Lady Jail Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Abigail

  Émile

  Doi

  Rozlynn

  Sandra

  Isaure

  Malka

  Marie-Philomène

  Jodi & Courtney

  Lagarde

  Part Two

  Paquet

  Lagarde

  Quinn

  Courtney

  Dubroc

  Temple

  Rozlynn

  Sandra

  Doi

  Malka

  Jodi & Courtney

  Doi

  Borde

  Afterword

  LADY JAIL

  John Farrow

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and 2021 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 2020 by John Farrow Mysteries Inc.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of John Farrow Mysteries Inc. to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9073-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-742-2 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0470-7 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  The author thanks the women he met at the Joliette Institution for Women for their cake and candor, and dedicates this novel to them.

  Be free.

  PART ONE

  ABIGAIL

  i

  They heard murmurings. Tales of allegiances and alliances, rumor of war. The year was 1994. They spoke in whispers and did the laundry.

  Over sandwiches one time, they played a game. Let’s say one of us gets snuffed. OK, who did it? Everyone wanted to be mentioned, to be in on the action, to be considered the killer at large. Everyone was. They laughed and laughed. They howled. Nobody asked who the victim should be. To say that out loud might be sufficient cause for trouble. Or murder.

  On Monday mornings the women met in the communal kitchen for a practical discussion. They ordered groceries. Each inmate was allocated twenty dollars a week; a total of one hundred and sixty dollars for a house-unit of eight prisoners. Overspend on meat, go without vegetables. Add a cake mix, request Kraft Dinner to stay on budget. Plan carefully. Be disciplined. Eat through the budget in five days, skimp for two. Go without whatever spoiled or burned. They had to be smart and cautious. By necessity they had to cooperate. That was the general idea: cooperation aided their progress toward that magical realm known as rehabilitation.

  ‘Get this, if we swing along, we get along. Nobody’s eyes get gouged out. I know, right? They think that way. Like, insane or what?’

  Reaching consensus, they marked their selections on an order form.

  Spuds and beans. Steaks. Chicken wings, legs, breasts. Chops. Go easy on the candy bars.

  In the Joliette Institution for Women – Lady Jail, they called it; by any name, a penitentiary – the women were segregated into group quarters rather than individual cells. The framework was considered experimental, an attempt at prison reform. Anyone wishing to be returned to the regular system with cells and steel bars and crappy food needed only to put in the request to be transferred within the week. Rarely did anyone do so and the waiting list for female prisoners in traditional penitentiaries hoping to arrive at Joliette was lengthy. The criteria for admittance basic: a prisoner had to be eighteen or older, as in any pen, and have two or more years remaining on her original sentence. That part was easy. The more critical requirement was difficult to achieve: an official’s signed stamp of approval.

  Once admitted, prisoners were given latitude to adapt. Second chances were permitted. Florence was back in solitary for the fourth time, yet as long as no convict was beating up bunkmates on a regular basis and she wasn’t caught with a shiv and didn’t topple a guard with a frying pan she could stay. Do the work. Get along. Stay. Pretty much everyone’s mantra.

  Each prisoner managed the life differently.

  Recently transferred to Joliette, Abigail was figuring out how things went down. She was struggling to adjust. When she first learned of her transfer, she was super-duper excited but also scared. Being delirious with joy was something she kept to herself, while also letting no one detect her fright. Moving through the system meant landing with a whole different slew of inmates, none of whom she’d know. No one could project how that would pan out. She had to give up the few close friends she’d made at the Nova Institution for Women – a pen by any other name – in Truro, Nova Scotia, and that was hard. Joliette was seven hundred miles away and most prisoners there spoke French, although they lumped English inmates together in the same house-units. She wouldn’t have family visitors. Too far away. Pretty lonely. Old friends in Montreal might visit, but who among them would want to associate with a convicted felon? They probably couldn’t get past the sniffer dog or the mass spectrometry machine anyway. Abigail was excited, though, and not because she’d be preparing her own food and baking cakes, although she loved to bake cakes. And eat them, too. The biggest deal: wearing her own clothes. Out of prison garb and, within reason, into her own togs: worth any sacrifice. She wasn’t prepared for communal living and shy to get started, but wearing her own get-up for the next six years? For that she’d accept any adjustment or hardship ten times over.

  ‘Abigail? Seriously. Order something. Everybody eats it anyway. Order for you, so long as you share. It’s your twenty bucks.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed. She had something she wanted to order.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Carrots.’

  ‘Carrots are on the basics list. Kinda automatic.’

  ‘I mean the baby ones. The tiny ones.’

  Courtney checked the list. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘They got those.’

  They agreed. They’d order baby-sized carrots.

  ‘With dip!’ Courtney suggested.

