Ghost Girl (33 page)

Actually saying that, hearing myself say it, brought me to the brink of tears.

Lucy looked over. “I think you’re doing the right thing.”

“But what if they don’t find anything? What if Jadie ends up going back home? What if Jadie never says a thing, and I’m stuck here with this big story about murdered children and voodoo dolls?”

“Well, just because she didn’t tell them, Torey, doesn’t mean she didn’t tell you. Just because they don’t find anything doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. You got to listen to yourself. If it’s crazy-sounding, it’s crazy-sounding, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be real.”

“But this is Pecking,” I muttered,

Lucy grinned. “I ought to be saying that, not you.”

I smiled.

“I guess what you’ve got to be asking,” she said, “is why
not
Pecking?”

At the end of the week, Arkie appeared in the doorway of my classroom. “We’ve got an appointment today. Did you hear about it?”

I nodded. “Rumor of it, yes.”

“Lindy wants us in the police station in Falls River at 4:30. Can you manage that? They’ve got to decide which way they’re going. Delores says she can get a twenty-eight day extension on the place-of-safety, but I haven’t heard what the police are going to do. If they’re not going to prosecute, I’d expect the kids to go back with their parents.”

“What do they want with us?”

Arkie shrugged. “Just tying up loose ends, I suppose.”

I regarded her. There’d been distance between us in the last week. I sensed Arkie still did not approve of my insistence that Jadie’s claims might be true, and I knew she was deeply afraid of the exploitive media attention this sort of case would garner. That remark she’d made to me last time we were out to dinner, the one about “good-bye
New York Times
, hello
National Enquirer
” stuck in my mind. I’d diminished myself professionally in Arkie’s eyes and it upset me.

“What do you want to see out of this?” I asked.

Arkie gave a slight lift of her shoulders. “Justice to be done, I guess.”

The Christmas season refused to stay at bay, despite my distinct lack of mood for it. Decorative lighting was strung from the street lamps and through the small trees along the downtown sidewalks of Falls River. An ectomorphic Santa Claus with black hair sticking out from under his cap stood on the corner outside the police station and dolorously rang his bell. The sound merged with the piped carols as we entered the building.

“Hi, you guys,” Lindy said, coming to the front desk to meet us. “Come on back.”

I’d been expecting a whole crowd at this meeting, as I’d assumed it would be a summing-up of the week’s findings, but in fact, there were only Lindy, Arkie, and myself. Lindy must have picked up on my surprise, because she said, “This is just an informal invitation. I thought we could make one last stab at getting the facts straight.”

Arkie and I nodded.

We were in a small, gray-painted room with a large table. Arkie and I pulled out chairs and sat down. Lindy, who held a set of file folders, sat across from us. She laid the files out on the table.

“I’ll have to confess this is proving a pretty hard case,” she began. “I wish I could give you good news, but …” She rifled through the papers. “We’ve had a good look at the girls and there’s nothing to support any kind of physical abuse, other than perhaps that circular scar on the six-year-old’s abdomen. While maybe not as clean as they could be, otherwise the girls were all in good physical condition.

“In terms of sexual abuse, well … the hymen’s been broken in all three girls. This happens naturally in many instances and, of course, this is what the parents maintain. That’s feasible in the two older girls’ cases, but it is rather unusual in an eighteen-month-old. However, we could hardly build a case for sexual abuse on that alone. The eldest girl and the baby also show evidence of anal dilation. This may mean anal penetration, but then again, it may simply indicate constipation—very common in girls of both ages. Otherwise, there has been no evidence of semen, seminal fluid, blood in the underclothes, vaginal irritations or infections. In short, we haven’t got a good case for sexual abuse based on the hard evidence.”

Lindy shifted papers and picked up another file. “Our psychologist has had three extended play periods with the girls, two individually and one with all three together, each time using the anatomically correct dolls. Nothing significant occurred with the younger two. With the eldest—that’s your Jadie—it’s obvious she’s sexually aware. She quite openly demonstrated vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, and fellatio, but we do have to keep in mind she’s nearly nine.

