I stared at Jane, holding the phone in one hand and shaking my head. After a few false starts, I finally said: “I’m really at a loss here, Doctor. The woman who arrived here a few days ago has identified herself as Fate Alban.”
“I’m not surprised about that. Mercy is fixated on her sister and, at certain times, insists that she is her sister. It’s one of the things we have been working on over the years in terms of her care. Without her medication—”
I interrupted him. “But Mercy died when she was a young child.”
Hearing me say the name “Mercy,” Jane sat down hard on the bed, her face ashen, her mouth agape.
“No, Miss Alban,” he said. “Mercy has been living here with us since 1956. Mercy is the reason your grandfather built the entire wing onto this hospital. Did you not notice the name of our facility? It was changed to Mercy House when she came to us.”
The room felt cold, as though an arctic chill had suddenly blown through it. “So what you’re saying is that Fate Alban has not been in your facility, not at any time?”
“No,” he said. “Our patient, the patient who has lived here for five decades and who left here unsupervised more than a week ago, is Mercy Alban.”
“But—” I started, but didn’t quite know where I was going with the thought.
“Miss Alban, I hate to cut this conversation short, but I have patients to see,” Dr. Baptiste said. “I’ll be in touch with Mrs. Jameson about when to expect the nurse to pick up Mercy. Tomorrow, the next day at the latest, depending on flight schedules. And do make sure she gets her medication between now and then. It’s vital. I’ll prescribe a sedative also. Please call me if you need anything. I want to be in closer touch with you as we move forward.”
“Yes,” I said, staring out the window into the garden. “Yes, I will.”
And he hung up. I sat, cradling the phone in my hands.
“What was that about?” Jane asked, her eyes watery, her voice cracking.
I just looked at her for a moment. “Jane, it’s the oddest thing,” I began, the words sounding strange and otherworldly as they slipped from my tongue. “The doctor told me that the woman upstairs on the third floor is Mercy Alban.”
She shook her head, smiling slightly, a chuckle on her lips. “That’s impossible.”
“That’s what the doctor said.”
“But Miss Grace, that’s impossible,” Jane repeated, still smiling. “Mercy died, right here in Alban House, when she was ten years old.”
“I don’t understand this any more than you do, but apparently, she didn’t die back then,” I said, finally hanging up the phone. “That’s Mercy up there, Jane. The doctor said my grandfather built a wing on that hospital for Mercy when she was a child, and she came to live there a decade or so later. Why would a father build a wing on a hospital for the criminally insane for his daughter—who was a child? Why would someone do something like that, Jane?”
Her mouth was a tight line, her spine rigid. “But it’s Fate Alban who disappeared that night.”
“How can you insist that when the doctor tells us different?” I shot back.
“The doctor wasn’t here all those years ago,” she cried. “I was!”
“But you weren’t there at the hospital for the past fifty years,” I said. “They even named the facility after her, because my grandfather gave so much money for her care. It’s called Mercy House.”
Jane shook her head slowly. Her eyes were focused on me, but I knew she was looking into the past, back to a rather chaotic night a half century earlier.
“And, here’s the other thing, Jane,” I went on. “Say the woman upstairs right now, the woman who lived in that hospital for the past five decades, is indeed Fate Alban. Why would her father have built a whole wing on that hospital to mimic this very house ten years or more before the night she disappeared? Fate wasn’t insane as a child. Was she?”
Jane shook her head. “Ach, no. Never more a sunny girl than your aunt Fate. Sweet and dear and funny until the day she disappeared.”
“So why then would her father, my grandfather, have built a wing at a hospital for the criminally insane for her, thinking she’d end up there someday? It doesn’t make any sense, Jane. It just doesn’t.”
“He wouldn’t.”
I watched Jane’s face morph from defiant to ashen to stone as something, a realization, took hold of her. She leaned across the desk between us and, uncharacteristically, took my hand.
“Miss, I want you to listen to me carefully,” she said slowly, holding my gaze with her steel-gray eyes. “If it’s truly Mercy up there, I think it’s best that you and the girls don’t spend another night under the same roof with her.”
“I’ve already arranged for Amity to stay over with her friend,” I said, pulling free of Jane’s grasp and walking across the room toward the window. “And it’s no problem for the lads to move back into the gardener’s house. But Jane, you and I have been here for days with Fate—Mercy—whomever. You’re going to the pharmacy to get her meds today. The doctor said he’s going to prescribe a sedative as well, so I think she’ll be pretty harmless. Don’t you? I certainly don’t want to leave.”
“Can’t you stay with your pastor friend?” she asked, her eyes earnest.
I leaned against the window frame. “No, that’s out of the question. I could just stay in a hotel … but Jane, aren’t you overreacting? Getting the girls out of here is one thing, but me? You sound afraid, Jane. But she’s just a sick, old lady. Isn’t she?”
“Miss Grace,” she said, her voice low and guttural, her old accent more pronounced than I had heard it in years. “You need to understand. Listen to me, and hear this now. It may be true that it’s not Fate Alban upstairs in her old suite of rooms. It may be true that, like the doctor said, it is indeed Mercy Alban.” She took a long breath and shook her head. “But it is also true that Mercy Alban died, right here at Alban House, when she was ten years old. I buried her myself.”