LITMIR.BIZ

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I’m not. I just need some information. Are you the person I need to talk to?”

      “I’m head of records here. Or at least I was.” Her eyes narrowed. “Are you a reporter?”

      “No.”

      “Then what kind of information do you want?”

      “A friend of mine made arrangements to move one of the deceased patients from the cemetery to a place closer to his home.”

      She picked up a stack of files and started sifting through them quickly. The desk was heaped with them.

      He went on. “But when they went to move her, the casket was full of rocks.”

      Her eyes came up to his face. “Are you a lawyer?”

      “No, just a private investigator trying to help out a friend.”

      She blew out a long breath and ran a hand over her curls. “Yes, I remember now. Someone called us a few weeks ago about this. His name was . . . Lawrence, I think. Are you him?”

      “No, but I’m working for him.”

      “What was the woman’s name again?”

      “DeFoe, Claudia DeFoe.”

      Alice shook her head slowly. “I felt bad for him, but I couldn’t tell him anything because she was an E Building patient.”

      “What’s E Building?” Louis asked.

      She paused. “Are you sure you’re not that reporter who’s been calling here?”

      “I’m a private eye out of Florida.” Louis reached in his coat and flipped open his ID card. She gave it a careful look before he put it away.

      “E Building housed the criminally insane and other patients who posed a danger to others,” she said.

      “This woman was here for depression,” Louis said. “Why would she have been in E Building?”

      Alice reached below the desk and pulled out a cardboard box. She didn’t look up as she began to stack the files in it. “Sometimes the family doesn’t know everything. People change after they come here.”

      “What about her records? Could I see them?” Louis asked.

      She arched an eyebrow. “Medical records are confidential. As a private investigator you ought to know that.”

      “Look, I really am a P.I. and the only thing I am interested in is finding out what happened to this woman’s remains.”

      Her expression changed slightly, the bright blue eyes not softening—Louis suspected she was too shrewd for that—but at least she wasn’t looking through him as if he weren’t there.

      “I can’t help you,” she said, stuffing another folder into the already packed box. “I am in charge of seeing that the patient files are moved. But all the E Building patient files are locked up over there, and I’ve been told a special crew is coming to move them next week.”

      “To make sure they don’t get in the wrong hands,” Louis said.

      “Exactly. Wrong hands, as in reporters’.”

      “What would reporters be after in this place?”

      “Donald Lee Becker. Does that ring a bell?”

      It took Louis a second to place the name. Donald Lee Becker had raped and murdered six young women at Michigan State in the sixties. He had claimed an insanity defense and had been institutionalized.

      “Becker was here?” he asked.

      She nodded. “In E Building. He died here. Last week, they found some bones on Becker’s old farm, and now the reporters have starting coming around again.”

      “So what’s going to happen to the E Building records?”

      “Someone from the state’s mental health association will go through them. Most will go to the county, some sealed and sent to the state.”

      Alice hoisted the full box with a grunt. Louis moved to help her, but she was already coming out from behind the counter. He watched as she went to the far wall and stacked it next to the others. He knew that once the state or county took possession of Claudia DeFoe’s hospital records, he’d never get a look at them.

      She came back with an empty box and started in on the next tower of folders.

      “I met a man on the steps,” he said.

      Alice hesitated. “That would be Charlie Oberon.”

      “Is he a patient?”

      “Kind of.”

      “I thought there were no patients left here.”

      Alice didn’t answer for a moment. “There aren’t. The last ones were moved months ago. We sent Charlie to a group home in Albion, but he ran away and came back here. We discovered his status has always been voluntary and he has no family.” She looked up at Louis. “He’s harmless.”

      “How long has he been here?”

      “Since he was fifteen.”

      “What’s going to happen to him?”

      Alice stopped her sorting for a second, and when she resumed she didn’t seem to be looking at the files. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been letting him sleep in one of the old beds, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to him when we lock the doors.”

      A phone rang somewhere. Alice’s eyes went down the empty hallway. Finally, the phone stopped, the ring echoing in the hallway.

      Alice looked back at Louis. “Please don’t tell anyone,” she said.

      “Tell anyone what?”

      “That I let Charlie stay here.”

      When Louis didn’t answer, she bent down and got another empty box. She began stuffing the box with the files she had just sorted. For several minutes, they were both quiet, Louis watching her as she finished filling the second box. Then she picked it up and started toward the stack of boxes at the far wall. Louis picked up the other box and followed her.

      She looked up at him in surprise when he deposited it next to the others.

      “Phillip Lawrence, the man I’m working for, he’s my foster father,” Louis said. “He was in love with Claudia DeFoe. They were going to elope but Claudia’s mother interfered. Claudia tried to kill herself and her mother sent her here.”

      Alice was quiet.

      “She was only seventeen,” Louis added.

      The phone began to ring again. This time Alice didn’t even look down the hall. She was looking hard at Louis, those keen blue eyes searching for a reason to trust him.

      She walked back to the nurse’s station. Reaching behind for a coat, she put it on. “I can’t give you the records,” she said. “But if you want to see E Building, I’ll show it to you.”

      CHAPTER 8

      Alice walked quickly, head bent against the wind, one hand holding the lapels of her wool coat closed.

      “That was originally the tuberculosis sanitarium,” she said, pointing to a building on their left. “After the TB epidemics subsided, it was transformed into a laundry and sewing department.”

      Louis glanced at it. Like all the buildings, it looked deserted, front door chained, windows dark.

      “The smokestacks are the power plant. Everything was steam heated in the early days, and somewhere around the late twenties, it was reconstructed to provide heat, lights, and hot water to the whole institution.”

      Louis paused for a second, turning almost a full circle. “How big is this place?”

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