Magic hour: a novel (19 page)

There was nothing for them to do now except wait. And pray that someone came forward to identify the girl.

“I don’t know, Pea. This is a tough one.”

“You’re up to it.”

Ellie smiled at her friend. “Of all the decisions I’ve made in this job, you know what was the best one?”

“The ‘Drive a Drunk Home’ program?”

“Close: it was hiring you, Penelope Nutter.”

She grinned. “Every star needs a sidekick.”

Laughing, Ellie went back to work, reading through the pile of documents on her desk.

A few moments later there was a knock at the door. Peanut looked up. “Who knocks at a police station?”

Ellie shrugged. “Not a reporter. Come in,” she said loudly.

Slowly, the door opened. A couple stood on the front step, peering inside. “Are you Chief Barton?” asked the man.

They weren’t reporters, that much was certain. The man was tall and white-haired, thin to the point of gauntness. He wore a pale gray cashmere sweater and black pants with knife-sharp pleats. And big city shoes. The woman—his wife?—was dressed in black, from head to toe. Black coatdress, black hose, black pumps. Her hair, an expensive trio of blonds, was drawn back from her pale face and coiled in a French twist.

Ellie stood. “Come on in.”

The man touched the woman’s elbow, guided her to Ellie’s desk. “Chief Barton, I’m Dr. Isaac Stern. This is my wife, Barbara.”

Ellie shook both of their hands, noticing how cold their skin was. “It’s nice to meet you.”

A blast of wind hit the open door, made it smack hard against the wall.

“Excuse me.” Ellie went to shut the door. “How can I help you?”

Dr. Stern looked at her. “I’m here about my daughter, Ruthie.
Our
daughter,” he corrected, looking at his wife. “She disappeared in 1996. There are many of us here. Parents.”

Ellie glanced outside. The reporters were still congregated in the street, talking among themselves and waiting for the press conference, but it was the line of people that caught her attention.

Parents.

There had to be one hundred of them.

“Please,” said a man standing on the steps. “You threw us out with the press, but we need to talk to you. Some of us have come a long way.”

“Of course I’ll talk to you,” Ellie said. “One at a time, though. Pass the word down the line. We’ll be here all night if we need to.”

While the news was being spread, Ellie heard several women burst into quiet sobs.

She shut the door as gently as she could. Steeling herself, she headed back to her desk and took her seat. “Sit down,” she said, indicating the two chairs in front of the desk.

“Penelope,” she said, “you can interview people, too. Just take down names, contact numbers, and any information they have.”

“Sure, Chief.” Peanut immediately headed for the door.

“Now,” Ellie said, leaning forward. “Tell me about your daughter.”

Grief stared back at her, stark as blood on snow.

Dr. Stern was the first to speak. “Our Ruthie left for school one day and never arrived there. It was two blocks from our house. I called the policeman who has been our friend in this, and he tells me this girl you have found cannot be my—our—Ruthie. I tell him our people believe in miracles, so we’ve come here to see you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small worn photograph. In it, a beautiful little girl with sandy brown ringlets held on to a bright pink Power Rangers lunch box. The date in the lower right corner was September 7, 1996.

Today, Ruthie would be at least thirteen. Maybe fourteen.

Ellie took a deep breath. It was impossible not to think suddenly of the line of hopeful parents outside, all of them waiting for a miracle. This would be the longest day of her life. Already she wanted to cry.

She took the photo, touched it. When she looked up again, Mrs. Stern was weeping. “Ruthie’s blood type?”

“O,” Mrs. Stern said, wiping her eyes and waiting.

“I’m sorry,” Ellie said. “So very sorry.”

Across the room, Peanut opened the door. Another couple walked in, clutching a color photograph to their chest.

Please God,
Ellie prayed, closing her eyes for just a moment, a heartbeat,
let me be strong enough for this.

Then Mrs. Stern started to talk. “Horses,” she said in a throaty voice. “She loved horses, our Ruthie. We thought she wasn’t old enough for lessons. Next year, we always said. Next year . . .”

Dr. Stern touched his wife’s arm. “And then . . . this.” He took the picture from Ellie, staring down at it. Tears brightened his eyes. He looked up finally. “You have children, Chief Barton?”

“No.”

Ellie thought he was going to say something to that, but he remained silent, helping his wife to her feet.

“Thank you for your time, Chief.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“I know,” he said, and Ellie could see suddenly how fragile he was, how hard he was working to keep his composure. He took his wife’s arm and steered her to the door. They left.

A moment later a man walked in. He wore a battered, patched pair of faded overalls and a flannel shirt. An orange Stihl chainsaw baseball cap covered his eyes, and a gray beard consumed the lower half of his face. He clutched a photograph to his chest.

It was of a blond cheerleader; Ellie could see from here.

“Chief Barton?” he said in a hopeful voice.

“That’s me,” she answered. “Please. Come sit down . . .”

TEN

L
AST NIGHT
J
ULIA HAD TRANSFORMED HER GIRLHOOD BEDROOM
into a safety zone for her and her patient. The two twin beds still graced the left wall, but now the spaces beneath them were filled to block hiding places. In the corner by the window, she’d gathered almost one dozen tall, potted plants and created a mini-forest. A long Formica table took up the center of the room, serving as a desk and study space. Two chairs sat tucked up beside it. Now, however, she realized what she’d missed: a comfortable chair.

For the past six hours the child had stood at the barred, open window, with her arm stuck outside. Come rain or shine, she held her hand out there. Somewhere around noon a robin had landed on the windowsill and stayed there. Now, in the pale gray sunlight that followed the last hour’s rain, a brightly colored butterfly landed on her outstretched hand, fluttering there for the space of a single breath, then flew off.

