She ends up staying overnight at a hotel nearby, returning to the archives the next morning to finish reviewing the documents.Had she kept going the day before, she and Lydia would have been there well past midnight.Despite the fact that Rachel is eager to get home, there’s no huge rush.She always has a go bag packed in her car for times like this, anyway: extra underwear, socks, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, her antidepressants.
She finishes around ten-thirty, bids Lydia goodbye and heads back to her car with a fresh stack of copies folded neatly into her folio.She takes a sip of the last cold bit of her hotel takeout coffee and shakes her head.Mercer was a truly horrific place.No wonder they shut it down and razed the whole thing for a soccer stadium.
Rachel’s spent plenty of time in prisons, knows the standards and laws and how things work—or are supposed to work.What she’s seen here, even for the sixties, is beyond the pale.The treatment of the psychiatric patients, particularly.She pauses, then crumples up the paper cup with undue force.
She hadn’t had much interest in seeing the site of the prison when she’d learned from Chapman that it no longer existed, but after reading all of this, her fingers are itching to steer over to Liberty Village before she leaves the city.
She looks down at her notes now, at the list of five inmates she isolated from the hundreds registered at the Mercer throughout the ’50s and ’60s; the names that will form the bulk of her work over the next several weeks.Though she has no idea how any one of them would have ended up in the Millgate Cemetery, two hundred kilometres from Liberty Village.
Three of these women died at the prison between 1958 and 1962.
Another two are mysteriously unaccounted for, with no death or discharge dates at all.
And one of them, she’s sure, is her Jane Doe.
CHAPTER 21
EMILY
July, 1961
Day 37 (146 to go)
Emily clutched the wet rag against her mouth and nose, eyes shut tight.The fumes from the gasoline were overwhelming, and she was terrified it would splash into her eyes and blind her.
“Just hold still,” the prison hairdresser, Maria, said.“A few more minutes.”Emily could hear the disgust in her voice as she brushed more of the cold chemical onto Emily’s scalp and strands as though she were applying Miss Clairol.It dripped down Emily’s neck into the towel tied around her shoulders as the hairdresser tugged at the hair around Emily’s right ear.
Maria was a fourth-generation Italian woman about Emily’s age, whose aspiring career in acting had spiralled into high-end prostitution.Three months ago, she was caught with a politician of some importance—she refused to say who—at the Windsor Arms Hotel.She was arrested and sent to the Mercer for a year.He didn’t even lose his job.
Maria had dark eyes, a rosebud mouth worthy of the screen and a sharp tongue that might very well have impeded her professional success.
“You’re lucky you only have to do this once,” she said darkly.“I’ll be doing it a hundred and twenty bloody times.”She herself hadn’t been infected yet, and wore a prophylactic plastic cap over her own spectacular head of dark locks.“My sentence’ll be up by the time I finishmurdering all these damn cooties.And God help my sense of smell.Burned half to hell already, I’m sure.”
The lice outbreak had spread through the Mercer faster than the fire at the turn of the century that destroyed most of the city’s core.The mites hopped from head to head over the course of two weeks, infesting nearly everyone except the prisoners currently in isolation cells in the basement.
I am certain those lonesome souls sequestered in the claustrophobic bowels of the damp basement had never before had cause to celebrate their punitive seclusion.
“All right, there you are.”Maria fixed a pink plastic shower cap onto Emily’s head with a grunt.“Go sit over there and watch the clock.It needs to sit for an hour, and then we’ll wash it out with water hot enough to cook a lobster.”
“Thanks,” Emily muttered, revolted.She stood and made her way over to the line of chairs against the wall as another inmate took her place in the salon chair.She noted the time on the clock opposite: 1:16 p.m.At least this was getting her out of her domestics lesson and a decent chunk of her cleaning shift.Three other women, including Eliza and Peggy, were seated already.Eliza appeared to be napping, her shower-capped head resting on the wall behind her, and Peggy was crying silently, tears absorbing into the cloth she held over her nose.Emily didn’t know the third woman, who was staring vacantly at the floor.
Emily ran her tongue over her teeth, swearing she could actually taste the gasoline fumes wafting from her head.The windows were barred in the hair salon, but the matrons had thrown up the casements in an attempt to filter the air.She held the cloth to her mouth again, repelled by the situation she found herself in, hadputherself in for the sake of the story.By God…the medical exam had been awful enough, the food a disgrace.If she was also going to scorch her scalp and its resident vermin, she sure ashell was going to get this story and see her name in that goddamn byline.That image was the talisman that kept her going, counting down the days to the end of her sentence and the beginning of her career.
“I’ve done this three times now,” Eliza said, not even opening her eyes.“Ev’ry time I been inside, there’s some sorta vermin.Nits.Bedbugs.Even had a rat in me cell once.In the winter.Burrowed into me mattress tryna keep warm.”
Maria scoffed, and Emily could only stare, incredulous.“And you still say this place is better than your home, Eliza?”
Eliza didn’t open her eyes, but nodded.“Yes ma’am.”
Emily sat beside Eliza, imagining, with no small measure of discomfort, the horrid realities of a home that rendered life at the Mercer preferable.Eliza appeared to doze off again, her head nodding, impervious to the fumes that choked her fellow inmates.
A little over twenty minutes later, a commotion in the hallway around Warden Barrow’s office next door caught Emily’s attention.The salon door was open onto the hall for ventilation, and she had a clear view from her seat.
A group of young women Emily didn’t recognize—many of them only teenagers—was clustered together, shuffling around awkwardly with suitcases.Nearly every girl displayed a rounded, pregnant belly.Emily stared, uncomprehending.Their expressions were fearful, and several of them spoke to one another, commenting on the fumes.A voice Emily didn’t recognize called instructions to them to file down the corridor and wait.She strained her ears, finally isolating the warden’s smooth voice in the clamour, just out of sight.Glancing at Maria, who was busy now dousing another inmate’s scalp like an arsonist intent on burning the place to the ground, Emily stood and wandered closer to the door, taking several long strides under the pretence of stretching her stiff legs.
“They are spread out over the second and third floors, wherever we’ve found room for them,” Warden Barrow was saying.“It was good luck that we aren’t currently at capacity.Here’s the chart.Matron Smithand Matron White can assist the girls with finding their cells—rooms.Are you staying here to get them processed and settled, Sister?”
“Well, yes, I think so,” a soft voice said.“But then we need to be getting back.”
