CHAPTER 17
1
Halfway to town, Clint Norcross had a thought that caused him to pull into the lot of the Olympia Diner and park beside the easel sign reading MY OH MY, TRY OUR EGG PIE. He pulled out his phone and searched HICKS. He didn’t have his number, which said everything about his relationship with Dooling Correctional’s assistant warden. He scrolled further and found LAMPLEY.
Lampley picked up on the second ring. She sounded out of breath.
“Van? You okay?”
“Yeah, but you left before the fireworks. Listen, Doc, I had to shoot someone.”
“What? Who?”
“Ree Dempster. She’s dead.” Van explained what had happened. Clint listened, aghast.
“Jesus,” he said when she was finished. “Are you all right, Van?”
“Physically unhurt. Emotionally fucked to the sky, but you can psychoanalyze me later.” Van made a vast watery honking sound, blowing her nose on something. “There’s more.”
She told Clint about the violent confrontation between Angel Fitzroy and Evie Black. “I wasn’t there, but I saw part of it on the monitors.”
“Good thing you did. And Claudia. Sounds like you saved her life.”
“It wasn’t a good thing for Dempster.”
“Van—”
“I liked Dempster. If you’d asked me, I would have said she was the last woman in here to go postal.”
“Where’s her body?”
“In the janitor’s closet.” Van sounded ashamed. “It was all we could think of.”
“Of course.” Clint rubbed his forehead, eyes squeezed shut. He felt he ought to say more to comfort Lampley, but the words weren’t there. “And Angel? What about her?”
“Sorley, of all people, got hold of a Mace can and blasted her. Quigley and Olson bullrushed her into a cell in A Wing. She’s currently beating on the walls and yelling for a doctor. Claims she’s blind, which is bullshit. She’s also claiming there are moths in her hair, which might not be bullshit. We’ve got an infestation of the bastards. You need to get back here, Doc. Hicks is having a meltdown. He asked me to surrender my weapon, which I refused to do, even though I suppose it’s protocol.”
“You did the right thing. Until things settle down, protocol’s out the window.”
“Hicks is useless.”
Don’t I know it, Clint thought.
“I mean, he always was, but under these circumstances, he could actually be dangerous.”
Clint searched for a thread. “You said Evie was egging Angel on. What exactly was she saying?”
“I don’t know, and neither do Quigley or Millie, either. Sorley might. She was the one who slowed Angel’s roll. Chick deserves a medal. If she doesn’t crash out, you can get the whole story from her when you come back. Which will be soon, right?”
“ASAP,” said Clint. “Listen, Van, I know you’re upset, but I need to be clear on one thing. Angel started in on Evie because Evie wasn’t in one of those cocoons?”
“That’s my sense. I just saw her whacking on the bars with a lid from one of the coffee urns, and yelling her head off. Then I had my own fish to fry.”
“But she woke up?”
“Yeah.”
“Evie woke up.”
“Yeah. Fitzroy woke her up.”
Clint tried to make something coherent of this, and couldn’t. Maybe after he got some sleep himself—
The idea caused a flush of guilt to heat his face. A wild idea came to him: What if Evie Black was male? What if his wife had arrested a guy in drag?
But no. When Lila arrested her, Evie had been buck naked. Presumably the female officers supervising her intake had seen her that way, too. And what would explain all her bruises and scrapes healing in less than half a day?
“I need you to pass on what I’m about to say to Hicks and the other officers who are still there.” Clint had come back around to the thought that had occurred to him in the first place, why he had pulled into the diner parking lot and called the prison.
“Won’t take long,” she said. “Billy Wettermore and Scott Hughes just came in, which is good news, but still, to call this a skeleton crew would be an insult to skeletons. We’ve got just seven warm bodies, counting Hicks. You’ll make eight.”
Clint ignored this broad hint. “It struck me as I was driving into town, this stuff about Eve Black being different from the rest of the women, on top of what you’ve told me now—I just don’t know what to make of it. But I know that we can’t let it leave the prison, not yet. True or false. It could cause a riot. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Um . . .”
That um gave Clint a bad feeling. “What is it?”
“Well . . .”
He liked that well even less.
“Just tell me.”
There was another wet honk. “I saw Hicks using his cell phone after the free-for-all in A Wing was over, and after I refused to give him my weapon. Also, after Millie updated Scott and Billy, they were both using their phones.”
