by Lesley Kagen
The Tree Musketeers hit the hay early that night and were up and at ’em before the sun so we could make that day last as long as possible. The first thing I did after we rolled off our cotton sleeping mats was to cross out number six, The County Fair and Carnival on our summer adventure list. Because when Bigger came by later that afternoon, we’d head up to the fair grounds and stay until they closed the gates for the night.
After that, we ate our breakfast while Aunt Jane May gave us one of her “mark my words” lectures, took baths—left a ring about an inch thick—dressed in clean clothes, and brushed our hair until it shone. We had out-of-town visitors coming in a couple of hours and we wanted to look our best.
As Leo Cavanaugh had promised during one of the phone interviews he conducted with us while we were still in the hospital, he was driving up from Chicago that morning with his brother, our friend and former patient at Broadhurst, Harry Blake, their mother, and Ernie Fontaine, to talk to us in person. We had so many questions that I suggested we write them down during breakfast. Frankie wanted to, but Viv was too keyed up to contribute anything even halfway reasonable. She was out of her gourd with excitement to see Ernie again, but still a little nervous about spending time with the gal formerly known as the “Summit Witch.”
Truer to her word than the girls and I had been that summer, after breakfast Aunt Jane May slid across the pine table the newspaper articles that she’d clipped out of the newspapers for us.
“I don’t want you three to badger them half to death after they get here,” she lectured. “These articles should answer many of your questions, but some of what you’re gonna read …” She withdrew one of her big lace hankies from her red clutch purse and fanned her face. “I’ve not yet discussed the birds and the bees with you, but I guess you’re old enough now to learn about … there are things of a delicate nature in some of the stories that you might find confusing. When you come across something you don’t understand, come down and ask me before our guests arrive. I don’t want you to bring something up during our visit that might cause embarrassment.”
“Things of a delicate nature” were her watered-down words for sexual matters, so the girls and I scooped the articles up off the table, rushed straight out to the hideout, divvied them up, and read aloud anything new that we learned.
After I skimmed through one of the stories, I told the girls, “Bigger was right when she told us that Doctor Cruikshank was putting holes in the patients’ heads in the Chambers of Horrors, but it’s not called drilling. It’s called trepanning. This reporter says it’s been done for centuries to the mentally ill or people who were thought to be possessed by evil spirits”—Viv gasped and was probably hoping that Granny Cleary didn’t read that particular article—“or didn’t fit into society.”
“Yeah, and the Chicago Sun Times says that Doctor Cruikshank got paid a lot of money to do that to homosexuals,” Frankie said.
I put the article I was reading down and asked her, “What are homosexuals?”
“Jimbo told me they’re the patients who like to bat for the other team.”
I still didn’t get it, so Viv said, “I heard Missus Klein tell Missus Patowski at the beauty parlor that homos—that’s their nickname—aren’t interested in the opposite sex.”
Since Frankie and I weren’t interested in the opposite sex either, I said, “So we’re homos and you’re not?”
“You can only be a homo if you’re a guy,” Viv said. “Lloyd told me that Liberace is one and Mister Yellen the florist is, too.”
Her brother Lloyd was an idiot, so that was a little hard to swallow, but if Viv had heard right at the beauty parlor, I suspected that Mr. Yellen wasn’t the only homo around here. We had a whole town full of them. The Men’s Club at church, the Elks, the police force, the baseball teams, and just about every other important organization in town didn’t want anything to do with the opposite sex.
I went back to pouring over another news clipping, then sat up and said, “This one explains how Ernie ended up at the hospital.” I had to stop and take a spoonful of honey from the little pot Aunt Jane May gave me, because my throat still hurt where Hopper had crushed it. ‘“Medical files law enforcement officials found hidden in the psychiatrist’s office revealed that after multiple failed attempts to convert adult homosexuals, Doctor Cruikshank decided that he might have more success drilling into immature brains. He instructed his wife, Nurse Ruth Holloway, to—”’
“They were married?” Viv exclaimed.
