not look perturbed. “You’re lying. But that’s all right. Please sit.”
Poole sat in a spare wooden chair that barely fit between the desk and the wall, his knees crammed against the desk.
“Are you a detective?”
Poole hesitated.
That was enough for Vesterhue. “Of course you are. Someone has finally come looking for those poor women.”
Women? “Is Lena Prosnicki here, Dr. Vesterhue?”
“Here?” Vesterhue shook his head with a spiteful laugh. “No. No, she’s not here.”
Poole sighed. It would have been too easy, finding Mrs. Prosnicki at the third sanitarium he visited. “Then why did you bring me back here?”
“Oh, she’s not here. No. But I know where she is.”
“You know where she is?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”
Something about Vesterhue’s eyes spooked Poole. They were too sharp for the fatigued features of his face. Poole took a quick scan of a row of medicine bottles without making any of the labels.
“Where is she, Dr. Vesterhue?”
“Let me tell you. Let me tell you where I met Lena Prosnicki. It was six years past or so. Maybe seven. At that time I was working at a place called All Souls’ Sanitarium. It was a place much like this, except that it was cleaner and the building was better kept.
“I was one of the specialists there. It was called All Souls’, but it was run by the City. Back in the nineties the City bought it from the Church. It was a common place, no different than a dozen others in the City. Occasionally we would get a former city official in an advanced state of dementia and we’d give him special care. But for the most part, it was a typical institution.
“Something like six years ago, a man named Smith came to All Souls’, and there was a meeting with the specialists and the administration. This man, Smith, told us that All Souls’ was going to be used for a special group of women. They were all suffering, he said, from extreme trauma, the source of which he couldn’t tell us. A consequence of this was that all of the current patients were going to have to be transferred to other institutions.
“Needless to say, this was most unusual. The City’s sanitariums are, of course, overcrowded, and the prospect of essentially dispersing one institution’s patients to the others . . . well, it was a radical suggestion. Scandalous. But it wasn’t up for debate. We spent that month preparing and then transporting the patients throughout the City. I can tell you that the staffs at these receiving sanitariums were not happy with taking extra patients.
“Regardless, when the last patient was gone from All Souls’, we were given two days off. When we returned, the women had arrived. Forty-two of them—a small number for an institution of that size, especially considering the numbers elsewhere. They were all heavily sedated. There were other new people, too. Police. There were a lot of police, or I guess I should say ASU. They mostly stayed at the entrance, but there were also guards posted at the stairway on each floor. They were armed.
“This Smith fellow—I got the feeling that this was not in the normal scope of his work—returned, and there was another meeting. Smith told us that our job from this point on would be to administer the drugs at preassigned dosages and to monitor their behavior. He emphasized that we were not to change the dosages or attempt any type of talking cure. Medicate and observe. Nothing else.
“It became apparent to me—and some of the others as well, though they had the good sense to keep their own counsel—that the women weren’t exhibiting any symptoms beyond those caused by the medications. I mentioned this to my supervisor, and less than a week later I was transferred here.”
After a pause, Poole said, “They transferred you here because you thought the women’s only problems were from the medication they were taking?”
“I thought that they would quite likely be perfectly healthy if they were just given relief from the drugs. I wasn’t alone in this belief, but I was alone in voicing it.”
“What was the point? I mean, why were they drugged if there was nothing wrong with them?”
Vesterhue’s bright eyes did not seem focused on anything in particular, giving the peculiar impression that they were focused inside himself or, possibly, on the past.
“I really don’t know. I have thought about it often. There was something odd and sad about all those women. Unable to function, and we were just giving them