Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery)

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  Jacques scratched his head and didn’t say anything, and the instructor did what every good psychiatrist and psychologist or social worker does — he let the silence flow around the room, waiting for Jacques to become uncomfortable and blurt something out. But Jacques remained silent and the instructor finally let it go by telling Jacques to think about it some more and that they would revisit his problem in another session. He then fixed me in his sights.

  “What about you, Cordi? Can you tell us about a situation that has bothered you?” I was about to flat out say no when it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I could use the session to advantage.

  “I saw Mavis dead in her bed.” Everybody in the room snapped to attention.

  “You mean you saw Mavis sick in her bed,” prompted the instructor, who had obviously been briefed by someone.

  “No, I meant what I said. I saw Mavis dead in her bed.”

  Joe looked around at the faces turned attentively toward him, and you could almost see his thoughts trying to get in line behind some strategy.

  “Okay, Cordi. How did that make you feel?”

  “Scared. Nauseated. Sad.”

  “And what thoughts went through your head when this happened?”

  “That she was too young to die. Was it suicide? Was she murdered — because there was a scarf around her neck?”

  “Is that all you felt and thought?” I nodded slowly and he said gently, “Perhaps you wondered if you were getting sick again.”

  I shook my head slowly, feeling the skin crawl on the back of my neck.

  “What’s your hot thought, the thought that means the most, Cordi?”

  “That she died. That she was murdered.”

  He looked around at the others in the group, all of whom were leaning forward in their chairs.

  “Okay. Let’s go through a reasonable response to your thought. Do you have any proof to back up your claim?”

  “The scarf, and the fact that scarves are not allowed on the floor.”

  “Perhaps a visitor left it behind,” said Austin, who was squirming in his seat.

  “But really, how do you strangle a person in a room with three other people in it?” asked Jacques.

  “And how do you escape the attention of the nurses?” asked Leo.

  “Maybe it was something else that killed her,” said Kit.

  I saw Austin stiffen at that and then he said, “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kit. “All I know is that, if she is dead, she didn’t kill herself with a scarf.” She sounded so sure that I wondered why.

  “Be hard to strangle yourself with a scarf, unless you secured it to the ceiling,” said Jacques dryly.

  The instructor broke in and said, “Cordi, why do think she’s dead?”

  “I told you, I saw her,” I said.

  “But the nurses and doctors say otherwise.”

  “I think they’re just trying to hide it from all of us, so we won’t be traumatized by it.”

  “All I’m saying,” said Joe gently, “is that I think you have to come to grips with the fact that your hot thought, that she is dead, might have been a simple misperception.”

  And that was the end of it for me. Not because we were through discussing my problem, but because Joe wanted to give someone else a chance to talk. Chicken.

  Chapter Six

  “Well, well, what have we here?”

  I was sitting in the hall outside my room, head in hands, slumped against the wall. I didn’t even bother to look up. I could tell by the gigantic feet that it was Jacques.

  “Feeling sorry for ourselves, are we?” he said.

  Even that didn’t get my goat.

  “Don’t you even want to know what happened to her?”

  That did get my goat. I looked up and said, “You know?”

  “I didn’t say that exactly.”

  “What did you say exactly?”

  He squatted down beside me so that I didn’t have to crane my neck. I was fascinated by the sheer size of his thighs as he did so. They were twice the size of mine and his hand, as he draped it over his knee, could have easily palmed my head.

  “I’m curious, aren’t you?” he said, his deep resonant voice bringing me back to the conversation at hand. “I’d like to know if she is dead or alive. If you are right or wrong. Purely academic.”

  “What did you have in mind, academically speaking?” I still had to look up at him, close enough to count some of the speckles in his lovely green eyes.

  “Let’s go to the morgue.”

  I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly. He repeated himself.

  “Are you crazy?” I said.

  Jacques smirked. “Can’t you be more imaginative than that? We are, after all, in a psych hospital.”

  I felt two inches tall, but he had to rub it in.

  “If I’m not crazy,” he said, “then why am I here?” His voice was low, even, with a tinge of something indefinable hiding behind the amusement.

  “Okay, okay. So you’re crazy. But the morgue? Just how are we supposed to get there unobserved, assuming a psych hospital even has a morgue?” I asked.

  “Oh, it has a morgue, and I know where it is.”

  “Is that all of your plan? Just go?” I said. And I really didn’t want to know how he knew about the morgue. But he told me anyway.

  He laughed. “I worked here once as a volunteer. The morgue isn’t manned — they don’t do autopsies here. It’s just storage, so we have to go tonight, because if she’s still there, they’ll be moving her soon.”

  “And does working here once get you the key to get in?” I asked.

  He laughed again and stood up and pulled out a jangly set of lock picks. He saw the surprised look on my face and said, “You’ve been here long enough, haven’t you, to know that it’s pretty easy to smuggle stuff onto the floor.” Which begged the real questions of why he would want to smuggle in a set of picks in the first place and why he had them at all.

  He was looking down, watching my face, which must have registered more surprise because he said, “Have you not signed out yet for a day pass or an overnight?”

