By reason of insanity

16

Time crawled as Catherine endured her afternoon in Cell G17. She was still jittery from the way she'd been treated at booking and was concerned about how long she might be confined. She knew her editor and attorney were pursuing every political and legal avenue to free her, but she also knew there were no guarantees. She could be here for a week, a month, maybe even a year. The thought of sitting in this same cell for a year was depressing beyond words. She actually wondered if it would drive her insane.

After an hour or so, she used the toilet on the opposite wall of her cell. A deputy walked by and glanced at her. An inmate three cells down was constantly hollering incoherently about one issue or another, causing others to yell at her and tell her to shut up. The language was as filthy as anything Cat had ever heard.

She hoped her editors would figure out a way to get some books to her as well as a notepad and pen. She had already decided to propose an impromptu idea to her editor-a jailhouse journal. If nothing else, it might make her a celebrity with the inmates and keep the deputies a little more vigilant so that they wouldn't look bad in the press-the pen being mightier than the sword and all.

She sat on her bed and stared at the wall. One hour. Two hours. The inmates were herded out for rec time to a small asphalt basketball court surrounded by high cinder block walls topped by barbed wire. But Cat wasn't allowed to join them. An hour later, they returned. For Cat, the seconds clicked by in slow motion until…

Her first visitor came wearing a three-piece pin-striped suit with a gold pocket watch. He had a trim, gray beard and a long, gaunt face. His skin seemed to hang on protruding cheekbones that underscored freakish eyes devoid of pupils. He took his place against the far wall, holding an inmate number over his chest.

He smiled, exposing the blackened remains of rotted teeth. A camera flashed, causing Catherine to blink. She blinked a second time, but the apparition remained.

A second man entered, younger and more robust, with dark hair and a short goatee. He also had an inmate number draped around his neck, and Catherine felt like she should know this man, but she couldn't quite place him. He took his spot next to the first man. A second flashbulb exploded, and the background noise started.

Frightened, Catherine moved back a little on the bed, still transfixed by the figures standing before her. She heard the sounds of court proceedings, of gavels banging and the excited murmurs that accompany the announcement of jury verdicts. She shook her head, blinked hard, and tried to force herself awake.

A third figure walked toward the others. He was younger than the first and older than the second, dressed in a suit with yet another inmate number, pushing a double baby stroller. In the stroller were two infants whom Catherine recognized immediately-the cute chubby faces and bright round eyes of the Carver twins. The man pushing the stroller took his place between the other men and turned to face Catherine. A third flash went off and Catherine focused on the twins, her stomach sickened by a sense that something awful was about to happen.

Before she could move to them, the stroller morphed into something less definable, like a chair, and then came into sharper focus. It was an electric chair, with a metal hood replacing the pink cap for Cail Ying, the blue cap for her brother, Chi. Catherine heard the clunk of a lever being thrown, and sparks flew from the hoods.

"No!" She leaped forward and rushed the wall, grasping for the kids.

Cat jerked awake, startled to find her hands clenching the sink. She brought them to her mouth, struggling to catch her breath, paralyzed with fear.

Out of nowhere, the fingers of a man's hand appeared and began writing on the wall just above the sink. The words were red, like blood, the handwriting neat and flowing. Cat felt herself go weak as she watched the words form, the blood rushing from her head.

I will visit the iniquities of the fathers unto the third and fourth generations.

The hand disappeared. The words remained, then seemed to melt, dripping down the wall in streaks of red that trickled into the washbasin and slithered down the drain. Striving to maintain balance, Cat stumbled back to the bed, where she sat nervously on the edge until the red fluid disappeared.

It was a dream, she told herself. A hallucination. A vision caused by the trauma of being imprisoned and the tension of covering the Carver kidnappings. The electric chair, she realized, had been seared into her mind by Quinn Newberg's description the night before.

She tried to stop shaking. But somehow the vision seemed more real than life itself, more solid than the bars of her cell.

It was just a dream. It was just a dream. She repeated it like a mantra until her heartbeat returned to some semblance of normal. She repeated it until the goose bumps started to disappear and the chill crawling up her spine went away.

Just a dream, she told herself.

Just a dream.

Though she had never been asleep.

That evening, Cat was a hot item during visiting hours. The whole experience seemed surreal and, like everything else in jail, impersonal. Cat sat alone in a booth, talking into a telephone, looking at her friends on the monitor in front of her. Her visitors sat in a large room adjacent to the lobby of the jail among a maze of cubicles with telephones and closed-circuit television monitors.

"Did you talk my mom out of coming down?" Cat asked one of her friends. Cat's mom and sister lived in central Pennsylvania, and Cat's friends had already told them about the results of the hearing. Cat loved her mom, but the woman knew how to fret.

"I think I can hold her off for a day or two."

"Thanks," Cat said, and immediately felt guilty.

Like a lot of families, the dynamics between the O'Rourke women were complicated. Cat's dad had deserted the family for another woman when Cat was in junior high. The divorce became final the following year. Cat had seen him only three times since.

Cat's younger sister, Kelsey-the "good sister" in Cat's mind-had stayed close to home to take care of their mom and raise a family. Meanwhile, Cat had chased after her own selfish dreams. Compounding Cat's guilt, her mom seemed to think that Cat could do no wrong and at the same time found ample reason to criticize Kelsey. For her part, Kelsey often returned fire, arguing frequently with her mom while Cat held her tongue, feeling like an awkward visitor even among her own family. Cat couldn't remember exactly when it happened, but the burden of being her mom's "perfect" daughter had somehow stolen her ability to be transparent and authentic, even around her own mom.

She wondered how her mom might react to this latest mess.

Halfway through visiting hours, Marc Boland showed up, and the guards escorted Cat into a booth reserved for attorney conferences. Cat sat on the opposite side of a sheet of bulletproof glass from Bo. The lawyer's tie was undone, and his eyes were bloodshot, as if he had been up three straight nights working on Catherine's case.

"We filed our petition for cert with a justice of the Virginia Supreme Court at 5:00," he said, pulling out a bound document too thick to fit through the slot at the bottom of the glass. "We have a hearing scheduled for 2 p.m. tomorrow. We should have a decision by the end of the day. If not, I'm pretty sure we'll get something on Saturday."

Though this was supposed to be good news, Cat's heart sagged a little. "So the most likely scenario is that I'll be in here for at least one more day and maybe two?"

Bo hesitated. "I'm afraid that's right."

"I can't post a bond and get out like violent felons do?"

Bo looked unsure as to whether Cat was kidding. "You can't get bonded out for contempt of court."

"Can you at least get me a few things to read and something to write with?"

"We can make that happen."

They talked for a few minutes about the procedural challenges. Cat asked Bo to call her mom and calm her down a little. Bo frowned but took down the phone number. He seemed antsy to get back to work, so Cat tried to keep her questions to a minimum. She wanted to talk to somebody about the vision she had experienced, but she didn't want to sound like a wacko to Bo.

"Are they treating you okay?" Bo asked, his big round eyes expressing real concern.

Cat looked at the tired warrior and decided he had enough to worry about. "Like a queen," she said.