Kristin Hannah's Family Matters 4-Book Bundle: Angel Falls, Between Sisters, The Things We Do for Love, Magic Hour (124 page)

Julia felt a chill move down her spine. She reached down and quietly opened her briefcase, pulling out a notepad and pen. As she observed the girl, she began making notes. “What do we know about her?”

“Nothing,” Ellie answered. “She just walked into town one day. Daisy Grimm thinks she came looking for food.”

“From which direction?”

It was Max who answered. “From the woods.”

The woods.
Julia remembered the Olympic National Forest. Hundreds of thousands of acres of mossy darkness; much of it was still unexplored. It was the realm of myth and legend, where signs and wonders existed. Land of the Sasquatch.

“We think she was lost there for a few days,” Ellie said.

Julia didn’t respond. This was more than a lost day or two in the national park. “Has she spoken?”

Max shook his head. “No. We don’t think she understands us, either. She spends all her time under the bed. We bathed and diapered her when she was unconscious, but we haven’t been able to get close enough to change the diapers. She’s made no attempt to use the toilet.”

“Well,” Julia said, feeling a rush of adrenaline. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with, shall we?” She turned to her sister. “Go to the cafeteria. Get me a sampling of chocolates and fudges. Also, a slice of apple pie and a piece of chocolate cake.”

“Anything else?”

“Dolls. Lots of them. Preferably with clothes that come on and off, but not Barbies. Cuddly dolls. And a stuffed animal. You said she was with a wolf pup, right? Get me a stuffed wolf.”

“Gotcha. Back in a bit.” Ellie turned and hurried off.

To Max, she said, “Tell me about those ligature marks on her ankle.”

“I think—” He was interrupted by the hospital intercom system paging him to the E.R., stat.

He handed her the file. “It’s all in here, Julia, and it isn’t pretty. If you want to get together later to discuss—”

“The chart is fine for now. Thank you.” She flipped open the folder and began reading. She barely noticed when Max left her.

The entire first page was a catalogue of the child’s extensive scarring, including what appeared to be a poorly healed knife wound on her left shoulder.

Max was right. Whatever had happened to this child, it wasn’t pretty.

FIVE

On leaving the hospital, Ellie wasn’t surprised to find a crowd outside. They were standing in formation, like a landing party from a distant era, with the Grimm sisters positioned at the front in a loosely formed triangle. As always, Daisy was in the lead. Today she wore a floral housedress beneath a heavy sweater. Green rubber boots ended an inch below her knees and two inches below the eyelet hem of the dress. Her dove gray hair was pulled back into a bun so tight it caused her eyes to tilt slightly up. The ever-present daisy necklace and earrings dwarfed her pale, wrinkled face.

“Chief Barton,” Daisy said, moving regally forward—or, at least as regally as one could move in rubber boots, carrying her dead husband’s ashes in an urn. The cowichan sweater she wore—a bulky gray and white Native American design—was at least two sizes too big. “We heard you were headed this way.”

“Ned saw you turn off the highway. He called Sandi, who saw you turn onto Bay Road,” Violet said, nodding with each word, as if the motion were necessary punctuation.

“What’s the story, Chief?” someone yelled from the back of the crowd.

Ellie was pretty sure it was Mort Elzik, the local reporter who’d broken the story in this morning’s paper.

“Hush, Mort,” Daisy said sternly, using her former principal’s voice to full effect. “We’ve rallied the town, Chief, just like you ordered. Folks really came through. We have toys and books and games and clothes. Even a scooter. That child will want for nothing. Shall I take them to her hospital room? Where is she, poor thing?”

Marigold stepped forward, lowering her voice as she said, “Psych ward?” She glanced at the crowd around her, got them all nodding. “On E.R., they
always
get a consult from psych.”

“What happened to the wolf?” It was Mort again, trying now to push through the crowd.

Suddenly everyone was talking. Daisy couldn’t stop them and Ellie didn’t try. They’d lose steam soon enough on their own. It was, after all, almost Happy Hour.

One by one they’d check their watches, mumble something, and head back to their cars. Daisy Grimm would lead the pack. No one could remember a day when she hadn’t been at the Bigfoot Bar at the start of Happy Hour, with the black urn on the stool beside her. Half-price boilermakers were her favorite poison. She proudly said that she never had more than two. Or less.

“Who is she?” Mort asked in a loud, exasperated voice.

That shut everyone up.

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Mort. Peanut is back at the station, doing everything she can to find out.”

“You see my article today? It was the front page.”

“I haven’t seen the paper yet, Mort. Sorry. What’s your headline?”

“Mowgli lives.” He swelled up with pride. “I love referencing the classics. Anyhoo, it got me a call from the
National Enquirer.
”

Ellie winced. She hadn’t thought about the sensational angle to this story.
Flying Wolf Girl Lands in Rain-Forest Town.
This wasn’t just local news.

