Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery)

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  “Sure. Why?”

  “She has an ECT this morning.” Lucy’s voice suddenly sounded tight and tinny and disturbingly ominous.

  I involuntarily shuddered. Electroconvulsive or electro-shock therapy. ECT. An electrical assault on the brain, producing controlled seizures. I didn’t know much about it, just that it scared me.

  We were interrupted by Ella gliding back into the room. Now that I had a chance to study her without her inquisitive eyes on me, I saw that her left hand, which was holding out a little paper cup, was missing its ring finger. I had visions of her chopping off her finger with a butcher’s cleaver or getting it caught in a table saw. This time the cup was not for me.

  “Where’s Mavis?” Ella asked. Lucy and I said nothing, probably thinking the other one would answer. When we didn’t, Ella turned to leave, just as Mavis came back into the room. My mind was still on Ella and her lost finger when Mavis’s voice cut all further thoughts from my mind.

  “What’s this?” she said in a soft suspicious voice.

  “It’s ECT day, Mavis,” Ella replied. “You know that. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Pills, pills, pills,” Mavis said in a singsong voice. She stared uncertainly at Ella and Ella stared back, her prominent chin at an impervious angle. She’d obviously been here many times before, waiting for balking patients to swig their meds before procedures. She held out the little cup.

  “Doctor’s orders,” she said again, but this time more sternly and with a touch of impatience. “Just a tranquilizer to make you calm.”

  Mavis suddenly snatched it out of Ella’s hand, threw back her head, and jettisoned the pill into her mouth. It was suddenly very quiet. Ella glanced at me and then slowly turned, and walked out of the room.

  I was still sitting on my bed trying to figure out what I should do next, when Mavis jumpstarted things for me.

  “KIT, IT’S TIME TO GET UP, OR YOU’LL BE IN TROUBLE!” she yelled. I picked my heart up off the floor where it had landed after Mavis’s outburst and looked in the direction of poor Kit, whose eardrums had been closer to the source than mine.

  Kit groaned in that universal thumbs-down to getting up, then slowly rolled out of her cocoon of sheet and blanket — we didn’t get anything more than that, just a sheet and a thin blanket. Like a chrysalis emerging into the light, Kit was an amazing sight. Her flaming red hair curled and sproinged at least six inches from her head. And her eyes were cobalt blue, in a wonderfully startling contrast to her hair. And they lit on me like a homing pigeon. She didn’t say anything as she got out of bed. She was wearing pink pajamas that clashed with her hair and left her figure looking amorphous. But even in the unflattering cloak of those pajamas I could tell that she was tiny, because the pajamas dwarfed her. She was well under five feet and her unruly hair framed a face with doll-like features. She was striking.

  She hadn’t taken her eyes off me.

  “Who are you?” she finally asked.

  “Cordi,” I said.

  She turned her back on us and pulled the sheet and blanket up over the pillow, then spent an inordinate amount of time smoothing out every crease and every dent until the bed was perfect. Next she straightened the already straightened objects on her bedside table and finally turned and walked over to Mavis’s messy bed, a look of intense concentration on her face, and not a little bit of anxiety.

  Mavis made a sound like a squawking bell and said in a stern siren voice, “Out of bounds, out of bounds,” as she pulled on some jogging pants and a white T-shirt with a sketch of a human brain on it and the words “There isn’t an app for this.” Nice.

  Kit looked at me again and started toward my bed, eyeing it like a hawk eyes it prey.

  I moved to deflect her and defend my territory, what pitiful little there was of it.

  Her face scrunched up in a grimace and she changed course. “Why does everyone have to be so messy?” she asked. I don’t think she expected an answer. We certainly didn’t give her one.

  Kit wrung her hands. “And what kind of a name is Cordi?” she said, her voice almost curdling over the word. “Sounds like an electrical device.” Must be a heavy sleeper, I thought, to have missed my explanation.

