33.

Gretchen and Nina slid through the door into the dilapidated house.

"We've been waiting for you," the woman had said. What was that all about?

Nina had hung back, concerned about entering. She'd sputtered about the bad aura permeating the building, but followed Gretchen inside after calling Caroline on her cell to let her know where they were.

The other part of their team would continue with the search and meet them back at the museum in approximately one hour.

The living room smelled of talc.u.m powder and mothb.a.l.l.s.

"I'm Nora Wade," the woman said, showing them to a flowered sofa covered in yellowed plastic. "This is my mother, Bea."

Most of the mothball smell seemed to be coming from the old shriveled woman sitting in a matching upholstered chair in a corner of the small room. Heavy drapes on the windows were pulled shut. A lamp on an end table supplied the only light.

Gretchen gave Nora her warmest smile before she said, "Our doll club is renovating the Swilling home, and we're searching for history on the house and the Swilling family members. We are looking for neighbors who may have known them."

A knowing look pa.s.sed between the other two women.

An affirmation that they knew the family? "Did you know them?"

Another look at each other before Nora nodded.

Wonderful. They'd found someone from the old days who might be able to help. They'd found someone from the old days who might be able to help.

"Would you like some tea?" the mother, Bea, asked. Her voice was so low that Gretchen had to strain to hear her.

Gretchen shook her head.

"No, but thank you," Nina said.

"What did you mean," Gretchen asked, "when you said that you had been waiting for us?"

Nora sat down on the edge of the sofa close to Gretchen. The heavy fragrance of talc.u.m powder came from her. "We weren't waiting specifically for you, but it was only a matter of time before people started wondering about that family and the house. You couldn't have been inquiring about any other. Besides, we've seen you in the neighborhood. You're the ones who are restoring the Swilling house."

"Please tell us what you know."

As it turned out, Nora Wade's mother had lived her entire life in the home they were in at the moment. Gretchen didn't think a single piece of furniture had been replaced during all those years. And the drapes must have been drawn to keep natural light from exposing layers of grime and the sorry condition of the furnishings. Dust danced in the lamplight.

"I remember when Flora disappeared," Bea said, speaking slowly and softly. Gretchen again strained to hear. "The family had so many tragedies, one right after another. You've known families like that, I'm sure, where everything goes wrong for them."

"Yes, I have," Gretchen said.

"The family had a long history of mental issues, but Richard had the most serious of the lot. Rachel was one year younger than Richard, and he hated her from the day she was born. He was a willful, jealous child, and when Rachel was ten, he tried to smother her with a pillow."

"Shocking," Nina said.

Gretchen and Nina exchanged concerned glances. If psychic ability ran in families as Nina believed, then Gretchen had a little of her own and was feeling it now. It wasn't warm and fuzzy. She felt as cold as one of Aunt Gertie's Michigan winters, as if her veins had turned to ice and were slowly freezing her arms and legs.

"His mother stopped him in time," Nora said. "But he became more and more dangerous as he grew. Richard started along his violent path in the same way many people with mental problems begin. He was horribly cruel to animals. His poor sister would tell the most awful stories about him."

"A lot of whispering went on in the neighborhood," Bea said. "I tried to tell Flora about the danger her son posed, since we were friends, but she wouldn't listen. The entire community was afraid of him. Finally when he was a teenager, the family sent him to a special place for people like him. What a relief for the entire neighborhood's sake."

"Did he ever return?" Gretchen asked.

Bea shook her frail head. "No. Rumors came and went about what happened to him. Some said he existed in a vegetative state after a botched lobotomy. Others thought they spotted him on the streets of Phoenix periodically. I always suspected he was dead. Then that woman from California showed up here looking for Rachel and strange things began to happen."

Gretchen sat up straight. "Did you meet Allison Thomasia? Did you speak with her?"

"My mother didn't," Nora said. "But I met her while I was out on one of my daily walks. She was standing in front of the Swilling house, staring at it. I asked her if she had a special interest."

"When was this?"

"A few months ago. When was it, Mother?"

"About then."

A few months ago? Had Allison been in Phoenix all that time? Or had she made two trips?

