Monday's Child (5 page)

Friday

Ten

The biggest difference, Noah Houston felt, between small towns and big cities was that small towns could be so quiet, and it was the silence that awoke him.

In Los Angeles, no matter what the hour, there was noise: speeding motorcycles, trucks lumbering by, mufflerless cars, and the unnerving sound of helicopters passing overhead.

And sirens.

Sirens always woke him, perhaps because he was a doctor—Pavlov’s dog responding to a different kind of bell?—but now the absence of sirens had brought him from sleep.

It wasn’t light out yet, and he glanced at the clock. Five forty-five.

Too damn early.

He closed his eyes experimentally, on the chance that he might doze off, but that only magnified his awareness that not even the crickets were stirring. He found himself listening for the settling sounds that houses made, or the low hum of the refrigerator.

Nothing.

It occurred to him that the fog which had been descending on the town as he’d driven home late last night had thickened into a dense cocoon through which nothing could be heard. He imagined it enveloping the house, tendrils of mist probing for points of entry . . .

“Uh huh,” he said, and sat up in bed. He shook his head to clear it. What was it about this place that invited such surreal ruminations?

Winslow was a small town very much like other small towns he’d seen, with modest homes, an unobtrusive business community, and a largely undetectable infrastructure. A majority of the residents were of retirement age—he had a suspicion that Winslow might not exist if not for the senior citizens and their social security benefits and pensions—but there were also families with school-age children.

The town had a single elementary school which offered classes for kindergarten through the sixth grade, but shared the secondary school with its closest neighbor, aptly named Tranquility.

Some of the residents commuted to jobs in the larger surrounding towns, but by and large, most worked in Winslow. Living was slow and, if not exactly easy, it wasn’t as hard as the city. People smiled.

By day, there was nothing of the gothic about Winslow, and yet . . .

No, it wasn’t the town.

It was her.

After arriving in Winslow, he’d spent most of the afternoon and all evening at the small Community Hospital which served the town. Since he held a high advisory position in the physicians’ group that supplied the doctors who staffed the hospital’s tiny emergency room, he pretty much had the run of the place.

As usual, he began by reviewing admissions records, looking for patterns, but also for anything out of the ordinary.

With the town’s elderly population, most admissions were to be expected: myocardial infarctions, unstable angina, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and the like.

Surgical procedures were rare—the facilities were adequate but surgeons preferred to admit their patients to larger hospitals than Community—but there was the occasional appendectomy, excisions of basal cell carcinoma or ganglion cysts.

Among younger patients, tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy were the most frequently performed surgeries, followed closely by bilateral myringotomy for chronic acute otitis media.

None of which was of interest to him.

The traumas were what he was looking for. Accidents, particularly those involving children.

More specifically, accidents without a clear and obvious cause.

A child on a skateboard could be expected to get hurt sooner or later. Kids routinely fell off jungle gyms, they bumped heads while engaging in horseplay, they skinned their knees and elbows roller skating, they sprained ankles playing soccer or baseball or other games.

A child doing none of these things, a child playing quietly in a schoolyard, for example, might be considered to be reasonably safe.

Not in this town.

In Winslow, kids got hurt doing nothing at all.

In the years he’d been searching through the records, he’d found a number of these inexplicable instances, most resulting in minor injuries, abrasions and contusions, sprains, a rare fracture now and then.

The medical records of those children revealed certain similarities.

First, they were all between the ages of five and eleven.

Naturally—there being no alternative—they were students at Meadowbrook Elementary. Not so naturally, eighty percent of the injuries occurred on the school grounds.

All maintained they were “not doing anything” when injured.

Most were boys, at a ratio of three to one.

All had abnormally low pulse rates when first seen in the emergency room.

All showed sluggish reflexes, and slowed neurological responses for at least an hour after being injured. Eye exams revealed that their pupils were not adequately reactive to light.

In most instances, the medical personnel had ascribed these abnormalities to a form of shock, although at least one doctor had ordered a drug screen when an eight-year-old boy, had a mild seizure after suffering a dislocated right shoulder while at school.

“Rule out ingestion of unknown substance,” the doctor had written.

