Voices of Angels

PROLOGUE

October, 1985

The late October sunset shadowed her face with eerie designs, dark and light patterns that scarcely shifted as she sat unmoving at the bare table in the court’s small ante-room. The guard watched her warily, keeping his distance, trying to maintain an air of detached professionalism that faltered in the light of his knowledge of her crimes. He stood with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, acutely aware of the weapon strapped to his side. The prison psychiatrist said that she was no longer a danger to anyone else, and she was confined to a wheelchair, but the guard had taken a personal part in too many instances of unexpected violence to let his ingrained posture of readiness slip even for an instant.

The rays that filtered through the dust-stained windows were gradually dimming in brightness, and the guard thought that it would be very soon when the request for adjournment would free him for the evening and imprison her for one more night of the endless waiting. He had actually grown a cautious fondness for the woman that he had been assigned to watch day after day. It had begun to matter to him how she dealt with her situation, what she felt, and what would happen to her when the inevitable occurred.

She had never asked for special favors, nor had she ever exhibited any behavior other than acquiescence and a distant civility in his presence. But he knew that the darkness that existed in her tormented mind could erupt in his direction—or anyone else’s—without the slightest warning. If that happened, he would be ready—unlike those unfortunate others.

The time was edging its way towards six o’clock, and the guard shifted restlessly. He began to lose focus on the object of his scrutiny, and began thinking of that night’s dinner, and the three or four beers he would consume between leaving the courthouse and reaching the dingy two-room apartment that had served as home for over ten years. The woman was still quiet and calm, and the only movement that he could detect was an occasional moistening of her lips.

When he had first been assigned to her, those many months ago, she had been little more than a barely animate shell whose only testament to awareness was an occasional movement of her milky eyes. Looking into those eerie eyes he could still see an ever-moving ripple of mood changes that both fascinated and repelled him. He had quickly gauged the situation: there was no possible way of predicting how she would act or react to anything that he would do or say; he would have to be even more cautious than usual in his dealings with her.

In the following months of incarceration, legal maneuverings and psychiatric sessions, those eyes had seemed to wash out of light and emotion to match her physical demeanor of listlessness; only a rare flickering of sensation ever showed the vibrant woman trapped within the shell. He applied extra caution to their daily dealings.

A sharp rap at the door wrenched them both out of their private thoughts. A familiar man entered the room, his eyes riveted on the woman sitting at the table. In the split second before he spoke, he thought, I loved you for so long, then articulated the words for which they had all been waiting since the nightmare had come to its climax nearly two years earlier.

“The jury’s back in—they have a verdict.”

She barely glanced at him, or at the guard, and tensed up as the lawyer began to wheel her chair swiftly and gracefully. She hadn’t spoken in many months, but she was ready and strangely eager to face the decision of the twelve strangers who had been given the charge to judge her life. She and her lawyer left the room first, followed by the guard. The mixture of darkness and light in the room finally fused to create an empty waiting place of still, even grey.

BOOK ONE

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CHAPTER ONE

June, 1965, Hartford, Connecticut

Norah Serafina Maguire was one of those human beings who do not, never have, and never will fit comfortably into any category of people. Ever. This inescapable fact of life had troubled her for a great part of her twenty years, but had long since diminished in importance as she came to rely on only herself for real companionship and direction.

She had been intensely introspective a few days after her UConn graduation on June 7th; most of the graduates had left or were leaving, but there were still quite a lot of students on campus preparing for summer classes. She liked the early mornings best when the campus was peaceful. On this cool, lovely morning, she was sitting on a bench gazing out on Mirror Lake as ducks and a few wild geese were swimming silently, bobbing their heads frequently to nip at insects and small fish just beneath the surface. An occasional quack broke the silence. She sat there from dawn until mid-morning, breathing in the fresh country air, and fighting back pangs of sadness and regret that she would be leaving this academic sanctuary forever.

She had loved her life here, studying Journalism 111 and 112, as well as the only two other classes in that regimen; her dreams of being a journalist had to be supplemented by as many English classes as she was allowed to take. She forced herself to pay attention to her science and math classes, but thrived on studying Roman and Greek mythology, and biology. She had given a passing thought to going into medicine, but her desire to write far outweighed that brief consideration. Her attempts at physical education in archery and tennis were pathetic.

She had found it hard to focus on some courses that were presented in an auditorium with hundreds of students; the English teachers at Bulkeley High School had never really taught their students how to take proper notes. Her difficulty in adjusting to the university world had destabilized the first half of her freshman year. She buckled down and shot up to the Dean’s List for the rest of her tenure, pushing her grades to within .04 of a point of graduating Magna Cum Laude; she’d had to settle for a mere Cum Laude on her record. She knew that would always irk her.