Sleeping Beauties: A Novel Read online

  Nearly half a century later, it still looked like a high school, but one that had fallen on hard times and a diminishing tax base. The buildings had begun to crumble. The paint (lead-based, it was rumored) was flaking. The plumbing leaked. The heating plant was badly outdated, and in the depths of winter, only the admin wing could maintain temperatures above sixty-five degrees. In summer, the inmate wings roasted. The lighting was dim, the elderly electrical wiring a disaster in waiting, and the vital inmate monitoring equipment went dark at least once a month.

  There was, however, an excellent exercise yard with a running track, a basketball court in the gym, shuffleboard, a midget softball diamond, and a vegetable garden adjacent to the admin wing. It was there, close to the flourishing peas and corn, that Warden Janice Coates sat on a blue plastic milk box, her beige-colored knit purse collapsed on the ground beside her shoes, smoking an unfiltered Pall Mall and watching Clint Norcross approach.

  He flashed his ID card (unnecessary since everyone knew him, but it was protocol) and the main gate rumbled open on its track. He drove into the dead space beyond, waiting for the outer gate to shut. When the officer on duty—this morning it was Millie Olson—got a green on her board, indicating the main gate was locked, she opened the inner gate. Clint brought his Prius trundling alongside the fence to the employees’ parking lot, which was also gated. Here a sign cautioned MAINTAIN SECURITY! ALWAYS LOCK YOUR CAR!

  Two minutes later he was standing beside the warden, leaning a shoulder against the old brick, his face turned up to the morning sun. What followed was akin to the call-and-response in a fundamentalist church.

  “Good morning, Dr. Norcross.”

  “Good morning, Warden Coates.”

  “Ready for another day in the wonderful world of corrections?”

  “The real question is, is the wonderful world of corrections ready for me? That’s how ready I am. How about you, Janice?”

  She shrugged faintly and blew smoke. “The same.”

  He nodded to her cigarette. “Thought you quit.”

  “I did. I enjoy quitting so much I do it once a week. Sometimes twice.”

  “All quiet?”

  “This morning, yes. We had a meltdown last night.”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Angel Fitzroy.”

  “Nope. Kitty McDavid.”

  Clint raised his eyebrows. “That I would not have expected. Tell me.”

  “According to her roommate—Claudia Stephenson, the one the other ladies call—”

  “Claudia the Dynamite Body-a,” Clint said. “Very proud of those implants. Did Claudia start something?”

  Nothing against Claudia, but Clint hoped that was the case. Doctors were human, they had their favorites, and Kitty McDavid was one of his. Kitty had been in rough shape when she arrived—a self-harm habit, yo-yo moods, high anxiety. They’d come a long way since then. Anti-depressants had made a huge difference and, Clint liked to believe, their therapy sessions had helped a bit, too. Like him, Kitty was a product of the foster systems of Appalachia. In one of their first meetings, she had asked him, sourly, if he had any idea in his big suburban head what it felt like not to have a home or a family.

  Clint hadn’t hesitated. “I don’t know what it felt like for you, Kitty, but it made me feel like an animal. Like I was always on the hunt, or being hunted.”

  She had stared, wide-eyed. “You . . . ?”

  “Yes, me,” he had said. Meaning, Me too.

  These days Kitty was almost always on Good Report, and, better still, she had made an agreement with the prosecutors’ office to testify in the Griner brothers case, a major drug bust that Dooling’s own Sheriff Lila Norcross had pulled off that winter. If Lowell and Maynard Griner went away, parole for Kitty was a distinct possibility. If she got it, Clint thought she might do all right. She understood now that while it was going to be up to her to find a place in the world, it was also going to take continued support—both medical and community—to meet that responsibility. He thought Kitty was strong enough to ask for that support, to fight for it, and she was getting stronger every day.

  Janice Coates’s view was less sanguine. It was her attitude that, when dealing with convicts, you were better off not letting your hopes rise too high. Maybe that was why she was the warden—the bull goose—and he was just the resident shrink in this stone hotel.

