The Third Hill North of Town (2 page)

The Bangor State Hospital had recently hired a local remodeling company to spruce up the smudged white walls of the dementia ward. Painters had arrived mid-morning and requested permission to wedge open the fire door for a brief time, to allow them access to their truck and their materials. Two hospital orderlies had been posted—one at the entrance to the corridor that led to the fire door, the other next to the open door itself—to ensure that none of the patients would be able to slip out as the painters unloaded their supplies. The door was open for barely five minutes, and was guarded, and nothing untoward should have happened.

But it had.

Deputy Oakley flipped a page in his pocket notebook and scribbled something in it. “So what exactly is this condition of hers?”

Edgar sighed. “She’s suffering from a severe schizophrenic disorder of some kind, but I fear we haven’t progressed much beyond that in our diagnosis. She’s only been with us for less than a month.”

Oakley’s pen hovered over the page. “She’s been here for a month and you still don’t know what’s wrong with her?”

Edgar bridled. “The human psyche isn’t a car engine, Deputy,” he said curtly. “We can’t just pop the hood and poke around with a screwdriver to figure out why things aren’t working.” He settled back in his chair and moderated his tone. “Suffice it to say, though, this is quite serious, and she shouldn’t be out among the general population.”

He rummaged through his desk drawer for a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Oakley before helping himself. He was running low on cigarettes; the full carton he’d just purchased that morning was now in Julianna’s possession, along with Edgar’s Edsel and several full bags of junk food—the loss of which, incidentally, upset him almost as much as the theft of his car.

Edgar was a bald, portly man with heavy jowls and a big, bristling mustache; his brown eyes were watery and he had a large mole on his left cheek that looked like a teardrop. His hands were short-fingered and pudgy, but his fingernails were impeccably manicured and the silver cufflinks on his shirtsleeves were polished and elegant.

Oakley shook his head, declining the offer of a cigarette. “Is she dangerous? What did she do to get put in here?”

Edgar lit his cigarette before answering. “A few weeks ago she set fire to her neighbor’s garage.”

The police had found Julianna perched on a log near the twenty-foot-high blaze, her hands held toward the flames as if she were sitting beside a campfire. A box of matches and a can of kerosene were at her feet, and she was humming “Kumbaya.”

Oakley raised his eyebrows. “On purpose? Why’d she do it?”

Edgar shrugged. “We don’t know yet. She’s never done anything remotely like that before, and what set her off is a mystery.” He rubbed his ear. “By all reports, Julianna is a lovely person, Deputy. And until a month ago, she was as normal as you or I. But something traumatic appears to have happened to her, and she’s now experiencing a variety of complicated delusions we haven’t been able to control or lessen whatsoever.”

Even with extremely high doses of Thorazine,
he added somberly to himself.

He lifted a folder from a stack on his desk and opened it. Julianna’s picture smiled up at him from the commitment order signed by her son.

“For instance,” Edgar continued, “she now believes it’s 1923, and that she’s a fifteen-year-old girl living on a farm in northern Missouri. She has absolutely no recollection of anything that’s happened since she actually
was
fifteen years old, and if you try to tell her that she’s now a middle-aged grammar school teacher with a grown son and a charming little two-story house in Bangor, Maine, she thinks you’re teasing her, or that you’ve gone crazy yourself.” He took a long, satisfying drag on his cigarette and continued speaking with his lungs full. “She also sees things that aren’t there.”

Oakley smirked. “Like little green men and flying saucers?”

Edgar blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling in irritation. “Certainly not. Her delusions are entirely non-bizarre. But she doesn’t really see what’s in front of her. She superimposes images from her past on almost everything and everybody she encounters.” He picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “For instance, she thinks I’m her family doctor from the Missouri town where she was raised, and her son is a blacksmith named Lars Olsen.”

Gabriel Dapper had come to visit his mother every weekend since she’d been a patient at the hospital. He was a big, gentle man who was devastated by Julianna’s break with reality. She kept asking him about the metal buggy he was building for a mule called Floppers, and whenever he addressed her as “Mom,” she would blush and giggle, and beg him to stop being silly.

Oakley made a sour face. “Wonderful. So she’s not only a firebug, she’s also a lunatic.” His expression made it clear he believed psychological disturbances only happened to people who lacked moral fiber. “How in God’s name did somebody like
that
sneak past your orderlies?”

Edgar’s temper flared again. “This isn’t a homicidal maniac we’re discussing,” he snapped. “Julianna is neither violent nor suicidal, which is why she’s in the dementia ward instead of the insane asylum.” He jabbed a thumb toward the window, indicating the maximum-security wing of the hospital, which was reserved for criminally insane patients. “She needs to be institutionalized, but I assure you she doesn’t require an armed guard and a straitjacket.”

He knew he sounded defensive, but he couldn’t help it.

Oakley snorted. “Yeah, she sounds like a real princess.” He jotted something else in his notebook and his voice dropped to a mutter. “I just hope to hell she doesn’t find any fucking matches in your glove box.”

Edgar glared at the top of Oakley’s head. “As I said before, Deputy . . .”

Oakley interrupted, still writing. “I believe you were getting ready to tell me how this firebug of yours got past your orderlies.”

Edgar fell silent. He needed to regain control of this interview, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. He stared out the window at the blue sky and chewed on his lip in frustration.

“I’m told they thought she was someone else,” he muttered at last.

Oakley looked up, instantly suspicious. “Come again?” He narrowed his eyes. “Do your orderlies have schizophrenia, too?”

