Page 67 of The Other Lady Vanishes

“Use you?”

“They needed another test subject, you see. I was Patient B. Evidently, Patient A died. The people housed on ward five told me that one day Gill and Ormsby would kill me with the drug and I would become a ghost, just like the other patient who had been locked in my room.”

“Gill and Ormsby conducted experiments on you?”

“They had other patients they could have used, of course, but those people were all locked up at Rushbrook in the first place because they had been diagnosed as suffering from some type of severe mental illness. Gill and Ormsby wanted a research subject who was... normal.”

“They didn’t just want a subject who was normal,” Jake said. “They wanted someone who was alone in the world. Someone who didn’t have any family members who might ask awkward questions.”

“They could have kidnapped some poor soul off the street if that was all they wanted,” Adelaide said. “But they also needed money. They had a nice little sideline going with the sales of some drug thatthey packaged in perfume bottles, but they didn’t have the capacity to produce and market large quantities of the stuff. And, as it happens, experimental research is expensive.”

“Massey agreed to give Gill a share of the money he got from your inheritance.”

“Yes.”

“How did Conrad Massey get involved in this?”

Adelaide’s smile was both cold and sad. “He wanted to marry me for the oldest reason in the world.”

“He needed money.”

“Yes.”

“But to get control of your inheritance, he would have had to marry you,” Jake said. “Not only that, he would have had to be your husband in order to have you committed against your will. You said you decided not to marry him. You gave him back his ring.”

“I told you, that’s where things get murky. You see, when I woke up in the Rushbrook Sanitarium, everyone insisted on addressing me as Mrs. Massey. I had a gold wedding band on my left hand.”

“The bastard claimed he had married you? Dr. Gill believed him?”

Adelaide shrugged. “I think it was Gill’s idea from the start. But here’s the problem—it might be true. I don’t know if I’m actually married to Conrad.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t have any clear memories of the time between the night of my so-called breakdown in Conrad’s dining room and the morning I finally started to recover from the delirium. I lost three days of my life to a nightmare. I was told that during those three days, Conrad and I had eloped to Reno. I was also informed that it was the stress of my wedding night that had caused my nervous breakdown. Gill said that I was suffering from amnesia.”

“Even though you collapsed in Massey’s town house shortly after you drank some drugged champagne?”

“I was advised that I could not trust any of my memories of events that took place during those three days.”

“You said that they were using Daydream, the drug your parents discovered, for the experiments. How did Gill and Ormsby get hold of it?”

“Gill was well aware of my parents’ research. He’s in the business of operating a psychiatric asylum, after all. My father had said Gill was especially interested in a drug that would cause patients to become highly suggestible. Gill claimed he wanted a drug that would induce a trancelike state so that a doctor could use hypnosis in a therapeutic way to stabilize a patient’s unbalanced mind. To some extent Daydream accomplishes that goal—it certainly has hypnotic properties. But as you discovered, it has some very serious side effects.”

“The hallucinations?”

“Yes. It is also very unpredictable. It can make you extremely paranoid, for example. In the end my parents concluded that it was simply too dangerous. They informed Gill that they were closing down the research into Daydream.” Adelaide paused. Her eyes tightened at the corners. “Coincidentally, my mother and father were killed less than a week later in a mysterious explosion in their laboratory, and all of the research files on Daydream disappeared.”

“But you doubt that?”

“Supposedly my parents’ notebooks were destroyed in the blast, but I’m very sure that Gill and Ormsby stole them.”

“You think Gill and Ormsby murdered your parents.”

“At the time I was convinced that the explosion really was an accident. But I stopped believing that when I woke up in a room at Rushbrook.” Adelaide made a face. “As I said, I may be a little naïve, but once I know the truth about someone, I learn my lesson.”

“What about the antidote?”

“Gill and Ormsby never knew about it. In hindsight, I think my parents may have been starting to get concerned about Gill. Theremust have been a reason why they did not record the formula for the antidote in the notes that they kept in their laboratory.”

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