Asylum Read Online Free

“Richard. Je suis desolée .” I am so sorry. What an inadequate thing to say, in the circumstances.
    He looked up, tears in his eyes. “It’s just…” He took a long, shuddering breath. “Martine, there may be problems. I’m sorry, but there may be. We—we were seeing each other.”
    Oh, God. I tried not to let my consternation show; it wouldn’t help anything. I kept my hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “I think you should tell me about it, Richard.”
    He nodded miserably, but didn’t speak again for an eternity. “Danielle … she was a research librarian. Over at UQAM.” That explained how they met; Richard was working part-time on a graduate degree at the Université du Québec à Montréal, my own alma mater. “She … at first, we went out for a coffee a couple of times, we liked each other, what can I say? We spent a lot of time together. We took a long weekend, went up into the Laurentians…”
    I remembered him taking that time off; I’d had to change my own personal plans to accommodate him, and Ivan hadn’t been best pleased. That had been at least a month ago. If Richard had met Danielle when classes were still in session, they had been seeing each other throughout the summer.
    My stomach clenched with anxiety. Most people are killed by someone they know. Despite the profile pointing to this being a serial killer, there was no way that my deputy wasn’t going to be on the list of suspects.
    Pretty high up on it, too.
    I took a deep breath. “Richard. When did you see her last?”
    There was misery in his eyes. “Wednesday night.”
    Great. And she’d been killed sometime Thursday. It was going to be a very long day indeed.
    All of us at the orphanage had one thing, one terribly important thing, in common: we were mistakes. I never really understood what that meant, but Sister said it often enough that I knew it must be true. We came from villages, farms, even the city itself; we were brought with favorite toys or blankets or in harsh cheap unraveling baskets or by some relative who hid us from the light of day.
    Those who brought us in were fed the lies. Of course he can keep his favorite blanket. Naturellement , she will have her stuffed rabbit with her in bed at night. Bien sûr there will be a good education. We love them all as though they were our own.
    Well, we were theirs, all right; but love didn’t have anything to do with it.
    It was all about the work. Hard work.
    Even the smallest children had something to do. My earliest memories of the orphanage are of floors, of scrubbing floors. Perhaps because we were small and couldn’t reach much of anything else, we were made to clean the floors.
    I don’t know if the sisters even knew our names, or if they ever cared about any of us as individuals. We were their charges, the mistakes that they were tasked to deal with. And that was what united us: the need to be children, real children, with names and pasts and thoughts that were all our own.
    Not that they didn’t try to hammer the individuality out of us. We looked the same, all of us girls, wearing long scratchy shifts in bed at night and pinafores during the day—we all wore the same clothes, interchangeably; nothing was our own. Nothing showed that one of us was in any way different from any other one.
    In the winter we washed in water so cold that we had to break the ice on it, we got dressed and made our beds, lined two-deep the length of the dormitory. Sister inspected all the beds and had a stick ready to rap the knuckles of any child who didn’t do it properly.
    Needless to say, I got quite good at making my bed.
    Then we’d stand in line, single file, down three sets of stairs and out to the chapel for morning mass, which none of us understood on account of it being in Latin, but which we had to stay awake for anyway. I got good at staying awake and attentive there, too.
    We had no idea, then, that it could get better—or worse. It was the way our lives were. It