Page 78 of Dead Serious Case 5 Madame Vivienne

Once Chan had left and we’d talked, we ended up in the shower. Danny shaved my scraggly face so sweetly and we washed each other—well, me mostly. We’d washed me. There was nothing sexual about it. It was about comfort and closeness.

After we’d aired out the bed and remade it with fresh linen for later, we curled up on the sofa to watch mindless TV.

It was what we both needed. To reconnect.

Each day since then, I’ve been making the effort to get up and get washed and dressed. I’m not ready to go back to work yet, but thankfully, they’ve been supportive and so understanding.

Instead, I’ve been pottering around the flat cleaning and trying to read, although my concentration isn’t that great. Danny and I have snuggled and talked, and although we’ve had toplan the funeral, Chan sorted most of the details, which I’m incredibly grateful for.

Harrison has been quiet. I’m not sure what he’s been up to, but I’m not sure I want to know right now. I hope he did go and speak to Mr Hadley. I know he wanted my help with all this demon stuff, but I’m hardly qualified to deal with stuff like that in the best of times. Right now? Not a fucking chance. I can’t even keep my own shit together.

Dusty checks in on me regularly and has mentioned Evangeline a few times, but I also can’t deal with more ghost stuff right now, not when I’m still feeling so raw. Danny and Sam are still trying to track down Sage Wilson but at least they don’t need anything from me. In fact, it’s giving Danny something to focus on while his own job is still under question.

Feeling my stomach rumble, I pad out of the bedroom, my sock-covered feet making no sound. The flat is quiet; a quick check of the kitchen finds it empty as is the living room. I assume Danny is holed up in the spare room. The space is fully his office to research all those old files now, but these days it looks more like a police incident room. Boards covered in notes and photos and strings are pinned to a couple of walls.

My stomach rumbles again, so I grab an apple from the fruit bowl on the table and head to the living room door. As I do, my foot catches on a box and I stumble. I manage to keep my balance even though my toe is throbbing, but the box tips over, spilling its contents across the floor.

Grabbing my apple in my teeth to free up my hands, I kneel down and begin to gather the loose documents and put them back into the box when something catches my eye. I don’t know what makes me stop and read, but as I skim over the elegant handwritten scrawl, my brow furrows. After quickly putting everything else back into the box, I tuck it safely under the table.

Taking a bite out of my apple, I chew thoughtfully as I read and then re-read the paper. It’s a journal entry, written by Cornelius Crawshanks, and from the neatness of the writing, I’d guess it was from early on before the chaos and the drugs overcame him.

I read it again before taking another bite of my apple.I wonder…

I need to get a look at the family tree we began compiling for the Crawshanks family, the one I know is tacked to another one of the walls in Danny’s office.

I wander out of the living room and into the spare room. Danny looks up from his desk and smiles when he sees me eating, even if it is only an apple.

“Hey, love.” His eyes dip to the paper in my other hand. “What’ve you got there?”

I hand it to him, my eyes already scanning the documents pinned to the wall. “I found that when I knocked over the box of the Crawshanks stuff Viv gave me.”

Danny scans the handwriting. “One of Cornelius’ journal entries?”

“Read the third paragraph down,” I mutter as I bite into my apple and continue to study the wall, my brain contemplating Cornelius’ words.

I was finally granted permission to visit my sister on compassionate grounds and was shocked by her appearance. They are keeping her restrained as they say she has already harmed several of the orderlies and attacked one of the doctors. She is not the same woman I knew. They’ve broken her. She should be home where we can care for her. The asylum my father had her committed to has the worst reputation of all of them.

I fear there is no way back for Cordie. She will never recover from having her child taken from her, and we have no idea where she was sent.

Danny reads the passage aloud and then shakes his head and looks at me in confusion. “We already knew her child had been taken from her. That’s why she ended up in the asylum.”

“We knew she had a son.” I reach up and unpin a paper from the Crawshanks family tree. “Here.” I lay the page in front of him. “Cordelia Crawshanks gave birth to an illegitimate child in 1843, a boy. The son of an Irish immigrant, he was sent to be raised by his father’s family. Cordelia’s father, Elmer, had her committed to the asylum, probably more as a punishment than anything else given what we know about the type of man he was.” Danny stares at me. “Look at the journal entry again. Cornelius wrote, ‘we have no idea whereshewas sent.’”

Danny picks up the paper and looks closer.

“She had another child, Danny. She was sent to the asylum straight after her son was born and she was there for nearly four years, which means she got pregnant while incarcerated. Victorian institutions were known for being brutal and this one in particular has become rather notorious. In its heyday, it had a shocking reputation for abuse and medical experimentation. I don’t even want to think about what went on behind those walls, and Cordelia had to endure it for years. I’m beginning to feel more and more sorry for her.”

Danny looks up from the journal entry. “You know what this means?”

I nod. “That there’s probably an entire bloodline descended from Cordelia out there that we don’t know about.”

“When we were dealing with the gateway in the bookshop that Cordelia originally opened, Death kept telling us it was all about the bloodlines. What if he didn’t just mean the gateway,what if he meant all of it? The demon, the trap? Everything keeps coming back to the Crawshanks family.”

“Jesus, talk about a lot of skeletons in the Crawshanks closet,” I mutter.

“I have a feeling we haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to that shop and the family.” Danny pushes his chair back to stand. “I’m going to head over to the records office. Been meaning to do it for ages but got sidetracked. They should have records from the asylum. Maybe I can pick up the trail of the girl they gave away. If we can track the descendants down to the present day, we may have another suspect.”

I step back and nod.