Secrets of the Asylum Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Legal

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  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 — Linda Hughes

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED—No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the authors, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published by Deeds Publishing in Athens, GA

  www.deedspublishing.com

  Printed in The United States of America

  Cover design and text layout by Mark Babcock

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publications data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-944193-99-7

  Books are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. For information, email [email protected].

  First Edition, 2017

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of Elizabeth “Liz” Champlin, who loved nothing more than a good story. Her undying support, wicked wit, and writing advice will live on forever in Secrets of the Asylum.

  1

  TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN, 1903

  Elizabeth Antoinette Wolcott Sullivan stood as still as Venus de Milo, looking out over the vast body of water before her. From her shaded vantage point high atop a hill in the white gazebo with its blue gingerbread trim, she became mesmerized by the glisten of sunshine on the bay. The whitecaps appeared to be dancing a merry jig. She stored the pleasing image in her memory for a future painting.

  Emerging from her fugue, she looked around, trying to decide which way to go next. Seeing that it was a pleasantly warm day, her outdoor options seemed boundless.

  A breeze caught a lock of her silky black hair, disengaging it from the hastily coiled bun on top of her head, allowing the runaway strands to tickle the side of her face. She reached back to pull out hairpins, carelessly tossing them aside, allowing her long mane to swirl about her shoulders. That felt much better but didn’t solve the quandary about how to spend her morning.

  Elizabeth turned her head. A lazy lace-trimmed hammock stretched from column to column beside her across a corner of the gazebo. It seemed to beckon her to snuggle in for a while. She knew from experience that would allow her mind to float as freely as her suspended body and could easily eat up the rest of the morning.

  She took a quick gander behind her. Yes, there was the house. Actually, all she could see from here were steeply-pitched gables with blue gingerbread trim, as another hill between this spot and the enormous Victorian structure cut off full view. She knew it was there all the same. She always knew. How could she forget? Her stalwart husband reminded her daily of her household duties as the wife of the most prominent and wealthy businessman in the entire northern half of Michigan’s lower peninsula.

  He also liked to remind her of her duties as a mother. But her child, a three-year-old girl, remained in that house with her nanny, whom she seemed to prefer over her own mother. That was fine with Elizabeth, seeing that the mother-child bond expected at birth had entirely eluded her. She’d heard other mothers talk about this bond as reverently as if it came as naturally as their own heartbeat. Elizabeth supposed she should believe she was missing something essential to life, but the truth was, she did not. In fact, she felt nothing other than relief that her daughter and the nanny adored each other. She was glad little Meg had motherly love from somewhere; as long as she didn’t have to do it.

  Margaret Ann, that was the girl’s name. Elizabeth liked to call her Meg, but “he” insisted upon using her full first name, as she’d been named after his mother who, from Elizabeth’s point of view, would never have allowed her stuffy, arrogant, pretentious self to be called by a nickname. Thank God the old biddy had croaked the year before and Herbert’s father had been dead since long before his young bride arrived, so Elizabeth didn’t have any pesky in-laws to cater to. But still there was, naturally, Herbert.

  “He” insists upon a lot of things, which is how I came to this, she thought, placing her hand on her pregnant belly. As if having to suffer through the throes of childbirth once hadn’t been enough.

  Suddenly she knew what she wanted to do. She suspected she’d known all along and didn’t know why she so often went through this charade of pretending she might consider going back to that house.

  With no one to see; as the mighty Sullivan property stretched for two miles on each land side and down the side of the hill, across a shifting sand dune, and over the beautiful white sand beach to the shore; she shucked her shoes, pulled up her taffeta morning skirt, gathered up her pristine white petticoat, pulled up the bottom of her knee-length drawers, and yanked off the garter that surrounded each thigh to secure her stockings. Tossing those little ribboned annoyances aside, she went for her stockings next, rolling the translucent silk down to each ankle, and then one-by-one sliding them off and dropping them on the spot. Next up was her white cotton shirtwaist, a casual garment donned solely for this opportunity. Impatiently, she worked the tiny ivory top buttons until she could yank the thing off over her head and get rid of it, too. Thank goodness society’s strict rules didn’t call for a pregnant woman to wear a corset when in private, so she was glad she didn’t have to fuss with that stupid torture chamber. Off came her skirt and petticoat. Standing now in nothing more than a shockingly indecent sleeveless camisole and calf-exposing drawers, she finally felt like she could breathe.

  Elizabeth Sullivan, only twenty years old, breathtakingly beautiful, and jailed in an unwanted marriage to an older man, spread her arms and let the air grace her sensuous, bare skin. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. Ah-h-h.... This was what life was meant to be like. Not mind-numbing dinner parties, not scolding church sermons, not yippy women’s social clubs, not having a big old man poke her in the night, not even taking care of children.