Too late, then. Clint closed his eyes. A quick fairy tale formed itself:
Once upon a time there was an obscure prison psychiatrist who dressed all in black, ran out into the night, and lay crosswise in the middle of a length of interstate. A Trailways bus came tooling along and put him out of his misery and everyone else lived happily ever after or maybe they didn’t, but it was no longer the obscure prison psychiatrist’s problem. The end.
“Okay, okay,” Clint said. “Here’s what we do: tell them no more calls, not to anybody. Have you got that?”
“I called my sister!” Van burst out. “I’m sorry, Doc, but I wanted to do something good, something to make up for having to shoot Dempster! I told Bonnie not to go to sleep no matter how much she wanted to, because we might have an immune person in the prison, and that might mean there’s a cure! Or that it cures itself!”
Clint opened his eyes. “How long have you been up, Van?”
“Since four this morning! The goddam dog woke me up! She had to go out and p-p-pee!” Tough-as-nails Vanessa Lampley could hold back no longer. She began to cry.
“Just tell everyone on staff no more calls, got it?” It was almost certainly too late, but maybe they could slow the news. There might even be a way to put a pin in this. “Call your sister back and tell her you were mistaken. Tell her it was a false rumor and you bought into it. Tell the others who made calls to do the same.”
Silence.
“Van, are you still there?”
“I don’t want to, Dr. Norcross. And, all due respect, I don’t think that’s the right way to go. Bonnie will stay awake now, at least through the night, because she believes there’s a chance. I don’t want to take that away.”
“I understand how you feel, but it is the right call. Do you want a bunch of people from town coming up to the prison like . . . like torch-carrying peasants storming the castle in an old Frankenstein movie?”
“Go see your wife,” Van said. “You said she’s been up even longer than me. See if you can look her in the face and not tell her there might be a little light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Van, listen—”
But Van was gone. Clint stared at the CALL ENDED message in the window of his phone for a long time before he put it in his pocket and drove the rest of the way into town.
Dempster was dead. Cheerful Ree Dempster. He couldn’t believe it. And his heart ached for Van Lampley in spite of her insubordination. Although, really, how could she be insubordinate to him? He was just the jailhouse shrink, for God’s sake.
2
Clint pulled into one of the 15 MINUTES ONLY spaces in front of the sheriff’s station, and heard the last thing he would have expected: the sound of laughter spilling out through the open door.
There was quite a crew in the ready-room. Lila was sitting at the dispatch desk next to Linny. Ranged around them in a rough circle were five other deputies, all male—Terry Coombs, Reed Barrows, Pete Ordway, Elmore Pearl, and Vern Rangle. Sitting outside the circle of cops was Barry Holden, the public defender who had briefly handled Evie Black’s case, and a white-bearded elderly gent that Clint knew from around town, Willy Burke.
Lila was smoking. She had stopped eight years ago, when Jared had one day remarked that he hoped she wouldn’t die from lung cancer until he grew up. Linny Mars and two of the others present were also puffing away. The air was blue and fragrant.
“What’s going on, guys?” he asked.
Lila saw him, and her face brightened. She snuffed her cigarette out in a coffee cup, ran across the room to him, and jumped into his arms. Literally, with her ankles hooked together at the backs of his thighs. She kissed him hard. This occasioned more laughter, a hoot from Attorney Holden, and a spatter of applause.
“Oh, am I glad to see you!” she said, and kissed him again.
“I was on my way to see Jared,” Clint said. “I thought I’d stop and see if you were here, if you could get away.”
“Jared!” she cried. “Can you believe what a great kid we raised, Clint? Gosh, as good a job as we did, sometimes I think it was selfish of us not to have a second one.” His wife thumped him on the chest and detached herself. Above her smile, Lila’s pupils were pinpoints.
Terry Coombs came over. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Terry shook Clint’s hand. “You know what happened to Roger, don’t you? Tried to unwrap his wife. Bad idea. Should have waited for Christmas.” Terry burst into a peal of laughter that turned into a sob. “My wife’s gone, too. Can’t get in touch with my kid.”
There was liquor on Terry’s breath, but there had been none on Lila’s; whatever she had ingested was a lot more up-tempo than booze. Clint thought of matching Terry by recounting what had just happened at the prison. He pushed the idea away. The death of Ree Dempster wasn’t a party story, and that was exactly what this gathering looked like.
“I’m sorry, Terry.”
Pete Ordway hooked an arm over Terry’s shoulder and drew him away.