“That’s what it says,” I replied and went back to quoting the article. ‘“He instructed his wife, Nurse Ruth Holloway, to phone orphanages and describe the traits that her husband believed were early indications of homosexuality—sensitivity, avoidance of sports, a soft speaking voice, and a wan physical appearance. She struck pay dirt at St. Jude’s in Milwaukee when the director of the orphanage, Sister Clement, suggested they come meet a young boy by the name of Ernest Fontaine.”’
I remembered how Ernie described the husband and wife he’d thought had come to adopt him. The lady was wearing a flowery dress—Holloway had worn the same to the emergency town hall meeting—and the man had a bushy mustache just like Cruikshank’s.
“The article goes on to say that Sister Clement had no idea the doctor and his wife were ill-intentioned,” I said. “She thought it was admirable that they showed interest in a boy with an abnormal personality and a birth defect.”
Viv blanched and said, “You don’t think … Ernie’s not a homo, is he?”
I shook my head. “I think Sister Clement was talkin’ about how he likes to knit and dance and all the winking he did.”
Frankie could’ve contradicted me and said something very nasty because Ernie was still a very touchy subject for her, but she picked up one of the articles from the pile in front of her, cleared her throat, and said, “Leo wrote this one. ‘I first discovered what was going on at Broadhurst Mental Institution after my friend, Roger Osgood, disappeared.”’
When Viv read in another clipping that it was the cook at the hospital, Dolores Spooner, who lead Walter Buchanan, the sheriff of Grand County, to the basement room where the surgeries had been performed, we couldn’t believe that Bigger hadn’t bragged about that to us.
“Listen to this,” I said. “After town employee and groundskeeper at Broadhurst Mental Institution Lance Howard was arrested for the part he played, he told the police that kidnapping homosexuals and burying their bodies if the surgeries failed was part of his job. The remains of eight men were dug up in the woods that surround the facility after Howard was persuaded to tell the FBI where to look.”
I felt sick to my stomach to learn that Albie hadn’t been lying about patients disappearing and seeing lights in the woods during some of his night shifts.
Viv said, “Let me see that,” and ripped the clipping out of my hands. “‘I didn’t know it was against the law,’ Lance Howard told the police after they arrested him. ‘I was just following orders.’”
Doc had been quoted in a couple of the articles, too. When When Mr. Jack Wilkes of the Summit Courier asked him if he was aware of what had been going on at Broadhurst, my father answered, “I didn’t know about the deaths or the illegal manner in which Doctor Cruikshank was securing patients to experiment on, but yes, I was aware that he was performing trepanations.”
I didn’t read that article out loud because Mr. Wilkes had to have been mistaken. If my father knew that Cruikshank had been doing those hideous surgeries at Broadhurst, he would’ve done everything he could to stop him. First, … do no harm.
Outraged, I shoved that clipping into my shorts’ pocket, then jumped up and told the girls, “I gotta go do something. Be right back.”
I was going to ride straight over to the newspaper office and demand that Mr. Wilkes print an apology to the most highly regarded man in town in tomorrow’s paper, but then Aunt Jane May shouted out a kitchen window, “Girls. Come down now. Our guests have arrived and they don�
�t have all day.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Leo was already seated at the pine table, but he got up and stood next to his brother, Harry, when the girls and I came banging through the screen door. Audrey Cavanaugh and Ernie Fontaine—and his stuffed bunny that was no longer missing his right eye—were sitting next to one another on the opposite side of the table.
Viv squealed when she saw her favorite Broadhurst patient, smiled broadly at his brother, and waved at Ernie, who waved back just as enthusiastically. She was not as overjoyed to see Audrey Cavanaugh, but at least she didn’t start breathing weird.
Harry was wearing a pair of tan slacks and a pale green shirt and looked quite a lot better than he had when we last saw him crumpled up on the ground in the hospital’s recreation yard. “Ernie you already know,” he said to the girls and me when we took our seats, “but I’d like to properly introduce you to my mother and brother.”
Audrey Cavanaugh’s black hair with the white streak down the middle had been pulled into a neat bun at her neck. Dressed in a yellow blouse with a bow and a pleated skirt, she looked much more like one of the do-gooders in town than a practitioner of the dark arts.
