Authors: Kristin Hannah
“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)
The second most recent case listed had been in the 1990s. It featured a Ukrainian child named Oxana Malaya, who was said to have been raised by dogs until the age of eight. She never mastered normal social skills. Today, at the age of twenty-three, she lived in a home for the mentally disabled. In 2004, a seven-year-old boy—also reportedly raised by wild dogs—was found in the deep woods of Siberia. To date he had not learned to speak.
Julia frowned and hit the Print key.
It was unlikely as hell that this girl was a true wild child.…
The wolf pup
The way she eats
But if she were …
This child could be the most profoundly damaged patient she would ever treat, and without extensive help, the poor girl could be as lost and forgotten in the system as she’d been in the woods.
Julia leaned over and took the stack of papers from the printer. On top lay the last page she’d printed. A black-and-white photograph of a little girl stared up at her. The child looked both frightened and strangely fixated. The caption below it read:
Genie. After twelve years of horrific abuse and isolation, she became a media sensation. The modern equivalent of the wild child raised in a California suburb. Saved from this nightmare, she was brought into the light for a short time until, like all the wild children before her, she was forgotten by the doctors and scientists and shuffled off to her shadowy fate; life in an institution for the mentally disabled.
Julia couldn’t imagine being the kind of doctor that would use a traumatized child for career advancement, but she knew that sooner or later those kinds of people would come for the girl. If the true story were as bad as she thought it could be, it would make front page news.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you again,” Julia vowed to the little girl asleep in the hospital. “I promise.”
SEVEN
By eight o’clock that evening the phones finally stopped ringing. There had been dozens of press-conference-related, fact-checking calls and faxes and queries from the reporters who’d been here and those who hadn’t bothered to come but had somehow gotten wind of the story. And, of course, the locals had arrived in a steady stream until the dinner hour, begging for any scrap of news about Rain Valley’s most unexpected guest.
“The quiet before the storm,” Peanut said.
Ellie looked up from the stack of papers on her desk just in time to see her friend light up a cigarette.
“I asked. You grunted,” Peanut said before Ellie could argue.
Ellie didn’t bother fighting. “What about the storm?”
“It’s the quiet before. Tomorrow all hell is gonna break loose. I watch Court TV, I know. Today there were a few local channels and papers here. One Flying Wolf Girl headline and that will change. Every reporter in the country will want in on the story.” She shook her head, exhaling smoke and coughing. “That poor kid. How will we protect her?”
“I’m working on that.”
“And how will we trust whoever comes to claim her?”
It was the question that haunted Ellie, the root of her disquiet. “That’s been bothering me from the get-go, Pea. I don’t want to hand her over to the very people who hurt her, but I have damned little evidence. Gut instinct doesn’t go far in today’s legal system. I’m actually hoping there’s a kidnapping report; how sad is that? I’d love to return a little girl who was outright stolen from her home. Then there might be blood samples and a suspect. If it’s not that simple …” She shrugged. “I’ll need some help from the big boys.”
“Without a crime, they’ll stay away like thieves from a lineup. They’ll want you to do all the hard work. The state might step in, but only to warehouse her. They’ve already told us as much.”
Ellie had ridden this merry-go-round of worries and outcomes all night. She was no closer to an answer now than when she climbed aboard. “It’s all up to Julia, I guess. If she can get a story out of the girl, we have a starting place.”
“If the girl
can
talk, you mean.”
“That’s Julia’s side of the problem, and if anyone can help that girl, it’s my sister. Right now our job is to find her a place to work.” Ellie tapped her pen on the desk.
Peanut started coughing again.
“Put that thing out, Pea. You’re the worst smoker I’ve ever seen.”
“And I’ve actually gained a pound this week. I’m going back to eating only cabbage soup. Or maybe carrot sticks.” Peanut put out her cigarette. “Hey, how about the old sawmill? No one would look for her there.”
“Too cold. Too indefensible. Some wily tabloid photographer would find a way in. Four roads lead up to it; at least six doors would need to be guarded. And it’s public property.”
“County hospital?”
“Too many employees. Sooner or later someone would sell the story.” Ellie frowned. “What we need is a secret location and a cone of silence.”
“In Rain Valley? You must be joking. This town lives for gossip. Everyone will want to talk to the press.”
Of course. The answer was so obvious, she didn’t know how she’d missed it. This was just like that time in high school when they’d stolen the attendance sheet on senior skip day. Ellie had planned the whole thing. “Call Daisy Grimm.”
Peanut glanced at the clock. “
The Bachelor
is on.”
