The Milwaukee County Institution Grounds were part of a large swath of land west of the city. Milwaukee County had bought this land from farmers in order to house the impoverished, insane, and ill citizens of Milwaukee back in the 1800s. There was a poor farm, an orphanage, an insane asylum, and eventually, several hospitals and schools. The land was also used to bury the city’s unfortunates, which included anyone who could not afford a burial, or anyone whose body was left unclaimed at the morgue. (Also, evidently, cadavers, and bodies that had been subjected to dissection by scalpel-wielding medical students, were buried in boxes of body parts and medical waste on the county grounds.) The county was in the business of burying its poorest citizens until the 1970s, when it began paying private funeral homes to do that for them. Milwaukee County claimed to have forgotten the location of a number of the cemeteries. As a result, construction in this part of the city often turned up a slew of trashed or intact coffins. Later, the county grounds would be home to the Medical College of Wisconsin, a prestigious teaching-research hospital, a state-of-the-art cardiac hospital, a children’s hospital, a mental health complex with a disturbing reputation, and a lot of open, empty land. Some of this land contained remnants of the old cemeteries, many of which were no longer marked, but some of which functioned as unofficial dog parks.
The Milwaukee County Asylum Cemetery was not a beautiful spot as Dee once described it. The county hadn’t exactly hidden this plot but hadn’t made it accessible either. We found it at the end of a gravel road. There was an unpaved turnaround in front of the grassy field, a historical marker, three green dumpsters, and two porta-potties that smelled like they hadn’t been serviced in a long time. True, the field was quiet and green, and there was a vantage point near the middle where one could look out and see the county grounds below. It wasn’t possible to see Milwaukee’s downtown or the lake, though. And upon closer inspection, the grass turned out to be the particularly scruffy and tough sort, and the city hadn’t planted it evenly, so there were large patches of dirt and weeds. Dandelions grew thick. There was also an odd, conspicuous wooded thicket in the middle of the field. The growth didn’t look very old, but it was thick and thorny.
Back in the nineties, I’d read a story in the Journal about people sneaking into this cemetery and digging up skulls to sell, or to use for unspecified rites around Halloween. The place had no security (the county had no budget for this cemetery), so in lieu of that, they’d done their best to make people forget that anyone had ever been buried here. The weathered brown sign was the only indicator:
The ground before you contains the mortal remains of approximately 200 souls who died at the Milwaukee County Asylum/Hospital for the Insane. These burial grounds were open from March 1880–November 1914. Patients without financial means or family to claim them found a place of eternal peace here. May they, at rest, find the peace and sanity they desired in life.
Ma crossed herself in front of the sign. If Milwaukeeans had been stealing skulls from the cemetery since it was abandoned, I doubted these “souls” were finding any peace or sanity in death. I didn’t know if the conditions of your death or the place of your burial had any impact on the state of your soul in the afterlife. Both Ma and Dad had been raised Catholic. Our father claimed that he’d been forced to tie too many nuns’ shoes, that he’d been rapped on his palms too many times, and that he’d spent far too much of his childhood confessing sins he hadn’t committed, to raise his own children Catholic. Following his lead, Ma claimed to renounce her own family’s Catholic traditions, although I knew she clung to more of them than she wanted to admit. I heard her prayers, at least twice a day when we were growing up, and sometimes three or four times a day after Dee went missing. Her voice took on a trancelike, lyrical quality that I found very soothing. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but it didn’t matter. I knew by the song of the words what they meant. (Bring her home. Bring her home. Bring her home.)
Peter, Dee, and I, well, we were believers during desperate times, and we were agnostics during good times. Ma’s family used to chide her for letting us waffle and then for letting us go. Peter and Ma started going to St. John Vianney’s together that summer. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and I suppose they took it as another piece of evidence against me; I couldn’t even enter such a holy place because my list of sins was so long. I guess they were right.
Twenty of us showed up to walk the county grounds, including a crew of ten archaeologists, all volunteers recruited by Dr. P. Wolski brought along a buddy who had a sniffer dog and had offered his services pro bono. Ma, Pete, Suze, the psychic, and his crew were there too. Leif, who was staying at the Hyatt and was plotting some kind of rebuttal to the psychic’s story, offered to come along, but I insisted he stay away. He called me from his hotel room to make his case one last time. “I want to help,” he pleaded. “Please.”
“You can’t,” I told him. I felt some rush of pleasure at denying him what he wanted, though this feeling was tinged with a kind of dull regret. I hung up on him.
Ma handed out maps from her wheelchair and refreshed us on that grim list of things to look for: Dee’s clothing (on the Fourth, she’d been in high-waist denim shorts, a white top, and sneakers), or her personal effects (she always wore a thin silver chain our dad had given her for her thirteenth birthday), or even anything belonging to Frank (he wore a gaudy graduation ring and had a rose-gold watch with a broken second hand).