  “Stephenson says McDavid woke her up,” Janice said. “First talking in her sleep, then yelling, then screaming. Something about how the Black Angel was coming. Or maybe the Black Queen. It’s in the incident report. With cobwebs in her hair and death in her fingertips. Sounds like it could be a pretty good TV show, doesn’t it? Syfy channel.” The warden chuckled without smiling. “I’m sure you could have a field day with that one, Clint.”

  “More like a movie,” Clint said. “Maybe one she saw in her childhood.”

  Coates rolled her eyes. “See? To quote Ronnie Reagan, ‘There you go again.’ ”

  “What? You don’t believe in childhood trauma?”

  “I believe in a nice quiet prison, that’s what I believe in. They took her over to A Wing, Land of the Loonies.”

  “Politically incorrect, Warden Coates. The preferred term is Nutbar Central. Did they have to put her in the restraint chair?” Though it was sometimes necessary, Clint loathed the restraint chair, which looked like a sports car bucket seat that had been converted into a torture device.

  “No, gave her a Yellow Med, and that quieted her down. I don’t know which one, and don’t much care, but it’ll be in the incident report, if you care to look.”

  There were three med levels at Dooling: red, that could only be dispensed by medical personnel; yellow, that could be dispensed by officers; and green, that inmates not in C Wing or currently on Bad Report could keep in their cells.

  “Okay,” Clint said.

  “As of now, your girl McDavid is sleeping it off—”

  “She’s not my girl—”

  “And that is your morning update.” Janice yawned, scrubbed her cigarette out on the brick, and popped it under the milk box, as if once out of sight it would somehow disappear.

  “Am I keeping you up, Janice?”

  “It’s not you. I ate Mexican last night. Had to keep getting up to use the can. What they say is true—the stuff that comes out looks suspiciously like the stuff that went in.”

  “TMI, Warden.”

  “You’re a doctor, you can handle it. You going to check on McDavid?”

  “This morning for sure.”

  “Want my theory? Okay, here’s my theory: she was molested as a toddler by some lady calling herself the Black Queen. What do you think?”

  “Could be,” Clint said, not rising to the bait.

  “Could be.” She shook her head. “Why investigate their childhoods, Clint, when they’re still children? That’s essentially why most of them are here—childish behavior in the first degree.”

  This made Clint think of Jeanette Sorley, who had ended years of escalating spousal abuse by stabbing her husband with a screwdriver and watching him bleed to death. Had she not done that, Damian Sorley would eventually have killed her. Clint had no doubt of it. He did not view that as childish behavior, but as self-preservation. If he said so to Warden Coates, however, she would refuse to hear it: she was old-school that way. Better to simply finish the call-and-response.

  “And so, Warden Coates, we begin another day of life in the women’s prison along the Royal Canal.”

  She hoisted her purse, stood up, and brushed off the seat of her uniform pants. “No canal, but there’s always Ball’s Ferry down the road apiece, so yeah. Let the day begin.”

  They went in together on that first day of the sleeping sickness, pinning their IDs to their shirts.

  10

  Magda Dubcek, mother of that handsome young pool-polisher-about-town known as Anton the Pool Guy (he had incorporated, too, so please make out your checks to Anton the Pool Guy, LLC), tottered into the livin
g room of the duplex she shared with her son. She had her cane in one hand and a morning pick-me-up in the other. She flumped into her easy chair with a fart and a sigh and fired up the television.

  Normally at this hour of the day she would have tuned in the second hour of Good Day Wheeling, but this morning she went to NewsAmerica instead. There was a breaking story that interested her, which was good, and she knew one of the correspondents covering it, which was even better. Michaela Coates, Michaela Morgan she called herself now but little Mickey to Magda, forever and always, whom she had babysat all those years ago. Back then Jan Coates had just been a guard at the women’s lockup on the south end of town, a widowed single mom only trying to hang in there. Now she was the warden, boss of the whole shebang, and her daughter Mickey was a nationally known news correspondent working out of DC, famous for her tough questions and short skirts. Those Coates women had really made something of themselves. Magda was proud of them, and if she felt a flicker of melancholy because Mickey never called or wrote, or because Janice never stopped in to chew the fat, well, they had jobs to do. Magda didn’t presume to understand the pressures that they operated under.

