“Thank you. I’m good friends with an officer in the Traverse City Police Department. His name is Harrison Blunt.”
Riza snorted. “He’s a cop and his last name is Blunt?”
Casey grinned and shook his head. “You can take the cat out of the alley…”
She flipped him off.
“Harrison Blunt and I have been buddies for about seven years. He was a cop in training during my rehab days and we got to be friends. He’d come around a few times a week to serve warrants. He told me this morning that Sandy was hit in the back of the head hard, probably with a baseball bat. They found wood embedded in her skull.”
Riza flinched. She hadn’t seen Sandy since they were children, but an image of her pale blonde hair matted with blood and bone rushed into her mind. The pizza in front of her looked suddenly grotesque, and Riza wished she hadn’t taken a bite.
“Shit,” she whispered.
“Yeah. The guy didn’t shove her off. He made her stand against the rail and then whacked her in the back of the head. Even if she hadn’t fallen, she would have been dead from that injury.”
Riza closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. “Poor Sandy.”
“Yeah.” Casey finished another slice of pizza and started on a third.
“How do you explain your interest to this cop? Doesn’t Blunt wonder why you’re asking?”
“I’ve been doing it for years. We talk about cases and bounce around theories. I’ve helped out a few times, and they actually caught a guy once based on a suggestion I gave to Blunt. He’d never tell his superiors that, of course. He’d get in deep shit if they knew he was sharing case information with a civilian, but…” Casey shrugged. “He trusts me.”
“What murder did you help him with?”
“No one connected to us. There was a guy who stabbed a bar owner in an alley a couple of years ago. We talked about the case and I remembered reading about a feud between the bar owner and the guy who owned the building next door. I wondered if he killed the bar owner and staged it to look like some drunk who did it in the alley after the bar closed. Turned out I was right.”
“Good instincts.”
“I’d like to think we all developed those.”
Riza sighed and pushed her plate away. “I can’t eat this, Casey. And I can’t make sense of any of this either. Why is this happening now?”
“I don’t know. Jaws has been living on the streets for as long as I can remember. I let him crash here a few times, but…” Casey shook his head. “He didn’t like the walls surrounding him. He said he felt trapped. And then suddenly he was murdered.”
“We all should have ended up under the bridge,” Riza murmured. “Why did we make it out when he didn’t?”
Casey lifted his eyebrows. “You think we made it out? My prison’s up here.” Casey tapped a finger on his temple. “I can take one look at you and know yours is too.”
Riza bristled, and he held up his hands. “Don’t go freaking out on me. I’m not the enemy, Riza. I’m answering your question. None of us got out of that place alive, not really.” He stood abruptly and walked down the hall, then turned back to look at her. “I want to show you something.”
Riza sighed and followed him, glancing in rooms. She saw a clean bathroom with a white-tiled floor and blue countertop. A bedroom with pale blue walls and a bed with a white bedspread stood on their right. At the end of the hall, Casey opened a door and started down a dark stairway. She held back until he flipped on a light at the bottom of the stairs.
Riza started down, relieved not to see cement floors and cobwebs. Basements gave her the willies, and she’d avoided them for years. The floor was laminate, peeling up at the sides, but otherwise in good shape. When she stepped off the bottom stair, her mouth fell open.
A floor-to-ceiling corkboard wall stretched the length of the basement. It had to be seven feet high and fifteen feet long. It was layered in papers, photographs and newspaper clippings. At the end of it stood plastic bins filled with books, notebooks, and newspapers.
The same stuff that she’d collected after she fled the asylum stood before her. In those earlier years, she’d clung to any scrap of news about the former hospital and the doctors who had died. Riza had pretended it was useful, but eventually realized it was chronic, on the edge of compulsive. One therapist at a rehab had even mentioned a diagnosis of OCD. Riza had saved receipts, business cards, chewing gum wrappers, the labels off shampoo bottles. That had been before she’d started working with Amy, before her real recovery began. Now she saved nothing.
Casey’s neurosis was far more organized than Riza’s had ever been. Every bin had a label and lid tightly pressing the contents inside. The space was clean, the floor swept, the rafters free of webs.
She saw the printouts of the online forums tacked to the corkboard. He’d highlighted her comments—username KillinTime11—in yellow.
Casey walked to a bin and yanked the lid off, dropping it on the floor. He dug down through dozens of other notebooks until he found a purple and green striped notebook. He held it up. “It’s asylum history from 1986.”
“What about the others?”
“I have a dedicated notebook for every year the asylum was operating. It’s not everything, of course, just the stories I’ve heard first- and second-hand and anything in the news.”
Something niggled in her guts, a flutter, an excitement like she hadn’t known in a very long time, something she’d quelled and turned away from in the intervening years.
“Everything we wanted to know back then, Riza. It’s so much bigger than we ever imagined.”
She and Casey had spent countless hours theorizing about what lay at the heart of the evil that seeped out of the asylum. It wasn’t only in the doctors who held them captive. It seemed to shimmer in the surrounding air, to vibrate in the land beneath their feet. Sometimes they called it He Who Walks Behind the Rows, from the movie Children of the Corn, which they’d stolen a VHS copy of from the liquor store that also rented videos. The Six had watched it one night when the doctors left the generator running so they had power. Jaws and Sandy had both had nightmares for a week.
“How did you find all this stuff?”
Casey surveyed the room, pride in his face. “Painstakingly,” he admitted. “The internet changed the game. That’s when I really started discovering things about the Northern Michigan Asylum.”
“May I?” she asked, holding out a hand.
Casey grinned and handed her the book. “Mi casa, su casa, Riza. I built this place for us.”
In the back of her mind, the new and improved Riza said, No. Turn around and walk out the door, never look back.
Instead, she peeled open the cover on the notebook and started to read.
6
Riza didn’t leave the basement except to use the bathroom for the next twelve hours. For the first two hours, Casey sat with her, guiding her through the corkboard, pointing out the especially interesting boxes. But then he left, mentioning something about a night shift, and she barely heard him. Riza sensed he wanted to let her explore, leave her to uncover the secrets on her own. After twelve hours, she’d only scratched the surface, but it was all there, all the secrets they’d been determined to find out. They were like the kids in the Boxcar Children storybooks they’d read aloud to each other at night—uncovering bits and bobs, but never getting to the meat of the thing.