Paper was so damn precious. Doi retrieved an unlined sheet hidden near the bottom of her basket of towels. She plucked a pen from her pants pocket. She’d been busy sorting and folding laundry pulled from the dryer when Malka stopped by for a chat, but as Doi appeared to be in a mood, Malka moved on. Her back to the room, Doi wrote on the paper in careful cursive that invariably slanted upward on the right, and she checked often to confirm that no one was noticing. She re-read what she put down, then more quickly added lines. Finally, she squirreled her sheet of paper away amid the towels – under the mauve one and above the pink so that she could locate it quickly – and packed them alongside her clean clothing in the laundry basket. She scooted back to her bunk.
Her nest, she called it.
Put her stuff away. The basket needed to be returned to its proper place. An imperative that everything, once moved for a purpose, is quickly returned to its assigned spot.
With enthusiasm, Doi obeyed the rules.
More than anyone she believed in rules. Still, she had her secrets. And her paper.
She dutifully wrote letters to the daughter she’d maimed.
She wanted to convince her to visit.
The outside door opened with a grating clang. As always, the inmates looked up. They had a special reason to be interested this time as Abigail was returning from her interrogation. She’d been the first. The door clapped shut behind her, bolted and locked, the last of the sounds like a hammer’s stroke. Like a nail in my coffin, Doi thought sometimes. She wanted to talk to Abigail, but she wasn’t the only one and the others gathered around the young woman before she could get close. Doi hung back then, for she really only wanted to talk in private. She desired to know how everything went. She needed a heads-up on what questions had been asked of Abi that would also be asked of her. More importantly, she wanted to know what to say, how to answer those questions when her turn came for the third degree.
Abi would know.
Only Abi would know.
Among them, she was the smart one.
They didn’t call her an artist – a fraud artist – for nothing.
You could talk to Abi. She could, anyway. The young woman was quiet and possessed a sympathetic nature. Everybody could see that. Not like these other killers and misfits. Doi didn’t belong in their midst and she knew that Abi didn’t either. They had that in common. They were separate, in every way that mattered, from the others.
Having missed any chance to catch her alone, she tagged on to the fringe of the group, listening in. They were working their way toward the octagonal table for lunch, then she took a seat there. Temple and Rozlynn were responsible for lunch today which meant it was likely to be edible. Not that it was hard to screw up soup and sandwiches, although somehow Courtney and Jodi managed the feat on a regular basis.
Tomato, the soup. Hot, with soda crackers.
She added butter and pepper.
The sandwiches were salmon. Leave it to Roz to choose one kind of fish or another.
Good, though. So good. She liked how Rozlynn added chopped-up green onions and just the right amount of mayo.
They all wanted to know how the interrogation went. What was it like being grilled by a visiting detective? The women no sooner fired off their questions than they proposed varying and differing opinions on the subject before Abi had the chance to answer.
‘Let her speak!’
Doi rarely jumped in like that. She never asserted herself. This time she did. She couldn’t stop herself from blurting out her decree and then Malka backed her up. ‘Yeah. Let the girl speak.’
‘I know him, the detective,’ Abigail said. That astonished them all. ‘Get this. Get this,’ she said, and the women leaned into her. She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial level. ‘He’s the one who arrested me.’
A couple of mouths dropped open. A hush crisscrossed the table, like a wave in the air.
‘Whoa. Wait. What’s going on?’ Temple asked.
‘You know him? What’s he like?’ inquired Malka.
That’s what Doi wanted to know, too, but she wanted to hear the answer in private, not in this public gabfest. She sipped soup from her spoon.
‘His name is Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars.’
‘Sank-what? Like the planet?’
‘French. Fifth of March, it means. He’s French, too, but his English is not so bad. Better than he thinks.’
‘What’s he like? Good-looking?’ Jodi wanted to suss out.
That’s what everybody was hoping to hear the most, how gorgeous he was. Except Doi. She didn’t care. At least the others were giving Abigail the time and space to formulate a response. ‘He’s tall, ladies, he’s dark, he’s handsome.’
Temple feigned a swoon. Malka laughed at that, then tried to do the same, although she couldn’t pull it off as naturally.