"She was tracing her family history," Nora said. "She said she was related to the Swilling branch. I gave her as many details as I could, like I'm doing now. Recently that young woman was found dead in the cemetery."

"Yes, we know," Gretchen said. "She designed dolls."

"She had a nice doll with her. Kind of strange for my taste, but you could tell that she had talent even if it wasn't my cup of tea."

Gretchen asked Nora to describe the doll. Flowing hair, fairy wings, ivy on the doll's leg. It was the same one found in the cemetery.

"She said she was going to give the doll to the next relative she met," Nora said. "She liked to do that, give away dolls, she said. The dear never had a chance."

Gretchen was pretty sure that Allison had found her next of kin. But the doll had been discarded along with the dollmaker's body. "Do you know why Rachel didn't live in the house anymore?"

"Too much misery," Bea said. "Flora's daughter had mental problems of her own."

"Well," Nora said, "we don't know that for a fact. But she had more than one side to her, that's for sure. Not that I'd speak ill of the dead."

"Of course not," Nina said.

Gretchen remembered Flora's metal-head doll and her travel trunk. "One more thing," she said. "I have a picture." She found it in her purse and handed it to Nora. "Flora's doll trunk fascinates me. Do you know how she got the travel stickers? Did she really visit all those wonderful places?"

Nora got up and took the picture over to her mother. "That's Flora. The memories this picture brings back!" Bea said. "Mr. Swilling, Flora's father, was an archaeologist. He traveled to foreign locations to partic.i.p.ate in digs and always returned with stickers."

That explained the exotic locations represented by the doll trunk's stickers. Cairo, Jericho, Rome. Cities with important archaeological significance.

"Did you find Mr. Swilling's rock collection in the house?" Nora asked.

"No," Caroline said. "But we found the doll Flora is holding in the picture."

"If I were you," Nora said, "I'd stay away from anything having to do with that family. The house and the family, if anyone's left, are cursed."

"Really?" Nina said, showing more interest than previously. "A curse?"

"She meant that figuratively, Nina," Gretchen said. They didn't need a ghost and and a curse. She shot her aunt a warning glance and projected out, a curse. She shot her aunt a warning glance and projected out, No ghost stories, please. No ghost stories, please.

It didn't matter whether or not Nina picked up the unspoken signal to refrain from telling her own ghost theory, because Nora stood up, signaling the end of their conversation.

"Go home now," Bea whispered, appearing more shrunken than ever. "You're pretty girls. You don't want to be next."

34.

Gretchen and Caroline worked side by side at one of the library's computer workstations. Expanded search strings had failed to produce information on Richard Berringer.

Caroline typed in a search string. Insane asylum patient lists. Insane asylum patient lists.

Thousands of pages of records came up for inst.i.tutionalized patients throughout the country.

"This is going to take days," Gretchen said, scanning page after page. "And we can't be sure his records were ever computerized."

"And once we find the records, they won't give us information about the present. We still won't know where he is." Caroline rubbed her neck. "The best we can hope for is a better understanding of mental disorders, so we know what we're dealing with. Here it says that the Insane Asylum of Arizona dates back to the 1800s. Thousands of patients were committed to it against their will. But then during the human rights movement, a bill was pa.s.sed. It stated that a person had to be dangerous to themselves or others to be confined."

"Before that, no one needed a reason to commit another person?"

Gretchen was shocked at the facts regarding sanatoriums, at the absence of any kind of patients' rights. She was developing a new appreciation for how much society had changed in regard to mental health laws.

Gretchen pulled up a lengthy list of patients and their diagnoses from an asylum that had been located on the East Coast. Insanity conditions, according to the charts, ranged from hallucinations to dementia, incoherency to delirium of grandeur.

"Delirium of grandeur?"

"Same as delusions of grandeur. In my day," Caroline said, as though she were an ancient artifact, "families could band together and inst.i.tutionalize another family member. It was a convenient way to remove dangerous people from society, whether the threat was perceived or real. If your relatives thought that you might harm yourself or someone else, off you went. Of course, some people took advantage of the law and abused their power. Patients were sent away because they were afflicted with diseases or had certain disabilities that their families couldn't or didn't want to deal with."

"I can't imagine our society allowing that to happen," Gretchen said.