  Mavis was practically bursting a stitch to answer Kit’s question, so I let her. It seemed to satisfy Kit and she turned to her little chest of drawers, before pulling out a neatly folded blouse and pants. It took a while for her to get dressed. Mavis had been much faster. Lucy, too. She’d dumped her PJs on the bed, changed into hot-pink sweats, yanked on hot-pink running shoes, and left.

  I thought about just leaving for breakfast without Kit and Mavis, but I didn’t have the nerve to go there all by myself, so I waited. I had a vague recollection of my meals being brought to me in whatever room I had had before this one, but I wasn’t sure, and I had no memory of any cafeteria or wherever it was that we ate.

  Kit became obsessed with the creases on her blouse that she couldn’t get rid of, and it made her cry, until Mavis took her by the hand and led her to the door. Kit glanced back at me as I rose from my bed, and then she gripped the door handle and opened it. I was right on Mavis’s tail and almost bumped into her when, for no apparent reason, Kit shut the door and stopped our forward momentum. I looked at Mavis, but she only smiled vacantly as Kit opened and closed the door nine times before finally entering the hallway.

  Chapter Three

  If you have ever walked down a long hospital corridor, then you know the fear and dread it can inspire, as well as the hope. I was getting a bit of each as I walked down the tiled floors past the rows of doors to patient rooms, under the institutional lighting and the institutional pale green paint of the walls and the white ceiling tiles with little dark specks floating in them. All hospitals seemed to have those little dark specks floating in their ceilings.

  I was feeling overwhelmed and I followed Mavis like a dog its master as we passed by the nurses’ station. It was a self-enclosed area with three of its four walls a row of sectioned glass panels from the waist up, so that anybody could see in at any time. From the waist down it was solid wall. One of the sectioned glass panels had a window through which we could speak to the nurses without their having to open the heavy door into the station. There was an identical window in the wall facing the lobby where the elevators were, and one on the far side, where Mavis told me the men had their rooms.

  The station itself was crammed with desks and computers and stacks of paperwork. I could see Ella sitting at a computer while another nurse hovered over her, pointing something out on the screen. The cafeteria was just past the nursing station and the door from the lobby, and I almost bolted when I saw how many people were sitting down eating.

  I counted six, not including my contingent, but viewed from my state of mind, it might as well have been a hundred. I looked around for Kit, but she was still halfway back down the hall. She was jumping from tile to tile, meticulously avoiding all the lines, her face set in a grimace of determination. At that rate she’d be another five minutes.

  So I followed Mavis up to the counter and ordered some toast and some wizened-looking blueberries for my breakfast. The woman behind the counter looked as though she hadn’t slept in years. The bags under her eyes would have held all my groceries for a week. She tried to entice me to take some scrambled eggs, or at least some cheese for my protein, but my stomach turned at the mere mention of either.

  Mavis took her tray and went to sit with Lucy and a chubby guy who looked to be about thirty. Two other tables were full and I looked across, enviously, at two young men, each sitting alone at a table. I thought for a moment of doing the same thing, but it would make a statement I wasn’t sure was a good one to make, so instead I plunked my tray down beside Mavis and sat. She introduced me to the chubby guy, Austin, who barely acknowledged me. He appeared to be listening intently to Lucy, who was talking a blue streak. I noticed Austin’s pale grey-blue ey
es and cute little nose and thought he could once have been a teacher’s pet. His light-brown wispy hair was thinning, so maybe he was older than thirty.

  Lucy was speaking so fast I could barely get the gist. But in some odd way she and Austin seemed to understand each other perfectly, because the lopsided conversation continued, or maybe they didn’t understand each other at all, but were simply reacting to the sound of each other’s voices. Even my arrival, then Kit’s, didn’t interrupt Lucy’s flow. At last I picked up some of what she was saying — she had just decided that she was going to run for Parliament in the next election and that she would then save all the forests from destruction and turn the oil sands into an environmental oasis. She sounded excited and sure of herself, until Austin told her that all politicians were out to get us and why would she be any different? She hesitated and then told him to shut up and mind his own business. Things were silent after that, for a while. But then Lucy started up again about running for Parliament and I tuned out.

