The Accounting
Truth costs less than the alternative in the long run, but the short run is terrifying.
Aftermath || Evidence || Justice || Revelation
The road was manageable — barely, but manageable, the partial thaw having turned the upper layer of snow to a heavy slush that the convoy trucks navigated with the complaint of vehicles operating at the edge of their tolerance, but navigating. She sat in the front of the lead truck with the senior driver, whose name was Pieter, and she held the green notebook on her lap and Bruck’s report inside her jacket and watched the valley open below them as they descended, the town of Marten becoming visible in stages — first as lights, then as structures, then as the particular organised geography of a settlement that existed in ordinary relation to ordinary time and ordinary winter and ordinary human rules about what was permitted and what was not. She felt the descent in her chest — a physical sensation of pressure releasing, air returning to a volume it had been compressed from for thirty-three days. She did not cry. She thought about crying and decided against it for the practical reason that she had work to do and the work required everything she currently had. She would cry later. She made a note of this decision.
In Marten she went directly to the police, with Carey beside her and Holl behind her and Hargreaves and Bruck behind Holl, and the other eight patients from the third floor arranged in the convoy truck outside the police station, being attended by the nursing staff she had brought. She was the first person through the police station door and she placed on the duty officer’s desk, in a deliberate sequence, the following things: her credentials, the Bruck report, her green notebook, the photographs of the 1959 patient file, the photographs of the floor plan with its discrepancies, the historical records from the Marten library, and a statement she had written in the truck on the descent and signed and dated. She said: “I am reporting criminal activity at the Coldmoor Psychiatric Institute. I need you to contact the medical board, the regional criminal authority, and someone with access to federal health oversight. I have patients who have been held unlawfully and a colleague who has been imprisoned. I have sixty-three pages of documented evidence and the living testimony of eleven witnesses.” The duty officer looked at her, at the objects on his desk, at the people behind her. He reached for the telephone. She sat down in the chair beside the desk. She had been standing, she realized, for the better part of thirty-three days.