Shades of Eva (56 page)

“Eva was home for a weekend just prior to
Halloween,” I began. “I was home alone. I loved her, Anna. I really
did. I swore, though, that I’d never use her in that way. I had
promised her just after she was taken here that I’d show up with a
car and a suit and a ring someday and bust her out. We’d run away
and be happy together.

“Eva and I made love. She was home on a
weekend pass. She was sixteen. I told her to hold on, that I was
going to come back for her like we always talked about—like I’d
always promised. But it didn’t happen. Things went downhill. She
became pregnant. I got scared, and when her baby was taken, I was
terrified.

“The days turned to months and then years,
and it all changed. I felt sorry for her. I felt guilty, and I
felt…pity. But above all else she frightened me. I just needed to
run...and she let me run.”

Anna let out a deep sigh that sounded like
relief. I think she finally understood. At least she seemed to, and
that’s what I needed. I needed someone to understand me and why it
was that I did what I did to Eva.

Anna didn’t judge me, just as Eva never
judged me. Instead Anna thanked me.

“Thank you for saying what you’ve said, Ben.
I too betrayed Eva—out trust and even our friendship, if I can
admit to such a thing. She was a friend. She wasn’t a patient. She
was more than that.

“I should have fought her father more than I
did. He wanted every inkling of her disease destroyed, every
artifact of her art and her imagination erased. It was as if he
were talking about a stain or something we could just wipe away.
And I went along with it.”

Anna was shaking her head,
disappointingly.

“She deserved to keep her child, Ben. At
least I did one thing for her while she was here. I told attendants
in the neonatal unit and the orphanage to keep the doors unlocked.
There were a few moms on campus who had babies while in here,
children their families didn’t want, babies who were going to be
moved to a different institution, like Elmer. I always thought that
the cruelest of reactions—taking a child away from its mother. It
wasn’t as if Eva was a threat to her son. She loved him.”

“What do you mean you kept the doors
open?”

“Eva was given some latitude with respect to
visiting Elmer. Virgil ordered Eva and Elmer separated. Thought it
would make the break easier on her if she wasn’t allowed to see him
until he could be transferred. Again, I thought that cruel. But I
allowed Eva access to her baby. She could visit him during the day,
and at night we kept the doors to the tunnels unlocked.”

“The tunnels?”

“There are tunnels beneath the Institution
that connect one building to the other. These are supply pathways,
mostly—for laundry, maintenance personnel, what have you. She was
rooming in the Hypnology Center—the rehabilitation center out
back—where Brad is staying now. There’s an underground tunnel
connecting the Main Hospital to the Center. Eva had access to the
tunnel…and ultimately to Elmer. She was allowed to take her baby
each night from neonatal back to her room. She’d keep him with her.
It was good for her and good for the baby.”

“Anna, tell me about the night Elmer was
taken.”

“That night Eva had used the tunnels to
bring Elmer to her room. That was confirmed by the neonatal unit
staff. This was about midnight. We aren’t sure what happened after
that. We go by what Eva told us, and what Ully has told us.”

“What did Eva tell you?”

“That she was assaulted very badly. And she
was. She was beaten unconscious, or had passed out, one of the two.
She said that sometime in the early morning your brother entered
her room.”

Anna paused. She was giving me time, I
think, to react to that. And she was also reacting, herself. I
suppose she felt guilty in a way. The same open door policy that
gave Eva so much happiness had left the door open for certain evil.
I nodded understandingly, and encouraged Anna to go on.

“Your brother, according to Eva’s statement,
was surprised that Elmer was with her. He wanted sex. She wouldn’t
cooperate with him, and he attacked her. She says he hit her and
she blacked out momentarily. When she came to, Fred and Elmer were
gone. She looked out the window and says she saw him disappear down
the ravine carrying something.”

“Did she say what he was carrying?”

Anna shook her head. “No. She couldn’t make
it out. She thought it was Elmer.”

“And what did Ully say?”

“Originally, he said that his sister was
right in her accusations. That your brother raped her, and that
Ully made some money off of that.”

“And what about the night Eva said Fred took
her baby?”