Lila pointed to the bearded man. “Hon, you know Willy Burke, don’t you? He helped me transport Roger and Jessica to the morgue with his pickup truck. Except by morgue I actually mean the freezer at the Squeaky Wheel. Turns out the hospital is a no-go these days. Talk about low-rent, huh?” She giggled and clapped her hands to her face. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Good to see you, sir,” Willy said. “Got a fine wife there. She’s well about her business, tired as she is.”
“Thanks.” And to his fine wife: “I take it you’ve been into the evidence locker.”
“Just Lila and me,” Linny said. “Terry had a little Scotch.”
Lila produced the Provigil scrip from her back pocket and gave it to Clint. “No luck with this, or anything else. Two of the pharmacies have been looted, and the Rite Aid is nothing but ashes and embers. You probably smelled it when you came into town.”
Clint shook his head.
“We’ve been having what I guess you’d call a wake,” Vern said. “Which is what I wish all the women would do.”
For a moment everyone looked puzzled. Then Barry started laughing, and the other deputies, and Willy and Lila and Linny joined in. The sound was jarringly merry.
“A wake,” Lila said. She punched Clint on the arm. “Awake. Get it?”
“Got it,” Clint said. He had stepped into the law enforcement version of Wonderland.
“Sober over here,” Willy Burke said, raising his hand. “I make a little from time to time—” He shot a wink at Lila: “You didn’t hear that, Sheriff—but I don’t touch the stuff. Been teetotal for going on forty years.”
“I must admit I appropriated Mr. Burke’s nip for myself,” said Barry Holden. “Seemed like the right thing to do, given all that’s going on.”
Deputies Barrows, Ordway, Pearl, and Rangle declared themselves sober, Vern Rangle raising his own hand as if he were testifying in court. Clint was beginning to be angry. It was the laughter. He understood it, certainly Lila was entitled to get a little wonky after thirty or more hours of sleeplessness, and getting into the evidence locker had been his own idea, but he still didn’t like it a bit. On the drive into town, he’d thought himself ready for just about anything, but he hadn’t been prepared to hear about Van shooting Ree, and he hadn’t been ready to walk in on an Irish wake at the sheriff’s station.
Lila was saying, “We were just talking about the time Roger rolled on a domestic and the lady of the house leaned out of an upstairs window and told him to fuck off and die. When he wouldn’t do either, she poured a bucket of paint on his head. He was still scrubbing it out of his hair a month later.”
“Dutch Boy Rhumba Red!” Linny screamed with laughter and dropped her cigarette in her lap. She picked it up, almost puffed on the lit end, and dropped it on the floor trying to get it turned around. That brought on more general laughter.
“What did you take?” Clint asked. “You and Linny? Was it the coke?”
“No, we’re saving the blow for later,” Lila said.
“Don’t worry, Sheriff, I’ll defend you,” Barry said. “I’ll plead exigent circumstances. No jury in America will convict.”
That caused another explosion of hilarity.
“We took in over a hundred Blue Scooties in the Griner brothers bust,” Linny said. “Lila opened one of the capsules, and we snorted the powder.”
Clint thought of Don Peters, first getting Jeanette Sorley to perform a sex act on him in the common room, then drugging Janice’s java. He thought of the idiotic coffee-mix that Coates had signed off on. He thought of the strange woman in A Wing. He thought of Ree choking Claudia and trying to open her throat with her teeth. He thought of terrified inmates crying in their cells, and of Vanessa Lampley saying, I don’t want to, Dr. Norcross.
“I see it worked,” Clint said. To hold himself in took a concentrated effort. “You seem very awake.”
Lila took Clint’s hands. “I know how it looks, honey—how we look—but we had no choice. The pharmacies are a bust, and anything of a speedy nature that the supermarkets sell is long gone. Jared told me. I spoke with him. He’s all right, you know, you don’t have to worry, you—”
“Uh-huh. Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”
“Of course.”
3
They walked outside into the cool night. Now he could smell ashes and burning plastic—all that remained of the Rite Aid, he supposed. Behind them, the conversation started up again. And the laughter.
“Now, what’s going on with Jared?”
She put up a hand, like a crossing guard. Like he was an aggressive driver. “He’s babysitting a little girl named Molly. She’s old Mrs. Ransom’s granddaughter. Mrs. Ransom is cocooned, so he took charge. He’s all right for now. You don’t need to worry about him.”
No, he thought, don’t tell me not to worry about our son. Until he turns eighteen, our job is to worry about him. Are you so drugged that you’ve forgotten that?
