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MARY LOOKED IN THE mirror that hung on the bedroom door, turning from side to side in front of it. Yes, this would do. This would do nicely.
Her trip to the dressmaker’s house on Main Street had netted her that plain gray suit she had spied two weeks before. The seamstress was hesitant to sell it, as it was intended for someone else. But she relented when Mary offered her double her price. The fit of the skirt didn’t seem quite right—a bit too loose—but not so much that anyone would notice.
Mary had pulled her curly hair back into a severe, tight bun, and topped it with a cheap hat that she had borrowed from Mrs. Wingate. There was no need for Mary to wear her veil, since Dr. Applegate wasn’t on duty.
Inside her purse were the lock picks left after she had given three to Christena. Nestled reassuringly at the bottom of the purse was her Smith & Wesson revolver, fully loaded.
Leaving her “Miss Patrick” costume strewn on the bed, Mary went out her door and knocked on the one across the hall. Edmond opened it.
“I had no idea you could look so ordinary,” he said in mock admiration.
Mary made a little curtsey. “Thank you, Mr. Roy. So kind. And now Miss Yates is ready for her command performance.”
They had already had a light supper in Mrs. Wingate’s dining room, and arranged with the woman to borrow her horse and carriage. They warned that they might not return until quite late.
By seven o’clock Edmond was steering the horse toward Westerholm. When they arrived at the front gate and climbed down out of the carriage, he laid down the terms of agreement for his role in this assault.
“I will wait for you by the gate. If you don’t reappear by ten o’clock with Christena, I’m going to go get the deputy.”
“Agreed,” Mary said. “It’s good to know you’ll be here, ready to bring in the cavalry if I need it.”
Then she stood up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the lips. He wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug.
Snuggled up against his chest, Mary suddenly wanted nothing more than to stay right there. How frustrating that her moments alone with Edmond were always cut short. One day, she promised herself, things would be different. She would have time to get to know him, time to understand him. Time to be alone with him.
She finally pulled away from his embrace. “Duty calls, dear boy.”
But before she could leave, he caught her arm.
“One more thing, Mary MacDougall,” he said, brushing a strand of hair from her forehead. “When we get back to Mackinac, I want your undivided attention. No more adventures. No more escapades. Just you and me, and a little bit of Paul and Christena. And if we ever make it to the dance floor, you have to promise every dance to me.”
Mary smiled at him. “Sounds heavenly.” Then she turned and began her march up to the entrance of the imposing edifice.
Coming into the front doors, she was relieved to see that, as she had hoped, Nurse Gillis was no longer on duty. Her much younger replacement was positively gregarious, in comparison.
“Good evening, miss,” the woman said brightly. “I’m Nurse Swenson. Isn’t it hot in here? I hope we get some rain soon. Now, what can I do for you?”
“I’m Sally Yates,” Mary lied, “and I’ve come for a visit with my grandmother’s friend, Mrs. Voelker. I believe Grandmother informed you that I would be coming.”
“Well,” Nurse Swenson said, “let me look here.” She riffled through some papers on the desk. “Ah, yes, here’s the note, Miss Yates. But it says you’re not expected until tomorrow afternoon.”
Mary tried to look embarrassed. “You see, I arrived in town early and my cousins Grace and Annie want me to go with them to Mackinac for a few days. So I just thought I’d nip up here tonight to see Mrs. Voelker and then be free to have a little fun the rest of my stay. Is it a terrible imposition to visit her now?”
“Oh, no. She’ll be through with supper. You just head over there into the east wing. Climb the main stairs up to the third floor and ask for Mrs. Voelker. One of the nurses will help you find her.”
Perfect, thought Mary. She remembered that Olive Handy had said the locked rooms were on the fifth floor of the east wing. Just two flights up from Mrs. Voelker’s floor. And the private rooms for the wealthy patients were on the second floor. If Agnes Olcott was at Westerholm, that’s where they would probably keep her.
Mary thanked the nurse and started to turn away. But an idea popped into her head and she turned back.
“By any chance,” she ventured, “do you have a patient named Mrs. Olcott?”
“Truth be told, I only started working here a couple weeks ago, so I haven’t learned all the patients’ names yet. Right off the bat, it doesn’t sound familiar. But let me take a look.”
She pulled a black ledger book out of a desk drawer, flipped through it, and scanned down a page. Her eyes stopped to read for a few long seconds. “No, Miss Yates,” she said with a nervous grin, slamming the book shut. “We have no patients here by the name of Mrs. Agnes Olcott.”
“I must have been mistaken then,” Mary said sweetly. “Thank you anyway. Now I’ll just go visit with Mrs. Voelker for a bit.”
