Veni, Vidi... Meow? Chapter One

Persistent mewing gradually permeated the industrious bubble that surrounded Grant and the pile of coursework he needed to grade. When he realized he had a crick in his neck from being hunched over the desk so long, he sighed and leaned back in his chair. The sofa was looking awfully inviting...

But there was that mewing again. His neighbor must've accidentally closed her cat out again. Grant rubbed the back of his neck and looked from the half-empty pack of cigarettes to the window where the fire escape was. Quitting was going to have to wait until after he finished this class. He grabbed the pack in one tired fist and made his way to the window, clambering out onto the fenced metal grating outside to smoke.

"Hey Trouble," he greeted the gray tabby cat sitting at the next window. The cat returned his greeting with a glare of displeasure and refused to comment. "It can't be as bad as all that," Greg told the cat, and he could've sworn the cat rolled his eyes. Chuckling, he leaned down to tap on the window with the hand holding his cigarettes and pet the feline with the other. As usual, the cat permitted it with an ill grace that made him want to stop instantly and yet continue to see how long the cat would let him, both at once. Another stroke and the cat was all friendly, rubbing against his ankles. He tapped on the glass again, then turned to peer between the blinds. "Maia? Hey, Maia, you home? There's a..."

Suddenly he forgot what foolishness he was about to ramble. A rare glimpse through the swinging blinds showed him what looked like a man lying unconscious on her floor. And if he weren't mistaken, that was blood, not a red carpet. He peered closer, concerned, and what he saw made him scramble for his phone.


The desk attendant looked up from his newspaper with some surprise. "Can I help you, miss?" Most people didn't visit Sunshine Home during the week, except for a few devoted family members, but this woman was not someone he'd seen before. Dressed in business casual attire, she carried a briefcase.

"Yes, I'm here to see Maia Saunders. I have a letter from her lawyer, clearing me and granting me permission for an interview."

"Let me call the director."


Lindsay was led through the mental institution by a woman in white and lavender scrubs. When they reached the back yard, which was far more expansive than Lindsay would have imagined from the front of the building, the woman pointed to a figure seated in the gazebo, facing away from them. "That's Maia."

From the position, it looked like the young woman was meditating. "Should I wait until she's done?"

"You'd be waiting a long time," the medical assistant replied. "She sits there until we call her in. No one really bothers her out here. But she's quite easy going, she won't mind being bothered for a change."

Something about the woman's expression bothered Lindsay, but she couldn't quite place it. "What aren't you telling me?"

The medical assistant looked at her sneakers. "Have you ever met Maia?" she asked after a moment, not looking up.

"No."

"She's... odd." The woman looked up, face concerned. "I don't want you to think she's anything but an angel. I've never known a sweeter person. But she's too intelligent for her own good. She... knows things. Without being told. It's hard to spend much time around her." The medical assistant didn't seem eager to leave the back porch of the institution, so Lindsay had no choice but to continue without the uneasy woman.

The journalist sighed and walked along the cement walk that curved from the porch towards the gazebo. She slowed as she reached the recently-painted building, not wanting to startle the young woman in front of her.

"What nonsense was Denise telling you?" the patient asked without turning. So much for startling her.

"Denise?" Lindsay asked, never having been introduced to the medical assistant. She assumed that was who 'Denise' was, at least.

"Probably that I'm scary, or odd? No matter." The loose brown ponytail that was facing Lindsay shook from side to side slightly. "What can I do for you?"

Lindsay had been put on guard by the medical assistant's uneasiness, but this calm young woman was being too polite not to arouse the writer's suspicions. "I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind." At least social graces was something to fall back on. Hardly what she'd been expecting, but then, Lindsay wasn't really sure what she had expected from the patient.

"Would you like to join me?" the seated young woman asked, still without turning. "It is generally more pleasant out here than anywhere they would offer to have us sit inside. And it's mercifully free of facilitators."

Lindsay had to smile at that. She took the two steps slowly, moving inside the gazebo and setting her briefcase on the bench before seating herself next to it. "My name is Lindsay Grafner. I occasionally write articles for the Globe when they require someone with special knowledge of the psychological field." The profile presented by the patient was hardly anything startling, and Lindsay was beginning to wonder what the institute's director had meant about being face to face with Maia Saunders.

"Ah, and it's time for little Maia to stop hiding in the asylum, is it?"

Lindsay had never heard such derision presented with so little facial expression. "Hardly. But your case has come up for review and they're hoping you might have more to add than you did a year ago." Why did she feel like she was the one being questioned? Whatever this woman was, she raised Lindsay's hackles in quite an uncomfortable way.

"Miss Grafner, this is not a case you want to become involved in. I would suggest you forget about it. Return to your classroom and pretend you'd never heard my name."

Lindsay had been told that Maia was unlikely to answer questions, but this woman was too much of a puzzle for the writer to just turn away. She'd never felt so uneasy with a nonconfrontational patient in so short a time in her life. "How did you know I was a professor?"

