30
Riverside Drive
Saturday, April 14, 9:00 a.m.
Barnett Griffin served as the head groundskeeper of Georgia’s Central State Hospital until 2013 when it officially shut down. Tony had promised his sister he would talk to the man. Griffin was eighty if he was a day but far from feeble. He informed Tony that he walked five miles every day and ate clean. No drinking, no smoking. He could be the poster boy for healthy living.
“It opened in 1842.” Griffin nodded. “A sad day in our history. ’Course I suppose it was a necessary evil. Taking care of the mentally ill was a learning process and Central State Hospital was part of the curve.
“Folks back then had good intentions, I suppose,” he went on, “Just not enough money or the right kinds of doctors. It was the biggest asylum in the country, you know. Sitting on about two thousand acres. Hundreds of buildings. Had around thirteen thousand patients at any given time. The things they did to patients.” He shook his head. “From lobotomies to forced sterilization, they did it all. Worst of all, they buried their dead in graves with nothing but old iron markers with numbers on them. Why, most folks bury their dogs better than that. God only knows who all’s buried out there. The state sure don’t have a clue. Makes it the perfect dumping ground, don’t you think?” He shrugged. “Shoot, a person could bury anything out there and no one would ever find it.”
Next to Tony, Joanna shifted. She had not wanted to come. They sat on the sofa in Griffin’s living room. Griffin sat in his easy chair facing the picture window. He claimed he never watched television or listened to the radio. He preferred the peace and quiet. His only social media was the newspaper.
The elderly man said, “Let me show you something.”
Griffin stood and led the way from the living room down a short side hall to a bedroom turned office of sorts. Images of deteriorating buildings, wooded grounds and sad-looking patients covered every square inch of wall on all four sides.
“These old buildings—” he gestured to the once-grand brick architecture that was now covered in vines with boarded-up windows and padlocked doors “—they all look deserted. They look good for nothing.” He directed their attention to another set of images. “These are surrounded by twelve-foot fences and the kind of wire you see around prisons. And that’s what they became. Some of the buildings were turned into prisons for a while back in the day.” He studied the grim images a moment. “Once the hospital shut down, they sent all the patients elsewhere, except a couple hundred mentally ill patients who were deemed too violent for prison. So they set up a forensic hospital out there. That’s where they keep the ones nobody else was willing to take.” He waved his arm around the room. “Most of the buildings look deserted and empty, like rotting corpses. But like a rotting corpse, you always got your flies and maggots and other critters who want to pluck the bones clean.”
Tony asked, “Are you saying there are still activities on the property?”
“Oh yeah. Pockets of all sorts of activities. Rumor has it that a security software company has some of their geniuses stashed out there. There’s a film group who has actually lured a couple of moviemakers to the area. But, the most interesting rumor I’ve heard is about a pharmaceutical company who tests drugs on participants—not necessarily volunteers is what I heard. And at least a couple of clinical studies on the mentally ill. You gotta believe me when I say there’s all sorts of things going on out there that nobody knows about. Security is as thick as fleas all over the place. There’s no gate so anybody who wants can go on the property but the security guards are always watching—24-7. With their cameras and their little electric cars buzzing around like bees. Lots of activity.”
“But you don’t have any proof these activities are actually going on,” Tony countered.
Griffin shook his head. “The production company has an office in the old administrator’s house. The software company and forensic hospital are legitimate operations. The others, no I can’t prove they exist but folks know there’s stuff going on out there. There’s always been bad things happening in that evil place.”
Tony moved closer to the images, studying each one. Joanna stayed near the door. He sensed her discomfort. Maybe this guy was crazy or paranoid or both, but Tony had a feeling there was some basis to his theories.
“What makes you so certain any of these rumors are true?” He turned back to their conspiracy theorist. “I’ve yet to visit a town with a deteriorating asylum who didn’t have lots of tales to tell.”
Griffin nodded. “I’m sure. But I worked there until five years ago when the state moved out the last of the noncriminal patients and closed the doors. I heard things. Got glimpses of things. I can give you a map. I’ll mark the spots I think might be hiding something. You can investigate at your own risk. Some of the buildings are falling in on themselves. Others are inhabited by squatters but they’re likely more scared of you than you would be of them. Then there’s the ghosts.”
Tony scanned the images again. He had to admit that the property posed the perfect setting for imprisoning victims. The kind of place no one would bother to look. Too dilapidated, surrounded by too much security. Some buildings were being torn down. “All the buildings are padlocked and marked no trespassing.”
