Dark Omen: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

She hadn’t seen Bette for several nights — not since she’d introduced her to Weston.

  Bette sat at her kitchen table, a flurry of notes spread out in front of her.

  Crystal had stopped by after working at the coffee shop, bringing pastries and coffee to sweeten up her sister.

  Bette stood and walked to the counter where Crystal had set the white paper bag. She extracted an almond scone and took a bite.

  “He’s okay, a little gooey for my tastes, but…” Bette shrugged. “He’s better than the tuba player.”

  Crystal laughed and threw a dried cranberry from her own scone at her sister.

  “Hey!” Bette said, scrambling to grab the cranberry. “I just swept.”

  “Better than the tuba player is hardly a compliment, considering the last time I saw him he was unconscious in my parking lot.”

  Bette laughed.

  “You’ve always attracted the crazy ones,” Bette said. “And you’re the one who didn’t call the cops when he started drinking from a bottle of tequila and playing his tuba beneath your window.”

  Crystal hung her head and laughed. “Oh God, he was crazy, wasn’t he? But he’d been so nice to his grandmother at Hospice House. He had a good heart. I still believe that.”

  Bette rolled her eyes. “That’s why you don’t date people you meet at work. Obviously, you haven’t learned your lesson since you’re now sleeping with one of your professors.”

  Crystal grinned and hopped up on the counter, legs dangling over the side. “We’re doing a lot more than that.”

  Bette wrinkled her nose.

  “Eew,” she said, shaking her head and returning to her chair at the table.

  “Not like that,” Crystal protested. “Oh, never mind.”

  Bette set her scone on a napkin. “Oh yeah, the love thing. You realize he’s got a decade on you?”

  “Nine years,” Crystal corrected. “He’s nine years older than me.”

  “Which puts him at nineteen when you were ten, which definitely classifies him as a pedophile.”

  “Stop,” Crystal moaned, flicking another cranberry at her sister.

  It bounced off her forehead and landed somewhere in her long dark braid.

  Bette grimaced and picked at her hair until she found it.

  Crystal looked at her watch.

  “I’ve got to go. I told Linda I’d pick up a shift at Hospice House tonight. The new girl called in sick.”

  “Again?”

  Crystal nodded. “She turns green every time someone throws up. I don’t think she’s cut out for hospice.”

  “Apparently not,” Bette agreed.

  “Hug me,” Crystal said, stopping next to Bette and offering to help her up from her chair.

  Bette took her hand.

  “Are we hugging now when we say goodbye?” Bette asked, wrapping her arms around her younger sister.

  “Yes.”

  They hugged for a long time.

  Crystal pulled away, but paused at the doorway.

  “I love you, Bette,” she said.

  “I love you too, sis. I hope nobody dies on you tonight.”

  Crystal blew her sister a kiss and walked out the door.

  16

  Now

  Bette called the office of the professor she worked for and left him a message. She wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week, maybe not the week after. Her sister was her only priority.

  She drove to the gas station and filled her tank before walking inside to buy a bottle of iced tea.

  As she stood at the glass doors, surveying the drink options, a reflection appeared in the glass beside her.

  She considered apologizing, promising them she’d only be a minute, but Bette wasn’t feeling friendly. They could wait.

  As her eyes scanned the labels, her gaze drifted to the figure, expecting an adult man or woman. Instead, a child stared back at her through the glass. Not only a child, but a child dressed inappropriately in a pale nightgown, her hair in tangles.

  Bette blinked at the girl and quickly opened the door, grabbing a sweetened black tea.

  She turned, expecting the girl to be standing behind her, but the aisle was empty.

  Standing on tiptoe, she searched for the girl but didn’t see her. Rather than heading for the counter, she walked along the backs of the aisles and glanced down each one. Who took their young daughter out in a nightgown in the middle of the day?

  Every aisle stood empty. She’d either gone to the bathroom or walked out the door.