“Dr. Denning, from the mental health clinic, has assessed the two elder girls for stability and overall functioning. Both are of normal intelligence, from what he can tell, although Jadie refused to participate in the verbal parts of the test. Neither appears wildly stable, according to him; neither was wildly cooperative, however. So goodness knows how helpful these data are.

“Regarding your comments, Torey, about the possibility of occult involvement or a porn ring or something similar, we took a search warrant and went through the house. We didn’t come up with much. A handful of
Playboys
stuffed down the back of the sofa, two books on astrology, one on numerology, a small box full of bones, which the path lab has identified as coming from small animals, and six boxes of white candles.”

“What are their explanations for those last two items?” I asked.

“Mr. Ekdahl says the bones are some he’s collected out in the field. He says he likes to reassemble skeletons as sort of a hobby. Says he’d always wanted to be a taxidermist but couldn’t afford to pursue it, so he goes out walking on the weekends and collects the bones. He was able to substantiate all this insomuch as he had two completed skeletons, one of a squirrel and one of a cat.” Lindy wrinkled her nose. “They were rather nauseating, really, because he’s glued them up in these coy little poses. We did bring the two skeletons in, but I must confess, I could hardly imagine anyone performing black rites around a squirrel sitting on a little red bench with its legs crossed and a newspaper in its paws.

“As for the candles, they’re just ordinary penny candles, which they say they keep in case of winter power cuts. Six boxes do seem a bit much, but Mrs. Ekdahl claimed they were on sale when she bought them. So …” Lindy paused.

“That’s not really going to be enough, is it?” I asked.

“Not to prosecute, no.”

“But what about these characters from ‘Dallas’?” I asked. “She talks so realistically …”

“No,
she
doesn’t,” Lindy replied. “That’s the whole problem.
You
talk realistically. She doesn’t talk at all. I have never yet heard this kid utter a word. And while we’ve tried to follow up some of the things you’ve said she’s said, unless you can give us something more specific, what are we supposed to do? A plain example: when you talk about these characters, you’re talking about five or six or more suspects,
all
involved in serious sexual abuse. At best, we’ve got two suspects. Where are the other ones? Who are they?”

“I think we have to face the possibility that these people simply may not exist at all,” Arkie said, her voice soft. “I know it’s hard for Torey. She’s closest to the child; she has the girl’s confidence, and certainly the girl can be remarkably vivid when she does talk. But irrespective of whether abuse has occurred or not, Jade is a seriously disturbed child. There is a hearty chance we’re chasing moonbeams.”

I looked over at Arkie in dismay.

“Torey, you’ve
got
to accept this.”

“But why can’t you accept it could be real?”

“Because it can’t. Because she’s disturbed. Because I don’t want to see a replay of the Salem witch hunt right here on my own turf. That’s what that was, wasn’t it? Hysterical children accusing innocent adults. Human nature hasn’t changed, and I just don’t want to be a party to destroying these people’s lives. These are
people
, Torey. This is a
family
we’re talking about here, and they’re never going to be the same because of this. You and I and the police and everyone, we’ll walk out of it. The Ekdahls won’t. I’m scared shitless by this talk of witches and Satan and stuff, not because of what it is, but because of what it can do. It’s exciting,
interesting
, something to liven up a dull police report and a bunch of dull lives. I’m so frightened we’re going to forget these are people and we’re destroying them.”

I fell silent. Indeed, we all did, the silence weighing down on us in the small room. Lindy shuffled through her papers for a moment, but the silence remained.

Finally, Lindy looked over at me. “What do you think? Do you really believe she’s telling the truth?”

