She grinned at my admittance. “Nice to meet you. If you’ll follow me, we’ll get started.”
Dr. Reginald led us past the front desk and down the hallway of the employees’ offices, meaning that all the patients were on the upper three floors. She opened the door to the stairwell and we followed her to the basement, which was even colder than the sub-zero first floor.
“Pardon me if I have a little trouble with the files,” the doctor said, taking a set of keys out of her pocket. “It’s very rare that we have past relatives coming in to find information about loved ones.”
“It’s fine,” I assured her.
“May I see your information?”
I handed her the file containing my birth certificate. She scanned it briefly and handed it back to me, turning to unlock the door. Inside, the room was filled with row after row of file cabinets, all with elaborate letters and codes for organization. Must have been hell to have to catalogue things this way.
“Our recent patients’ information is in our computers upstairs, but everyone who was at this facility from ten years ago or longer has hard copies. We keep them in case the state or federal government needs them.” Dr. Reginald ‘s dark eyes scanned the rows until she recognized the one we needed to be on. We approached a worn out black file cabinet and she opened it, mumbling to herself as she looked through the folders’ tabs. I chewed my bottom lip, but at last she found the right manila and pulled it out.
“Here we are. There’s not much on there—just your basic profile and how long she stayed at this hospital,” she said, handing it to me.
My hands shook the tiniest bit as I opened the folder, coming upon a grey document with my mother’s name, former address, marital status, and so on. A picture was paper-clipped in the top right corner and it made my breath catch to see her face again. Morena, just like me. Staring into the photograph was like looking into a mirror of an older, much stronger reflection of myself. After a moment, I tore my gaze away from my mother’s brazen brown eyes and instead read through the information.
“Wait, this says that she was never legally released from the hospital because she ran away. I thought my mother’s body was found here?” I asked, frowning.
Dr. Reginald’s brow furrowed as well as she stepped on my left side, since Michael towered over my right, and scanned the profile. “That’s odd. If you want more clarification, you’d have to see if there’s a police report attached.”
She turned the page and I read it out loud: “Found three blocks away from psychiatric hospital with a deep laceration in her rib cage that suggest it was self-inflicted. No signs of struggle. The weapon was found in her chest cavity with her fingerprints and the prints of another unidentified dead man on it. Her male accomplice fled the scene. Male accomplice?”
Behind that page, I found a rough sketch of a dark-haired man in his late thirties with a thin scar over his right eyebrow and another peeking up from the collar of his shirt on the left side of his neck. I couldn’t breathe.
It was Mr. N.
Beneath his picture, in an untidy scrawl, was a name.
Andrew Bethsaida.
Andrew Bethsaida was the name of the man I killed.
My throat tightened upon seeing his face again. I swallowed hard a couple of times before speaking to the doctor.
“Do you have a profile on this man?”
“He was brought in as a consultant later on during your mother’s stay at the hospital. He specialized in schizophrenia, paranoia, and other psychological problems in people with multicultural backgrounds. However, if you aren’t his next of kin then I’m afraid I can’t divulge his personal information.” She sounded regretful, as if she noticed the distraught look on my face.
“It’s…okay. I just wanted to know. Would I be able to get a copy of this file?”
“Sure, I’ll get that for you upstairs.”
“Thank you. One more thing—is there a chance that she had any personal items put in storage here?”
Dr. Reginald paused, thinking about it. “Most likely, no. The policy is to keep a patient’s things for about a year and then either donate them or throw them away. However, I did see something on the other page.”
She flipped back to the first sheet and pointed down at the bottom.
“It says here that her personal belongings were forwarded to this address.”
“God,” I whispered.
Michael touched my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s the address to my Aunt Carmen’s apartment.”
Chapter 19