Insanity (23 page)

I sat up straighter and tested myself by stretching out my arms. A twinge of pain made me wince, but my skin felt solid enough, and my muscles still seemed to be attached. I didn’t feel like I had a fever, either.

My attention shifted to Addie, and I lowered my arms as she sat in a chair beside the couch. Her expression was gentle, and
she looked calmer and more at peace than I had seen her in a while. Heat and tension filled my chest, and tears welled in my eyes. Just looking at her ... I hadn’t been sure I’d ever get the chance to talk to her again.

I couldn’t find words for the hundred questions I needed to ask her, so I went with, “My father. The short version?”

Addie closed her eyes, then opened them, and nodded. “I cracked his head pretty good. It took him three days and all my healing spells to wake up. The second his eyes opened, he panicked about what was happening to you, and we went searching.”

“Three days?” That didn’t add up. I had only been at Darius’s house for one day when we went to Lincoln.

“You lost a little time when you passed through the other side,” Jessie said. “Forest and Levi went wonky trying to find you when you vanished out of the hospital, and they almost didn’t get you in time.”

While I was trying to digest the fact that what had lasted minutes in my perception took days in everyone else’s, Jessie continued. “Did you know that your father knows tae kwon do? Should have seen him trying to bust Darius’s head when he thought they were hurting you.”

I put my hands over my face to fight off a fresh wave of dizziness, and the image of my father going Jackie Chan on my boyfriend in Lincoln Psychiatric’s bell tower. For a split second I heard the bells again, so loud they made my bones shake.

“Stay with me, honey.” Addie gave my leg a pat.

I nodded and looked up at her.

Addie’s frown eased, then came back again. She twisted her hands in her lap like she did whenever she was nervous.

When I twitched and started twisting my own fingers together, Addie met my gaze. She took a breath, then let it out very, very slowly. “He’ll want to know you’re awake, Trina.”

Jessie cleared his throat and made a point of staring out the living-room window, leaving me to make my decision.

“It’s not like I can avoid it,” I said, my voice sounding so small and young it pissed me off.

Addie and Jessie didn’t say anything, and neither of them looked at me.

I twisted my fingers together a few more times.

My father had intended to hurt me when Addie hit him. I knew that. But he had been blinded by rage and maybe other feelings I didn’t understand. When he woke up, his first thought had been for my safety instead of his injured face.

Had he really gotten into a fight with Darius and Levi and Imogene to save me? Had I really seen him praying while Forest tried to heal me? My vision blurred, part from emotion and part from dizziness.

I didn’t hate him, and I wasn’t angry with him. I felt hurt. Confused a little bit. But it wasn’t all about me, was it?

“I’ll talk to him when I talk to everybody else,” I said.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

About an hour later, Imogene stood on the brick patio in Darius’s backyard and handed me a brittle yellow newspaper clipping. It was from the
Cincinnati Enquirer
. The headline and date were too worn to read, but I could see that the year was 1929, and I made out the words, “Boy free.”

There was a picture of a woman holding tight to a boy in her lap—a boy with a cruel face and dark hair and a mean little smile. Just the sight of him made me shiver in my lounger, even though the sun was hot on my cheeks.

“That him?” Imogene asked.

I handed the clipping back to her, not wanting to touch it a single second longer. “Yes.”

“Who is he?” Ms. Hyatt asked. She was sitting in her wheelchair on my left, and Darius sat cross-legged on my right, handsome in his sunglasses and jeans and black T-shirt. When he reached out to take my hand I let him, even though my father
was only a few feet away, directly across from me in one of the folding chairs Darius had fetched from his garage.

Addie sat at my father’s right hand, with her big bag of potions tucked underneath her chair. Forest was on my father’s left, and Levi was standing next to Forest, of course. Jessie stood between both groups, ready to intervene if we came to blows or spells.

“Name is Carl Newton Mahan,” Imogene said. “He was from up around Paintsville, in eastern Kentucky.”

