CHAPTER 2
1
The Dooling County sheriff’s station dozed in the morning sun. The three holding cells were empty, barred doors standing open, floors freshly washed and smelling of disinfectant. The single interview room was likewise empty, as was Lila Norcross’s office. Linny Mars, the dispatcher, had the place to herself. Behind her desk hung a poster of a snarling, buffed-out con wearing an orange jumpsuit and curling a couple of hand barbells. THEY NEVER TAKE A DAY OFF, the poster advised, AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU!
Linny made a practice of ignoring this well-meant advice. She had not worked out since a brief fling with Dancercise at the YWCA, but did take pride in her appearance. Now she was absorbed in an article in Marie Claire about the proper way to put on eyeliner. To get a stable line, one began by pressing one’s pinky against one’s cheekbone. This allowed more control and insured against any sudden twitches. The article suggested starting in the middle and working one’s way to the far corner of the eye, then going to the nose side and working one’s way in to complete the look. A thin line for daywear; a thicker, more dramatic one for that important night out with the guy you hoped would—
The phone rang. Not the regular line, but the one with the red stripe on the handset. Linny put Marie Claire down (reminding herself to stop by the Rite Aid and get some L’Oréal Opaque) and picked up the phone. She had been catching in Dispatch for five years now, and at this time of the morning it was apt to be a cat up a tree, a lost dog, a kitchen mishap, or—she hoped not—a choking incident with a toddler involved. The weapons-related shit almost always happened after the sun went down, and usually involved the Squeaky Wheel.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“The Avon Lady killed Tru!” a woman shouted. “She killed Tru and Tru’s friend! I don’t know his name, but she put his fuckin head right through the fuckin wall! If I look at that again, I’ll go blind!”
“Ma’am, all 911 calls are recorded,” Linny said, “and we do not appreciate pranks.”
“I ain’t prankin! Who’s prankin? Some random bitch just came in here, killed Tru! Tru and the other guy! There’s blood ever’where!”
Linny had been ninety percent sure that this was a prank or a crank when the slurry voice mentioned the Avon Lady; now she was eighty percent sure that it was for real. The woman was blubbering almost too hard to be understood, and her piney woods accent was as thick as a brick. If Linny hadn’t come from Mink Crossing in Kanawha County, she might have thought her caller was speaking a foreign language.
“What is your name, ma’am?”
“Tiffany Jones, but ne’mine me! They’s dead and I don’t know why she let me live, but what if she comes back?”
Linny hunched forward, studying today’s duty sheet—who was in, who was on patrol. The sheriff’s department had only nine cars, and one or two were almost always in the shop. Dooling County was the smallest county in the state, although not quite the poorest; that dubious honor went to neighboring McDowell County, splat in the middle of nowhere.
“I don’t see your number on my screen.”
“Course you don’t. It’s one of Tru’s burners. He does somethin to em. He—” There was a pause, a crackle, and Tiffany Jones’s voice at once receded and pitched higher. “—oh my Christ, the lab just blew! Why’d she do that for? Oh, my Christ, oh, my Christ, oh—”
Linny started to ask what she was talking about, and then heard a rumbling boom. It wasn’t particularly loud, it didn’t rattle the windows, but it was a boom, all right. As if a jet from Langley over in Virginia had broken the sound barrier.
How fast does sound travel? she wondered. Didn’t we learn that formula in physics class? But high school physics had been a long time ago. Almost in another life.
“Tiffany? Tiffany Jones? Are you still there?”
“You get someone out here before the woods catch afire!” Tiffany screamed this so loudly that Linny held the phone away from her ear. “Follow your damn nose! Watch the smoke! It’s pilin up already! Out Ball’s Hill, past the Ferry and the lumberyard!”
“This woman, the one you called the Avon Lady—”
Tiffany began to laugh as she cried. “Oh, cops goan know her if they see her. She’ll be the one covered in Truman Mayweather’s blood.”
“May I have your ad—”
“Trailer don’t have no address! Tru don’t take mail! Just shut your gob and get someone out here!”
With that, Tiffany was gone.
Linny crossed the empty main office and went out into the morning sun. A number of people were standing on the Main Street sidewalks, shading their eyes and looking east. In that direction, maybe three miles distant, black smoke was rising. Nice and straight, not ribboning, and thank God for that. And yes, it was near Adams Lumberyard, a place she knew well, first from pickup truck trips out there with her daddy and then from pickup truck trips out there with her husband. Men had many strange fascinations. Lumberyards seemed to be one of them, probably falling somewhere just ahead of bigfoot trucks but well behind gun shows.
“What do we got?” called Drew T. Barry of Drew T. Barry Indemnity, standing outside his storefront across the street.
Linny could practically see the columned figures of premiums scrolling across the backs of Drew T. Barry’s eyes. She returned inside without answering him, first to call the fire department (where phones would already be ringing, she guessed), then Terry Coombs and Roger Elway in Unit Four, then the boss. Who was probably asleep after calling in sick the previous night.
2
But Lila Norcross wasn’t asleep.
She had read in a magazine article, probably while waiting to have her teeth cleaned or her eyes checked, that it took the average person fifteen to thirty minutes to fall asleep. There was a caveat, however, of which Lila hardly needed to be informed: one needed to be in a calm state of mind, and she was not in that state. For one thing, she was still dressed, although she had unsnapped her pants and unbuttoned her brown uniform shirt. She had also taken off her utility belt. She felt guilty. She wasn’t used to lying to her husband about little things, and had never lied about a really big thing until this morning.
