“Sometimes there is no explanation,” I said.
“Anyway, she didn't put up any resistance whatsoever. We took her in quietly”
“It was a huge story though,” Madeline said.
“That's true. Put Derby Line on the map for about a week. Hope it doesn't happen again now”
“Did either of you see Mary after she was committed?”
Both Lapierres shook their head. Decades of marriage had clearly linked them.
“I don't know anyone who ever visited her,” Madeline told me. “It's not the kind of thing you want to be reminded about, is it? People like to feel safe around here. It wasn't that anyone turned their back on her. It was more like . . . I don't know. Like we never knew Mary in the first place.”
Mary, Mary
Chapter 110
VERMONT STATE HOSPITAL was a sprawling, mostly red- brick building, unassuming from the outside except for its size. I had been told that almost half of it was unused space. The women's locked ward on the fourth floor held forensic patients, like Mary Constantine, but also civilly committed patients. “Not a perfect system,” the director told me, but one borne of small population size and shrinking budgets for mental health care.
It was also part of the reason Mary had been able to escape.
Dr. Rodney Blaisdale, the director, gave me a quick tour of the ward. It was well kept, with curtains in the dayroom and a fresh coat of paint on the concrete-block walls. Newspapers and magazines were spread on most end tables and couches: Burlington Free Press, The Chronicle, American Woodworker It was quiet - so quiet. I'd been on locked wards many times before, and usually the general noise level was like a constant buzz. I had no idea until now how oddly comforting that buzz could be.
It occurred to me that Vermont State had the still, slow- moving quality of an aquarium.
Patients seemed to come and go in response to the quiet itself, barely speaking, even to themselves.
The television was on a low volume, with a few women watching the soaps through what looked like Haldol-glazed eyes.
As Dr. Blaisdale took me around, I kept thinking about how vivid a scream would be in here.
“This is it,” he said as we came to one of many closed doors in the main hallway I realized I had stopped listening to him, and tuned back in. “This was Mary's room.”
Looking through the small observation window in that steel door, I found no clue that she had ever been there, of course. The platform bed held a bare mattress, and the only other features were a built-in desk and bench, and a stainless- steel blunt-edged shelf mounted to the wall.
“Of course, it didn't look like this then. Mary was with us for nineteen years, and she could do a lot with very little. Our ow-n Martha Stewart.” He chuckled.
“She was my friend.”
I turned to see a tiny middle-aged woman standing with one shoulder pressed against the wall opposite us. Her standard-issue scrubs indicated she was forensic, though it was hard to imagine what she might have done to get here.
“Hello,” I said. The woman raised her chin, trying to see past us into Mary's room. Now I saw that she had ragged burn scars up and down her neck. “Is she back? Is Mary here? I need to see Mary if she's here. It's important. It's very important to me.”
“No, Lucy I'm sorry she's not back,” Dr. Blaisdale told her.
Lucy looked crestfallen. She quickly turned and walked away from us, disconsolately trailing one hand along the concrete-block wall as she went.
“Lucy's one of our few really long-term patients here, as was Mary It was hard for her when Mary disappeared.”
“About that,” I said. “What happened that day?”
Dr. Blaisdale nodded slowly and bit into his lower lip.
“Why don't we finish this in my office.”
Mary, Mary
Chapter 111
I FOLLOWED BLAISDALE through the locked door at the end of the ward and down to the ground floor. We entered his office, which was high-end generic, with brass in boxes and pastel-colored mini-blinds. A poster for Banjo Dan and the Midnite Plowboys was framed on one wall and definitely caught my attention.
I sat down and noticed that everything on my side of his desk was several inches from the edge, just out of reach.
Blaisdale looked at me and sighed. I knew right away that he was going to soft-sell what had happened with Mary Constantine.
"All right, here goes, Dr. Cross. Everyone on the ward can earn day-trip privileges.
Forensic patients used to be prohibited, but we've found it therapeutically unconstructive to divide the population in that way As a consequence, Mary went out several times. That day was just like any other.“ ”And what happened on that day?" I asked.
“It was six patients with two staff, which is our standard procedure. The group went to the lake that day Unfortunately one of the patients had a meltdown of some sort.”
Of some sort? I wondered if he knew the exact details, even now Blaisdale seemed like a hands-off administrator if I'd ever seen one.
"In the middle of the hysterics, Mary insisted she had to go to the rest room. The outhouse building was right there, so the counselors let her go. Mistake, but it happens.
No one knew at the time that there were entrances on both sides of the building."
"Obviously Mary kne<' I said.
Dr. Blaisdale drummed a pen on his desktop several times. “At any rate, she disappeared into nearby woods.”
I stared at him, just listening, trying not to judge, but it was hard not to.
“She was a model patient, had been for years. It took everyone very much by surprise.”
“Just like when she killed her kids,” I said.
Blaisdale appraised me with his eyes. He wasn't sure if I had just insulted him, and I certainly hadn't meant to.
"The police did a major search - one of the biggest I've seen. We left that job to them.
