Magic hour: a novel (14 page)

He went upstairs, took a quick shower, and changed his clothes.

He was at the steamy mirror, shaving, when he thought about her again.

The pierced ear.

He put down his razor slowly, staring at the tiny dot in his ear. It was barely visible anymore; he hadn’t worn an earring in more than seven years.

But she’d seen it, and in seeing it, she’d glimpsed the man he used to be.

“Y
OU DECIDED TO HOLD A PRESS CONFERENCE WITHOUT WARNING ME
?” Julia couldn’t help yelling at her sister. “Why not just tie a yellow ribbon around my throat and toss me to the wolves?”

“How was I supposed to know you’d stop by? You never came home last night, but I’m supposed to plan around your movements. Who am I? Carnac the Magnificent?”

Julia sat back in the car seat and crossed her arms. In the sudden silence, rain pattered the windshield of the police cruiser.

“Maybe the media
should
know you’re here. I’ll tell them how much we believe—”

“You think it would be a
good
thing to show my face on camera? Now? My patient—a kid, mind you—beat me up. It hardly is a ringing endorsement of my skills.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“
I
know that,” Julia snapped. “Believe me when I tell you they won’t.”

It was the same thing she’d told herself a dozen times in the last thirty minutes. For a moment there, when she’d seen those reporters, she’d considered revealing herself as the doctor on this case. But it was too early. They no longer trusted her. She needed to do something right or they’d ruin her. Again.

She had to get the girl talking. And fast.

This was obviously going to be a big story for a few days. Headlines would be everywhere; people would be speculating about the girl’s identity. The story would probably run that she was incapable of intelligible speech because of brain damage or unwilling to talk because of fear or trauma. Nothing seized the public attention like a mystery; the press would pull at every strand. Sooner or later, Julia knew, she would be part of the story.

Ellie pulled up in front of the library. The building, an old converted taxidermy shop, sat tucked up against a stand of towering Douglas fir. Night was falling fast, so the gravel path to the door could barely be seen. “I sent everyone home for the night,” Ellie said, reaching into her breast pocket for the key. “Just like you asked. And Jules . . . I am sorry.”

“Thanks.” Julia heard the wobble in her voice. It revealed more than she would have liked. And Ellie heard it.

If things had been different between them, this was the moment when she would reach out to her sister and say
I’m scared to face the media again.
Instead, she cleared her throat and said, “I need somewhere private to work with the child.”

“As soon as we find a temporary foster parent, we can move her. We’re looking for—”

“I’ll do it. Call DSHS. There shouldn’t be any problem getting me approved. I’ll get the paperwork filled out tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I can’t help her an hour a week, or even an hour a day. She’ll be a full-time job for a while. Get the paperwork started from your end.”

“Okay.”

Headlights came up behind them, illuminating the cab. Moments later there was a knock at the car window that sounded like gunfire.

Julia opened the car door.

Penelope stood alongside the passenger door, waving happily. Behind her was a battered old pickup truck. She was already into her sentence when Julia stepped out. “—said you could borrow old Bertha for a while. She was his daddy’s hay truck when they lived in Moses Lake. The keys are in it.”

“Thank you, Penelope.”

“Call me Peanut. Heck, we’re practically related, with Ellie being my best friend and all.”

Julia had a sudden memory of Penelope at Mom’s funeral. She’d taken care of everything and everyone like a den mother. When Ellie had started to cry, Penelope bustled her out of the room. Later, Julia had seen her sitting beside Ellie on the end of her parents’ bed, rocking a sobbing Ellie as if she were a child.

Julia could have used a friend like that in the past year. “Thanks, Peanut.”

Ellie got out of the cruiser and came around to where they stood. Her police-issue black heels crunched the gravel. As they stood there, the clouds drifted away to reveal a watery moon. “Get in the car, Pea. I’ll walk her to the front door.”

Peanut fluttered her fingers in a sorority girl wave and lowered herself into the cruiser, slamming the door shut.

Julia and Ellie walked up the gravel path to the library. As they neared the entrance, moonlight fell on the
READING IS FUN!
poster that filled the front window.

Ellie unlocked the door and opened it, leaning forward to flick on the lights. Then she looked at Julia. “Can you really help this girl?”

Julia’s anger slipped away, along with the residue of her fear. They were back on track, talking about what mattered. “Yes. Any progress on her identity?”

“No. We’ve input her height, weight, eye and hair color into the system, so we’re narrowing the possibilities down. We’ve also photographed and logged the scarring on her legs and shoulder. She has a very particular birthmark on her back left shoulder, too. That’s the one identifying mark we know has always been on her. The FBI advised me to keep it secret—to weed out the kooks and crackpots. Max sent her dress to the lab, to look for fibers, but I’m sure the dress is homemade, so it won’t give us a factory. Maybe DNA, but that’s a real long shot. Her fingerprints don’t match any recorded missing kids. That’s not unusual, of course. Parents don’t routinely fingerprint their kids. We’ve got her blood, so if someone comes forward, we can run a DNA test.” Ellie sighed. “In other words, we’re hoping that her mother reads tomorrow’s newspaper and comes forward. Or that you can get her to tell us her name.”

“What if it was her mother that tied her up and left her to die?”

