Page 114 of The Last Time I Lied

I check the phone. There’s one bar of signal. Not good at all. I stand atop the toilet seat, holding the phone toward the ceiling, hoping for a better signal. It now shows two bars, the second onewavering and unsteady. I stay on the toilet, my body tilted, bent elbow jutting toward the ceiling. It works. The static is gone.

“What did you find?”

“Not much,” Marc tells me. “Billy says it’s hard to research something like a private asylum. Especially one so small and remote. He ended up looking everywhere. Books. Newspapers. Historical records. He had a friend search the library’s photo archives and made a few calls to the library at Syracuse. I’m going to email everything he found. Some of it couldn’t be scanned because it was too old or in bad condition. But I wrote those down.”

The sound of rustling paper bursts from the phone, high-pitched and screechy.

“Billy found a few mentions of a Mr. C. Cutler of Peaceful Valley in the ledger of Hardiman Brothers, a wig company on the Lower East Side. Do any of those names sound familiar?”

“Charles Cutler,” I say. “He was the owner. He sold his patients’ hair to wigmakers.”

“That’s Dickensian,” Marc says. “And it would explain why the Hardiman brothers paid him fifty dollars on three different occasions.”

“When was this?”

“Once in 1901. Twice in 1902.”

“That lines up with what I saw in the book Vivian found at the library. There was a picture of the place from 1898.”

“Did the book mention when it closed?” Marc asks.

“No. Why?”

“Because something strange happened after that.” There’s more rustling on Marc’s end, followed by more static, which makes me worry the signal is again getting worse. “Billy found a newspaper article from 1904. It’s about a man named Helmut Schmidt of Yonkers. Does that ring a bell?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Well, Helmut was a German immigrant who spent ten yearsout west. When he returned to New York, he sought out his sister, Anya.”

That nameisfamiliar to me. There was a photograph of someone named Anya tucked into the box I found in the Lodge. I even remember her hair color. Flaxen.

“Helmut described her as ‘often confused and prone to nervous exasperation,’” Marc says. “We both know what that means.”

All too well. Anya suffered from a mental ailment that probably didn’t even have a name at the time.

“It appears that while Helmut was gone, Anya’s condition worsened until she was committed to Blackwell’s Island. He looked for her there and was told she had been put into the care of Dr. Cutler and taken to—”

“Peaceful Valley,” I say.

“Bingo. Which is why Helmut Schmidt then traveled upstate to Peaceful Valley to retrieve his sister. Only he couldn’t find it, which is why he spoke to the press about it.”

“Are you saying it didn’t exist?”

“No,” Marc says. “I’m saying it vanished.”

That word again. Vanished. I’ve grown to hate the sound of it.

“How does an insane asylum just disappear?”

“No one knew. Or, more likely, no one cared,” Marc says. “Especially because the place was in the middle of nowhere. And those who lived even remotely nearby wanted nothing to do with it. All they knew was that it was run by a doctor and his wife and that the land had been sold a year earlier.”

“And that’s it?”

“I guess so. Billy couldn’t find any follow-up articles about Helmut Schmidt and his sister.” I hear the clatter of keys, followed by a single, sharp click. “I just emailed the files.”

My phone vibrates in my hand. An email alert.

“Got them,” I say.

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