The Lost and the Damned (5 page)

I laughed loudly and cheered, no doubt disturbing anyone in rooms adjacent to me. I jumped up and down, simply elated that I had something. I fucking had something! Something that none of the others had. The bizarreness, the unreality of it, the unlikeliness had not hit me in my drunken stupor. All I knew was I had a chance. I never doubted that a simple dream would lead me to her, I never questioned how impossible it was that a dream would bring me to that place.

In retrospect, maybe I should have.

I booked a flight that left in the morning for Vermont.

Three

I’m not sure what exactly I expected to find when I went to that spot in the woods in Vermont. Maybe Katie Vanders in a shallow grave among weeping pines. Maybe a cabin in the woods where she was held captive. Those things would have been easier, better. Instead I found secrets and danger in the little town of Sommersfield.

I flew into the Newport Airport and rented a car. I drove west, traveling through Troy and then south to Lowell.  Along the way, my phone rang. I answered and heard a familiar voice: “O, for a draught of vintage that hath been / Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, / Tasting for Flora and the country green, / Dance and Provencal son, and suburnt mirth!”

I sighed. “Hello Morty.” This was just one of many of Morty’s quirks. Since taking me under his wing, he now jokingly refers to himself as “a patron of the arts.” If you weren’t aware, I share a name with a famous poet of old, John Keats. And since he is my partner, Morty considers himself my “patron.” He also finds it amusing to quote me bits of Keats poems whenever he calls me. I’m sure he has a volume of Keats he keeps by the phone just for this purpose. Over the past few years, I’ve heard more Keats than even my high school English teachers subjected me to. I wonder what he’ll do when he runs out of quotes. Reusing just doesn’t seem his style.

“Afternoon, John!” said Morty. “How’s Chicago?”

“I’m in Vermont actually.”

“A very long flight layover?”

“More like a lead.”

“See?  This is what I told them.  My golden boy would have the girl found within a week.”

 “You give me too much credit, Morty. Finding a missing girl in an unfamiliar town is very different from taking a few pictures of an unfaithful husband dipping his wick in the wrong place.”

He laughed.  “Yet you are already in Vermont following a lead you didn’t think you’d have.”

“Yeah, well, about that.  Consider this a very long shot.  I got a feeling on this one.”

“Just a feeling?”

“Sometimes I have to go with a feeling, Morty.  But I’ll let you know this pans out.”

“Of course,” he said. “Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Tough Guy Detective.”

“I wish,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Good luck, my friend.”

I stopped for gas in Lowell, where I decided to pick the gas station attendant’s brain. I went inside the shop and grabbed myself a candy bar to bring to the register. The man at the register wore blue jeans, a baseball cap, and a fleece jacket. As he rang me up, I asked casually, “Hey, is there anything west of here? In the woods? Parks, hunting?”

“You mean Tillotson Mill?” he asked, chewing his gum.

I had seen Tillotson Mill on the map and knew it was a bunch of lonely roads between here and my coordinates. I had considered that she could be there, but the coordinates were so exact. I played dumb. “Tillotson Mill? What’s that?”

“A couple of homes out that way. Old roads. Technically a village, but all spread out. No parks. No hunting unless you know someone who lives out there. Nice people, though. I have a cousin there.”

“Anything past that?” I asked. “I saw on the map there are some woods there. No hiking and camping there?”

He gave me a funny look I couldn’t read. “You don’t want to go out there.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You just don’t want to go out there,” he said, putting my candy bar in an unnecessary bag.

“Why? What’s out there?” When he looked at me strangely, I said with a friendly smile, “C’mon, you can’t just say something like that and not expect me to be curious.”

He cracked a smile. “That’s fair. But curiosity killed the cat, y’know.”

“Luckily, I left my cat at home,” I said. “Now c’mon, really. What’s out there that I don’t want to see?”

“There’s just not much out there, just a small town…”

“Tillotson Mill?” I asked.

“No,” he said, taking a moment to swallow and wet his mouth. “There’s another town.”

“Huh?” I said. “The map I got from the gas station in Newport had nothing between Tillotson Mill and Belvidere. I think I got ripped off.”

