Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,52

explain all this.”

“What needs explaining, Jess?”

“Lonnie’s dead, Cleave! Lonnie and his boy. How’re we gonna explain that?”

“We’re not.”

“We’re not?”

“We were never here.”

“We were never here?”

“Do I have a fuckin’ echo? No, we weren’t never here. Whatever happened, happened between some out-of-towner and Lonnie and his boy. We weren’t here. We don’t know nothing.”

“But won’t the sheriff wonder where that buck inside, where his friends went? Surely they told people where they were going, people’re gonna know they were travelling together, they’ll wonder what happened to the rest of them.”

“Let them wonder, Jess. No one took a picture of us, did they? We weren’t never here. That’s all that matters. Now give me a fuckin’ hand with the girl.”

Jess set his rifle aside and took her left arm, Cleavon her right arm, and they hefted her upright. She shrieked but there was little else she could do with only one good leg. They carried her between them to the Chevy El Camino and set her in the flatbed.

“Why…?” she said between sobs, propping herself up on her elbow. “Where…what are you…doing to me?”

“Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle for the duration of the ride, darling,” Cleavon told her. “And if you try another jumping stunt once we get going, and don’t break your other fuckin’ leg, you better believe I’ll do it for you.”

He slammed the tailgate shut.

CHAPTER 16

“These are godless times, Mrs. Snell.”

Carrie (1976)

“Would you like any more potatoes, dear?” Lynette asked Spencer Pratt, her husband of seventeen years—who, she was nearly positive, was cheating on her with another woman.

He dabbed his lips with the cotton napkin. “Thank you, no,” he said.

“Are you going to the hospital this evening?”

“Are you so eager to have the house to yourself?”

“Of course not. I was just wondering,” she said, collecting her dishes and taking them to the kitchen. “You’ve been spending a lot of time there this year.”

“Yes, well, work’s work, isn’t it?” he said, following her with his dishes. He set them in the sink and rinsed them with hot water. “These two new patients I have require…extensive work.”

Lynette placed the jug of milk in the refrigerator. “Work that can’t be done during regular working hours?”

Spencer didn’t reply, and Lynette wondered whether she’d said too much, overplayed her hand. Smiling kindly, she turned around, assuming the role of the doting, naïve housewife. Spencer was scribbling something in a notepad he had taken from his pocket, apparently oblivious to her question.

Lynette went to fetch the rest of the dishes from the dining room table. They’d had roast pork, vegetables, and mashed potatoes with gravy. As usual, Spencer finished off most of the pork and potatoes but barely touched the vegetables. When she returned to the kitchen, Spencer was still scribbling notes.

He was the Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Boston Mills Psychiatric Hospital, which had once been called the Boston Mills Lunatic Asylum. Lynette still thought of it as the latter. She had grown up in Boston Mills, and her first memory of the asylum had been overhearing her parents talking about a lunatic who’d gone on a rampage and killed a caseworker and two nurses. At six or seven she didn’t know what a lunatic was, but she could tell by the way her parents were acting that she should be scared. Her mother would use this fear to keep her in line with ominous sayings such as, “You better be good or the lunatic will get you.” She would also threaten to ring up the director of the asylum to have Lynette committed, telling her, “It’s a rat trap, very easy to get in, impossible to get out.” These threats were made all the more real and frightening because Lynette’s father, a gardener at the hospital, brought home any number of stories about what went on there. Patients who would be forced to eat everything on their plates at mealtime even if it made them vomit it all back up. Patients who would be tied to their beds with wet sheets layered in ice in the pit of winter. Orderlies who would beat patients to within inches of their lives with wiffle ball bats before locking them away in solitary confinement. An old woman who wandered into a closed-down ward and died, her corpse remaining undiscovered for so long it left a permanent body-shaped stain on the floor. And then of course there was the debacle in 1962 when a man escaped the asylum and murdered a local woman and lived in