“Good to see you again, Greta,” Peter said, rubbing a hand along her arm slowly and nearly touching her breast. She managed to cringe away before his fingers, nails dirty, brushed against her.
When her aunt left her alone in the room, the small space stuffed with boxes waist high, Greta almost let out a sob. It was sorrow — but more than that it was anger, hatred.
She hated her Uncle Peter and her Aunt Dolly. She wanted to shove them both down the basement stairs in the old farmhouse and listen to the thumps and groans as her father prepared them for the forest.
That night, when she tried to lock the door to the cramped little room, she found only a hole where the knob should have been.
She slept fitfully, waking at every creak.
When the sun rose and she heard her aunt making coffee, she finally slept, grateful to have survived the first night in the trailer and convinced that her uncle would not arrive to assault her.
She soon learned that he’d merely waited for Dolly to leave for her shift at the Shell Gas Station.
Greta opened her eyes around ten to find Peter filling the doorway, his shoulders so wide they touched the frame on either side. He held a belt in his hand, and she could see the bulge in his dirty sweatpants.
For the first week she fought him. She screamed and kicked and clawed at his face. He beat her senseless and raped her when she was too exhausted to fight back.
By week two, she’d learned to lie still. It was over faster and it hurt less if she didn’t resist him.
She’d never been a nighttime dreamer. For most of her young life, she closed her eyes and fell into a black void, waking in the morning with no more memories than an occasional jaunt to the bathroom.
Maribelle had dreamed. She’d whisper her dreams to Greta while she brushed her teeth. Dreams of flying on the backs of winged cats or of swimming deep into the sea and finding jewels and glowing flowers. Sometimes Greta thought Maribelle lied about the dreams. How could they be real? Then she heard patients in the asylum talking of their vivid, sometimes fantastical dreams and she started to wonder if Maribelle was insane like the people locked in the buildings.
But when she moved into her aunt and uncle’s trailer, Greta started to dream.
She dreamed every night of the asylum grounds. She dreamed of the field filled with bodies and the blood-spattered basement floor. She dreamed that the land was breathing, rising and falling beneath thick grass or heavy snow.
When it rained, the earth cracked open, gulping, but it wasn’t water that fell from the swollen gray clouds.
It was blood.
38
Then
“Where am I?” Crystal asked.
She’d come to in a dark room, strapped to a wooden chair.
The floor beneath her bare feet was dirty. A single dark candle in a silver base sat on a rickety table missing one of its legs.
Crystal couldn’t see Greta but sensed her nearby, watching.
Dark tattered curtains hung over the windows, but along their edges Crystal could see night had fallen. She struggled to make sense of the room, at first assuming she’d awoken in the abandoned house in the woods, but this house seemed… more intact. No mold crawled up the walls. Gone were the rotted floorboards and sagging walls replaced by a simple farmhouse kitchen.
“Where are we?” Crystal murmured.
Her head seemed heavy and waterlogged. It took enormous effort to hold it up. She feared if she let it fall forward, her neck would snap and her head would roll across the dusty floor. It was a crazy thought, but one she couldn’t shake.
The woman still didn’t answer. Crystal sensed she stood behind her to the right.
“Left to the ghosts,” Greta said, stepping from a corner and walking along the kitchen counter, her finger trailing through a layer of silty dust. She held the finger close to her face and licked it off. “That’s what a reporter wrote when they shuttered the asylum last year. It’s all been left to the ghosts. And, boy, are there a lot of those.” Greta laughed, and the sound fell empty in the room.
“I grew up in this house,” Greta confessed. “My father was the caretaker at the Northern Michigan Asylum. God how they cowered when Joseph Claude walked into the ward. Even after he’d lost his mind, they feared him.”
Crystal steadied her eyes on the woman, but she slid in and out of the shadows like vapor, and Crystal’s eyelids kept tumbling closed.
She leaned her head back and gazed at the cracked plaster ceiling.