  I looked over at the two solitary men. One was furiously writing in a notebook and eating at the same time. He had long black hair and a beard trying hard to be a beard and failing miserably. His eyes were watery and anemic-looking in a long pale face that looked as if it had been rolled and stretched out with a rolling pin, with an aquiline nose stuck on as an afterthought. It was a face that looked young and vulnerable — he couldn’t have been more than nineteen — made somehow more so by the dimple in his cheek. He was still wearing navy-blue pajamas that poked out from under a shabby burgundy dressing gown.

  Mavis saw the direction of my gaze and said, “That’s Bradley. Sometimes he doesn’t talk at all, and he keeps pretty much to himself. He doesn’t like people very much.”

  We both stared at Bradley, who seemed oblivious, as he made notes in his book.

  “He went off his meds, and with schizophrenia you can’t do that. Not with any mental illness. I know. I tried.”

  And Mavis giggled her little-girl giggle, but I saw no giggle in her eyes. I wondered what kind of problems she had harboured before her medication had kicked in, although I vaguely remembered her saying someone was stealing her, so maybe her meds still needed to be tweaked. Probably why she was here.

  “Bradley’s much better since he came in and they put him on new meds, but he’s still not right.” She sighed. “I guess we’re all still not right. That’s why we’re here. At least we aren’t the sickest, though; at least we don’t pose a security threat.” I looked at her in some alarm. “We’re not violent. They live on another floor.”

  Mavis said the second man was Leo. He was tall, with his knees bunched up under the table, and he was painfully skinny. His clothes hung from his sloping shoulders, valiantly trying to find some part of him to hold them up. His face was flaccid and splotchy and his eyes were sunken, so that he looked a bit like a raccoon. He was eating his food without taking his eyes off any of us. I noticed he had taken the chair closest to the wall and was sitting on the edge of the seat, as if ready for flight. I caught his eye and he quickly looked away, as if I had intruded on him by just looking at him.

  Suddenly someone called Mavis’s name. She swivelled to look and I followed her gaze just in time to see Bradley incline his head at her. She looked around and caught my eye, and something in the vagueness of her gaze made me quickly look away as she got up and went over to Bradley’s table. He was holding something out for her in his hand and she hesitated, looking over her shoulder at me before hastily taking it from him and putting it in her pocket. For someone who didn’t like people, it seemed like an odd thing for Bradley to do.

  She came back to me with an uncertain smile and said, “He’s always giving me candy,” but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  We were sitting at one of seven tables set at right angles to the bank of cafeteria windows, so that we couldn’t actually look outside without turning our heads. To the right of the windows was a door painted the cheery colour of a canary and plastered with the words NO ADMITTANCE. One t was missing and someone had added the letter with a red Magic Marker. As I was looking at it, the door opened and out walked a man with a shock of white hair. I vaguely remembered him trying to get me to agree to something, but I couldn’t remember what. Without the overpowering drag of the fog on my mind I realized that he was my doctor. I remembered thinking that he was as old as the hills when I first met him. I revised my observation now to a prematurely grey forty-year-old.

  Lucy, who had been getting more and more detailed about her future run for Parliament, fell silent when she saw the doctor. She dropped her head, but just before she did I caught a fleeting glimpse of something inexplicable on her face. Was it panic? But then Austin, whose back was to the doctor, told her that if she was running he was going to run in her riding, as well, and they would sit side by side in the legislature as Liberal MPs, as if he had totally forgotten his distaste for politicians. Lucy forgot about the doctor in her eagerness to answer Austin. What was weird was that it didn’t seem to occur to either of them that they couldn’t both run for the same seat and win. I had the smug little thought that I had actually noticed, sick as I was.

  The doctor stopped at the end of the table and surveyed us like a kindergarten class. He was wearing a nametag that pegged him as Dr. Osborn — no first name — pinned to the traditional white lab coat many doctors preferred. He had a handsome rough-hewn face with high cheekbones, pockmarked with the scars of teenage acne. Close up, his hair was like snow, white and deep and thick.

