The moon was prowling between clouds like a wolf through a herd of sheep, lighting up and then concealing the dour brick fortress of the School for Feeble-Minded Youth. I clung to the spiked iron palings of the fence, wondering how I was getting in.
I hoped that she wasn’t on the top floor. The windows there were fitted with metal fire-escape tubes that swooped from the three-story building like giant ear trumpets. Did they just hurl the children down them when there was fire, like laundry down a chute?
Didn’t matter. I was getting her.
I slipped through the open gate as a carriage shuddered its way out. Before the guard could see me, I was sneaking across the grounds.
Moisture seeped into my boots from grass spongy with melted snow and rain. A light peppering of sleet had begun zinging. I was picking my way through the slush, my heart whaling at my chest, when my shin rapped something hard. I stuck out my hand and caught a wet chain. A swing?
I kept going, past an abandoned bandstand, along the brick drive empty of carriages and wagons, to the front of the building with its forbidding rows of windows. The dark seemed to hold its breath. Or was that me?
A flight of concrete steps led into the central tower, where a gas lamp hung in the portal, its flame hissing at the night. I would march inside to whoever was in charge and demand to see my baby.
I trudged up the stairs, then heaved open the door, releasing a thrum of distant disembodied voices and the stink of Lysol and despair. The desk by the door was bare save for a greasy white plate piled with chicken bones. The wooden chair behind it was askew.
“Hello?” My voice echoed down the green plaster hall.
No one answered. I not so much walked as floated toward distant voices. Fear had disconnected my mind from my feet. I glanced in rooms along the way, my brain unwilling—unable—to process the horrors it was seeing: Iron rings on the wall. Howling mouths. Flurries of limbs and hair.
Keep moving, I told myself. Find somebody to help. Find where they keep the babies.
An attendant burst from a room in a flash of white gown. I flattened myself against the wall as another flapped forth, then another. Their footsteps beat the tiny gray honeycomb tiles as they flocked to a room ringing with shrieks.
I felt invisible. Or dead.
Down more halls I drifted, and up a broad stairwell, going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the place, where the very walls seemed to contract and dilate with suffering. A sweet medicinal tang masked something pungent.
I peered through doorways, revulsion auguring through my gut. In some rooms, children sat on their cots, still as stones. In others, teenagers tore at their mattresses or at themselves. I saw trembling heaps upon the floor. Heaven help these poor lost children. How could people treat their fellow souls this way? But my baby was not among them. Had Mrs. Lamb lied?
There was one last room. Its door yawned open at the end of the hall. One last dip in, one last mortal blow to my heart, and I was done. Mrs. Lamb would have had her cruel joke.
I drew in a breath and plunged in.
It was in the corner. A single white iron crib.
My heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t see straight. Something was hanging down from the bars of the bed: four leather restraining straps, thick and flaccid as dead snakes.
I lifted my gaze to the mattress, where lay a small white-gowned figure. Its legs were splayed in the manner of porcelain limbs sewn onto the soft cloth body of a doll that had been dropped.
I leaned in.
She rolled her gaze up.
Those eyes. A kitten’s eyes.
My heart jammed to my throat.
“Shhhh. Don’t scream.”
But June was as mute as glass.