Of course, we were eager to have Mary back, and to make sure she was all right. But it's not the kind of story we go out of our way to publicize. She wasn't -" He stopped.
“Wasn't what?”
“Well, at the time, we didn't consider her any danger to anyone, other than herself perhaps.” I didn't say what I was thinking. All of Los Angeles had a somewhat different opinion of Mary - that she was the most vicious homicidal maniac who ever lived.
“Did she leave anything behind?” I finally asked.
“She did, actually iou'11 definitely want to see heT journals. She wrote almost every day Filled dozens of volumes while she was here.”
Mary, Mary
Chapter 112
A PORTER, MAC, who looked as though he lived in the basement of the hospital, brought me two archive boxes filled with tape-bound composition notebooks, the kind a child raised in the fifties might have used in school. Mary Constantine had written far more in her years here than I would ever have time to read today I could requisition the whole collection later, I was informed.
“Thanks for your help,” I told Mac the porter.
“No problem,” he said, and I wondered when it was, and how, the response “you're welcome” seemed to have disap peared from the language, even up here in rural Vermont.
For now, I just wanted to get a sense of who Mary Con- stantine was, particularly in relationship to the Mary I al ready knew. Two archive boxes would be enough for a start.
Her cursive was tidy and precise. Every page was neatly arranged, with even, empty margins. Not a doodle in sight.
Words were her medium, and she had no shortage of them. They slanted to the right on the page as if they were in a hurry to get where they were going.
The voice, too, was eerily familiar.
The writing had Mary Smith's short, choppy sentences, and that same palpable sense of isolation. It was evident everywhere I looked in the notebook.
Sometimes it just seeped through; other times, it was right on the surface.
I'm like a ghost here. I don't know if anyone would care wh
ether I stayed or left. Or if they even know I'm here at all.
Except for Lucy. Lucy is so kind to inc. I don't know that I could ever be as good afriend to her as she is to me. I hope she doesn't go anywhere. It wouldn't be the same without her Sometimes I think she's the only one who really cares about me. Or knows me. Or can see me.
Am I invisible to everyone else? I truly wonder-am I invisible?
Reading through and picking out entries at random, I also got a picture of someone who stayed busy while she was kept in the mental hospital. There was always one project or another going on for Mary. She'd never given up hope, had she? She seemed to be the resident homemaker, as much as a person could be in this environment.
We're making paper chains for the day room. A little babyish, but they're pretty It will be nice for Christmas. I showed all the girls how to make them. Almost everyone participated. I love to teach them things. Most of them, anyway That Roseanne girlfrorn Burlington, she tries my patience sometimes. She truly does. She looked right at me today and asked me what my name is. As f I haven't already told her a thousand times. I don't know what kind of somebody she thinks she is. Shes just as much a nobody as the rest of us.
I didn't know what to say to he so I just didn't answer Let her make her own decorations.
Serves her right. I'd like to smack Roseanne. But I won't, will I?
Somebodies and nobodies. Those words, and that idea, had shown up more than once in the e-mails out in California. The inclusion of it here jumped out at me like an identification tag. Mary Smith had been obsessed with somebodies - high-profile, perfect mothers who stood out so clearly against the negative space of her own nobody- ness. Something told me that if I kept looking, I'd find it as a long-running theme for Mary Constantine as well.
What was missing was any mention of her children. In context, the journals read like a chronicle of denial. The Mary who lived here at the hospital seemed to have recorded no memory or awareness of them at all.
And the woman who lived as Mary Wagner - the woman Mary Constantine had become - could think of nothing but those children.
The common thread as she had evolved was a lack of consciousness around Brendan, Ashley's, and Adam's murder.
The A's and B's.
I could only hypothesize at this point, but it seemed to me that Mary was on a crash course toward a fuller realization, and wreaking havoc along the way Now that she was in custody again, the only person she could harm was herself.
Still, if she was in fact moving toward the truth, I hated to think what might happen to her when she got there.
Chapter_113 IT WAS HARD TO TEAR MYSELF AWAY from Mary's journals - her words, her ideas, and her anger.
For the first time, it seemed possible to me, even probable, that she had actually committed the series of murders in L.A.
When I looked at my watch, I was already half an hour for a meeting with her lead therapist, Debra Shapiro.
Shit. I need to hustle over there.
DL Shapiro was actually on her way out when I got to her I was full of apology Shapiro stayed to speak with me but was perched on the edge of a couch with her briefcase on her lap.
“Mary was my patient for eight years,” she told me before i even asked.
“How would you characterize her?”
“Not as a killer interestingly I view the incident with her children as an aberration to the larger arena, if you will, of her mental illness. She's a very sick woman, but any violent impulses were subjugated a long time ago. That's part of what kept her here; she never moved through anything.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked Dr. Shapiro. “Especially given what's happened.”
Maybe Mary wasn't the only person in denial around here.
“If I were testifying in court, I'd have to say I can't. Beyond that, though, I think eight years of interaction is worth something, Dr. Cross. Don't you?”
I did think so, of course. But only if the therapist showed me some insight.
“What about her children?” I asked. "I didn't Find any mention of them in her journals.