“Ully denies being involved with that, now.
Now he says he was home asleep.”

“But originally? Did he admit to something
different?”

“Yes, when he first arrived here, he said
that he was with Fred that night, and that Fred coerced him into
bringing him here for one last night of sex with Eva. He said that
he waited by the ravines for Fred, and that he came out in a few
minutes carrying a red toolbox.”

“A red toolbox?”

“Yes. He was specific about the color, and
what it was.”

“What did he and Fred do with it?”

“He said that Fred had stolen it, but had
gotten scared that he took it and that he decided to bury it.”

“Bury it?”

“Yes, bury it. Out back of the grounds
here.”

“Elmer wouldn’t have been in there, would
he?”

“I don’t know. I asked Ully. He didn’t know.
He said he did not think so, but wasn’t sure. Now he just simply
denies he ever said that.”

“What do you make of that?”

“I’m not sure. I think Ully recanted these
statements because police identified Abigail Angstrom. I think the
manhunt for her has given him the nerve to recant, as well as turn
his nephew in. But I can’t say for sure if he was telling the truth
about all this, or if he was coerced into saying these things by
Mitchell and Abigail. After all, they were trying to take him for
over a million dollars.”

I was listening to Anna ramble on, but my
mind was stuck on something else she’d said. “Anna, does the
institution keep records on maintenance equipment? A lost and found
record? A record of thefts, for instance?”

“Yes, of course.” Anna must have thinking
what I was thinking. As she was answering, she’d opened her desk
drawer and retrieved a small notebook. She flipped to a certain
page and then picked up a telephone and dialed.

She spoke into the phone. “Yes, it’s Dr.
Norris. Listen, I need you to come in and open up records. I’ll
make it worth your while.” A pause. “Equipment losses.” There was
another pause. “1954. Looking for a missing toolbox. It’s urgent,
alright? Thank you.”

 “I’m not sure which version to
believe,” Anna said as she hung up the phone. “We’ll look into the
maintenance records. If what Ully said was true, then there should
be a report somewhere that a toolkit was lost.”

“Anna, I know this sounds bazaar, but police
told me they found a strap saw on the premises here, and that a
black oak tree was cut down. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And now someone’s faxed in some DNA reports
comparing my DNA to the alleged DNA of Eva’s baby.”

“You’re thinking they didn’t just chop a
tree down,” Anna said, leaning forward, excitedly.

“I’m saying they might have found Elmer’s
remains. I think you are right. I think that Ully seeing Abigail’s
picture on TV gave him a little backbone, a little courage to
recant.”

I asked Anna point blank, “Could Elmer have
been smuggled out of Eva’s room in a toolbox, or do you think
something else happened to him?”

“I think Ully knows more than he’s admitting
to. I don’t think Eva was lying, either.”

“I don’t think so either.”

“What I know is that I have a few more hours
with Ully, and after tonight, I think we’ll have our answer.”

I was stunned. I was angry. I was horrified
at the idea that Ully could have been keeping—was still
keeping—such a terrible secret. How could he betray his sister—his
nephews—in that way?

And then again, why hadn’t I confessed to
police my true relationship with Eva. The answer was something I
had been telling Mitchell all along: like him, I was just a boy,
and so was Ully. We were, after all, just kids.

“Eva was frantic after that,” Anna
continued. “She made a lot of threats. She also blew some whistles.
She told administration that I’d allowed her access to the tunnels,
and that she wasn’t the only one. I was suspended after that, and
almost lost my job. Eva never forgave me for not protecting her
baby. I’ve always felt slightly responsible for what happened.”

“Your heart was in the right place,” I told
Anna. “Sometimes kindness can backfire on you.”

“Ben, this place…this profession…it has a
lot to atone for. One of the ways we do that is by staying
connected to the people who’ve come through here. I try and stay
connected to my patients. I visit them. I attend their weddings. I
attend their funerals, as many as I can. I send them cards when
they have children, and I try and visit those children. I used to
visit Eva and Brad when they lived on Maple. I met Mitchell this
way. This is how I met Abigail Angstrom.”

“You’ve met Abigail?”

