The Insane Pavilion was a new, single-story brick building that ran the length of the south side of the lawn to the river. Una had never been inside, not even on her initial tour, as it was one of the few locations of the hospital not staffed by the training school. She’d learned through hushed conversations with Miss Cuddy that Superintendent Perkins refused to supply nurses for the pavilion because of insufficient physician oversight. Instead, the attendants were semi-inebriates recruited from the lodging houses, their skill commensurate with their abhorrently meager wages.
A single resident physician oversaw the ever-growing number of patients. He, along with a city-appointed Examiner in Lunacy, reviewed each case and made out the necessary certificates to commit and transfer the patients to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island.
On several occasions as she’d crossed the darkened hospital grounds after her shift, Una had heard cries from within the pavilion or seen shadowed figures behind the barred windows. Some of the nurses refused to pass by the building at night unless accompanied by the watchman. Una had met enough so-called lunatics to know it was a convenient label for many who simply didn’t fit in. Even so, she crossed herself and whispered an “Ave Maria” when walking past the building on particularly black nights.
Now, however, she had to get inside, no matter what sort of pitiful horrors lay within the walls. Mrs. Hobson and the other matrons from the governing board had flocked to Una when they heard the crash of her teacup, fussing over her pallid complexion and unsettled gaze. Overexcited, they pronounced her and shooed her out of the boardroom to rest for the remainder of the afternoon.
But Una had not returned to the nurses’ home for rest. Instead, she’d hidden in the stairwell alongside the warden’s office until she heard him return from the yard. Then she slipped outside, hovering in the shadow of the arched entryway until she was certain the coppers were gone.
What business had they been about? Surely they weren’t here looking for her. Her heart quickened again, thudding against her chest like a bird trapped in a chimney. Police came to Bellevue for all sorts of reasons, she reminded herself. They brought drunks and tramps in all the time. Invalid prisoners received care on the wards under police supervision. But that didn’t explain the orderly’s urgency or Warden O’Rourke’s grave expression. Una had to find out the reason.
The sun hung low in the sky, still muted by clouds, casting long pale shadows across the yard. Not as safe as darkness, but if the coppers suspected she were here, she couldn’t wait for nightfall. She crept down the steps and along the edge of the hospital, her seersucker skirt rasping against the stone wall. It wouldn’t do for anyone from the governing board to see her sneaking about the lawn when she ought to be resting at the home. When she neared the entrance to the Insane Pavilion, she stopped, straightened, and then crossed the lawn to the door with a purposeful, unhurried stride. Rule number five: Look like you belong.
A sharp odor struck Una’s nose as soon as she entered the pavilion. Not that of disinfectant, which she’d become accustomed to smelling throughout the hospital, but something more akin to the rear yard of a saloon where the stench of every possible bodily excretion mingled in the air. She covered her nose with a handkerchief and proceeded down the wide corridor that bisected the building, looking for the orderly she’d seen earlier. Roughly hewn doors lined either side of the corridor. A glance through the peephole revealed crowded cells lit only by the waning daylight. Patients huddled on straw beds, their breath clouding in the cold air. Others paced the small confines of the cell or stared despondently out the barred window.
Una’s skin prickled. She knew what awaited these patients on Blackwell’s Island, rich and poor alike: the Octagon. A place notorious for its filth and disease where they’d be doused with freezing water or strapped to flea-ridden beds or tied up in straitjackets with scant hope of leaving.
Little better awaited Una if the coppers found her, she reminded herself, and continued on, doing her best to ignore the moans and erratic shrieks echoing from the cells. She found the orderly on his hands and knees in the last cell, mopping up a pool of vomit. He eyed her nurse’s uniform with a mix of suspicion and surprise. The patients in the cell were staring as well,
some with a languid curiosity, others with a keenness so sharp it could cut through bone.
“You lost, miss?” the orderly asked.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“Your patients complaining about their supper? Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree.” He tossed his soiled rag into a bucket of sudsless water. “I had nothin’ to do with them missing ham hocks. If you ask me, the cook done stole ’em outta the soup pot himself.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“I ain’t responsible for no missing laudanum neither.”
“Actually, I was wondering about the police officers who were here earlier.”
The orderly stood and carried his bucket from the cell, leaving behind a long streak of vomit to dry and crust on the floor. He had the unlined face of a youth but moved with the shuffling gait of an old man. “You saw ’em, eh?” He walked past her without saying anything more, locking the door and dumping out the bucket in the nearby water closet.
