A Madness So Discreet

by Mindy McGinnis

  Janey left, but Grace remained motionless in her bed. In the days since Nell’s death, the bleak winter had wrapped itself around the asylum, seeming to fill even Grace’s head. Everything inside of her was gray, all of her actions meaningless. Letters written to Alice were taken by the wind; long conjectures with Thornhollow produced nothing more concrete than chalk on slate. She was a madwoman in truth, with no direction and no hope.

  There was a timid scratching at her door. Grace ignored it but the door creaked open slightly and Elizabeth appeared, long braids hanging out from under a sleeping cap. She crept inside, crawling into bed with Grace without being invited. The girl’s hand wound into Grace’s unbound hair and she nestled in beside her.

  “String said you needed me,” she said, tucking the comforter around both of them. Grace slipped off to sleep, lulled by Elizabeth’s hands moving through her hair.

  “It was a mistake,” Thornhollow informed her the next day in his office.

  “In your opinion,” Grace said. “I didn’t want to look at a dead girl.”

  He strolled around her as she sat, deep in thought. “How are you feeling, Grace? Lonely? Hollow?”

  “Useless,” she said, eyes not meeting his own.

  He slapped his hands together. “Exactly what I’m trying to remedy. Your eyes could’ve gleaned much last night, Grace.”

  “As could your own. More than mine.”

  “I learned things, yes,” he said. “But you know yourself the million tiny details that assault you in these situations, any one of them holding the key to our killer. What if that one thing avoids me but you catch it?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor,” Grace said, head in her hands, fingers finding her scars.

  “I do know,” he said. “You complement me, Grace. I work better with you by my side. My mind can be sharply focused while you capture the larger canvas.”

  Grace worked at her scars, the soft skin numb to the touch but pleasant to the fingertips. “I wasn’t only mourning for Nell when they locked me away, Doctor. These girls we see, their helplessness is so evident. The ether strips them more completely than he does. They don’t even fight. All they can do is lie there, and be posed and pawed as he pleases.”

  “I understand,” Thornhollow said. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you since . . .” He trailed off, searching for the right words. “I met your father.”

  “Yes,” she said, her throat threatening to close still farther. “I saw him, from the turret.”

  “He’s an arrogant ass,” Thornhollow said, slamming his hand down on the chair arm. “I’d have disliked him even if I’d never met you.”

  “Was it difficult?”

  “The entire thing was difficult,” Thornhollow said, drawn back into his own sufferings. “There were people who needed to be met and talked to, a ridiculous amount of food to eat. And there were—”

  “Women?” Grace asked, thinking of the lady in blue.

  “A few,” he said. “Though they were less of a problem than usual. Your father is a magnetic man.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “It’s easy to see that he’s accustomed to getting his way.”

  “Father doesn’t lose. Ever.”

  Thornhollow cleared his throat. “Grace, I can’t help but wonder if you see yourself in these helpless girls. Our inability to catch their killer combined with the arrival of your father has intensified the connection.”

  “No.” Grace shook her head, voice aching with use. “You’ve drawn too many lines, looked too deeply when it’s really quite simple.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t see myself, Dr. Thornhollow. I see Anka. I see Mellie. I see exactly who they are and what’s been done to them. It’s what I can’t see that I couldn’t face last night—the man who had them to their last breath and at his mercy until their darkness fell.”

  She went to the blackboard, spinning their notes to the front. “I can’t see him, Doctor. And neither can you. Both our minds have touched every detail, turned it to see if we’ve missed something, and then examined it again. And yet we’ve found nothing, come no nearer than we were the night we saw the crowd forming around Anka. I can’t bear it.”

  “Then perhaps I’m wrong,” Thornhollow said. “Taking you out last night would’ve done nothing to gratify your need to avenge them.”

  “But you said you learned things?”

