“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.
“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.
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.
CHAPTER 15