CHAPTER 14
1
Maura Dunbarton—once the subject of newspaper headlines, now largely forgotten—sat on the lower bunk of B-11, the cell she had shared with Kayleigh Rawlings for the last four years. The cell door was open. On B Wing, all the cell doors were open, and Maura did not believe they would roll closed and be locked from the Booth tonight. No, not tonight. The tiny TV set in the wall was on and tuned to NewsAmerica, but Maura had muted the sound. She knew what was going on; by now even the dimmest inmate in Dooling knew. RIOTING AT HOME AND ABROAD, read the super running across the bottom of the screen. This was followed by a list of cities. Most were American, because you cared about your own before you cared about those in more distant places, but Maura had also seen Calcutta, Sydney, Moscow, Cape Town, Mexico City, Bombay, and London before she stopped looking.
It was funny, when you thought about it; what were all those men rioting about? What did they think they could accomplish? Maura wondered if there would have been riots if it had been the other half of the human race who were falling asleep. She thought it unlikely.
Kayleigh’s head, swaddled in a white helmet that pulsed in and out with her breathing, lay in Maura’s lap. Maura held one of Kayleigh’s white-gloved hands, but she didn’t attempt to tamper with the material. There had been an announcement over the prison intercom system that it could be dangerous to do so, and the same warning had been thoroughly conveyed on the news broadcasts. Though the filament was slightly sticky, and very dense, Maura could still feel Kayleigh’s fingers buried inside, like pencils encased in thick plastic. She and Kayleigh had been lovers almost from the time Kayleigh, years younger, took up residence in B-11, doing time for assault with a deadly weapon. Age difference aside, they matched. Kayleigh’s slightly cockeyed sense of humor fit Maura’s cynicism. Kay was good-natured, filling the dark pits that had been eaten into Maura’s character by the things she had seen and the things she had done. She was a slick dancer, she was a wonderful kisser, and although they didn’t make love often these days, when they did, it was still good. As they lay together with their legs entwined, there was no prison for a little while, and no confusing outside world, either. It was just them.
Kayleigh was also a fine singer; she had won the prison talent show three years running. Last October there hadn’t been a dry eye in the house when she finished singing—a capella—“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Maura supposed all that was over now. People talked in their sleep; few if any sang in their sleep. Even if Kayleigh should be moved to sing, it would come out all muffled. And what if that crap was all down her throat, as well? And in her lungs? It probably was, although if that were the case, how she could go on breathing was a mystery.
Maura raised one knee, then the other, back and forth, up and down, rocking her lover gently. “Why did you have to go to sleep, honey? Why couldn’t you wait?”
Jeanette and Angel came by then, pushing a cart with two large coffee urns and two large plastic pitchers of juice on it. Maura could smell their approach before she saw them because man, that brew smelled bitter. Officer Rand Quigley was shepherding them along. Maura wondered how many of the female guards were left. She guessed not many. And few would show up for the next shift. Maybe none.
“Coffee, Maura?” Angel asked. “It’ll pep you right the fuck up.”
“No,” Maura said. Up and down went her knees. Up and down. Rock-a-bye Kayleigh, in the treetop.
“Sure? It’ll keep you goin. If I’m lyin, I’m dyin.”
“No,” Maura repeated. “Get on.”
Quigley didn’t like Maura’s tone. “Watch your mouth, inmate.”
“Or what? You’ll tonk me on the head with your stick and put me to sleep? Go ahead. That might be the only way I manage it.”
Quigley didn’t reply. He looked frazzled. Maura didn’t see why he should be. None of this would touch him; no man would bear this cross.
“You get that insomnia, don’t you?” Angel asked.
“Yeah. Takes one to know one.”
“Lucky us,” Angel said.
Wrong, Maura thought. Unlucky us.
“Is that Kayleigh?” Jeanette asked.
“No,” Maura said. “It’s Whoopi fucking Goldberg under that mess.”
“I’m sorry,” Jeanette said, and she looked sorry, and that hurt Maura’s heart in a way she had been guarding against. She would not cry in front of Officer Quigley or these young ones, though. She would not.
“Get on, I said.”
When they were gone with their fucked-up coffee wagon, Maura bent over her sleeping cellie—if you could call it sleep. To Maura it looked more like a magic spell from a fairy tale.
Love had come late for her and it was a miracle that it had come at all, she knew that. Like a rose blooming in a bomb crater. She should be grateful for the time the two of them had had, all the greeting cards and pop songs said so. But when she looked at the grotesque membrane covering Kayleigh’s sweet face, she found that her well of gratitude, always shallow, was now dry.
Not her eyes, though. With the coffee crew and Officer Quigley gone (nothing left but the trailing stink of that strange brew), she let the tears come. They fell on the white stuff enclosing Kayleigh’s head and the white stuff sucked the moisture up greedily.