  At the cash register, Bette peered into the parking lot, but hers was the only car at the pumps.

  “Where did that little girl go?” she asked the man who scanned her drink.

  He was tall and slim with a dark goatee and wore mirrored glasses pushed up on his head.

  “Huh?” he asked, glancing past her. “Dollar even.”

  She handed him a dollar.

  “The girl in the nightgown. I just saw her back there.” Bette pointed toward the cooler of drinks.

  He lifted an eyebrow and smirked. “You might be imagining things, Miss. I see every person who walks through that door and not one of them today, yesterday, or even this month was a little girl in a nightgown.”

  Bette frowned, tempted to argue with him. The girl must have slipped in unnoticed. And back out again too.

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a flier.

  “Have you seen her?” She held up an image of Crystal, long red hair flowing over her bare shoulders.

  He nodded. “On the news a couple nights ago, but she’s been in here a few times. She came in around Christmas time. I remember because she was wearing a sweater with a big snowman on it.”

  Bette smiled. She knew the sweater well.

  “You’re welcome to post that on the bulletin board,” the man told her, pointing at a large corkboard near the restrooms.

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Bette hung the flier and left.

  * * *

  Bette found Wes eating eggs at a sunny little table by the front window in Luna’s Cafe, the place where Crystal had insisted they shared a fated coffee only months before.

  She wanted to flip his table over.

  Bette stopped and gazed down at him.

  He glanced up and his face paled.

  “You’re married?” she hissed.

  He blinked at her, setting his fork down slowly as if sudden movements might cause the whole place to blow up.

  “Bette,” he said. “I… I was going to tell you. I was going to tell her. I just—”

  “You just what?” she demanded, and her voice boomed across the small, quiet cafe.

  “Please, sit down,” he said. “Please, let me try to explain.”

  As she sat, he stood. She reached out and grabbed the hem of his button-down shirt.

  He looked at her hand, surprised.

  “I’m refilling my coffee,” he assured her, nodding his head toward the coffee station. “Can I get you a coffee or a tea?”

  “No,” she snarled, releasing his shirt and not letting him out of her sight as he walked to the counter and filled his cup.

  When he returned, some color had come back to his face.

  “I was lost for a long time, Bette,” he told her sitting down. “The black hole, I call those years now. I mean it, blackouts. It started when I was young, the drugs. I don’t know how much Crystal told you about my past, but I was a wreck for a long time. I was a musician, a poet. I started drinking a lot, smoking reefer, nothing major. And then I met a guy in California and…”

  He stopped, picked at his eggs, and not looking her in the eyes, released the next words in a rush. “I got hooked on heroin. I got high during the day, played music at night, got high some more. By the time I left California, I needed a fix every day. I was convinced I’d be a terrible musician without it, a terrible writer. I’d lose my vision, my edge. I chased the dragon and lost myself.”

  Bette’s mouth had fallen open at his words.
Crystal had told her things about Weston, but heroin sure as hell hadn’t been one of them.

  “Are you trying to say my sister is aware that you used to be a junkie?” she demanded.

  Weston looked like he might cry, and Bette was tempted to push further, to say the cruelest, most hateful things she could imagine until Weston Meeks was sitting across from her blubbering like a child.

  He looked down, gazing at his half-eaten eggs. “Hillary, my wife, found me in Detroit. I had passed out on a mattress in an abandoned building, been robbed of everything except my book of poetry. I had track marks up and down my arms. I was twenty-one and looked forty. She was in nursing school down there. She shoved me into a cab and took me back to her place, detoxed me for two weeks. Hillary fought for me. A perfect stranger who saw something in me my own parents hadn’t seen, that I hadn’t seen. I think that’s what I fell in love with most of all. And I did love her.” He paused and looked Bette in the eye.

  She glared at him, not moved by his story. It sounded like an excuse. As if he genuinely believed any explanation could justify his lies.

  “And yet you cheated on her,” Bette sneered.

