Specter (9780307823403) (5 page)

“If he loved you, he’d be happy. Then he’d act nicer to his patients.”

“No one’s talking about love,” she says. She leans forward. She’s in command again. “Dina, you can be a big help with Julie. It’s obvious that she knows something she doesn’t want to tell us. In fact, we know very little about her.”

“She doesn’t talk to me, either.”

“What about this man who is frightening her?”

“When she woke during the night, she was scared to death. She said he was in the room.”

“Jack told me about the nightmare.”

“Jack?”

“Oh. Dr. Paull.”

“That’s one thing I don’t like about him. He just assumed it was a nightmare. He didn’t listen. I told him it felt as though someone was in the room. I was scared, too. But he didn’t listen to me. He didn’t listen to either of us.”

She thinks a moment. Finally she says, “There is a possibility someone could have been in the room. The nurses can’t see everything that’s going on at every minute.”

“Thanks for having an open mind. Julie was afraid that the man in the supply room was this guy, too.”

“What does she call him?”

“Sikes. She insists that he killed her father.”

“She says she cried when her father died. Have you seen her cry?”

“Yes, and I was glad when she did. It sort of frightened me when she knew her parents were dead but she didn’t cry.”

“Sometimes it’s hard for people to cry. Sometimes they’re in a temporary state of disbelief.”

“Can a state like that come and go?”

“I don’t understand, Dina. What are you asking?”

“Well, sometimes Julie lets down, and then she’s like one of the kids at the home. But at other times I get the impression that her head is so filled with terrible thoughts that the fear has pushed her into
a corner of her own mind, and she’s afraid to come out.”

“Okay,” she says. “I know what you mean.”

“She’s so afraid of this Sikes that she can’t feel what she’s supposed to feel about losing her parents.”

“I told you that you’d be a help,” she says. “This gives me something to work with.”

“She said she should have been killed, too. Apparently Sikes tried to kill all of them. If someone did this and he’s after Julie, shouldn’t somebody care? Shouldn’t somebody try to stop him?”

“Yes,” she says. “A detective asked to question Julie, and I requested that he wait until after I had talked with her. He’ll probably come by soon after I phone him. I’ll tell him exactly what you told me. He’ll know what to do.”

She gives me that wide smile. “Want to talk about yourself? How you feel about leaving the hospital?”

“Dr. Lynn, I can’t go yet.” And I tell her about this dumb promise I made to Julie.

“Why do you think it was a ‘dumb’ promise?”

“Because I don’t want to get mixed up in anyone else’s life.”

“Yet you are, and by your own choice. You could have rejected her on the spot.”

“Don’t try to look inside me.”

“I want you to look inside yourself.”

I get up from that sagging sofa and walk to the other side of the small room, keeping my back to
her. “When I look inside myself, I see a monster. It’s an eyeless thing with a gaping mouth and a thousand claws, and it’s churning inside me and eating away at me.”

She is suddenly beside me. “Your disease is in remission. You know that. You must accept that.”

“I’m trying to accept it. But I know the thing is there, and even if it’s in a cage for now, someday it will be strong enough to break the cage and get out.”

“Dr. Cruz was honest with you. He expects you to be honest with him. Your being honest means believing that you will be one of the survivors. There’s a fine chance of survival now. In the years to come everyone who gets Hodgkin’s disease may be cured.”

“I hate my body for doing this to me!”

She puts an arm around my shoulders, not like a doctor, like a friend. Finally she says, “I’ll do what I can to help find a place where you and Julie can be together.”

“At least for a while,” I say. “Until she has other people she can trust.”

“Agreed.”

“Thanks.” Now I can smile at her. “Let’s go back, so you can call that detective. I want someone to start working on this problem. If Sikes is frightening Julie, then the police should find him.”

It’s after dinner when the detective arrives.

I’m not surprised to see Dr. Lynn with him. But Julie is afraid of the man. She’s a little, shrunken,
shivering person in that bed, eyes stretched wide in a tight face.

“I’m here to help you, Julie,” he tells her. “I’m Roger MacGarvey.”

