When She Was Bad

PART ONE

The Institute

CHAPTER ONE 1

There was a dark place inside Lyssy, where he was never to go. He pictured it as a room, though it had neither floor, ceiling, nor walls, and sometimes, especially when he was alone at night, Lyssy imagined he could hear a voice inside the room, muttering quietly to itself in the darkness.

But Lyssy knew better than to discuss the dark place with his doctor, or indeed with anyone at the Reed- Chase Institute, the private psychiatric care facility in Oregon where he had been confined for almost as long as he could remember.

“No, really, I can do it myself,” he protested as the nurse knelt in front of him to help him on with his prosthetic right leg. But he didn’t protest too hard-this was the nurse he secretly thought of as Miss Stockings, because that’s what she wore instead of the panty hose favored by the other nurses. And when she knelt, her white uniform skirt rode up with a faint whispering noise, offering Lyssy a glimpse of the shiny-smooth dark bands at the top of the stockings, a few inches of creamy gartered thighs, and even a peek at I-See-London-I-See-France.

“I just need to make sure,” she said. “If you get a pressure sore and can’t walk, it’s my heinie on the line.”

“Heinie?” Lyssy giggled.

“Oh, grow up.”

Wounded pause, then: “I’m trying, Nurse. I’m trying as hard as I can.” When he’d first arrived at the Institute, Lyssy had been basically a child in a man’s body, with almost no memory, and the affect and intellectual functioning of a three-year-old.

Miss Stockings colored. “I’m sorry, Lyssy, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No problem.” He flashed her the boyish grin that had made him a staff favorite, not just here in the locked ward, but all over the Institute. Especially with the females: Lyssy’s delicate, heart-shaped face, with its long- lashed brown eyes flecked with gold and its lips curved like a Cupid’s bow, still retained its youthful prettiness; a lock of nut-brown hair drooped across his unlined forehead.

Just as he’d finished tucking the tails of his forest-green corduroy shirt into his neatly pressed chinos, the door to the room slid open with a whoosh, admitting a massive young man with dark curly hair and a bodybuilder’s physique. He was dressed in the uniform worn by all the psych techs at the Institute: white duck trousers and a white polo shirt with the letters RCI encased in a diamond on the left breast. “There a Ulysses Maxwell in here?” he called cheerfully.

“That would be me.” Big, double-chinned Wally Smets was Lyssy’s favorite orderly-when Wally escorted Lyssy, somehow he made it seem as if they were just two buddies out for a stroll.

“Let’s go, li’l bro-there’s somebody wants to have a chat with you.”

“Really? Who?”

“Just be on your best behavior-that’s all I can tell you.”

“Best foot forward,” replied Lyssy. That was one of his and Dr. Al’s jokes. The reason it was a joke was because Lyssy only had one foot, Dr. Al had explained-humor was one of many things Lyssy’d had to learn from scratch.

The Institute was comprised of three two-story buildings of weathered brick that formed a U around a central arboretum; on the fourth side, a spike-topped brick wall overgrown with glistening ivy separated the hospital grounds from the director’s residence.

From Lyssy’s room on 2-West, the maximum security ward, Wally escorted Lyssy down the long corridor to the elevator lobby, all but dwarfing his five-foot, six-inch charge, and entered his security code into a keypad. When the elevator arrived, he peered inside before allowing Lyssy to enter; exiting, he reversed the procedure.

Another long corridor led to the two adjoining conference rooms on 1-South, which also housed the reception lobby, the cafeteria, and the administrative offices. Wally ushered Lyssy into the smaller room, which had apparently been pressed into service as a storage area. Lyssy limped over to a stack of molded plastic chairs-he found it aesthetically pleasing, the way the chairs fit together, nested seat upon seat, arms upon arms. Just for the fun of it, he asked Wally to help him up to the topmost chair. Lyssy stiffened his elbows and the psych tech lifted him as easily as if he were a child, then steadied the swaying stack.

“King of the world,” Lyssy exclaimed delightedly. But when he started waving his arms about, pretending the chairs were about to topple over, Wally glanced nervously at the long smoky mirror set into the side of the wall between the two conference rooms.

“Down you go,” he said, swinging Lyssy from his perch by the armpits.

“No fair,” whined the thirty-one-year-old Lyssy, sticking out his lower lip in a grotesque, if unintended, parody of a toddler’s pout. “I never get to have any fun.”

2

Okay boys, who’s next?

Ten days had passed since Lilith had spat out what was left of her attacker’s nose and issued her challenge to the circle of ogres in that reeking tent outside Sturgis, South Dakota. Nor would there have been any shortage of takers if a bosomy, leather-clad, middle-aged redhead carrying a double-barreled shotgun hadn’t stepped through the tent flap just then and announced that the party was over.

“Hey, c’mon, Mama Rose,” a squat, troll-faced biker had whined, as two of his buddies helped their mutilated colleague to his feet. “We bought her fair and square.” And so they had, from the biker who’d originally picked “Lilah” up in Seaside-to his surprise, three days of her constant sexual demands had been about as much as he could stand.

“I got rock salt in one barrel and triple-ought buckshot in the other,” the biker mama had replied calmly, cocking both hammers of the twelve-gauge side-by-side. “Fucking thing is, I’m not sure which is which.” Then, turning to Lilith: “Get your clothes on, honey.”

“Carson? How ’bout it, man?” Troll-face turned to a tall, lean man with a Viva Zapata mustache, a fringed buckskin jacket, and a leather cowboy hat, standing quietly in the shadows, leaning against a tent post. “You gonna let the cunt get away with that?”

Mama Rose had swung the shotgun around and trained both barrels on the speaker. “You best not be referring to me, Li’l T.,” she said.

“I meant the girl,” he’d replied quickly, without taking his eyes off Carson. “She bit Merv’s fucking nose off, man.”

Carson, who was obviously the alpha male of the pack, had narrowed his eyes; a hint of a smile lifted the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Good thing he don’t wear glasses.”

The Sturgis run had lasted another three days, during which the childless Mama Rose took the dazed, penniless amnesiac under her wing. She bought Lilith clothes to replace the tattered hooker outfit, taught her how to ride a motorcycle, loaned her a.22 pistol and taught her how to shoot it, and when it had become apparent that the girl had nowhere else to go, brought her back to Shasta County after the run.

To Lilith, saddle-sore after riding pillion for close to a thousand miles, the isolated, pink-sided ranch house on a scrubby hillside north of Redding had been a veritable paradise. For the next few days she’d done little but eat, sleep, take hot tubs, and sunbathe.

Then the biker known as Swervin’ Mervin had shown up at the front door in a surgical mask, demanding revenge on the girl who’d de-nosed him. Annoyed, but curious to see how it would all play out, as if Lilith were a