And now Julia was involved.

Oops.

“Did you ask people to contact us with information on her possible identity?”

Mort looked stung. “Of course. I’m a professional, you know. I’d like to interview her.”

“Wouldn’t we all? I’ve got a psychiatrist in with her now. I’ll let you know if we get any information. As to the items you’ve all gathered—”

“It’s Julia!” Violet yelled, clapping her hands together.

“Of course!” Marigold chimed in. “Ned wondered who the blond woman was.”

“I can’t believe I missed the obvious. You went to the airport to fetch her,” Daisy said.

“Dogs fetch,” Marigold said with a sniff. Once a high school English teacher, always a high school English teacher.

Mort started to bounce up and down like a kid at the front of the
Pirates of the Caribbean
line. “I want to interview your sister.”

“I have not confirmed that Julia Cates has been contacted in this case,
nor
that she is here.” Ellie looked directly at Mort. “Is that clear? I don’t want to see her name in print.”

“Maybe if you promised me an exclusive—”

“Stop talking.”

“But—”

Daisy whopped him in the back of the head. “Mort Elzik, don’t you even
think
of disobeying Ellie. Your mother would turn in her grave at the very thought
.
And Lord knows I’ll call your daddy.”

“Don’t break that story, Mort.” Ellie added, “Please,” because they both knew he could do what he wanted. But they had decades of history between them. At times like this they were more high school newspaper geek and Homecoming Queen than reporter and police chief. In small towns, the social dynamic was like concrete; it set early and hard.

“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out into a whine.

Ellie smiled. “Good.”

Daisy said, “What do we do with the supplies, Chief?”

“Thank you, Daisy. Why don’t you put everything in my carport? Be sure and get every donor’s name. I’ll want to tell them thanks.”

Marigold patted her vinyl notebook. “Already done.”

Ellie nodded. “Good. I knew I could count on you all. Now, I’d best get to work. We’ve got an identity to track down. Thanks for all your help. That kid was lucky to stumble into our town.”

“We’ll take care of her,” someone said.

Ellie headed across the parking lot. She could hear the buzz of gossip behind her; it grew softer with each step. Tonight, at both the Bigfoot and The Pour House, speculation would be served more often than pitchers of Olympia beer. The subjects would be Julia and the wolf girl in equal proportions. She should have seen it coming.

Julia had always been different in a town that prized sameness. A quiet, gawky girl who’d somehow been born into the wrong family, and then—unimaginably—proven that she was practically a genius. The townspeople hadn’t known what to make of her when she belonged here; God knew they wouldn’t know what to say to her now.

Ellie climbed up into her mom’s old Suburban—“Madge” to those in the know—and drove back to the station house. All the way there she added things to her mental to-do list. Today was the day she’d find the girl’s identity. It
had
to be. Either someone would read a newspaper and come forward or (and this was the best answer) she would find the answer in the cold case files and become a hero.

Ellie parked in her spot and went into the station.

Viggo Mortensen stood in her office. Not in the flesh, of course. A cardboard cutout of him in full Lord of the Rings regalia. A white construction-paper dialogue bubble had been taped next to his lips. It read:
Forget Arwen. It’s you I want.

Ellie burst out laughing.

Peanut came around the corner and walked into the office, holding two cups of coffee.

“How did you know I’d need this today?” Ellie said.

Peanut handed her a cup of coffee. “A good guess.”

“And Aragorn? Where was he hiding?”

“In the projection booth at the Rose Theater. Ned loaned him to me.”

“So I have to return him?”

Peanut grinned. “Tomorrow. Maybe the next day. I told Ned it’d be a while, seeing how badly you need a man in your bedroom. Ned said cardboard was better than nothing.”

Ellie couldn’t help smiling. “Thanks, Peanut.” Then she thought of her to-do list and it was easy to let go of that smile. “Well, I guess we’d best get to work.”

Peanut reached down to her cluttered desk and pulled up a single sheet of paper from the mess. “Here’s where we are so far.” She put on her rhinestone-encrusted Costco reading glasses. “The Center for Lost and Missing Children is running a database search. Their first pass brought up over ten thousand potential matches. They’re trying to narrow it down. Her exact age would help.”

Ellie slowly sat down. Her dream of heroism fizzled like an old balloon. “Ten thousand missing girls. God help us, Peanut. It would take us decades to go through all the information.”

“Get this, El. There are eight hundred thousand missing children cases a year in this country. That’s almost two thousand a day. Statistically, fifty percent of them will be white girls, kidnapped by someone they know. Is she white for sure?”

“Yes.” Ellie felt overwhelmed suddenly. “Did the FBI get back to us?”

“They’re waiting for proof of kidnapping or a solid identification. It could just be a lost girl from Mystic or Forks. Technically we have no proof of a crime yet. They recommend we canvass the town … again. And the DSHS is putting pressure on us to identify a temporary foster parent. We’ll need to get on that. She can’t stay in the hospital forever.”