Houston had sought out the doctor involved, finally reaching her by phone. But although she knew immediately to which case he was referring, she had no answer for him.

“It was odd,” she’d told him, “I wasn’t sure
what
was going on with him. He had no history of seizures, no known head injury. I kept him for observation and his condition improved. That’s all I can say.”

“What about your impressions.”

“I’ve just said—”

“Not medically. Emotionally. What made you suspect drugs?”

For a moment she’d been silent. In the background he heard a beeper go off. “Listen, I’ve got to call my service—”

“Please.”

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “These days an eight-year-old on drugs isn’t uncommon.”

“In LA, maybe.”

“Even in the small towns. He just looked drugged to me. Hell, he looked anesthetized. Or hypnotized.”

Yes, he thought.

“And to be honest, I was covering my ass. Defensive medicine, you understand?”

He understood.

Then yesterday afternoon, after all the years he’d been coming to Winslow, he’d had a chance to see first-hand what he’d only read about.

They’d brought in Kevin Browne, age seven, with a compound fracture of the right radius and ulna. The boy was unable to talk, nearly stuporous, but the fire department medic related a history of non-traumatic injury.

“The teacher said he was just standing there and all of a sudden his arm broke.”

And Houston knew he had one.

He could track this injury back to its cause.

As much as he wanted to remain objective, he already knew what he’d find.

Jill.

He showered and dressed, then went to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. He’d bought a couple of apple Danish at the bakery in town, and he warmed one in the microwave, trying not to think about what his patients would say if they saw him indulging in the pastries he’d warned them to give up.

It was still early, not yet seven a.m., so he relaxed, having two cups of black coffee and finishing the Danish before going to the front room to take his position.

He drew back the drapes and the morning sunlight flooded the room. The fog had dissipated, and the sky was a crisp blue.

The child wouldn’t be leaving for school for a while, but he was prepared to sit and wait.

He didn’t want to miss her. Not when so much was at stake.

Eleven

Georgia went out in her bathrobe to get the paper, breathing in the fresh, sweet air. The grass was damp—last night’s fog had been the worst yet—but the sun promised warmth for later.

It was going to be a beautiful day.

She returned to the house and took the paper with her into the front room to read while having her tea, but then found herself putting it aside. The morning was too perfect to spoil with news of this or that tragedy, and that was all the newspapers seemed to print of late.

Even the local
Winslow Gazette
went out of its way to import bad news, reporting on drug busts, gang warfare, and the almost nightly drive-by shootings that plagued Los Angeles. It made her anxious for her sister Beverly. And Katy, who at eight could hardly be expected to understand the violence around her.

Georgia sighed and shook her head. She really didn’t want to think about any of that. She took a sip of tea and contemplated the day ahead of her. If only it would stay this peaceful.

And it
was
blissfully peaceful. She supposed that she should feel guilty about it, but early morning had come to be her favorite time of day, those hours before Dave or Jill were awake.

It wasn’t that she wanted the house to herself—in fact she was alone more often than she cared to be—but rather in the morning her world felt safer than at any other time. She could walk through the quiet rooms and enjoy her solitude without having to worry that somewhere, one of them might be needing her.

Knowing where they were comforted her.

She didn’t consider herself an over-protective mother, but since the first day of kindergarten, she’d been nervous about Jill.

Perhaps it was because Jill was adopted, but she’d never been able to shake the feeling that the child could be taken away. It was as if, since she hadn’t endured the pain to bring her daughter into the world, she had no real claim to her.

Legal papers weren’t the same as the bond of shared blood.

What if someday, Jill’s natural mother showed up on their doorstep?

The law, she knew, was on her side, but despite centuries of trying, man still wasn’t able to legislate feelings, to control human emotion. A child couldn’t be forced to love.

Georgia frowned.

Jill was fine. She might not be as demonstrative as other children, but Georgia attributed that to the fact that she’d been without a real family for the first year of her life.

Even now, it upset her that her poor baby had been shunted from home to home. What possessed those people to reject an innocent child? Had they no heart?

If only she and Dave had been the first.

Dave.

He hadn’t come home yet when she went to bed at eleven. Nor was he in when she woke shortly after one.