“I don’t care. Call her. I want everybody who is anybody in this town at a six
A.M.
meeting at the Congregational church.”
“A town meeting? About what?”
“It’s top secret.”
“A
secret
town meeting, and at dawn. How dramatic.” Peanut pulled a pen out from the ratted coil of her auburn hair. “What’s the agenda?”
“The Flying Wolf Girl, of course. If this town wants to gossip, we’ll give them something to talk about.”
“Oo-ee. This is going to be fun.”
For the next hour Ellie worked on the plan, while Peanut called their friends and neighbors. By ten o’clock they were done.
Ellie looked down at the contract she’d devised. It was perfect.
I _____________________ agree to keep any and all information about the wolf girl completely confidential. I swear I won’t tell anyone anything that I learned at the town meeting in October. Rain Valley can count on me.
________________________ (signature required)
“It won’t hold up in court,” Peanut said, coming over to her.
“Who are you? Perry Mason?”
“I watch
Boston Legal
and
Law & Order.
”
Ellie rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t need to be legally binding. It just needs to seem like it is. What does this town love more than anything?”
“A parade?”
Ellie had to concede that point. “Okay, second most.”
“A two-for-one sale?”
“Gossip,” she said, realizing Peanut could make guesses until dawn. “And secrets.” She stood up and reached for her coat. “The only problem will be Julia.”
“Why’s that?”
“She’s not going to like the idea of a town meeting.”
“Why not?”
“You remember how it was for her in town. No one knew what to make of her. She walked around with her nose in a book. She never talked to anyone but our mom.”
“That was a long time ago. She won’t care what people think of her now. She’s a
doctor,
for cripe’s sake.”
“She’ll care,” Ellie said with a sigh. “She always did.”
He is deep in a green darkness. Overhead, leaves rustle in an invisible breeze. Clouds mask the silvery moon; there is only the sheen of light. Perhaps it is a memory.
The girl is crouched on a branch, watching him. She is so still that he wonders how his gaze found her.
Hey, he whispers, reaching out.
She drops to the leaf-carpeted floor without a sound. On all fours, she runs away.
He finds her in a cave, bound and bleeding. Afraid. He thinks he hears her say
“Help,”
and then she is gone. There is a little boy in her place, blond-haired. He is reaching out, crying—
Max came awake with a start. For a moment he had no idea where he was. All he saw around him were pale pink walls and ruffles … a collection of glass figurines on a shelf … elves and wizards … there was a vase full of silk roses on the bedside table and two empty wineglasses.
Trudi.
She lay beside him, sleeping. In the moonlight her naked back looked almost pure white. He couldn’t help reaching out. At his touch, she rolled over and smiled up at him. “You’re going?” she whispered, her voice throaty and low.
He nodded.
She angled up to her elbows, revealing the swell of her bare breasts above the pink blanket. “What is it, Max? All night you were … distracted.”
“The girl,” he said simply.
She reached out, traced his cheekbone with her long fingernail. “I thought so. I know how much hurt kids get to you.”
“Picked a hell of a career, didn’t I?”
“Sometimes a person can care too much.” In the uncertain light, he thought she looked sad, but he couldn’t be sure. “You could talk to me, you know.”
“Talking isn’t what we do best. That’s why we get along so well.”
“We get along because I don’t want to be in love.”
He laughed. “And I do?”
She smiled knowingly. “See you, Max.”
He kissed her shoulder, then bent down for his clothes. When he was dressed, he leaned closer to her and whispered, “ ’Bye,” and then he left.
Within minutes he was on his motorcycle and racing down the black, empty expanse of road. He almost turned onto the old highway; then he remembered why he’d left Trudi’s house in the first place. The dream he’d had.
His patient.
He thought about that poor girl, all alone in her room.
Kids were afraid of the dark.
He changed directions and hit the gas. At the hospital, he parked beside Penelope Nutter’s battered red pickup and went inside.
The hallways were empty and quiet, with only a few nighttime nurses on duty. The usual noises were gone, leaving him nothing to hear save the metronome patter of his footsteps. He stopped by the nurses’ station to get the girl’s chart and check on her progress.
“Hey, Doctor,” said the nurse on duty. She sounded as tired as he felt.
Max leaned against the counter and smiled. “Now, Janet, how many times have I asked you to call me Max?”
She giggled and blushed. “Too many.”
Max patted her plump hand. Years ago, when he’d first met Janet, all he’d seen was her Tammy Faye fake eyelashes and Marge Simpson hair. Now, when she smiled, he saw the kind of goodness that most people didn’t believe in. “I’ll keep hoping.”