  Weston put his face in his hands and nodded.

  “We’ve been together for ten years. The first few were good, great even. But then…” He looked into Bette’s eyes. “We drifted. I started spending more time in East Lansing. She traveled more for work. She’d started taking on private nursing jobs. When I met Crystal…” He stopped, closing his eyes. “It was like being on the shore as a powerful hurricane gathers in the ocean. The hurricane is so strong it sucks the water from the shoreline. That’s how I felt, this inescapable pull. I couldn’t turn away.”

  Bette bit her lip and said nothing. She knew Crystal’s magnetism. She’d felt it herself her entire life, the force that surrounded her sister, that had drawn more than a few obsessive admirers during Crystal’s twenty-two years on earth.

  “So it’s Crystal’s fault. Is that it? My twenty-two-year-old sister was so powerful that you — a grown man — couldn’t keep it in your pants?” Bette gripped the edge of the table so hard her fingers ached.

  “I didn’t hurt her, Bette. I swear to you, I didn’t.”

  “How can I possibly believe a word you say, Weston? You came to my house and had dinner. You lied point blank to my face and not only to mine, but to Crystal’s, the supposed love of your life.” She shook her head in disgust.

  “I’m a coward. I… I knew when I told her the truth, I’d lose her. I never intended for it to go so far.”

  “The man with a thousand excuses,” Bette taunted.

  Wes sighed and pushed a hand through his hair. He paused and touched the short strands.

  “Let’s hear your excuse for that,” Bette demanded.

  He blinked and frowned.

  “I… Hillary got gum in it,” he confessed.

  Bette laughed. “Are you fucking kidding me? Your explanation is that your wife got gum in it? Are you a ten-year-old girl?”

  Weston’s face turned red. “I know, it sounds ridiculous, but—”

  “How about the beard, Wes? Why did you shave your beard?”

  Wes scratched at his bare face. “My wife—”

  Bette didn’t let him finish. Furious, she stood and turned to leave, but Weston grabbed her arm.

  “Didn’t you know her at all, Bette? Your sister. Would she have fallen in love with me if I were the man you’re claiming? Would she have fallen in love with me if I were a killer?”

  Bette jerked her arm from his grasp. “You won’t get away with this, Weston. You think your pretty-boy bullshit makes you invisible, but I see you. I fucking see you.”

  She stormed from the table, breaking into a run as she fled the cafe.

  By the time she reached her car, tears flowed in rivers down her cheeks. She struggled to breathe, to contain the sobs, the cries that would contort her face and wither her body. She needed to be alone for those tears, in the car, or better yet in her bed.

  She drove fast through town, running a red light and narrowly missing a pickup truck. The driver laid on his horn and flipped her the finger.

  Bette barely registered him. When she reached her house, she ran inside, pounded up the stairs and collapsed on her bed. The sobs came then. Loud, furious, sobs that could break a person in two.

  She stood and wrung her hands, pacing away from the bed.

  Her eyes fell on a picture of Crystal on her bedside table. The girls sat in a field of flowers back to back. Long black hair and long red hair pressed into one mane of dark crimson.

  “Damn it. God damn it,” she heaved, wanting to reach into the picture and pull her sister out.

  “Crystal,” she whispered. “Please…”

  But the phone didn’t ring as it had so many times in the past when Bette called out for her sister. Crystal knew when you needed her or if you’d run out of coffee creamer or if the dog in the shelter had parvo and you could adopt him, though he’d be dead within a year.

  Bette remembered that sweet pup with the golden fur and the sad brown eyes, and she’d opted instead for the beagle dog, six months old, strong as an ox, as a gift for their father.

  But they hadn’t left the golden puppy. Crystal had rescued him. He’d slept in her bed for four months and then, one morning, he didn’t wake up.

  Bette slid to the floor. The pain clenching and unclenching, a constant desperate desire to know, to find her sister, to hold her. But no reprieve came. She could only sit on her floor, stare at her picture, and wish and wonder and cry.