Abigail had more to say. ‘He’s got this huge nose on him.’ She spread her hand wide in front of her face, as if her entire palm was needed to cover that nose. ‘What a honker. Jesus. You can’t help but stare. He can slay you with his stare, though, his deep glare. Like an eagle’s. He glares at you until your arms fall off. I’m not kidding. He reminds me of … I don’t know.’
‘What?’
‘What?’
They so wanted her to say, expecting to hear the name of some movie star dreamboat.
‘Of like a mortician. You know? Sort of. Like he’s come to collect the body.’
This time they groaned. They didn’t enjoy hearing that so much, but they could picture it.
‘The thing is, there’s one thing you gotta know, then never forget it, not for a second.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Abi, what?’
Doi was interested in her message, too, but these others, they were hanging on every word. Hanging on her words without truly realizing their importance. They were forgetting the context. In her mind, they weren’t asking the right questions.
‘He’s crazy smart. Trust me. If he blew his nose, extra brains would come out on his snot.’
The image made them laugh like crazy, but her words also scared them, more than they’d expected. They had prepared stories and responses to the questions they anticipated, but they hadn’t prepared themselves for a smart inquisitor. They didn’t know what a smart detective might mean. Each inmate solemnly believed she’d had been incarcerated by a nincompoop. None had had to deal with smart.
Merely the thought of it had them feeling stupid and afraid.
Doi was gauging Abigail, and in that instant saw through her. This young woman knew what she was doing. Now that Flo was gone from their midst, she was almost imperceptibly, step by step, assuming control over them. The detective might be just as smart as she said, but Doi was betting that Abi was way smarter.
Warning them that the detective was super intelligent made herself necessary, given that she was the brilliant swindler among them. From now on, everyone would bring worries about all of this and about everything else to Abigail. Whatever the cop told anyone, Abi would hear it next. They’d all confide. Doi saw that. She saw it happening right before her eyes. She, herself, would do it that way.
‘You were real quiet,’ Abi said.
‘Was I?’ Lunch turned out to be festive. The talk gregarious and at times quarrelsome but always animated. The ladies laughed a lot. Tears rolled down their cheeks. When they were about to break up for their post-lunch chores – clean the table, the floor, do up the dishes, put away the supplies which required a guard to unlock then lock the cupboards again and the pantry – Corrections Officer Isaure Dabrezil was called to the front door grill. She received a message there and afterward sought out Doi. She informed her that she was next. At one o’clock sharp Doi was to wait at the front door to be escorted to the interrogation room.
‘You didn’t say boo,’ Abi pointed out.
‘With that bunch? It’s hard to get a word in edgewise.’
‘That’s true. So what’s up?’ Abi asked. She took out a small nail file from the shelf by her bunk and Doi’s eyes grew to the size of tablespoons. Doi was standing over her by her bed.
‘What?’
‘Where’d you get that?’ Doi asked.
They both looked at the file.
‘My business. Just don’t tell anybody.’
‘Tell me,’ Doi begged.
‘I bought it off a French girl,’ Abigail whispered. ‘Caught her in the yard doing her nails. Bought it off her. That’s all. A simple transaction.’
‘How did you buy it? With what?’
‘Money. Not much.’ A bit of cash on the outside helps her to get by on the inside.
Their eyes met again, the tablespoons seemingly expanding before they relaxed.
‘There’s a reason I was quiet,’ Doi said.
‘So why?’
‘We’re all forgetting something. Hard for me to forget it.’
Abi waited for her to finish. When she didn’t, she filled in the blank for her. ‘One of us must’ve killed Flo.’
‘I can’t forget that.’
‘Me neither. Still, you know, life goes on in the meantime. Your turn next, huh?’
‘Yeah. Abi, tell me, what’s he going to ask me? I need to prepare. You said he’s smart?’
‘He is. You can’t prepare for that kind of smart. I mean, it’s simple. He’ll want to know who you are, where you’re from, what you did to end up in here. I’m only guessing, of course. He already knew all that about me, so he didn’t ask me that. He will you. We only reminisced a little.’
‘Doesn’t he have my sheet? He must.’