Una followed behind him. “Warden O’Rourke seemed rather unnerved by their visit. Do you know what it was about?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Superintendent Perkins asked me to look into the matter.” It was better to avoid naming someone else in a lie, but Una needed some leverage. “In case there was some danger to the nurses she needed to be made aware of.”
The orderly snorted. “Whatever the danger, it’s come and gone now.” “What do you mean?”
“We had a suicide last night. Over on the female ward.” He nodded to a cluster of cells farther down the corridor beyond a sliding door of steel bars. “The doc at the morgue thought nothing of it, but you know how them coppers are. Always sniffing around when they think there’s a chance a little brass might come their way.”
“Brass, as in money?” Una asked, trying to sound naive.
He nodded. “A bit suspicious, it was. How it happened, I mean. Not the sort of thing the warden wants to read about in the papers.”
Una’s knotted insides untangled with his words. The coppers’ visit had nothing to do with her. How the dickens had she ever thought it had? No one but Barney knew she was here. And Bellevue wasn’t exactly the first
place you’d come looking for an escaped murderer. Certainly not among the staff. Present company excluded.
A laugh bubbled up inside her. She cleared her throat to hide the sound. “That’s good to hear, thank you. I’ll be sure to relay this to the superintendent.”
“‘Good’?”
“Well, no, not good, but at least nothing to worry the other nurses over.” Una turned around and started for the door, eager for a breath of fresh air.
“Ain’t you wonderin’ what was suspicious about it?” “About what?” she said over her shoulder.
“The suicide.”
Begrudgingly, she turned back to face him. “Please, enlighten me.” “Don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Like I said, it happened on the female ward.” He shuffled to the door that separated the wards and banged his empty bucket on the bars. “Madge!”
A woman peeked her head out from a nook at the far end of the corridor. “What, you chucklehead?”
“Them training school nurses are in a dither wantin’ to know about that gal who hung herself.”
Una winced at their shrill shouting. No wonder the patients here were mad. She would be too with such noise.
The woman, a short, stocky creature with unkempt hair and a missing front tooth, waddled to the door. She stared at Una a moment before saying, “Well, what do you wanna know?”
“Actually, I don’t—”
“She was askin’ why them coppers were here. I told her they came with their palms up and peepers closed.”
“Ain’t nothing to see anyway,” the woman said. “She hanged herself plain and simple.”
“With what?” Una asked. She knew enough about the care of insane patients to know that ropes and laces and other such things were to be kept out of the cells.
The woman shrugged. “A length a cloth. A belt.” She held her thumb and index finger an inch and a half apart. “Something about yea wide if the bruising on her throat’s any indication.”
The image of Traveling Mike splayed out on the snowy ground flashed in Una’s mind. “Did you say a belt?”
“Maybe. Whatever she used to do it was gone this morning when we found her.”
“Gone? But how is that possible?”
“One of her cellmates likely took it and hid it somewhere.” “Did you ask them about it?”
“Can’t. One’s so mad she thinks she’s a bird and only answers in chirps and squawks. The other’s a mute.”
“But surely you would have found it when you searched them.” Una’s voice was thin, her words clipped. “You did search them, didn’t you? The cell too?”
The woman nodded. “Me and them coppers. Nothin’.” “Then how can you be sure it was a suicide at all?”
“What, you think one of her cellmates killed her? Strangled her without the night attendant hearin’?”
Or maybe someone broke in and did it, Una thought, though she kept the idea to herself. The dank, musty air seemed to thicken around her. She knew there was no reason to believe this woman had been murdered like Traveling Mike. Still, that knowledge did little to steady her breath. She tugged at her collar, then snatched the cap from her head and fanned her face. When she glanced back, she saw the woman staring at her with a curious intensity.
“Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Una jammed her cap back onto her head, her fingers trembling as she pinned it in place. The dim light from the overhead gas lamps made it hard to see the woman’s features clearly, and nothing about her had struck Una as familiar. “I’ve been working at Bellevue for several weeks. We’ve likely crossed paths on the grounds.”
The woman shook her head. “No, before that. Somewhere else.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Una replied, her voice wavering. “I only just came from Maine.”
As the woman continued to study her, Una fought the urge to fidget or step back. She blinked slowly, her gaze fixed on the greasy scarf wrapped around the woman’s wiry hair. “Thank you for your help. I’m sure, as you say, there’s nothing suspicious to report. Miss Perkins will be very pleased.” She turned and, though her legs itched to bolt, forced herself to walk calmly out of the pavilion.
