She found Casey’s notebooks where he summarized theories. He’d read every bit of information and made connections. He’d collected newspaper articles, reached out to people online and in person. He’d been searching for years. The Six had known they weren’t the only children who’d been captive at the asylum, but as Riza read she realized the doctors were not merely doctors. They had formed a brotherhood, a secret society, that fed upon the patients who exhibited strange abilities. There were stories of people who spoke with the dead, who could tell the future, levitate objects, see into a person’s past by merely touching them.
She read one of Casey’s summaries out loud. “‘As far as I can tell, the Umbra Brotherhood emerged at the same time as the Northern Michigan Asylum itself. It comprised a vast network of doctors, not only those at the Northern Michigan Asylum, but doctors from all over the country, maybe all over the world. The chamber became a macabre theatre of sorts where they could parade their patients with supernatural abilities as if they were merely fantastical objects to be dissected.’”
Below that, he’d written the definition of ‘umbra’ according to the Webster dictionary: ‘the fully shaded inner region of a shadow cast by an opaque object, especially the area on the earth or moon experiencing the total phase of an eclipse. Also shadow or darkness.’
She poured the dregs of the coffee pot she’d carried down an hour before into her mug and sipped it, balancing the cup on a tote while she opened a notebook labeled ’Doctor Kaiser.’ Every doctor had a notebook. Every year had a notebook. Every patient Casey had discovered who’d gone into the chamber had a notebook.
She’d passed over the notebooks that listed the names of the doctors who’d been with the Six. The three doctors who’d all died in 1989.
When Casey came back sometime the following day, Riza’s head jerked up, and she dropped the notebook on her lap. She’d been reading about Kerry Manor, a house on the Leelanau Peninsula plagued by years of strange and horrifying incidents from hauntings to murders. The origin of those dark deeds appeared to involve an experiment on a child at the Northern Michigan Asylum in the early 1900s.
“Ready to come up for air?” Casey held up a white paper sack. “I’ve got a cinnamon roll, two chocolate donuts, and a lemon blueberry muffin.”
“Kerry Manor,” she murmured, gestured at the notebook. “How do you know so much about it? Who’s this guy sending you the emails?”
“His name is Will.”
“Will?” She frowned. “The murderer? The guy the police believe killed Sammy Flynn on the property in 2001?”
“Yes. He found me through one of the forums.”
“And you never turned him in?”
“It’s complicated, as I’m sure you know.”
Riza blinked at him and then looked at her watch. She should have reported to work three hours before. She hadn’t shown up or called in.
“Shit,” she muttered, standing and dropping the notebook back into a bin. “I have to go.”
“Can’t you call in? We need to talk about this.”
“No,” she snapped. “I called in yesterday. I can’t risk losing my job.” She started toward the stairs and then paused. “Why have you done all this?” She motioned at the board.
Casey fished a chocolate donut from the bag. He chewed thoughtfully before answering. “Because I wanted to know how deep it went. There’s more than this, so much more. There are a hundred asylums connected to the Umbra Brotherhood. Men from all over the country came to that chamber. Our asylum is just one place they used to torture people.”
“But why did they choose us? Why target kids?”
“By the time they got to us, the power of the place was fading. The hospital was shutting down. They had to resort to kids to run their experiments on. Simple as that. They wanted street kids, foster kids, because no one missed them when they disappeared.”
His words bought a familiar pang of jealousy. A memory of seeing a girl’s photo on the back of a milk carton beneath the block letters: ‘MISSING.’ Riza had wondered what it felt like to be one of those kids, a kid whose family searched desperately for her, a kid who was wanted.
“But why reach out to me now, Casey? Why did you have to bring me into this?”
Casey sighed. “Because someone murdered Jaws with belladonna. They killed Sandy at your apartment building. Think about that, Riza. That’s a message. Maybe it’s a warning. I don’t know.”
“I can’t do this right now. I don’t know what I was thinking of coming here.” Riza pushed past him and ran up the stairs.
He caught her at the front door and lunged in front of her, blocking her exit.
“Get out of my way,” she shouted, pushing both hands against his solid chest. It threw her off, the mass of him. Some part of her still expected the rangy boy he’d been.
“Riza, stop running. For God’s sake, stop fucking running.”
She stepped away from him, planting her hands on her hips. “Fine, let’s say for a moment that you’re right. Some psycho is killing off the Six. What do you want to do about it?”
“I want to find out who it is. I want to stop him before he kills you or Ice. And then…” He trailed off and she could see he didn’t intend to finish his statement.
“And then what?” she demanded.
“And then I want to destroy that place. I want to blow the chamber sky high. I want to put an end to the curse.”
“The curse. Now there’s a curse?”
“I guess you didn’t get to that box.”
Riza sighed and looked at the door. Casey stepped aside. She looked at her watch again and then bit her lip. In four years, she hadn’t called in sick a single time. Now she’d called in sick and then had a no-call, no-show. She tried to imagine getting in her car and rushing to work, passing the hours cleaning leaves out of gutters and sweeping off porches.
“Fine. But… I’m not committing to anything.”
Descended, destined, cursed.
Riza studied the words that seemed to jump out from the other lines of text. They didn’t fit somehow. Riza didn’t have a destiny. It was miraculous she’d survived childhood. There’d obviously been no hand of fate guiding her way through the darkness. Her own desperation to crawl out of the murk had been the only fortunate element in her life.
“Where did this come from?” She held a single sheet of paper filled with close, single-spaced text.
It spoke of a woman murdered in 1887 on the grounds that later became the Northern Michigan Asylum. Delfia Starling was her name, but they called her the Bayou Witch, the Glades Witch, and just the Witch. The Claude family who’d brought her to Michigan in the 1880s had drawn her bad favor and she’d cursed them. They’d killed her, but unbeknownst to them, she’d given birth to a secret child. She cursed the land, the Claude family, and she set forth a prophecy that she would rise again in the first girl child of her descendants. The name listed for the first female child born to Delfia’s bloodline was her own: Riza Marsh.
“I know a guy who’s into all this too, the asylum history. He got tangled up in it as well, and it’s become his life’s purpose. He hacked into the email of a man involved with the Umbra Brotherhood and intercepted this.”