Ghost Girl (32 page)

At lunchtime, Jadie joined the others in the cafeteria, the first time she’d ever eaten lunch at school. After seeing the children down to the lunchroom, I headed back to my room to collect my sack lunch before going to the teachers’ lounge. However, just before the bell had rung, I’d been using some homemade modeling dough with Brucie and could now feel the salt from it on my hands. So, I detoured into the girls’ rest room to wash them before collecting my lunch.

There were several younger children in there, using the toilets and washing their hands, and they finished quickly at the appearance of a teacher, leaving me alone. However, when the last of them had gone out the door, I had the sense I was still not entirely by myself. Turning my head, I looked around. There, just inside the door, stood Amber.

Like Jadie, she had been considerably tidied up. Her hair had never been as ungovernable as Jadie’s, but she’d still always looked a little wild. Now, however, her long blond hair had been brushed carefully and the sections around her face had been pulled back and tied with a bow. Like Jadie, she wore a slightly out-of-date outfit suggestive of donation clothes.

“Hi,” I said.

“What you done to my mommy and daddy?”

“I haven’t done anything to them,” I said, not sure that was completely true.

“Then how come we can’t go home?”

“If things all come out fine, I’m sure you will be able to go home again. But the people from the police and Social Services need a little time to make sure things are fine.”

Amber cocked her head slightly. “You’re listening to what Jadie tells you,” she said, her voice soft, almost hoarse.

“We only want to make sure everything is all right for you girls.”

“Jadie can’t help the way she is. She got borned wrong and she don’t know what she’s saying. She can’t help it; it’s not her fault, but you shouldn’t oughta be listening to her.”

At recess in the afternoon, Jadie came to stand with me. It was a cold, gray December day with a bitter wind sifting snow off the tops of the heaps where it had been cleared back from the playground. I took shelter in the lee of the building to watch the children. Jadie stood next to me.

“I’m not going to be able to talk to you anymore,” she said, after several moments had elapsed in silence.

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause me and Amber are coming by taxi now. I won’t be able to stay after school, like I done before. You’ll have to take me down to my ride now, just like you do with the boys.” There was a note of pride in her voice. I think she enjoyed being like the others.

“If you want to talk, we’ll always find time for it, somehow.”

Jadie leaned closer as the wind gusted. Snow eddied around our boots. “Have you told them about Tashee yet?” she asked quietly.

“Have you?”

A pause, then she shook her head. “They won’t believe me, if I tell ’em. You tell ’em, okay? You’re grown up. They’ll believe what you say.”

I looked down at her. “I’ve told them what I know, but that’s the best I can do. It didn’t happen to me.”

“They brought them dolls out. They got holes in them, them dolls. Did you know that? You know, poop holes. And they got hair under their arms. Yeeuch,” Jadie said, smiling and making a face. “The man one’s got a dicky. And so does the little boy.”

I nodded. “That’s to make it easier for you to let them know what’s happened.”

“Amber, she don’t want to touch them. They make her scared. They’re like the dolls J.R. makes. His dolls got dickies on them too and they’re big and hard. Amber gets nightmares about them dolls.”

“Have you said this to the social worker?”

Jadie didn’t answer.

“You
have
to talk to them, Jadie. I’m not kidding. I can back up what you’re saying, but I can’t be the one who says it all, because I wasn’t there. When I tell it, I might tell it wrong, and it’s very important that we don’t get anything about this wrong. We need it all to be true.”

She pressed against me as the wind blew.

“I mean it, Jadie. You have
got
to talk to them. You need to tell them in your own words what’s going on. It’s not going to be good enough, coming from me, if you don’t talk, too.”

“Amber don’t like you anymore,” she muttered in response.

“I know.”

“She hates you.”

“Yes, I can pretty well imagine.”

“I said you was doing good, that you were going to get us out of this. I said she ought to like you, ’cause you were God. But she said no. She said you ain’t.”

“She’s right, there.”