  I hadn’t. Not because I didn’t know about it — I knew I wasn’t a prisoner — but because I was afraid to go back to my old life and find it lacking. Even stepping out onto the street left me feeling vaguely uneasy. Maybe just off the floor would be okay, though.

  “So we just waltz out, zip down to the morgue, and unobserved, unlock the door, check for Mavis, and exit stage left?”

  “You betcha.”

  It was some hours since Mavis had exited the floor on a stretcher, her body covered in a thin white sheet, the crimson scarf stuck like a leech to her neck. Cold crimson death. Jacques and I had agreed to sign out of the floor five minutes apart and right after dinner. He told me to take the elevator to the basement floor and he would be waiting for me. And so he was.

  I stepped off the elevator and he took me by the arm and started walking down the long narrow corridor as if we were supposed to be there. His fingers on my skin were electric and I found myself thinking more about him than about what we were going to do. Then he let go and the moment was lost.

  The lighting in the basement was budget-oriented and low-wattage, and cast more shadows than it dispersed. We came to a junction and he turned us to the right and we walked until we reached the end of the corridor. On the right-hand side was a maroon door con-veniently labelled MORGUE. We were in an exposed position and I felt trapped, until I noticed the door across the way. It had a little window in it and I could see stairs going up. If I’d missed that, the sign saying STAIRS would have alerted me, I thought wryly.

  While I was off in Neverland, Jacques was working wonders with his lock picks, and he nudged me with his massive paw when he got the door open. How the hell he had managed t
o work with the delicate locks with his big hands I couldn’t fathom, but he had, and that was all that counted. We were in.

  The windowless room was bathed in a red night-light, and despite Jacques’s assertion that no autopsies took place here, there was an autopsy table in the middle of the room, its shiny metal surface so clinical and forbidding in that room of death. Jacques swore under his breath and then said, “Wait here. I forgot something. Back in five.”

  I felt a moment of panic as he turned abruptly and headed back to the door we came through.

  “Where are you going?”

  But either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t want to, because all I heard was the quiet click of the door as it shut behind him. I shivered. I was in the morgue all alone. The room was windowless and the eerie red light, the colour of blood, made me feel like death was a living breathing thing out to get me. The room was bathed in it. Even the air seemed strangled, suffocating, inert. And the faint hissing sound coming from a grate in the wall was the voice of the dead trying to smother me. I shook myself, trying to dislodge images that were careering at me like a movie whose director had lost control. I was here for a reason. I had to ground myself.

  I surveyed the room. Metal chests of drawers lined one wall, the contents of which I could imagine were instruments of death, but I didn’t want to go there, had to stop my mind from its wild ride.

  And then I saw them.

  Two square metal doors one above the other, with a single lever handle on each one. They looked so innocuous, so anticlimactic, as to be the storage places for human bodies. But there was no mistaking what they were. Even though I had never seen one in real life, I had seen these stainless-steel refrigerated units on TV countless times.

  I crept over to them, sidling up to them as if afraid they’d bite me. They were so shiny and clean. It seemed impossible that something dead could be inside them. I reached for the bottom door and opened it. The unit had a gigantic tray inside it, which you could pull out to view what was on it. This one was empty. I opened the top one and closed my eyes and held my breath. Slowly I opened one eye and drew in my breath.

  Very definitely Mavis. Very definitely dead.

  The scarf was gone, but a tiny silver cross was still around her neck, and what life there once had been was gone.

  I suppose if I had been religious I would have crossed myself or something, but all I felt was sadness. And that was when I heard voices coming down the corridor. I looked wildly around for a place to hide. There was a locked closet and nothing else.

  I nearly gagged when I realized the only place to hide was in the bottom drawer. I opened the door and got down on my hands and knees and looked inside. So cold and dark and claustrophobic. Supporting myself on my elbows, I squirmed in backward and pulled on the edge of the door, almost but not quite closing it.

  I let out an involuntary gasp as the cold steel touched my body and the darkness was almost absolute, except for a tiny crack in the door. I’m not claustrophobic, but the walls were so close upon me, the air so smothering, and the cold so penetrating and indifferent that I felt the welling up of panic and envisioned the walls slowly moving in and squeezing my body until the life was flattened right out of me.

  It was visceral and it was real, but so were the voices in my head yelling at me to get the hell out. A very reasonable order. Except for the other voices, which were now coming through the door. Was this really happening to me? I pulled my hand up to my face and bit it. Definitely real. Definitely happening to me. And then the voices were in the room.

  I had my hand on the door, lightly gripping it by its interior edge. I tried looking out the crack, but whoever they were, they were not in my line of vision and I could only hear them intermittently. The closest one to me was a woman. Of that I was sure. The other had a low voice I could not hear very well, so I couldn’t tell if it was a man with a high voice or a woman with a low voice.

  “She saw her …

  “… have to do something.

  “… she’s talking.

  “… knows too much.

  “… police snooping.

  “Leave it with me … I’ll think of something.”

  And suddenly the speaker I could hear moved closer to me and I shrank back, if that was humanly possible in the small space I was in. There was only one person she or he could have been talking about, and that was me.