“It’s nice to meet you girls under more pleasant circumstances,” she said in the voice of the angel I’d heard the afternoon she’d rescued us from Elvin Merchant. “I believe your uncle has already told you that I filed a formal complaint against the boy who accosted you in the woods that afternoon.”
He had.
And after Cindy Davenport heard the sheriff had arrested Elvin Merchant for grabbing Frankie, she went over to the police station and admitted to him that it hadn’t been “high jinks” when Merchant ripped her blouse off and put his hands up her skirt at the Starlight Drive-In. She also told him how later that night he’d come to her house and threatened to cut her pussycat’s throat and hers, too, if she didn’t keep her mouth shut. Hopefully, the time Merchant would spend in the juvenile detention center in Port Washington would rehabilitate him, but nobody really believed that. Like the sheriff said, “The boy is rotten to the core.”
Audrey Cavanaugh’s sons looked nothing alike, but we already knew that from seeing Leo’s picture under his byline in the Chicago Tribune. Unlike his sandy-haired, emerald-eyed, burly brother, Leo was slight of build, with hair the color of soot, and he was blue-eyed like his mother, too. His tortoise-shell glasses also made him appear more studious and thoughtful than Harry, who still had the energy of a rabbit eluding a hound, so that hadn’t been part of his act.
Leo smiled at us and said, “You’re quite the celebrities, you know.”
Aunt Jane May harrumphed because her breakfast lecture that morning had warned of the dangers of growing conceited from all the attention we’d been getting. “Can I get anybody anything?” she asked. “Lemonade? Coffee?”
When Viv said, “Harry would like some shortbread cookies,” we all got a good laugh, and that broke the ice.
Even though the girls and I had already learned some of what we’d hear that morning in the kitchen, we were still riveted by what Leo had to say. He wasn’t as good a storyteller as Jimbo, but he was pretty darn close.
“I first learned about the procedures Doctor Cruikshank was performing after my best friend, Roger Osgood, disappeared,” Leo told us. “He and I talked almost every day, so when he didn’t return my calls, I got worried. After I called the bookstore he worked at and some of our friends and came up empty-handed, I paid his parents a visit. They told me Roger was fine, that he was on a religious retreat, but when I pressed them for details, they broke down and told me the whole story. Of course, I was horrified by what they’d done, but I’ve known Bill and Mary Osgood my whole life and knew they’d acted out of love.”
“They sure have a funny way of showin’ it,” Frankie said.
Leo paused, then explained, “You have to understand that the Osgoods are devout Catholics. They’d been taught that homosexuality …” He caught himself up short and turned to Aunt Jane May.
“Do you know what that means, girls?” she asked.
We thought we did, and after we nodded, Leo went on to say, “Bill and Mary believed that Roger was committing a grievous sin and feared for his immortal soul. When a member of their parish told them her son had suffered from the same affliction and had been cured by a miraculous surgery performed by a doctor in Wisconsin, they thought their prayers had been answered.”
Harry interjected, “Leo found out later that the woman who put the Osgoods in touch with Cruikshank was the mother of Broadhurst patient Stanley Larson.” The girls and I knew who he was. Jimbo had told us that Mr. Larson had to wear diapers and babbled like a baby. “His brain had been irreparably damaged during a trepanation,” Harry went on, “but apparently his mother believed saving her son’s soul was more important than preserving his sanity.”
“When the Osgoods asked Roger to have the surgery, he refused, so they took matters into their own hands,” Leo said. “They contacted Doctor Cruikshank, who told them that as soon as they sent him his fee and signed a confidentiality agreement, he would make all the arrangements. Roger disappeared a few days after Bill and Mary fulfilled their end of the bargain.
“I told them that afternoon that I knew that their hearts were in the right place, but what they’d done was wrong and against the law,” Leo continued. “I had no proof that Roger had been kidnapped and I begged them to go to the police with me, but they were scared. Not for themselves, but because they thought he wouldn’t get the surgery if they broke the confidentiality agreement.”