If she’s somewhere close, and if I could just go to sleep, maybe I could catch up. Then we could go together.
But no. Because of the insomnia. She had lived with it since the night she had methodically slaughtered her entire family, finishing with Slugger, their elderly German shepherd. Petting him, soothing him, letting him lick her hand, then cutting his throat. If she got two hours of unconsciousness at night, she considered herself lucky. On many nights she got none at all . . . and nights in Dooling could be long. But Dooling was just a place. Insomnia had been her real prison across these years. Insomnia was boundless, and it never put her on Good Report.
I’ll be awake after most of them are asleep, she thought. Guards and inmates both. I’ll have the run of the place. Always assuming I want to stay, that is. And why would I want to go anywhere else? She might wake up, my Kayleigh. With a thing like this, anything is possible. Isn’t it?
Maura couldn’t sing the way Kayleigh could—hell, couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket—but there was a song Kayleigh especially liked, and now Maura sang it to her as she gently raised her knees up and down, as if operating the pedals of an invisible organ. Maura’s husband had listened to it all the time, and Maura had learned the words by osmosis. Kay heard her singing it to herself once, and demanded Maura teach her. “Aw, that’s naughty!” Kayleigh had exclaimed. It had been on an LP by a bunch of goofy potato eaters. That was how long Maura had been inside; her husband had owned an extensive collection of LPs. He didn’t matter now. Mr. Dunbarton had been put into an everlasting slumber early on the morning of January 7, 1984. She’d given him the knife first, right in the chest, plunged it like a shovel into loam, and he sat straight up, and his eyes had said, Why?
Because, that was why. And she’d have killed him or anyone else over and over and over again, would do it this very moment, if it would bring Kayleigh back to her.
“Listen, Kay. Listen:
“In the female prison there are seventy women . . . I wish it was with them that I did dwell . . .”
On the little TV, downtown Las Vegas appeared to be burning up.
“Then that old triangle . . . Could jingle jangle . . .”
She bent and kissed the white cocoon that had buried Kayleigh’s face. The taste was sour on her lips, but she didn’t mind, because Kayleigh was beneath. Her Kay.
“Along the banks . . . of the Royal Canal.”
Maura leaned back, closed her eyes, and prayed for sleep. It did not come.
2
Richland Lane curved gently to the left before dead-ending at a small park. The first thing Lila saw when she came around this curve was a couple of garbage cans lying overturned in the street. The second was a knot of yelling neighbors in front of the Elway house.
A teenage girl in a tracksuit sprinted toward the cruiser. In the light of the flashing jackpots, her face was a stuttering picture of dismay. Lila hammered on the brake and opened the door, unsnapping the strap over the butt of her pistol.
“Come quick!” the girl screamed. “She’s killing him!”
Lila ran for the house, kicking one of the garbage cans aside and pushing past a couple of men. One of them held up a bleeding hand. “I tried to stop her, and the bitch bit me. She was like a rabid dog.”
Lila stopped at the end of the driveway, her gun hanging down beside her right thigh, trying to process what she was seeing: a woman in a frog-squat on the asphalt. She appeared to be swathed in a muslin nightgown, at once form-fitting and ragged, leaking countless loose threads. Decorative bricks, patriotically painted in red, white, and blue, lined the drive on both sides. The woman held one in her left hand and one in her right. She was chopping them down, edge first, on the body of a man wearing a blood-drenched Dooling Sheriff’s Department uniform. Lila thought it must be Roger, although it would take fingerprints or a DNA test to be sure; except for a remnant of broad chin, his face was gone, cratered like a stomped ground-apple. Blood ran down the driveway in creeks, flashing blue each time her cruiser’s jackpot lights strobed.
The woman crouched over Roger was snarling. Her flushed face—Jessica Elway’s face—was visible, only partially screened by the tatters of the webs that her husband must have made the lethal mistake of removing. The hands on the plunging bricks were gloved in red.
That’s not Jessica Elway, Lila thought. It can’t be, can it?
“Stop!” Lila shouted. “Stop it right now!”
For a wonder, the woman did. She looked up, her bloodshot eyes so wide they seemed to fill half her face. She stood, holding a dripping brick in each hand. One red, one blue. God bless America. Lila saw a couple of Roger’s teeth stuck in the cocoon material hanging down from her chin.
“Watch out, Sheriff,” one of the men said. “She sure does look ray-bid to me.”
“Drop them!” She raised her Glock. Lila had never been so tired, but her arm was steady. “Drop the bricks!”