  Well, there was a bright side. At least I wasn’t psycho. Mavis had died. I didn’t know how and I didn’t know why. What I did know was that I needed to find out, because if Mavis hadn’t committed suicide, then whoever had killed her might kill me. In my sleep. Just like Mavis. The words I had just overheard were ominous and I felt a chill of fear in my gut. Had I just heard my own death sentence?

  I was getting very cold. My legs and arms were numb and I had a sudden cramp in my leg that had me doing a silent scream to ease the pain. Nothing like getting a charley horse while trapped inside a morgue fridge.

  “What’s this door doing open?”

  The voice, a woman’s, was right there by my ear, and I jumped and then my heart leaped as I saw her hand, minus one finger, push the door closed with a resounding thud. I pulled my own hand back just in time. I lay there shivering in my cold dark tomb, wondering if I should pound on the door and take the chance that I might escape my probable murderers, once they released me from the fridge, or wait and hope Jacques would find me.

  I lay there listening to myself breathing. I could hear my heart beating in my ears and feel it thumping in my chest and I felt suffocated. After a few minutes I couldn’t stand it any longer and that was when I realized the material from the right sleeve of my shirt was caught in the door. I struggled to pull it free but it wouldn’t budge. And then I really panicked. I was getting colder by the second and having trouble breathing, and I saw myself gasping out the rest of my life in a glorified fridge. I yelled. I rapped the door with my left hand and I did it over and over until I was exhausted.

  And then the door opened. I didn’t know whether I was about to be murdered, having just been rescued from certain death, or whether it would be my salvation.

  It was the latter. Jacques.

  “Nice-colour shirt,” he said as he pulled my frigid body out of the tray by my shoulders. I looked down at my canary-yellow shirt.

  “I might not have noticed it sticking out if it had been some dull colour.”

  I didn’t say anything, I was so cold. My teeth were jumping around and hitting each other like castanets. Jacques was still holding me by my shoulders and I wasn’t sure if the chill down my spine was because I was practically hypothermic or because Jacques was holding me. I looked up at him and he suddenly drew me to him, enveloping me in his arms and holding me so tightly that I could hardly breathe. Definitely not all hypothermic, because hypothermia does not usually come with a frisson of excitement. He was rubbing me vigorously with his hands and I didn’t want it to end. I could have stood there in his arms forever and been happy, but we weren’t exactly in a safe place and so the hug ended and we were back in the morgue. The owners of the two voices, one mysterious and the other not so much, had left the lights on and the room suddenly looked ordinary, clinical but ordinary. Jacques must have just missed them.

  He picked up a camera from the floor where he must have dropped it to rescue me and said, “Had to go back for my camera. Did you find her? We need photographs.”

  I nodded and pointed to the top drawer. As he approached it, we heard a voice call out somewhere in the corridor, so Jacques moved with lightning speed to the closet door I’d tried earlier.

  “It’s locked,” I said.

  He pulled his picks from his pocket and fumbled with the door as I stood, like a deer caught in headlights, waiting for the morgue door to open. But Jacques was first and we tumbled through the door, mere seconds before we heard people moving about in the morgu
e and talking. We were in a supply closet that was only slightly less claustrophobic than the fridge had been. I was slowly starting to warm up, but my chattering teeth sounded so loud that I had to consciously keep my mouth open to keep my teeth from hitting against one another. We stayed huddled in that little closet for a long time after the noises had stopped coming from the morgue. Jacques held me tightly in his arms, trying to warm me, the heat from his body slowly seeping into mine. I could hear his heart beating and feel his breath ruffling my hair. I almost forgot that we were in a rather precarious situation until Jacques finally released me. He opened the door cautiously and we were greeted with the same reddish light that had so disturbed me.

  “Let’s be quick,” he said and he walked over and pulled out the top morgue drawer. As I joined him and looked inside, I suddenly felt disoriented and light-headed.

  Mavis was gone.

  Chapter Seven

  I was thinking about my brother and my poor little niece and trying to warm up from the refrigerated morgue drawer when I looked out the seventh-floor window of my room and remembered it was winter. Now I vaguely recalled that Ryan had brought me my winter boots and coat on one of his recent visits, but nothing had registered — with the exception of the look of desperation in his eyes when he’d asked me how I was doing. He’d needed me to say I was okay and I couldn’t. He’d been worried sick about Annie and worried sick about me, and I wasn’t able to give him anything.

  I focused on the streets below. They were where I used to roam as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, and were now covered in a thick blanket of snow. The city was in the midst of a snowstorm, and the unwise, the unwary, or the unfortunate few who were out in this weather were embracing themselves, holding on to their coats against the cold north wind.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, not down on the streets, but at my level. Something small and black. I peered through the swirling snow and felt a cold tendril of fear spiral inside me. It was a squirrel. A black squirrel. Part of me wondered how the hell a squirrel could be seven floors up a sheer wall in a raging snowstorm in the dead of winter. It must have come from the roof, I thought, even as another part of me thought I must be hallucinating. I watched its tiny feet gripping the cement as its inched downward headfirst and out of sight. But not before I heard someone exclaim, “Look at that! A squirrel!”