Imola
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Accolades for
AGNES HAHN by Richard Satterlie
“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
DEDICATION:
To my wife Tricia and my children, Alison, Jake and Erin.
Published 2009 by Medallion Press, Inc.
The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO
is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2009 Richard Satterlie
Cover Design by Adam Mock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-193475504-4
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
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.
CHAPTER 1
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.
CHAPTER 2
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.
Then again, maybe Dr. Leahy was doing all of this because of Jason. Agnes stiffened in her chair. This was the only subject that made her think Dr. Leahy wasn’t such a great doctor. Jason didn’t come to see Dr. Leahy. Maybe the doc wasn’t so perceptive. She didn’t even realize who Jason came to visit.
Agnes tightened her crossed arms and felt something poke her left forearm. Milo’s spoils. But she didn’t want to look. That was Milo’s business.
“I’m going to give you to the count of ten to give themto me,” Nurse Reginald said to Milo. She stomped her right foot in time with her backward count. “Ten … nine … eight …”
Milo’s grin widened, his body frozen in place. His chest didn’t even move with his breathing.
Agnes stood and walked around behind Nurse Reginald. She smiled at Milo.
“… three … two …”
One of Milo’s eyelids twitched. His version of a wink?
Nurse Reginald stomped her foot twice more. “God damn it.” She spun around and rushed down the women’s hall, a string of unintelligible words flailing in her wake.
Milo tiptoed over to Agnes and nodded.
She pushed her chest out toward him and turned so he could reach into the pocket. His hand barely touched cloth as it slid in, then out with his prize.
Agnes stared at the object and shook her head. “You need reading glasses?”
He shrugged, smiled, and turned toward the men’s hall. The bells on his shoes rang in triumph all the way to his room.
CHAPTER 3
The days passed in bunches, sometimes dragging on forever, sometimes over in a blink. To Agnes, time was marked by Dr. Leahy’s weekly visits—the days had lost their formal names. They were called “one day until Dr. Leahy,” “two days until …” “three days …” and so on. What day of the outside week did she visit? Thursday? Sunday? It didn’t matter. Not in Imola.
Agnes straightened in her chair and turned her right ear toward the door of the Day Room. It was the only connection to the outside world—the passageway for visitors and visiting therapists. Every time the door opened, a breath of the outside world wafted in, only to be terminated by the hiss of the gas cylinder of the door closer, and the clunk of the automatic lock.
Agnes tilted her head like a curious dog. There shewas. Dr. Leahy. If Agnes listened carefully, she could tell it was the doctor. The double tap of each heeled shoe on the tiled hallway was like the gait of a tap dancer: two sounds from each foot strike.
Agnes slumped in the chair and gripped the armrests.
Dr. Leahy leaned back a little when she walked, so her weight shifted forward slowly. Tip-tap. Maybe it would sound different if she didn’t wear those shoes with the big, blocky heels.
You know why she does it.
Agnes nodded.
It pushed her breasts out. And gave them a bounce when she walked. She wanted everyone to look at her breasts.
Dr. April Leahy pushed open the self-closing door of the Day Room and tip-tapped along the far wall. Agnes’s eyes followed her. The doctor’s shoulder-length auburn hair flowed behind her, exposing her ears and dangling earrings, each a single, thin bar that widened at the apex to accommodate a diamond. At least half a carat each.
She slid her soft sided, leather attaché onto a table at the far right of the Day Room and opened it, fishing inside. “Hi, Agnes. Are you ready?” Her jaw hinged against her ever-present piece of gum.
Agnes leaned forward
and rested her elbows on her knees. She didn’t like to walk over too soon. It wasn’t because the sessions were unpleasant. She just didn’t like to give in to Dr. Leahy right away. And she didn’t know why.
You know why.
“Agnes?”
Agnes scanned Dr. Leahy from head to toe.
Brown and orange today. She always wore a suit: tight fitting, with a coordinated blouse, also snug. Seventeen meetings now, and she hadn’t duplicated an outfit yet. But they weren’t really that different.
Agnes looked down at her own jumpsuit. She could get the same variability if she rolled up the sleeves one day, cuffed the legs another day, changed the level of the zipper, and then varied the combination.
But Dr. Leahy’s clothes were way different if she knew Jason was visiting. Then the skirts were higher—upper thigh—and the blouse was low cut, showing cleavage. Her walk changed, too. The tip-tap went to tip-TAP. It made her cleavage sway as well as jiggle.
Dr. Leahy didn’t talk the same way when Jason was around either. She was more animated, and she laughed a lot. Not laughed. Giggled. She giggled when he was around. She didn’t giggle when it was just the two women.
She’s fucking him.
Agnes balled her hands into fists and ground her molars together.
Dr. Leahy must have thought Jason came to see her. Why else would she bounce her breasts and giggle? But she was wrong. He didn’t come to see her.
She is fucking him.
Dr. Leahy shifted her weight onto her left leg and tapped a pencil on the table. “Come on, Agnes. I haven’t got all day.” She cradled her attaché in the crook of her arm and tip-tapped into the small conference room midway along the far wall of the Day Room. She turned. “Now, Agnes.”
A slight hint of a smile tugged on Agnes’s lips as she stood. She tried to duplicate the tip-tap walk, but her hospital-issue sneakers squished with each step. She squeezed through the door and stood next to her chair. “Good morning, Dr. Leahy. How was your week?”
Dr. Leahy sat. “You can call me April, you know.”