Mr. Ballin

The body on that table in the operating theater had not been his sister's.

Because leaning against the wall inside of the small room, Joseph saw the skeletal remains of a woman with tattered pieces of a blue flannel dress clinging to her bones and two old slippers lying at her feet.

Joseph turned away from the skeleton towards the window.

Through it, he could see almost the entire city.

And Joseph started crying.

Because now he understood that as much as he'd wanted to believe it, his sister Carrie had never escaped and found her freedom.

because it would turn out that the orphanage that Joseph had come to, where he climbed the old stairwell and found his sister's body, had once been the Union State Hospital, the psychiatric institution where Carrie had been committed.

The hospital had shut down not long after Carrie disappeared, and the building had been used for several different things in the years that followed.

And now, the construction crew that was converting it into an automobile repair shop had discovered this old staircase by accident,

And that staircase led to a tiny hidden room that was located up above the attic and that had windows to the outside.

Joseph and the detectives had searched the hospital attic on the day Carrie went missing, but they hadn't noticed the staircase.

So they didn't know that Carrie had actually been right there just above them the whole time.

The official report on Carrie's death would later conclude that her terrible eyesight had led her to become lost and wind up in this room and not know how to get out again.

And then she froze to death.

But as always, Joseph did not accept the official statement.

In fact, he would spend years coming up with theories of his own.

But there was one theory that couldn't be ignored.

And that was that maybe Carrie didn't get confused and stuck inside the room because she couldn't see.

Maybe when she crawled into that secret room, she had known exactly what she was doing.

Because Carrie had almost certainly been alive throughout the entire search of the hospital.