“Did you call the Laura Recovery Center?”

“And
America’s Most Wanted.
And the attorney general. By tomorrow this girl is going to be front page news.” Peanut’s face pleated into worried folds. “It won’t be easy to hide Julia.”

This story was going to be a hurricane of publicity, no doubt about it. And once again, Dr. Julia Cates would be in the eye of the storm.

“No,” Ellie said, frowning. “It won’t.”

Girl is coiled up like a young fern in this too-white place. The ground is cold and hard; it makes her shiver sometimes and dream of her cave. While she was asleep, the Strangers changed her. She smells now of flowers and rain. She misses her own scent.

She wants to close her eyes and go to sleep, but the smells in here are all wrong. Her nose itches most of the time and her throat is so dry it hurts to swallow. She longs for her river and the roar of the water that is always leaking over the steep cliff not far from her cave. She can hear the Sun-Haired Her breathing, and her voice. It is like a thunderstorm, that voice; dangerous and scary. It makes her scoot closer to the end of the place. If she were a wolf, she could burrow through it and disappear. The idea of that makes her sad. She is thinking of Her … of Him, even. Of Wolf.

Without them she feels lost. She can’t live in this place where nothing green is alive and the air stinks.

She shouldn’t have run away. Him always told her it was cold and bad beyond their wood, that she had to stay hidden because in the world there were people who hurt little girls worse than Him did. Strangers.

She should have listened, but she’d been so scared for so long.

Now she will be hurt worser than the net.

They are waiting to hurt her when she comes out, but she will be too small for them to see. Like a green bug on the leaf, she will disappear.

Sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair in the cheerily decorated playroom, Julia stared down at the notebook in her lap. In the last hour she’d talked endlessly to the girl hidden beneath the bed, but had received no response. Her notebook remained full of questions without answers.

Teeth—dental work?

Deaf?

Stool—any evidence of diet?

Toilet trained?

Scars—age of

Ethnicity

In the early years of her residency it had become clear to everyone that Julia had a true gift for dealing with traumatized and depressed children. Even the best of her teachers and colleagues had come to her for advice. She seemed innately to understand the extreme pressures on today’s kids. All too often they ended up on the dark, back streets of downtown wherever, selling their thin bodies to pay for food and drugs. She knew how exploitation and abuse and alcohol marked a child, how families lost their elasticity and snapped apart, leaving each member adrift and searching. Most importantly, she remembered how it felt to be an outsider, and though she’d grown up and merged into the traffic of adulthood, those painful childhood memories remained. Kids opened up to her, trusted her to listen to them, to help them.

Although she hadn’t specialized in autism or brain damage rehabilitation or mental challenges, she’d dealt with those patients, of course. She knew how autistics functioned and reacted.

She knew, too, how profoundly deaf children acted before they’d learned sign language. Astoundingly, there were still places in this country—backwoods settlements and such—where deaf/mute children grew up with no ability to communicate.

But none of that seemed relevant to this case. The child’s brain scan showed no lesions or anomalies. The girl under the bed could be a perfectly normal child who’d been lost on a day hike and was now too terrified to speak up.

A perfectly normal girl who traveled with a wolf

—and howled at the moon

—and seemingly didn’t know what a toilet was for.

Julia put down her pen. She’d been silent for too long. Her best hope with this child lay in
connecting.
That meant communication. “I guess I can’t write my way to understanding you, can I?” she said in gentle, soothing tones.

“That’s too bad, because I enjoy writing. Probably you prefer drawing. Most girls your age do. Not that I know your age, exactly. Dr. Cerrasin believes you’re about six. I’d say you’re a little younger, but I haven’t really gotten a good look at you, have I? I’m thirty-five. Did I tell you that? I’m sure it seems old to you. Frankly, in the last year, it’s started to feel old to me, too.”

For the next two hours Julia talked about nothing. She told the girl where they were and why they were here—that everyone wanted to help her. It didn’t matter so much what she said as how she said it. The subtext on every word was
Come on out, honey, I’m a safe place.
But there had been no response whatsoever. Not once had so much as a finger appeared out from beneath the bed. She was about to start talking about how lonely the world could sometimes feel when a knock at the door interrupted her.

There was a scuffling sound under the bed.

Had the girl heard the knock?

“I’ll be right back,” Julia said in a quite ordinary oh-there’s-someone-at-my-door voice. She went to the door and opened it.

Dr. Cerrasin cocked his head to the right, where two white-clad male orderlies stood. One held a large box; the other held a tray of food. “The food and toys are here.”

“Thanks.”

“No response yet?”

“No, and it’s impossible to diagnose her this way. I need to
study
her. Actions, reactions, movements. That damn bed makes it impossible.”