He looks like his name. He’s a broad, muscular man with dark, thick hair. He reminds me of those big men with kilts and bagpipes in the eighth-grade geography book. Even at that age Holley Jo and I could appreciate those great, burly legs. I wonder how Roger MacGarvey would look in kilts. It’s an interesting thought.

“Julie, tell me the names of some of your relatives. You’ve got a grandmother? An aunt?”

His pen poises over his notebook, but she shakes her head.

“You must have someone.”

“No,” she says.

“Maybe it’s someone you haven’t met. Did your mother or father ever talk about a cousin, or a brother? Someone in another city?”

Negative.

“Julie,” he says, “we need to find someone who can take care of you.”

Her eyes flicker to me, where I am perched on the edge of my bed, my bare toes playing with the hem of my robe. “I haven’t got any relatives,” she says.

MacGarvey stares at his notepad for a few moments. Then he raises his head. “Julie, you must have gone to school. Could you tell us the name of the last school you went to?”

“I went to lots of schools,” she answers. It surprises me that now she’s willing to talk. “We moved a lot. Sometimes we lived in apartments. Sometimes we lived in a mobile home. I didn’t like the mobile home.”

“Tell me the name of your school.”

“There were so many schools. I don’t remember. There was Brookhollow. I remember Brookhollow. I was in the second grade, and we stayed long enough so that I could go to the Halloween carnival. My teacher was nice, but she left to have a baby, and I cried because she was the only one who told me I was smart and put gold stars on my papers.”

“What city was Brookhollow in?”

Her forehead crinkles. Then those clear blue eyes focus on his, and she says, “It might have been in Tennessee, or Georgia. I was only in the second grade.”

“What grade are you in now?”

“Fourth. No, third. I’ll be in fourth grade next fall. But I haven’t been to school for a long time. My mother just gave me lots of books to read. I’m a good reader.”

MacGarvey pauses, and Dr. Lynn steps forward. “What kind of books do you like to read, Julie?”

“I like to read about horses,” she says, “and ghosts.” There is something about that high-pitched, thin voice in this quiet room that makes me uncomfortable.

“Your doctor told me that you just moved to
San Antonio,” MacGarvey says. “Can you give me your address?”

“It was just for a week. About a week, I think. We lived in an apartment house near the freeway.”

“We have a number of freeways in San Antonio, Julie. Can you describe the apartment house for me?”

She thinks for a minute. “It’s white. It looks like most apartment houses look. It’s ugly, and it has ugly furniture. Most apartment houses have ugly furniture.”

“Is it near a shopping center?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of stores do you remember in the shopping center?”

She names two chain stores that must be in every shopping center in the United States.

“What can you tell us about your father, Julie? What kind of jobs did he have?”

“He was an auto mechanic,” she says.

“Do you know where?”

She shakes her head again.

“Did your mother ever tell you what kind of work she did while your father was in jail?”

The blue eyes spark, and she struggles up from the pillow. “My father was never in jail!”

MacGarvey looks at Dr. Lynn, then back at Julie. “Please try to think of something that will help us, Julie. We need to know where your parents come from. We want to find someone who will take good care of you.”

“I can’t think of anything.”

“For now can you give me the names of some cities and towns where you recently lived? Any addresses?”

She hesitates, and he adds, “You’re nine years old. You’re old enough to know where you’ve lived during the last year.”

“We were in a trailer park in Miami, Florida, in January and February,” she says. “I think it was named Seabird. And then we were in another trailer park in a little town in Louisiana for two weeks, but I can’t remember its name. And we stayed in Texarkana in an apartment house, and that’s where they sold the mobile home, because my mother was afraid of tornadoes, and she said they hit mobile homes. The apartment house was on a street called—”

She suddenly stops. “We were just there for a week. I don’t remember the name of the street, but I think it started with a
C
. And we lived in some places in Arkansas and Texas.”

MacGarvey leans back, resting his pad and pencil on his lap. “Dr. Manning tells me that you think a man named Sikes is responsible for your parents’ death, and that you may be in danger from him. Is that right?”

Julie gets white, and I jump to my feet, expecting her to pass out. But she doesn’t. Her voice is a hoarse croak as she says, “I was supposed to die in that crash, too. I hate Sikes! I hate him! He killed my father!”

“Where is this man Sikes?” MacGarvey asks. “Where can I find him?”

