Paperback & ebook, 143 Pages
April 6, 2021 by Burns and Lea Books
I stare unflinchingly around the table, staring down the hospital board of directors.
“Gentlemen, I do not see why Jane must wait.”
With Frost gone, not one of them can hold a proverbial candle to my prowess as an alienist.
Not even Gentile—no matter his age or experience. My patients improve, are often discharged. Few alienists can make such claims.
“Jane Frost now has family who are willing and able to claim her. To care for her.”
Dr. Sniveler’s dark eyes narrow behind horn-rimmed glasses. His tiny mustache twitching reminds me of a mouse who has unearthed a foul-smelling cheese.
“Miss Frost has no way to prove this alleged relationship and familial tie. The word of a governess is far from legally binding.”
“Even if they were not related, patients are discharged into the care of fosters all the time. I do not see the—”
“Patient Twenty-Nine is not yet well. She still hears voices and is prone to fits of rage,” Gentile interjects. “She may yet be a danger to herself or the community at large.”
My fingers twitch and I fight the urge to ball them into fists.
Fits of rage.
Let me dunk you into ice baths, twirl your body about till you’re ill, and cram crème of tartar down your gullet. Then we shall see who is “prone to fits of rage.”
Instead I say, “Twenty-Nine shows great promise in being able to care for herself, not only physically, but she has an industrious mind. I daresay she might remain gainfully employed. I—”
“Jonathon.” Gentile sits at the table’s end, too-long gray hair curling around his temples, fingers steepled before pursed lips. “I am afraid I agree with Sniveler. Jane is not yet ready.”
“On what grounds?”
“I believe she hears voices.”
Something. There is something veiled in those eyes. An iced blue barricade.
“I thought we established that the voices were Frost, a voyeur, stalking her, saying her name. Trying to convince the poor girl she was daft.”
His eyebrows rise. He knows about the music. I see it in his eyes.
Yet he doesn’t want to play that card before the board; he holds it close to his vest.
“Fine. Then I am going to insist on a trial of Jane in Ward One permanently, to give her the chance to prove her sanity.”
Hardcover, Paperback & ebook, 300 Pages
February 4, 2019 by Burns and Lea Books
Life for Patient 29 is full of medicated day dreams of a life outside the walls of Soothing Hills Asylum. But fantasies are not all that consume her. A monster roams the halls of the sanitarium she reluctantly calls home and three girls have been found dead. The dead girls share one common thread . . . each was 29's cell mate. As the investigation gets under way, she retreats into her mind, listening to the voices that call to her. She is endowed with the cursed gift of perception. Through it, she hears messages carried upon the notes of music, discerns words hidden among the strokes of paintings, and minds pleadings for help from the corn field outside.
Could the key to the murders lie within 29's broken mind? Mason, an orderly, does not see 29 as a lunatic and as his belief in her grows so does her self-confidence. The possibility of one day leaving the asylum seems less and less like a fantasy. But the monster has other plans for her. Leaving will not be so easy, at least not while she is alive.
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