“Or at least, not any more than you have to,” she added after a moment.
She’s tired and she’s got a lot on her plate, Clint reminded himself. She just killed a woman, for God’s sake. You have no reason to be angry with her. But he was angry, just the same. Logic had very little power over emotions. As a shrink he knew that, not that knowing it was any help at this moment.
“Any idea how long you’ve been awake?”
She closed one eye, calculating. It gave her a piratical aspect he didn’t care for. “Since maybe . . . one o’clock or so yesterday afternoon, I guess. That makes it . . .” She shook her head. “Can’t do the math. Boy, my heart’s pounding. But I’m wide awake, there’s that. And look at the stars! Aren’t they pretty?”
Clint could do the math. It came to roughly thirty-two hours.
“Linny went on the Internet to see how long a person can go without sleep,” Lila said brightly. “The record is two hundred sixty-four hours, isn’t that interesting? Eleven days! It was set by a high school kid who was doing a science project. I’ll tell you, that record is going down. There are some very determined women out there.
“Cognition declines pretty quickly, though, and then emotional restraint. In addition, there’s this phenomenon called microsleep, which I myself experienced out at Truman Mayweather’s trailer, whoo, that was scary, I felt the first strands of that stuff coming right out of my hair. On the bright side, humans are diurnal mammals, and that means as soon as the sun comes up, all the women who’ve managed to stay awake through the night will get a boost. It’s apt to be gone by mid-afternoon tomorrow, but—”
“It’s too bad you had to pull that graveyard shift last night,” Clint said. The words were out before he even knew they were on the way.
“Yeah.” The laughter went out of her at once. “It is too bad I had to do that.”
“No,” said Clint.
“Pardon?”
“A pet food truck did overturn on Mountain Rest Road, that much is true, but it happened a year ago. So what were you doing last night? Where the hell were you?”
Her face was very white, but in the darkness, her pupils had grown to more or less their normal size. “Are you sure that’s something you want to get into right now? With everything else that’s going on?”
He might have said no, but then another burst of that infuriating laughter came from inside, and he gripped her arms. “Tell me.”
Lila looked at his hands on her biceps, then at him. He let go and stepped back from her.
“At a basketball game,” said Lila. “I went to see a girl play. Number thirty-four. Her name is Sheila Norcross. Her mother is Shannon Parks. So tell me, Clint, who’s been lying to who?”
He opened his mouth—to say what, he didn’t know—but before he could say anything at all, Terry Coombs burst out through the door, eyes wild. “Oh, Jesus, Lila! Jesus fuckin God!”
She turned away from Clint. “What?”
“We forgot! How could we forget? Oh, Jesus!”
“Forgot what?”
“Platinum!”
“Platinum?”
She only stared at him, and what Clint saw on her face caused his rage to collapse. Her perplexed expression said she sort of knew what he was talking about, but couldn’t put it in any context or frame of reference. She was too tired.
“Platinum! Roger and Jessica’s baby daughter!” Terry shouted. “She’s only eight months old, and she’s still at their house! We forgot the fucking baby!”
“Oh dear God,” Lila said. She spun and ran down the steps with Terry on her heels. Neither of them looked at Clint, or looked around when he called after them. He took the steps two at a time and caught Lila by the shoulder before she could get into her car. She was in no shape to drive, neither of them were, but he could see that wouldn’t stop them.
“Lila, listen. The baby is almost certainly okay. Once they’re in those cocoons, they seem to enter a kind of steady state, like life support.”
She shrugged his hand away. “We’ll talk later. I’ll meet you at the house.”
Terry was behind the wheel. Terry who had been drinking.
“Hope you’re right about that baby, Doc,” he said, and slammed the door.
4
Near Fredericksburg, the spare tire the warden’s daughter had been driving on for several weeks blew at the least opportune time, the way her mother—maniacally dedicated, as mothers and wardens are wont to be, to the calculation of worst case scenarios—would have warned her that it inevitably would. Michaela eased her car to a stop at a McDonald’s parking lot. She went inside to pee.
A biker guy, massive and bare-chested except for a leather vest with SATAN’S 7 stitched on it, and what appeared to be a Tec-9 strapped over his back, was at the counter. He was explaining to a raccoon-eyed counter girl that, no, he wouldn’t be paying for any of his Big Macs. There was a special tonight; everything he wanted was free. At the hush of the door closing, the biker guy turned to see Michaela.