Crack-up on Mountain Rest Road, she had texted. Don’t try calling, we need to get the mess cleaned up. This morning she had even added a bit of verisimilitude that now pricked her like a thorn: Cat litter all over the highway! Needed a bulldozer! But a thing like that would be in Dooling’s weekly paper, wouldn’t it? Only Clint never read it, so perhaps that would be all right. But people would talk about such a humorous happenstance, and when they didn’t, he’d wonder . . .
“He wants to be caught,” she had said to Clint when they were watching an HBO documentary—The Jinx, it was called—about a rich and eccentric serial killer named Robert Durst. This was early in the second of six episodes. “He would never have agreed to talk to those documentary guys if he didn’t.” And sure enough, Robert Durst was currently back in jail. The question was, did she want to be caught?
If not, why had she texted him in the first place? She told herself at the time it was because if he called and heard the background noise in the Coughlin High School gymnasium—the cheering crowd, the squeak of sneakers on the hardwood, the blare of the horn—he would naturally ask where she was and what she was doing there. But she could have let his call go to voicemail, right? And returned it later?
I didn’t think of it, she told herself. I was nervous and I was upset.
True or false? This morning she leaned toward the latter. That she had been weaving a tangled web on purpose. That she wanted to force Clint to force her to confess, and for him to be the one to pull the unraveling string.
It occurred to her, ruefully, that for all her years of experience in law enforcement, it was her husband, the psychiatrist, who would make the far better criminal. Clint knew how to keep a secret.
Lila felt as though she’d discovered that there was a whole other floor in her home. Quite by accident she had pressed a certain scuffed spot on the wall and a stairwell had been revealed. Just inside the secret passage was a hook and draped on that hook was a jacket of Clint’s. The shock was bad, the pain was worse, but neither compared to the shame: How could you fail to perceive? And once you did become aware, once you did wake up to the reality of your life, how could you live a second longer without screaming it out loud? If the discovery that your husband, a man you had spoken to every day for over fifteen years, the father of your child, had a daughter that he had never mentioned—if that didn’t warrant a scream, a throat-ripping howl of rage and hurt, then what did? Instead, she had wished him a good day, and lain down.
Weariness at last began to catch up and iron out her distress. She was finally going down, and that was good. This would look simpler after five or six hours of sleep; she would feel more settled; she would be able to talk to him; and maybe Clint could help her understand. That was his job, wasn’t it? Making sense of life’s messes. Well, did she ever have a mess for him! Cat litter all over the road. Cat shit in the secret passage, cat litter and cat shit on the basketball court, where a girl named Sheila dropped her shoulder, making the defender scramble back, then crossed over and headed for the hoop.
A tear dripped down her cheek and she exhaled, close to the escape of sleep.
Something tickled her face. It felt like a strand of hair or maybe an errant thread from the pillowcase. She brushed it away, slipped a little deeper toward true sleep, and was almost there when her phone bugled at her from the utility belt laid across the cedar chest at the foot of the bed.
She opened her eyes and swam into a sitting position. That thread or hair or whatever it was brushed her cheek; she swatted it away. Clint, if that’s you—
She got the phone, stared at the screen. Not Clint. The single word was BASE. The clock read 7:57 AM. Lila thumbed ACCEPT.
“Sheriff? Lila? Are you up?”
“No, Linny, this is all a dream.”
“I think we might have a big problem.”
Linny was clipped and professional. Lila gave her full marks for that, but her accent had crept back into her voice, not I think we have a big problem but Ah thank, which meant she was serious and worried. Lila popped her eyes wide, as if that would help her wake up faster.
“Caller reported multiple homicides out by Adams Lumberyard. She might have been wrong about that, or lying, or even hallucinating, but there certainly was one hell of a bang. You didn’t hear it?”
“No. Tell me exactly what you got.”
“I can play the call—”
“Just tell me.”
Linny told her: stoned woman, hysterical, says there’s two dead, Avon Lady did the deed, explosion, visible smoke.
“And you sent—”
“Unit Four. Terry and Roger. According to their last call-in, they’re less than a mile away.”
“Okay. Good.”
“Are you—”
“On my way.”
3
She was halfway to the cruiser parked in the driveway when she became aware of Anton Dubcek staring at her. Shirtless, pecs gleaming, pants riding (barely) the spars of his hipbones, the pool guy appeared to be auditioning for the position of May pin-up boy on a Chippendales calendar. He was at the curb by his van, retrieving some piece of pool cleaning equipment. “Anton the Pool Guy” written on the side in Florentine script.
“What are you looking at?”
“Morning glory,” Anton said, and favored her with a radiant smile that had probably charmed every barmaid in the Tri-Counties.
She looked down and saw that she had neither tucked in nor buttoned her shirt. The plain white bra beneath showed a lot less than either of her two bikini tops (and a lot less glamorously), but there was something about men and underwear; they saw a girl in a bra, and it was like they had just won fifty on a five-buck Dollars ‘N’ Dirt scratch ticket. Hell, Madonna had made a career of it back in the day. Probably before Anton was born, she realized.
“Does that line work, Anton?” Buttoning and tucking in. “Ever?”