“I’m a nurse,” Greta said. “Did I ever tell you that?” She let out a harsh laugh. “Nurses today have access to drugs my father would have murdered someone for.”
Greta grabbed a chair and spun it around, straddling it and balancing her chin on the back.
Her dark curls were gone, replaced by limp silver-blond hair that stuck to her sweaty cheeks.
“Not that he was a drug addict. Not at all. But drugs would have made everything easier, cleaner. God knows it has for me. You can’t avoid the blood, of course. But there are so many ways to drain blood from a human body. Cleaner ways.”
Crystal trembled in her chair. The warmth of the room drifted near her, but didn’t penetrate her body. Her bones felt cold. Her teeth began to chatter loudly.
Greta studied her.
“You’re coming down from the anesthesia,” Greta explained. “But don’t worry, I’ve prepared your room, Crystal. I’m sure you’ll love it here.”
* * *
Crystal woke and for one, two, three seconds, she didn’t remember. Her first thought was that she needed to pick up flowers for her mother’s grave.
And then she opened her eyes.
She sat up with a jolt, and pain shot through her numb hands and wrists. They’d been bound behind her back, and she must have rolled, crushing them beneath her body. Her hands prickled, and she flexed and unflexed her fingers, gazing around the nearly empty room.
It was an old house, the same house she’d been in the night before. Gray wood floors and faded beige wallpaper gave the room a drab, colorless appearance. The bed Crystal had slept on had an iron frame painted black with a thin twin mattress. A wool blanket lay crumpled on the floor as if Crystal had kicked it off in the night.
As feeling returned to her hands, Crystal scooted her legs off the bed and planted them on the floor. She wasn’t groggy anymore. The drugs had worn off, but her head ached, and her mouth felt fuzzy and dry.
She stood and walked to the single curtainless window. Someone had covered the glass in the exterior with opaque plastic. The window revealed only a blurred image of what lay outside. Grass and trees, and the sunlit blue of sky.
She returned to the bed and sat, concentrating on the squeeze and release of her lungs.
Fear sat beside her, his shadow long and threatening. He wanted to get closer, climb inside, but she refused him.
“Just breathe and trust. Breathe and trust.” She repeated the words, and the sound of her voice soothed her.
She thought of the day before, struggled to piece it all together and slowly she remembered Greta’s words. She’d been talking about a man who had loved her until Crystal came along.
“Weston,” she murmured.
Greta was Weston’s secret.
* * *
It was late afternoon, the sun in the western sky when Greta unlocked Crystal’s door.
“Drink,” she said, holding a glass of water to Crystal’s lips.
Crystal slurped the lukewarm water and her stomach clenched painfully.
She wouldn’t throw it up; couldn’t throw it up. She closed her eyes as the nausea swam through her.
“Time for fresh air,” Greta told her, smiling strangely.
She grabbed Crystal’s bicep hard and pulled her up, forcing Crystal ahead of her as they walked down a shadowy hallway to a flight of wood stairs.
The old farmhouse was mostly empty, but it was not derelict. The walls and floors were in good but worn shape.
Cry
stal followed Greta into the woods. Beneath the dense trees, the high grass and vegetation thinned out. They started up a high hill, the ground soft and poked by huge gnarled roots.
She wanted to run. She could turn and throw herself down the hill, but her hands were bound with zip ties, and Greta had drugged her water. The drug already seemed to be streaming along the blood pathways in her body, distorting the world around her.
They came to the top of the hill and walked through an opening in the trees to a grassy field.
The ground looked oddly bumpy. Crystal’s eyes fell upon the raised mounds, grass covered, some flecked with flowers, and she frowned.
Though no tombstones marked the graves, Crystal saw the place as Greta had as a young girl. A place to hide bodies.
“It’s a graveyard,” Crystal breathed.
“Daddy marked them with a single rock,” Greta murmured. “Even Maribelle’s. But I added to hers over the years.”
