Imola

“It’s one of those books that you will decide on just one more chapter before you turn the light out (for the eighth time that night).”

–L.E. Lester,
Eternal Night

“Agnes will hook readers who get inside her head and learn her value system is structured around good and bad people as she perceives them. Although others like psychologist Dr. Leahy, Detective Bransome, and reporter Powers are fully developed characters, the insightful discerning glimpse at the title protagonist makes for a strong tale.”

–Harriet Klausner,
Midwest Book Review

“… a deftly plotted, ingeniously crafted, and elegantly written suspense thriller.”

–
CountGore.com

To my wife Tricia and my children, Alison, Jake and Erin.

I thank Tricia and Alison for being my primary readers. Thanks also go to the crew at AW for all of their help over the last few years. Finally, I appreciate all of the help provided by Helen and all of the other good people at Medallion Press.

My name is Agnes Hahn. I’m a serial killer, emasculator of men. And I’m not. I’ve seen the pictures, heard the descriptions. If the voice isn’t real, like they’ve told me, then how can the actions be real?

We have cable television here at Imola, but they don’t let us watch what we want. Figure that. At home, I liked to watch those real doctor shows—actual surgery. The only thing that bothered me was the initial incision. The first slice of the sharp scalpel through fresh skin gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. It made my fingers curl into fists and my toes grip the soles of my shoes. I always had to look away. That’s why I don’t understand how I could have cut all of those men. Dr. Leahy says they were hurt by my hands, but, she says, my hands weren’t controlled by my mind. How can that be? I know myhands, and my hands couldn’t cut through skin.

Once the skin was opened in the TV shows, I was fascinated by the surgeries. The human body is a remarkable machine. The most incredible thing is the way the body heals itself after such an invasion. It can be opened and a piece removed, and if properly stitched, it will heal like nothing happened. Too bad the same can’t be done to the mind. It’s easy to find the junction between the small and large intestine, locate the appendix, and cut it out. But one can’t remove a few brain cells and expect a bad memory to go away forever. Not without removing a lot of other memories.

For me, it’s impossible to forget small parts of the past without forgetting all of the past. Same thing for remembering. Now, Dr. Leahy wants me to remember things I don’t like to remember. About Lilin. About our father. What he did to her. She wants to know about specific things that happened, but more than that comes back. She wants a bucket of water, but wave after wave crashes on the beach to fill that tiny bucket. She says it will help me. Helping shouldn’t hurt.

Hurt her back
.

Agnes spun in her chair. Jingling footsteps echoed in the women’s hall, coming closer, the pace fast. Shoe bells meant only one person—Milo.

The skeletal man bobbed toward Agnes, the bells barely keeping up with his pace. He bent toward her and shoved something into the breast pocket of her hospital-issue jumpsuit. A long finger pressed to his mouth. “Shhh.”

Agnes turned in her chair to follow Milo’s arc through the Day Room.

Near the opposite wall, he leaned close to the green, fake leather seat cushion of an armchair and puffed air from his mouth, rotating his head around to clean the entire seat. He paused, blew a full breath on the center of the cushion, and swiveled his behind onto the seat. A chuckle escaped his taut lips.

Agnes glanced around the room. The lengthening shadows of the massive oak trees penetrated the high windows and decorated the interior wall of the Day Room, the only hint of life on the outside. The windows were little more than a source of natural light, too high to see anything but a narrow swatch of sky and the very tops of the gnarled oaks. Agnes kicked at the leg of a chair. Everything was intended to exude a calming influence on her and her fellow residents, from the serene green walls and seamless linoleum floors, to these narrow slits of natural light that projected the first oak shadows on the east wall in midafternoon. Those shadows would grow up the wall like vines, then dissolve as the sun ran through the changing colors of the sunset.

Residents? They were patients to the staff, but really prisoners to the legal system, and each ruling group independently worked hard to produce the calm.

But how can life without horizons be calming? A high window ledge is no more a physical horizon than the dull existence of psychological incarceration is to one’s emotional outlook. The absence of the horizon on a rolling sea is the best trigger of seasickness, yet no one associated with Imola seemed capable of comprehending the analogy of a missing horizon with rolling emotions, in terms of the maintenance of mental health. It was a wonder the residents themselves weren’t as green as the walls. Agnes kicked the chair leg again.