The smile widened. “You’d be surprised.”
Ah, such white teeth. She wouldn’t be surprised.
“Back door’s open, if you want a Coke. Lock it behind you when you leave, okay?”
“Roger-wilco.” He snapped off a half-assed salute.
“And no beer. It’s too early even for you.”
“It’s always five o’clock somewh—”
“Spare me the lyrics, Anton. It was a long night and if I don’t manage some shut-eye down the line, it’s going to be a long day.”
“Roger that, too. But hey, Sheriff, I got bad news: pretty sure you got Dutch Elm out back. You want me to leave you the phone number for my tree guy? You’re not going to want to let that—”
“Whatever, thanks.” Lila didn’t care about the trees, not this morning, although she had to appreciate the thoroughness of the bad timing: her lies, Clint’s omissions, exhaustion, fire, corpses, and now infested trees, all before nine o’clock. The only thing missing was Jared breaking an arm or something, and Lila would have no choice but to go to St. Luke’s and beg for Father Lafferty to take her confession.
She backed down the driveway, headed east on Tremaine Street, did a California stop that would have earned her a ticket if she hadn’t been the sheriff, saw the smoke rising out Route 17 way, and hit the jackpot lights. She’d save the siren for the three blocks that constituted downtown Dooling. Give everyone a thrill.
4
At the traffic light across from the high school, Frank Geary tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. He was on his way to Judge Silver’s house. The old judge had called him on his cell phone; by the sound he’d barely been holding it together. His cat, Cocoa, had been struck by a car.
A familiar homeless woman, bundled in so many layers of garments that you couldn’t see her feet, crossed in front of his truck, pushing her shopping cart. She was talking to herself with a bright, amused expression. Maybe one of her personalities was planning a surprise birthday party for one of her other personalities. He sometimes thought it would be nice to be crazy, not crazy like Elaine seemed to think he was, but actually crazy, talking-to-yourself-and-pushing-a-shopping-cart-full-of-garbage-bags-and-the-top-half-of-a-male-mannequin crazy.
What reason did insane people have to worry? Crazy reasons, probably, though in his fantasy of madness, Frank liked to imagine it was simpler. Do I pour the milk and cereal over my head, or do I pour it all into the mailbox? If you were bonkers, perhaps that was a stressful decision. For Frank, there was the stress of the upcoming annual cutbacks in the Dooling Municipal Budget that might put him out of work, and there was the stress of trying to hold it together for the weekends when he saw his daughter, and then there was the stress of knowing that Elaine expected him not to be able to hold it together. His own wife rooting against him, how was that for stress? Milk and cereal over the head or into the mailbox, by comparison, he thought he could handle with no problem. Cereal over the head, milk in the mailbox. There. Problem solved.
The light turned green and Frank swung left onto Malloy.
5
On the opposite side of the street the homeless woman—Old Essie to the volunteers at the shelter, Essie Wilcox once upon a time—jounced her shopping cart up the short, grassy embankment that surrounded the high school parking lot. After she had gained the plateau of the pavement, she pushed toward the athletic fields and the scrub woods beyond, where she kept house in the warm months.
“Hurry along, children!” Essie spoke forward, as if to the rattling contents of her shopping cart, but actually addressing her invisible family of four identical little girls, who trailed behind in a row, like ducklings. “We need to be home for supper—or else we might end up as supper! In a witch’s pot!”
Essie chuckled but the girls began to weep and fuss.
“Oh, you silly-billy girls!” she said. “I was only kidding.”
Essie reached the edge of the parking lot and pushed her cart onto the football field. Behind her, the girls had cheered up. They knew that Mother would never let anything happen to them. They were good girls.
6
Evie was standing between two pallets of freshly cut pine boards on the left side of Adams Lumberyard when Unit Four shot past. She was screened from the rubberneckers standing outside the main building, but not from the highway. The responders paid no attention to her, however, although she was still wearing nothing but Truman Mayweather’s shirt on her body and Truman Mayweather’s blood on her face and arms. The cops had eyes only for the smoke rising on the edge of some extremely dry woods.
Terry Coombs sat forward and pointed. “See that big rock with TIFFANY JONES SUCKS spray-painted on it?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll see a dirt road just past it. Turn there.”
“You sure?” Roger Elway asked. “The smoke looks at least a mile further on.”
“Trust me. I’ve been out here before, back when Tru Mayweather considered himself a full-time trailer pimp and a part-time gentleman pot grower. I guess he moved up in the world.”
Unit Four skidded on the dirt, and then the tires caught hold. Roger bucketed along at forty, the county car sometimes bottoming out in spite of the heavy suspension. High weeds growing up the center hump whickered against the undercarriage. Now they could smell the smoke.
Terry grabbed the mic. “Unit Four to Base, Base, this is Four.”
“Four, this is Base,” Linny responded.
“We’ll be at the scene in three, as long as Roger doesn’t put us in the ditch.” Roger raised one hand from the wheel long enough to flash his partner the finger. “What’s the status on the FD?”
“They’re rolling all four engines, plus the ambo. Some of the volunteer guys, too. Should be right behind you. Watch out for the Avon Lady.”
“Avon Lady, got it. Four is out.”
Terry racked the mic just as the cruiser took a bounce that rendered them momentarily airborne. Roger brought the car to a skidding halt. The road ahead was littered with scraps of corrugated roofing, shattered propane canisters, plastic jugs, and shredded paper, some of it smoldering. He spotted a black and white disc that looked like a stove dial.
