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