Mary, Mary

piecework than anything, just my memories. We never got a peep out of Mary about the murders after her arrest.”
    “Anything you can tell me would be helpful. Try to think, Sheriff.”
    Madeline took a deep breath and put a hand flat on top of her husband’s on the couch cushion. They both had the solid quality of old farm stock, not unlike what I’d seen in Mary at times.
    “It looks like she took them for a picnic that day. Drove way out in the woods. We found the spot later, just by luck. That’s where she shot them. One, two, three, in the back of the head.
    “The ME thinks she laid them down, like maybe for a nap, and I’m guessing she did the older two first, since the baby couldn’t run away.”
    I waited patiently for him to go on. I knew that the passage of time didn’t make this kind of thing any easier to remember and talk about.
    “She carefully wrapped them each in a blanket. I still remember those old army blankets she used. Terrible. Then it looks like she took them home and did the knife work on Ashley there. All over her face and just on her for some reason. I’ll never forget it. I’d like to, but I can’t.”
    “And were you the first one to find them?” I asked.
    He nodded. “Mary’s boss called and said he hadn’t seen Mary for days. Mary didn’t have a phone at the time, so I said I’d go over. I thought it was just a courtesy call. Mary came to the door like there was nothing going on, but I could smell it right away. Literally. She’d put them all in a trunk in the basement—in August—and just left them there. I guess she blocked that smell out like everything else. I still can’t explain any of it. Not even now, after all these years.”
    “Sometimes there is no explanation,” I said.
    “Anyway, she didn’t put up any resistance whatsoever. We took her in quietly.”
    “It was a huge story, though,” Madeline said.
    “That’s true. Put Derby Line on the map for about a week. Hope it doesn’t happen again now.”
    “Did either of you see Mary after she was committed?”
    Both Lapierres shook their head. Decades of marriage had clearly linked them.
    “I don’t know anyone who ever visited her,” Madeline told me. “It’s not the kind of thing you want to be reminded about, is it? People like to feel safe around here. It wasn’t that anyone turned their back on her. It was more like . . . I don’t know. Like we never knew Mary in the first place.”

Chapter 110
    VERMONT STATE HOSPITAL was a sprawling, mostly redbrick building, unassuming from the outside except for its size. I had been told that almost half of it was unused space. The women’s locked ward on the fourth floor held forensic patients, like Mary Constantine, but also civilly committed patients. “Not a perfect system,” the director told me, but one borne of small population size and shrinking budgets for mental health care.
    It was also part of the reason Mary had been able to escape.
    Dr. Rodney Blaisdale, the director, gave me a quick tour of the ward. It was well kept, with curtains in the dayroom and a fresh coat of paint on the concrete-block walls. Newspapers and magazines were spread on most end tables and couches:
Burlington Free Press, The Chronicle, American Woodworker.
    It was quiet—so quiet.
    I’d been on locked wards many times before, and usually the general noise level was like a constant buzz. I had no idea until now how oddly comforting that buzz could be.
    It occurred to me that Vermont State had the still, slow-moving quality of an aquarium. Patients seemed to come and go in response to the quiet itself, barely speaking, even to themselves.
    The television was on a low volume, with a few women watching the soaps through what looked like Haldol-glazed eyes.
    As Dr. Blaisdale took me around, I kept thinking about how vivid a scream would be in here.
    “This is it,” he said as we came to one of many closed doors in the main hallway. I realized I had stopped listening to him, and tuned back in. “This was Mary’s room.”
    Looking through the small observation window in that steel door, I found no clue that she had ever been there, of course. The platform bed held a bare mattress, and the only other features were a built-in desk and bench, and a stainless-steel blunt-edged shelf mounted to the wall.
    “Of course, it didn’t look like this then. Mary was with us for nineteen years, and she could do a lot with very little. Our own Martha Stewart.” He