Greta led Crystal to a raised mound, long overgrown and swallowed by the earth, barely a lump anymore. A pile of stones stood at one end. The rocks were small and gray, with bursts like ashen fireworks on the hard surfaces. Petoskey stones.
Crystal thought of Bette and her father discussing the stones during their various summer trips to Lake Michigan. Just found another three-hundred and fifty-million-year-old fossil, Bette would call out each time she found a Petoskey stone.
Greta stared blankly at the grave and walked on, looking back sharply to let Crystal know she expected her to follow. Crystal considered running again, fleeing into the woods, and letting the steep hill tumble her down.
Instead, she followed Greta through another thicket of forest that opened onto a grassy mantel.
Far below them, Crystal gazed at huge white buildings with peaked roofs topped by sharp dark points. Beyond the buildings, Crystal could see all the way to a small city and beyond that, a large body of water.
“Where are we?” she mumbled.
Nothing in East Lansing looked like this place. Of that she was sure.
Greta stopped beside her, staring at the buildings below.
“The Northern Michigan Asylum.”
Crystal searched for the place in her mind.
Traverse City. It was the mental institution in Traverse City. The other city where Weston lived.
“It’s fading, this place,” Greta said, and anguish filled her voice.
“The asylum?” Crystal asked.
Greta didn’t answer.
Just above the treeline, the blue sky, cloudless, lay across the world like the watchful eye of the mother. The mother of the world, but Crystal saw her own mother in that sky. So close.
She lifted her face and closed her eyes, imagining the sun as her mother’s hand caressing her cheek.
A wave of nausea rose through her belly, and Crystal’s mouth filed with saliva. She tried to fight it away, but her resistance only intensified the sensation. She stumbled forward, too close to the edge. Her foot slipped, and she started to fall.
Greta’s hand closed on her hair.
A sharp jolt of pain ripped across the back of her skull as the woman yanked her back.
Crystal’s eyes watered, and she fell to her knees. She threw up on the grass, her stomach spasming. The nausea came again. She puked a second time. Whatever was in the water had made it into her bloodstream, but not all of it.
“I used to watch them,” Greta said, as if Crystal hadn’t just gotten sick. The woman’s stormy gray eyes gazed toward the asylum. “The men in their black suits and the doctors in their white coats. They came at night. The brotherhood. They brought patients right down that hill into that black hole, the mouth of the forest. Sometimes I hid in the trees and saw the patients. Sometimes the patients saw me. Not with their eyes. Never with their eyes.”
Crystal didn’t understand what Greta was referring to. She lay with her face in the grass, her hands resting on her back as she struggled to calm her churning belly.
“The caretaker knows everything,” Greta continued. “That’s the way with these places. The doctors didn’t hide the brotherhood from Daddy. He knew more about the origin of this land than any of them ever would. They were merely servants to that darkness, and my father was a steward, a keeper of the balance of things. If too many months went by without a meeting, my father brought a sacrifice of his own to the forest. A nobody, a drifter or a prostitute. Someone the world was better off without.”
Sweat coated Crystal’s forehead. She felt feverish and wanted to sleep. She couldn’t imagine standing and trekking back through the forest and up the stairs of that old house.
Greta grabbed her arm and jerked her up.
“Better move quick,” she muttered. “Fall asleep out here and the ground will swallow you up.”
39
Now
“Sheriff Montgomery?” Bette asked when a silver-haired man appeared in the small lobby of the police station.
“Yes. How can I help ya?” He spoke with a slight accent; one the locals called it a Yooper dialect.
“I’m Bette Childs,” Bette offered, holding out her hand.
He shook it and waited for her to explain her reason for being there.
“I wondered if you had some time to talk about Matt Kelly and Peter Budd?” she went on.
The sheriff raised both eyebrows. “Sure do. Follow me.”
He turned and walked down a narrow hallway, stepping into a little office.