“Hey, sister.” His look was appreciative: not bad. “I know you?”
“Maybe?” Michaela replied, not stopping as she strode up the side of the McDonald’s, skipping the bathroom, and continuing right back outside again through the rear exit door. She hustled for the rear of the parking lot and pushed between the branches of a hedge. On the other side of the hedge was the parking lot for a Hobby Lobby. The store was lit and she could see people inside. Michaela wondered how goddam dedicated to your scrapbooking you had to be to go shopping at Hobby Lobby on this night of all nights.
She took a step and something closer caught her attention: a Corolla idling about twenty feet away. A white form occupied the front seat.
Michaela approached the car. The white form was a woman, of course, head and hands cocooned. Although Michaela was still high from the coke, she wished she were much, much higher. In the cocooned woman’s lap was a dead dog, a poodle, the body wrung and twisted.
Oh, Fido, you shouldn’t lick the webs off Mommy’s face when she’s snoozing in the parking lot. Mommy can be very cross if you wake her up.
Michaela gingerly transported the dead dog to the grass. Then she dragged the woman, by her driver’s license Ursula Whitman-Davies, over to the front passenger side. While she didn’t much like the idea of keeping the woman in the car, she was deeply uncomfortable with the alternative, which would be depositing her in the grass next to her dead poodle. And there was the utilitarian to consider: with Ursula along, she could legally use the carpool lane.
Michaela got behind the wheel and rolled onto the service road that would take her back to I-70.
As she passed the McDonald’s, an evil idea struck her. It was no doubt coke-fueled, but it seemed divinely right, nevertheless. She turned around at the Motel 6 next door and went back to Mickey D’s. Parked right in front and heeled over on its kickstand was a Harley Softail that looked vintage. Above the Tennessee plate on the rear fender was a skull decal with SATAN’S in one eyesocket and 7 in the other. Written across the teeth was BEWARE.
“Hang on, Ursula,” Michaela said to her cocooned co-pilot, and aimed the Corolla at the motorcycle.
She was doing less than ten miles an hour when she struck it, but it went over with a satisfying crash. The biker guy was sitting at a table by the front window, with a mountain of food stacked before him on a tray. He looked up in time to see Michaela backing away from his iron horse, which now looked like one dead pony. She could see his lips moving as he ran for the door, a Big Mac dripping Secret Sauce in one hand and a milkshake in the other, Tec-9 bouncing against his back. Michaela couldn’t tell what he was saying, but she doubted if it was shalom. She gave him a cheerful wave before swinging back onto the service road and putting Ursula’s Toyota up to sixty.
Three minutes later, she was back on the interstate, laughing wildly, knowing that the euphoria wouldn’t last, and wishing for more blow so that it might.
5
Ursula’s Corolla was equipped with satellite radio, and after fiddling with the buttons for awhile, Michaela found NewsAmerica. The news was not so terrific. There were unconfirmed reports of an “incident” involving the vice-president’s wife that had caused the Secret Service to be summoned to Number One, Observatory Circle. Animal rights activists had set free the inhabitants of the National Zoo; multiple witnesses had seen a lion devouring what looked like a human being on Cathedral Avenue. Hard right conservatives on talk radio were proclaiming the Aurora virus as proof that God was angry with feminism. The pope had asked everyone to pray for guidance. The Nationals had canceled their weekend interleague series against the Orioles. Michaela sort of understood this last one, but sort of didn’t; all the players (the umpires, too) were men, weren’t they?
In the passenger seat, the cotton-ball-headed creature that had been Ursula Whitman-Davies mimicked the rhythm of the interstate, lolling gently with the stretches of smooth macadam, jittering around when the tires found grooved, unfinished paving. She was either the absolute best or absolute worst traveling companion in the history of the world.
For awhile Michaela had dated a girl who was devoted to crystals, who believed that, with calm focus and sincere belief, you could take the form of light. That sweet, earnest girl was probably asleep now, swathed in white. Michaela thought of her own late father: good old Dad, who used to sit beside her bed when she was scared at night—or at least, that’s what her mother had told her. Michaela had been three when he’d died. She couldn’t remember him as a living man. Michaela—despite her nose job, despite her fake last name—was a true reporter. She knew the facts, and the one fact about Archie Coates that she did know well, was that he had been placed in a coffin and planted in the soil of the Shady Hills Cemetery in the town of Dooling, and was there still. He had not become light. She did not allow herself to fantasize that she was soon to meet her dad in some afterlife. The deal was simply this: the world was ending and a poodle-strangling woman clothed in webs was swaying beside Michaela and all she wanted was to have a few hours with her mother before sleep took them both.