If Julia hadn’t written it down, she would have stopped believing she’d seen it. After all, it was autumn; hardly the season for butterflies, and even in the full heat of summer, they rarely landed on a little girl’s hand, not even for an instant.

But she
had
written it down, made a note of it in the permanent file, and so there it was now. A fact to be considered, another oddity among the rest.

Perhaps it was the girl’s stillness. She hadn’t moved in hours.

Not a shifting of her weight, not a changing of her arm, not a turn of her head. Not only did she evidence no repetitive or obsessive movements, she was as still as a chameleon. The social worker who had come this morning to conduct the home study to determine Julia’s fitness as a temporary foster parent had been shocked, though she tried to hide it. As she closed her notebook, the woman had thrown a last, worried glance at the girl before whispering to Julia, “Are you sure?”

“I am,” Julia had said. And she was. Helping this child had already become something of a quest.

Last night after preparing the bedroom, she had stayed up late, sitting at the kitchen table, making notes and reading everything she’d been able to find on the few true wild children on record. It was both fascinating and wrenchingly sad.

Their cases all followed a similar pattern, whether they’d been found three hundred years ago in the dense woods of Bavaria or in this century in the wilds of Africa. All of them were discovered—usually by hunters—hiding in deep, dark forests. More than a third of them ran on all fours. Very few had been able to speak. Several of them—including Peter, the wild boy in 1726; Memmie, the so-called Savage Girl in France; and most famously, Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron in 1797—had become media sensations in their day. Scientists and doctors and language theorists flocked to their sides, each hoping their wild child would answer the most elemental human nature questions. Kings and princesses brought them to court as oddities, entertainments. The most recent case, that of a girl named Genie, who, though not raised in the wild, had been subjected to such systematic and horrific abuse that she had never learned to speak or move around or play, was yet another case of media attention.

Most of the documented cases had two things in common. First, the children possessed the physical ability to speak, but never acquired actual language to any great degree. Secondly, almost all of these former wild children lived out their lives in mental institutions, forgotten and alone. Only two cases, Memmie and a Ugandan boy found living among the monkeys in 1991, ever truly learned to speak and function in society, and Memmie still died penniless and alone, forgotten. She had never been able to tell people what had happened to her in her youth, how she’d ended up in the dark woods.

One after another, scientists and doctors had been drawn to the challenge these children presented. The so-called professionals wanted to know and understand—and yes, to “save”—a human being totally unlike all others, one who could be seen as more pure, more untouched than anyone born in a thousand years. A person unsocialized, uncorrupted by man’s teachings. One by one they had failed in their quest. Why? Because they cared too little about their patients.

It was not a mistake she would make.

She wouldn’t be like the doctors who’d gone before her, who’d sucked the soul from their patients, furthered their own careers, and then moved on, leaving their silent, broken patients locked behind bars, more confused and alone than they’d been in the woods.

“It’s your heart that matters, isn’t it, little one?” she said, looking up again. As Julia watched, another bird landed on the windowsill by the girl’s outstretched hand. The bird cocked its head and warbled a little song.

The girl imitated the sound perfectly.

The bird appeared to listen, then sang again.

The girl responded.

Julia glanced at the video camera set up in the corner. The red light was on. This bizarre “conversation” was being recorded.

“Are you communicating with him?” Julia asked, making a note of it in her records. She knew it would sound ridiculous, but she was seeing it. The girl and the bird seemed to understand each other. At the very least, the child was an accomplished mimic.

Then again, if she’d grown up in the woods, alone or among a pack of animals, she wouldn’t necessarily make the distinctions between man and animals that were commonplace in our civilized world.

“Do you know the difference between man and animal, I wonder?” She tapped her pen on the pad of paper. At the gentle thudding sound, the bird flew away.

Julia reached sideways for the books on the table that served as her makeshift desk. There were four of them.
The Secret Garden,
Andersen’s Fairy Tales,
Alice in Wonderland,
and
The Velveteen Rabbit.
These were only four of the many books donated by the generous townspeople. Early this morning, while the girl was still asleep, Julia had changed her diaper and then searched the boxes for anything that might help her communicate with her patient. She’d chosen crayons and paper, a pair of old Barbie dolls, still dressed for disco, and these books.

She opened the top one,
The Secret Garden,
and began to read out loud. “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. . . .”

For the next hour Julia read the beloved children’s story aloud, concentrating on giving her voice a gentle, singsong cadence. There was no doubt in her mind that her patient didn’t know most of these words and thus couldn’t follow the story, and yet, like all preverbal children, the girl liked the sound of it.

At the end of a chapter, Julia gently closed the book. “I’m going to take a short break here. I’ll be right back.
Back,
” she repeated in case the word was familiar.

She stood slowly, stretching. Long hours spent sitting in this chair, tucked up to a makeshift desk at the end of her girlhood bed, had left her with a crick in her neck. She took her pen—it could be a weapon, after all—and headed for the tiny bathroom that had been built for her and Ellie when they were preteens. It connected to their bedroom through a door by the dresser.

Julia went into the bathroom and closed the door just enough for privacy. She didn’t want her voice to be lost. Pulling down her pants, she sat on the toilet and said, “I’m just going to go to the bathroom, honey. I’ll be right back. I want to know what happens to Mary, too. Do you think she really hears crying? Do
you
cry? Do you know what—”

The girl skidded to a stop in the doorway and shoved the door open, wincing when it banged against the wall. She slapped her cheeks and shook her head. Snot flew from her nose as she blew it, hard.