“Yep. But people roam around out there all the time. It’s a felony if you get caught in one of the buildings. For a while that didn’t stop people but they’ve cracked down lately. To tell you the truth, it’s a big tourist attraction. You can go anywhere you want but security will be watching. If you try to go into one of the buildings, they’ll show up.”
“Let’s have a look at that map.”
Griffin opened up the folded layers and spread across the desk a hand-drawn map. He circled what he called hot spots. “I’m pretty sure this is where you’ll find those software geniuses. Note the towering antenna and a couple of satellite dishes.” He touched another of his marked spots. “This is one of the prisons that came later. If I was operating a pharmaceutical trial, I would like the security offered by the fence and the steel wire on the windows. I’ve been in all these places—the ones I’ve marked—they’re in decent shape. It would be easy to whip them up to par for use on the inside and leave the outside looking abandoned.”
“The local police aren’t suspicious of the activities going on out there?” Tony supposed there was really no reason for them to be interested. The state owned the property. It was their jurisdiction. Their problem.
“Maybe there are legitimate licenses or what have you for these pockets of activity,” Griffin offered, “but that don’t mean they’re doing what the powers that be think they’re doing.”
“You were the head groundskeeper. Did you ever notice any new graves?”
He pointed to another spot on the map. “There’s more than twenty-five thousand patients buried right around in here. You can see the memorial they set up a few years back right here.” He pointed to another spot. “There’s a gazebo and a little arrangement of some of the markers that got moved from the original grave sites. The bodies were buried all around in this wooded area. You’ll stumble over the tops of markers if you’re not careful. The area is a big slope. Time and water rushing over the ground there have all but swallowed them up. All the pine trees keep plenty of needles covering the ground. Like I said before, it would be easy as hell to lose a body in there, and then just rake pine needles over the freshly turned dirt. No one would notice. You’ll see what I mean.”
Tony thanked the man. Joanna was out the door and in the car before the door had closed behind Tony.
When they’d driven away from Griffin’s home, he asked, “What’s going on with you? You were agitated last night and you’re—I don’t know—more so today.”
“I need to get out of the car.”
“What?” He shot her a look.
“Now!” She reached for the door handle.
Tony hit the brakes and whipped off to the side of the road. Her door was open before the car had jerked to a complete stop.
She stumbled into the grassy ditch and fell to her hands and knees. Tony turned on the hazards and shoved the gearshift into Park. He got out and sat down next to her. She heaved and gagged. He dug around in his jacket pocket, found a cocktail napkin from the other night at that bar and offered it to her.
When she’d stopped heaving and sat back in the grass, he spoke, “Tell me what’s going on, Joanna.”
She wiped her mouth with the napkin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
As frustrated as her refusal to come completely clean about the past made him, he took a breath and tried to speak calmly. “You came to me because you want help. You want to make sure whoever took my niece—whoever took you and Ellen—is stopped. I can’t help make that happen if you aren’t completely honest with me.” He glanced around, considered how many days he’d been in Milledgeville already and the fact that he had basically nothing so far. “To tell you the truth, I’m beginning to think you don’t want to find the people responsible for what happened then or now.”
“I think Griffin is right. Where we...woke up in the woods wasn’t more than a mile or so from the hospital, I always thought deep in my gut that we were held there somewhere. At the time the hospital was still operational so I couldn’t be sure. My brother told me the cops had searched the whole place. He talked about how creepy it was so maybe I’m way off base.” She drew in a big, steadying breath. “All I know is that when Angie started to talk about it I couldn’t listen. It was like hot coals raking over my skin. That’s why I was so mean to her.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have said those things to her. Anyway—” she inhaled a big breath “—when we were at Griffin’s house and he kept going on and on, my head started spinning and I felt like I needed to puke.”
“What they talked about nudged a memory you’ve repressed.” Tony saw it on a regular basis when interrogating witnesses. “That’s why you’re reacting this way.”
She glared at him. “So you’re a shrink now?”
Tony shook his head. “No but I’ve walked enough victims through the horrors they suffered to know what PTSD looks like and the things that can make it flare up.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She shoved the napkin into her pocket and stood. “What else is new?”
Tony followed her to the car, stood at her door as she slid into the passenger seat. “If you want to help me find Tiffany and Vickie and whoever else this bastard took, stop fighting me. Don’t hold back. Let the memories come. We need all the help we can get.”
“Easy for you to say,” she grumbled.