At Morgantown she had to refill the Corolla’s tank. It was full-service. The young guy who pumped the gas apologized; the credit card machines were down. Michaela paid him from a wad in Ursula’s purse.
The guy had a short blond beard, wore a plain white tee-shirt and blue jeans. She had never been especially attracted to men, but she liked the look of this lean Viking.
“Thank you,” she said. “You hanging in there?”
“Oh,” he said, “forget about me, lady. You don’t need to be worrying about me. You know how to use that?”
She followed the tilt of his chin to Ursula’s purse, which rested at the hip of the cocooned woman. The grip of a revolver protruded from its unzipped mouth. It seemed that Ms. Whitman-Davies had fancied firearms as well as canines.
“Not really,” she admitted. “My girlfriend knew I was making a long drive and loaned it to me.”
He gave her a stern look. “Safety’ll be on the side. Make sure it’s switched off if you see trouble coming. Point it at the middle of Mr. Trouble’s body—center mass—and pull the trigger. Don’t let go or get hit in the boob when it recoils. Can you remember that?”
“Yeah,” said Michaela. “Center mass. Don’t let go or get hit in the boob. Gotcha. Thanks.” And rolled out. She heard the Viking call, “Hey, you on TV, maybe?”
Around one o’clock on Friday morning, she finally arrived on the outskirts of Dooling. Drifts of smoke from the fire in the woods rolled across West Lavin as she piloted the Corolla toward the long, low outline of the prison in the dark. The smoke made Michaela press a hand over her mouth to keep from inhaling the reek of ash.
At the gate, she stepped from the car, and punched the red call button.
6
Maura Dunbarton sat in her B Wing cell with what remained of Kayleigh, not dead but dead to this world. Did she dream inside her shroud?
Maura sat with her hand on Kayleigh’s chest, feeling the gentle rise and fall of her respiration and watching the white mat of fibrous gunk first puffing out, then pulling back in, outlining Kayleigh’s open mouth with each inhalation. Twice Maura had set her nails into that thick and slightly sticky material, on the verge of ripping it open and setting Kayleigh free. Both times she thought of what the TV news had been reporting and took her hands away.
In a closed society like Dooling Correctional, both rumors and cold germs spread fast. But what had happened an hour ago in A Wing was no rumor. Angel Fitzroy was caged up, eyes swollen from Mace. Raving about how the new woman was a fucking witch.
This to Maura seemed perfectly possible, especially after Claudia Stephenson crept through B Wing, wearing bruises on her neck and deep scratches on her shoulders, telling all and sundry how Ree almost killed her, and all she had seen and overheard before that. Claudia claimed the new woman had known Jeanette and Angel’s names, but that was only the least of it. She also knew—knew!—that Angel had killed at least five men and a newborn baby.
“The woman’s name is Evie, like Eve in the Garden of Eden,” Claudia said. “Think about that! Then Ree tried to kill me, and I bet the witch knew that was going to happen, just like she knew them others’ names, and about Angel’s baby.”
Claudia was not what anyone would call a reliable witness, but it still made sense. Only a witch could know such things.
Two stories came together in Maura’s head and combined there to make a certainty. One was about a beautiful princess who was cursed by a wicked witch and fell into a deep sleep when she pricked her finger on a spindle. (Maura wasn’t sure what a spindle was, but it must be sharp.) After countless years, a kiss awakened the princess from her slumber. The other was the story of Hansel and Gretel. Captured by a witch, they kept their cool and escaped after burning the hag alive in her own oven.
Stories were only stories, but the ones that survived over hundreds of years must contain nuggets of truth. The truth in these two could be: spells could be broken; witches could be destroyed. Popping off the witch-woman in A Wing might not wake up Kayleigh and all the other women in the world. On the other hand, it might. It really might. Even if it didn’t, the woman named Evie had to have something to do with this plague. Why else would she be able to sleep and wake normally? How else could she know things she had no way of knowing?