  “And I did.” Thornhollow rose to join her at the board. “The girl had been dead for some time, her body only discovered when a farmer went to cut a Christmas tree for his family. She was frozen solid and had been laid out at the coroner’s to thaw when I saw her last night. It was definitely our man—arms laid across the chest, ankles crossed, eyes open.”

  “Why would he kill again now?” Grace asked, drawn in despite herself. “It’s been months.”

  “And why out in the country this time?” Thornhollow shot a question back. “The first two girls were in town, which carries much more risk and implies that he’s comfortable in that environment and therefore a city dweller. Except now we get a girl out in the woods, and it makes me wonder if your earlier thought about him being a country doctor might be right.”

  “When was she killed?” Grace asked, standing back to look at the board. “If we can establish a timeline, it could answer any number of things.”

  “Wouldn’t a timeline be lovely?” Thornhollow said, his gaze roaming over their notes. “But no, sadly, last night’s victim won’t help in that respect. As I said, frozen solid. She was a kitchen girl in one of the larger country estates, unhappy in her position. She’d been talking of returning home, so no one thought anything of it when she went missing. With the temperatures we’ve been having she could’ve died weeks ago, or within the last two days. It’s impossible to tell.” He slapped his leg. “And with her discovery in the middle of nowhere under a foot of snow, it makes me wonder if there’s a whole bevy of corpses out there, just waiting for the spring thaw to announce that they’ve died.”

  “That’s really quite horrible,” Grace said, closing her eyes against the picture he’d drawn.

  “It’s true,” Thornhollow insisted. “This discovery throws off everything we thought we knew.”

  “You’re certainly not putting together a compelling argument to make me want to return to this,” Grace said, pointing to the board. “This is its own kind of madness.”

  “I know it,” the doctor agreed, returning to his chair. “And all to see my own pet theories proven, to capture criminals in order to vindicate this new science.”

  “This is where we’re different, Doctor,” Grace said quietly, her fingers tracing their chalk notes. “We both look upon things that no one should see and yet we do not flinch. I see the blood and think of the person it’s leaving while your mind is only on the one who spilled it. My thoughts are on the people and yours the puzzle.”

  “And that is exactly why I need you.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The late-evening sunlight slanted in through the windows of the women’s dining hall, illuminating every dust mote and bringing a false sense of warmth to the room. Elizabeth pulled her wrap closer around her and leaned over the table toward Grace.

  “Would you like a game of checkers before dinner?”

  Grace nodded, grateful to find something to do other than wait for the announcement that food was ready. Though the winter daylight hours were so few, she was hard-pressed to fill them. Lizzie went to a cupboard and drew out the game board.

  “This set is missing a few of the red ones, as Mrs. Neckard ate three when she lost last week to Miss Payne. But I’d like a game all the same. I was getting pretty good, if I may say so. Nell and I, we used to play a lot but . . .”

  Elizabeth’s voice faded out as it often did whenever their lost friend was mentioned. “Sorry, Grace. I knew her for so long. It’s hard when all the little things are still there but she’s not.”

  Grace understood too well. Nell’s ro
om had held all her things, the bed neatly made, hair ribbons laid out in flat rows on her stand. Yet Nell was gone, her body never recovered, while her room looked as if it awaited her return any moment.

  “I’ll be black, if you don’t mind,” Elizabeth said, unfolding the board. “I think you’re quick enough to play minus three pieces and still beat me.”

  Grace smiled and began lining up her checkers as other women filtered into the dining hall. She moved a piece forward and Elizabeth hovered over the board, tip of her tongue sticking out as she concentrated.

  “Janey is worried about you,” Lizzie said as she made her move. “Said she doesn’t know whether she should knock on your door the next time Thornhollow sends for you, or tell him to go pound sand.”

  Grace only shrugged and made her next move. She hadn’t decided herself what she would do.

  “I don’t know what to think about it, myself,” Elizabeth said, squinting at the board. “But having a purpose does seem to make the time go faster, am I right? Our checker game is making dinner come closer every second, and we’re not sitting here thinking about how hungry we are. We’re thinking about checkers. Or at least I am.”

