THE WOMEN

Everything changed when Iris went missing.

Before that morning, if you had asked anyone living in the six bungalows on Azalea Court if we were close, we would have rolled our eyes. We’re not one of those neighborhoods that celebrate holidays with grab bag gift exchanges or host cheerful red, white, and blue progressive dinners where you have appetizers at one house and off to another for the next course. We mostly respect each other’s privacy and stay in our own homes and yards.

That is, until Iris disappeared.

People often ask us if Azalea Court is cursed. “How could it not be?” they insist. It’s a balloon-on-a-string shaped road, though that description implies celebration and fun and that’s not really us. Our small homes sit on the grounds of the former state mental hospital, where thousands of lost souls were incarcerated over the course of a century and a half. By the time our six wood-frame bungalows were built on the edge of the hospital grounds to house medical staff and their families, the state hospital was no longer burdened with “insane” or “lunatic” in its title, but it was still regarded with deep suspicion by the town. A developer renovated the houses in the early 1950s, and another repurposed them as condos fifty years later when the nearby Hospital Hill neighborhood was constructed.

Long after the last patients were transferred out and the crumbling red brick buildings torn down or gutted for apartments, the stigma persisted. “How can you live there?” asked our classmates in high school and acquaintances in the grocery store. They rarely waited for an answer.

Tucked away in a swamp maple grove, our small court with its center circle of grass triggered suspicion in town; they read our secluded location as unsociable. Azalea Court is not easy to find, if you don’t already know it. Because the court is hidden from the road and accessed by a narrow lane off Prince Street, looking for the street sign is unreliable. For some unfathomable reason, stealing it is a time-honored tradition of the high school football team. We sometimes joke about how many local teens have a green metal Azalea Court sign swinging from a nail on their bedroom wall. Some of us feel that the petty vandalism is aimed at the state hospital and specifically at those of us who once worked there, but others say we’re just being paranoid.

In spite of the complicated history, we like living on Azalea Court. Thanks to Eric’s horticultural prowess, our postage-stamp front yards are exuberant with blooms, in stark contrast to the crumbling decay of the institutional buildings finally torn down. Butterfly bushes, spiky bee balm, a pastel rainbow of azaleas, and thick laurel shrubs threaten our wood porch structures. Magnolias litter their wanton petals onto our parked cars. Most of us let down our hair in our private backyards, where patios open up to wooden play structures, croquet sets, teak picnic tables with striped market umbrellas and pot-bellied clay stoves that inevitably crack after a year or two.

We neighbors are a mixed group, so it’s not surprising that we don’t socialize much. Our gardener/caretaker lives in Number One with his fancy doctor wife and their two school-aged kids. Our local celebrity, Dr. Asher Blum, who is really more infamous than famous, lives at Number Two with his wife Iris, the person at the center of the current trouble. Dr. Blum was the last head shrink at the state hospital, the guy who oversaw the dismantling of the institution after working there for decades. Rumor has it that he’s writing a book about the state hospital and the history of the institutional treatment of the mentally ill. He calls it “What We Thought We Knew,” and many of us are more than a little worried about what nasty surprises he might reveal, what unpleasant publicity it might bring to disrupt our privacy on Azalea Court.

At ninety-four, Blum is the oldest resident, but he’s not the person who has lived here the longest. That would be our neighbor Donnie, who was born in Number Three and still lives there now with his wife Evelyn, the neighborhood gossip. Donnie inherited his house from his mother, who bought the place with decades of deductions from her wages as an attendant on the women’s locked ward. We’ve heard that the people who once lived in Number Four had a hot tub in back and used it naked, but none of us ever saw them and they moved away five years ago. Now people gossip about the lesbian couple living there. Not because of their sexual orientation—nothing unusual about that in this city—but they keep strictly to themselves, and we’ve heard whispers about the Witness Protection Program. Number Five stands empty, although a couple with a baby is supposedly moving in any day now. None of us is friendly with the folks in Number Six, even though they’ve rented their cottage for years from the college just across the river. It’s too bad, but they just don’t fit in. An oversized American flag flies in their front yard, the guy has odd eyes and never talks to anyone, and the androgynous-looking woman is rarely seen, and never without a hoodie.

If you could see directly into our hearts and read our secrets, you’d know that in addition to the ugly, ancient secrets of the hospital, our little street is home to people who have survived all sorts of trauma, from genocide to rape to kidnapping to torture. But on that Friday morning in November 2019 when Iris went missing, Azalea Court was quietly sliding out of autumn and anticipating winter. It was the last place any of us expected to see police cars and search teams.