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.
CHAPTER 18
1
Frank expected another heaping helping of bullshit from Elaine when he returned to the house, but it turned out to be a zero-bullshit situation. Like nothing else that day—or, for that matter, in the days to come—his problems solved themselves the easy way. So why didn’t he feel at all cheered?
His estranged wife lay asleep in their daughter’s bed with her right arm looped over Nana’s shoulder. The cocoon around her face was thin, a tight first coating of papier maché, but a complete coating nonetheless. A note on the bedside table read, I prayed for you, Frank. I hope you will pray for us.—E.