‘The women’s ward,’ Dr Ensor explained. ‘We have twenty-six female patients at the moment, out of one hundred and seventy patients overall. That’s the visitors’ room.’
She pointed through glass at a spacious open area with comfortable chairs and televisions. No one was in there now.
‘Did she ever have visitors?’ I asked as we kept walking.
‘Not from the outside, not once. Inspiring more sympathy for her, I suppose.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘The women actually stay in there.’
She pointed out another area, this one arranged with single beds.
‘She slept over there by the window,’ Dr Ensor said.
I retrieved Carrie’s letter from my pocketbook and read it again, stopping at the fifth paragraph:
LUCY-BOO on TV. Fly through window. Come with we. Under covers. Come til dawn. Laugh and sing. Same ole song. LUCY LUCY LUCY and we!
Suddenly I thought about the videotape of Kellie Shephard, and of the actress in Venice Beach who played bit parts on television shows. I thought of photo shoots and production crews, becoming more convinced that there was a connection. But what did Lucy have to do with any of this? Why would Carrie see Lucy on TV? Or was it simply that she somehow knew that Lucy could fly, could fly helicopters?
There was a commotion around a corner, and female peace officers were herding the women patients in from recreation. They were sweating and loud, with tormented faces, and one was being escorted in a preventive aggressive device, or a PAD, which was a politically correct term for a restraint that chained wrists and ankles to a thick leather strap about the waist. She was young and white, with eyes that scattered when they fixed on me, her mouth bowed in a simpering smile. With her bleached hair and pale androgynous body, she could have been Carrie, and for a moment, in my imagination, she was. My flesh crawled as those irises seemed to swirl, sucking me in, while patients jostled past us, several making it a point to bump into me.
‘You a lawyer?’ an obese black woman almost spat as her eyes smoldered on me.
‘Yes,’ I said, unflinching as I stared back, for I had learned long ago not to be intimidated by people who hate.
‘Come on.’ The director pulled me along. ‘I’d forgotten they were due up at this time. I apologize.’
But I was glad it had happened. In a sense, I had looked Carrie in the eye and had not turned away.
‘Tell me exactly what happened the night she disappeared, please,’ I said.
Dr Ensor entered a code into another keypad and pushed through another set of bright red doors.
‘As best anyone can reconstruct it,’ she replied, ‘Carrie went out with the other patients for this same recreation hour. Her snacks were delivered, and at dinner she was gone.’
We rode the elevator down. She glanced at her watch.
‘Immediately, a search began and the police were contacted. Not one sign of her, and that’s what continued to eat at me,’ she went on. ‘How did she get off the island in broad daylight with no one seeing her? We had cops, we had dogs, we had helicopters . . .’
I stopped her there, in the middle of the first floor hall.
‘Helicopters?’ I said. ‘More than one?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘You saw them?’
‘Hard not to,’ she replied. ‘They were circling and hovering for hours, the entire hospital was in an uproar.’
‘Describe the helicopters,’ I said as my heart began to hammer. ‘Please.’
‘Oh gosh,’ she answered. ‘Three police at first, then the media flew in like a swarm of hornets.’
‘By chance, was one of the helicopters small and white? Like a dragonfly?’
She looked surprised.
‘I do remember seeing one like that,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just some pilot curious about all of the commotion.’
22
LUCY AND I lifted off from Ward’s Island in a hot wind and low barometric pressure that made the Bell JetRanger sluggish. We followed the East River and continued to fly through the Class B airspace of La Guardia, where we landed long enough to refuel and buy cheese crackers and sodas from vending machines, and for me to call the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. This time I was connected to the director of student counseling. I took that as a good sign.