  The news anchor on duty this morning was George Alderson. With his glasses and stooped shoulders and thinning hair, he didn’t look anything like the matinee idol types that usually sat behind the big desks and read the news. He looked like a mortuary attendant. Also, he had an unfortunate voice for a TV person. Sort of quacky. Well, Magda supposed there was a reason NewsAmerica was number three behind FOX and CNN. She was eager for the day when Michaela would move up to one of those. When it happened, Magda wouldn’t have to put up with Alderson anymore.

  “At this hour we’re continuing to follow a breaking story that began in Australia,” Alderson said. The expression on his face attempted to combine concern with skepticism but landed closer to constipated.

  You should retire and go bald in the comfort of your home, Magda thought, and toasted him with the first rum and Coke of the day. Go Turtle Wax your head, George, and get out of the way for my Michaela.

  “Medical officials in Oahu, Hawaii, are reporting that the outbreak of what some are calling Asian Fainting Sickness and others are calling Australian Fainting Flu continues to spread. No one seems to be sure where it actually originated, but so far the only victims have been women. Now we’re getting word that cases have popped up on our shores, first in California, then in Colorado, and now in the Carolinas. Here’s Michaela Morgan with more.”

  “Mickey!” Magda cried, once more toasting the television (and slopping some of her drink onto the sleeve of her cardigan). Magda’s voice held only a trace of Czech this morning, but by the time Anton got home at five PM, she would sound as if she had just gotten off the boat instead of living in the Tri-Counties for almost forty years. “Little Mickey Coates! I chased your bare ass all around your mother’s living room, both of us laughing fit to split our sides! I changed your poopy diapers, you little kook, and look at you now!”

  Michaela Morgan nee Coates, in a sleeveless blouse and one of her trademark short skirts, was standing in front of a rambling building complex painted barn red. Magda thought those short skirts served Mickey very well. Even big-deal politicians were apt to become mesmerized by a glimpse of upper thigh, and in such a state, the truth sometimes popped out of their lying mouths. Not always, mind you, but sometimes. On the issue of Michaela’s new nose, Magda was conflicted. She missed that sassy stub that her girl had when she was a kiddo, and in a way, with her sharp new nose, Mickey didn’t look so much like Mickey anymore. On the other hand, she did look terrific! You couldn’t take your eyes off her.

  “I’m here at the Loving Hands Hospice in Georgetown, where the first cases of what some are calling the Australian Fainting Flu were noticed in the early hours of the morning. Almost a hundred patients are housed here, most geriatric, and over half of them female. Administrators refuse to confirm or deny the outbreak, but I talked to an orderly just minutes ago, and what he had to say, although brief, was disquieting. He spoke on condition of anonymity. Here he is.”

  The taped interview was indeed brief—little more than a sound bite. It featured Michaela speaking to a man in hospital whites with his face blurred and his voice electronically altered so he sounded like a sinister alien overlord in a sci-fi movie.

  “What’s going on in there?” Michaela asked. “Can you fill us in?”

  “Most of the women are asleep and won’t wake up,” the orderly said in his alien overlord voice. “It’s just like in Hawaii.”

  “But the men . . . ?”

  “The men are dandy. Up and eating their breakfast.”

  “In Hawaii there have been some reports of—growths, on the faces of the sleeping women. Is that the case here?”

  “I . . . don’t think I should talk about that.”

  “Please.” Michaela batted her eyes. “People are concerned.”

  “That’s it!” Magda croaked, saluting the television with her drink and slopping a bit more on her cardigan. “Go sexy! Once they want to stir your batter, you can get anything out of em!”

  “Not growths in the tumor sense,” the overlord voice said. “It looks more like they’ve got cotton stuck to em. Now I gotta go.”

  “Just one more question—”

  “I gotta go. But . . . it’s growing. That cotton stuff. It’s . . . kinda gross.”

  The picture returned to the live shot. “Disquieting information from an insider . . . if true. Back to you, George.”