Maura had been in prison for decades. She had done a lot of reading, and even made her way through the Bible. It had seemed like a fairly worthless stack of paper at the time, men creating laws and women begetting beget-me-nots, but she remembered a compelling line: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
A plan assembled itself in Maura’s mind. She would need a bit of luck to execute it. But with half the guards AWOL and the prison’s ordinary nighttime routine all shot to hell, maybe not too much. Angel Fitzroy hadn’t been able to do it, because all of Angel’s rage was on the surface, for anyone to see. That was why she was currently in a locked cell. Maura’s rage, on the other hand, was a deeply banked fire, its glowing coals masked with ashes. Which was why she was a trustee, with the run of the prison.
“I’ll be back, honey,” she said, patting Kayleigh’s shoulder. “Unless she kills me, that is. If she’s a real witch, I guess she might.”
Maura lifted her mattress and felt for the tiny slit she’d made. She reached in and brought out a toothbrush. The hard plastic handle had been sharpened to a point. She slid it into the elastic waistband of her pants at the small of her back, bloused her baggy top over it, and left her cell. In the B Wing corridor, she turned back, and blew her faceless cellmate a kiss.
7
“Inmate, what are you doing?”
It was Lawrence Hicks, standing in the doorway of Dooling Correctional’s small but surprisingly well-stocked library. He normally favored three-piece suits and dark ties, but tonight both his jacket and vest were gone, and the tie was pulled down so that the end flapped over the top of his fly, like an arrow pointing to his no doubt shriveled junk.
“Hello, Mr. Hicks,” Maura said, continuing to load paperbacks onto a rolling library cart. She gave him a smile, her one gold tooth sparkling in the overhead fluorescents. “I’m going on a book run.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that, inmate?”
“I don’t think so, sir. No lights-out tonight, I don’t think.”
She spoke respectfully and continued to smile. That was the way you did it; you smiled and looked harmless. It’s just old, gray Maura Dunbarton, beaten down by years of prison routine and happy to lick the shoes of anyone whose shoes needed licking, whatever harpy that had possessed her to kill those people long since exorcised. That was a grift the Angel Fitzroys of the world never learned. You had to keep your powder dry in case you ever needed it.
He came in to inspect her cart, and she could almost feel sorry for him—face all pale, beard-speckled jowls hanging like dough, what little hair he had mussed up—but if he tried to stop her, she’d stick him in his fat gut. She had to save Kayleigh if she possibly could. Sleeping Beauty had been saved with a kiss; Maura might be able to save her girl with a shiv.
Don’t get in my way, Hicksie, she thought. Not unless you want a hole in your liver. I know right where it is.
Hicks was examining the paperbacks Maura had culled from the shelves: Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joe Hill.
“These are all horror stories!” Hicks exclaimed. “We let inmates read this stuff?”
“This and the romances is about all they do read, sir,” Maura told him, not adding, Which you’d know if you knew anything about the way this place works, you weasel. She refreshed her smile. “I figure horror stories are what will keep the ladies awake tonight, if anything will. Besides, ain’t none of this stuff real; all vampires and werewolves and such. They’re like fairy tales.”
For a moment he seemed to hesitate, maybe getting ready to tell her to go back to her cell. Maura reached around to the small of her back, as if scratching an itch there. Then he puffed out his cheeks in a sigh. “Go on. At least it’ll keep you awake.”
This time her smile was genuine. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Mr. Hicks. I suffer from insomnia.”
8
Michaela had ceased pressing the button and now just held it down. Light blazed from the glassed-in front area of the prison, and there were cars parked in the lot; someone was awake in there.
“What?” The male voice that answered was the definition of weary; it was a voice with a ten o’clock shadow. “This is Officer Quigley. Cut it out with the damn button.”
“My name is Michaela Morgan.” A second later she remembered that her TV name meant nothing here.
“So?” The voice was not impressed.
“I used to be Michaela Coates. My mother is the warden. I would like to see her, please.”
“Uh . . .”
Silence, except for a faint buzz on the line. She straightened up, her patience exhausted. She thumbed the call button as hard as she could. “I’ll also have you know that I work for NewsAmerica. Do I need to do an exposé on you, or can I speak with my mother?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Coates. She fell asleep.”
Now it was Michaela’s turn to be silent. She was too late. She sagged against the chainlink. The headlights of the Corolla bounced back from the front of the gate, and dazzled her swollen eyes.
“I’m sorry,” came the voice. “She was a good boss.”
“What do I do now?” Michaela asked. She wasn’t pressing the call button so the question was only directed to the night and the smoke leaking from the woods.
Officer Quigley came back with the answer, as if he had heard. “Go on into town, why don’t you? Get a room. Or . . . I hear the Squeaky Wheel’s got an open bar tonight and they’re not closing till the sun rises or the beer runs out.”