  Grace ignored the tremor in her hand as she made her next move, thinking that having a purpose was exactly what she needed.

  Grace was in the carriage the next time she was summoned. Her blank stare sliding over her features the moment she exited, Thornhollow handing her down like royalty to a macabre parade. Davey’s eyes glanced off hers and back again as she and Thornhollow made their joint assessment of another murder that hardly required their presence, another lover’s quarrel ended badly.

  “Honestly,” Thornhollow huffed as the carriage door swung shut behind him. “Why do people bother to fall in love? I’ve never seen it bring anything but pain.”

  “You hardly spend time in places that happy couples frequent,” Grace reminded him, burying her hands in her wrap to warm them.

  “Mmmmm . . .” He looked out the window, thoughts following the same scattered path as the blowing snow. “How is Lizzie holding up? It’s been two months. I worry that she’s not eating enough.”

  “I watch her at dinner. She eats enough to keep her going,” Grace said. “I think she’s all right, but she has her dark days. When Joanna moved into Nell’s room it was difficult.”

  The new girl had arrived along with a blizzard that trapped them all indoors for a week, her presence reminding them that Nell would never come back. Janey had divvied Nell’s hair ribbons among Grace, Elizabeth, and Rebecca, keeping one for herself. Nell’s clothes had been taken to the poorhouse after being boiled, the sheets stripped and the bed made ready for the next unfortunate, who turned out to be a scratcher.

  “Keep your eyes on that one, girls,” Janey had warned Grace and Lizzie as she swept past them one day, bloodied furrows on her forearms. “I don’t want any of you peaceful ones ripped to shreds.”

  Joanna had ended up in leather mitts that prevented her from hurting others, but she vented her frustrations by pounding them against the wall hard enough to send plaster trickling down onto Grace’s pillow.

  “And how are you? I can’t help but notice you aren’t yourself lately.”

  “I’m fine,” Grace said a little too quickly. “You’ll not need to put me back in the padded room.”

  “I wasn’t inferring that I would,” Thornhollow said. “Or that it would be necessary. Quite the opposite, actually. You seem to have little room for your emotions these days.”

  “That’s the pot calling the kettle black if I ever heard it,” Grace said irritably. They fell quiet as the carriage rattled over the brick streets of town and Grace bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I didn’t mean to snap. The new girl has made our floor a little less welcoming. I don’t think I’ve slept the night through since she arrived.”

  “Mmmmm . . . ,” the doctor said again, his gaze riveted on the blank pane of the window. “Grace, would you like to meet my sister?”

  “I . . .” Grace tried to make out his face in the darkness of the carriage. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Oddly enough,” he said. “Like all other humans, I was born from a mother and like many of my kind I’m not the only person she gave birth to. In short, yes, I have a sister. Would you like to meet her?”

  “Yes, I think I would,” Grace said. “Why are you asking me?”

  “Because it’s winter, and it brings a person down. You and I both have had some harsh strokes played against us lately. I’ve taken to long walks despite the cold. A change of scenery can do wonders for the mood, and it occurred to me the other day that you might benefit from that as well. This thought came along with a letter from my sister saying that we should spend some time together.”

  “That you ‘should spend some time together’? It hardly sounds like she’s looking forward to it.”

  “I assure you neither one of us is,” Thornhollow said as they rattled onto the gravel driveway toward home. “But my sister doesn’t respond well to rejection. I’ve reserved myself some rooms in town so that I can get out of the asylum for a bit myself. Of course, I can only spirit you away for one evening, but I thought you might like an opportunity to speak freely with someone other than me. Another woman, especially.”

  “So I can be myself?” Grace asked.

  They pulled into the roundabout, the gas lamps from the portico turning each snowflake into a brilliant meteor. “You shouldn’t be Grace Mae, specifically, no. If we simply present you as a girl who was removed from unfortunate circumstances and now assists me, I think that will be sufficient. I can’t promise a lovely evening, but I can promise that you won’t have to listen to Joanna tearing out a supporting wall. My sister arrives tomorrow evening. Will you join us?”