Julie’s voice is so soft now that for a moment I must have misunderstood her, but as she repeats what she just said, I get so scared I grab the bedside table and hold on.

“He’s watching us,” Julie says. “And he’s waiting, because he knows where I am.”

Her eyes move toward the doorway, and the three of us look, too, as though we expected the door to open and someone to walk through.

“He might even be hiding in the hospital,” Julie says. “He’s good at hiding. The police can never find him.”

Dr. Lynn steps up to MacGarvey and nods at him. “I think we can let Julie rest now,” she says. “Maybe you’d like to talk to her tomorrow.”

“Sure,” he says. “Tomorrow.” He looks as though he’s glad to be leaving, but he takes a moment to study Julie. “Try to think of an address, Julie,” he tells her. “Come up with something that will help us.”

The two of them leave, and Mrs. Cardenas pops in. She’s got two paper cups of ice cream, and she
gives them to us. “I was working in the hallway,” she says. “I heard some of it.”

“I think you know everything that goes on in this hospital,” I tell her. The ice cream is cold, and I lick the spoon slowly, letting it numb my lips.

“Probably,” she says matter-of-factly. She sits on the end of my bed, and the mattress sags. She grins at Julie. “
Niñita
, how’s it going?”

“Okay,” Julie says. “I like the ice cream. I liked the fruit juice you brought me, too.”

Mrs. Cardenas winks at me. “You missed the fruit juice, Dina, because you were busy walking down the hall with Dr. Lynn. You want fruit juice, you gotta stick around.”

I take another mouthful of ice cream, and she says, “Sometimes it happens. A man can hide from the police for a lifetime. I know some people who came over the border when they were young, got jobs, raised families, and now they’re old, and the law still hasn’t caught up with them.”

She pauses for a deep breath. “And a man commits a crime. He can keep moving, too. My brother-in-law, Arturo, tells me that there’s lots of crimes that never get solved. It’s not like all the detective shows on TV.”

Julie is staring into her ice cream cup, rhythmically eating as though there was nothing in the world more important to do.

Mrs. Cardenas goes right to the point. “Julie,” she says, “if you know places you lived, all that stuff, you should tell the detective who came here.”

“But I don’t know,” Julie answers.

Mrs. Cardenas nods at me. “
Es una posibilidad
. People on the run don’t teach their
niños
addresses and phone numbers. It’s safer if the little ones don’t know much.”

“Is that it? Was your family running away, Julie?” I ask.

“We just kept moving,” Julie says. “I hated all the moving.”

I hand my empty cup to Mrs. Cardenas. “Will you tell all this to Dr. Lynn? I don’t think the doctor, or even the detective, understands.”

“They live in a different world,” Mrs. Cardenas says. “And they don’t ask people in other worlds how it is.”

She elaborately shrugs her roundly padded shoulders, but the smile is there, and I suddenly hurt at the thought that she’ll leave the hospital, and I’ll leave the hospital, and I’ll never see her again.

But a stronger, startling thought tramples the first. “Mrs. Cardenas, what are you going to do after you resign from the hospital?”

“Rest my aching back,” she says. “The legs don’t feel too good, either.” She stretches them straight out and studies them, rotating her pudgy ankles. “Carlos—he’s my husband—don’t bring in much money, but at least it’s steady, and we can get along.”

“You could make a little extra money,” I say, “and have some help besides.”

She peers at me sideways, one eyebrow raised.
“How am I gonna do that? Win one of those big contests?”

I lean toward her eagerly. “Take in a couple of foster children—Julie and me.”

Julie’s mouth is open, and both of Mrs. Cardenas’s eyebrows are raised like little banners. The idea has been forming while I’ve been talking, and I am just beginning to realize what I’ve said. I’m surprised, too, but it seems to make such good sense. I don’t want to spend what time I’ve got with strangers. I like Mrs. Cardenas. She cares about people. She really likes people. She’d be good for Julie.

I talk fast. “I can drive. I can run errands for you. And I’m a good cook. Julie and I can help you clean house. And I know that you’ll get paid for our expenses and something more.”

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” she answers, but I can see her turning the idea around and around, examining it for leaks, as she does the paper juice cartons.