  “I could never do what you could,” Bette murmured, the picture clutched so tightly she loosened her grip for fear of shattering the frame.

  If Bette had gone missing, Crystal would know where to find her. She’d have driven to Bette without pause, but she wasn’t Crystal, never had been and never would be.

  17

  The Northern Michigan Asylum

  1966

  Greta Claude

  “Someday a white horse is going to come out of those woods and rescue us,” Maribelle said, lying long on a tree branch, stomach down, with arms dangling over the sides.

  Greta sat on the ground pinching ants when they scurried up her tennis shoe. She crushed them and dropped their tiny bodies back into the grass.

  “Rescue us from what?” Greta asked. “Daddy?”

  “Daddy and this whole place. This whole evil place. Daddy’s a liar,” Maribelle whispered.

  She sat up and climbed down from the tree, looking towards the path in the woods as if that white horse might just appear today.

  They were twins; not identical, not in appearance nor personality. Greta’s hair was silver white and Maribelle’s was black as coal. Where Greta was subservient, Maribelle was defiant. Maribelle laughed loudly, twirled in the yard, snuck dolls out of the children’s ward in the asylum so she and Greta had toys to play with. Toys they kept hidden in a hollowed log in the woods because their father forbid toys, especially dolls.

  “We wouldn’t have anywhere to go,” Greta complained.

  “We’d go to a castle. A beautiful castle perched on a cloud. You’d only be able to see it on clear, sunny days. The castle would be made from pink crystal, and the beds would be filled with fluffy feathers, and for breakfast every day we’d get bowls of melon and strawberry milkshakes. Only special people could see it. Daddy’s eyes are black. When he looks at our castle, he’ll see nothing but clouds.” Maribelle tilted her face toward the sky and her long dark hair hung down her back.

  “But how can you say that? This is our home. Daddy said a Claude must always stay here at the asylum, always pay homage to the land.”

  Maribelle scowled and kicked the base of the tree. She bent over and grabbed a handful of pigweed. She threw the leafy stalks to the side and crunched them under her flat black shoes.

  When she stopped, sweat glistened on her face.

  “Did you see the lady in the black dress?” she asked.
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br />   Greta nodded and flicked an ant off her wrist.

  “She was pretty,” Maribelle said, and her words sounded pinched, like she was trying not to cry.

  Greta shrugged.

  “Daddy has to feed the land, Maribelle,” she said, avoiding her sister’s tear-filled gaze.

  “I found something in the basement.” Maribelle sat down next to Greta and fished in the pocket of her dress. She pulled out a small gold ring containing a red stone and a white stone.

  Greta glanced at it, and her eyes widened.

  “You should have put it in the black bag,” she whispered. “If anyone ever found it—”

  “They’d know what Daddy did,” Maribelle finished.

  18

  Then

  “Tell me more about this sixth sense you have,” Weston said. “How did you know that lady was sick today?”

  Crystal and Wes had been grabbing salad fixings and wine from a little market near campus when a woman had paused in an aisle.

  Moments before she collapsed, Crystal had walked close to the woman and snaked an arm around her waist. Weston had been startled, but almost immediately the woman’s eyes rolled back in her head and she lost consciousness.

  Crystal gazed at Weston’s curious face and wondered how much she wanted to reveal.

  “It’s something I’ve always been able to do,“ she admitted. “I sense things. Today with the woman in the store…” She bit her lip, warmth creeping into her face. “I saw a shadow around her, a darkness. She’s going to die.”

  “She’s going to die?” he asked. “How can you know that?”

  “I’ve seen the shadow before. I understand what it means.” She said the words, but didn’t look at him, feared he would sense all that she held back.

  “You’ve seen the shadow and then those people have died?” he asked.

  Crystal nodded. “Bette has likened the gift to being really good at trivia When does that ever come in handy unless you’re on Jeopardy?”