Free Kiss of Midnight by Lara Adrián Page A

brought in generous amounts of soft morning light.
    Through her camera lens, she looked out over wide lawns and courtyards flanked by elegant brick and limestone buildings. She snapped a few pictures of the faded glory of the place, appreciating both the architecture and the warm play of sunlight against so much ghostly shadow. It was strange looking out from the confines of a building that had once held so many disturbed souls. In the eerie silence, Gabrielle could almost hear the voices of the patients, people who had not been able to simply walk away like she could now.
    People like her birth mother, a woman Gabrielle had never known beyond what she had heard as a kid through hushed conversations between social workers and the foster families who would, eventually, one by one, return her into the system like a pet that had proved more trouble than it was worth. She lost track of the number of places she’d been sent to live, but the complaints against her when she was bounced back were always the same: restless and withdrawn, secretive and untrusting, socially dysfunctional with self-destructive tendencies. She’d heard the same labels applied to her mother, along with the added distinctions of paranoid and delusional.
    By the time the Maxwells came into her life, Gabrielle had spent ninety days in a group home, under the supervision of a state-appointed psychologist. She’d had zero expectations and even less hope that she might actually make another foster situation stick. Frankly, she’d been past the point of caring. But her new guardians had been patient and kind. Thinking it might help her cope with her emotional confusion, they had helped Gabrielle obtain a handful of court documents pertaining to her mother.
    The young woman had been a teenage Jane Doe, presumably homeless, with no ID, and no known family or acquaintances, except for the newborn baby girl she had left, squalling and distressed, in a city garbage bin late one August night. Gabrielle’s mother had been brutalized, bleeding from deep puncture wounds in her neck that had been made worse by her hysteria and panicked clawing at the injury. While she was being treated at the emergency room, she slipped into a catatonic state and never recovered.
    Rather than prosecute her for the crime of abandoning her infant, the courts had deemed the woman incompetent and sent her away to a facility probably not much different from this one. Not a month into her institutionalization, she had hanged herself with a knotted bedsheet, leaving behind countless questions that would never have answers.
    Gabrielle tried to shake off the weight of those old hurts but standing there, looking out the hazy glass windows, brought her past into tighter focus. She didn’t want to think about her mother, or the misfortune of her birth, and the dark, lonely years that had followed. She needed to concentrate on her work. That’s what always got her through, after all. It was the one constant in her life, sometimes all she truly had in this world.
    And it was enough.
    Most of the time, it was enough.
    “Get a few shots and get the hell out of here,” she scolded herself, bringing the camera up and taking a couple more photos through the subtle metalwork that was meshed between the double panes of glass in the window.
    She thought about leaving the same way she had come in, but wondered if she might find another exit somewhere on the main floor of the central building. Going back down to the dark basement was not exactly appealing. She was creeping herself out with thoughts about her crazy mother, and the longer she lingered in the old asylum, the more her skin was beginning to crawl. She opened the stairwell door and felt a little better to see dim light filtering in through windows in some of the empty rooms and at the end of the adjacent hallway.
    Evidently the “bad vibes” graffiti artist had made it in here, too. On each of the four walls, strange scroll-like symbols had