Leo thanked Aunt Jane May when she set a cup of coffee down in front of him, and after he took a quick sip, he said, “I left the Osgoods’ house that day knowing that it was up to me to rescue Roger and I had to act fast. As soon as I got back to my apartment, I called Doctor Cruikshank and told him the Tribune was interested in doing an article about the fine work he was doing at Broadhurst, and he agreed to meet with me the following day.
“I kept the interview simple, flattered him, and afterward, I asked if I could take a look around. I was hoping to find Roger and get him out of there, but Cruikshank cited the importance of patient confidentiality, told me that he looked forward to reading the article, and called Lance Howard to escort me out. Howard recognized me immediately and exploded. He told Cruikshank that he’d seen Roger and me together at the bookstore and a coffee shop when he was looking for an opportunity to grab him, and that I’d come to the hospital to get the goods on them. He coldcocked me, and when I woke up, I was in the cell on the third floor.”
Leo looked a little wobbly, so his mom patted his hand and said, “Anytime you want to stop is fine.”
“I should’ve tried harder to get through to the Osgoods. If I had, he might still be alive,” he said, because Roger’s body was one of the ones that’d been dug up in the woods by the FBI.
“You can’t keep blaming yourself. You did your best,” his mother said and looked over at her other son. “You better take it from here.”
Harry placed his hand on Leo’s shoulder and said, “I hate to think what would have happened if he hadn’t told me what he’d learned from the Osgoods, and what he intended to do about it, on our drive to the train station the next morning. I tried to talk him out of it, pointed out that he was dealing with a man who’d participated in a kidnapping and done God only knows what else. He called me a worrywart, reminded me what a seasoned reporter he was, and told me that he and Roger would meet me later for dinner. I was on pins and needles all day, and when I didn’t hear from him by six, I was sure that Cruikshank had seen through his cover story, panicked, and done something to silence him. I called the hospital and asked to speak to the doctor, told him I was with the Trib as well, and asked if he’d had an appointment with a reporter by the name of Leo Cavanaugh earlier that day. He told me he had, but that the reporter never showed up, and he hadn’t heard from him. He suggested that Leo might’ve had some car trouble on his way up, but, of co
urse, I knew he hadn’t.
“I called the police and told them that my brother was missing, that he hadn’t returned from a trip to Wisconsin,” Harry said. “They told me to contact the authorities up here. I spoke to one of the deputies at the Summit Police Station, but he stopped me mid-explanation and told me to get in touch with the Chicago police.”
“We were getting the runaround,” Audrey Cavanaugh said, “so I called Leo’s editor at the paper, Sam Eubanks. After I explained what’d happened and how worried Harry and I were, he told me he’d do some digging and get back to me. When he did, he told me that Doctor Cruikshank had a sterling reputation and was highly respected in the medical community. Then he reminded me that Leo was on a two-week vacation and must be painting the town red, and reassured me that as soon as he sobered up, we’d hear from him.”
When Mrs. Cavanaugh cupped her hands over her eyes, I thought remembering the fear and frustration she’d felt when she’d reached that dead end had brought some tears. Aunt Jane May must’ve thought so, too, because she handed her a big white lace hankies out of her red clutch purse.
After Harry checked to see if his mom was okay, he told us, “I had no idea what to do at that point, so I decided to follow Leo’s lead. I knew I needed to get into the hospital to look for him, the same way he had Roger, but I’m not a reporter, I’m an actor. So I decided to feign mental illness to see if I could get admitted to Broadhurst as a patient. I’d played a mentally ill character in a play a few months earlier, so I drove up here that night and recreated that role. I made a hat out of aluminum foil and began shouting about brain-sucking aliens in that bar on Main Street, and someone called the sheriff. He thought I’d escaped from the hospital, so he threw me in the back of his car and drove me out there. Cruikshank tried to explain that I wasn’t one of his patients and that he’d never seen me before, but the sheriff was furious, called him a liar, threatened that he’d be back to make sure that I was being watched more closely, and drove off.
