Gabrielle pushed open the flap of snipped fence, shoved her gear inside, and scrambled spiderlike on her belly through the low opening. A shiver of apprehension coursed along her limbs as she came up on the other side of the fence. She should be used to this type of covert, solitary exploration; her art often depended on her courage to seek out desolate, some might argue dangerous, places. This creepy asylum could certainly classify as the latter, she thought, her gaze drifting to graffiti spray-painted next to an exterior door that read, BAd VIBeS.
"You can say that again," she whispered under her breath. As she brushed the dirt and dried pine needles off her clothes, her hand drifted automatically to the front pocket of her jeans for her cell phone. It wasn't there, of course, still in the possession of Detective Thorne. Just one more reason to be pissed at him for standing her up last night.
Maybe she should cut the guy a little slack, she thought, suddenly eager to focus on something other than the ominous feeling that pressed down on her now that she was inside the asylum grounds. Maybe Thorne had been a no-show because something bad happened to him on the job.
What if he'd been injured in the line of duty and didn't come by as promised because he was incapacitated in some way? Maybe he hadn't called to apologize or to explain his absence because he physically couldn't.
Right. And maybe she had checked her brain into her panties from the second she first laid eyes on the man.
Scoffing at herself, Gabrielle picked up her things and walked toward the soaring architecture of the main building. Pale limestone climbed skyward in a steep central tower, capped by peaks and spires worthy of the finest gothic cathedral. Surrounding this was a sprawling compound of red-brick walled and tile-roofed outbuildings arranged in a batwing layout, connected by covered walk-ways and cloisterlike arches.
But as awe-inspiring as the structure was, there was no dismissing its air of slumbering menace, as if a thousand sins and secrets loomed behind the chipped walls and smashed mullioned-glass windows. Gabrielle strode to where the light was best and took a few pictures. There was no current point of entry here; the main door had been bolted shut and boarded up tight. If she wanted to get inside to take interior shots - and she definitely did - she had to go around to the back and try her luck with a ground-level window or basement door.
She skirted down a sloping embankment, toward the anterior of the building and found what she was looking for: wooden shutters concealed three windows that likely opened into a service area or crawl space of the structure. The shutter's rusty latches were corroded but not locked, and they broke away easily with a little encouragement from a rock Gabrielle found nearby. She pulled the wooden covering away from the window, lifted the heavy glass panel, and propped it open with the window brace.
After a perfunctory sweep of her flashlight to make sure the place was empty and not about to cave in on her head, she shimmied through the opening. As she hopped down from the window casement, the soles of her boots crunched broken glass and years of accumulated dust and debris. The foundation of gray cinderblock bricks ran about four yards in, disappearing into the gloom of the unlit basement. Gabrielle shot the thin beam of her flashlight into the shadows at the other end of the space. She ran it back along the wall, holding the light steady when she came across a battered old service door bearing the stenciled words No General Access.
"Wanna bet?" she whispered as she approached the door and found it unlocked.
She opened it and shone some light around the other side into a long, tunnel-like corridor. Broken fluorescent light fixtures hung down from the ceiling; some of the panel coverings had fallen to the industrial-grade linoleum floor, where they lay shattered and dust-coated. Gabrielle stepped into the dark space, not certain what she was looking for, and a bit apprehensive of what she might find in the deserted bowels of the asylum.
She passed an open room off the corridor and her flashlight skimmed across a red vinyl dentist's chair, a little worse for wear, and poised in the center of the room as if awaiting its next patient. Gabrielle removed her camera from its case and took a couple of quick shots. She moved on, passing more examination and treatment rooms in what must have been the medical wing of the building. She found a stairwell and climbed two flights, pleased to find herself in the central tower where tall windows brought in generous amounts of soft morning light.
Through her camera lens, she looked out over wide lawns and courtyards flanked by elegant brick and limestone buildings. She snapped a few pictures of the faded glory of the place, appreciating both the architecture and the warm play of sunlight against so much ghostly shadow. It was strange looking out from the confines of a building that had once held so many disturbed souls. In the eerie silence, Gabrielle could almost hear the voices of the patients, people who had not been able to simply walk away like she could now.
People like her birth mother, a woman Gabrielle had never known beyond what she had heard as a kid through hushed conversations between social workers and the foster families who would, eventually, one by one, return her into the system like a pet that had proved more trouble than it was worth. She lost track of the number of places she'd been sent to live, but the complaints against her when she was bounced back were always the same: restless and withdrawn, secretive and untrusting, socially dysfunctional with self-destructive tendencies. She'd heard the same labels applied to her mother, along with the added distinctions of paranoid and delusional.
By the time the Maxwells came into her life, Gabrielle had spent ninety days in a group home, under the supervision of a state-appointed psychologist. She'd had zero expectations and even less hope that she might actually make another foster situation stick. Frankly, she'd been past the point of caring. But her new guardians had been patient and kind. Thinking it might help her cope with her emotional confusion, they had helped Gabrielle obtain a handful of court documents pertaining to her mother.