"You have chalk under your fingernails, and on the toe of your shoe." A glance away from Maia told Lindsay that this was, indeed, true. But the patient wasn't finished. "Besides, I've been reading the Globe for years, every day that I had access to it, at least. I've read some of your articles, they're charmingly bland. I'd suggest you try to speak to bias, rather than keep it out of the article entirely. Readers are less likely to ignore your politically correct narrative if you bounce things off the biases they're aware of."

"Writing advice from a mental patient?" Lindsay pointed out with a smirk. "I'm not sure how I should feel about that."

"Whether you take it or not is up to you, but I think you'll find it's sound advice. However, I really do suggest you leave before you get in over your head." The young woman's eyes were still closed, and her facial expression hadn't changed since Lindsay had sat down.

"If you don't want to talk to me, you don't have to warn me off, just say so," Lindsay told Maia, slightly annoyed that the woman would choose to play it like that. Her original impression of Maia made her seem much more blunt.

"I don't care who I talk to, if they want to speak with me," Maia replied. "Unfortunately, you really will get in over your head in my case. There's a good reason it's been unsolved for so long, and I can understand why the judge preferred to have me institutionalized rather than speak in full judicial court. Anyone trying to pick apart me or my case is likely to end up in here beside me."

"I think I'll take my chances, if you don't mind." Lindsay opened her briefcase and pulled out a tape recorder, which she flicked on. "Maia, would you please summarize what happened a year ago for me? Having your words will help me find my starting point."

The patient shrugged, turning her head slightly toward the tape recorder, though how the woman had known what it was with her eyes closed puzzled the writer. "I was being followed for about a week before my apartment window was broken. That first time, the alarm scared off whoever had tried to break in. A few days later, when I could tell I was still being followed every so often, I came home from class to find a large man waiting for me in my bedroom. I don't know who he was, I never saw who was following me, just repetitive glimpses of cars or shapes without clear features that usually disappeared after I noticed them. The details of who he was are probably in the police report, I don't know. They never told me." Something about how she said 'I don't know' made Lindsay curious. The young woman had known she was a professor from a few traces of chalk, but she didn't know who attacked her?

Lindsay nodded when she realized Maia was finished. "No reasons you would be followed, bad experiences prior to the event, anything like that?" she asked for confirmation of what she already knew.

"Nothing that you'd believe, no. They all just decided I was paranoid with possible mental disorders."

Trying to decide how to approach that one, Lindsay decided she could take a different approach and see where it took her. "You said you were coming home from a class. Are you a... grad student?" It took her a moment to remember how old Maia was now, and where in the line of education that would likely have placed her a year ago.

"I was working on my PhD in quantum physics," replied the meditative woman, speaking as if it was nothing special. "Specifically--"

"I'll have to stop you there, it won't mean much to me, regardless. Where were you at school?"

"I was at MIT, though I think I was teaching more than working on my doctorate at the time. I had a rather reclusive professor for an advisor, and he agreed to take me on, conditional upon my teaching his intro classes and a good portion of his advanced ones as well. But teaching has a way of explaining the material in more detail than you already knew it, so if anything it was helping me on my thesis."

Lindsay was nodding, having found the same thing true of her own teaching, when she realized that a twenty-four-year-old teaching advanced classes at MIT was rather remarkable. For the school to allow it at all, Maia must be more than just above average intelligence, though she'd noticed that already. She pulled out a notebook and jotted a note to see if Maia had ever gone through neurological testing of any sort. "That's quite an achievement. Will you go back to it when you're released?"

The dry chuckle that escaped Maia's lips was not comforting. "If they let me out, I'd need to complete a couple classes, but my thesis is finished, and my advisor approved it. But I doubt they'll be letting me out any time soon."

"You seem rather sure of your situation here," Lindsay commented idly.

"Fairly certain, yes. It's not hard to figure out with my record and my case file. The case has self-defense written all over it, but that doesn't change the fact that I killed a man larger than I with my bare hands, and the docs think I'm insane. Insane killers don't usually get to run around free." The tone she presented this in was so bland, Lindsay was staring at her by the time she was through.

Maia's commentary dovetailed with Lindsay's own early impressions of the case, but to hear that from an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic was unprecedented as far as she was concerned. "Maia, I think I need to get your records from the institution, which will likely take more paperwork before I can take them home to look over. I had thought a brief interview would be enough, but I'm beginning to wonder. I'll be coming back as soon as I get them, again if that's all right with you."

"Sure," was the bland reply with a tiny shrug. "Say hi to your kitten from me."

Lindsay blinked. "I don't have a cat."

"Uh-huh."

And with that noncommittal statement from the woman who'd pulled 'professor' out of a few traces of chalk, Lindsay Grafner retreated back into the Sunshine Home.