Two muffled words rose up from the half-fetal figure balanced on the floor like an egg. “Malachi’s dead.”
I waited to see if she had anything else to add, but she didn’t. “Is that so?” I asked, and I asked it carefully because something about her voice told me that she didn’t believe it when she said it.
“S’what I heard. It was on the news, about a year ago.”
Again I looked over to the speaker on the wall. Nothing indicated that we were being overheard, but I wanted to play it cautious all the same. “Maybe he is, and maybe he isn’t—but he was coming to talk to you the other night. Were you two good friends?”
I thought maybe I’d lost her again; it took a full ten or fifteen seconds for her to respond. “Don’t know about good friends. He was all right. Thought I was crazy, though.”
“But you knew what he was in here for, right?”
She nodded, rubbing her forehead against her leg in the process.
“Then maybe you should take a look at me, and hear me out. I started this on the wrong foot, maybe, with a fib. Let me begin again—Malachi’s not exactly a friend of mine, but he and I have come to an understanding. He’s the one who told me about you.”
Since everything with this woman happened in slow motion, I let the conversation lull drag on while she slowly swiveled her eyes up from her lap and over to the bed where I was sitting.
She was a pretty woman in a corn-fed sort of way—big blue eyes and good bone structure, like thirty years ago she might have gone on an album cover for the Mamas & the Papas.
Kitty fixed me in a stare that wasn’t precisely blank, but apathetic. “You’re his sister, then,” she said. “That must be some interesting understanding.”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “It is. But it works all right.”
Unwrapping her arms one at a time, and unfolding her legs in a similar fashion, Kitty stretched herself out. She pivoted on her tailbone and reassembled herself into the same crunched position, this time facing out at me.
“What’d Malachi want?” she asked.
I gave the talk-box one last look and gave up. If they could hear me, they could hear me and there wouldn’t be much stopping them. Maybe, so far as they were concerned, it would just be chatter—one lunatic to another. Let ’em listen, then. Let them hear us.
I leaned in forward, closer to her but only by inches. “He wanted to talk to you—see if you could answer some questions for him. He ran into some trouble looking for you, though, because they’d moved you since he was here last. I ended up picking him up and sending him home.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about why they moved you upstairs here. Are you more comfortable up above ground level?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Yeah.” She clutched absently at her knee, halfway between scratching at it and rubbing it.
“It puts you farther off the street, and away from the Hairy Man, doesn’t it?”
Her eyes narrowed sharply, leaving a slit of blue and white. “If you’re here to make fun of me, you can just—”
“No,” I cut her off quick. “No, nothing like that, I swear. Sort of the opposite, in fact. I need to ask some questions, and I don’t want you to make fun of me. Can we agree to that, and can you hear me out?”
Kitty thought about it, and twisted her chin in a motion that might have been a nod, except it dipped sideways. “I guess,” she mumbled. “But don’t you make fun of me. If you make fun of me, I’ll go to sleep and I won’t talk to you. I don’t have any more patience for that sort of thing. I’ve been here too long, and I’m too old.”
“I promise,” I repeated. “I swear.”
“Okay then. But I’m not stupid. Don’t treat me like I’m stupid.”
“I won’t, if you don’t treat me like one of these doctors here. You can tell me exactly what you mean, and whatever you know, and I’m more likely to believe you than anyone you’ve ever met in your life. When I came out here to get Malachi, we had some problems with the car. We got stuck over by the woods for a little bit, and before we could get out, I saw the Hairy Man you were talking about.”
Her eyes didn’t open any wider, but she didn’t curl up and implode into silence, either. “You saw him, huh?”
“Yeah, I saw him. And I’ve got some thoughts about who and what he might be. But I bet you’ve seen him more than I have, and I wanted to know if you could tell me anything about him before I go jumping to conclusions.”
“Malachi said that you saw stuff. He thought it made you wicked.”
“He’s had a change of heart on that matter. It nearly killed him, I think, but we’ve come to terms. I do see stuff. And I want to talk to you, because you see stuff too.”
She digested this, and then did her funny tic of a nod. “What did you see?” she asked. “Tell me. People don’t ever tell me what they see—they only ask what I see. So you talk first.”