Jadie shrugged good-naturedly.

“I’m not God. The time’s long since come for you to stop thinking I am.”

“I don’t care.”

“And it’s all right for Amber to feel angry with me,” I said. “A lot of frightening things have happened very suddenly.”

Jadie tilted her head slightly, making the sausage-shaped curls tumble down over her shoulder. “Tashee still likes you, though.”

“She does?”

“Tashee says Amber don’t know. Amber’s too little, but I got to take care of her. I got to take care of Sapphire, too, ’cause she’s littlest of all.” A pause. “I don’t think Sapphire hates you. She’s too small to understand anything.”

Concerned, I looked at her. “How does Tashee tell you these things?”

Jadie shrugged. “She just does. See, what I think happened is that when Tashee died, her ghost got inside me, so I could talk for her. I listen and then I think about her, and that way I can hear her. I think what she wants and how I can make her happy and then that’s what I try to do.”

My heart sank.

T
he week went by in a disconcerting jumble of meetings, phone calls, and disjointed conversations. On two occasions, social workers came to the school with their dolls and equipment to interview Jadie and Amber. The police appeared, combed through Jadie’s school files, and talked individually first with me, then with Mr. Tinbergen, and then with Alice Havers, who had had Jadie for two of her years at the school. Time and again, we saw the police cars parked across the street in front of the Ekdahls’ home.

Very little information on the investigation filtered through to us in the school, which I found disconcerting in the beginning and then downright distressing. Despite being integral in bringing the case to the attention of the police and Social Services, I was now very much on the periphery of the investigation, and my fear that they were acquiring no substantial evidence mounted as the week progressed.

More difficult were the stark warnings to me about talking with Jadie. While I was told to carry on as normal in the classroom, I was instructed not to encourage any in-depth conversations between us alone, for fear that I might ask leading questions that would prejudice the case were it ever to come to court. Indeed, as the week went on, I had the horrible sense that the lawyers now representing Mr. and Mrs. Ekdahl were going to try to prove that I had planted many of these ideas in Jadie’s fertile imagination.

All of this made me more and more reluctant to stand behind my accusations of occult involvement. With Jadie refusing to talk, with only skimpy evidence of any abuse, much less abuse by a large group of people, and with the police lawyers repeatedly suggesting that if the defense discovered I had gone several times to the occult bookshop and consulted with a person claiming to be a witch, they could be well down the road to proving the occult connection came from me. I wanted only to extricate myself, career intact.

In the quiet of Lindy’s office, I did talk at some length with her about my suspicions. Couldn’t it be, for instance, that Jadie was familiar with the old video machine I’d brought in the previous year because she’d come in contact with one before? I’d asked. What if the abuse sessions were filmed? Could that account for the number of times Jadie had asked me if I’d seen them on my TV? Perhaps she’d seen them played back in private and assumed they were being broadcast. Perhaps this was why everyone was referred to by “Dallas” character names. Wouldn’t that be a perfect ploy to keep from being identified? With the reference to being on TV, outsiders would naturally conclude it was all a child’s fantasy.

Jadie’s continual reference to being given Coca-Cola was another example, I told Lindy. In one of the books on satanism I’d gotten from the occult bookstore, there had been mention of putting Valium or similar drugs into soft drinks to make the victims of the ritual assaults more compliant. While admittedly it sounded a bit farfetched to me, Jadie had mentioned Coke as an integral part of her times with Miss Ellie and the others too many times for me to dismiss it out of hand. Certainly, that would account for Jadie’s hazy recollection of specifics during these occasions.

Lindy appeared to take these points seriously and was particularly interested in the doll incident; she felt, as I did, of all the occurrences, it was the most likely to indicate the involvement of someone other than Jadie. On the other hand, she felt the same kind of professional leeriness.

