Chapter 20 Rachel #2
Blood, so much blood, in the cracks between the tiles.
The madness in her swollen eyes that seemed never to fully fade.
She has haunted me.
TORONTO—JUNE, 1996
MWP. The Mercer Women’s Prison.
Rachel has no idea what that place is. The old Toronto psych hospital and the Kingston Penitentiary, she knows; they’re both still in operation. But she’s never heard of the Mercer Women’s Prison.
Her stomach growls. It’s lunchtime. She locks the files in the trunk of her car and drives around the corner beneath the railroad tracks, pulling into a street parking space on Dundas.
She gets out and locates a hot dog cart a block over.
Then, hungrily chomping in the shade of a tattoo shop, considers her next move.
She needs to locate this prison. If it’s right in the city, she can go there next, before she heads back up to Huron County.
She scarfs the rest of the street dog, washes it down with a Pepsi, then scans the sidewalks along the sunny stretch of Dundas West for a phone booth.
She heads for a heavily graffitied one three blocks down.
Her HQ doesn’t have cellular phones yet, though there’s been buzz about the Toronto Police Service testing out that new Motorola one in their squads.
Knowing Green, it’ll probably be at least a decade before he’s willing to advocate for funding to have them.
Until then, they all have to use pay phones.
Rachel should probably just bite the bullet and get her own car phone in the meantime.
When she reaches the booth, she realizes that the phone book that’s meant to be hanging from a cord has been ripped out.
Only shreds of the spine remain on the metal coil, like a fish skeleton picked clean.
She walks another three blocks to the next booth, which does still have its book intact.
She balances it on one raised knee, flipping through the government pages in search of the Mercer Women’s Prison, but doesn’t find it.
She rummages in her pocket for the change from her lunch, presses a quarter in with a clink to call a colleague in the Toronto OPP office.
“Hey, Chapman. It’s Mackenzie, from Clinton.” She recaps the morning’s discoveries quickly. “I haven’t heard of this Mercer Women’s Prison; can’t see it in the phone book I’ve got here. Know anything about it?”
“Women’s prison?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Hmm. I didn’t think there was one here. Just Vanier in Brampton, and Kingston obviously. And uh…”
Rachel clears her throat. “Grand River. Yeah, I’m aware—”
“Mackenzie—,” Chapman begins, tone thick with apology.
“I’m actually wondering if the Mercer is defunct,” she says, plowing on. “The case dates from the sixties, so it could be.”
“Yeah, sure, uh…Hang on a sec, I’ll ask Deb in our finance office. She’s been around for decades. Don’t think she’s ever going to retire. Too stubborn. But she might know.”
Rachel smiles despite herself. “Thanks, Chapman.”
She takes in the street as standard-issue tinny elevator music crackles through the line.
It’s always a bit strange when she’s in plain clothes, which is more often now that she’s a detective.
People act differently around cops—for better or worse—when they see the uniform.
Which is, in large part, the point of wearing one.
But when she looks like a civilian, she can observe with a little more ease, so long as no one notices the firearm on her hip holster beneath the blazer.
Some teens from the school down the street are still roaming during their lunch hour, pushing one another and laughing on the sidewalk.
Rachel looks at her watch. They aren’t truant yet, but will be in about six minutes.
A man wearing an apron emerges from the Chinese restaurant twenty metres away, dumps a couple of garbage bags at the curb between the newspaper box and the telephone pole.
A curious pigeon lands on the garbage, then takes off again as a streetcar rattles past. Rachel misses the city sometimes.
She came here a lot more as a teenager than she does now.
The music on the phone stops. “Mackenzie?”
“Here, Chapman.”
“All right, apparently the Mercer Women’s Prison was in Liberty Village until the sixties sometime, Deb says. But the building is gone. It was where the Allan Lamport Stadium is now.”
“Huh. Okay. Thanks, Chapman.”
She signs off and steps away from the booth, thinking. There’s no point going to the site, really, if the building’s been razed—at least not yet. What she needs are prisoner records.
And for that, she needs a librarian.
Rachel moves her car to a parking lot near Dundas West Station, where she boards the subway, heading to College Station and the Ontario archives.
It’s been ages since she’s taken the Toronto subway, and she takes a moment to enjoy the memories it conjures, of summer visits to the city with Kimberly or Lori to see concerts at the Forum down at the waterfront.
The outdoor concert space drew in their rebellious teen selves with its revolving round stage surrounded by screaming, singing, drunken fans and a haze of pot smoke.
She was appalled when they demolished it two years ago.
The last concert she’d seen there was Radiohead, at Edgefest in 1993, with her friend Steve.
They’d originally met at Pineview and dated on and off after they left, which was at best a mistake and at worst scraped against the outline of the rules.
They stayed friends for a while, mostly because—aside from Tom Stevens—he was one of the few people Rachel could relate to.
But she hasn’t heard from him since he relapsed last year.
She exits the station now and walks the rest of the way. Inside the archives building, she identifies herself to the receptionist, whose blond eyebrows lift with intrigue. She leads Rachel back into an office area and asks her to wait.
Rachel’s never been here before, and isn’t entirely sure what to expect, but she holds her files in her resting hand, the manila folder pressed against her firearm.
She takes a deep breath of the air that smells like carpet cleaner and freshly photocopied paper, feeling eager.
If these archives can produce the prisoner register for the Mercer from the 1950s and ’60s, that should be enough to take back to headquarters and start whittling down the list of possible identities for her Jane Doe.
She needs to know who died there during that window.
