something out of a fucking fairy tale. Corrie wasn’t trying to kill herself, she was trying to numb the pain. She couldn’t handle finding Sammy dead. She still can’t. I’m terrified for her. Have you considered that Corrie was drugged? What if someone slipped a roofie into her drink?”

  “A roofie?”

  “Oh, come on, don’t make me feel stupid. Isn’t that what the date-rape drug is called?”

  “It is sometimes called that, yes.”

  “Why didn’t you guys test her blood?”

  “Because we had no reason to suspect she’d been drugged. And if I might remind you, you gave her a sedative yourself, and then took her to your mother’s house. If you were concerned, you might have taken her to the hospital.”

  “My brother was fucking dead! I was out of my mind. We all were!”

  Sarah stood, bit back more angry words, and stormed out of the office.

  She sat in her car and blasted the heat. Her hands shook as she gripped the wheel.

  “Corrie would never hurt Sammy,” she grumbled, pulling out of the parking lot.

  CHAPTER 10

  Now

  Sarah

  A fter she spoke with the detective, Sarah went home and tried to work. She sketched roof-lines until her eyes blurred, but they were all wrong, and ended up crumpled in her recycling bin. Finally, she got in her car and drove to Kerry Manor.

  The house was quiet when she arrived. Corrie might be napping, and Sarah had no interest in waking her. She doubted Corrie was getting much sleep, other than little sips stolen when the exhaustion became too much to bear.

  Sarah stood in the foyer of Kerry Manor and considered her mother’s ominous feeing upon first entering the house. Did she sense it? Or had the dark premonition already come to pass? The opportunity for an intuitive warning fading as quickly as a dream once the sleeper has awoken.

  She stepped into the great room, glanced at the ugly doll house tucked in the corner. Sammy had found it in the crawl space, a dark hole in the butler’s pantry that Sarah had looked in on Halloween night. Sammy had wanted to put huge rubber rats with glowing eyes in the space, and then stack the extra wine behind them so people would be forced to crawl into the black hole to refill their drinks. Corrie had given him a firm ‘no,’ and Sarah reminded him of his lack of liability insurance.

  The square of wood contained a tiny metal handle. Sarah pulled up it up and recoiled at the blast of cold, acrid air that gusted out.

  She listened for Corrie, and hearing nothing, switched on her phone flashlight and dropped into the hole, crouching and waving the beam across the dirt floor. A few old crates stood further back, thick with cobwebs.

  In another corner, her light bounced over a heap of rags. She shuffled closer, recoiling at the dark, red-brown stains marring the light fabric.

  CORRIE

  * * *

  I STOOD DRINKING my coffee on the porch. I wore only a thin nightshirt, and the crisp
November air had teeth. Shivering, I sipped the scalding coffee, allowing the extremes of hot and cold to burn out the thoughts always gathering like storm clouds in my head.

  “Corrie?”

  I head Sarah’s voice but didn’t turn. I couldn’t face her today. My dreams had been troubled, flashes of Sammy’s face filled with fear. I doubted there would ever come a day when he didn’t haunt me.

  The glass door slid shut and Sarah paused beside me, putting her hands on the rail.

  “Corrie, I found something,” she said.

  I nodded but trained my eyes on the horizon. The sun had already risen, and the lake was perfectly still, not a ripple in sight.

  “I found a towel, Corrie, in the crawl space. It was covered in something that looked like dried blood.”

  Sarah’s words hung in the air - not an accusation, but perhaps the start of one.

  Sammy had been her twin, her other half. It made sense she would hunt for the truth at whatever cost.

  I closed my eyes and felt him there behind me. He’d widen his eyes and say something funny. Uh-oh, Gorey, you’re in for it now.

  “Corrie,” Sarah’s tone sharpened.

  I wondered how long she’d been saying my name.

  “Look at me, damn it!”

  She grabbed my arm and jerked me around. Hot coffee spilled from my cup, splattering us both.

  “Oh damn, ouch,” she hissed, pulling her white t-shirt away from her body.

  The liquid scalded my bare thighs and knees, and a few drops splashed onto my feet. I barely noticed it as I sank slowly to the porch. I wrapped my arms around my legs and buried my head in my knees.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah whispered. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Before Halloween, Sammy said something,” Sarah continued.

  I wanted to put my hands over my ears and scream, but now and then her voice merged into Sammy’s. If I didn’t look at her, I could almost believe he stood above me.

  “He said you’d been acting strangely, disappearing in the house for hours at a time. He searched everywhere and couldn’t find you.”