One wall of a shed was leaning against a dead tree that was blazing like a Tiki torch. Two pine trees close to what had been the rear of the shed were also on fire. So were the scrub bushes lining the side of the road.
Roger popped the trunk, grabbed the fire extinguisher, and began spraying white foam onto the undergrowth. Terry got the fire blanket and began flapping at the flaming debris in the road. FD would be here soon; the job right now was containment.
Roger trotted over, holding the extinguisher. “I’m empty, and you’re not doing shit. Let’s scat out of here before we get rear-ended, what do you think?”
“I think that’s an excellent idea. Let’s see what’s up at chez Mayweather.”
Sweat beaded across Roger’s forehead and glimmered in the sparse hairs of his pale yellow flattop. He squinted. “Shay what?”
Terry liked his partner all right, but he wouldn’t have wanted Roger on his Wednesday Quiz Bowl team down at the Squeaky Wheel. “Never mind. Drive.”
Roger threw himself behind the wheel. Terry scooted to the passenger side. A Dooling FD pumper came swaying around the turn forty yards behind them, its high sides brushing the boughs of the trees crowding the road. Terry waved to them, then unlocked the shotgun beneath the dash. Better safe than sorry.
They arrived in a clearing where a trailer painted the hideous turquoise of aquarium pebbles sat on jacklifters. The steps were concrete blocks. A rust-eaten F-150 sat on a pair of flat tires. A woman slumped on the tailgate, mousy brown hair hiding her face. She wore jeans and a halter top. Much of the skin on display was decorated with tattoos. Terry could read LOVE running down her right forearm. Her feet were bare and caked with dirt. She was scrawny to the point of emaciation.
“Terry . . .” Roger inhaled and made a throat-clearing noise that was close to a retch. “Over there.”
What Terry saw made him think of a county fair midway game he’d played as a boy. A man stuck his head through a cardboard cutout of Popeye, and for a dime you could throw three plastic bags of colored water at him. Only that wasn’t colored water below the head protruding from the trailer’s wall.
An immense weariness filled Terry. His entire body seemed to gain weight, as if his innards had been turned to concrete. He had suffered this before, mostly at the scene of bad car accidents, and knew the feeling was transitory, but while it lasted, it was hellish. There was that moment when you looked at a child still strapped into his car seat but with his little body torn open like a laundry bag—or when you looked at a head sticking out of a trailer wall, the skin peeled down the cheeks by its cataclysmic passage—and you wondered why in the hell the world had been created in the first place. Good things were in short supply, and so much of the rest was downright rancid.
The woman sitting on the tailgate raised her head. Her face was pale, her eyes ringed with dark circles. She held out her arms to them, then immediately lowered them to her thighs again as if they were too heavy, just too heavy. Terry knew her; she’d been one of Tru Mayweather’s girls before he had gone into the meth business. Perhaps she was still here because she had been promoted to quasi-girlfriend—if you could call that a promotion.
He got out of the cruiser. She slid down from the tailgate, and would have gone to her knees if Terry hadn’t caught her around the middle. The skin under his hands was chilly, and he could feel every rib. This close, he saw that some of her tattoos were actually bruises. She clung to him and began to cry.
“Hey, now,” Terry said. “Hey, now, girl. You’re okay. Whatever happened here, it’s over.”
Under other circumstances, he would have considered the sole survivor the prime suspect, and all that blather about the Avon Lady so much bullshit, but the bag of bones in his arms could never have put that guy’s head through the trailer wall. Terry didn’t know how long Tiffany had been getting high on Truman’s supply, but in her current condition he thought just blowing her nose would have taken a major effort.
Roger strolled over, looking oddly cheerful. “Did you make the call, ma’am?”
“Yes . . .”
Roger took out his notebook. “Your name?”
“This is Tiffany Jones,” Terry said. “That’s right, isn’t it, Tiff?”
“Yeah. I seen you before, sir. When I come get Tru out of jail that time. I remember. You were nice.”
“And that guy? Who’s he?” Roger waved his notebook at the protruding head, a casual gesture, as if he were pointing out an interesting local landmark, and not a ruined human being. His casualness was appalling—and Terry envied it. If he could learn to adjust to such sights as easily as Roger, he thought he’d be a happier man, and maybe better police.
“Don’t know,” Tiffany said. “He was just Trume’s friend. Or cousin, maybe. He come up from Arkansas last week. Or maybe it was the week before.”
From down the road, firemen were shouting and water was whooshing—presumably from a tanker truck; there was no city water out here. Terry saw a momentary rainbow in the air, floating in front of smoke that was now turning white.
Terry took Tiffany gently by her stick-thin wrists and looked into her bloodshot eyes. “What about the woman who did this? You told the dispatcher it was a woman.”
“Tru’s friend called her the Avon Lady, but she sure wasn’t one of those.” A little emotion surfaced through Tiffany’s shock. She straightened up and looked around fearfully. “She gone, ain’t she? She better be.”
“What did she look like?”
Tiffany shook her head. “I don’t remember. But she stole Tru’s shirt. I think she was nekkid beneath.”
