The Whispering Room. Amanda Stevens

Salt Lake City, he’d never lost his drawl. He had a knack for dealing with people, and he wasn’t above pouring on the Southern charm when it suited his purposes. His laid-back charisma often came in handy when dealing with the local good ol’ boys.

      Tom’s approach to their assignments was instinctive and organic while Nash tended to be more textbook and detail-oriented. He knew he could sometimes come off as arrogant and impatient, but he was neither.

      What he was, was focused.

      “Who owes us a favor at NOPD?”

      Tom grinned. “You want me to make you a list?”

      “A name or two will do.”

      “I take it you’re down for a little arm-twisting,” Tom said. “You want we should do it the nice way?”

      Nash slipped on his sunglasses, turned and opened the car door. “I don’t care. So long as it gets done.”

      He glanced over his shoulder one last time at Evangeline Theroux. He almost hated to do this to her. The murder of a prominent attorney would get a lot of media attention and a high-profile investigation could be a real feather in a young detective’s cap.

      But he had a job to do and the last thing Nash needed was Johnny Theroux’s widow anywhere near Sonny Betts.

      Four

      With its lush gardens and gleaming white columns, Pinehurst Manor might have been a slightly careworn cousin of the grand old dames situated along River Road, that fabled seventy-mile corridor of Southern plantation homes stretching on either side of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

      But to the discerning eye, it soon became apparent that the house was merely a poor replica of its far grander predecessors. Built in 1945 as a personal residence for Dr. Bernard DeWitt, a noted psychiatrist and philanthropist from Baton Rouge, the original home was later expanded and converted into a private sanatorium.

      Under Dr. DeWitt’s stewardship, Pinehurst Manor became one of the most highly regarded psychiatric institutions in Louisiana. For over thirty years, the hospital treated patients from all over the state, suffering from all manner of mental disorders, but by the late eighties, the once pillared splendor of Pinehurst was but a distant memory.

      Rocked by the twin scandals of misappropriation of funds and inappropriate behavior by some of the male orderlies, the hospital fell on hard times. By the end of the decade, only a handful of forgotten patients remained in treatment and those unfortunate few were eventually turned out when Pinehurst was forced to shut its doors for good.

      The building remained boarded up for over a decade until the state bought the property and reopened it as a medium-security psychiatric facility, admitting only those patients who were not considered a serious threat to society.

      But all that changed with Katrina.

      Hospitals affected by the storm had to be evacuated quickly and even though every effort was made to relocate the more violent patients—those designated criminally insane—to maximum-security facilities in other parts of the state, the sheer number of beds lost to flooding forced low-to-medium-security hospitals like Pinehurst to take in the overflow.

      One of the patients evacuated to Pinehurst was Mary Alice Lemay.

      For over thirty years, Mary Alice had been incarcerated at a branch of the South Louisiana State Hospital in Plaquemines Parish, a dingy, gloomy facility with cinder-block walls, chipped tile flooring and hallways that reeked of urine.

      In that building, the worst of the worst were housed and treated—the serial killers, rapists and child molesters who had been remanded to a state psychiatric hospital rather than being sent to prison.

      Mary Alice had spent the first few years of her custody under a suicide watch and in virtual solitary confinement. During that time, she received not a single outside visitor. Friends and relatives were so shocked by what she’d done, they couldn’t bring themselves to meet her gaze in the courtroom, let alone visit her face-to-face in a mental institution—especially considering most thought she deserved the electric chair.

      The weeks, months, years of her internment were passed alone and in complete silence until a new doctor assigned to her case decided one day that integration into the general population of the institution would be beneficial to her treatment.

      So the door to her room came open, and Mary Alice Lemay stepped through into a world unlike any she could have previously imagined.

      A nightmare world of confusion, misery and perpetual terror.

      She was encouraged to mingle with the other patients, but she didn’t like eating her meals in the cafeteria or socializing in the solarium or taking group walks around the grounds. Her ward was filled with all sorts of people suffering from all kinds of distress—addicts, schizophrenics, those with depression and bipolar disorder—and Mary Alice was afraid of them.

      She’d been born and raised in a small town in Southern Louisiana. For the most part, she’d lived a very sheltered life, and what she saw inside the walls of that hospital shocked her.

      Some of the patients were so violent, they were never allowed to leave their cells. Others were let out, but were kept restrained, and it was those patients that seemed to watch Mary Alice with more than a passing interest.

      They were the ones with the dark stares and the knowing smiles, the ones who gave her a nod as she passed by in the hallway, as if to acknowledge a kindred spirit.

      And then there were the sad cases, the distraught patients who tugged at Mary Alice’s heart. The elderly woman who stood in a corner all day long pulling imaginary spiders from her tangled, gray hair. The young man who drew nothing but eyes, then cut them out and taped them to the back of his head.

      Sometimes Mary Alice wondered what that young man had been like as a child. Had he been happy and carefree, or had the seeds of his sickness already been sewn?

      Sometimes Mary Alice thought of her own children, but she’d learned early on that it was unwise to look back. No good could come of living in the past, of trying to remember a time when she, too, had been happy and carefree.

      It had all been so long ago.

      Before evil had invaded her life.

      Before she had been forced to do the unthinkable. The unforgivable.

      Mary Alice didn’t want to look back, but the only thing she had to look forward to each day was art therapy where, instead of drawing eyes, she took up origami. Some of the doctors used the art of paper folding as a way to decrease anxiety and aggression in the patients, but for Mary Alice, it was an escape.

      Her fingers were very nimble, her patience boundless, and she could lose herself for hours in the intricate folds. Soon her room overflowed with the tiny paper cranes, each one beautiful and unique and—to Mary Alice—each represented a very special wish.

      She’d had to leave all her cranes behind when she was transferred to Pinehurst, but she didn’t really mind. The new facility was so much better. The building was old, but it had a lot of character and there where windows everywhere. The green-gold light that filtered down through the trees outside her room each morning reminded her of the bayou, and when she stared out that window, she could easily ignore the bars and imagine that she was back in her own bedroom.

      But she refused to dabble in the dangers of make-believe, nor would she allow herself the luxury of losing her mind. Every hour of every day, Mary Alice Lemay was cognizant of where she was and why she was here.

      She knew what people thought of her, what they called her here and in the outside world. But they hadn’t looked into the eyes of her children. They hadn’t seen what she’d seen. They didn’t know what she knew.

      So, no, Mary Alice did not—would not—look back with regret.

      Sorrow, yes, but not regret.

      Whatever anyone else thought of her, she knew that she was