Watch for Me by Moonlight (19 page)

THE TRUTH ABOUT PERFECT

T
he emergency room was crowded with the usual Saturday night screwups, slings, and swollen eyes. Trista and Meredith pushed through to the desk and asked for Campbell Brynn.

“Campbell is busy with critical care,” said the receptionist. “Oh, Meredith? I didn’t see you back there. Don’t be afraid, though. Owen is fine. He has a cut on his head, and it’s bleeding like crazy. But he was in his car seat, and he’s just fine. Crying his head off.”

Meredith hugged Trista Novak and pushed through the double doors.

“What’s wrong with the cheerleader?” some guy who’d had one or eight too many yelled. “I’ve been sitting here for two hours with excruciating pain in every bone in my body!”

“Mister, you sit here every Saturday night and give me an excruciating pain in my rear end,” said the receptionist.

It took Meredith only seconds to spot first her sister, then her mother. Mallory was standing upright, but looked almost green under her freckles. “Now I know how Owen felt,” Mallory told Merry. “Whatever she put in my food packed a wallop.” Weakly, Mallory found a place on a hard green plastic seat.

Campbell was a pro; she would never attempt to work on Owen or even be in the room herself. Bonnie Jellico handed instruments to the doctor, a man Merry didn’t know, as he cleansed and numbed Owen’s head wound before suturing. Bonnie said to the girls, “Your dad is on his way. Owen’s going to need six tiny stitches, and they will come out in a week or so, knowing how fast these little guys heal. We already rushed an X-ray, and there’s not a thing broken. Thank God for car seats. She did that much.”

“Who?”

“Sasha Avery.”

“She took Owen to the shopping center,” said Merry. “I don’t know how we got here so fast, except we went ninety. Trista’s dad got us a police escort from some town, and we whammed it all the way in.”

“I need you here now, Bonnie,” the doctor said.

The girls huddled outside the drawn curtain, listening to Owen’s wails. With tears in his eyes, Tim rushed through the curtain with Adam. “How did you get here so fast, Meredith?

“Magic,” said Meredith, who grabbed her dad and hugged him. “I can’t believe all he got was a little cut on his head.”

“Isn’t even that too much?” Tim asked. “How much did he have to go through before we got it through our heads, the poor little mite? Frank Novak said that the car hit the tree going thirty miles an hour. She slowed down to get on the exit a few blocks from here. The highway headed east, and that’s when she almost hit some guy in the road. Swerved and hit the tree instead.” Tim then asked, “How’s Sasha?”

Neither girl had thought to ask.

Merry slumped on the green sofa next to Mallory. Her body had begun to cool, and she began to shiver. One of Bonnie and Campbell’s friends thoughtfully draped a light hospital blanket around each of the twins’ shoulders. “Slow,” Merry said. “Fizzit ter.”
It will get better.

“Poor Owen, I’ve never felt cramps in my stomach like this,” Mally said.

Moments later, Campbell emerged from an ER cubicle a few doors down. She said, “Sasha’s conscious, but she’s in a bad way. Collapsed lung, six broken ribs. Broken arm and they don’t know about her spleen. If her spleen is okay, we can deal with the rest. She’s on her way upstairs to the OR.”

“You took care of her, Mom?” Meredith asked.

“Why wouldn’t she take care of her?” Mallory said.

“Of course, I’d take care of her,” Campbell said. “I don’t know if Sasha did anything wrong. I do know that she was going the wrong way to be headed for Pilgrim Square.” Campbell sighed. “Right now, she’s a really sick girl, and I’m not going to make any judgments. It’s a long story, and it’s going to get a lot longer after she comes out of surgery. But the gist of it is, Mallory, she was headed out of town with Owen when she went around a curve right before the entrance to the highway. Supposedly, a guy stepped out into the road, and Sasha swerved to avoid running him over. And she hit a tree.”

“A man stepped out in front of her?” Mallory asked.

“Some kid. Some guy your age. She said he was, well, her words weren’t pretty. She said he just stood there in front of her with both hands up.”

Tim said, “That’s what Frank Novak told me, too. But nobody found any sign of him.” Merry’s eyes filled with tears.
I wonder who that was, she thought? I wonder why he had nothing to lose?
She disappeared for a moment into the washroom. When she’d splashed some water on her face, she came out and nearly collided with Carla Quinn.

“I kept praying,” Carla said “Is the little boy okay?”

“He’s good, Carla,” Merry said, hugging the big woman spontaneously.

“He stole my heart,” Carla said, and Meredith felt pelted with a riot of emotion—shame for how she’d felt about Carla, pity for the little boy that Carla would never again hold close and rock the way she rocked Owen. Then Meredith went back to the room where Campbell had worked on Sasha. When Campbell was finished cleaning up, Merry asked, “How could you take care of her, with what you know? ”

“Do you think I want her to die before I can ask her what the hell she’s been up to?” Campbell said. “Forgive me for that. I don’t wish anything bad to happen to Sasha. I just need some answers. Dr. Renfrew, the cardiologist, needs some answers too. And Sasha is the only one who can give us those answers.”