  They had a choice of three kinds. Onion, dill, or roasted pepper. They argued over that and chose the roasted pepper.

  ‘We could pretend we’re having a midnight snack.’

  ‘They’re cheap. You know. Just saying
.’

  ‘Not the dip.’

  ‘Who cares? More KD, less pork.’

  They ordered more baby carrots and dip, this time the onion. They were looking forward to that midnight snack-fest, although it could never take place at midnight. They’d pull solitary for a stunt like that.

  ‘We’ll be the first to OD on baby carrots.’

  ‘Abi! Good idea, girl.’

  ii

  Two days after Abigail arrived, she found out why each of her housemates was doing time. A way of opening up the conversation, the getting-to-know-you aspect. She told them what she was in for, too. Only fair to tell them, since they were willing to share their own stories.

  ‘Fraud,’ Abi admitted. ‘Eight and a half.’

  ‘Months?’

  ‘Years. Six to go.’

  A silence.

  ‘Fraud,’ Temple repeated. She chewed on the word. ‘Fraud.’ As though fraud was a wad of gum. Temple, the only black woman among them, was in for smuggling, although she didn’t let on what she smuggled. Just as Abigail didn’t say whom she defrauded or how she did it or for how much. Abigail figured Temple’s smuggling came down to the usual: drugs, most likely, or perhaps jewelry. She realized later that everybody gave out only the bare bones of their crimes; that they held back on the critical details. Instinctively, she did that, too.

  Quite the roll call. Even when limited to the bare bones.

  She didn’t know how she could fit in here.

  Doi was the eldest. Abigail didn’t want to ask her age. Late fifties, early sixties a reasonable guess. Doi was Polish and a mother. She was still a mother, she said, even though she had slashed her daughter. Cut her up pretty good with a hatchet for staying out late at night. At least the teenager survived. It seemed like the right thing to do, Doi said, to attack her daughter with a hatchet for staying out late with a boy.

  Right. The thing to do. Take a small axe to your own kid. Abigail had been inside with rough people in Nova, but she never had to sleep in the same dorm with them or bake cakes alongside them.

  The next oldest was Malka. Early fifties, give or take five years. Hard to tell with her, too. She’d been a minor politician. A city councilwoman, and previously a small-town mayor for a decade before losing an election. After her defeat she ran again and made it back onto council. That was before she was convicted of murdering her own husband.

  A band of killers, Abigail was thinking. Christ!

  Florence – who told Abigail she could call her Flo most of the time as long as she called her Florence once a week and warned her to keep track – had thrown acid in the face of a rival. ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t mean to, but she was asking for it,’ Flo said, although Abigail couldn’t imagine anyone alive asking for that, and someone who threw acid had to mean it. Her blood chilled inside her and she made up her mind to give Flo miles of personal space. She wondered if she shouldn’t ask to go back to Nova immediately and she’d only just arrived. The clothes an old friend from school sent to her hadn’t passed inspection yet – they were being checked to make sure she wasn’t smuggling in a pistol wrapped in her panties or a shiv in her socks – and already she wanted out.

  Temple, the smuggler, was in her mid-to-late-twenties like her, and Rozlynn was early twenties although she’d been inside since she was eighteen. The two kids, Jodi and Courtney, were both nineteen years old and seemed to be virtually inseparable, though not, as far as Abigail could tell, as lovers. Big-time friends, though, and she envied them that. Jodi had shot a man in a convenience store robbery while providing cover for her boyfriend – she didn’t elaborate on the victim or on the damage done. Courtney had stabbed her best friend to death with a kitchen knife. She did elaborate on why – the girl had flirted with Courtney’s boyfriend.

  Rozlynn was very quiet overall and said nothing herself about her crime. She was First Nations. Doi spoke for her. ‘Can I say?’ Doi asked her.

  Rozlynn nodded.

  ‘She killed her father on her eighteenth birthday. What does that tell you? I know what it tells me: He deserved it.’

  Unlike, Abigail was thinking, your daughter, hey?

  iii

  Abigail spiraled into a sinkhole of depression. She’d been through this before. The episodes were never welcome. Wearing her own clothes once they’d been inspected – no hidden weapons, no weed – helped her out for about an hour. The novelty faded. Reality walloped her mood. The group voted for Temple to speak with her, partly because Temple volunteered, and mostly because they were similar in age.

  ‘It’s like you’re not happy here, Abi.’

  ‘Who is?’

  Temple chortled. She found that very funny. ‘So right,’ she said. ‘So right.’ They sat together in their dorm. They had deliberately been left alone. For several minutes they sat in silence, separated perhaps by culture and race.

