Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,73

instead withering away in the long-stay wards until they died and were no longer burdens on the system.

Mary was deeply and irremediably psychotic with the most extreme form of what used to be called manic depression and is now known as bipolar disorder. On the day Spencer first met and interviewed her, she was in relatively good spirit and mind. She spoke with an educated accent and, had you not known better, you would have thought she was a perfectly healthy young woman.

But Spencer had treated enough patients with bipolar disorder to know this was a deceptive calm in what would be a stormy, unforgiving life. Indeed, the very next day Mary sank into her depressed state and refused to get out of bed. She simply lay there unmoving, unspeaking, barely eating or drinking. She would be torturing herself inside her head, Spencer knew, rehearsing every bad thing she had every done, every bad thought she’d ever had, telling herself she was trash, filth, perhaps contemplating killing herself. This terrible low continued for several days until her manic state took over and she became wild, uncontrollable, ripping off her clothes, screaming obscenities at the orderlies and other patients, and once attacking the charge nurse, taking a bite out of her arm.

Seven weeks after she was committed she escaped from the hospital while under the influence of one of her manic phases. The Ward 16 nursing station sat between both the male and female dormitories, with a twenty-four-hour lookout spot. After ten o’clock only one nurse remained on duty. That night it was Ron (the night nurses were always male), who admitted to falling asleep for what he called in his statement to the police a “brief spell.” Spencer, who had been working late at the hospital as usual, alerted Alan Humperdinck, the Summit County sheriff, to Mary’s disappearance, and an impromptu, sleepy search of the hospital grounds commenced. When Mary wasn’t found, the search was called off until first light. Spencer left the hospital at 3 a.m. that morning—and discovered Mary when he pulled out of his parking spot. She had been hiding beneath his Volvo, presumably to get out of the wind and snow, and had fallen asleep.

Instead of installing her back in her room, Spencer set her in the backseat of his car. The situation was too serendipitous to pass up. The police knew she was missing; Ron had already copped blame. The weather being how it was, everyone would assume she’d died from exposure to the elements and was buried by the snow.

While Spencer drove her to one of the abandoned houses that littered the national park—now wide awake and buzzing with the adrenaline and excitement that always preceded a kill—Mary woke and went into a psychotic episode, screaming at him, clawing his face with her sharp nails, pulling his beard.

Spencer lost control of the car and plowed into a tree. He struck his forehead on the steering wheel and incurred a three-inch-long gash that gushed blood dangerously. Mary hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt and flew into the windshield, her head smashing through the reinforced glass up to her shoulders.

Holding onto consciousness by a thread, Spencer nevertheless understood he was in serious trouble. If he’d been heading in the direction of Boston Mills, he could have explained he’d been returning home when he spotted Mary alongside the road and picked her up before she went ballistic on him. But he hadn’t been returning to town; he’d been driving in the opposite direction, into the national park. He couldn’t lie about this fact. The police would want him to take him to the scene of the accident. Nor could he dump Mary’s body somewhere and pretend nothing happened. Scratches raked his cheeks, Mary’s blood coated his windshield, and he was in no condition right then to clean up himself or the car.

With a desperate, half-formed idea in mind, Spencer reversed onto the road and drove to what he thought simply as The House in the Woods. In fact, his father had built the house years ago after the bank took his Cleveland residence. It had been little more than a two-room shack then. His mother and father lived in one room, Earl and Floyd in the other. This arrangement, however, only lasted a few months. That was how long it took their father to work up the nerve to fill his wife with buckshot before turning the shotgun on himself. Cleavon, who’d been living in a trailer park