‘Sure. He probably knows your jacket by heart. He’ll want to hear it from you. Don’t lie. He’ll catch any tiny fib and walk it back with you down a corridor straight to the back door of a dungeon in hell.’ Abigail said that then put a hand over her mouth and laughed.
‘Don’t say that,’ Doi objected.
‘He’s investigating a murder, Doi. No stone unturned.’
‘But I didn’t kill Flo.’
‘Who did?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘He’ll want to know that and a whole lot more. Just make sure that when you lie you can back it up until the cows come home.’
‘I won’t lie!’ Doi declared.
‘Don’t be silly. Of course you will. Everybody fucking lies. Especially when somebody like Cinq-Mars puts you through the wringer. You’ll get scared for no good reason. You’ll get frustrated. You’ll panic. You’ll lie. Then try to worm your way out of it. Really, don’t bother. Whatever you hide will crawl up to the surface, you know, like worms in the rain. By the time he’s done, if you didn’t kill Flo, you’ll wish you did. You’ll be dying to confess, Doi, just to get the pressure off you. Just to get those squiggly worms out of your hair.’
Doi felt herself reeling inside. ‘You came back so happy, so flip. You seemed that way.’
‘That was me. Him and me, we have a thing. We’ve been down that road. You and him, you’re starting out. Be prepared.’
‘Oh shit.’
‘Feel that way. Oh shit – you said it. There. Now you’re better prepared.’
‘But what’s he going to ask me exactly?’
‘Did you kill, Flo? Why did you? He’ll ask you that.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Why did you hack up your daughter?’
‘He won’t ask me that!’
‘You wanna bet?’
Doi knew better than to argue with Abigail about anything. ‘No, seriously, Abi,’ she said, worrying about the nail file again, ‘how’d you get that thing in here?’
‘Doi, Doi, I told you that already. It’s nothing. It’s not like I can saw through bars with it. We don’t even have bars. We don’t have a window. You can’t pick a lock with this thing. I would’ve tried if that was true.’
Doi could never tell when she was joking.
‘You’re still not allowed. Why do you have it?’ She wanted to remind her that there were other things she could do with a nail file. Poke an eye out. Slice an artery. Someone else’s or her own. More reasons to prohibit the file than could fit on a list.
‘Doi, get real. You don’t want to know. If I told you that, I’d have to strangle you with a wire just to keep you quiet.’ Abigail laughed at her friend’s evident consternation. Then she implored her, ‘Doi, I’m kidding. God. I have it to do my nails. I like nice nails.’
‘You shouldn’t joke about that, strangling,’ Doi admonished her.
‘Come on! You know I wouldn’t hurt a fly. But! I’ll swat you dead if you squeal on me.’
Doi believed her. ‘I know,’ she said.
‘Good,’ Abi said. ‘Now get ready. Remember, like I told the girls, it’s OK to ask this cop for a smoke. If he gives it to you, it means he thinks he’s getting somewhere with you. So enjoy the smoke, at least. It’s one minute to one, Doi. Do your lipstick. You’ll feel more confident that way. You won’t look so guilty like you do now.’
She still could never figure out when and if she was joking.
She guessed that that was Abigail’s way.
Doi had to wait more than five minutes for the detective to arrive after she was deposited in a room that felt cold and alien to her. The delay increased her fret. When he arrived, he was exactly as Abigail had described, so tall and with a nose that made her want to stare. Abi had warned her that he might look as though he expected to take away a body. She was right about that, too. Maybe Abi only put the idea in her head and it wasn’t really true, but the impression stuck. Back door parole, a phrase she’d learned at her previous institution; if she was to die in prison, if that fate awaited her, this one might as well collect her now.
She was impressed that everything Abi remarked about him was confirmed as true. She could see it for herself. A good indication that everything else was true, too. Such as, he was smart, he was going to ask tough questions, and she had no hope of holding her own against him.
Then he smiled. That knocked her off-kilter.
‘Doi Katowski,’ he read from her jacket, then looked up again. That stare. ‘How are you today?’
Tongue-tied for a moment – she hadn’t anticipated the smile or the greeting, and the way he stared was disorienting – she nodded. She cleared her throat as though that was her only problem. Then managed to smile back. She’d already forgotten his question.