Jessica dropped one, and appeared to consider. Then she raised the other brick and ran, not at Lila but at one of the men who had crept closer for a better look. And, hard as it was for Lila to believe, to take a picture. The man’s cell phone was raised at Jessica. As she approached, he squealed and turned tail, head down and shoulders hunched. He knocked the girl in the tracksuit sprawling.
“Drop it drop it drop it!”
The Jessica-thing paid no attention. She leaped over the girl in the tracksuit and raised the remaining brick. There was no one behind her, all the neighbors had scattered. Lila fired twice, and Jessica Elway’s head exploded. Chunks of scalp with yellow hair still attached flew backward.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” It was the fallen girl.
Lila helped the girl to her feet. “Go home, hon.” And when the girl started to look toward Jessica Elway, Lila turned her head away. She raised her voice. “All of you, go home! In your houses! Now!”
The man with the cell phone was creeping back, looking for a good angle, one where he could capture every bit of the carnage. He wasn’t a man, though. Beneath his sandy hair his features were soft and teenage. She recognized him from the local newspaper, some high school kid, she didn’t know his name, some kind of sports star, probably. Lila pointed a shaking finger at him. “You take a picture with that thing and I’ll stuff it down your motherfucking throat.”
The kid—it was Eric Blass’s friend Curt McLeod—stared at her, brows furrowing together. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“Not tonight,” Lila said. Then she screamed, shocking herself as much as the cluster of neighbors. “Get out! Get out! GO!”
Curt and the others went, a few snatching glances back over their shoulders, as if afraid she might come flying after them, as crazy as the woman she’d just shot down in the street.
“I knew they had no business putting in a lady sheriff!” one man called over his shoulder.
Lila restrained the urge to give him the finger and walked back to her cruiser. When a lock of hair fell in her eyes, she brushed it back with a panicky shudder, thinking it was that stuff, trying to spin out of her skin again. She leaned against the door, took a couple of deep breaths, keyed her mic.
“Linny?”
“I’m here, boss.”
“Is everyone coming in?”
A pause. Then Linny said, “Well. I got five. Both Wittstocks, Elmore, Vern, and Dan Treat. And Reed’s coming back soon, too. His wife—fell asleep. I guess his neighbor’s going to look after little Gary, the poor kid . . .”
Lila did the addition and it came to eight officers, not much when you were hoping to fend off anarchy. None of Dooling’s three female deputies had responded to Linny’s calls. It made Lila wonder how they were doing at the prison. She closed her eyes, started to drift, and forced them open again.
Linny was onto the subject of the countless emergency calls. There had been more than a dozen from men like Reed Barrows who suddenly found themselves the sole guardians of small male children. “Several of these feckless fools wanted me to explain to them how to feed their own children! This one idiot asks me if FEMA is setting up a facility to take care of kids because he’s got tickets for a—”
“Any of them at the station yet?”
“Who? FEMA?”
“No, Linny. Any of the deputies.” Not Terry, though. Please not him. Lila didn’t want Terry to see what was left of the man he’d most often partnered with for the last five years.
“Afraid not. The only person here is that old guy from Adopt-A-Highway and the VFD. Wanted to know if he could do anything. He’s outside, smoking his pipe.”
It took a few seconds for her exhausted, shocked brain to process this. Willy Burke, who knew about fairy handkerchiefs, and who drove a rattletrap Ford pickup.
“I want him.”
“That guy? Really?”
“Yes. I’m at 65 Richland Lane.”
“Isn’t that—”
“Yes. It’s bad, Linny. Very. Jessica killed Roger. He must have cut open the stuff on her face. She chased him outside and—she came at a kid with a brick, some little asshole, he was trying to take her fucking picture. She was out of her mind.” What mind? Lila thought. “I warned her to stop, and when she didn’t, I shot her. She’s dead. There was no choice.”
“Roger’s dead?” Nothing about his wife being dead. Lila wasn’t surprised. Linny had always had a soft spot for Roger.
“Send Willy out here. Tell him we’ll be transporting two bodies to the hospital morgue. He should bring a tarp. Hold the deputies there at the station. I’ll come as soon as I can. Out.”
She lowered her head and prepared to cry. No tears came. She wondered if a person could be too tired to cry. It seemed possible. Today, anything seemed possible.
Her cell phone rang in its little holster on her utility belt. It was Clint.
“Hello, Clint,” she answered. “This isn’t really the best time to talk.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You don’t sound all right.”
Lila wasn’t sure where to begin. With Roger and Jessica Elway, dead in the yard? With the hallucination she’d had out by the power lines in the woods behind the rubble of Truman Mayweather’s meth shack? With Sheila Norcross? With Shannon Parks? With the day Clint shut down his practice with no advance warning? With their marriage vows?
“You’re not falling asleep, are you? Lila?”