But for the short time I've known Mary they've been all she can think about. They're very much alive in her mind now. She's obsessed with them."
Dr. Shapiro nodded while she looked at her watch. "That's more difficult for me to reconcile. I could offer a theory, which is that maybe Mary's therapy was finally actualizing. The memory of those children was slowly slowly bubbling up.
"As the children came into her consciousness, one way to avoid processing twenty years of repressed guilt all at once would be to keep the children alive, as you put it. It could explain what drove her to escape when she did - to get back to her life with them.
Which, to Mary's experience, is exactly what happened."
“And these murders in California?” I was going very quickly on purpose; Dr. Shapiro fidgeted as though she might jump up and leave at any moment.
She shrugged, clearly impatient with the interview. I wondered if her therapy sessions felt like this to her patients. “I just don't see it, It's hard to know what might have happened to Mary once she left here, but as for the woman that I knew?” She shook her head back and forth several times. “The only part of the story that makes sense is Los Angeles.”
“How so?” I asked.
“There was some interest in her story a few years ago. Some movie people came and went. Mary permitted the interviews, but as a state's ward, she didn't have the autonomy to grant any farther-reaching permission. Eventually they lost interest and went away During her last couple of years here, I think they were the only visitors she had.”
“Who?” I took out my notebook, folded it open. “I need to know more about this. Are there records of the visits? Anything?”
“I don't actually recall any names,” she said. “And beyond that, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the level of disclosure here. I might refer you back to Dr. Blaisdale if you want more specific information. He'd be the one to release it.”
I wondered if she was feeling protective of her patient, or maybe just late for something on her social calendar. The clock said 5:46.
I realized I might do better elsewhere, in which case, I had to get going as well. I thanked Dr. Shapiro for her time, and help, and headed back to the administration building.
I was running.
Mary, Mary
Chapter 114
STILL AND ALL, I was feeling like a real cop again, and it didn't seem half bad to me.
The wall clock in the administrative office said 5:52 when I slipped in.
I smiled across the counter at a young woman with pink- streaked blond hair and a lot of costume jewelry. She was draping a plastic cover over her typewriter.
“Hi, I've got a really quick request for you. Really quick. I need it, though.”
“Can it wait until tomorrow?” the woman asked, eyeing me up and down. “It can wait, right?”
"Actually, no. I just spoke with Doctor Shapiro, and she asked me to run down here and catch you. I need to see the women's forensic ward visitor's log for the last few years.
Specifically for Mary Constantine. It's really important. I wouldn't bother you otherwise."
The woman picked up her phone. “Doctor Shapiro sent you?”
“That's right. She just left for the day, but she told me this wouldn't be a problem.” I held up my ID. “I'm with the FBI, Dr. Alex Cross. This is part of an ongoing murder investigation.”
She didn't hide her displeasure. “I just shut down the computer, and I have to pick up my daughter. I suppose I can get you the hard copy if you want.”
Without waiting for an answer, she disappeared into another room and came back with a small stack of three-ring binders.
“Youcan only stay as long as Beadsie's here.” She waved to a woman in a goldfish-bowl office at the back. Then she left, without another word - to me, or to Beadsie.
The pages of the visitor's log were divided into columns. I worked from the back
of the most recent book, looking for Mary's name under Who Are You Here to See?
For two years' worth of entries, there was nothing at all. It was obvious how alone Mary Constantine had been in this place.
Then, suddenly, a rash of names cropped up on the log. Here was the flurry of interest that Dr. Shapiro mentioned. It lasted over the course of about a month and a half.
I slowed down and perused the visitors' names. Most were unfamiliar to me.
One of them, I recognized.
Mary, Mary
Chapter 115
MY CELL PHONE and Vermont seemed to hate each other. Apparently, this was the Land of No Signal.
I found a pay phone instead, called Agent Page in Los Angeles, and had him patch in LAPD. A minute later we had Maddux Fielding's office on the line, but no Fielding.
What a surprise.
“You know what?” I said to the nameless lieutenant on the line. “Screw it. Transfer us over to Detective Jeanne Galletta.”
“What's going on?” Page asked me again, while we were on hold with LAPD.
Then I heard another voice on the line. “Jeanne Galletta. Is this Alex?”
“Jeanne, it's Alex all right. Karl Page from the L.A. Bureau office is on the line, too. I'm in Vermont. I think I have important news on the Mary Smith case.”
“I think I may have another connection for you - a murder in Vancouver,” Jeanne said.
“What are you doing all the way up in Vermont?”
“Hold that thought about Vancouver. Please find Fielding. Or do whatever you have to do, but someone needs to pick up Michael Bell for questioning. Michael Bell. Marti LowensteinBell's husband.”
“What?” Jeanne sounded incredulous. Then Page swore, obviously muffling the receiver.
I gave them a very quick rundown of my last two days up here, then finally the names on the visitor log at the state hospital.
“He knows Mary Constantine. He's visited her here in Vermont before. Several times, actually”
Alex Cross 11 - Mary, Mary Page 21