“That sounds familiar.” My father reached for the clipping, and Imogene let him have it before she went and settled herself on the low brick wall holding back a bed of azaleas. It was the strangest thing to see my father in one of his best brown Sunday suits, sitting next to folks with Madoc blood—and not just any Madocs, but Forest and Levi and Imogene, probably the strongest he had ever run across. I couldn’t stop looking at his face, his sad, nervous expression, or the way the right side of his head seemed out of line, like Addie hadn’t been able to get the bones all back together again.

“I remember hearing about this,” he said, shaking his head at the clipping, then passing it back to Imogene. “That boy was six years old when he shot his best friend to death after they fought over some scrap iron they were trying to sell to a junk dealer up in coal country. Youngest murderer ever convicted in this state, or anywhere.”

Scrap iron.
I shuddered again, remembering the shanks stabbing toward me in the rain, and that maniac-child face on top of a man’s body.

“Whole nation got up in arms about how young he was, and the attorney general sent him back to his folks instead of putting him in reform school,” Imogene said. “That’s when the newspapers forgot him, and his folks brought him west to get away from the trouble.”

“But he brought the trouble with him?” Addie said.

Imogene nodded. “Boy was twisted up, even that young. He came to Lincoln when he was twelve, after he tortured a girl to death over to Cadiz. They had to keep him in a room by hisself, or he’d try to kill folks when they slept. He died of consumption afore he turned thirty. I crossed him over.”

After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Ms. Hyatt shifted in her wheelchair. “So he came back, like my father?”

“Seems so,” Forest said.

“Why?” Ms. Hyatt asked.

“It’s what the bad ones do,” Imogene said. “They linger close, and come back to work whatever wickedness they like best. They’re starving for blood and mayhem.”

“Did they all have Madoc blood in life?” my father asked. “The spirits that make it back?”

“I used to think so,” Imogene said. “Time was, I wondered if only folks with Madoc blood went crazy, or did the terrible things on this earth. But now I know the truth. Ain’t a person in this world who can’t go bad or lose their wits, no matter what kind of blood runs in their veins. All it takes is the wrong things to happen.”

Ms. Hyatt’s frown seemed as dark as a thundercloud. “The
ghosts and spirits trying to come back—does that happen in other places, too, or just Lincoln?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Imogene admitted, “but I suspect we ain’t the only ones livin’ a few inches too close to hell’s own hills.”

“But the Madocs came to our area—” Addie started.

Imogene cut her off with a quick gesture. “Those folks, whatever they was, didn’t only settle here. This is just one place. Likely there are a lot of others.”

My father’s face twitched as he considered this.

In the quiet that followed, I tried to imagine a kid awful enough to murder his best friend and torture a girl to death, all before he even turned thirteen. “I think Carl Newton Mahan used the energy in my spells to turn ghost or poltergeist or come back to life or whatever,” I muttered. “Perfect.”

“True enough, spirits can’t usually get solid enough to act.” Imogene shifted her gaze to her knobby knuckles, and I saw the slight tremor in her hands. “Like as not, those what want bedlam feel me waning. I used to could send them on their way a second time, before they figured a way to really wreak havoc, but that time’s passed, and they know it.”

My father’s half-broken face stayed blank. His eyes fixed on mine, and for once in my life, I felt like I was reading him, staring at his soul, instead of the other way around.

“That’s the real war,” I told him. “Good people like us against true evil, not us against people with Madoc blood. Do you get that now?”

He opened his mouth, like he was about to say a whole bunch, but all that came out was a whispered “Trina.”

I took a quick breath, and Darius squeezed my hand.

So much emotion in just one word. How did my father do that?

I knew it was the closest he could get to apologizing. A million years ago that would have pissed me off, but right at that moment, it was enough. I nodded to him, and he seemed to relax.

“Before we got attacked,” I said to Levi, “Darius and I saw somebody who looked just like Forest in the hospital, on Unit C.”

Levi’s too-red lips pulled into a frown, and I tried not to look at how his teardrop tattoos glittered red in the sunlight. “Darius told us that.”

“Could it be a time thing?” Jessie asked. “Maybe she moved through it and was in two places at once.”

Levi shook his head. “Can’t happen.”

The thought of Forest being in two places at once was way too metaphysical for me, so I left it alone. “Forest—or the thing that looked like her—shrieked when she saw us. The sound had power, and it made Darius visible. I think it also summoned the—that—Carl Mahan, or whatever it was.”