“No, I’m right here.”
“Janice is—out of commission. Long story. Hicks has gone off. Somehow I’ve ended up in charge of this place.”
Lila said she was sorry. It was a difficult situation, no question about it. But maybe it would look better once he had some sleep. Her husband could do that: go to sleep, and then wake up again.
He said he was going home to check on their son. Jared had said he’d hurt his knee and it was nothing serious, but Clint wanted to see it for himself. Did Lila want to meet him there?
“I’ll try.” But Lila didn’t know when she’d be able to get away. All she knew was that it looked like it was going to be another late one.
3
“Do you hear that?” A woman had found Kayleigh Rawlings in the dark. The woman smelled like booze and had a soft arm. Magda, she said her name was. “Singing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” It was Maura singing. Maura’s voice wasn’t worth a shit; her sense of a tune was all seasick, up and down and creaky and broken; and to Kayleigh right then, it was incomparably sweet, carrying off the silly old words of that dirty old air.
“. . . Royal Canal . . .”
The singing stopped.
“Where was it coming from?”
“I don’t know.”
Somewhere far away, that was about the only thing Kayleigh could tell for sure. Had it drifted all the way from Dooling? Where was Dooling? This was definitely not Dooling. Or was it? Hard to tell. Impossible, really.
A gentle wind circled through the darkness. The air was fresh and good and under her feet the ground felt not like cement or sticky tile, but like grass. She squatted down and touched: yes, it was grass, or weeds, about knee high. Birds chattered faintly somewhere. Kayleigh had awakened feeling strong and young and well rested.
Correctional had taken twelve years from her, the better part of her thirties, the first couple of years of her forties, and it had a claim on another ten. Maura was the best part of those lost years. It wasn’t something that could ever have worked outside the walls, of course, the deal they had, but in prison you made do. If Kayleigh had been suddenly shoved out the doors of Dooling Correctional she would have remembered Maura fondly and gratefully, and moved on. You didn’t carry a torch for a triple-murderer no matter how strangely charming you found them. The woman was nuts, Kayleigh had no illusions about that. She loved Kayleigh wholly, though, and Kayleigh loved to be loved. And you know, maybe she, Kayleigh, was a little nuts, too.
There had been no heedless love in the time before prison. No love of any kind, really, not since she was a little child.
On one job—not the one they clipped her for—Kayleigh and her boyfriend had knocked over a pill shop in back of an hourly motel. In the room there’d been a teenage kid in a rocking chair. The rocking chair had been nice, polished to a glow, totally out of place in the fleabag motel, a throne amid garbage. The kid who sat in it had a massive, volcanic hole in his cheek. It was a glossy, swirling mix of red and pitch black; a hot mess from which came the wafting smell of rotting flesh. How had it happened? Had it started with a scratch, a scrape, a tiny infection? Or had someone cut him with a dirty blade? Was it a disease? Kayleigh felt lucky not to have to know or care.
She put the kid at about sixteen. He scratched his pale belly and watched as she and her boyfriend kicked around, searching for the stash. What else was wrong with him that he just sat there calm as could be and watched them with no fear?
Kayleigh’s boyfriend found what he was hunting for under the mattress and stuffed it into his jacket. He turned to the kid. “Your face is putrid,” he said. “You know that?”
“I know,” the kid said.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of the chair, son.”
The kid didn’t give any trouble. He got up from the chair and dropped onto the sprung bed, lying there and scratching his stomach. They took the rocking chair along with the money and the drugs. They could do that because the boyfriend had a panel truck.
That was the kind of life she led in those days, one where she had stood by and helped the man she slept with steal the very chair a kid was sitting in. A ruined kid. And guess what? It was a life where the kid did nothing about it. He just lay down and pointed his ruined face at the ceiling and scratched his belly and did fuck-all else. Maybe because he was stoned. Maybe because he didn’t give a shit. Maybe both.
There was a floral scent on the breeze.
Kayleigh felt a pang for Maura, but at the same time, she was stirred by an intuition: that this was a better place, better than prison, better than the world outside prison. It felt boundless, and there was earth beneath her feet.
“Whoever you are, I got to tell you I’m scared,” said Magda. “And I’m worried about Anton.”
“Don’t be scared,” said Kayleigh. “I’m sure Anton’s fine.” Not knowing who that was, nor caring. She felt for Magda’s hand and found it. “Let’s walk toward the birdsong.” They edged forward in the blackness, finding themselves moving down a gentle grade, among trees.
And was that a glimmer of a light there? Was that a crack of sun in the sky?
It was blazing dawn when they came to the overgrown remains of a trailer. From there, they were able to follow the ghost of a dirt lane to the time-shattered pavement of Ball’s Hill Road.