  “Yes,” Grace said slowly, her own eyes now focused on the whirling snow. “I think I will. I’ll have to wash this plaster out of my hair first, though.”

  “You deserve it,” Lizzie said as she sat on Grace’s bed, watching her pin her hat on. “Whenever you put on your street clothes and cover the scars you look like such a lady, Grace.”

  Grace made a face as she bent to button her shoes, pointing at her friend.

  “You’re thinking you’re not the only one who deserves it,” Lizzie interpreted. “But there’s something more to it than the difference between the sane and insane. You’ve got a high quality about you, right down to the way you walk. Me, if I left the asylum . . .” She shivered even at the thought. “I’ve been here too long, Grace. I may not be mad but if you dragged me out of these walls you’d think I was. I wouldn’t even know how to buy a pound of flour, or refill my favorite perfume bottle anymore.”

  The other girl’s voice drifted off sadly, her fingers toying with the ends of Nell’s ribbon, the edges frayed with her endless worrying. Grace captured the fretting fingers with her own, pressing them down tight in her hand.

  “You go,” Lizzie said. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

  Ned was waiting outside, the horse’s breath making warm clouds around its nose. “The doctor said I was to take you to the hotel. Also to tell you the number two hundred and eight,” he said, and she nodded. He handed her into the carriage, his usually calm face twisted into a grimace. Grace touched her hand to his, eyebrows raised in a question.

  “I don’t . . .” Ned’s brow wrinkled as he concentrated, weighing each word. “Your friend, the girl that died with ice. I’m sorry about her. She had nice hair, like a pony’s, but almost better.” He stuck a finger into the air to clarify. “Almost.”

  Grace squeezed his hand, and he shut the carriage door, her thoughts straying from the evening she was supposed to enjoy to the image of Nell’s braid, black against the ice. The gravel drive gave way to the bricks of town, and Grace focused on maintaining a mask of sanity, her back straight, her face resisting the slack muscles she usually adopted.

  They stopped in front of a brick hotel, well lit from inside against the alre
ady failing light of the day. Ned helped her out of the carriage, then leaned over her before leaving. “Three hours,” he said sternly, pointing at the stone steps. “The doctor said to be back for you in three hours. So you be here.”

  “I will, Ned, thank you,” Grace said, so deeply fastened on to the image of a healthy young woman out for the evening that she forgot to be mute. Her eyes widened for a moment, but Ned only nodded. “Three hours,” he reminded her before he drove off, and she nodded.

  Grace shook off her nerves at the slip, mounting the stone steps as if she belonged there. She swept into the lobby, pulling her gloves off and cutting a quick turn to the right staircase before anyone could ask her what she was doing. Remembering Ned’s broken instructions, she found room 208 and knocked. The door was flung open, and Thornhollow motioned her in without a word of greeting, his hair standing up in red spikes all over his head.

  “I’ve stabbed myself with the tie tack twice; never have managed to tie an ascot without a little blood spilled. Janey had to do mine for the reception at the asylum, and I swear she was giggling when she left my office. I’m sorry, Grace, everything is a bit of a mess, and Adelaide hasn’t arrived yet.” He waved around the sitting room, where she could see at least three jackets that had been dismissed as unsuitable for dinner. “Have a seat, I’ll just . . . it shouldn’t be more than a minute or two,” he said, running into the bedroom and slamming the door behind him.

  Grace sighed, moved a jacket, and sat down only to crush a hat. She was standing in the middle of the room, trying to punch it back into form, when there was a sharp rap at the door. She glanced up, frozen in place. From the bedroom came a muffled thump and a “Damn.” She could only guess that Thornhollow was nowhere near being ready to answer the door. Another sharp rap, this one conveying impatience, sent Grace’s nerves soaring, and she was reminded of Lizzie’s certainty that she’d been institutionalized so long she could never function outside of it.