  With a yelp of joy, she leapt down the steps of the gazebo and gleefully galloped down the side of the dune, sand playfully squishing up between her toes as she went. Arms swinging, legs sprinting, and hair flying, it took only minutes for her to reach her destination on a grassy knoll halfway down the dune: The Cottage. Once a tumbledown shack left from before her husband’s father bought the land and built the big house, she’d begged her spouse to let her fix it up and use it as a retreat for painting her pictures. A newlywed at the time, he’d agreed in order to keep her, his beautiful young bride, happy. Elizabeth knew he’d expected her to tire of her “little amusement” once they had children, and he’d even confessed to her that at that time he’d have the place torn down.

  Little did he know that cottage would become her sanctuary. Since then, he’d argued with Elizabeth that she’d become too attached to the place and had become obsessed with her leisure pursuit. When she’d told him she had to paint to live, he’d looked as stricken as if she’d slapped him across the face, standing there as he had in his crisp black suit with a Wate
rford crystal whiskey glass with two fingers of Walker’s Old Highland held suspended motionless in the air. She’d known then that he was sorry he’d ever married her. But he was also smart enough to know that if he did away with her cottage she had the gumption to do away with their marriage. She knew he’d never let that happen. That was too much of a scandal for a man like Herbert Ambrose Sullivan, Jr., to imagine.

  So, he let her have her “silly painting shed” and left her alone there in the hope that someday she would come to her senses and take on a wife’s responsibilities. In the meantime, as he’d told her many times, what could she possibly do out there all by herself that would lead to mischief anyway? She liked to paint pretty pictures. So be it. He’d never even gone down there.

  As long as she showed up for aperitifs before dinner, dressed in fine silk and jewels, with her hair in a proper chignon, what she did during the day didn’t affect him. They had a large staff of servants to take care of the house, including a tidy head housekeeper, efficient upstairs and downstairs maids, and a gifted cook. They had a nanny for taking care of children. They had a stable master and livery driver. They had groundskeepers. Herbert didn’t believe Elizabeth could possibly do anything improper in what she called her painting cottage that would embarrass him while he spent his days at his office in town.

  Or so he thinks, Elizabeth thought, smiling as she unlatched the timeworn wooden door and reveled in its cranky creak as she entered her haven. She went straight to her latest canvas, a half-finished water scene with vibrant blues and greens and white emanating from its surface, propped up on an easel. Running a finger over the dry oil paint, a tingle ran up her spine in response to its effervescence, the hues radiating off the flat canvas to waltz the picture to life.

  Rushing to the windows on the bay side of the cottage, she thrust them open and let the humid fresh air swash over the room, the sheer white curtains she’d put up herself billowing romantically in the breeze. She pulled them aside for an unfettered view of her subject. Then she opened the windows on the front, the land side, allowing the breeze to enter in one side and depart out the other.

  Nothing would ever be held captive here.

  She went back to a bayside window and spread her hands out to rest on the sill. She’d had the windows put in, three on the land side and three on the bay side. The foundation of the building was a log cabin that had harbored only two small windows. At some point during the long life of the place, plaster walls inside and a clapboard exterior had been added right over the logs and mortar to give it a homey, cottage feel. So, the walls were extra thick, allowing for window sills large enough to sit on.

  She skootched her fanny up on the sill and looked east to scan the scene before her. The west arm of Grand Traverse Bay sprawled out below, with the land arm of Old Mission Peninsula across the water directly in front of her. To the south, in the distance where the bay curved to turn back into that peninsula, the water abutted the town of Traverse City, where Herbert had his office. She quickly turned away from that view and looked north, where the bay disappeared over the horizon, leaving it to blind belief that it mingled with mammoth Lake Michigan.

  As a young girl in school, she’d learned that the Great Lakes had been carved out by behemoth melting glaciers thousands of years earlier, reshaping the land as they crawled south from the Arctic Circle and northern Canada. They’d done a spectacular job here.

  How she loved her bay. Born and raised in Chicago of one-time wealthy, high-society parents who lost it all during something called the Long Depression of 1873-1878, before she was even born, her parents had hung on enough to keep up appearances until their daughter reached a suitable age to sell her off to the highest bidder. Of course Elizabeth knew they hadn’t actually done that, but it had been clear to her throughout her teen years that she was expected to marry well in order to keep them afloat. And so she had.

  Herbert, eighteen years her senior, had been an easy mark. A very lonely but very rich man, he’d been smitten the moment he saw her four years earlier at the Traverse City dock, where she, along with her parents, had landed for the weekend after sailing up Lake Michigan from Chicago with friends on their small sailboat. Herbert had been at the dock doing business of some kind and as soon as her parents ascertained his status in the community, they had been more than willing to facilitate an introduction to their supposedly sweet and obedient daughter. Elizabeth had always known, however, they had been happy to get rid of their recalcitrant child. Now her parents kept their distance in a respectable townhouse in a posh area of the Windy City. She hadn’t seen them since her wedding day.