“No,” he said, “It’s not like that. It’s not on maps. It’s that way purposely.”

“Purposely? Why?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody I know at least.”

“So there’s this town that’s not on the map, but nobody knows why and no one questions that?” I wasn’t sure if he was being on the level. It was adding up wrong.

He leaned across the counter conspiratorially. “There’s a place there. Nobody likes to talk about it. Never was a good place, the current doctors aren’t anything better. People around here don’t like talking about it, and people there don’t want it advertised. So I guess it doesn’t get on maps.”

“But I’ve seen satellite photos!” I said. “It doesn’t appear on there either!”

He leaned back. I had just overstepped “seeing it on a gas station map”, and I think he knew it. He folded his arms. “Maybe they got some friends in high places.”

The rest of our conversation was rather cold. I was asking too much and I had overstepped the bounds of friendliness. I did manage to get directions out of him. He gave them reluctantly, but at this point he seemed to not care what happened to me. I got in my car and followed the roads, taking them slow. I didn’t want to crash when I was so close. Eventually I found the sign on the side of the road: Sommersfield, population 237.

The sign was rather well maintained, sticking out from brush and trees. But if I hadn’t been driving slow, I would have missed the rest of it. Below the sign, there was scraggily brush, overgrown and uncared for. I could just make out something sticking out of the brush. I pulled the car over to the side and got out. The ground dropped off sharply on the edge of the road. My footing was uneasy, but it was enough to get a handful of branches. With effort, I pulled it back revealing a second, older sign. The sign was dark and aged, but I was able to read it well enough: Sommersfield Mental Hospital.

The plot thickens.

I let the brush go, the branch scraping some skin off my hand. I got back into the car and I followed the road until the trees opened, revealing a very small town. It looked to me just a short main street and a few houses on roads off the main street. From here I could see a road leading out the other end of town, through trees and up a hill. On the top of that hill there was a monstrosity of architecture, a nightmare of bricks and mortar. Slouched upon that hill was Sommersfield Mental Hospital.

Just looking at it gave me a chill. There was something that definitely wasn’t right about it, even at a distance. It was old architecture weathered by time and washed with dirt. It stretched out over the entire hill, a huge complex of wings and windows. It looked out over the town and dwarfed it. The hospital must have been bigger than all the buildings in town put together. There seemed to a disproportion between the size of the hospital and the size of the town.

I drove down the main street and parked in front of the diner, a red cursive neon sign declaring it Lorraine’s. I got out and looked over the street. A grocery/pharmacy, a post office, a motel, and Lorraine’s. Nothing more. That was a very small main street, not much of a walk, not much of anything. Just the bare essentials needed to even be a town. I turned and entered the diner, a bell ringing as the door opened.

The diner looked like a fugitive from a retro-truck-stop revival. The counter had round leather stools on silver bases, while silver mirrors gleamed from behind the counter. Pies and cakes on stands with glass tops were displayed across the counter. Comfortable red leather booths ringed the restaurant while small square formica tables with requisite Heinz 57 bottles filled the center of the restaurant. I looked around the diner and found it mostly empty, unsurprising for three o’clock in the afternoon. I took a seat at the counter, where I was greeted by the waitress. She had a warm smile and dark red hair, dyed and tied back. She was pretty and did her makeup as if she were in her early thirties, which was still quite flattering. The lines on her face showed she was older than she let on, causing me to place her in her early fifties. I knew she had a friendly way by the way she greeted me with, “Afternoon, sugar.”

“Afternoon,” I responded. I peered at the nametag on her apron, which said LORRAINE. “Are you
the
Lorraine?”

“Sure am,” she said with a smile, “Owner, proprietor, head waitress, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” With how she spoke, that last part sounded instead like excedera, excedera, excedera.

“That’s an impressive list of titles.”

“Not really, just enough to make me happy,” she said. “They mean jack and squat to be truthful. I have to keep this place running and it doesn’t matter what they call me. If there’s something to be done and there’s no one doing it, I have to get it done.