She’d gotten up and stood at the window, thinking she’d heard a car. She couldn’t see through the fog, but she stayed there, shivering from the cold, willing him home.

Finally, a pair of headlights turned onto the street, but it was only the doctor.

She’d gone back to bed then.

Sometime during the night, Dave apparently tiptoed in, undressed, and crawled into bed beside her. He was sleeping with his back to her when the alarm went off at six, oblivious to the sound.

When she looked to see that he was all right, she noticed the smile on his face.

Dreaming about what?

The teacup rattled as she put it on the saucer, and she realized that her hands were shaking.

Annoyed at the turn her thoughts had taken, she got up and went into the kitchen to start breakfast.

While Dave was in the shower and Jill ate her breakfast, Georgia went into the bedroom. She took the vacation fund piggybank off the dresser and sat on the bed.

She turned the bank upside down and used a butter knife to guide the coins out the narrow opening.

A nickel, a dime, another nickel.

It was slow going, but she needed enough to give to Jill so that she could buy lunch at school. Normally Jill turned her nose up at cafeteria food, but today, as befitting the day before a holiday, there was a special menu, a choice of hamburgers or hotdogs, with potato chips, fresh fruit, and ice cream bars.

Overall, the food represented a nutritional wasteland, but there probably wasn’t a child at Meadowbrook who could resist it.

And it saved her from having to make lunch.

“Ah ha,” she said as a quarter dropped out. “Come to Mama.”

Three pennies tried to come through the slot at the same time and became wedged. She turned the bank right side up and forced them back inside.

“I haven’t got all day,” she told the pig sternly, and shook him for luck. She was rewarded with another quarter and two dimes.

Thank heavens today was payday at the Library. On her break she would make a deposit to cover the checks she’d mailed yesterday, and hold out enough cash to pay for her own meals next week, Easter week.

It was too bad she wouldn’t be able to take time off from work like she had last year, but they needed the money. She hated to leave Jill alone, but she didn’t have a choice, really.

At least she worked nearby. If Jill needed her, she could be home in minutes.

A dime and a penny slid along the knife blade and dropped onto the other coins. She poked at them, counting. “Seventy-six cents.”

The school lunch was a dollar fifty, and extra ice cream bars were priced at twenty-five cents. Another dollar and Jill could have it all.

Her gaze turned to the chair by the dresser where Dave had draped his pants. She could see a corner of his wallet and a thin edge of green within it.

Would he even know if she borrowed a dollar?

The piggybank was heavy in her hands, full of change. It wouldn’t take
that
long to get the rest of the money, she thought, but it would be easier to use a bill.

On the other hand, she had never taken money from her husband’s wallet. He’d never told her not to, but her own mother had been an alcoholic who regularly snuck money from her father’s billfold to pay for her booze, and she’d always felt that doing so was wrong.

Of course, paying for their daughter’s lunch was something else entirely.

At that moment the water in the shower turned off and she glanced at the bathroom door. She heard the shower curtain being drawn back.

She put the piggybank on the bed and got up, moving without sound to the chair. The wallet fit snugly in the pocket, but she pulled it free.

Georgia took a breath and opened it, listening at the same time for footsteps nearing the door.

He had a twenty, a five, and three singles.

With her fingertips, she eased one of the singles out of the wallet.

Now put it back,
she thought.

Her heart had begun to pound.

Put it back.

Her hands refused to do as she bid them, but rather they opened the wallet wider, and began to finger through the folded slips of paper tucked inside. There were a surprising number of them, she thought.

“What are you looking for?” she asked herself.

From behind the bathroom door, the medicine cabinet squeaked open, startling her.

That was enough. She closed the wallet and shoved it back in his pants pocket.

After replacing the piggybank on the dresser, she scooped up the coins and left the room hurriedly.

She didn’t want to be there when Dave came out of the bathroom.

Georgia stood inside the front door, watching as Jill walked down the street to the corner where the other children were waiting for the school bus.

Jill stopped a short distance from where they were gathered, and it seemed to Georgia that the other kids moved back. The animation that they’d displayed before Jill arrived was markedly absent.

It was a scene she’d witnessed before, she realized.

Other children didn’t take to Jill.

Georgia felt an ache in her heart at the sight of her daughter standing alone.