But I can’t.
I need to open the book and see what Vivian saw.
So I fling it open, seeing on the first page a vintage photo of a young woman confined in a straitjacket. Her legs are nothing but skin covering bone, her cheeks are beyond gaunt, and her hair is wild. Yet her eyes blaze with defiance. As wide as half-dollars, they stare at the photographer as if willing him to look at her—really look—and understand her predicament.
It’s a startling image. Like a kick in the stomach. A shocked huff of air lodges in my throat, making me cough.
Below the photo is a caption as sad as it is vague. Unknown asylum patient, 1887.
I turn the page, unable to gaze at the image any longer, just the latest person who could bear to look at this unnamed woman for only a brief amount of time. In my own way, I’ve also failed her.
Skimming through the book is an exercise in masochism. There are more photos, more infuriating captions. There are tales of women being committed because their husbands abused them, their families didn’t want them, polite society didn’t want to see them. There are accounts of beatings, of starvation, of cold baths and scrubbings with wire brushes on skin that hadn’t seen daylight in months.
Each time I find myself gasping at a new horror, I realize how lucky I am. Had I been born a hundred years earlier, I would have become one of these women. Misunderstood and suffering. Hoping that someone would figure out why my mind betrayed me and thus be able to fix it. Most of these women never enjoyed such a fate. They suffered in sorrow and confusion until the end of their days, whereas my madness was temporary. It left me.
The shame is another story.
After a half hour of torturous skimming, I finally come to page 164. The one Vivian noted in her diary. It contains another photo, one that fills most of the page. Like the others in the book, it bears the same sepia-toned fuzziness of something taken a century ago. But unlike those images of anonymous girls imprisoned within asylum walls, this photograph shows a man standing in front of an ornate, Victorian structure.
The man is young, tall, thick of chest and stomach. He boasts an impeccably waxed mustache and a distinct darkness to his eyes. One hand grips the lapel of his morning coat. The other is slid into a vest pocket. Such a pompous pose.
The building behind him is three stories tall, made of brick, with dormer windows on the top floor and a chimneylike turret gracing the roof. The windows are tall and arched. A weathervane in the shape of a rooster rises from the turret’s peaked roof. A less showy wing shoots off from the building’s left side. It has only one floor, no windows, patchy grass instead of a lawn.
Even without that utilitarian wing, there’s something off about the place. Brittle strands of dead ivy cling to a corner. Sunlight shining onto the windows have made them opaque. It reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting—House by the Railroad. The one that’s rumored to have inspired the house from Psycho. All three structures project the same aura of homespun menace.
Beneath the photo is a caption—Dr. Charles Cutler poses outside Peaceful Valley Asylum, circa 1898.
The name summons a memory from fifteen years ago. Vivian and I alone in the woods, reading the tiny name engraved on the bottom of a rotting box.
Peaceful Valley.
I remember being curious about it. Clearly, Vivian was, too, for she came here looking for more information. And what she learned was that Peaceful Valley had been an insane asylum.
I wonder if that realization stunned her as much as it does me. I wonder if she also sat blinking in disbelief at the page in front of her, trying to wrap her head around how a box of scissors from an insane asylum ended up on the banks of Lake Midnight. I wonder if her heart raced as much as mine does. Or if her legs also suddenly started to twitch.
That sense of shock subsides when I look at the text on the page opposite the photo. Someone had drawn a pencil line beneath two paragraphs. Vivian, most likely. She was the kind of person who’d have no problem defacing a library book. Especially if she found something important.
By the end of the nineteenth century, a growing divide had formed regarding the treatment of mentally ill women. In the nation’s cities, asylums remained crowded with the poor and indigent, who, despite a growing call for reform, still lived in deplorable conditions and were subjected to harsh treatment from undertrained and underpaid staff. It was quite a different story for the wealthy, who turned to enterprising physicians opening small, for-profit asylums that operated without government control or assistance. These retreats, as they were commonly known, usually existed on country estates in areas remote enough for family members to send troubled relatives without fear of gossip or scandal. As a result, they paid handsomely to have these black sheep whisked away and cared for.
A few progressive doctors, appalled by the extreme difference in care between the rich and the poor, attempted to bridge the gap by opening the doors of their bucolic retreats to those less fortunate. For a time, Dr. Charles Cutler was a common sight in the asylums of New York and Boston, where he sought out patients in the most unfortunate of situations, became their legal guardian, and whisked them away to Peaceful Valley Asylum, a small retreat in upstate New York. According to the diary of a doctor at New York’s notorious Blackwell’s Island Asylum, Dr. Cutler intended to prove that a more genteel course of care could benefit all mentally ill women and not just the wealthy.
While I’m almost positive this is what Vivian was pointing to in her diary, I have no idea what it has to do with Franny. In all likelihood, it doesn’t. So why was Vivian so convinced that it did?
There seems to be only one way to find out—I need to search the Lodge. Vivian discovered something in the study there before Lottie came in and disrupted her. Whatever she found led her here, to this same book in this same library.
Always leave a trail of bread crumbs. That’s what Vivian told me. So you know how to find your way back.
Only I can’t help but think that the trail she left for me won’t be enough. I’ll need a little help from a friend.
I grab my phone and immediately FaceTime Marc. He answers in a rush, his voice almost drowned out by the cacophony in his bistro’s kitchen. Behind him, a line cook mans a skillet that sizzles and pops.
“It’s a bad time, I know,” I tell him.
“The lunch rush,” Marc says. “I’ve got exactly one minute.”
I dive right in. “Remember that reference librarian at the New York Public Library you used to date?”
“Billy? Of course. He was like a nerdy Matt Damon.”
“Are the two of you still friendly?”
“Define friendly.”
“Would he try to get a restraining order if he saw you again?”
“He follows me on Twitter,” Marc says. “That’s not a restraining order level of animosity.”