Meanwhile, Dr. P walked us through the archaeological procedures. They would excavate a two-meter-by-two-meter pit in the spot Thomas Alexander had pointed out. They would screen all of the dirt from this pit through quarter-inch mesh shaker screens in order to catch anything small or fragmented. Peter had brought a bag of shovels. The summer Dee disappeared, Peter had begun to collect shovels. He frequented garage sales, thrift stores, and flea markets to buy up old shovels. He taught himself the art of hand filing them so they cut through compacted dirt, or heavy clay, and through the roots of hardy plants. At first, the archaeologists admired his collection, and then were embarrassed when they realized the sad nature of this admiration.
We split into three groups. The psychic and his crew hung back with Ma in the gravel parking lot. Dr. P ordered some of the archaeologists to walk in transects through the field outside the thicket. They kept their heads bent toward the ground. And the rest of us went to dig in the woods. Sometimes I look back on those kinds of canvasses (this was, of course, not our first), and I get the sense that even if there had been something huge (a piece of Dee’s clothing or jewelry), we might have missed it just because we were looking so hard. I don’t know how it’s possible, but it strikes me as true that over the years, the harder and more intensely we looked for her, the less likely it became that we’d ever find her.
When we got to the thicket of woods, Peter removed a machete from his bag of tools, another thrift store purchase, and began hacking away at the vegetation, so it was easier for us to search and for the archaeologists to dig.
Inside the thicket was a small path, which led to a shrine. Peter wanted to conduct a search of the entire area, so he continued hacking away at all the vegetation. He was enjoying the sensation of destruction. The shrine was at the foot of a makeshift wooden cross that was wrapped in barbed wire and pinned to a scrawny tree. There were dozens of tiny mementos beneath the cross: rocks placed in concentric circles, fake garlands of blue flowers, a deck of playing cards, lighters, a pack of cigarettes, a pen, some bones (which we later learned were from a butchered pig), a plastic bottle of Smirnoff. It was hard to tell what was garbage and what was an offering. There was no indication of who had made the shrine, or to whom or what it was dedicated, or why it was there. Peter seemed less interested than I was. He picked through the mementos quickly and, seeing nothing that leaped out at him, kicked one of the rocks that framed the shrine. It rolled out into the field. Peter squatted in the undergrowth and looked around him. One of the archaeologists began to sketch the shrine in a weathered field notebook.
“This is bizarre,” I said. My voice echoed in the woods.
“I don’t believe it,” Peter said.
“I feel something about this place, though,” I said. I expected him to guffaw or roll his eyes at me, but he nodded.
“I know. I had the same thought as soon as we pulled up,” he said. He shook his head. Sweat poured from the sides of his face.
I crouched down too, so Peter and I were at eye level. Behind him, I noticed an odd patch of freshly upturned dirt, relatively free of vegetation.
“Pete,” I said. He turned his head to follow my gaze. He sprang up to his feet and began rifling around in his canvas bag. He pulled out a short, sharp shovel and began removing the loose dirt. I didn’t say stop, because I knew he wouldn’t listen, and because I didn’t want him to stop. He tossed the dirt into the archaeologists’ screen, and they sifted through it all with gloved hands. Though I didn’t think he was supposed to be the one digging, the archaeologists, at Dr. P’s request, let him. I recognized the look on their faces. It was the only look I ever got anymore when people learned about Dee. Pity.
Peter was still digging; his arms and hands had become caked in dirt. I went into his bag and found another shovel so I could help him. I felt we were completely alone. Ma and our aunt and the psychic were waiting outside that copse, only a few feet away, but they might as well have been a universe or a millennium away. Peter and I were stranded in that tiny spot of woods, which was a different world than the one outside. My back ached and my hands were rubbed raw by the handle of the shovel when we stopped. There was a black plastic bag at the bottom of the hole. It was then I remembered we were digging in a cemetery. It was then I remembered the stories of stolen skulls and looted graves. Dr. P put her hand up. She hopped down into the pit and used her trowel to open the bag enough to see inside. I was on the ground with my head in my hands, because I sensed I’d know by the sound Pete would make when he saw what was inside. I didn’t want to see; I couldn’t see. Peter huffed, and some of the tension in his body entered the air between us. I felt it as a great breath of wind. I felt cold even in the heat.
“It’s somebody’s dog,” Pete said. It was like Thomas Alexander had said. I believed then, I knew unequivocally, that she would be under the dog. Pete collapsed onto his back. His feet hung into the grave, and he lay down with his arms flung over his face. The shovel lay like something else dead. I wanted to go and lie with him, to fit myself into that space beneath his arm and his shoulder, and rest my head in his neck, but I stayed where I was, and I tried to regain my breath.
While Peter and I stayed still and panting, Dr. P had carefully removed the dead dog in its plastic bag shroud, and kept digging. She was much, much better and more efficient at it than we were. Every once in a while, she would use her trowel to scrape at something. We both jolted when we heard her trowel hit something metallic in the ground. We all peered into the hole and saw the outlines of a coffin appearing. The sniffer dog whined and pawed through a pile of back dirt. His handler yanked on his choke collar.