Ellie’s gaze was steady. It was obvious that she’d thought the same thing. They both knew that the overwhelming number of child abductions were by family members. Cases like Elizabeth Smart were incredibly rare. “Then you’d better get the truth out of her,” she said quietly. “It’s the only way we can help her.”

“Nothing like a little pressure.”

“On both of us, believe me. Until this week, my toughest law enforcement job was taking car keys from people at The Pour House on Friday night.”

“We’ll take it one step at a time, I guess. First off, I need a place to work with her.”

“I’m on it.”

“Good.” Julia smiled. “Don’t wait up for me. I’ll be home late.” She stepped over the threshold and onto the serviceable brown carpeting.

Ellie touched her shoulder. “Jules?”

Julia turned. Her sister’s face was half in shadow and half in light. “Yes?”

“I believe you can do it, you know.”

Julia was surprised by how much that meant to her. She didn’t trust her voice to sound normal, so she didn’t say thank you. Instead, she nodded, then turned on her heel and went into the brightly lit library. Behind her, she heard Ellie sigh heavily and say, “I believe in you, too, big sis. I know you can find the kid’s family.” Then the door banged shut.

Julia winced. It had never occurred to her to return the sentiment. She’d always seen her sister as indestructible. Ellie had never needed approval the way she had. Ellie always expected the world to love her, and the world had complied. It was unsettling to get a glimpse of her sister’s inner nature. There was a vulnerability in there somewhere, a fragility that belied the tough-girl-meets-beauty-queen exterior. So, they had something else in common after all.

Julia walked around a grid of tables to the row of computers. There were five of them—four more than she’d expected—sitting on individual desks beneath a cork bulletin board studded with book covers and flyers announcing local events.

She pulled a legal-sized yellow tablet and a black pen out of her briefcase, then scouted through the interior pockets for her handheld tape recorder. Finding it, she added new batteries, turned it on and said: “Case file one, patient name unknown.”

Clicking the Stop button, she sat down on the hard wooden chair and scooted closer to the screen. The computer came on with a
thump-buzz.
The screen lit up. Within seconds she was surfing the Net and making notes. While she wrote, she also talked into the recorder.

“Case number one, patient: female child, age unknown. Appears to be between five and seven years of age. Name unknown.

Child presents with limited or no language ability. Physical assessment is severe dehydration and malnutrition. Extensive ligature-type scarring on body suggests some serious past trauma. Socialization impairment appears to be marked, as does her ability to interact in an age appropriate manner. Child exhibited utter stillness for hours, broken by period of high excitability and irritation. Additionally, she appears to be terrified of shiny metal objects.

Initial diagnosis: autism.”

She clicked the recorder off, frowning. It didn’t feel right. She Googled
autism, symptoms of,
and read through the list of behaviors typically associated with autism. None of it was new information.

•  Language delay

•  Some never acquire language

•  Lack of pleasure at being touched

•  Unable/unwilling to make eye contact

•  Ignores surroundings

•  May appear deaf, due to ignoring of sounds/world around him/her

•  Repetitive physical behaviors common, i.e., hand clapping, toe tapping

•  Severe temper tantrums

•  Unintelligible gibberish

•  Savant abilities may develop, often in math or music or drawing

•  Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to age level

The list went on. According to the DSM IV criteria, a patient who exhibited a set number of the symptoms could reasonably be diagnosed as autistic. Unfortunately, she hadn’t observed the child fully enough to answer many of the behavioral questions. Like: did the girl like to be touched? Could she exhibit reciprocal emotions? To these, Julia had no concrete answers.

But she had a gut response.

The girl
could
speak, at least some, and she could hear and understand some limited amount. Strangely, Julia was convinced that the girl’s responses were normal; it was the world around her that was wrong.

There was no point in running through the related diagnoses—Asperger’s syndrome, Ratt’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, or PDD NOS. She simply didn’t have enough information. On her pad, she wrote:
Tomorrow: study social interaction, patterns of behavior (if any), motor skills.

She clicked the pen shut, tapped it on the table.

There was something she was missing. She went back to the computer and started searching. She had no idea what she was looking for.

For the next two hours she sat there taking notes on whatever childhood behavioral and mental disorders she could find, but none of them gave her that
Aha!
moment. Finally, at around eleven, she ran a Google search on
lost children.
That took her to a lot of television movies and kidnapping sites. That was her sister’s job. She added
woods
to the search to see how many similar cases there were of children lost or abandoned in a forest or national park.

Feral children
came up. It was a phrase she hadn’t seen in print since her college days. Below it was the sentence fragment: . . . 
lost or abandoned children raised by wolves or bears in the deep woods may seem . . .

She moved the cursor and clicked. Text appeared on the screen.

Feral children are lost, abandoned, or otherwise forgotten children who survive in completely isolated conditions. The idea of children raised by wolves or bears is prevalent in legend, although there are few scientifically documented cases. Some of the more celebrated such children include:

•  The three Hungarian bear boys (17th century)

•  The girl of Oranienburg (1717)

•  Peter, the wild boy (1726)

•  Victor of Aveyron (1797)

•  Kaspar Hauser (1828)

•  Kamala and Amala of India (1920)

•  Genie (1970)