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“People have vivid imaginations,” he said, looking uncomfortable.
Bliss was disappointed; other than the Heart of Stone, she had been hoping to discover something more about the fire, something that could be a real clue to the hounds’ whereabouts. She and Jane began to gather their things when the fire chief coughed and looked guiltily at them.
“Well, there was something,” he said finally. He lit his pipe and the room filled with the sweet smell of tobacco.
Bliss and Jane exchanged looks, but neither of them said anything.
“We found something.” He squirmed in his seat. “It’s…difficult to talk about.”
Bliss sat back down and leaned forward. “Tell us. You can tell us.”
“Actually, not something…but someone. A girl.” He closed his eyes, wincing at the memory. “The house burned right to the ground, piles of ashes everywhere—great mounds of it—you saw. It was a few days after the fire was out—me and my boys were doing cleanup when we saw her…a girl, buried under the ashes. Naked, covered in blood and dust. We thought she was dead.”
“But she’s not?” Bliss asked, hope thrumming in her chest. This was something—a beginning—a clue at last.
He shook his head. “Nope. She was breathing.”
“Who was she?”
“Don’t know. We had her checked out at the hospital…and it was the oddest thing…they said she was completely unharmed. No signs of physical injury, not one bruise, not one cut, not one burn. Just—covered in ashes. Ashes and blood.” He took a puff from his pipe.
He hitched his pants, put down his pipe in the ashtray, stood, and left the room. When he came back after a few minutes, he was holding a notebook. It was covered in soot. “We also found this.” He handed it to Bliss. “Will you take it? I don’t like having it around.” He seemed glad to be relieved of the burden.
“What happened to her? The girl you found?” The girl covered in ashes and blood.
“Mental hospital.”
“Do you have the address?” asked Jane, ready with her pen.
He nodded. “I can get it.”
This is it, Bliss thought, her excitement bubbling as she tucked the journal into her bag. Find the girl, Bliss knew, and she would find the hounds.
St. Bernadette’s Psychiatric Clinic had taken great pains not to look like a mental asylum, to distance itself from the negative connotation of institutional sanatoriums: nightmarish loony bins where crazies were locked up and caged, left to sit in a mess of their own filth. It was a small four-story building located on a pretty hillside in a sleepy Cleveland suburb. There were no bars on the windows, there were no armed guards at the gates, and none of the nurses were named Ratched. The lobby was peaceful and cheerful, decorated in soothing pastel colors, and patients were allowed to wear their own clothes—none of that shuffling in hospital gowns and slippers.
The mental hospital looked innocuous enough, but even so, when Bliss arrived in the afternoon, she could not help shuddering. In a past life, she had been sent to a place not unlike this one, and she could still remember the horror of that experience: the shackles and the tests, the buckets of cold water poured on her head during her ravings. The clinic was more like a college dormitory than a prison, but Bliss could bet that the windows at Case Western weren’t built from two inches of shatterproof acrylic you couldn’t break with a sledgehammer.
She had left Jane back at their motel. For a moment she wondered whether she’d done the right thing; Jane had wanted to come, though she was too tired to protest when Bliss insisted she stay behind. But Bliss wanted to speak to the girl alone. It was her task, afte
r all, her burden, to find the hounds.
“Sign here,” the young guy at the desk said, pushing over a few papers.
Bliss scribbled on the page. “What’s this?”
“Liability waiver. Means you can’t sue the clinic if anything happens to you after seeing her. Or when you see her.” He had a flat nasal accent, less midwestern than southern Appalachian, a real twang. Bliss had always thought of Ohio as the Midwest, like Kansas or Nebraska, but as they’d moved through the state, she’d discovered it was a real patchwork, a hodgepodge of big cities and dying steel towns, affluent suburbs that rivaled the toniest Westchester neighborhoods and a pretty rural countryside dotted with horse farms and lush green forests.
“I don’t get it. What’s going to happen?”
The orderly shrugged. “Not supposed to say, but see that lady sitting over there?”
Bliss nodded. There was a smiling middle-aged woman sitting by the window, talking softly to herself. Once in a while her whole face would twitch in a frightening spasm.
“Yeah, well, Thelma used to work here. Now she’s a patient. She was your patient’s nurse, you know. Spent a week with her and went insane. And then there’s the janitors…” He stopped without finishing the sentence. He only shook his head as he took the clipboard back and handed Bliss a visitor pass. “What do you want with her, anyway? You a reporter or something? Or family?”
Bliss shook her head. “Neither.”
“Law enforcement?”
