Ghost Girl (27 page)

T
he hanging plants were restaging “Day of the Triffids” over the table to which Brad, our waiter for the evening, escorted me. Not having Arkie’s guts, I failed to mention to him my preference for tables occupied only by humans and was seated next to a monstrosity of a cheese plant with a menacingly inclined main stem. Gently, I tried to rearrange the trailing strands and hooked the worst of the spider plant’s offspring over the back of the booth. The cheese plant seemed to take offense at this and leaned a little closer to me, so I stopped.

“Jeee-sus,” Arkie muttered, when she arrived. “This is like a night out in the Congo. I should have brought my machete.”

“Shush,” I whispered and gestured toward the cheese plant. “We’re outnumbered.”

As with our previous visit to Tottie’s, Arkie and I quickly fell into amiable conversation while browsing through the menu and wine list. We put in our orders and the repartee continued until well after our food arrived. Wistfully, I wished it could continue all evening.

“To say I’m having problems with Jadie is a bit of an understatement,” I began.

“Yes,” Arkie agreed. “I sussed that. I think we all have. Glen was just mentioning it to me the other week, saying you’ve got something going with her.”

“Mr. Tinbergen said that?”

Arkie nodded. “I think he’s worried. I mean, what with June Harriman last year and all that, he tends to get concerned about his teachers pretty easily. It’s understandable. But I told him he probably didn’t have anything to worry about, as far as you’re concerned. You’ve had a lot of experience, and if you got into trouble, you’d have the good sense to ask for help. You wouldn’t try to solve the world’s problems on your own.” She looked over. “And I assume I told him right.”

I found this information embarrassing. Mr. Tinbergen was worried about
me?
Did I appear that out of control?

“You aren’t getting in over your head, are you?” Arkie asked.

“No,
I’m
okay. It’s Jadie Ekdahl … I keep thinking that I finally understand what’s going on with this kid and just about get to the point where I think I can help, then poof! Like a house of cards, all my assumptions fall flat and I’m back at the beginning again. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a situation where I’ve changed my mind more times. Or where I’ve felt more helpless.”

“I think what’s worrying Glen is that you’re not talking to any of the rest of us about this. It’s going to be frustrating, if that’s what’s going on, but you shouldn’t try to do it on your own.”

I fell silent. She was right, if she meant I didn’t sit around down in the teachers’ lounge, discussing Jadie the way Alice discussed Ben Soames’s hopeless table manners or Lucy bemoaned Matthew Grinstead’s inability to understand subtraction. Arkie wasn’t right, however, about my not giving anyone else a chance. What did she think I was doing here and now?

Arkie perceived my discomfort and smiled reassuringly. “So, I’m all ears.” She leaned across the table and touched my arm. “How can I help?”

“She’s abused.”

“Yeah, I remember you saying you thought that some while back. Have you got something we can take to court?”

“No. Not if Jadie doesn’t back me up.”

Arkie’s brow furrowed.

“It’s damned slow business getting facts out of Jadie, for one thing. She can be incredibly specific about some things, things you’d never imagine a kid her age could make up, so you just assume they’ve got to be true. Then you ask her about the basic stuff—who, where, when—and she never seems to know any of this. I mean, what I’ve got is a girl who can tell me in excruciating detail how she and her sisters are molested, but she can’t tell me who’s doing it.”

“She doesn’t know who’s abusing her? Is it a stranger?”

I shook my head. “No, she just has different names for them. Code names, I think. That’s these ‘Dallas’ characters I’ve told you about before. What she’s talking about is very, very serious abuse, but she only knows them by these names.”

“They’re real people?” Arkie’s voice had a skeptical tinge.

“Well, I
think
they’re real people.” A pause. Arkie had gone back to her meal and I sat, watching her, my brain revving up, like a car at a stoplight. “What I’m going to say here … I know I’m going to sound a little far-fetched.” I reached for the wine bottle and poured myself a second glass. “But if I’m going to be credited with having the good sense to ask for help when I need it, I’d better say it.”

