Kitty's Greatest Hits

“I need to know the names of any women who were executed here. Let’s say right around 1900, give or take a decade. And any history you can find on them.”

She narrowed her gaze, and he wondered if he’d said too much. Now they were both going to worry, because she wouldn’t keep this secret from Ben. “Are you being haunted or something?”

“I don’t know. It’s a hunch. It may be nothing.” That last was a lie.

“Is everything okay?”

He hoped she didn’t tell him to get some sleep, that she didn’t see the stress written on his face. He tried to smile, failed. “Hanging in there. Sometimes by my fingernails. But hanging in there.”

* * *

He played the visit over in his memory, like he did every time, even though he knew he shouldn’t. He made himself sick, worrying that maybe this was the last time they’d visit, maybe they’d skip next week, maybe they’d decide they didn’t need him—they wouldn’t do that, they weren’t like that. But he had a hard time not imagining it, so he dwelled, reflecting on every word they spoke, every loose strand of Kitty’s hair, just in case they didn’t come back.

Noises here echoed. The hollered complaints kept up even after lights out, and the warden and his guards couldn’t do anything about it. They’d have had to put every damn inmate into solitary. Cormac was betting that nobody even knew why they were leaning out, as far as they could, faces pressed to bars and yelling. They were scared and had to do something. Nothing was right and as far as they could tell the folks in charge weren’t doing anything about it. The idea that they didn’t know what to do was worse than the usual apathy.

Cormac could take care of any problem that bled. But this—without the help of someone like Olson or the warden, he couldn’t do anything. He lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling, trying to block out the noise. Trying not to think too hard about what might be lurking in these walls.

* * *

No priests came in to perform an exorcism. Cormac wasn’t surprised. He made a cross of his own, borrowing scraps of pine from the wood shop and lashing them together with a shoelace, and hung it over the door of his and Frank’s cell. Things got worse.

The dream was a form of escapism, he recognized that. The images kept him from wanting to break things, and that was good. Here, he remembered being safe, when everything was right. Almost everything. Enough of it was right that he didn’t think about the rest, the vague memory of a woman who’d died when he was young. He should have loved her, but anymore she was a shadow. A face in a few old snapshots. She didn’t enter into calculations of whether he was happy. But sometimes he wondered, What if. What if she had lived. Would having a mother have kept him from all this?

He sat on a rock overlooking the stream, squinting into a searing blue sky. Crystals embedded in the granite dug into his hands. He could even smell the sunbaked pines, meadow grasses cooled by the running water, snow- touched air coming down from the peaks. If he had to pick an opposite smell from the prison, this would be it. Clean and natural instead of antiseptic and institutional. Bright instead of sheltered.

He saw the woman again. Not at all ghostly this time, she walked obliquely up the hill toward him, watching where she stepped, lifting her heavy skirt with gloved hands. Some ten paces away, she stopped, smoothed her skirt, and folded her hands before her. She had color in her cheeks and wore a gold cross on a chain. Donning a small, bemused frown, she regarded him as if she had walked a long way to get here, but hadn’t found what she expected. Her gaze was cynical.

She didn’t look like a murderer or a demon. She looked far too real to be a ghost.

They could stay here, staring at each other for hours. If this had been real, he would have asked her what she was doing here. Or she would have spoken. This was a dream, his imagination, and so they simply stared. Trouble was, he’d never have imagined anyone like her. Nothing in his conscious mind could account for her. His mother had had auburn hair, not so dark as this woman’s.

He finally asked, “Who are you?”

The woman’s frown disappeared, but her smile was not comforting. She wanted something from him.

“I should be asking you that,” she answered. She had a crisp British accent, clipping her words like she was in a hurry.

He looked to the distance. He could wait. She wouldn’t stand there staring at him forever, and he was willing to bet his stubborn would outlast hers. Then again, how long had she been lurking here?

“Why won’t you let me in?” she said next.

This was getting a little too obvious to be a stray bit of psychoanalysis bubbling up from his subconscious. He didn’t want to be talking to his subconscious, his feminine side or whatever. Or maybe he was reading too much into it. A woman he didn’t know was standing here, asking him a question that had an obvious answer. Why not just answer her? Why not treat it as real?

“I don’t know you,” he said, looking at her. “I don’t know what you want.”

“That’s wise, I suppose, and I ought to respect that. But you see, Mr. Bennett, I’ve been waiting such a long time. I need you. More than anyone I’ve met I think you’d understand that.”

For the first time, she looked uncertain, clasping her hands together, ducking her gaze. Cormac thought, It’s an act. She was trying to soften him up.

“Wrong sales pitch,” he said. “Is that what you told Moe and Brewster? Is that how you killed them?”

Clenching her hands into fists, she said, “I did not kill them. I could have saved them, if you’d only listened to me.”

He felt the thunder of a sudden storm in the core of his bones, and his skull screamed in pain. She’d done something, he hadn’t seen what. Like banging on a door—Let me in.

With the flashing light of a migraine, he jerked awake, nearly toppling out of his bunk. He sat up, clutching his sheets like they would anchor him and gasping for breath. Sweat chilled his skin.

“Jesus, fuck, what is it?” Frank, half out of his bunk, clutched the bed’s frame and looked up at him.

Cormac felt the remnant of a scream in his throat. Closing his eyes tight, he swallowed and forced his breathing to slow. Everything was fine. He wasn’t in pain. Nothing was happening. Except for that almost constant itching in his brain. He scratched his head hard, ripping at his hair. The cell block was dark, quiet.

“I don’t know,” Cormac said. “Must have been a nightmare.”

“You’re not getting killed?”

“No. Doesn’t look like it.”

“There’s no blood? Look around—you don’t see blood?”

Although he felt silly doing it, he checked himself—and was relieved when he didn’t find any blood. “I’m in one piece.”

“Jesus Christ, man, don’t ever do that again. You have another nightmare I’ll beat it out of you, understand?”

Cormac didn’t argue because he couldn’t blame him; he’d have told Frank the same thing if the roles were reversed. His cellmate was still muttering as he rolled back into bed.

Lying back, Cormac didn’t try to sleep. He stared at the ceiling, a field of thick, institutional gray paint full of cracks and shadows. How many hundreds of eyes had stared up like this over the years? What did that do to a building? Cursing himself, he looked away. That was how far gone he was, attributing malevolence to a building.

Somehow, this woman, this demon, whatever she was, had dug into his brain and found his meadow, his refuge. The chink in his armor.

She thought she could get control of him through that weakness. Fine. He just wouldn’t go there anymore.

* * *

Her overriding goal, the purpose of her being—however truncated it had become—became more imperative than ever.

She found herself in a bind she had not expected. Not that she’d even known what to expect. Hacking her way through a jungle of unknown size and density was the least of it, really. But she was hacking and had faith that if she continued long enough, she would persevere. She had lasted this long, hadn’t she? At some point, time had no meaning. Science had discovered that fossils could lie in the earth undiscovered for millions of years. So would she.