But as she walked away, Mary thought how interesting it was that Nurse Swenson knew Agnes Olcott’s first name, even though Mary hadn’t mentioned it. Whatever the young nurse had read in that book must have specified that Mrs. Olcott’s presence at Westerholm was to be kept confidential.
Mary was sorely tempted to poke her nose behind the handsome glass door on the second floor that said “Special Ward” and go hunting for her client’s mother. But she reminded herself that Mrs. Olcott was no longer her primary concern. At the moment nothing on earth was more important than liberating Christena MacDougall from her captivity.
As Mary made her way up the stairs, she bumped into two nurses coming down. They looked at her curiously, as if they wondered what she was doing there that time of the evening.
“I know I’m here late, but I’m trying to find my friend Mrs. Voelker,” Mary said, anticipating their question. “Could you tell me if I’m heading in the right direction?”
They told her she was, then watched her head up to the landing on the third floor. Mary decided she had better actually go find Mrs. Voelker, to keep suspicion at bay. Then she’d figure out how to ascend those two additional flights to the locked ward.
At least a dozen women were sitting at chairs and tables in what felt like a reasonably homey common room. Some of them were playing cards, some were reading books, some holding dolls, and some were just staring into space. They all had on unadorned, homemade dresses.
As Mary walked in, several of them turned to scrutinize her. Their expressions were neither friendly nor unfriendly—merely impassive and expressionless.
However, one of the inmates, a moon-faced, fidgety blonde girl of eighteen or so, bounced to her feet from behind a table littered with dominoes and scampered over to Mary.
“Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello,” she chirped, leaning in uncomfortably close to the visitor. “They say my name is Ethel. But they’re lying you know.”
The words came out of her like a Gatling gun—rat-tat-tat-tat.
“I’m really Alice Roosevelt the daughter of the president and they put me in here because I know a state secret that would help our enemies and they think I can’t keep my mouth shut but I can. I can. I most definitely can. I’m no traitor. They think I saw Father do something very, very, very bad. What’s your name?”
She stared expectantly at Mary with saucer-wide, vivid blue eyes.
Mary was so shaken, she almost gave her real name to the girl. “I’m, I’m Miss Yates,” she said, backing away a step. “I’ve come to visit Mrs. Voelker.”
“You look like someone I can trust,” the girl observed. “So I’ll tell you what I saw Father do because I...”
“No you will not, Alice.”
Out of nowhere, a nurse appeared and took the young woman firmly by the arm, leading her back to the table with the dominoes. Alice seemed not to take any offense. The nurse returned to Mary, shaking her head.
“I’m sorry that Alice... Her name really is Ethel, but it upsets her when we call her that. I’m sorry she waylaid you. She likes to tell her little story to anyone who comes. And who can blame her? Her make-believe life is a lot more pleasant than her real life was.”
“What do you mean?” Mary asked.
The nurse briefly shut her eyes and shook her head. “Poor Ethel saw her father stab her mother to death. He put that knife into her dozens of times. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, covered in blood, as if nothing had happened, and ordered the girl to fix him his dinner. He’s up in the madhouse in Newberry. Mrs. Westerholm’s trust pays for Ethel to stay here in a dormitory bed.”
Mary was appalled. How could such things even be possible?
“Can I help you find someone?” asked the nurse.
Mary told her she was visiting Mrs. Voelker and the nurse pointed at an older patient, sitting in a rocking chair and paging through a magazine. Mary went over to her and knelt beside her.
“Hello, Mrs. Voelker,” she said. “I’m a friend of Sally Yates. She said I should come visit you if I was in town.”
Mrs. Voelker focused her rheumy eyes on Mary and smiled. “Oh, little Sally. She’s such an adorable girl. How old is she now? Four? Five?”
The woman seemed delighted to have a visitor, so Mary pulled up a chair, seeing no harm in spending a few minutes chatting with her. It would, after all, lend credibility to her story if she were to be questioned later on during her search for Christena. She would just claim that she had gotten lost after visiting with Mrs. Voelker, and the nurse would confirm that Mary had been there.
Except for being a bit mixed up about her location in time and space, the woman was an amiable conversationalist. Listening to her prattle on, Mary glanced around the room at the other inmates.
Her eyes fell upon someone sitting by a window who looked almost like an angel. She was a beautiful, pale woman, staring out into the early evening. Although she had flowing white hair, her face looked oddly young. She held a picture frame in her hands. In this room full of people, she seemed to be in a place all by herself.
“Mrs. Voelker, do you know who that lady is by the window?” Mary asked when the old woman had paused for a second.
“Oh that poor dear. She’s waiting for her children, you see. But they’re never going to come, you know. They’re dead. The doctor takes extra good care of her. Visits her often.”