The sheriff kept his office clean. His desk was mostly clear, except for a coffee mug that read “If Dad Says No, Ask Grandpa.”
The sheriff sat down and picked up the mug, finding it empty.
“Wouldn’t be gentlemanlike if I didn’t offer you a cup of joe. Need a refill myself. Cream and sugar?”
“No coffee for me,” Bette said. The coffee at Lisa’s had her nerves bouncing and jostling.
The sheriff left.
Bette heard a woman stop in the hallway.
They spoke briefly and the man let out a chuckle.
He returned several minutes later with a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies.
“Oatmeal chocolate chip?” he asked, pushing the plate toward her. “Chloe, wife of one of my deputies, has made it her life’s mission to fatten us up.” He laughed and bit into a cookie.
Despite the woman’s efforts, Sheriff Montgomery was anything but fat. Probably approaching sixty, he looked like he’d still outrun most teenagers. Long and lean, the man moved like an athlete.
Bette took a cookie and nibbled the edge.
“You caught me off guard, Bette. Did you know Matt?”
Bette shook her head. “I didn’t know Matt or Peter. I’m from downstate, the Lansing area, and my sister disappeared ten days ago.”
The sheriff nodded and took a sip of his coffee.
“Not of her own accord?”
“No. Something happened to her. Something terrible, I’m afraid,” Bette confided.
“And somehow you’ve linked her disappearance to Matt Kelly and Peter Budd?”
“Greta Claude.”
A stormy look passed over Montgomery’s features, and he didn’t bother hiding it.
“You suspect she hurt your sister?”
Bette set her cookie down and threaded her fingers together. She thought of her conversation with Hillary and the torment in the woman’s face. She hadn’t thought so, no. She’d assumed Weston Meeks had hurt Crystal, but the more she uncovered about Hillary or Greta Claude, the more convoluted the whole story became.
“Crystal, my sister, was having an affair with Greta Claude’s husband. Greta’s name is Hillary Meeks now. A few days before Crystal vanished, she found out she was pregnant.”
The sheriff blew out a breath and shook his head.
“That’s one woman I wouldn’t want to cross, I’ll tell you that. But Bette, I never found an ounce of evidence that Greta murdered Matt or Peter.”
“But your instincts told you she was involved?”
“But you looked into her? You considered her a possibility?” Bette demanded.
“I understand why you want me to confirm your fears,” Montgomery told her. “When someone disappears, we’re desperate to make the puzzle pieces fit. It’s always strange when one person has so many dark things happen in their life. Two people very close to Greta Claude died while she lived here in Marquette. I can’t say what other tragedies surrounded her in the years before she came here and the years after she left, but I know that coincidences exist. I’ve met people who seem forever in the hurricane’s eye through no fault of their own. I looked into Greta because she was Matt’s girlfriend. We always consider the significant other in cases of violent crime.”
“And did she have an alibi?”
The sheriff cocked his head. “Sort of. A high school boy threw a big house party in town, not three blocks from Bishop Park. Greta showed up at the party. People saw her, but there was a lot of drinking. She might have slipped away for a half hour. Her alibi didn’t clear her. But she got a ride home from the party, and Matt’s murder was…”
He paused and put both palms together as if in prayer. “Messy. I can’t imagine how she could have returned to that party without a speck of blood on her. I mean, we’re talking about a sixteen-year-old girl, not a seasoned killer. A boy drove her home. He said she seemed perfectly normal. Cool, kind of distant, but that was her nature.”
“Matt’s sister, Lisa, told me they found him in a hangout spot, a fire pit area. Why was he there that night?” Bette questioned.
The sheriff spread his palms out. “That’s one of the many pieces we’ve never fit into the puzzle. Nobody knows why he went there. No one said they had plans to meet him. Everyone figured he’d be at the house party down the road. A few of the kids figured he was planning to head there after he met someone at the bonfire.
Dark Omen: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 19