A depressing weariness overtook me. “I don’t know. I really don’t. But … it’s not so much what she says when she’s talking about the abuse, it’s the little things. Like how she talks of Tashee always being cold. Or how Tashee was short for her age. Or like the other week, just before Thanksgiving. One of my boys is Sioux and he got to talking about a headdress and some other Indian articles his father has, when Jadie mentioned that Tashee had a pair of genuine moccasins. Then she scooted back and showed this boy how the moccasins came up around the ankles. That incident struck me, because it wasn’t Tashee she was talking about and it wasn’t me she was talking to. It was the moccasins and it was to him. From her description, she was clearly referring to real Indian moccasins, because they do look so different from what gets fobbed off on the tourists. Such a casual, minor reference. It’d take considerable skill to lie like that, and I’d find it unusually complete, if it’s the result of some kind of psychopathology.”

“But it could be,” Arkie replied. “Maybe
she
wanted those moccasins. Then it’d be only natural that she’d put them on Tashee.”

Lindy pursed her lips. “So, basically, we’re not a whole lot further along than we were at this time last week.”

“S
o, what we gonna do in here, man? You gonna get us a Christmas tree or what?” Jeremiah demanded. We were only half an hour or so into the morning on Tuesday, all sitting together around the table, supposedly working, but nobody was. Brucie was in deep conversation with his crayon, flipping it before his face and saying “Bwah, bwah, bwah” to it. Reuben had done his first math problem, to which the answer was “12.” So taken by the sight of “1” followed by “2”, he felt compelled to continue on, writing “3”, “4”, “5”, and so on, covering his paper with minute numbers. I’d already stopped him twice and reoriented him, but he reverted the moment I turned my attention away and was now up to 736. Philip had drawn a gigantic Christmas stocking on his paper and was decorating it with stars. Jadie just sat.

“I think we have plenty of time to worry about Christmas trees in the weeks ahead, Jeremiah. Now is the time for numbers.”

“Fuck numbers. We gonna have a party?”

“We’ll discuss it another time. Now we work.”

He slammed his pencil down on the table, grabbed his chair, and slammed that down as well. Then he saw Philip’s paper. “Look at him, lady. Look at what that little boog’s doing. Hey, baby boogs, what’s Santy Claus gonna bring you, if you been a good boy? Put in your itty, bitty stocky?”

“Jeremiah, please sit down.” I reached a hand behind me to the bookcase. “And here, Phil, here’s
another
math sheet.” I removed the decorated one.

“I don’t hang up a stocking no more,” Jeremiah announced. “I’m too big. That’s what my mom says. Says I won’t get nothing in it.” He shrugged. “But don’t matter, ’cause what I want don’t fit in a stocking anyhow. Know what I want?” He flung himself down on his back on the tabletop, his face right under mine. “A BMX.”

Deciding to ignore him, which wasn’t easy, as he was nearly lying in my lap, I stretched across to reorient Brucie.

“What you gonna get, girlie?” he asked Jadie, as he rolled across everyone’s work on the table to come face to face with her.

“Go stick your head in a toilet, okay?” Jadie replied.

Rising, I took hold of Jeremiah’s shirt collar and belt and lifted him bodily off the table. I placed him upright in his chair.

“Hooeeee! Did you see that, guys? That is one strong broad there. Lifted me up just like that. Man, better mind what she says. Better do what this dame wants. Man, lady, you know how to treat a guy.”

“Jeremiah,
work.
”

About twenty seconds’ silence reigned before Jeremiah looked up. “I know what. Let’s make Christmas wishes.”

“You’ve already told us about your bike. Now, go back to math, please.”

“No, not that. Wishes. Like peace on earth and stuff. Like what you’d wish for—not for yourself, man—for everybody.”

The idea caught my fancy. “Okay, Jeremiah, what would your Christmas wish be?”

“That people with brown skin don’t get picked on no more. That it don’t matter that you got brown skin or black skin or anything, that nobody gets beat up, just ’cause they’re different.”

“Well, that’s a very good wish, Jeremiah. Wouldn’t it be lovely, if it came true?”

“What do you wish for, girlie?” he asked Jadie.

Jadie thought a moment, then shrugged, and I didn’t think she was going to answer. Finally, however, she did. “No more fighting, I guess. That everybody in the whole world could be happy.”