Page 22 of Antihero (Tregam’s Fractured Souls #3)

Marion Lester. Harry’s wife. The one who was, for whatever reason, out of town when Paige was at their house gearing up to murder her husband.

As the only definite and living victim of the Wraith so far, I figure my best bet at finding Paige’s motivations, and therefore her future victims, is through him.

I spot Marion as soon as she steps into the café, and watch her as she’s directed to the booth I’m waiting in. She’s a classically good-looking, late middle-aged woman, with big gold earrings underneath soft-looking silver hair.

Sliding in across from me, her sharp eyes fix on my notebook, where she thinks I’ll be taking notes on what I asked her here for— Harry’s criminal charges.

Hence, I’m surprised she showed up. All of the charges against him were dropped, leading to no convictions or criminal record against him.

Each and every one of the claims came from young women who’d crossed his path at one time or another.

I found the court records and the report on it in the Tregam press.

All brushed away due to Harry’s status as a member of high society, not to mention being on a number of councils, including the White Rock Island council twenty to fifteen years ago, while he was lead surgeon at Eternal Light.

I shake her hand, and she settles into her seat, outwardly relaxed, though I catch the way her eyes dart around, checking who's watching.

“You’ve been in contact with the alleged victims?” she asks, getting right to the point.

“Yes.” It's true, I emailed a couple of them. The reports seem to share too many commonalities between victims to be coincidence, to have been ideas each woman came up with out of sheer imagination.

“You believe them?”

I stare back at her. Decide not to lie. “Yes.”

“Good.” I raise an eyebrow. “They’re true,” she says.

“I have to confess, I expected you to take a different stance.”

“I won’t defend that bastard.”

“You’re separated, I take it?”

“As much as I can be.”

“Meaning?”

She sighs, entwining her fingers on the table. I note that she still wears her wedding ring. She toys with it now, seeming to struggle for words for the first time since the beginning of this odd meet. “There’s… a centralised power, on White Rock.”

“Right…”

“A boys' club.” She pulls a face. “A dwindling one, thanks to this Wraith, but a club nonetheless.”

“Harry is in it?”

She nods. “They support each other through court cases, kill any negative stories about their roles in the asylum…”

“Harry was a surgeon there,” I say.

“Yes, that was his role. And that’s controversial enough.”

I frown and decide to ask anyway, even though it might give away my true motivations.

“Did you or Harry know Frank Elvin?” I ask.

He’s the only one I haven’t been able to nail down the role of.

Aside from being an ‘investor’ in the girls' home. Nick ran the asylum, so that’s enough for the Wraith to be interested in him.

The second death, before I arrived at White Rock, was a man who used to be a guard in the mad ward a decade ago.

And the one dead woman was the matron of the girls’ home.

Based on what I could find about her, she was a right witch.

So much for looking like a sweet grandmother in the obituary.

Her eyes narrow on me. “What story are you doing, again?”

“It could be interesting to include.”

“Well, Harry never tells me much. But yes, he and Frank were… in touch. Frank was some sort of liaison at the ward. A connection between Eternal Light and housing for the cured, back in Tregam.”

“Sounds innocent,” I say doubtfully.

Her chuckle is humourless. “Think again. The homes 'cured' girls were being sent to in Tregam were businesses. Not the savoury kind.”

“But why?”

She spreads her hands. “Simple-minded workers? Already broken by the madhouse? Which is what the asylum was, back then. Make no mistake.”

“And there was a profit in that?”

As though holding class, Marion explains to me.

“So, here’s how the asylum worked; As a private institution doing a public service, it was paid by the state for every patient housed—so, the longer the better, for some, yes?

” I’ve heard of the same policy before of course, in prisons and similar places. I didn’t know the asylum ran under it.

“I suppose,” I agree, feeling a little sick. Whose idea of the right incentive is that ?

She holds up a finger. “But they were also paid—slightly less in the long run—for every patient cured enough to leave and get on with their life. I want you to think about what ‘cured’ might mean. Not thriving, that’s for sure.

For some, it might mean being a vegetable—but not a violent one—for the rest of their lives.

Maybe at the asylum, therefore...” She rubs her thumb and forefinger together.