  As glad as Magda was to have seen Mickey, she hoped the story wasn’t true. Probably just another false scare, like Y2K or that SARS thing, but still, the idea of something that not only put women to sleep but caused stuff to grow on them . . . like Mickey said, that was disquieting. She would be glad when Anton got home. It was lonely with only the TV for company, not that she was one to complain. Magda wasn’t about to worry her hardworking boy, no, no. She’d loaned him the money to start the business, but he was the one who’d made it go.

  But now, for the time being, maybe one more drinky, just a little one, and then a nap.

  CHAPTER 3

  1

  Once Lila had the woman cuffed, she wrapped her in the space blanket she kept in the trunk of the cruiser, and thrust her into the backseat. At the same time, she recited the Miranda. The woman, now silent, her brilliant grin faded to a dreamy smile, had limply accepted Lila’s grip on her upper arm. The arrest was completed and the suspect secured in less than five minutes; the dust sprayed up from the cruiser’s tires was still settling as Lila strode back around to the driver’s side.

  “They call moth watchers moth-ers, spelled like mothers, but not said like that.”

  Lila was turning the cruiser around and pointing it back down Ball’s Hill toward town when her prisoner shared this bit of information. She caught the woman’s eyes, looking at her in the rearview. Her voice was soft, but not especially feminine. There was a wandering quality to her speech. It was unclear to Lila if she was being addressed, or if the woman was talking to herself.

  Drugs, Lila thought. PCP was a good bet. So was ketamine.

  “You know my name,” Lila said, “so where do I know you from?”

  There were three possibilities: the PTA (unlikely), the newspaper, or Lila had arrested her at some point in the last fourteen years and didn’t remember. Door number three seemed the best bet.

  “Everyone knows me,” said Evie. “I’m sort of an It Girl.” Her cuffs clinked as she hiked one shoulder to scratch her chin. “Sort of. It and Girl. Me, myself, and I. Father, Son, and Holy Eve. Eave, a roof underhang. Eve, short for evening. When we all go to sleep. Right? Moth-er, get it? Like mother.”

  Civilians had no idea how much nonsense you had to listen to when you were a cop. The public loved to salute police officers for their bravery, but no one ever gave you credit for the day-in, day-out fortitude required to put up with the bullshit. While courage was an excellent feature in a police offi
cer, a built-in resistance to gibberish was, in Lila’s opinion, just as important.

  As it happened, this was why filling the latest open position for a full-time deputy had proved so difficult. It was the reason she had ultimately passed on the application from the animal control guy, Frank Geary, and hired a young vet named Dan Treater instead, even though Treater had almost no experience in law enforcement. Smart and well-spoken as Geary obviously was, his job-file was too big—he’d generated too much paperwork, written up too many fines. The message between the lines was one of confrontation; this was not the kind of guy who could let the small shit slide. That was no good.

  Not that her staff as a whole was some kind of crackerjack crime-fighting squad, and so what, big deal, welcome to real life. You got the best people you could, then tried to help them along. Roger Elway and Terry Coombs, for instance. Roger had probably absorbed one hit too many as a lineman for Coach Wittstock’s Dooling High School football team in the early aughts. Terry was smarter, but could become dispirited and sullen if things weren’t going his way, and he drank too much at parties. On the other hand, both men had fairly long fuses, which meant she could trust them. Mostly.

  Lila harbored an unspoken belief that motherhood was the best possible rehearsal for a prospective police officer. (Unspoken especially to Clint, who would have had a field day with it; she could picture how he’d cock his head and twist his mouth in that rather tiresome way of his and say, “That’s interesting,” or “Could be.”) Mothers were naturals for law enforcement, because toddlers, like criminals, were often belligerent and destructive.

  If you could get through those early years without losing your cool or blowing your top, you might be able to deal with grown-up crime. The key was to not react, to stay adult—and was she thinking about the naked woman covered in blood who had something to do with the violent deaths of two, or was she thinking about how to handle someone closer to home, much closer, the fellow who rested his head on the pillow next to hers? (When the clock clicked to 00:00, the gymnasium horn had blared, and the boys and girls cheered. The final score: Bridger County Girls AAU 42–Fayette Girls AAU 34.) As Clint might say, “Huh, that’s interesting. Want to tell me a bit more?”