Edgar took another drag on his cigarette to stall for time. He didn’t want to go into detail about Julianna’s escape with Oakley, because he was quite sure the man would just use it as ammunition against him. Besides, how Julianna had gotten away wasn’t really pertinent to the police investigation; he believed the deputy’s only interest should be in catching and returning her to the hospital.

Oakley was waiting for an answer.

Edgar rested his cigarette on the lip of an overflowing ashtray, then opened another drawer of his desk and dug through it until he unearthed a bag of butterscotch drops. A bite or two of something sweet always made him feel calmer when he was under stress, but he only kept a small stash of candy in his office, for fear his staff might suspect him of an eating disorder if they knew how much he craved such things. With a pang he remembered the heaping bags of goodies sitting on the floor of his missing car, and knew if Julianna wasn’t captured soon he would have to return to the grocery store to replenish his dwindling home supply.

Oakley cleared his throat impatiently.

Edgar sighed in surrender. He supposed there was nothing else for it but to attempt an explanation.

What a miserable fuckup,
he thought again.

Coincidence loves insanity.

Several hours earlier that same morning, Julianna Dapper had risen and breakfasted, then proceeded under supervision to the nurses’ station to get a caplet of Thorazine, just as she’d done each day since her arrival in the dementia unit. A prune-faced intern handed her the medication and a small paper cup with water, then watched as Julianna popped the caplet in her mouth and swallowed. Julianna stopped on her way out the door afterward to admire a potted African violet on the windowsill, just as she had done each morning since being committed to the hospital.

“Oh, my, you’re a pretty little thing,” she cooed, stroking its leaves and glancing over her shoulder at the intern, who was ignoring her. Julianna continued to caress the plant and her fingers drifted casually to the soil of the pot. “Momma would just love to get her hands on a pretty little thing like you!”

In truth, the African violet was a marvelous representative of its variety: It had recently nearly doubled in size, seeming to very much appreciate the daily dose of anti-psychotic medicine Julianna had been administering to it for the past twenty-six mornings. Julianna had no idea what the big orange pills they kept giving her were for, but she didn’t feel even the teensiest bit sick and thought it was ridiculous to take something she clearly didn’t need. This being the case, she had just palmed her medication and pretended to swallow it—yet again—in front of the negligent intern, and was now busy planting, with considerable stealth, Thorazine caplet number 27 in the violet’s soil.

“Ta-ta for now!” Julianna sang to the plant as she successfully finished her morning ritual and departed the nurses’ station. The attendant in charge of escorting patients was at that moment trying to prevent an elderly gentleman from urinating in an ashtray in the waiting room outside the nurses’ station, and Julianna—considered by the hospital staff to be both “high functioning” and “highly cooperative”—was ordered to proceed by herself back to the common room of the dementia unit. Julianna agreed without complaint, skipping out of the waiting room and humming to herself as she entered an empty hallway, delighted to be left to her own devices.

Finding herself truly alone for the first time in weeks, she slowed to a walk and gazed about her with a puzzled expression. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she didn’t like it; the plain white walls on each side of her made her feel depressed and the reek of ammonia everywhere she turned gave her a headache. An office door that had been left ajar caught her attention, and Julianna ambled over to look into the office thus revealed, noticing at once a bright-green dress, a checkered headscarf, and a white sweater hanging on the coatrack; on the floor next to the rack was a lovely pair of black pumps. She then glanced over at the desk by the door, and happened to see a daily calendar, open to the day’s date. The lettering was large and easy to read (though upside-down from her perspective), and her eyes lingered on the page for nearly a minute.

“June twenty-third,” she whispered at last, and the quiet syllables seemed to echo off the sterile, cold walls surrounding her. A sudden, imperative desire gripped her.

Without hesitation she stepped into the office, shut the door, and changed into the dress, headscarf, and pumps, believing them to be hers. The pumps were a bit too small, as was the dress, but not terribly so. She exited the office immediately after dressing with the sweater draped over her forearm, hiding her wristband, and she glided smartly down the corridor and vanished around the corner at the precise moment the bathroom door across from the office opened and Nurse Helen Gable appeared.

This was a bit of good timing for Julianna, but she would not have made it much farther than that were it not for the fact that Nurse Gable wasn’t feeling well that morning. The previous evening she had sought solace in a bottle of tequila, and was dealing with a ferocious margarita hangover. (Binge-drinking was out of character for Nurse Gable, but her nerves had needed calming after a vicious fight with her husband over whose fault it was that Sparky, their beloved guinea pig, had been eviscerated by Plummy, their equally beloved Siamese cat.) No sooner had she emerged from the bathroom than her stomach rebelled again, and she spun around on the spot to scurry back to the toilet.

Thus occupied, it would be another fifteen minutes before she discovered the formal clothes she had intended to wear to a conciliatory dinner that night with her husband were missing from her office, replaced by a patient’s gown and a pair of institutional white slippers. The gown was folded on a chair, the slippers lined up next to each other on the floor.

Meanwhile, Julianna rounded the corner to find herself faced with a choice. The hallway to her left was empty and led back to the common area for the dementia ward; the hallway to her right had two orderlies in it, standing guard at each end as three painters laid plastic down on the floor between them. The orderly at the far end of the corridor was next to an open door, with sunlight streaming in behind him.

Home is that way,
Julianna thought.

She spun toward the sunlight and marched up to the first orderly in her path. She recognized him at once as Clyde Rayburn, her next-door neighbor from Missouri. Clyde could be ill-tempered and bossy, but she knew from experience that if she was pleasant and direct with him—and didn’t allow him to bully her—he could also be quite decent.