Her eyes slipped shut, then slowly rolled open again. Terry recognized the signs. First the trauma of some unexpected violent event, next the hysterical call to 911, and now the post-event shock. Add to that whatever drugs she had been taking, and how long she had been taking them. Elevator up, elevator down. For all he knew, Truman Mayweather, Tiffany, and Truman Mayweather’s Arkansas cuz had been on a three-day run.
“Tiff? I want you to sit in the cruiser while my partner and I have a look around. Sit right here in back. Rest up.”
“Sleepytime gal,” Roger said, grinning, and for a moment Terry felt a well-nigh irresistible urge to kick his country ass.
Instead of doing that, he held open the cruiser’s back door for her, and this called up another memory: the limousine he’d rented to go to the prom in with Mary Jean Stukey. Her in a pink strapless dress with puffy sleeves, the corsage he’d brought her at her wrist, him in a rented tuxedo. This was in the golden age before he had ever seen the white-eyed corpse of a pretty girl with the crater of a shotgun blast in her chest, or a man who had hung himself in his hayloft, or a hollow-eyed meth-addicted prostitute who looked as if she had less than six months to live.
I am too old for this job, Terry thought. I should retire.
He was forty-five.
7
Although Lila had never actually shot anyone, she had drawn her gun on five occasions and fired it into the air once (and oy vey, the paperwork just for doing that). Like Terry and Roger and all the others in her small band of blue knights, she had cleaned up the human wreckage from plenty of mishaps on the county roads (usually with the smell of alcohol still hanging in the air). She had dodged flying objects, broken up family disagreements that turned physical, administered CPR, and splinted broken limbs. She and her guys had found two children lost in the woods, and on a handful of occasions she had been puked upon. She had experienced a great deal during her fourteen years in law enforcement, but she had never encountered a bloodstained woman in nothing but a flannel shirt strolling up the centerline of Dooling County’s main highway. That was a first.
She crested Ball’s Hill doing eighty, and the woman was less than a hundred feet from the cruiser. She made no effort to dodge either right or left, but even in that hair-thin moment Lila saw no deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face, just calm observation. And something else: she was gorgeous.
Lila couldn’t have stopped in time even if she’d had a full night’s sleep—not at eighty. She swung the wheel to the right instead, missing the woman in the road by mere inches, and not entirely missing her, at that; she heard a clup sound, and suddenly the outside mirror was reflecting Lila herself instead of the road behind.
Meanwhile, she had Unit One to contend with, a projectile now barely under her control. She hit a mailbox and sent it flying into the air, the post twirling like a majorette’s baton before it crashed to the earth. Dust spumed up behind her, and she could feel the heavy cruiser wanting to slide ditchward. Braking wouldn’t save her, so she stepped down on the accelerator instead, increasing her speed, the cruiser tearing up the rightside shoulder, gravel pinging off the undercarriage. She was riding at a severe slant. If the ditch captured her she would roll, and chances that she would ever see Jared graduate high school would shrink drastically.
Lila feathered the wheel to the left. At first the car slid, but then it caught hold and roared back onto the highway. With tar under her again she hit the brakes hard, the nose of the cruiser dipping, the deceleration pushing her so hard against her seatbelt that she could feel her eyes bulging.
She stopped at the end of a long double track of burned rubber. Her heart was hammering. Black dots floated in front of her eyes. She forced herself to breathe so she wouldn’t faint, and looked into the rearview mirror.
The woman hadn’t run into the woods, nor was she beating feet up Ball’s Hill, where another road forked off toward the Ball Creek Ferry. She was just standing there, gazing over her shoulder. That glance-back, coupled with the woman’s bare butt protruding from under the tail of her shirt, was strangely coquettish; she looked like a pin-up on an Alberto Vargas calendar.
Breathing fast, her mouth metallic with the taste of spent adrenalin, Lila backed into the dirt driveway of a neat little ranch home. A woman was standing on the porch with a toddler cradled in her arms. Lila powered down her window and said, “Go back inside, ma’am. Right now.”
Without waiting to see if the bystander would do as ordered, Lila shifted to drive and rolled back up Ball’s Hill toward where the woman stood, being careful to swerve around the dead mailbox. She could hear her bent front fender scraping one of her tires.
The radio blurped. It was Terry Coombs. “Unit One, this is Four. You there, Lila? Come back. We got a couple of dead meth cookers out here past the lumberyard.”
She grabbed the mic, said, “Not now, Ter,” and dropped it on the seat. She stopped in front of the woman, unsnapped the strap on her holster, and, as she got out of Unit One, pulled her service weapon for the sixth time in her career as a law enforcement officer. As she looked at those long, tanned legs and high breasts she flashed back to her driveway—could it only have been fifteen minutes ago? What are you looking at? she had asked. Anton had replied, Morning glory.
If this woman standing in the middle of Dooling Town Road wasn’t morning glory, Lila had never seen it.
“Hands up. Put them up, right now.”
The Avon Lady, aka Morning Glory, raised her hands.
“Do you know how close you just came to being dead?”
Evie smiled. It lit up her whole face. “Not very,” she said. “You had it all the way, Lila.”
8
The old man spoke with a slight tremble. “I didn’t want to move her.”
The cat, a brown tabby, was in the grass. Judge Oscar Silver was down on the ground beside her, staining the knees of his khakis. Sprawled on its side, the cat almost appeared normal, except for its right front leg, which hung loose in a grotesque V-shape. Up close you also saw the curls of blood in her eyes, washing up around the pupils. Her breath was shallow and she was, according to the counterintuitive instinct of wounded felines, purring.