‘I’m Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars. Pleased to meet you.’ He leaned back in his chair on the opposite side of their little table and folded his arms across his chest. She was expecting him to glare down at her with eagle-like eyes; instead he smiled a trifle, and glanced at her and at his papers repeatedly. She was cross with herself that somehow, he had made her feel more comfortable. ‘Any questions,’ he asked, ‘before we start in?’
‘Abigail said,’ she began, then thought she shouldn’t say.
‘You talked to Abigail,’ Cinq-Mars confirmed.
‘I did. That’s allowed, isn’t it?’
‘Perfectly natural. What did Abigail say?’
‘I could ask you for a cigarette.’
He took a deeper breath, and looked away, perhaps to spare her his eagle glare.
‘You gave Abigail a smoke,’ Doi told him.
‘Why would I do that when Abigail doesn’t smoke? At least, she never has. Since inmates are not allowed to smoke in here, I assume she still doesn’t.’
Doi stared back at him, confused. Finally, she contended, ‘We can smoke in the yard.’
‘I stand corrected. Still, not indoors. And Abi doesn’t smoke.’
‘She said she had a smoke.’
‘Of course she did. Now you think that I’m a liar and that Abi told the truth. Isn’t that right?’
Her head bobbed down, then back up again.
‘Abi didn’t bum a smoke off me,’ Cinq-Mars repeated. ‘She never asked for one. The subject never came up. Not that it would’ve done any good, since I don’t have any. I quit. Trying to, anyhow.’
‘She says she asked you,’ Doi maintained, ‘and you gave her one. She told everybody that over lunch.’
‘Why would I lie to you? I didn’t do that.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Cinq-Mars explained it to her. ‘Abi said she smoked. She said you could smoke. She said everybody could smoke. All you have to do is ask. The problem with that, it’s a big fat lie. But now we have a bigger problem. Do you know what it is?’
She didn’t.
‘You believe her. That’s the larger issue here. Not that you can’t smoke, but that you believe Abi was given a cigarette. Tell me, who do you think is in charge of this investigation?’
She was feeling hopelessly confused again, as if they were talking through a wall. Doi spoke quietly. ‘You are, of course.’
‘No. I’m not. I mean, I should be. But Abi is in charge right now. She’s in charge because you believe her and not me.’
Doi remained at a loss. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Abi can’t be in charge.’
‘Who do you believe, her or me?’
She hesitated long enough, and she knew that, to suggest her reply had not been honest.
‘See what I mean?’ he asked.
She didn’t.
‘Why would Abi lie?’ Doi put to him.
‘Why would I?’ Cinq-Mars asked her. ‘That might be the better question. But we’ll start with yours. Off the top of my head, Abi has a few reasons to lie. She might want to play me, hoping I might get irritated if women come in here, one after another, expecting to smoke. Or she wants to conscript you. Make you believe in her and not in me. A third reason for her to lie is that she plans to use you in some way that neither of us can figure out. Only time will tell. She figures she might need to use you someday if she’s not doing so already. It’s worth thinking about. Abi might be setting you up for something.’
‘For what?’ Doi asked. She couldn’t follow the conversation and felt that she was spinning.
‘If she killed Flo, for instance, she might need somebody to take the fall. You never know. She could be setting you up for that. Of course, I’m not saying that she killed Flo. Did you?’
‘Did I what?’
‘Kill Flo?’
‘No! Of course not!’ Abi had said he’d ask her that, only natural that he would. She just didn’t expect it to be so abrupt. That not only caught her off-guard, but as Abi forewarned it almost made her feel guilty.
‘Hmm,’ Cinq-Mars murmured. Then he asked, ‘Why not?’
‘What do you mean why not? Why not what? That’s a crazy question. Why would I kill Flo?’
‘That’s a good question. You found Flo. That means you were in the toilet room with her. Tell me about that. Why did you scream when you found her? How did that happen anyway? How is it you were in the toilet room with Flo, that she was dead, and you were screaming at the top of your lungs? Tell me how everything happened, and please, I’ll ask you not to leave anything out. It’s important that you not do that.’
‘Of course I screamed. Flo was dead.’
‘You’ve been in violent situations before. Your daughter was a bigger mess. Were you screaming then? I bet your daughter was.’
