Mary, Mary

chuckled.
    “She was my friend.”
    I turned to see a tiny middle-aged woman standing with one shoulder pressed against the wall opposite us. Her standard-issue scrubs indicated she was forensic, though it was hard to imagine what she might have done to get here.
    “Hello,” I said.
    The woman raised her chin, trying to see past us into Mary’s room. Now I saw that she had ragged burn scars up and down her neck. “Is she back? Is Mary here? I need to see Mary if she’s here. It’s important. It’s very important to me.”
    “No, Lucy. I’m sorry, she’s not back,” Dr. Blaisdale told her.
    Lucy looked crestfallen. She quickly turned and walked away from us, disconsolately trailing one hand along the concrete-block wall as she went.
    “Lucy’s one of our few really long-term patients here, as was Mary. It was hard for her when Mary disappeared.”
    “About that,” I said. “What happened that day?”
    Dr. Blaisdale nodded slowly and bit into his lower lip.
    “Why don’t we finish this in my office.”

Chapter 111
    I FOLLOWED BLAISDALE through the locked door at the end of the ward and down to the ground floor. We entered his office, which was high-end generic, with brass in boxes and pastel-colored mini-blinds. A poster for Banjo Dan and the Midnite Plowboys was framed on one wall and definitely caught my attention.
    I sat down and noticed that everything on my side of his desk was several inches from the edge, just out of reach.
    Blaisdale looked at me and sighed. I knew right away that he was going to soft-sell what had happened with Mary Constantine.
    “All right, here goes, Dr. Cross. Everyone on the ward can earn day-trip privileges. Forensic patients used to be prohibited, but we’ve found it therapeutically unconstructive to divide the population in that way. As a consequence, Mary went out several times. That day was just like any other.”
    “And what happened on that day?” I asked.
    “It was six patients with two staff, which is our standard procedure. The group went to the lake that day. Unfortunately, one of the patients had a meltdown of some sort.”
    Of some sort?
I wondered if he knew the exact details, even now. Blaisdale seemed like a hands-off administrator if I’d ever seen one.
    “In the middle of the hysterics, Mary insisted she had to go to the rest room. The outhouse building was right there, so the counselors let her go. Mistake, but it happens. No one knew at the time that there were entrances on both sides of the building.”
    “Obviously, Mary knew,” I said.
    Dr. Blaisdale drummed a pen on his desktop several times. “At any rate, she disappeared into nearby woods.”
    I stared at him, just listening, trying not to judge, but it was hard not to.
    “She was a model patient, had been for years. It took everyone very much by surprise.”
    “Just like when she killed her kids,” I said.
    Blaisdale appraised me with his eyes. He wasn’t sure if I had just insulted him, and I certainly hadn’t meant to.
    “The police did a major search—one of the biggest I’ve seen. We left that job to them. Of course, we were eager to have Mary back, and to make sure she was all right. But it’s not the kind of story we go out of our way to publicize. She wasn’t —” He stopped.
    “Wasn’t what?”
    “Well, at the time, we didn’t consider her any danger to anyone, other than herself perhaps.”
    I didn’t say what I was thinking. All of Los Angeles had a somewhat different opinion of Mary—that she was the most vicious homicidal maniac who ever lived.
    “Did she leave anything behind?” I finally asked.
    “She did, actually. You’ll definitely want to see her journals. She wrote almost every day. Filled dozens of volumes while she was here.”

Chapter 112
    A PORTER, MAC, who looked as though he lived in the basement of the hospital, brought me two archive boxes filled with tape-bound composition notebooks, the kind a child raised in the fifties might have used in school. Mary Constantine had written far more in her years here than I would ever have time to read today. I could requisition the whole collection later, I was informed.
    “Thanks for your help,” I told Mac the porter.
    “No problem,” he said, and I wondered when it was, and how, the response “you’re welcome” seemed to have disappeared from the language, even up here in rural Vermont.
    For now, I just wanted to get a sense of who Mary Constantine was, particularly in relationship to