Frank squatted beside the cat. He propped his sunglasses back on his head and squinted against the harsh morning light. “I’m sorry, Judge.”
Silver wasn’t crying now, but he had been. Frank hated to see that, although it didn’t surprise him: people loved their pets, often with a degree of openness they couldn’t allow themselves to express toward other people.
What would a shrink call that? Displacement? Well, love was hard. All Frank knew was that the ones you really had to watch out for in this world were the ones that couldn’t love even a cat or a dog. And you had to watch out for yourself, of course. Keep things under control. Stay cool.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” said Judge Silver.
“It’s my job,” Frank said, although it wasn’t exactly. As the county’s sole full-time animal control officer, his department was more raccoons and stray dogs than dying cats. He considered Oscar Silver a friend, though, or something close to it. Before the judge’s kidneys had put him on the wagon, Frank had shared more than a few beers with him at the Squeaky Wheel, and it was Oscar Silver who had given him the name of a divorce lawyer and suggested he make an appointment. Silver had also suggested “some kind of counseling” when Frank admitted he sometimes raised his voice to his wife and daughter (taking care not to mention the time he’d put a fist through the kitchen wall).
Frank hadn’t seen either the lawyer or the therapist. In regard to the former, he still believed he could work things out with Elaine. In regard to the latter, he felt he could control his temper quite well if people (Elaine, for instance, but also Nana, his daughter) would only realize he had their best interests at heart.
“I’ve had her since she was a kitten,” Judge Silver was saying now. “Found her out behind the garage. This was just after Olivia, my wife, passed. I know it’s ridiculous to say, but it seemed like . . . a message.” He drew his forefinger through the valley between the cat’s ears, rubbing gently. Although the cat continued to purr, it did not extend its neck toward the finger, or react. Its bloody eyes gazed steadily into the green grass.
“Maybe it was,” said Frank.
“My grandson was the one who named her Cocoa.” He shook his head and twisted his lips. “It was a damn Mercedes. I saw it. I was coming out for the paper. Had to be going sixty. In a residential neighborhood! Now what reason is there for that?”
“No reason. What color was the Mercedes?” Frank was thinking about something Nana had mentioned to him months earlier. A fellow on her paper route who lived in one of the big houses at the top of Briar had some kind of fancy ride. A green Mercedes, he thought she had said, and now:
“Green,” said Judge Silver. “It was a green one.”
A gurgle had entered the cat’s purr. The rise and fall of its flank had quickened. She was really hurting.
Frank put a hand on Silver’s shoulder, squeezed it. “I should do this now.”
The judge cleared his throat, but must not have trusted himself to speak. He just nodded.
Frank unzipped the leather pouch that contained the needle and the two vials. “This first one relaxes her.” He poked the needle into the vial, drew it full. “The second one lets her sleep.”
9
There came a time, long before the events recounted here, when the Tri-Counties (McDowell, Bridger, and Dooling) petitioned to have the defunct Ash Mountain Juvenile Reformatory converted into a badly needed women’s prison. The state paid for the land and the buildings, and it was named after the county—Dooling—that provided most of the money for refurbishing the institution. Its doors opened in 1969, staffed by Tri-County residents who badly needed jobs. At the time it had been declared “state of the art” and “a benchmark in female corrections.” It looked more like a suburban high school than a prison—if one ignored the rolls of razor wire that topped the acres of chainlink surrounding the place.
Nearly half a century later, it still looked like a high school, but one that had fallen on hard times and a diminishing tax base. The buildings had begun to crumble. The paint (lead-based, it was rumored) was flaking. The plumbing leaked. The heating plant was badly outdated, and in the depths of winter, only the admin wing could maintain temperatures above sixty-five degrees. In summer, the inmate wings roasted. The lighting was dim, the elderly electrical wiring a disaster in waiting, and the vital inmate monitoring equipment went dark at least once a month.
There was, however, an excellent exercise yard with a running track, a basketball court in the gym, shuffleboard, a midget softball diamond, and a vegetable garden adjacent to the admin wing. It was there, close to the flourishing peas and corn, that Warden Janice Coates sat on a blue plastic milk box, her beige-colored knit purse collapsed on the ground beside her shoes, smoking an unfiltered Pall Mall and watching Clint Norcross approach.
He flashed his ID card (unnecessary since everyone knew him, but it was protocol) and the main gate rumbled open on its track. He drove into the dead space beyond, waiting for the outer gate to shut. When the officer on duty—this morning it was Millie Olson—got a green on her board, indicating the main gate was locked, she opened the inner gate. Clint brought his Prius trundling alongside the fence to the employees’ parking lot, which was also gated. Here a sign cautioned MAINTAIN SECURITY! ALWAYS LOCK YOUR CAR!
Two minutes later he was standing beside the warden, leaning a shoulder against the old brick, his face turned up to the morning sun. What followed was akin to the call-and-response in a fundamentalist church.
“Good morning, Dr. Norcross.”
“Good morning, Warden Coates.”
“Ready for another day in the wonderful world of corrections?”
“The real question is, is the wonderful world of corrections ready for me? That’s how ready I am. How about you, Janice?”
She shrugged faintly and blew smoke. “The same.”