“Opened the door for him to come through, maybe.” Forest leaned forward in her folding chair. “It sounds like she used sound to shove you out of Lincoln.”

“Can you do that?” Ms. Hyatt asked Forest.

A touch of color rose in Forest’s cheeks. “I usually just find a
thin spot where it’s easy to do the crossing. I never tried making my own.”

“I tried to fight Mahan with spells,” I said, “but they didn’t work right. They just made him stronger.”

Levi sank into a crouch next to Forest, as if I had just knocked all the strength out of his legs. “So he’s strong enough to absorb energy,” he murmured. “Guess he’s a shade, like Eff Leer was.”

Jessie cracked his knuckles. “Can we kill him again, like we did Levi’s grandfather?”

“Yes,” Imogene said. “Though ‘kill’ might be the wrong word. We can send his spirit back where it came from.”

Levi sat quietly, watching my father, and for the first time ever I saw something in his eyes that looked like fear. He lowered his head, and I swear his shoulders shook before Forest brushed her fingers through his hair.

“Was it him?” I asked Levi, nodding toward my father. “The one who, um, killed you?”

Nobody looked at my father, and Levi didn’t answer.

After a minute so long the planet seemed to stop spinning, my father whispered, “It was me.”

When Levi raised his head, the tattoo under his right eye seemed brighter than usual, like he was actually crying a tear made out of blood.

I felt like crying myself, or apologizing. I wanted to hit my father or shake him. Then my emotions just shut down, and I wanted to lean over, put my head on Darius’s shoulder, and sleep until next week, or next month, and wake up to find out I had only had a nightmare about my father being a killer.

“I was wrong,” my father said. “I can see that now. I’ll turn myself in to the authorities and confess my crimes.”

“That won’t make any of this right, preacher,” Imogene said. “You never can, not in my books. But Levi speaks for himself.”

She got up from the wall without saying anything else and walked out of the yard, heading back in the general direction of Lincoln Psychiatric. I was about to say something about somebody giving her a ride when the world seemed to shimmer, and Imogene wasn’t in the backyard anymore.

I stared at the spot where she had been, but I couldn’t make a sound.

“Why?” Levi asked, and the sound of his voice made me jump.

“My father started this business after his father got killed.” My father cleared his throat. “My grandfather’s killer was a man named Purcell Mace. He was a patient at Lincoln, off and on. When he was out, he drank. Seemed like he always knew who had money he could steal. Followed my grandfather out of a bar one night and beat him to death with a lead pipe.”

After another pause he glanced up at me, and I didn’t look away.

“Mace never did a day’s time in jail,” my father continued. “They just sent him back to Lincoln, and he died there, but not before he killed one of the folks trying to take care of him. My cousin. Her mother’s the one who told us about him, and about other patients they had who could—you know, do things no human being ought to be able to do, and know things they couldn’t possibly know.”

“Like who had money to steal?” Ms. Hyatt asked.

My father nodded.

“I came to find out there were folks like that all over Never,” he said. “Not all of them were patients in the hospital. And I could sense them, or reveal them using spells I learned.” This time, he looked at Levi. “A lot of our murders and disappearances—a lot of things that shouldn’t have happened—Madocs were at the bottom of them.”

Levi still didn’t say anything, but I could tell he didn’t disagree.

My father shifted his gaze back to me. “With that, and after Mace, I figured they were all bad. Creatures of the devil. So I did what my father taught me to do. I eliminated them whenever and wherever I found them, and I thought it was God’s work.”

He stopped and looked at his hands. “I thought that’s why God gave me the tools he gave me, to rid the earth of the scourge.”

His mouth got tight, but the edges trembled.

Oh God. Was my father going to cry? I couldn’t hack it if he cried.

But he didn’t. He just waited, like he wanted me to say something, but I didn’t have any words for him at all. Understanding why he had done what he did ... it made more sense, but it didn’t feel any better.

“What do you want us to do with Pastor Martinez, Levi?” Ms. Hyatt asked. “Call the police? Let it be? You’re the one he wronged, so whatever you think ought to happen, we’ll help you.”