The faint hint of hunger in her face made me uncomfortable; it reminded me how short the distance was between us, and I understood a little too well her desire to listen. After all, who ever reads the cards for the fortune teller?
I gave her the rundown from the beginning, when I got the frantic phone call from Malachi, and filled her in regarding the small wreck. She let out a laugh when I told her how he had run out in front of me and I’d gone off the road.
“That sounds like something he’d do,” she interjected.
“No kidding. It shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. But once I stopped and we checked out the car, I began to hear this noise—it’s hard to describe, like TV static, kind of. Or like a radio stuck between stations.”
Kitty bobbed her head, but didn’t offer any additional commentary.
“It got louder and louder as he got closer. Even Malachi heard it, which sort of surprised me. But Malachi, he—well, he got his head hit, and I had to leave him for a minute. I went following the noise, and I saw the Hairy Man sitting down by the river. He was talking to himself. Have you ever heard him talking?”
“Not exactly,” she admitted. “You don’t ‘hear’ it really. You feel it in your ears.”
“That’s a good way of putting it. I felt it in my ears, then. He wasn’t talking to me, I don’t think, but he didn’t seem to care if I could hear him, either.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘The dead are my children,’ and that he shouldn’t have left them. I think I know what he meant, but I’m not sure. That’s why I came here. I wanted to know if you knew anything that might flesh out what I’ve gathered. So please—if there’s anything you can contribute to this, I’d really appreciate it.”
She wrinkled her toes up until they cracked, and then lay one long leg down so her foot was pointing at me. She didn’t bother to meet my eyes. She didn’t need to. “Why did you really come here, anyway? You already know who he is. You guessed it before you got home that night, like I’d guessed it too, a few weeks ago. Is it just that you want to say it out loud, and not be laughed at? ’Cause I understand, if that’s all it is.”
It was my turn to stay silent for too long.
“It’s not that, exactly,” I said.
“What is it, then? Don’t you know anyone else like you? Have you got a mother, or a sister—or brother? Anyone else who sees?”
If we were really playing turns, this would have been her round to keep quiet, but she had me twice in a row. “No,” I finally confessed. “I guess I really don’t.”
Kitty hunched her shoulders in a shifting shrug. “Makes it hard to get a second opinion, don’t it?”
“It does.”
She closed her eyes and opened them, too slowly to call it a blink. “I don’t blame you for coming. It’s hard, when it’s only you—and you don’t have anyone else to ask. It’s hard, when you think you’re the only one who can hear it. And if you listen long enough, and no one else butts in to say, ‘Hey, I heard it too,’ I think after a while you start to misunderstand.”
I would have been tempted to call killing children something more dire than a misunderstanding, but I wasn’t in a position to be too judgmental, so I let it lie. The elephant in the room remained unmentioned.
“These days, I try to tune it all out,” she continued. “I thought it’d get better once I came here. I thought maybe if they closed me away, I wouldn’t hear anything at all, and then it wouldn’t matter who was talking because the walls are very thick. They don’t want to let me out, so I thought it’d be okay if they kept me in. But I didn’t know they’d put me here.”
“What’s so bad about—oh. Never mind. Not the ideal location for someone who’s sensitive, I don’t guess. Indian burial ground, and all that.”
She nodded. “There’s a lot of negative energy here, that’s for sure. It’s very…draining, sometimes. But in time, I got used to it. I can ignore almost anything, these days. But I couldn’t ignore him…”
She didn’t put a period after the pronoun. We each waited for the other to go ahead and say his name. I caved first. “Green Eyes, you mean.”
Kitty went ahead and laughed. “There you go. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“I don’t suppose it was.” I shook my head. “Not hard, but weird.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
“Yeah, actually I’ve got a couple of friends who are pretty open-minded. We’re doing some investigation on our own—”
“Not with those people on TV?”
“The Marshalls?” I rolled my eyes. “Oh hell no. We ran into them today, downtown. It was awkward. I think they know what we’re up to, and that’s unfortunate. Discretion being the better part of valor, and all.”