"But we did. The mentally ill could be placed in a facility and abandoned forever," Caroline said. "The laws eventually changed, thank goodness, and people could no longer be inst.i.tutionalized against their will. Over time, the insane asylums closed. Many are abandoned buildings to this day."

"What happened to a released patient after the new laws were pa.s.sed?" Gretchen asked.

"They rejoined society the best they could. Many were released in downtown Phoenix to fend for themselves. Social service agencies that could have rehabilitated patients for re-entry into society didn't exist. Some of the released patients' families would have taken over the responsibility of caring for them. Some must have become homeless."

Gretchen leaned back and rubbed her weary eyes. "Mentally ill patients were abandoned on the streets without professional care. One of them could have been Richard Berringer."

"That's right. Or one might have been Rachel, based on what Nora and Bea told you."

"But she's dead. We need to find out what happened to him him." The task was monumental. If they had weeks maybe, but they didn't.

After a few minutes of contemplating the Berringer family time lines, Gretchen opened the notebook she had carried while canva.s.sing the Swilling neighborhood. She began drawing a simple sketch of a family tree, constructing branches and filling in dates of births, deaths, and disappearances. Information from the Swilling gravestones helped, but most of the doodles were Gretchen's a.s.sumptions.

She drew a tiny question mark next to Flora's name, then, remembering what Matt had told her, crossed it out and wrote the year the woman had vanished: 1981. "We can a.s.sume for now that she was murdered close to or on the day she disappeared," she said to Caroline, who had stopped searching to watch her daughter work.

"She disappeared in the early eighties," Caroline said. "At a time of social change, when patients in the sanatorium were being released. We don't know that Richard was still in an insane asylum when the laws changed."

"But the dates fit." Gretchen looked at her simplistic effort at charting a family's history.

Richard Berringer, Flora's son, could be the killer. But would he have murdered his own mother? And what about Allison Thomasia? Did he kill her because she came too close to the truth behind his missing mother?

She could imagine the scenario.

The Berringer family's son Richard was mentally ill. He might have had many issues, an established pattern of violence. The family had to deal with his problems once and for all. Prison or an asylum? Which would be worse? They made a choice. He remained in a sanatorium for years. Then changes to the mental health laws put him out on the street without follow-up treatment for his condition and without a place to live.

After that, his mother disappeared.

Did he return for revenge and kill her, leaving her decaying body in the armoire?

If an enthusiastic family genealogist showed up asking questions, delving into his past, he might have arranged to meet her at the cemetery. He might have murdered her.

Everything made sense.

If Allison found Richard and told him of her plan to search through the family's past, that meant he was near, close enough to lure Allison into the cemetery to silence her forever.

Richard might be living under an a.s.sumed name. Or he could be one of the homeless that Gretchen had seen at the rescue mission or at the soup kitchen.

Richard Berringer could be anyone.

Caroline's phone rang, interrupting Gretchen's thoughts of murder. Her mother, immersed in reading an item on the Internet, handed it to Gretchen without looking at the caller ID.

"We went to pick up the dogs from your house," Nina said. "A cop stopped us outside. Then your honey showed up."

Gretchen heard April whooping in the background. "What a man!" came through loud and clear.

"Quiet down, April," Nina said. Her aunt sounded tense. "I can't hear myself think."

"You didn't tell him where I was, did you?" Several library patrons glanced toward her. She rose from her chair and walked out into the entryway for privacy.

"No, I didn't tell him," Nina said. "But only because I promised you I wouldn't. Isn't he on the same side as we are? I don't get it."

"Someone tried to kill your sister," Gretchen said, keeping the threatening note and concerns about her own safety out of the conversation. "Matt doesn't want to give us the chance to help her. He wants to place us under lock and key. If he had his way, we'd be behind bars while he machos around."

"He's so protective, not to mention smart," her aunt said. "Let him take care of both of you. Your last reading was a bad one. You need all the help you can get, and he's one explosive package to have on your side."

"I know it sounds crazy, but I have to be my own woman." Nina wouldn't understand her inner turmoil. She needed to say it out loud, to listen to herself, determine if she was acting like a kook.

"You're still reacting to the split from that control freak," Nina said. "Matt isn't Steve."