‘Don’t ask me about that,’ Doi said, sullen.
‘That’s not how this works.’
‘How what works?’
‘This. I ask. Whatever I want. You answer.’
They stared across the table at each other, and Doi saw that it was true, that he had an eagle’s glare. Like Abi said, she felt as though her arms were going to fall off.
Day into night had been exceptionally hot and muggy. She passed the time at home wearing only a slip over her underwear as she lived without air-conditioning. Mopped her brow with a towel. The house felt airless, the air close. Her husband had stayed out late with the guys, then come home surprisingly sober and gone straight to bed. She tried to sleep next to him. The heat stymied her. His skin emitted heat and a strong scent of old sweat and pizza fart. And Katarzyna had not come home.
Doi got up and waited in the kitchen.
She lived in the far-flung suburbs of Toronto, in Burlington, Ontario. Middle of the road everything: class, money, advantages. Not the big houses, not the small. Not the newest, not the old. While the homes all looked the same at first glance, they were not identical, unlike in some areas. She could point out the differences to anyone who couldn’t see it for themselves, how each house was unique. She could be proud. Her man was a decent man. Not her first husband, hopefully her last. Katarzyna was not her first daughter either, but the only daughter anyone knew about. The only one of her daughters she knew. She wondered where the others went, if they were alive.
She considered her husband, Dawid, to be a good if imperfect man. What blemishes distorted him, and his general lack of interest in her and in their marriage, did not compel her to think poorly of him. He worked dutifully, if not hard. He helped build and repair homes. Never the contractor himself, always the contractor’s laborer. His bosses, and there were several, appreciated his worth and were also infuriated by his peccadilloes. He did not work in heat. He did not work in the cold. He did not work in the rain. He did not work one job if he was offered another that was less physically demanding. He did not work on his knees. He had to be standing or sitting to put in the hours. If not, if he was asked to parget a foundation or dig a ditch or get on his belly and squiggle into a crawl space, he went home for the day instead. His bosses complained to her about these things, although they still hired him for what he was willing to do and for how well he did it. He made a living, he paid his bills, and at work his assistance was appreciated when the job was not too demanding.
Better if he was his own man, a contractor himself, and she had pushed him in that direction, but he always declined.
So they were not rich, or richer. They got by.
Not strict with himself, he was not strict with Katarzyna either. Not strict enough by half! Dawid did not understand what can happen to a girl lacking the proper supervision. She tried to explain it to him, but he dismissed her worries the same way he dismissed her entreaties to work harder. Her daughter assured her father that she could take care of herself and he, the easy-goer, the don’t-work-too-hard nincompoop, the relax-it’s-not-a-problem decent man of the house went along with everything his daughter desired. He didn’t understand and she could not explain it to him. She could not explain it to Katarzyna either. To do that, she would need to explain about her other daughters. Her unwanted daughters. And she could never explain that. Not to anyone.
The night stayed hot and muggy. Katarzyna stayed out late. And she remembered, Doi did, how she bent over at her kitchen table, while waiting, bent over with both her arms across her belly, bent over and she moaned, the pain there, that memory of pain there and still Katarzyna was not home. Then she arrived. It seemed like the middle of the night. Later, she’d admit, not that late. But it seemed like the middle of the night and Katarzyna and her boyfriend kissed in the car in the back lane, then they both got out. They kissed outside the fence to the backyard and came into the yard and kissed again. His hand on her behind. Doi must have left the house by then for she was already in the backyard with them and yelled at the boy and her daughter screamed back at her. The boy laughed. He thought it was funny. Funnier when she shoved him away, funnier when she punched his shoulder, his arm. He was laughing even as he was leaving and Katarzyna, huffy, angry with her as if she was the one with the laughing boyfriend in the middle of the night, as if she was slamming the door in her mother’s face going into the kitchen. Doi, in a rage then, to have that boy laughing like that other boy laughed when she was sixteen and he was done with her and she would be disgraced in the city, handed over to the nuns there, until the birth. That child, that daughter she was told, taken from her and only then was she returned to her family and to her disgrace. Yet a soldier still married her only to die on maneuvers. In a war game, dead. A game. And Katarzyna, now playing her games, her anger as if the mother was to blame for ruining her night, her life, her chance at love and where was her bra? That smile. That coquettish smirk she had. Doi had left on her own for her second disgrace, she would not be sent away that second time, she went on her own, back to the city and to the nuns and when that child was born she would not take it, and left the world she knew for a world she did not know, walking across the border in exchange for a certain kind of sex that meant nothing to her, but not nothing, but nothing, what mattered was escape, leaving Poland, and Doi, was she screaming now? Perhaps she was screaming now, the daughter screaming back, the daughter saying, ‘Mom, he likes my titties, so? Live with it.’ Then the blood, the slashing, a real and different screaming now, more blood, the husband awake and wrestling with her but he was too lazy and she slashed again, the daughter screamed again, the blood, and finally the husband got her on to the floor and while she begged him then he did not let her up like those others had not let her up. So much blood on the floor she wanted to mop up. Then the neighbors came. And the ambulance came. And the police came. The trial after that. Then prison.
