They rounded a bend in the narrow basement hallway, and the music grew stronger. Sydney could see a light drifting through a doorway at the end of the corridor. Golden stopped her at the threshold. “He prefers to be alone when he plays,” she explained. “I think this song’s almost done.”
Standing at the doorway, half blocked by the doorjamb, Sydney could see a shriveled man with white-gray hair slumped over a guitar on a wooden chair behind a gray metal government-issue desk. His eyes were closed, and his fingers flew across the fretboard of his beaten old six-string. His ivory skin was so pale it was almost translucent, and his shoulders were pinched together, swimming under a heavy denim work-shirt that looked at least two sizes too large. Sitting there in the wan light of the single bulb in the lamp on his desk, he looked to Sydney like an apparition—a middle-aged Boo Radley whose alabaster fingers danced nimbly upon the guitar without even seeming to touch it, producing a melody at once sad and hopeful.
When the music ended, Golden poked her head into the room. “Willie, it’s Dr. Golden. I have a visitor with me. Can we come in?”
At first Sydney thought the man hadn’t heard, because he sat eerily still, eyes closed, straining as if to hear something. “Ain’t done yet,” he said in a quiet, even voice.
Golden signaled for Sydney to keep quiet and still for another moment. After a brief pause, the man opened his eyes and placed the guitar carefully into a weathered case that lay open against the wall. “Wasn’t dead yet,” he said, seemingly to no one in particular. His head was still down and he was flicking the catches closed on the guitar case.
“Who wasn’t dead yet?” Sydney asked Golden, still unsure whether to engage the strange man directly in conversation.
“The music,” the man answered Sydney’s question himself. He sat up and looked at the two women by the door. Something in his eyes gave Sydney a start. They were pale blue, flecked with white and pierced by pupils the size of pinpricks. But it was something behind the eyes that unsettled her. “The music wasn’t dead yet,” he explained. “It was still out there, hangin’ on to the air, tryin’ to get out. I had to wait till it was gone.” Sydney had no idea how to respond, and wondered whether he was being serious or merely playing with her.
“Willie,” Golden said, walking into the little office ahead of Sydney, “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. This is Sydney Chapin.”
Willie nodded, but did not extend a hand. “Hello, Miss Sydney,” he said.
“Hello, Willie,” Sydney replied.
“Sydney wants to talk to you about Elizabeth Creay, the woman who came to visit you a few weeks ago. You remember Ms. Creay, don’t you?”
“I remember her.” Willie nodded. He looked at Sydney again. “You got her eyes,” he said.
“She was my sister.”
“Willie,” Golden said softly, “Sydney’s sister Elizabeth was killed recently. She was murdered. You understand? Sydney wants to know what you talked about with her.”
Willie shook his head. “I had me a bad feelin’ for her,” he said. “She carried death with her. She was nice, though. I’m sorry, ma’am.”
All at once Sydney felt a rush of emotion over the loss of her sister. She choked it down. “Thank you, Willie,” she said, her voice quavering.
Willie nodded. “I’ll leave you two alone to talk,” Golden said, withdrawing from the room.
As the door to the tiny office closed, Sydney felt lost once again, and a little uneasy in the presence of Willie Murphy. There seemed to be some power to him—a confidence born, perhaps, of the knowledge that he’d endured the worst inhumanity his fellow man could inflict and had survived. There were wounds, that much was clear from his posture and the drawn expression, but they had not overtaken him.
“Your sister seemed like a good woman,” he said, breaking the silence between them. “Sometimes you can tell, just from bein’ in a person’s company, whether they good or bad. I got to feelin’ she was good.”
“I think so,” Sydney agreed.
Willie looked down at his hands. They were the only part of him that conveyed any physical strength. They were disproportionately large, and the calluses and grime on them made them seem less vulnerable than the rest of him. “So what you wanna ask me?”
Sydney cleared her throat. “I wanted to know what you talked with her about.”
Willie took in a deep breath, expelling it in a long sigh. “We talked ’bout a lot of things.”
“Can you remember anything specifically?”
He nodded. “Reckon I could.” He looked up from his hands and faced her, his eyes meeting hers and drawing her in. They were luminescent, and the light they gave off seemed to rival the illumination from the lamp on his desk. “I told her ’bout my job; what it is I do here, and how I take care of all the buildings. I told her how I know somethin’ ’bout bein’ a patient here, so I can sympathize with those poor souls here now.”