Listening to her girlish laughter, he headed for the day care center. There, he peered through the window, expecting to see the girl curled up on the mattress on the floor, asleep in the darkness. Instead, the lights were on and Julia was there, sitting on a tiny chair beside a child-sized Formica table. There was a notebook open on her lap and a tape recorder on the table near her elbow. Although he could only see her profile, she appeared utterly calm. Serene, even.
The girl, on the other hand, was agitated. She darted around the room, making strange, repetitive hand gestures. Then, all at once, she stopped dead and swung to face Julia.
Julia said something. Max couldn’t hear it through the glass. The words were muffled.
The girl blew snot from her nose and shook her head. When she started to scratch her own cheeks, gouging the flesh, Julia lunged at her, took her in her arms.
The girl fought like a cat, but Julia hung on. They stumbled sideways, fell down on the mattress.
Julia held the girl immobile, ignoring the snot flying and head shaking; then Julia started to sing. He could tell by the cadence of her voice, the way the sounds blended into one another.
He went to the door and quietly opened it. Just a crack.
The girl immediately looked at him and stilled, snorting in fear.
Julia sang,
“… tale as old as time … song as … old as rhyme …”
He stood there, mesmerized by the sound of her voice.
Julia held the girl and stroked her hair and kept singing. Not once did she even glance toward the door.
Slowly, the minutes ticked by. “Beauty and the Beast” gave way to other songs. First it was “I’m a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch,” and then “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and then “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Gradually, the girl’s eyelashes fluttered shut, reopened.
The poor thing was trying so hard to stay awake.
Julia kept singing.
Finally, the girl put her thumb in her mouth, started sucking it, and fell asleep.
Very gently, Julia tucked her patient into bed and covered her with blankets, then went back to the table to gather her notes.
Max knew he should back away now, leave before she noticed him, but he couldn’t move. The sound of her voice had captured him somehow, as had the glimmer of pale moonlight on her hair and skin.
“I guess this means you like watching,” she said without looking at him.
He would have sworn that she’d never once glanced at the door, but she’d known he was there.
He stepped into the room. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
She put the last of the papers in her briefcase and looked up. Her skin appeared ashen beneath the dim lighting; the scratches on her cheeks were dark and angry. A yellow bruise marred her forehead. But it was her eyes that got to him. “I miss plenty.”
Her voice was so soft, it took him a second to really hear what she’d said.
I miss plenty.
She was talking about that patient of hers, the one that killed those children in Silverwood and then committed suicide. He knew about that kind of guilt. “You look like a woman who could use a cup of coffee.”
“Coffee? At one o’clock in the morning? I don’t think so, but thank you.” She sidled past him, then herded him out of the day care center and shut the door behind him.
“How about pie?” he said as she headed down the hallway. “Pie is good any time of the day.”
She stopped, turned around. “Pie?”
He moved toward her, unable to keep from smiling. “I knew I could tempt you.”
She laughed at that, and though it was a tired, not-quite-genuine sound, it made his smile broaden. “The pie tempted me.”
He led her to the cafeteria and flipped on the lights. In this quiet time of night, the place was empty; the cases and buffets were bare. “Take a seat.” Max eased around the sandwich counter and went back into the kitchen, where he found two pieces of marionberry pie, which he covered with vanilla ice cream. Then he made two cups of herb tea and carried a tray out into the dining room and set it down on the table in front of Julia.
“Chamomile tea. To help you sleep,” he said, sliding into the booth seat opposite her. “And marionberry pie. A local favorite.” He handed her a fork.
She stared at him, frowning slightly. “Thanks,” she said after a pause.
“You’re welcome.”
“So, Dr. Cerrasin,” she said after another long silence, “do you make a habit of luring colleagues down to the cafeteria for early morning pie?”
He smiled. “Well, if by colleagues you mean doctors, there aren’t exactly a lot of us. To be honest, I haven’t taken old Doc Fischer out for pie in ages.”
“How about the nurses?”
He heard a tone in her voice and looked up. She was eyeing him over the beige porcelain of her cup. Assessing him. “It sounds to me like you’re asking about my love life.” He smiled. “Is that it, Julia?”
“Love life?” She put a slight emphasis on
love.
“Do you have one of those? I would be surprised.”
He frowned. “You sure think you know me.”
She took a bite of pie. “Let’s just say I know your kind.”
“No. Let’s not say that. Whoever you’re confusing me with is not sitting at this table. You just met me, Julia.”
“Fair enough. Why don’t you tell me about yourself, then? Are you married?”
“An interesting first question. No. Are you?”
“No.”