Merry went out into the waiting room and snuggled back down beside Mally on the sofa. Mallory looked to be half asleep.

A few moments later, the elevator doors opened, and Luna Verdgris emerged in all her black-and-silver glory, her eyes and lips animated with purple glitter in a slash.

“Don’t,” Merry said, “Tell me you intuited this.”

“Nope,” Luna said. “I heard it on my mom’s scanner, and I had to see what the action is.” Luna blinked. “What’s wrong with you, Mallory? For your information, Sara Solokow’s older sister is a hairstylist. She was going to get some floor sweepings for our next moonlight ... thing. We never even got them because her sister said it was against state law to take human whatevers. Now I know Corey Gilberston told you. I have to kill her.”

“Don’t even say that for a joke, Luna. Mallory saw it in a vision. It hasn’t even happened yet. My sister can see the future.”

“Why do you do this? I don’t make fun of cheerleaders. It’s my extra-curricular activity.”

“I’m not making fun,” Merry said. “Honest, honest. I’m not. Just teasing a little.” Gently, she patted Luna’s arm, and Luna, after a moment, relaxed.

“How’s the little guy and sweet Sasha?” she said.

“He’s fine. She’s not so fine.”

Luna said, “Good.”

A STOLEN LIFE

T
o the delight of the Mountain Beanery, the dry cleaner, the Picket Fence B&B Inn, and Pizza Papa, national press descended for days on Ridgeline. They dutifully wrote headlines that screamed a strange story, with such headlines as “Fake Teen a Feral Misfit?” Sasha Avery, a.k.a. Sandra Avery Hammond, was a nurse—in fact, she was a registered nurse. She was also thirty years old. The exam at the hospital showed that she’d given birth to a child.

But they never heard the story that Officer Novak told the Brynns, all alone one evening at their kitchen table.

Trista’s father visited all the Brynns on the first night that Owen was home. Sasha was still in the hospital, recovering from surgery. The girls didn’t know Trista’s father well. But he played on one of Tim’s softball teams, and he said he had information he needed the Brynns, every one of them, to know. With care for what the Brynns had already endured, Officer Novak came over to their home in his own car—which would not attract the attention of reporters who cruised the house periodically—hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the Brynns.

“She is from Texas,” said Frank Novak. “And she’s been a heckuva cheerleader and a very good nurse. That’s all that’s true. And there are other things I wish I didn’t know.”

The girls glanced at Adam. Frank Novak nodded and cast his eyes to the corner of the room.

“Go upstairs now,” Campbell said. “Watch anything you want. You know how bad Sasha was, but we don’t want you imagining you see her outside the window when you’re trying to sleep. Your imagination is probably going wild, Adam. But I swear to you she will never come near this house again. She’d have to come through me or Daddy. No one will ever take care of you or Owen except Grandma.”

“Or Carla,” Adam said. “Carla’s a good person. Her daughter’s in my grade.”

“She had a crush on you, Ant,” Mallory said. Adam whirled and raced for the stairs, startlingly lacking in curiosity about the woman whose acts had ruled their lives for so long and nearly ruined them.

When Adam was out of earshot, Frank said, “Sasha Avery has never been charged with a crime. But she’s what we call a person of interest in the deaths of three people.” Even Campbell gasped and held Owen closer.

“Deaths?” she said softly. “Deaths?”

“It’s worse than that, Campbell. One of them was her own daughter, a little girl named Monique,” Frank said, shaking his head and staring down at his shoes. Married at twenty and divorced at twenty-five but still involved with her drifter ex-husband, Sasha had a chronically ill three-year-old who died two years before Sasha came to Ridgeline. “But that kid’s hospital folder is as thick as a dictionary. She was sick. She was born with a heart abnormality. But she was always getting infections that had nothing to do with the heart thing.”

The infections weren’t all that Monique suffered in her short life. She was also prone to chronic vomiting and seizures that gradually weakened her and finally led to a fatal heart attack. Although it was never proven, police and doctors suspected that Sasha gave her daughter syrup of Ipecac, a medicine closely guarded by pharmacists because it was used by girls who wanted to get thin by throwing up their food. It was actually made to give in an emergency to little children—or even adults—so they would throw up things they ate that could injure them.

There was a brown bottle of Ipecac syrup in the Brynns’ medicine cabinet, high out of reach of anyone except Campbell using a stool or Tim on his tiptoes. Campbell gave Owen to Tim and reached for the bottle, using her oven mitten. She had never opened it. But when she handed it to Frank, a third of it was missing. Frank Novak would later tell the Brynns the police could find no fingerprints at all on the bottle.

“What’s wrong with Sasha?” Tim asked. “Is she a cold-blooded killer? A psychopath?”

