Page 18 of Two Kinds of Stranger (Eddie Flynn #9)

Elly

She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten.

The peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich she’d been offered that afternoon in the holding area had a strange smell.

She’d tried a little of it, but her stomach threatened to throw up the first bite and she put it back on the paper plate and left it in the corner of the holding room.

No sooner had she put it down than two women in the cell began fighting over it.

The smaller one whacked the other in the mouth with a closed fist and this seemed to be enough to claim the prize.

The large woman with the dreadlocks who got punched, spat blood on the floor and walked back to her bench.

The other ten women in the holding area watched her walk the whole way, like she was prey.

She had exposed weakness, and now wore it like a badge of shame.

Elly made a mental note never to put herself in that situation.

This wasn’t high school. There would be no teachers to break up a fight.

This was survival, all over again, but for real this time.

She had kept her eyes on her rubber gym shoes and sipped the juice box.

It was sweet and full of sugar, but she didn’t care.

Kate had told her they would get her out in forty-eight hours.

Elly desperately wanted to believe that.

She couldn’t remember the journey from the courthouse to Riker’s Island. Elly had sat in the prisoner van and wept in her transport cell. Like a closet, not much bigger than a coffin set upright, but with a chair and metal hoops for the chains on her wrists and ankles.

She remembered the vague smell of the river. Then getting off the transport, her gym shoes hitting wet concrete as she stepped onto the island; the rattling of the chains as they shuffled into another holding room.

The smell of disinfectant.

Stripping naked. Trembling with cold and fear. Spreading her legs while a female corrections officer laughed, barked instructions and shone a flashlight at her genitals and anus.

A cold shower. Fresh, thin orange clothes. A cloth bag with more of the same clothes, a towel, a toothbrush and toothpaste.

There was a line of fresh detainees ahead of her, but Elly only stared at her new gray slip-and-slides over gray socks.

She picked up a thin rubber mattress, which was also surprisingly heavy despite its appearance, and dragged it, along with her bag, along endless gray corridors, with steel bars painted blue every hundred yards.

She passed the overflowing dorm rooms – fifty beds, fifty women, to every dorm – to the clanking of the steel doors, and the buzzing of the electronic locks, and the hollers of the women.

Elly’s arms were aching by the time they got to Max.

That’s what the male CO called it. Maximum security house 421 looked like a cave built with cinderblocks, painted white.

Lights hung from the high ceiling. Several steel tables stood in the center, with stools around – all bolted to the ground or cemented directly into the floor.

She could see fifteen steel cell doors – f ive on the bottom, ten one floor up accessed by a steel staircase and walkway.

At first the house looked deserted. All the doors were closed.

The correction officer led Elly up the steel staircase and along the walkway and told her to wait outside cell M8.

He called for an unlock on M8. The buzzer, more high-pitched than the others, signaled the CO to yank open the cell door.

She wished it had never opened.

It was a single cell, obviously designed for one prisoner, but inside were three women.

Steel plates secured to the wall with chains acted as bunk beds.

Bunks on either side of the narrow cell, a toilet in the corner.

Just enough space to walk in between them.

The lower bunk on the right was empty, and Elly stepped in, put her mattress over the steel and her bag on top.

She took her rough blue blanket from the bag.

She didn’t look at the other women in the cell.

She just crawled onto the bed, still clutching the cloth bag with her meager possessions inside, and turned to face the wall.

The CO said, ‘Play nice with the new fish.’

Elly heard his boots on the floor as he turned, and the steel door slammed shut.

She was in darkness.

She cried as quietly as she could.

The other three women didn’t speak.

They tutted, and one of them sucked their teeth, no doubt irritated by the further erosion of what little space they had left by a fourth body in a cell that would be cramped for two.

In the dark, she heard the singing, and the crying and the screaming and the banging, and all the sounds of two thousand women in torment.

Right then, at that moment, she just wanted her father more than anyone else on this earth.

He was the one who always made things right.

Over these past torturous weeks, she had thought of him often and her pain caused by James and Harriet’s betrayal mixed with her grief for his loss.

Her mother was practical, but never an optimist. Her father, Stewart, balanced things out in that marriage.

He always told Elly that everything would work out just fine.

She needed her dad to tell her that right now.

To give her one of his big hugs, to smell that old aftershave on his shirt and the faint odor of motor oil that somehow never left his hands.

When Elly was at her lowest, Stewart had always been there for her.

The last time, before he died, when Elly was struggling badly for money, he had taken her in his arms and told her he would pay her rent, but the relief didn’t come from the handout, it came from the love and warmth of her father.

They weren’t religious. Never went to church, but Stewart had been raised Catholic and that never really left him.

He sometimes told Elly to say a prayer if she was really worried. That this would help, no matter what.

Elly, shaking in her bunk, said a silent prayer.

She prayed for Eddie Flynn, and Kate, and Harry, and for them to get her the hell out of here.