After a few more minutes, Mary finally stood, telling Mrs. Voelker that Sally Yates would be up to see her tomorrow, which was quite true. As she turned to go, Mary almost ran into another patient who had come up behind her.
“Thank you for visiting Mrs. Voelker,” the woman said. “She gets quite lonely here.”
Mary saw kindness in the warm brown eyes that regarded her. The woman had a solidness about her that seemed out of place here. If it weren’t for the faded pink and blue dress she wore, Mary might have mistaken her for one of the nurses or attendants. She looked normal, and sounded quite normal, too.
“Please excuse my presumption,” Mary said tentatively, “but might I ask why...”
“I’m here?” the woman said dejectedly. “Simple. My husband didn’t want me anymore. Dr. Applegate diagnosed me with hysteria and malicious disposition. I didn’t even have a say in the matter—they just hauled me off to the bathtub.” She gave a frustrated laugh. “I wonder if Dr. Applegate ever met a wife he couldn’t help a husband get shed of.”
Another victim of Dr. Applegate, Mary thought angrily. When Christena was out of harm’s way, Mary would make damned sure that Dr. Applegate was held accountable for his actions.
“This place isn’t all that bad,” the woman said. “Homer is paying for me to stay here. But once he divorces me...” Her voice quivered. “The money will stop and they’ll likely send me to the state hospital up in Newberry.” She pulled a hanky out of her pocket. “That place makes Westerholm look pretty plush.”
Mary felt horrified at the woman’s prospects. “Don’t you have people who can take you in?”
“Homer has poisoned the children’s minds against me. Beyond them and the in-laws... I’m not wanted by anyone. But I’m a fine cook and I took good care of the young ones.” She bit her lower lip and shut her eyes, as if to hold back the tears. “I do my best,” she finally said. “But some days, life just doesn’t seem worth living anymore. I don’t understand what’s happened to me.”
Throwing a seemingly levelheaded woman like this into a madhouse just because her husband found her wanting—now that was true insanity. “What’s your name, ma’am?” Mary asked.
“Still Mrs. Alvina Tiegland. For a little while, anyway. I wonder if I must give up the name ‘Tiegland,’ when I’m no longer his wife.”
“Mrs. Tiegland, I have to leave now. But please look for a letter from Miss Mary MacDougall in a few weeks. I know she will be able to help you with your predicament.”
“Who is she?” Mrs. Tiegland asked. “This Miss MacDougall?”
“You’ll find out.”
Mary left her and made her way across the room. The nurses were moving some of the patients toward a dormitory filled with dozens of narrow beds in rows. Most of them were tidily made up, but some were already occupied by huddled and curled-up women.
As Mary came out onto the landing, she looked about. No one was in sight. This was it. Things had gone well so far. Now it was time to finish the job. Time for action.
She rummaged in her purse for her lock picks. She found the slender black case and jammed it into the right pocket of her gray jacket.
A couple of moments later she was up on the fifth floor, which to all appearances looked abandoned. Down the corridor to her right, she saw a solid-looking locked door. This is what Olive Handy had described to her. Mary only hoped that her huge gamble—that Christena was behind that door—was a winning one.
She closely examined the heavy commercial lockset on the door. It looked much more daunting than any she had worked on before. She selected the short-hook pick and the tension tool. One last time, she glanced over her shoulder and was relieved to see she was still quite alone. With a deep breath, she inserted the tension tool, then the pick, and began to work.
As she had when she practiced picking locks at home, Mary went into an almost meditative state. Her eyes shut, she focused all her senses into her hands and fingers, and the two tools in them. She applied rotational force to the lock’s plug with the tension tool and moved the pick around inside the lock, trying to lift the pins one at a time. When she had lifted the final pin the proper distance, the lock would open with a sweep of the tension tool.
But this particular lock resisted her, and she went back to again attack the pins with her pick. It took a few seconds for the sound of the soft padding footsteps that came up behind her to penetrate through her single-minded concentration, just as the lock snicked open.
Mary spun around to see the raw-boned, equine face of Willis Flugum leering at her, as if out of a nightmare. She tried to dart sideways. But Flugum moved with supernatural agility.
With brutal swiftness, two powerful arms locked around her like a python’s grip, and they squeezed until Mary could barely breathe. A sweaty slab of a hand clamped over her mouth, smothering her screams of outrage.
She tried to struggle, but her captor was far too strong.
“Any more kicking or shouting,” Flugum growled hoarsely, “and I’ll break your pretty neck. Understand?”
Mary went limp as her heart pounded wildly.
“Understand?”
She nodded twice, fighting off a wave of nausea.
“A single squeak and you’re dead. Right?”
Mary nodded again.
She was in no position to argue.