“Not really, or so far as we can tell. She actually loved her daughter very much. She was a young woman with a chronically sick kid and no mother or father of her own. The nurses got to be like her family, I guess. Nobody had ever given her the kind of approval they gave her for how well she took care of Monique. But when Monique started to get better, all those good feelings were gone.”

Frank explained the report that the police had been given by a psychologist who evaluated Sasha during her involvement with the deaths of Monique and two of her young patients, both mortally ill children too young to describe what was really wrong with them. Sasha might well be a sociopath—someone who was standing behind the door when a conscience was passed out. She also had a knack for knowing exactly what people wanted almost before the people did themselves.

But what really was wrong with Sasha, Frank said, was something called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental illness in which the person literally made another person sick—usually a child or older adult who couldn’t speak for himself—to get the attention.

“Id a quo,” Mallory whispered to Meredith, twin talk for “just what I said.”

“Stop that,” Campbell said, without turning her head. Even now, the girls’ use of their exclusive language annoyed their mother, who had to be in on everything—or so the twins thought.

“People like this usually have medical training,” Frank went on. “They love that hero role, and of course that includes rushing the person to the hospital just in time and having people trust them.”

“Like we did,” said Tim. “Why didn’t we see it? Why were we such fools?”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Tim,” Frank said. “You either, Campbell. You had the best specialists in the world looking at Owen. And they didn’t catch it. Mr. Highland is a pharmacist, and even though he’s retired, he’s a sharp guy. These people are smart. She knew just what to do.”

The complication with Sasha was that Ipecac, unlike other medicines or drugs or toxic things like cleaning products, didn’t stay in the system long. Traces of it were hard to find, even for crime scene investigators and medical people. The terrible thought of exhuming poor little Monique’s body would do no good. Nothing in two years had changed which could prove that Sasha, probably not intentionally but with knowledge, helped kill her own child. Frank went on to say that there were plenty of ways that she could have given the syrup to Owen. A little sugar could have covered the bitter taste. Those bottles had long since been washed and sterilized. The Brynns had thrown out the baby nipples and bought only two more—just to make sure that they could keep track of them.

Officer Novak then admitted he had to ask a few questions in an official capacity.

“You mean, there’s some suspicion of us?” Campbell said.

“No. No one believes that. But when a kid is chronically ill, we always have to ask the parents and give a report to the state social services. I told my chief that I was a friend but that I would do the honors anyhow. We have to look at every angle and then turn that angle over and look at it upside down.”

The only suspicion, it turned out, arose from the numerous times that the parents had hauled Mallory and Merry into the hospital for this test or that, having to do with their “fainting spells”—all of which came to nothing. Once more, the girls squirmed, hating “the gift” that was now placing their innocent parents in a fix. Campbell explained that the cause of the fainting spells was exclusionary: She and Dr. Staats, the pediatrician, had determined that stress or low blood sugar (if the twins hadn’t eaten) caused them.

“Then that’s that,” Frank said. “I’ll type up a little report, and we’ll go from there.” He sighed. “But to tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re going to learn very much more than they did down there. If she was doing this years ago, she’s only better at it now.”

Finally, all the police could do was establish that Owen’s illness took place at the same time that Mrs. Avery entered Ridgeline High and the Brynns’ lives. Everything that could condemn her could also clear her name, it seemed.

Sasha did have an aunt in Deptford.

But that aunt lived in a nursing home, a victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Like Mrs. Highland, Beatrice Avery had weakened in recent months as well.

“Wonder if that’s a coincidence,” Mallory said bitterly. No one knew, said Frank, if, when Sasha visited with a man who might or might not be her ex-husband, they brought more than flowers. The public record showed, however, that Sasha and her sister Serena were heirs to Beatrice Avery. Her savings and her small house—especially given the value of the land it was on—amounted to more than $300,000.

“More than enough to give anyone a really fresh start,” said Tim.

“Why do people get this syndrome?” Merry asked. “And why can’t you pronounce it?”

Frank had to consult the file and explained the disease was named after some ancient German baron who told all these fantastical stories about himself to get approval. People were so hungry for attention that they swallowed nails or stuck pins in their heads or injected things in their veins to cause an infection throughout their whole bodies. They had unnecessary surgeries—and liked feeling special.

“You said proxy,” Mallory said.

“Well, that’s when they make other people sick so that they can get attention and praise,” said Frank. “A proxy is like a stand-in for somebody else.” Sometimes the people were actually medically trained, like Sasha. Some of them were so brutal that they did things such as hold a pillow over a child’s face until the child passed out so they could call 911. “Nobody gets more attention in the hospital than the sick kid’s parents.”

“Talk about get a life,” Tim said.

Campbell said, “Imagine feeling so hollow you had to invent yourself over and over again.”

The girls tried to feel some of their mother’s heroic compassion.

They failed.