Right. Guaranteed income for the asylum. “Something tells me there’s more.” Though suddenly I'm not sure I want to know it.

“Your intuition tells you right. There are the others, the ones who leave. Where’s the profit in that, if Eternal Light was better off housing more for longer, for life, even?

Well, as I mentioned, the homes they were sent to on the mainland were businesses.

Most of the patients who passed through that place were women—take what you will from that. ”

“Explain it to me, anyway.”

“Well, who better for a brothel than a sterilised woman?”

I stare. “Sterilised?” Paige comes immediately to the forefront of my mind.

Her face turned away, the heel of her boots thumping on the moss when she told me she couldn’t have children.

A ‘medical’ thing. I pull my hand off the table as it draws into a fist. Did they do that to her?

With the intention of shipping her off to a Tregam brothel? “Okay. How… how many women?”

Spreading her hands, Marion sits back. “Hundreds? Dozens? It wasn’t exactly logged.”

“And you’re sure of this?”

“Harry’s best friend—who died first to the Wraith, by the way—was the connections man on that front.

” That must be the other man found dead in his bed.

Marion continues. “He picked which girls were to be sent on to the ‘homes’ once they came of age. And Frank facilitated that.” Her lips curls in slight disgust.

“Picking which ones they wanted that done to?” I press.

I haven’t taken a note in several minutes.

Persona be damned. Marion only nods. I wonder if she’s ever spoken these things aloud before.

Perhaps the guilt of silence has been eating at her all these years.

Why else would she be so candid? “Did Harry do the sterilisations?”

Marion shrugs, considering. “I don’t know. Perhaps. He specialised in something different.”

“Lobotomies,” I say flatly. I’d hoped that rumour had been just that—a rumour.

Marion meets my eyes, sensing my anger perhaps. “He was a bad man. They all were.”

“No one stopped him? He was a surgeon , claiming to be improving…” I search for the right term, “People’s brains.”

She spreads her hands. “So long as he got another practitioner to sign off on the patient, he could do whatever head treatment he liked.”

“Uh-huh. Why not divorce?”

“Us older generations, we don’t like to divorce. It makes us look bad.”

I lose a little sympathy for her. Until I consider that being married to the man is possibly the only thing saving Marion from his wrath. It would be tough for the ex-surgeon to keep up appearances if his wife was going around with a black eye.

“You’ve heard, I suppose, of Nick Pastryachi’s death?” I ask, naming the late CEO of Eternal Light, the one Paige ‘visited’ after she drugged me.

“Of course.”

“They say there was an opened safe in his home. Documents gone missing, maybe.”

Marion blinks like she didn’t know this. I had to trawl through police reports to see that detail. When she speaks, I can tell she’s purposely keeping inflection out of her tone. “The Wraith has them now?”

“Supposedly.” I spread my hands. “Any idea what might have been in them? He was CEO of the asylum. Could be something delicate.”

With a shrug, falling back into that formal-relaxed exterior she’s clearly perfected, Marion tells me, “It’s almost definitely something delicate. If the Wraith has them, you can expect a lot more murders before this is over.”

I watch her. I was hoping she’d give some indication, drop a name of who might be next.

But I can see pressing for that would be too obvious.

I sit up straighter and pull the conversation back to my original purpose.

Even if everything I’ve learned knocks around in my brain like lead weights, needing to be analysed.

Paige is an ex-patient of the asylum. I know it in my gut. Back when she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Why wasn’t she sent to Tregam when she came of age? How did she escape that? And what has she found in Pastryachi’s safe?

I shake my head, though that does little to clear it. “Can you tell me about the charges against your husband? He seems to have a… pattern.”

She gestures as though ticking off a schedule. “Lure young women back to his hotel room, or home, or dark corner; gets handsy; don't take no for an answer; rough them around, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.”

“There were broken bones in several of the reports.”

“And those are just the reports that were made.”

“The women were very reluctant to speak to me,” I tell her. “Most of them blocked my email, and the number I was calling from.”

Marion takes a deep breath. “Harry… has a vengeful streak. He visited some of them after the failed court case.”

She doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t need to. He roughed them up, again. I’m starting to think I should have helped Paige murder this guy, rather than stopped her.

“He started doing this after he was banned from practicing surgery, I take it?”