‘A question, as I see it,’ Émile Cinq-Mars said to her, his voice soft and slow and deliberate; she had been forewarned that he was smart and that he would ask questions that she did not want asked, and say things that she did not want heard, ‘has to do with how the small axe, the hatchet, the one you injured your daughter with, came to be in your right hand, Doi. It did not suddenly appear there. Did you pick it up in the backyard? Or on the porch? People don’t usually leave a hatchet just lying around. Had you already brought it into the kitchen with you, while you were waiting, so that you were waiting there with the hatchet at the ready?’
‘What?’ Doi asked. ‘What?’ This made no sense. He was wrong. The axe. It was in her hand. She admitted that. But it was not like he said. It just appeared there. What else?
‘That’s one question. At what point did you pick up the axe so that you could attack your daughter?’
‘Just to scare her, maybe. Only to show her that she was wrong. Her father didn’t care from nothing about the trouble she was in.’
‘Some would say she was in love, not trouble, but when and where did you pick up the axe?’
It just appeared. It was in her hand. It was not in her hand. Then it was in her hand.
‘The other question that I’d like you to take back to the dorm, to think about, is why you looked into the stall where Flo was killed. You told the police that you urinated in the middle stall, that that’s the toilet you used. But Flo was out on the end. Why did you go down to the last stall and look in there? Do you usually look in on other people doing their business?’
‘There are no doors.’
‘I know there are no doors. All the more reason to respect someone’s privacy, no?’
‘I looked in her stall.’
‘I know you did. Why did you? When and where did you pick up the axe, and why did you look in Flo’s stall? Can you think about those two things?’
‘Why?’ Doi asked.
‘You’re wondering why I want to know about the axe?’
Doi nodded.
‘That’s a fair question. I want to understand your anger. What is spontaneous with you? What is planned when you go off the deep end? I think it’s fair for me to know that. That we both understand it. That may help both of us to understand what happened in the toilet.’
‘I didn’t kill Flo.’
‘But you attacked your daughter with an axe, and I’m told that you still don’t believe it was all your fault.’
‘She was out so late!’
‘Why did you look in on Flo?’
‘Flo?’
‘Wasn’t that rude? Are you a rude person, Doi?’
‘I’m not. I’m not rude.’
‘Then why? For now, just think about it. You can tell me what you discover the next time we meet. The issue with the hatchet helps me to understand you. I’m interested to learn why you screamed, after you found Flo, when you didn’t scream when you slashed your daughter. Or did you? I also want to know what you did between the time you came across Flo in her dreadful state and the moment when you screamed to alert the others.’
‘What?’
‘It’s in the guard’s report. You were standing right at the opening to the toilet room when the guard located you. Flo was in the stall at the opposite end. You found Flo, then went to the doorway so that people could hear you better when you screamed. That’s what it seems like. Then you screamed. Strange delay. Why? But that’s a question for another time. In any case, I think you understand me. I’m quite sure you do. Time now to do your maps. Do you know what they are? Did Abi tell you? I bet she did. The maps, then that’ll be it for today, Doi.’
Understand him? She didn’t understand a damn thing. He didn’t seem so smart to her. Maybe Abi was wrong. No, not smart, not smart at all.
She diligently, angrily, sketched out the stupid maps.