Chapter 10
CHAPTER
TEN
They bedded down shortly thereafter, sleeping through what little remained of the night and into the day. Nigel woke around ten in the morning to the smell of toast and reconstituted eggs.
Everyone helped themselves bleary-eyed to breakfast. Ethan had prepared an urn of coffee as well as their food. When he whisked away to Ms. Montague’s private tent, Dr. Lawson said, “Of course Patricia’s too good to eat with the rest of us.”
Nigel wished the two older women could bury the hatchet, or at least not put everyone else in an awkward position between them. He made a noncommittal noise and wolfed down his breakfast and coffee as quickly as possible. “I’m going to go into the front offices of the asylum and see if I can find any clues as to the nurse’s identity,” he said when he was finished.
“Do you need any help?” Oscar asked.
“I wouldn’t mind the company, provided you don’t have anything else you need to do.”
Oscar smiled. “Then I’ll come with.”
Chris rose to their feet. “If it’s all right with everyone else, I’d like to take the van into Howlston itself and photograph some of the abandoned buildings.”
“Knock yourself out,” Oscar said.
“Whereas I’ll be staring at video and listening to audio.” Tina stood up, smoothing her skirts.
Zeek perked up. “Need any help?”
Adrienne cleared her throat. “We have our own audio and video to go through, Zeek. We didn’t bring our whole setup with us, unlike some people, and I’m not staring at a laptop for hours by myself.”
“How un-ambitious of you,” Chris said, just loudly enough for Adrienne to hear them.
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you going to buy us a van to lug stuff around in? No?”
“I thought all those views you get would pay for one.”
Nigel slipped out of the tent, fleeing the argument. A few moments later, Chris emerged with an annoyed expression on their face and headed for the van without speaking. Oscar followed them out, and Nigel held out his hand.
Oscar took it, and together they walked across the drive toward the front stairs. The spring air still held some coolness, and not a cloud marred the solid blue vault of the sky. Birds sang in the trees, proclaiming their territory to one another. If they climbed out of the valley, no doubt they’d find mountain laurel and rhododendron thickets in bloom.
Oscar stopped at the bottom of the steps, causing Nigel to stop as well. He stood on the first step, so they were at eye-level with one another.
“Hey,” said Oscar with a grin.
Nigel grinned back. “Hey yourself.”
They kissed under the bright sky, mouths warm and hungry—until Nigel felt a sneeze building.
He turned aside and sneezed into his elbow, then sniffled. “Sorry. Very romantic.”
“And I brought you to such a picturesque location,” Oscar teased.
Nigel pulled a tissue out of his pocket pack and blew his nose. “Damn allergies.” He swallowed, wincing a little at the soreness developing in his throat. He could use a cup of tea with lemon and honey, but that would mean driving over to Weston.
Worry creased Oscar’s brow. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine—just allergies. I get them every spring, but they’re a lot worse than usual.” Nigel shrugged. “Different pollen over here than in Durham, I guess.”
“Okay.” Oscar kissed him again, then looked up at the door. “We should get to work, even though I’d rather just make out with you.”
“I’m sure being inside will kill the mood pretty quick.” Nigel led the way up, the door squeaking open at his touch.
Hopefully the sunlight would keep any spirits at bay for the time being. He’d brought a high-lumen flashlight in case it didn’t, as well as a pouch of salt. At least they weren’t going very far inside.
“Is it just me, or has the patch of mold on the wall gotten bigger?” Oscar asked, stopping in the hall to stare at the black fuzz.
Had it? Nigel tried to remember what it had looked like yesterday. “I’m not sure. Maybe it likes the warmer spring days?”
The old secretary’s office was stuffed with filing cabinets, their metal bottoms slowly rusting onto the old wooden floor. They were locked, but a quick search of the desk turned up some keys, as well as dried-up pens, a rubber band ball whose bands had melded into a single entity, and an ancient stick of gum.
They unlocked cabinets one by one. The first Nigel checked was given over to invoices and the other paperwork involved in running any institution. Fortunately some long-ago employee had been organized, and all the file folders were neatly labeled, which made scanning through them much easier.
“These look like patient records,” Oscar said from the cabinet he’d opened.
Nigel’s heart quickened. “How far back do they go?”
“I don’t know.” He opened the drawer marked F-H and began to flip through them. “Finley, Fuller…there’s no Fox.”
Nigel hadn’t expected there to be—Oscar’s grandmother died nearly twenty years before the asylum closed. “They must have stored the older records somewhere. I’m thinking the big room with all the extra equipment in it. There were a bunch of filing cabinets in there.”
