You could get yourself pretty jazzed in front of a closed door in a state-run facility.
He swung it open and walked in.
A forty-watt bulb burned through a smoke-stained, dust-covered lampshade, giving the room a sickly yellow pallor.
Sarah Burke was seated in a ladder-back wooden chair in the far corner, huddled inside a ratty cotton nightgown. Her slippered feet didn't quite touch the floor. It was a crazy place to be, sitting over there far away from the rest of the furniture, the windows, the closet, everything. She was drawn up into herself-her body twined against and within itself-staring out at everything else like she found it all so peculiar.
A bony, ragged face, all you really saw were her eyes.
He'd dealt with a lot of bad dudes in his time, but only a couple of them had ever given him the willies on sight. She did it to him. Plucked a nerve deep inside that you never wanted touched. Some people, you just looked at them and knew the seriously bad juju was at work. It was all over her.
Her white hair stuck out in clumps and tufts. This was a witch, a queen gone bad in the deep forest who plotted your death while she fed you gingerbread cookies. Stevie's kiddie books were filled with creepy broads like this. She was so thin that he found it hard to believe her bones didn't break just carrying out the most casual acts. Just walking across the room would cause her kneecaps to burst through her skin.
He remembered he'd thought something similar about her brother, Sam Burke. Sitting there in his living room with his anguish pulsing under his face, pulsing, like it would come crashing through his flesh at any second.
She was needful all right. What she needed you couldn't give her. If you could give it to her then you'd be as wracked across the rocks as she was.
Crease said, 'I'd like to talk to you.'
The woman turned her lifeless eyes on him. She stared hard, harder than most people were able to do no matter the reason. You couldn't get angry enough to glower that way. You couldn't be thoughtful enough. It was something that happened when you went so deep in the well that you couldn't climb back out again.
Yeah, the lady had taken a fall and dug in when she hit the ground. He cocked his head and studied her another minute.
We're going home, Teddy.
The fever scrambled over him again. The sweat flowed down his neck and back, his scalp prickled. Soon his hair was dripping and his face was wet, the taste of salt flowing into his mouth. If nothing else, it perked her up. Her tiny body began to churn in the chair. He did the math. Burke had said she was older than him by four years. That made her no more than maybe fifty on the outside.
She grinned at him and Crease grinned back. She drew her chin back and her wrinkled lips dropped back into place. She said, 'You my new neighbor? You number thirteen?'
'No.'
'They always say no. All the thirteens say no.'
'I guess they were lying then. I'm not.'
'What do you want from me? I don't have anything for you.' She started slowly nodding, certain of something. 'You're sweating. It's not hot in here. Why are you sweating like that?' Her feet began to swing, the bottom of the slippers slapping her heels with each pass. 'None of the other thirteens sweated.'
'I want to talk about Mary.'
The name got to her.
Sarah Burke was gone but not as gone as she wanted everyone to think. Her eyes cleared and she tilted her chin at him. Her brow knotted, the bottom lip quivered and drooped. He saw a pink flash of jutting tongue. Her hands gripped the arms of the chair, and the tendons stood out in her forearms as clear as polished marble.
'Who are you?' she asked.
'Tell me what happened, Sarah,' he said.
'No.'
He walked to the window nearest her. The shade was drawn. He tugged on it and the shade inched up over the glass. A ray of moonlight stabbed into the room and she flailed in her chair.
'Don't do that, thirteen,' she told him. 'My eyes, I've got a condition.'
'I bet I know what it is. Tell me what happened to Mary.'
'I could yell, you know. I could scream.'
'You've been screaming for seventeen years. How about if you just talk to me instead?'
The condition of her eyes grew worse as the memories began to burn through her mind. He saw it happening, one small flame igniting a patch of dry woodland. The fire spreading, leaping across treetops, spanning all the hidden acres marked off with barb wire. It was alive and inescapable.
The blaze ran rampant as if on a mission. Sarah Burke sat gaping and wide-eyed with only purified, burning sparks of remembrance left behind in her head.
It made her slump even further down in the chair. Her feet were now swinging so fast that both slippers had launched across the room. He tried to enforce his will over her, make her spit out the truth. She seemed to be slowing down, waking up. Crease wondered why she'd outlasted all the thirteens next door.
He walked over and sat on her bed. It was a basic psychological ploy. You made yourself at home, showed them that you were there to stay, that what was theirs was now yours. He shifted the pillows behind him and lit a cigarette.
Sarah Burke stared at him with a kind of grudging respect.
Surrendering she said, 'Where do you want me to start?'
'You know where.'
'I suppose I do.'
He waited, and time drifted quaintly in the house. The screen door slammed and the other needy occupants took advantage of the state of New Hampshire's and Sinclair Mayridge's good graces and settled in for the night. Doors opened and shut around the home. Toilets flushed, a shower went on.
Finally he had to prod her by saying, 'With the upset.'
'I've had a few. Haven't you?'
'Yes. Talk about the first one that counted.'
She let out a cackle. It went on and on as the bones in her small body grated against one another. He could vividly picture her throwing back her head and letting that noise go on for another half minute before leaping out of the chair and diving through the window. Crease got ready to tackle her if need be.
But instead the laughter ended as abruptly as if she'd been strangled. 'Who are you?'
'Tell me about the broken love affair.'
'I've had a few of those too.'
'No,' Crease said. 'I don't think you have.'
'You're right, I'm too ugly. Hardly any man would ever have me.'
'Just tell about the one who mattered. The one that meant everything to you.'
What was inside her began to move closer to the surface. He could almost see it there in the black depths, rising, fighting to break free.
'What was his name, Sarah?'
That's all it took. The legs stopped swinging. She untwisted a little, and groaned from somewhere in the center of her chest as if awakening from a long sleep. The unfolding of her body became the unfurling of her past.
She drew her fingers through her hair and brushed it back across her head, and the witchy lady became just another battered woman who looked twenty years older than she was. He had arrested her many times. Under Tucco's tutelage he had created many variations of her.
She said, 'Daniel. Daniel Purvis. He was a gambler.'
'Ah.'
'He couldn't help himself. It was a sickness. It had nothing to do with money, but with the excitement, the rush it gave him. He'd ride his truck on empty to see how much farther it would go. He'd pass a gas station and get a wild thrill that he'd made it that far, and then he'd still keep going, and pass another, and another. He always ended up stuck on the side of the road. Always. You ever meet anybody like that?'
Everybody had, whether they knew it or not. 'Yes.'