She said, “I think it’s just going to muddy the water, if you bring in all these heebie-jeebie things, don’t you? What we’ve got to do is get these kids safe. From what you’ve said, from the way this oldest girl acts, I feel fairly definite about the fact these girls have been abused, and I’d hate to see them go back home. But if you get in there talking about ghosts and witches and all that, Torey, we’re going to be asking for it. Their defense is going to shred us. Know what I mean?”

I did. Still unable to convince myself beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jadie’s terrible stories were factual, I didn’t know what kind of witness I would make. Mortified at the thought of what it would do to my professional credibility, embarrassed that I might be thought a crackpot or worse, it was only too easy to agree that unless concrete evidence to the contrary came up over the course of the investigation, I would not make a major issue out of the satanic business.

I came home from the meeting with Lindy to fall wearily into the chair in front of the TV. I didn’t bother to make myself a meal. I didn’t even bother to take off all my outer clothes. Feeling overwhelmed, I flicked the TV on and just sat, staring vacantly at it.

The doorbell rang.

Not wanting to answer it, but not daring not to, given all that was going on, I pulled myself up from the chair. Opening the door, I found Lucy.

“Hi,” she said nervously, glancing around. “Am I interrupting anything?” Despite the amount of time we had spent together in the summer, she had almost never been over to my apartment, and I think she continued to harbor fantasies about the grand city lifestyle I must be carrying on. She looked vaguely disappointed to find it empty.

“Come on in.” Then, suddenly aware I was still wearing my jacket, I pulled it off. “I just got here myself.”

“I didn’t mean to bother you or anything. It’s just that I was nearby, and I haven’t been seeing much of you at school …” Lucy looked over at me and the moment’s hesitation became a full-blown pause. “Are you okay, Torey?” she asked softly. “I guess that’s what I wanted to know. I mean, we’re all aware of what’s going on. It’s all anybody talks about in the teachers’ lounge …”

“Sit down,” I said and smiled. “You want something? A soft drink? Coffee?”

“No, I was just stopping by. But how is it going?” She settled into the other armchair. “Are you all right?”

Sitting back down myself, my jacket still in my hands, I told her. She already knew a good deal about Jadie’s strange other world, but I told her now about the seamy stuff, about my concerns for something deeper and more horrific than straightforward sexual abuse, but at the same time, I mentioned all my doubts. I spoke of the problems Lindy and her officers were encountering, of the complexity in reporting something of this nature. Lucy listened silently, chin braced in her hand.

I hadn’t meant to include Lucy in all of this. I liked her very much and, indeed, she was as close to a confidante as I had in Pecking. In quiet moments together at school, we’d shared much of ourselves with one another. We cheered each other on in the good times and cheered each other up in the bad. But there remained an innocent and naive side of Lucy that had kept me from sharing everything. She loved her world of white weddings, potluck suppers, and sleighbells in the snow. I didn’t like to be thought of as cynical, because I didn’t think I was, but my brand of realism didn’t marry well with Lucy’s world. Yet, there I was, tired, frightened, and very much in need of a sympathetic ear. So Lucy got all of it.

She listened thoughtfully, not saying a word until I’d finally fallen silent. “Do you really think that’s going on? That ritualistic stuff? Do you really think some little girl’s been murdered?”

“To be perfectly honest, at this point I don’t know what I think. I’m so jumbled up, even in my own mind.”

“But Jadie thinks there is?”

I nodded.

“What have the police found?” Lucy asked.

“They haven’t told me very much. The worst part of this whole deal is the lack of communication. I’m not supposed to be talking to Jadie, in case I inadvertently ask leading questions. The police aren’t talking to anybody. Social Services are going their merry way, not feeling obliged to tell me anything, which they aren’t, of course. I’m just the teacher. And Jadie … Jadie’s not saying a word to anyone.” I sighed. “It’s going to fall through, I just know it. They’re not going to come up with any hard evidence. I’ve been involved in other, just ordinary abuse cases and, believe me, the kind of evidence the police need to prosecute … we’re going to get all this way and it’s going to be thrown out. I just know it is.”