“Yes. Several times. She was just a little
girl the first time I met her. She and her mother were attending an
aunt’s funeral. This aunt was a patient here. Her name was Emily.
She was a friend to Eva. She fell in love with one of our doctors,
with her psychiatrist. She was enigmatic. She was poetic, yet she
killed her own husband. She poisoned him. She poisoned him because
when he was sick, he wasn’t cruel to her. It was an accident, but
not a coincidence. She told me something once, this Emily, shortly
before she died in here. She said there were no such things as
coincidences.

“Ben, it’s not a coincidence that you’re
here. If Abby or Mitchell hadn’t have approached you, I would have
called you, because one way or the other we have to know.”

Here, Anna grew very solemn and leaned
forward in her chair. She was looking me directly in the eyes. “I
want you to go and see Brad. He is in the rehabilitation center out
back. I’ll get you a pass. Staff will give you directions. I’ll be
over shortly to talk with you both. You need to make amends,
Ben—you and Brad. I’ve told him the same thing. You’ve each loved
and lost in similar ways. This place needs your forgiveness as much
as we need hers. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

The Asylum—like any human being—had made
mistakes. It was not the Asylum of old. The old way was gone, and
like an aging convict whose committed a crime in her youth and paid
for it in a thousand different ways, she deserved forgiveness.

***

Mitchell

Abby told me that Christian had put a GPS
homing device on the undercarriage of Ben’s car, a wiretap on his
home’s landline, and a few audio-surveillance bugs about his house.
If Ben was withholding his brother’s whereabouts from police, for
any reason, then three things were likely to happen: he’d try and
telephone Fred, visit him personally, or perhaps discuss the truth
with his wife. In the end, he discussed the truth with his wife,
but he truly didn’t know where Fred was.

Allie Levantle was less than thrilled—to say
the least—at the news that her husband of almost forty years had
admitted to having sex with my mother forty years ago. Allie must
have thought old Ben a virgin when she married him. I had to allow
myself a laugh at Ben’s expense. It was a bit more justice for Mom;
a surprise to me, but justice nonetheless. Mom finally got the
credit—or the discredit she deserved—for being the first to bed
Allie’s reticent, hometown husband from the Bluffs.

When Ben began his drive to River Bluff that
evening, the device sent a roaming alarm that our computer at the
river rental house picked up. It was easy to romanticize the
scenario: a psychologist being drawn into a secret past, one
hunting for the ghost of a long-forgotten first love. It was easy
because that long-forgotten love was my mother. It felt validating,
but it was just a romantic notion.

Abby watched the blip representing Ben’s
location on the computer screen and commented, “This might be all
you ever have from the Levantles, Mitchell.”

And she was right. A hunt, which was all
this was at that point, was almost more than I could ask for.
Police were looking for Fred Levantle, if for no other reason than
to warn him. Abby and I were looking for him, and so was Ben in a
way.

The blip stayed in River Bluff
for an
hour. It was centered inconspicuously on the River Bluff police
headquarters. According to Ben’s wiretap, Ben was giving a formal
statement to police, to a Detective named Hubert Ramsey. I
remembered Ramsey. He wasn’t too happy with me as a child. I
wouldn’t—or couldn’t—answer his W questions.

About an hour later, the blip began making
its way toward a very familiar place to me: my once Maple Street
home where I’d grown up.

I had to wonder what Ben was doing there,
and furthermore, why hadn’t he bothered to stop at his own
childhood home? Abby and I were expecting him to pull up next door
once he began his trip our way, so much so that Abby and I had
taken the trouble to hide the cars down the street and hang some
old sheets in the windows to prevent him from seeing something he
shouldn’t see.

It was all for naught, as he never visited
his old house. 

He stayed at the Maple Street address for
about fifteen minutes and then began working his way east toward
the Asylum. Abby and I just looked at one another with
bemusement.

I stayed locked on the monitor, making sure
the bugs in the halfway house, particularly those in room eight
where my father was staying, were still transmitting. My hunch was
that police had told Ben that my father was rooming at the halfway
house and that Ben just might be going to pay him a visit.