“The rape?” I asked calmly.
“The damn bastard. Excuse me. But it still upsets me.”
“Understandably.”
“He later claimed he wasn’t doing anything inappropriate. Damn, he was such a liar. He denied everything. But I’d seen it. I knew exactly what he was doing. He was playing the role of the stepfather, and Rita was so terrified she didn’t move. She was frozen in the chair. He was in her face, leaning over her, talking in a low voice. Sound carries inside the ballroom. I could hear everything. Rita was very mature, developed, for thirteen. Jim was asking her, ‘Is this what he did, Rita?’ He kept asking her that as he touched her. Fondled her, just as her stepfather had done, I suppose. I slipped out. He never knew I’d seen it until both Dr. Masterson and I confronted him minutes later.”
I was beginning to understand why Dr. Masterson had refused to discuss Jim Barnes with me, and possibly why pages of Al Hunt’s case file were absent. If something like this was ever made public, even though it had happened long ago, the hospital’s reputation would take it on the nose.
“And you were suspicious Jim Barnes had done this before?” I asked.
“Some of the early complaints would indicate he had,” Jeanie Wilson replied, her eyes flashing.
“Always females?”
“Not always.”
“You received complaints from male patients?”
“From one of the young men. Yes. But no one took it seriously at the time. He had sexual problems anyway, supposedly had been molested or something. The very type someone like Jim would fix on because who would believe anything the poor kid said?”
“Do you remember this patient’s name?”
“God.”
She frowned. “It was so long ago.”
She thought. “Frank … Frankie. That’s it. I remember some of the patients called him Frankie. I don’t recall his last name.”
“How old was he?” I could feel my heart beating.
“I don’t know. Seventeen, eighteen.”
“What do you remember about Frankie?” I asked. “It’s important. Very important.”
A timer went off, and she pushed back her chair to take the cake out of the oven. While she was up, she checked on her boys again. When she returned, she was frowning.
She said, “I vaguely remember he was on Backhall for a while, right after he was admitted. Then he was moved downstairs to the second-floor ward where the men are. I had him in occupational therapy.”
She was thinking, an index finger touching her chin. “He was very industrious, I remember that. Made a lot of leather belts, brass rubbings. And he loved to knit, which was a little unusual. Most of the male patients won’t knit, don’t want to. They’ll stick with leather work, make ashtrays and so on. He was very creative and really pretty skilled. And something else stands out. His neatness. He was obsessively neat, always cleaning off his work space, picking bits and pieces of whatever off the floor. Like it really bothered him if everything wasn’t just right, clean.”
She paused, lifting her eyes to mine.
“When did he make the complaint about Jim Barnes?” I asked.
“Not too long after I started working at Valhalla.”
She hesitated, thinking hard. “I think Frankie had only been at Valhalla a month or so when he said something about Jim. I think he said it to another patient. In fact”–she paused, her prettily arched brows moving together in a frown–“it was actually this other patient who complained to Dr. Masterson.”
“Do you remember who the patient was? The patient Frankie told this to?”
“No.”
“Could it have been Al Hunt? You mentioned you hadn’t been working at Valhalla long. Hunt would have been a patient eleven years ago during the spring and summer.”
“I don’t remember Al Hunt…”
“They would have been close to the same age,” I added.
“That’s interesting.”
Her eyes filled with innocent wonder as they fixed on mine. “Frankie had a friend, another teen-age boy. I do remember that. Blond. The boy was blond, very shy, quiet. I don’t recall his name.”
“Al Hunt was blond,” I said.
Silence.
“Oh, my God.”
I prodded her. “He was quiet, shy …”