The Door To December Part 6

'No,' he said gently, apparently sensing that empty rea.s.surances would only anger her. 'No, she won't be a well-balanced, healthy little girl. She'll be lost, sick, frightened, maybe withdrawn into her own world, maybe beyond reach, maybe forever. But there's one thing you mustn't forget.'

Laura met his eyes. 'What's that?'

'She needs you.'

Laura nodded.

They left the blood-spattered house.

Rain lashed the night, and like the crack of a whip, thunder broke across the sky.

Haldane put her in an unmarked sedan. He clipped a detachable emergency beacon to the edge of the car roof. They drove to Valley Medical with the light flashing and the siren wailing and the tires kicking up water with a hissing sound that made it seem as if the world itself was deflating.

6.

The emergency-room doctor was Richard Pantangello. He was young, with thick brown hair and a neatly trimmed redbrown beard. He met Laura and Haldane at the admitting desk and led them to the girl's room.

The corridors were deserted, except for a few nurses gliding about like ghosts. The hospital was preternaturally silent at 4:10 in the morning.

As they walked, Dr. Pantangello spoke in a soft voice, almost a whisper. 'She had no fractures, no lacerations or abrasions. One contusion, a bruise on the right arm, directly over the vein. From the look of it, I'd say it was an IV drip needle that wasn't inserted skillfully enough.'

'She was in a daze?' Haldane asked.

'Not exactly a daze,' Pantangello said. 'No confusion, really. She was more like someone in a trance. No sign of any head injury, though she was either unable or unwilling to speak from the moment they brought her in.'

Matching the physician's quiet tone but unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice, Laura said, 'What about ... rape?'

'I couldn't find any indication that she'd been abused.'

They rounded a corner and stopped in front of Room 256. The door was closed.

'She's in there,' Dr. Pantangello said, jamming his hands in the pockets of his white lab coat.

Laura was still considering the way in which Pantangello had phrased his answer to her question about rape. 'You found no indications of abuse, but that isn't the same as saying she wasn't raped.'

'No traces of s.e.m.e.n in the v.a.g.i.n.al tract,' Pantangello said. 'No bruising or bleeding of the l.a.b.i.a or the v.a.g.i.n.al walls.'

'Which there would've had to've been in a child this young, if she were molested,' Haldane said.

'Yes. And her hymen's intact,' Pantangello said.

'Then she wasn't raped,' Haldane said.

A bleakness settled over Laura as she saw the sorrow and pity in the physician's gentle brown eyes.

With a voice as sad as it was quiet, Pantangello said, 'She wasn't subjected to ordinary intercourse, no. We can rule that out. But ... well, I can't say for certain.' He cleared his throat.

Laura could see that this conversation was almost as much of an ordeal for the young doctor as it was for her. She wanted to tell him to stop, but she had to hear it all, had to know, and it was his job to tell her.

He finished clearing his throat and picked up where he had left off. 'I can't say for certain there wasn't oral copulation.'

A wordless sound of grief escaped Laura's lips.

Haldane took her arm, and she leaned against him slightly. He said, 'Easy. Easy now. We don't even know if this is Melanie.'

'It is,' she said grimly. 'I'm sure it is.'

She wanted to see her daughter, ached to see her. But she was afraid to open the door and step into the room. Her future waited beyond that threshold, and she was afraid that it was a future filled with only emotional pain, despair.

A nurse went by without glancing at them, pointedly avoiding their eyes, tuning out the tragedy.

'I'm sorry,' Pantangello said. He took his hands out of the pockets of his lab coat. He wanted to comfort her, but he seemed afraid to touch her. Instead, he raised one hand to the stethoscope that hung around his neck and toyed with it absentmindedly. 'Look, if it's any help ... well, in my opinion, she wasn't molested. I can't prove it. I just feel it. Besides, it's highly unusual for a child to be molested without being bruised, cut, or visibly hurt in some way. The fact that she's unmarked would tend to indicate she wasn't touched. Really, I'd bet on it. He smiled at her. At least she thought it was a smile, although it looked more like a wince. 'I'd bet a year of my life on it.'

Fighting back tears, Laura said, 'But if she wasn't molested, why was she wandering around naked in the street?' The answer to that question occurred to her even as she spoke.

It occurred to Dan Haldane too. He said, 'She must've been in the sensory-deprivation chamber when the killer - or killers - walked into that house. She would have been naked in the tank.

'Sensory deprivation?' Pantangello asked, raising his eyebrows.