  “Mavis. It’s time.” His voice was gentle, reassuring. Everybody at the table stared for a second, including me. Then Austin pushed his chair away from the table and Mavis sidled closer to me. She looked up at Dr. Osborn, sideways, a frown creasing her entire forehead. Finally she found part of her voice.

  “For what?” she asked, pathetically, because of course she knew.

  “Your ECT,” he said, making it sound like it was a soothing massage or something.

  “But it’s Lucy’s turn,” she said.

  “Have you forgotten, Mavis?” he said gently. “I reminded you several times yesterday.”

  Mavis looked confused. She struggled to say something, but would not meet Osborn’s gaze.

  “I don’t want it,” she said in a barely discernible whisper.

  “Let’s just go and talk about it then,” he said. I looked at Mavis and back at Dr. Osborn and wondered if I’d told him all my secrets. Surely not.

  Mavis suddenly leaped up from the table as if she’d been bitten. Unable to help, I watched as her tray flipped up and crashed against her, before falling to the floor, leaving a blaze of red cranberry juice on her white T-shirt with the brain emblazoned on it.

  “Oh, no!” she said, her voice cracking. “It’s my favour-ite.” She frantically wiped at her shirt with a napkin.

  “That’s okay, Mavis,” said Dr. Osborn. “One of the nurses will see that it gets cleaned.” Mavis stared at him as if she thought he was lying and then, wiping her hand across her mouth, she knelt on the floor to pick up the tray.

  “Let’s go, Mavis,” said Dr. Osborn. Mavis stood up with the tray and turned her gaze directly on me, and the mixture of emotions I saw there was a kaleidoscope of confusion, defiance, fear, resignation, excitement. Then she turned, dropped the tray on the table, jammed her hands into her pants’ pockets and followed the doctor back through the NO ADMITTANCE door that admitted a Mavis who wished the sign meant what it said.

  Meanwhile Kit had jumped up and was frantically wiping up the mess with a balled-up wad of napkins. We all just sat there and watched her. No one thought to offer to help.

  “Poor sod,” said Lucy as she stared absently after Mavis. “They steal a little more of you each time. For her own good, though, that’s what they say. She’ll wake up happy — she just won’t know why.” And she laughed, the haunting laughter of someone who knew.

  Before I
even thought about questioning her, a leonine colossus of a man slid his heavily laden tray one-handedly onto the tabletop as if it were a mere butterfly. He had what I call stage presence, a certain flamboyance. He smiled at me and flicked his blond mane out of a pair of startlingly green eyes as he sat with surprising grace. He was a real hunk of a man. I figured he must be about six foot five and well over two hundred pounds of pure muscle. He was clean-shaven and deeply tanned with high cheekbones and a strong Roman nose. His lips were smooth and just the right size for getting lost in.

  “You finally woke up, eh?” he said. He pulled me out of my reverie and I started guiltily. I looked behind me.

  “‘You’ being me?” I asked and he responded with a cat-got-the-mouse smile.

  “I’m Cordi,” I said and wished I were somewhere else, because there were too many people and my mind was too brittle and it was way too early in the morning to be thinking the thoughts I was thinking, or any thoughts at all, for that matter.

  “Jacques, at your service,” and he gestured with his hand to encompass the whole table. In doing so he knocked over his little plastic cup filled with orange juice — glass I guess was taboo — and annihilated my impression that he was graceful. Kit, who had finished with the floor and resumed sitting quietly, gasped and started mopping up the mess with her napkin, taking care to keep her hands from getting wet.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, get your hands off my tray,” said Jacques, who then had the good sense to look sheepish.

  Kit’s hand fluttered around the tray like an injured bird, until Lucy pulled her away.

  I thought it might be a good idea to change the topic and give Kit a chance to collect herself. “What’s wrong with Mavis?” I asked, point-blank. Kit inhaled sharply and looked away from me. Lucy looked stunned and Jacques looked amused.

  “We’re not supposed to say,” said Lucy.