  ‘Where is everybody?’ Abigail asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, OK? I’m not making out with you.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Part of the thing here, right? We can’t let nobody go down a rabbit hole in the dark. Not by herself. Find out why first. Find out what’s up. Keeps the morale high, you know? Supposed to work that way, anyhow.’

  ‘Some idea.’

  ‘I know, right? But look, everybody can tell you’re freaking out. I get it. You’re a fraud artist. You’re in with a hatchet-wielding mom and a daddy-killer. We got a shooter and a stabber. You’re peaceful. All you do is bilk people. Malka used poison to finish off her old man. She did it slow. Like she wanted him to feel the worst pain for the longest time, then die in pure misery. We won’t even talk about Flo. Let’s not. She throws acid. Who does that?’

  ‘I thought we weren’t talking about it.’

  ‘I know, right? But me and you, we have this thing in common. You’re not in here sitting with a fencepost halfway up your butt all by your lonesome self. All right? We’re sitting on the same fucked up fence, me and you.’

  Abigail had to work through that image. Then she said, ‘In common? How do you figure that? You mean like we didn’t kill anybody?’

  ‘I mean like we’re the real criminals in here, right?’

  ‘Wait. What?’

  Temple’s hands were expressive. ‘Think about it. Everybody else is nothing more than a fuck-up who didn’t control her temper. Me, you, we had our own purpose. We knew what we were doing. They didn’t. We’re legitimate crooks, right? These others? Fine ordinary upstanding citizens who lost their shit for a few seconds. Except for Malka maybe, because she took her time. But it was only her husband. It’s not like she’s a homicidal maniac. Just don’t marry the woman. All these others, they have regrets. Me and you, we had ambition, right? We had our plans. We were in the game. We got caught is all.’

  ‘Jodi was out robbing a variety store,’ Abigail pointed out to her.

  ‘You’re right about that, you got me there. Except I think it was a convenience store, but what’s the difference, right? Still, it’s like she was having an experience. Adolescent bullshit crap. Nothing more. She got stoned. She got pissed. She was on some kind of mind-fuck drug. Like meth. She was handed a gun, told to stand beside her idiot boyfriend to look tough while he emptied the till. I know, what? Like she could look tough. That one looks like an angel on a Christmas card. Fairy dust falls off her back when she walks by. Jodi, she was starting in the life – first time out she panicked. Blasted away for no reason. Tried to shoot her way out of what she was doing, maybe, or tried to shoot herself. Who knows? Really, it’s pathetic if you want to know the truth. She panicked and now she’s inside. Everybody else here, except us, same thing. Spur of the moment type horseshit. You and me, we were in it for the long haul. We were in the life. OK, Flo was, too, but same as the others she just lost it. We got busted for one crime only but got away with a ton of others, am I right? Tell me I’m not wrong.’

  Abigail said nothing, never wise to admit to anything, but her nod conceded the validity of the
argument. She had been committed to a life bilking the hapless and the banks, some thought, although those who were plugged in probably knew by now that she’d bilked the mob. Word gets around and that kind of news never stays tight. Mob women were on the inside. Inevitable, and it scared her. They’d still be following orders. Temple was mobbed up, she could tell, so she only pretended to trust her.

  ‘One more thing we have in common. I’m guessing, but fraud artist? You know what that makes me think?’

  Abigail waited to hear.

  ‘Tells me you weren’t working alone. Plus, you got a whack of years for only fraud. Like, Jesus, must’ve been some kind of scam. Other people in it with you. A man, I bet, maybe more than one. Maybe a gang. Like me. Part of a gang.’

  She sure sounded as though she was digging for deeper dirt. ‘What did you smuggle?’

  ‘You really want to know?’ Temple asked her back.

  Abigail shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Some don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Want to know. I mean, after I tell them, they wish they didn’t know. Or they don’t want to know me.’

  ‘You have to tell me now, after that intro.’

  ‘Weapons. Ammo. Heavy caliber horseshit, baby.’

  Abigail stared back at her.

  ‘I know, what? Now you’re thinking you’re really screwed. Just remember, you’re the hardened criminal in here. And yeah, that would be me, too. Us, and that’s it. The rest of these chick-a-roos? Amateurs. They couldn’t control their own shit. So buck-up, Abi-girl. You belong here. We respect. Even look the fuck up to you. To do what you did? You had to be effing smart. To get that many years for white-collar horseshit? Wow. Not like the rest of us dumb asses. Don’t worry that you never killed nobody. Me neither, though who knows maybe a few took it in the ear from the ammo I supplied and the quick-loaders. The thing is, nobody expects you to kill nobody. You paid your own dues.’

  Abigail took all that in. She said, ‘I was in with weird ladies in Nova. But behind bars. At night, anyway. Separate cells.’