“Did you talk to her about what it was like when you were a patient here?”
He nodded slowly. “I told her how I got here, first.” He closed his eyes slowly as he cast his memory back to his conversation with Elizabeth Creay and beyond. “How I was shipped here from Richmond after my parents was killed in a car crash in nineteen an’ fifty-seven. How they took me to a room in the state hospital the day my daddy—he held on longer than my ma—passed on, and how they put a test in front of me and told me to answer the questions. I told her how I screamed at them.” A dark smile crept across his face. “Damn, but how I screamed at them.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her again. Sydney could see the anger behind them. “You imagine that? Eight years ol’ and they want me to take a test less than an hour after I watch my daddy gone to heaven?” He shook his head in disgust. “They heard things outta my mouth I don’t think they’d ever heard before. I was kickin’ and screamin’ and throwin’ the papers at anyone who came near me till two big ol’ security guards tackled me and held me down. I remember this doctor—some long-necked, evil-lookin’ man—speakin’ down at me and sayin’, ‘This one’s ready for the Institute, eh boys?’ ” He laughed and a tear rolled down his cheek. “I don’t think I’d remembered that day till your sister came here and started in on me with all her questions. I thought the docs here were somethin’ with they questions, but your sister got ’em all licked.”
“What happened when you got here?” Sydney asked.
He shook his head. “You too, huh?” He sat back in his chair and looked down at his hands again. “That’s what your sister kept pushin’ at.” His eyebrows drew together, knitting a scowl. Sydney couldn’t tell whether it was an expression of anger or sadness. “Some things are better left buried in the past,” he said at last.
“But my sister made you remember?”
“Some.” Willie moved his mouth like he was chewing on something distasteful. “I’d started remembering some on my own over the years, but I always buried it again. Your sister started pokin’ just underneath the surface, and some of what was shallow came out.”
“What was it?” Sydney was breathless.
“Beatin’s mainly.” He looked at his knuckles as though searching for a scar long covered over. “They could deliver a beatin’ somethin’ awful. Not like what you’d imagine it’d be, or what you see in the movies, or what you read about. Worse. Much worse. So bad you piss blood for a month, prayin’ that you’ll piss your life away, ’cause you know if you heal it’s gonna start all over again.”
“Do you remember who beat you?”
Willie Murphy scoffed at the question. “It was all of ’em. Guards mainly, but sometimes the docs, too.”
“Would you remember who they were if you saw them?” Sydney asked. “Would you be willing to testify against them if you had the chance?”
“We talkin’ ’bout stuff that happened forty years ago, mainly. You think anyone’s gonna listen to the words of a moron ’bout somethin’ that long ago?” Sydney looked away in embarrassment. “Yeah, Miss Sydney, that’s the official diagnosis I got when I came here:
moron.
They say they stopped using the word, but that’s what’s on my papers.”
Sydney didn’t return his smile. “If you could remember, though, would you testify against the people who did these things to you if you had the chance?” She asked the question pointedly.
His face turned inward, and then grew dark. “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t even know if I’d trust myself to figure out who it was if someone gave me the chance, an’ I don’t suppose it’d take the best lawyer in the world to make me look foolish—particularly after all these years of no memory. It wouldn’t serve no one— least of all me.” He relaxed again, or maybe it was just that his shoulders slumped even farther from the fatigue of talking about the past. “’Sides, I ’spect I lost any rights I had when I took the money a while back.”
“The money?” Sydney asked. “What money?”
“Settlement money, they called it,” he replied. “From one of them group lawsuits. What do they call them?”
“Class actions?” Sydney guessed.
“Yeah, that’s it. Class action. That’s what I was told. I was part of a class. I got some money ’cause I was part of a class.” He chuckled. “Makes it all sound civilized, don’t it?”
“And this was for the beatings you suffered?” Sydney asked.
Willie frowned. “No, not the beatings. It was for the testing.”
“The testing?” Sydney felt lost.
“Medical testing,” Willie explained. “They used us as guinea pigs for anything they felt like. Who’d care? Bunch of morons out in the woods, who’d complain? So when they wanted to figure something out, they’d get a group of us together and test things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Who knows?” He laughed sadly again. “An’ who really cares? It wasn’t nearly as bad as the beatings. Lots of times, being tested just meant we got better food—cereal mainly, but in our position we couldn’t complain. They say there was stuff in it, but you couldn’t tell from the taste of it. And when you were in a test, none of the guards touched you. Those were the most bearable times I had here.”