Oscar rolled the drawer shut, looking disappointed. “We can check in there later, when we have Chris to help us move things out of the way,” he said, hand still resting on the drawer handle. “Though I don’t know what I think I’m going to find. Just records of a medium everyone else thought had severe schizophrenia.”
Nigel went over and hugged him from behind. “You want to connect with her,” he said, resting his head against Oscar’s back.
“Yes, but will notes written about her by other people—people who thought she was insane—help me to do that?”
“You’d at least know what she went through.” Nigel hesitated. “Though it might be better not to know.”
“Maybe.” Oscar sighed. “Let’s keep looking around in here.”
None of the staff records from the 1990s were likely to tell them anything about the nurse, but it was likely many of the staff were still alive. They might be willing to talk about any paranormal experiences they’d had—if it was possible to track any of them down, at least. Nigel made a mental note of the files’ location and kept looking.
In the bottom of an especially rusty cabinet, he found a series of crumbling ledgers alongside more modern binders. Some were thicker than others, but all had years, or spans of years, neatly labeled on the spines.
Nigel pulled out a binder marked 1978-1980 and opened it. The first page read “Howlston Lunatic Asylum, Howlston, VA, Death Records January 1, 1978 - December 31, 1980.”
“Oscar, take a look at this,” he said, laying it out on the desk.
Oscar let out a low whistle. “I don’t remember her death date exactly, just that it was in 1979.”
Nigel flipped through until they found the right year. The records consisted of columns: date of death, date of hospitalization, name, cause of death, age, and cemetery lot.
“There’s a cemetery somewhere on the grounds,” he said. “For patients who didn’t have anyone to receive the bodies when they died.”
“Or anyone willing to claim them.” Oscar shook his head. “Mamaw is buried beside Papaw back in Marrow, so at least she isn’t lying in a forgotten grave somewhere.”
Nigel scanned the entries, looking for Barbara Fox’s name. “Do you think we should find the cemetery? They aren’t usually haunted, but it does happen.”
“Unmarked graves, the inhabitants abandoned here by their families and society…there could be some unquiet spirits hanging around,” Oscar said. “Maybe we should head over there just after dusk, before we go back into the asylum.”
A familiar name caught Nigel’s eye. “Hold that thought. I found her.”
The record was heartbreaking in its simplicity. March 10, 1940 - December 1, 1979. Fox, Barbara. Pneumonia. Aged 39.
Damn it—she’d been so young. All those years of life ahead of her, wasted and lost thanks to the combination of a vengeful ghost and a disbelieving medical system. She’d left behind a family, a community. People who needed her as a mother, as a medium.
Oscar let out a long sigh, as if he were having the same thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” Nigel said, not knowing what else to do.
“Thanks. So am I.” Oscar closed the binder and returned it to the filing cabinet. “Wow. A lot of people died here in the twenties and early thirties,” he remarked in a voice that sounded like he was trying to change the subject.
The binders for those years were noticeably larger than the others. “Penicillin wasn’t widely available until the 1940s,” Nigel pointed out. “We tend to underestimate just how many people died back then from what we think of as simple infections.”
“You’d think the previous decades would be just as thick, then. Or the ones after…looks like 1933,” Oscar said. “Should we take these to look at later?”
Nigel doubted they’d find anything more mysterious than a tuberculosis outbreak. Even so, he shrugged. “We might as well. Obviously no one else cares about these records, or will miss them if they’re gone.”
Oscar hauled the crumbling binders out and stacked them on the desk. “Anything else?”
“Let’s check out the superintendent’s office, just in case any records were kept in there,” Nigel suggested.
The superintendent’s office was dimmer, thanks to fewer windows and more overgrown vines. The air hung thick with dust, making Nigel cough.
“Look,” Oscar said, pointing to the wall behind the massive oak desk that dominated the office.
Framed photos hung on the wall, overlain with dust and cobwebs. Nigel brushed aside some of the grime, revealing a row of men and women in Victorian-era dress posing on the front steps of the asylum
“They’re staff photos,” he said, wiping off more dust. “Going by the date written in the corner, this was taken in 1870, only a few years after the asylum opened.”
Their eyes met, both having the same thought at the same time. The nurse might be in one of these photos.
Oscar peered closely at the Victorian-era picture, shook his head, and moved on to the next. The dates on the photos were somewhat haphazard, with decades passing between some and only a couple of years between others. At last, Oscar let out a gasp and pointed. “That’s her.”
Nigel peered at the photo, which bore the year 1932 on a small brass plaque affixed to the frame. A white man with a strong mustache stood in the center, dressed in a sharp suit. To his right stood the woman Oscar had identified. The rest of the nurses wore short sleeved, pinstriped blouses under their white aprons; she was the only one completely in white and with long sleeves. “Her uniform is different—I wonder if she was the head nurse?”