  Good riddance. I did my duty there. Now I’m done with them.

  She didn’t intend to ever set foot in Chicago again and seldom gave her parents one iota of thought, knowing Herbert religiously sent them a monthly check, but today it made her laugh out loud as she had a fleeting notion they’d think her insane if they could see her cottage. There were canvases painted with outdoor landscapes and wild animals and birds all over the place, stacked on the floor, hanging on the walls, and propped up on logs of driftwood she’d dragged up from the shore. There was a plump chaise lounge upholstered in flowered chintz and scattered with fat pillows, facing the bay windows. A small table held a Blue Willow bone china tea set and a canister for tea, which was brewed in an iron pot over the small fieldstone fireplace on the side wall. A larger table held dozens of tubes of oil paints of every color and paintbrushes of all sizes, along with a can of turpentine and a glass jar with used brushes soaking in the pungent fluid for cleaning. A wooden stool sat in front of her easel.

  She’d had everything delivered here by workmen and continued to have her paint supplies delivered on a regular basis. Herbert never said a word. He knew he didn’t dare.

  Elizabeth took in a long deep breath. Strong fresh air, mellow oil paint, and a hint of the turpentine: the smells of her world. Here she felt at home.

  She took her yellow apron off the hook on the wall. Reaching under the untethered hair at the back of her neck, she fashioned a bow of the neck ties and then wrapped the waistband around to tie it in back. Picking up her paint palette, she stuck her left thumb through the hole and rested the palette on her flat palm. Taking a brush in her other hand and facing her work in progress, a sense of peace overcame her.

  Finally, she could escape into her imaginary real world.

  2

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 1921

  Meg fiddled with her dangly diamond and pearl earring. Catching herself fidgeting, she stopped, demurely placing her hand in her shiny fringed lap. Her other hand went to her champagne glass even though she didn’t really want another drink.

  Bored. That was the problem: She was bored stiff, a curious development seeing that she sat at the head of a table at The 226 Club, one of the most titillating speakeasies out of hundreds of speakeasies in Chicago. Surrounded by friends, with her dashing fiancé at her side, they had gathered on this particular evening, even though they gathered at one club or another on most evenings, to celebrate the milestone of her twenty-first birthday.

  She’d known as she dressed for the evening that she didn’t really care about going out. Usually meticulous about her appearance, pouring over the garments spilling out of her stuffed wardrobe, this time she’d donned the first chemise she spied, a black and ivory chiffon Chanel with layers of glass straw beaded fringe. Of course she’d thrown on her long triple strand of pearls and the earrings, but no bracelet as she’d speculated she’d be getting one as a birthday gift from her fiancé, which turned out to be a good guess. A sparkly diamond bauble encased her wrist. A carelessly tied black silk scarf circled her coif, serving as a headband, the ends of which reached to the middle of her back. Last year she’d sported a Clara Bow bob, the “It” girl’s look being all the rage. But this year Meg had gone for a shorter cut, leaving her unruly black curls to fend for themselves. Tonight they chose to boink out in all directions around the scarf, giving the young woman who
had just come of age an almost little girl appeal.

  Feeling out-of-sorts for being bored in this place that she should enjoy, she sighed and looked around.

  The snazzy jazz band with its Negro musicians playing a crooning clarinet, trombone, and saxophone offered up its usual repertoire of stimulating fare. The women club dancers had performed, kicking up their heels in the usual way, this night in flashy little red sequined costumes. Illegal booze, flagrantly ignoring prohibition, flowed freely. Smoke wound its way to the ceiling as young men partook of their usual cigarettes and young women flaunted their new-found freedom by puffing away, as well. Couples danced the one-step and the shimmy, with the exception of one couple who ignored the rhythm of the music and swayed cheek-to-cheek.

  Earlier at Meg’s table, steak dinners had been served. The crumbs of a white birthday cake sat in front of her, the confection itself having been devoured by her inebriated companions. Colorful paper streamers meandered every-which-way across their table in honor of her big day.

  She should be having the time of her life.

  Instead, the cacophony of blaring music, raucous laughter, and loud voices gave her a headache. She had to get out of this place.

  Robert interrupted her thoughts. “Hey, baby, that’s our song!” He grabbed her hand and yanked her out of her chair, dragging her to the center of the room. Shouting to be heard, he sang into her ear, “‘Five foot two, eyes of blue, but oh! What those five foot could do, has anybody seen my gal?’ That’s you, baby!” He swung her around and broke into a lively one-step, then morphed into the shimmy. Feeling like an acquiescent sheep, Meg followed with a lackluster performance.

  “Could she love, could she coo! Cootchie-cootchie-cootchie coo! Has anybody seen my gal?” Robert sang to no one in particular this time, appearing to pantomime, seeing that he could no longer be heard over the music. When he turned his attention to other dancers and they started competing to see who could kick the highest, a common practice with this crowd, Meg walked away.