“But here, I’m talking about myself, that’s not the hospitality I was taught to give. What about you? You obviously aren’t from around here,” she said, “and I know you’re not here to see the sights.”

“No,” I said with a smile, “definitely not for the sights.”

“Relative?” she asked, nodding her head in the direction of the hospital.

“Nah,” I said. “I just like going off the beaten path.”

She poured me coffee without even asking. “Nothing wrong with that, not typical though. You write for a travel magazine or something?”

“Maybe someday,” I said, “But not now. I just like seeing hidden America.  And it seems like this place is very hidden,” I said, looking around.

“Not really hidden, sugar,” she said. “Just old, forgotten. Old places like this aren’t popular locations. Why would people want to see an old broken down mental hospital when they could see some colonial inn or battle site? We don’t get many tourists.” She chuckled. “Any. We really don’t get any tourists.”

“But then why are you here? How do you stay in business with only the 200-some-odd residents of the town?”

She laughed. “Don’t believe that sign out there. The town doesn’t have two-hundred residents. Not how you’d think. Most of the two hundred are up there,” she said, nodding toward the hospital again. “There’s only a handful of us in town. I do most of my business with visitors. Relatives, friends, doctors. It’s the only reason I’m still here. Sometimes I even wonder why I stay…”

“So the hospital is still open?” I said, genuinely surprised. “I mean, it looks so… I thought it was closed down.”

“It was. Well, almost,” she said. Since the diner was empty, she was very talkative. “Its heyday was back in the thirties. My grandma told me what it was like at that time. Construction going on continually, not enough room for all the patients. It was not only mental patients but also some patients with chronic health issues. But as time went on, mental health care changed. Institutionalization was unpopular and there were budget cuts.  They started shutting down entire wings. In the Eighties they had to discharge a bunch of people due to big budget cuts. That was a dark time for this town. My mom retired during that time, said she didn’t want to run a diner that no one went to. I took over the diner and nearly went bankrupt keeping it afloat. If it wasn’t for my regulars, I’d be out on the streets. In the mid Eighties, there wasn’t anyone coming to visit, because almost no one was up at the Beast. Then –“

“The Beast?” I asked.

She had an embarrassed smile, like I had caught her with her hand in the cookie jar. “That’s… That’s what we call it,” she said, nodding toward the hospital again. “Locals. In private. It’s just… when you look it up there on that hill, especially at night, it just looks… horrifying….” She trailed off, she smile disappearing from her face as she stared into space. She caught herself and smiled at me. “You won’t tell anyone, right? I try not to say it in front of visitors. Nobody wants to think of their loved one at ‘The Beast’. But you don’t have anyone here, so it’s okay, right? I’m sorry if I offended, but…”

“It’s okay,” I said reassuringly, “I won’t tell.”

“The name fits it perfectly, doesn’t it?” she laughed. “Just so creepy up there. I don’t even go any closer to it than here and I’m still sometimes scared to get into my car at night. Imagine me, a grown woman, afraid of a glorified haunted house!” She laughed again. “I don’t know if it’s haunted, if that’s what you’re wondering. But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I’m not much for ghosts anyway,” I said. “But you were saying, back in the mid Eighties?”

“Oh yes, I completely derailed myself!” she said. “I’m just a talker, hun, so bear with me. I ramble. Oh, did you want something to eat? I gave you coffee but maybe you want something else.”

“For now, I’m mainly looking for a cup of coffee and good conversation,” I said, “Though, I will say I’ve been eyeing that pie since I came in. Cherry?”

“You know it, sugar,” she said. “A piece?”

“I shouldn’t,” I said, “but sure. Gimme some pie.”

She cut me a slice, which I began to pick at while she continued her story. “In the mid Eighties, the hospital was practically empty. There was a stretch from ‘85 through ‘92 where there was just one doctor, an administrator, and two very unhappy nurses. The nurses used to come in here every day and all those two would do was complain and complain. Mean-spirited too. I would have hated to be one of their patients. There were rumors of very bad stuff going on up there, but nothing proven, you know. Between you and me, I think it could have been true.”

“So what happened?” I prompted.

“The state closed it down,” she said, washing a glass.

“It closed down?”