He nodded to her cigarette. “Thought you quit.”
“I did. I enjoy quitting so much I do it once a week. Sometimes twice.”
“All quiet?”
“This morning, yes. We had a meltdown last night.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. Angel Fitzroy.”
“Nope. Kitty McDavid.”
Clint raised his eyebrows. “That I would not have expected. Tell me.”
“According to her roommate—Claudia Stephenson, the one the other ladies call—”
“Claudia the Dynamite Body-a,” Clint said. “Very proud of those implants. Did Claudia start something?”
Nothing against Claudia, but Clint hoped that was the case. Doctors were human, they had their favorites, and Kitty McDavid was one of his. Kitty had been in rough shape when she arrived—a self-harm habit, yo-yo moods, high anxiety. They’d come a long way since then. Anti-depressants had made a huge difference and, Clint liked to believe, their therapy sessions had helped a bit, too. Like him, Kitty was a product of the foster systems of Appalachia. In one of their first meetings, she had asked him, sourly, if he had any idea in his big suburban head what it felt like not to have a home or a family.
Clint hadn’t hesitated. “I don’t know what it felt like for you, Kitty, but it made me feel like an animal. Like I was always on the hunt, or being hunted.”
She had stared, wide-eyed. “You . . . ?”
“Yes, me,” he had said. Meaning, Me too.
These days Kitty was almost always on Good Report, and, better still, she had made an agreement with the prosecutors’ office to testify in the Griner brothers case, a major drug bust that Dooling’s own Sheriff Lila Norcross had pulled off that winter. If Lowell and Maynard Griner went away, parole for Kitty was a distinct possibility. If she got it, Clint thought she might do all right. She understood now that while it was going to be up to her to find a place in the world, it was also going to take continued support—both medical and community—to meet that responsibility. He thought Kitty was strong enough to ask for that support, to fight for it, and she was getting stronger every day.
Janice Coates’s view was less sanguine. It was her attitude that, when dealing with convicts, you were better off not letting your hopes rise too high. Maybe that was why she was the warden—the bull goose—and he was just the resident shrink in this stone hotel.
“Stephenson says McDavid woke her up,” Janice said. “First talking in her sleep, then yelling, then screaming. Something about how the Black Angel was coming. Or maybe the Black Queen. It’s in the incident report. With cobwebs in her hair and death in her fingertips. Sounds like it could be a pretty good TV show, doesn’t it? Syfy channel.” The warden chuckled without smiling. “I’m sure you could have a field day with that one, Clint.”
“More like a movie,” Clint said. “Maybe one she saw in her childhood.”
Coates rolled her eyes. “See? To quote Ronnie Reagan, ‘There you go again.’ ”
“What? You don’t believe in childhood trauma?”
“I believe in a nice quiet prison, that’s what I believe in. They took her over to A Wing, Land of the Loonies.”
“Politically incorrect, Warden Coates. The preferred term is Nutbar Central. Did they have to put her in the restraint chair?” Though it was sometimes necessary, Clint loathed the restraint chair, which looked like a sports car bucket seat that had been converted into a torture device.
“No, gave her a Yellow Med, and that quieted her down. I don’t know which one, and don’t much care, but it’ll be in the incident report, if you care to look.”
There were three med levels at Dooling: red, that could only be dispensed by medical personnel; yellow, that could be dispensed by officers; and green, that inmates not in C Wing or currently on Bad Report could keep in their cells.
“Okay,” Clint said.
“As of now, your girl McDavid is sleeping it off—”
“She’s not my girl—”
“And that is your morning update.” Janice yawned, scrubbed her cigarette out on the brick, and popped it under the milk box, as if once out of sight it would somehow disappear.
“Am I keeping you up, Janice?”
“It’s not you. I ate Mexican last night. Had to keep getting up to use the can. What they say is true—the stuff that comes out looks suspiciously like the stuff that went in.”
“TMI, Warden.”
“You’re a doctor, you can handle it. You going to check on McDavid?”
“This morning for sure.”
“Want my theory? Okay, here’s my theory: she was molested as a toddler by some lady calling herself the Black Queen. What do you think?”
“Could be,” Clint said, not rising to the bait.
“Could be.” She shook her head. “Why investigate their childhoods, Clint, when they’re still children? That’s essentially why most of them are here—childish behavior in the first degree.”
This made Clint think of Jeanette Sorley, who had ended years of escalating spousal abuse by stabbing her husband with a screwdriver and watching him bleed to death. Had she not done that, Damian Sorley would eventually have killed her. Clint had no doubt of it. He did not view that as childish behavior, but as self-preservation. If he said so to Warden Coates, however, she would refuse to hear it: she was old-school that way. Better to simply finish the call-and-response.
“And so, Warden Coates, we begin another day of life in the women’s prison along the Royal Canal.”
She hoisted her purse, stood up, and brushed off the seat of her uniform pants. “No canal, but there’s always Ball’s Ferry down the road apiece, so yeah. Let the day begin.”
They went in together on that first day of the sleeping sickness, pinning their IDs to their shirts.
10
Magda Dubcek, mother of that handsome young pool-polisher-about-town known as Anton the Pool Guy (he had incorporated, too, so please make out your checks to Anton the Pool Guy, LLC), tottered into the living room of the duplex she shared with her son. She had her cane in one hand and a morning pick-me-up in the other. She flumped into her easy chair with a fart and a sigh and fired up the television.