“Were you hurt as a result of the testing?” Sydney asked gently.
“Depends on what you mean by hurt,” Willie said. Then, in response to her confused look, he blushed. “They say I can’t have kids.” She looked away to avoid his embarrassment. “Not that it ever mattered much to me, though,” he went on. “I never learned how to love nobody, anyhow. You spend that much time bein’ beat, bein’ put down, and you’ll never really learn how to act like a real person again.” He looked off into space. “Everything normal in you just fades away, like the music. It clings to the air for a while—bounces off these stone walls and tries to keep itself goin’, but after a while, the air is too thin, and the walls are too cold, and it dies out.”
Sydney had no idea what to say. “Who gave you the money?” she asked after a moment.
“A lawyer,” Willie spat. “He said it was comin’ from the government an’ some of the companies the government was usin’ to carry out the tests. Said I was the ‘named plaintiff,’ whatever that means, and congratulated me for bein’ a beacon of justice.” He shook his head. “The people here—the people here before Dr. Golden an’ them others came—they took everything from me. They took my childhood. They took my manhood. They took any chance I could ever have. An’ the lawyers gave me twenty thousand dollars in return. Some beacon of justice, huh?” He looked away. “I don’t even know how long ago it was. Ten years, maybe more. A sharp-dressed lawyer from
D.C. walks down into this basement an’ tells me he’s made me a bunch of money. Even has a check cut already. Tells me all I have to do is sign a few papers, an’ the money’s mine. Twenty thousand dollars. For everything I’d lost. For everything I’d suffered through. Twenty thousand dollars.”
“What did you do?”
Willie’s eyes dropped. “I signed the papers and took the check,” he said. For a moment, Sydney thought the man was going to cry. “And then I shook the man’s hand, and I thanked him,” he said with disgust. “Twenty thousand dollars for everything they’d done to me, and I
thanked
the man!” His body shook violently, and for a moment Sydney thought he was crying. It was only when he picked his head up that she saw the bitter smile on his face and recognized the spasms as laughter. “Maybe they was right all along,” he said through gritted teeth. “Maybe I am a moron.”
She wanted to reach out and touch him, to provide some warmth and comfort, but from his posture he seemed incapable of receiving it. “You’re not a moron,” was the best comfort she could offer. “Did you tell my sister anything else?”
Willie shook his head. “No ma’am. Nothin’ else I can remember. I’m real sorry.” “Nothing at all?” she pressed.
He looked long and hard at her. “Nothin’ at all,” he said.
She could tell that their conversation was over, and she rose out of her seat. “Thank you very much for your time, Willie,” she said.
“You’re welcome, Miss Sydney,” Willie replied.
She walked to the door and opened it. Just as she stepped through the doorway, Willie spoke again. “I meant what I said, Miss Sydney.”
She turned and looked at him. He seemed even smaller than he had when she first walked in the room. “What’s that, Willie?”
“Some things are better left buried in the past.”
I
T WAS PAST SIX O
’
CLOCK
in the evening by the time Sydney was on the road again, heading back toward Washington. She wouldn’t make dinner at her mother’s house—not with a five-hour drive ahead of her. She pulled out her cell phone to call and let her mother and Amanda know that she would be late, and not to worry; she flipped open the phone and had started dialing before she noticed that the service indicator was flash
ing. Not surprising, really, she thought. Most cellular coverage tended to center on populated areas around cities and suburbs, and it didn’t take a sociologist to recognize that this mountainous region in southwestern Virginia clearly didn’t qualify. She put her cell phone away and reminded herself to call from a pay phone once she was closer to civilization.
She was disappointed at how little her investigation had yielded. The Institute itself was eerie in its isolation, and its shadowy past seemed the stuff of horror movies, but she’d come across nothing that would suggest any connection to her sister’s death. Even Willie Murphy’s tale led nowhere in the end. He couldn’t remember who was responsible for his horrific treatment all those years ago, and if he could, what would it matter? He was right; any decent attorney would be able to shred him on cross-examination, even if he were ever willing and able to identify any of the people responsible for his suffering. Moreover, the statute of limitations had most likely run out on anything other than a murder charge—and proving up a murder charge three or four decades old was a virtual impossibility. Nothing she or her sister had learned seemed to suggest a motive for murder on anyone’s part.