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?