Another woman arrives within minutes, sweeping over the threshold of her small office in a cloud of purposefulness and Elizabeth Arden Red Door.
“Good afternoon, Detective…?”
“Mackenzie. Rachel Mackenzie.” Rachel extends a hand, which the woman shakes firmly.
“I’m Lydia Jacek, Director of Archives. I understand you’re looking for some prisoner records.”
“Yes,” Rachel says. “It’s part of an investigation into a Jane Doe found up in Huron County.” She recaps the Mercer prison info. “It’s defunct, but I wondered if any of the records might still be extant.”
The director is already nodding fervently. “Absolutely. I’ll do what I can.”
Rachel withdraws from her folder the sheet from Cartwright-Cambridge Co. with the Mercer Women’s Prison’s information. She passes it into Lydia’s hands, the nails trimmed short but impeccably well-manicured. It bodes well—she values attention to detail.
“There’s the spelling, and the address, if that helps,” Rachel says. “It was in Liberty Village.”
Lydia nods again. “Excellent. I’ll see what we can do. Normally we would need some time to pull this information, a day or two.” She glances at the clock on the wall. “But I can get two staff on it right now, and we’ll do our best. It may take a while, though, I’m sorry.”
“I’ll wait,” Rachel says with a smile, thinking fondly of saying the same thing to Mitch Jackass Cambridge under very different circumstances a little over an hour ago. “Thank you, Ms. Jacek.”
“Lydia, please.”
“Lydia.” Rachel smiles. “I don’t mind waiting. There’s a lot of that in my line of work. Just show me where I can find the coffee, and I’ll be fine.”
“Ha!” Lydia smiles indulgently and gestures for Rachel to follow.
She waits back in Lydia’s office after securing some fresh coffee in a ceramic mug with a faded image of a blue cat sitting atop a stack of multicoloured books.
Rachel’s always a bit fascinated by the mugs she gets offered in her day-to-day while waiting for information.
She wonders what the mugs say about the people.
Snarky quips. Best Grandpa Ever. Shakespeare quotes.
Snoopy and Woodstock. Such-and-Such University crests.
But it’s the nondescript ones without any identifying characteristics that always make her the most suspicious, as though the person supplying the coffee is self-conscious, reluctant to give her anything to analyze.
She finishes the drink and then sneaks a couple of the Werther’s candies from the dish on Lydia’s desk.
Nearly two hours later, she’s memorized the details of the director’s degrees on the wall and established theories for all four of the stains on the carpet when Lydia finally reappears.
“We’ve got them, Detective. I’m sorry it took so long. Back this way, please.”
“Don’t apologize, I appreciate your help on such short notice.
” Rachel follows her through a different part of the office where study rooms are situated along one wall.
Lydia approaches one labelled “3” and holds open the door.
Rachel enters to find a series of documents spread out on a large conference-style table, a set of white gloves resting beside them.
“If I could ask you to put on the gloves, please. It’s protocol.”
Rachel nods. “Not a problem,” she says, pulling them on and noting how strange and luxurious the cotton feels on her fingers compared to the rubbery blue ones she’s used to. It’s like stepping out of high heels and into slippers.
“Here,” Lydia says, pointing, “we’ve got the register from the prison for the years 1950 through 1960, then 1960 to 1962. They end there, so let’s hope that’s the year it closed. I’ve also pulled some of the other records we had in relation: the prisoner punishment register—”
“Oof.” Rachel grimaces.
“Yes, I know. I’ve also got here the inmate medical records, and various others referencing the Mercer Women’s Prison. I wasn’t sure what else might be helpful.”
“This is excellent, thank you.”
“Well,” Lydia says, exhaling a quick breath of a laugh. “I’m glad we could get it in time. If there’s anything else you need, just let me know. We technically close at five to the public, but I’ll stay through until you’re done, detective.”
“And is there any way to get copies of these documents?” Rachel asks.
“Most of them should be okay to copy. Just let me know.”
“Thank you so much.”
Lydia closes the door with a polite nod. Rachel takes a focusing breath and leans over the table.
She ends up staying overnight at a hotel nearby, returning to the archives the next morning to finish reviewing the documents.
Had she kept going the day before, she and Lydia would have been there well past midnight.
Despite the fact that Rachel is eager to get home, there’s no huge rush.
She always has a go bag packed in her car for times like this, anyway: extra underwear, socks, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, her antidepressants.
She finishes around ten-thirty, bids Lydia goodbye and heads back to her car with a fresh stack of copies folded neatly into her folio.
She takes a sip of the last cold bit of her hotel takeout coffee and shakes her head.
Mercer was a truly horrific place. No wonder they shut it down and razed the whole thing for a soccer stadium.
Rachel’s spent plenty of time in prisons, knows the standards and laws and how things work—or are supposed to work. What she’s seen here, even for the sixties, is beyond the pale. The treatment of the psychiatric patients, particularly. She pauses, then crumples up the paper cup with undue force.
She hadn’t had much interest in seeing the site of the prison when she’d learned from Chapman that it no longer existed, but after reading all of this, her fingers are itching to steer over to Liberty Village before she leaves the city.
She looks down at her notes now, at the list of five inmates she isolated from the hundreds registered at the Mercer throughout the ’50s and ’60s; the names that will form the bulk of her work over the next several weeks.
Though she has no idea how any one of them would have ended up in the Millgate Cemetery, two hundred kilometres from Liberty Village.
Three of these women died at the prison between 1958 and 1962.
Another two are mysteriously unaccounted for, with no death or discharge dates at all.
And one of them, she’s sure, is her Jane Doe.