She glanced around the room. All of the men and women sat quietly in scattered chairs, oblivious to Milo’s movements. Several of them faced the television on the far left wall, barely blinking at the flickering light of a cartoon.

Did any of them see what he had done? See what he had put in her pocket? No one reacted, but that was the way here. She wanted to look in the pocket, but Milo had given the “shush” sign. With so little privacy, such things had to be respected.

Her eyes swung to the right, to the two hallways that opened from the main room. The one on the left sprouted the men’s rooms; the one on the right, the women’s. The two hallways reminded her of a pair of naked tree branches with parallel sets of blossom buds, each bud a room for one of the residents. Would she ever get to see a real tree wake up after a winter pause and burst out in bloom again? How long would her winter pause last here in Imola?

A new commotion built in the right-hand hall, punctuated by the swelling squeals of regulation shoes on linoleum, pushed to a trot. Agnes turned her head and flopped back in her chair. The sounds came from the nurse’s station, at the end of the women’s hall.

Nurse Reginald barged into the Day Room. “Where is he?” She spotted Milo and sprinted to his chair. “Where are they? Where did you put them?”

Milo shrugged.

“Stand up.” Nurse Reginald’s round face glowedcrimson, enhanced by the ultra-white of her starched uniform. “Turn your pockets inside out.”

Milo rose in slow motion, unfolding his six foot three, rail-thin frame in time-lapse jerks. His hands crept into his pockets, diving to their depths with magician-like deliberation. In a single decelerating motion, his hands pulled back from the pockets, tugging the liners inside out like floppy rabbit ears. He held his arms out straight, parallel to the floor. His shadow formed a cross that bent from the floor up onto the east wall of the Day Room, dwarfing the tangled mass of phantom branches. A grin inched across his face.

Nurse Reginald stepped close and patted his hip and chest pockets, then down his legs, up his torso, and back down his back. She stood away. “Okay. I know where they are.” She grabbed his crotch, hard.

Milo flinched, but maintained his scarecrow posture. A flickering scowl spun into another grin.

“Damn it, where are they?”

Milo shrugged.

“You took them. I know it. I want them back. Now. Or you’ll go in lockdown.”

Agnes crossed her arms across her stomach just below the breast pocket that held Milo’s prize. Lockdown wasn’t a punishment for him. He spent most of his time in his room anyway.

Her frown mutated to a grimace. That would leave Stuart Guerin as the only other interactive male in the wing, and he was no bargain. Fortunately, Stuart spent a good part of his day in his room as well. She scanned the Day Room. The other four men on the floor were medicated to a point just this side of a vegetative state. She didn’t even know their names. Two sat and stared all day. The other two rocked back and forth until they fell asleep, hunched in sitting positions that nearly defied gravity. A major plus—it let the girls have the run of the Day Room for most of each day.

The Imola annex, though modern and progressive, wasn’t supposed to have co-ed wings like this. But Agnes read the newspapers, listened to the complaints of the staff members, and asked lots of questions. Some were even answered. Evidently, a paltry budget further withered by three rounds of annual budget cuts had altered the organization of the hospital from functionally coordinated to crisis shuffled. Patients were housed based on their level of required care, the severity of their behavioral peculiarities, and the nature of their criminal activities. Gender fell low on the ward assignment priority list. Supposedly, there was a complex formula used to determine placement, but to Agnes the formula came in the shape of a dartboard.

Criminally insane wasn’t a politically correct tag anymore. She knew all of her ward-mates had been arrested and tried for a crime, or crimes. And they all had been sentenced to Imola rather than jail or prison. They allhad problems that required therapy. Most of them, anyway. Here, the rallying cry wasn’t of unrecognized innocence, but of undiagnosed sanity. Unfortunately, it was obvious medication was doled out more to maintain order than to correct chemical imbalances, and group and individual counseling sessions came and went in unpredictable waves for those with interactive minds.

Agnes felt lucky. She had the regular services of Dr. April Leahy of Santa Rosa, one private session per week. She wasn’t sure why the good doctor made the drive all the way over to Napa and worked for free. But she was grateful. Dr. Leahy seemed to be particularly competent. Best of all, Dr. Leahy had been with Agnes from the beginning. From the first arrest of what is now called the menstrual murders. When Lilin showed up to pull Agnes into the horrendous acts. It was also one of the best times of Agnes’s life—when Jason showed up.