9
Maura rolled her cart down B Wing, going slow, not wanting anyone to think she had any particular goal in mind.
“Books?” she inquired at each occupied cell—at least at those where the occupants weren’t covered in white shit. “Want to read some scary stuff? I got nine different flavors of boogeyman.”
She had few takers. Most of them were watching the news, which was a horror story in itself. Officer Wettermore stopped her near B Wing to have a look at the titles on her cart. Maura wasn’t that surprised to see him here tonight, because Officer Wettermore was as gay as New Orleans on the first night of Mardi Gras. If he had any womenfolk at home, she’d be astounded.
“That looks like a bunch of garbage to me,” he said. “Go on and get out of here, Maura.”
“Okay, Officer. Going down A Wing now. A couple of the ladies down there, Dr. Norcross has got them in the Prozac Posse, but they still like to read.”
“Fine, but keep your distance from both Fitzroy and the soft cell at the end, right?”
Maura gave him her biggest smile. “Absolutely, Officer Wettermore. And thank you! Thank you very much!”
Other than the new one—the witch—there were only two wakeful women in A Wing, plus the sleeping heap that had been Kitty McDavid.
“No,” said the woman in A-2. “Can’t read, can’t read. The meds Norcross has me on screw up my eyes. Can’t read, no. Been shouting in here. I don’t like shouting.”
The other woman, in A-8, was Angel. She looked at Maura with puffy what-the-fuck-happened-to-me eyes. “Keep rolling, Mo-Mo,” she warned when Maura, in spite of Officer Wettermore’s admonition, offered her a couple of the books. That was okay. Maura was almost at the end of the corridor now. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Wettermore with his back to her, in deep conversation with Officer Murphy, the one the girls called Tigger, like in the Pooh stories.
“Maura . . .”
It was only a whisper, but penetrating. Resonant, somehow.
It was the new one. Evie. Eve. Who in the Bible had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and gotten both her and her hubby banished into this world of pain and perplexity. Maura knew banishment, knew it well. She had been banished to Dooling for banishing her husband and her two kids (not to mention Slugger) to the vastness of eternity.
Evie stood at the barred door of the soft cell, gazing at Maura. And smiling. Maura had never seen such a beautiful smile in her life. A witch, maybe, but gorgeous. The witch put a hand through the bars and beckoned with one long and elegant finger. Maura rolled her cart onward.
“No further, inmate!” That was Officer Tig Murphy. “Stop right there!”
Maura kept going.
“Get her, stop her!” Murphy yelled, and she heard the clatter-clap of their hard shoes on the tiles.
Maura turned the cart sideways and pitched it over, creating a temporary roadblock. Tattered paperbacks flew and skidded.
“Stop, inmate, stop!”
Maura hustled for the soft cell, reaching around to the small of her back and whipping out the toothbrush shiv. The witch-woman still beckoned. She doesn’t see what I got for her, Maura thought.
She drew her arm back along her hip, meaning to piston it forward into the witch-woman’s midsection. Into her liver. Only those dark eyes first slowed her, then stopped her. It wasn’t evil Maura saw in them, but chilly interest.
“You want to be with her, don’t you?” Evie asked in a rapid whisper.
“Yes,” Maura said. “Oh my God, so much.”
“You can be. But first you must sleep.”
“I can’t. Insomnia.”
Wettermore and Murphy were coming. There were only seconds to stick the witch-woman and end this plague. Only Maura didn’t. The stranger’s dark eyes held her fast and she found that she did not wish to struggle against that hold. They weren’t eyes at all, Maura saw, but gaps, openings into a new darkness.
The witch-woman pressed her face against the bars, her eyes never leaving Maura’s. “Kiss me quick. While there’s still time.”
Maura didn’t think. She dropped the sharpened toothbrush and pressed her own face to the bars. Their lips met. Eve’s warm breath slipped into Maura’s mouth and down her throat. Maura felt blessed sleep rising from the bottom of her brain, as it had when she was a child, safe in her own bed with Freddy the Teddy curled in one arm and Gussie the stuffed dragon curled in the other. Listening to a cold wind outside and knowing she was safe and warm inside, bound for the land of dreams.
When Billy Wettermore and Tig Murphy reached her, Maura was lying on her back outside Evie’s cell, the first strands spinning out of her hair, out of her mouth, and from beneath the closed lids of her dreaming eyes.