Normally at this hour of the day she would have tuned in the second hour of Good Day Wheeling, but this morning she went to NewsAmerica instead. There was a breaking story that interested her, which was good, and she knew one of the correspondents covering it, which was even better. Michaela Coates, Michaela Morgan she called herself now but little Mickey to Magda, forever and always, whom she had babysat all those years ago. Back then Jan Coates had just been a guard at the women’s lockup on the south end of town, a widowed single mom only trying to hang in there. Now she was the warden, boss of the whole shebang, and her daughter Mickey was a nationally known news correspondent working out of DC, famous for her tough questions and short skirts. Those Coates women had really made something of themselves. Magda was proud of them, and if she felt a flicker of melancholy because Mickey never called or wrote, or because Janice never stopped in to chew the fat, well, they had jobs to do. Magda didn’t presume to understand the pressures that they operated under.
The news anchor on duty this morning was George Alderson. With his glasses and stooped shoulders and thinning hair, he didn’t look anything like the matinee idol types that usually sat behind the big desks and read the news. He looked like a mortuary attendant. Also, he had an unfortunate voice for a TV person. Sort of quacky. Well, Magda supposed there was a reason NewsAmerica was number three behind FOX and CNN. She was eager for the day when Michaela would move up to one of those. When it happened, Magda wouldn’t have to put up with Alderson anymore.
“At this hour we’re continuing to follow a breaking story that began in Australia,” Alderson said. The expression on his face attempted to combine concern with skepticism but landed closer to constipated.
You should retire and go bald in the comfort of your home, Magda thought, and toasted him with the first rum and Coke of the day. Go Turtle Wax your head, George, and get out of the way for my Michaela.
“Medical officials in Oahu, Hawaii, are reporting that the outbreak of what some are calling Asian Fainting Sickness and others are calling Australian Fainting Flu continues to spread. No one seems to be sure where it actually originated, but so far the only victims have been women. Now we’re getting word that cases have popped up on our shores, first in California, then in Colorado, and now in the Carolinas. Here’s Michaela Morgan with more.”
“Mickey!” Magda cried, once more toasting the television (and slopping some of her drink onto the sleeve of her cardigan). Magda’s voice held only a trace of Czech this morning, but by the time Anton got home at five PM, she would sound as if she had just gotten off the boat instead of living in the Tri-Counties for almost forty years. “Little Mickey Coates! I chased your bare ass all around your mother’s living room, both of us laughing fit to split our sides! I changed your poopy diapers, you little kook, and look at you now!”
Michaela Morgan nee Coates, in a sleeveless blouse and one of her trademark short skirts, was standing in front of a rambling building complex painted barn red. Magda thought those short skirts served Mickey very well. Even big-deal politicians were apt to become mesmerized by a glimpse of upper thigh, and in such a state, the truth sometimes popped out of their lying mouths. Not always, mind you, but sometimes. On the issue of Michaela’s new nose, Magda was conflicted. She missed that sassy stub that her girl had when she was a kiddo, and in a way, with her sharp new nose, Mickey didn’t look so much like Mickey anymore. On the other hand, she did look terrific! You couldn’t take your eyes off her.
“I’m here at the Loving Hands Hospice in Georgetown, where the first cases of what some are calling the Australian Fainting Flu were noticed in the early hours of the morning. Almost a hundred patients are housed here, most geriatric, and over half of them female. Administrators refuse to confirm or deny the outbreak, but I talked to an orderly just minutes ago, and what he had to say, although brief, was disquieting. He spoke on condition of anonymity. Here he is.”
The taped interview was indeed brief—little more than a sound bite. It featured Michaela speaking to a man in hospital whites with his face blurred and his voice electronically altered so he sounded like a sinister alien overlord in a sci-fi movie.
“What’s going on in there?” Michaela asked. “Can you fill us in?”
“Most of the women are asleep and won’t wake up,” the orderly said in his alien overlord voice. “It’s just like in Hawaii.”
“But the men . . . ?”
“The men are dandy. Up and eating their breakfast.”
“In Hawaii there have been some reports of—growths, on the faces of the sleeping women. Is that the case here?”
“I . . . don’t think I should talk about that.”
“Please.” Michaela batted her eyes. “People are concerned.”
“That’s it!” Magda croaked, saluting the television with her drink and slopping a bit more on her cardigan. “Go sexy! Once they want to stir your batter, you can get anything out of em!”
“Not growths in the tumor sense,” the overlord voice said. “It looks more like they’ve got cotton stuck to em. Now I gotta go.”
“Just one more question—”
“I gotta go. But . . . it’s growing. That cotton stuff. It’s . . . kinda gross.”
The picture returned to the live shot. “Disquieting information from an insider . . . if true. Back to you, George.”
As glad as Magda was to have seen Mickey, she hoped the story wasn’t true. Probably just another false scare, like Y2K or that SARS thing, but still, the idea of something that not only put women to sleep but caused stuff to grow on them . . . like Mickey said, that was disquieting. She would be glad when Anton got home. It was lonely with only the TV for company, not that she was one to complain. Magda wasn’t about to worry her hardworking boy, no, no. She’d loaned him the money to start the business, but he was the one who’d made it go.
But now, for the time being, maybe one more drinky, just a little one, and then a nap.