Arkie looked up, fork poised halfway to her mouth.

“Some of the things Jadie talks about … well, I was up in the city last summer and talking with my boyfriend … and I got this book at a bookstore there … and just sort of putting things together … I’m wondering if she isn’t being abused in some kind of … well, ritualistic way.”

“What?”

“I know it sounds crazy, and this is why I haven’t been talking much to anyone about what’s going on. I feel crazy just for thinking it.”

“You mean like Moonies or something?”

“Like satanists. See, there’s this symbol Jadie is always drawing, and my boyfriend was the one to mention that it’s a Black Mass symbol. And then a couple of weeks ago, I was up in the city and went to this occult bookstore. I got a couple of books on satanism and in this one …”

Arkie’s fork went down with an audible clink.

“Some of what Jadie talks about fits what they say in this book. Some of it doesn’t, admittedly, perhaps most especially the fact she’s never mentioned Satan or a master or that sort of thing. This woman, this Miss Ellie, seems to be the leader of this group Jadie’s involved with. But a lot of what they say in this book … well, it could explain some of the gaps in Jadie’s stories. Like, for example, they talk about how these groups often drug kids, legal drugs as well as illegal ones, and Jadie’s always saying how Miss Ellie wakes them up at night and gives them Coke to drink. Maybe they’re being drugged before they’re taken to wherever it is, and that’s why she never remembers how she gets there.”

“So what do you think this means Tashee is?” Arkie asked. “You think Tashee is a real girl? This—‘group’—has murdered a real six-year-old without anyone else ever knowing it? Without anyone ever reporting her missing? Without any evidence at all? Wouldn’t there have been a birth register? Wouldn’t she have been in school somewhere?”

“Well, in this book they talk about ‘brood mares,’ women who have babies specifically to be used as sacrifices …”

“We’re not talking about a baby here, Torey. We’re talking about a six-year-old girl. A first-grader. Someone old enough to have undoubtedly encountered doctors, teachers, and countless other outside adults. Old enough to be missed and yet not so old that she’d be classed a runaway. If these people were genuinely into human sacrifice, I would have thought a child of that age would be a particularly bad choice.”

Arkie’s expression was glazed with skepticism, her tone of voice vaguely patronizing, and I was quickly being overwhelmed by humiliation. How close I was treading to the lunatic fringe had always been something I was aware of. When reading the book on satanism that I’d bought at the occult bookstore, I had often found myself suspicious of the content. Certainly, it had an answer for everything, particularly substantiating the use of humans as sacrifice, saying that these were either offspring of the “brood mares” or fetuses from abortion clinics. Bodies were disposed of by sympathetic undertakers, who included them in freshly dug graves, and so on and so forth. In fact, I found myself unsettled by just how pat all the solutions were. I think I would have been able to believe more easily if the authors of the book had occasionally said that they thought these things were going on, but they didn’t know how the satanists kept getting away with it. Yet, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I was willing to give it all the benefit of the doubt, particularly in light of some of the things Jadie had talked about. On the other hand, hearing myself actually say this stuff aloud, I was only too aware of how ridiculous it sounded. The fear of being thought silly, or worse, unprofessional swamped me.

“I mean, not that I necessarily
believe
any of this,” I added hastily. A sigh. “I don’t know. I’m grasping at straws at this point.”

An expression of tremendous relief crossed Arkie’s face, and she dropped her fork in mock collapse. “God, you really had me scared there for a second, kid. I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, she’s gone native on me.’ Know what I mean? Good-bye
New York Times
. Hello
National Enquirer.
”

I laughed, too.

A pause came between us and grew into silence. I looked down at the food remaining on my plate. As before, it was nothing more than a sandwich with pretensions. Frankly, I would have preferred a steak, calories, cholesterol, and all, to this green version of the emperor’s new clothes.