“Turn the picture over and see if anything is on the back,” Oscar suggested.
There was no information on the paper backing, so he laid the frame face-down on the desk. “Do you have a knife or anything?”
Oscar took out a small Swiss-army knife. “Always prepared.”
Nigel carefully slit the paper so he could remove the photo from the frame. Someone had written the names of everyone in the picture on the back, along with the date it was taken: September 25, 1932 .
He scanned the lines—fortunately the person who’d written on it had good handwriting, which made the process a lot easier than most of the old documents he looked at.
“Della Young,” he read. “She’s standing beside Superintendent Dr. Herbert Wilkes.”
“She does not look any happier in life than she did last night,” Oscar remarked.
“She worked here during the period of high mortality. She might have reason to be unhappy if her patients kept dying.”
“Unless she was the one killing them.”
Nigel frowned. “Is that what you sensed from her?”
“Not precisely, but it would explain why she wants to keep us from talking to the other ghosts.”
“Good point.” Nigel kept hold of the photo. “Let’s take this with us, along with the binders. Maybe we’ll find a pattern. Something to help us move her along to the afterlife.”
They left the asylum and took their finds back outside and into the command center. The van and Chris were still gone, but Tina, Adrienne, and Zeek were there.
As they entered, Adrienne and Zeek looked up from where they sat together in front of their laptop.
“We should ask,” Zeek said to Adrienne.
She bit her lip. “I don’t know…Ms. Montague…”
“Look, we’ve already been collaborating a little bit.”
“Collaborating on what?” Nigel asked warily.
“I’m glad you asked.” Zeek beamed at him. “You know we work with mirrors a lot.”
“No. I’ve never seen your show.”
The wattage of Zeek’s smile faltered slightly. “You’re missing out, dude. Anyway, we do this mirror seance, where you sit in front of a mirror in the dark and sometimes ghosts show up in the reflection.”
“And your face starts to look weird,” Adrienne added with a shudder. “That part is just the human brain getting confused, though.”
All of it might be their brains getting confused, sitting in front of a mirror in a darkened room. Still… “Ghosts have been known to use mirrors as portals,” Nigel admitted.
“Bingo!” Zeek pointed at him as if he’d won a prize. “We want to do a double seance, with the mirrors facing each other, and us back to back. Mirrors that reflect in other mirrors make the best portals, right?”
Nigel wasn’t certain where this was going. “According to anecdotal data. But there hasn’t been any scientific investigation done on the subject, so…”
“Here’s your chance, then.” Zeek grinned. “See, if both of us are doing the seance, we won’t have anyone to do camera work. I mean, we’ll set up a static cam, but it’s not going to catch as much as someone moving around.”
Nigel frowned. “I’m not a cameraman.”
“Would you like to be?” Zeek asked hopefully.
“Not really.”
“Listen.” Adrienne pushed her long hair out of her face. “We can do it without a third person, but it won’t be as good or catch as much. Obviously Chris won’t be working with us, and Oscar is your lead investigator and your medium, so we can’t ask him to do it. Tina is in here working the tech, so that leaves you.”
“Hey, Nigel’s an important part of our team,” Oscar protested.
Adrienne looked doubtful. “If you don’t want to do it, it’s fine. We’ll manage.”
Nigel hesitated. It would be interesting to watch a different method for contacting the dead than he’d seen before. But… “Ethan made it clear we’re expected to work separately.”
“Ms. Montague is too distracted by that doctor…Lawson, right?” Zeek said, waving a dismissive hand. “She won’t have any idea what we’re doing.”
To his surprise, Oscar said, “That’s true. And technically, Ethan said to focus on our work instead of asking about theirs. He never outright told us not to work together.”
Nigel hesitated. “If we get thrown out…”
“She’d have to send away both teams, leaving her with nothing. I don’t think she’s going to do that.”
“Exactly!” Zeek pointed at Oscar now. “Collaboration is what it’s all about.”
Nigel bit his lip. He wanted to observe their mirrorwork, but…
Oscar put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay if you want to go with them, babe. Chris and I will check out the cemetery, then maybe do another spirit box session inside. You can meet up with us later.”
Feeling a bit like he was betraying the team, Nigel turned to Adrienne and Zeek. “I have to warn you, I’m not an expert when it comes to cameras. Far from it.”
“No problem—we’ll set everything up for you, you just need to point it at anything interesting,” Zeek reassured him.
“Then I suppose I’m in.”