“I suppose I think like you do,” Arkie said at last, “that there must be some truth at the bottom of this. But what? I’m not sure. The only thing I can think is that Jadie has fragmented the abuser. Perhaps it’s Dad. Or Mom
and
Dad. And she just can’t face it. She’s created this assortment of personas to help her cope with Mom/Dad as abuser and as loving parents. And I agree with the basic difficulty: that we can’t go charging in there to do something until Jadie somehow indicates who’s the guilty one.”

“You don’t think there’s any possibility—faint possibility—that Jadie might be telling the truth about these people and there are a lot of them?”

“You mean the possibility that Larry Hagman is dancing around her living room? Do
you?
Cutting out all the sensational newspaper reporting, all the seamy books and horror films, now, have you, with your experience, your background, your travels, actually ever encountered evidence—concrete evidence, not hearsay—of something like this? As opposed, say, to the number of times you’ve come across schizophrenic-type children obsessed and often hallucinating about blood, gore, monsters, or whatever?”

I had to admit I hadn’t ever.

“More to the point, you could never keep a large group underground in a small town like this. Not the way everybody knows everybody else’s business.”

“But it does happen,” I said.

“Sure, it does. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but we’re the professionals here, Torey. There’s God knows how many folks out there to worry about witches and ghosts and aliens from outer space and all the mischief they get up to. But it’s your responsibility and mine to remain rational, to judge each of these incidents by educated standards, and then see this child gets the treatment she so desperately needs.”

I nodded.

“The real problem in Jadie’s case is that she is one heck of a sick child,” Arkie said. “When Glen told me about that mark on Amber, my stomach turned. I mean, can you imagine her doing that? Holding Amber down and cutting her like that? And, of course, the other question I think we’re forced to ask ourselves is how safe are we with this girl in a public school? Here’s a kid hallucinating about people coming off the television and molesting her baby sister. About seeing a little girl murdered and then magically put back together. About playing with this little girl’s ghost. Indeed, about becoming a ghost herself. And now, this incident with Amber. I mean, if you were a parent, how thrilled would you be to have your boy or girl in the same school as a delusional child with access to knives?”

Contemplating Arkie’s words, I realized there was a great deal of sense in what she was saying. Indeed, it felt good to be back on familiar ground, dealing with a disturbed child. No doubt Jadie was deeply psychotic and I hadn’t encountered anything of such a distressing nature before, but this was work I knew I was good at. In fact, it was the mystery of mental illness that had always attracted me to working with it. The similarities among types of disturbances was enough to give a toehold, yet each individual’s problems were always challengingly unique, providing me with an ultimate sense of mastery on those occasions when I could successfully intervene. As Arkie talked, my mind began chasing quickly down the maze of possibilities for such a complex disturbance in an eight-year-old girl.

“The only thing I can think of,” Arkie was saying when I tuned back in, “is to call a conference with her parents and insist they take her back to the mental health clinic. They were going there for a while when Jadie was about five, but they broke it off because of the trouble in traveling weekly between Pecking and here. That, and, of course, the fact that Jadie wouldn’t talk to the therapist. Seemed a bit of a waste of money at the time. But none of us appreciated what a disturbed child the mutism was cloaking. I think we now need to impress upon Mr. and Mrs. Ekdahl that this isn’t something Jadie is going to grow out of. I think we might even mention the possibility of short-term psychiatric hospitalization if Jadie doesn’t show signs of improving. That might be one of the best ways of tackling the situation, if it’s abuse related.”

“Yes, that might be a good idea.”

“And this should take some of the burden off you. If she can establish a good relationship with a therapist, a lot of this counseling role you’ve fallen into should be lessened.”

I nodded.

Arkie leaned down and retrieved her handbag. Taking out her Filofax, she paged through it. “Who I’d really like to have see Jadie is a woman named Phyllis Ruiz. She’s a psychiatrist at the mental health clinic who’s had a lot of experience with severely disturbed children, and she holds some very enlightened views. Not just pills and theory. You’d like her. I’ll see if I can contact her on Monday and find out what her schedule’s like.” Arkie snapped the diary shut and looked over, grinning. “There. Great. I always feel better when I’ve settled on some concrete action, don’t you?”