To Haldane, Laura said, 'Maybe that's why she wasn't killed along with everyone else. Maybe the killer didn't know she was there, in the tank.'

'Maybe,' Haldane said.

With swiftly growing hope, Laura said, 'And she must've gotten out of the tank after the killer left. If she, saw the bodies ... all the blood ... that would have been so traumatic. It would sure explain her dazed condition.'

Pantangello looked curiously at Lieutenant Haldane. 'This must be a strange case.'

'Very,' the detective said.

Suddenly, Laura was no longer afraid of opening the door to Melanie's room. She started to push it inward.

Halting her with a hand on her shoulder, Dr. Pantangello said, 'One more thing.'

Laura waited apprehensively while the young doctor searched for the least painful words with which to convey some last bit of bad news. She knew it would be bad. She could see it in his face, for he was too inexperienced to maintain a suitably bland expression of professional detachment.

He said, 'This state she's in ... I called it a "trance" before. But that's not exactly right. It's almost catatonic. It's a state very similar to what you sometimes see in autistic children, when they're going through their most pa.s.sive moods.'

Laura's mouth was exceedingly dry, as if she'd spent the last half hour eating sand. There was a metallic taste of fear as well. 'Say it, Doctor Pantangello. Don't mince words. I'm a doctor myself. A psychiatrist. Whatever you've got to tell me, I can handle it.'

Speaking rapidly now, words running together, anxious to deliver the bad news and be done with it, he said, 'Autism, mental disorders in general, they really aren't my field. Evidently, they're more yours. So I probably shouldn't say anything at all about this. But I want you to be prepared when you go in there. Her withdrawal, her silence, her detachment - well, I don't think this condition is going to go away quickly or easily. I think she's been through something d.a.m.ned traumatic, and she's turned inward to escape from the memory. Bringing her back is going to take ... tremendous patience.'

'And maybe she'll never come back?' Laura asked.

Pantangello shook his head, fingered his red-brown beard, tugged on his stethoscope. 'No, no, I didn't say that.'

'But it's what you were thinking.'

His silence was a wounding confirmation.

Laura finally pushed open the door and went into the room, with the doctor and the detective close behind her. Rain beat on the only window. The sound seemed like the wings of nocturnal birds beating in a frenzy against the gla.s.s. Far off in the night, out toward the unseen ocean, lightning pulsed twice, three times, then died in the darkness.

Of the two beds, the one nearer the window was empty, and that half of the room was dark. A light was on above the first bed, and a child lay under the sheets, in a standard-issue hospital gown, her head resting on a single pillow. The upper end of the bed was tilted, raising and angling the girl's body, so her face was entirely visible when Laura entered the room.

It was Melanie. Laura had no doubt about that. The girl had inherited her mother's hair, nose, delicate jaw line. She had her father's brow and cheekbones. Her eyes were the same shade of green as Laura's but deeply set like Dylan's. During the past six years, she had become a different child from the one Laura remembered, but her ident.i.ty was confirmed by more than her appearance, by something undefinable, a familiar aura perhaps, an emotional or even psychic link that snapped into place between mother and daughter the instant that Laura walked into the room. She knew this was her little girl, though she would have had some difficulty explaining exactly how how she knew. she knew.

Melanie resembled one of those children in advertis.e.m.e.nts for international hunger-relief organizations or a poster child for some rare and debilitating disease. Her face was gaunt. Her skin was pale, with an unhealthy, grainy texture. More gray than pink, her lips were cracked and peeling. The flesh around her sunken eyes was dark, as if it had been smudged when she had wiped away tears with an inky thumb.

The eyes themselves were the most unnerving evidence of her ordeal. She stared at the empty air above her, blinking but seeing nothing - nothing in this this world. Neither fear nor pain were evident in those eyes. Just desolation. world. Neither fear nor pain were evident in those eyes. Just desolation.

Laura said, 'Honey?'

The girl didn't move. Her eyes didn't flicker.

'Melanie?'

No response.

Hesitantly, Laura moved toward the bed.

The girl seemed oblivious of her.

Laura put down the safety rail, leaned close to the child, spoke her name again, but again elicited no reaction. With one trembling hand, she touched Melanie's face, which felt slightly fevered, and that contact shattered all her reservations. A dam of emotion broke within her, and she seized the girl, lifted her away from the bed, held her close, and hugged her. 'Melanie, baby, my Melanie, it's all right now, it'll be okay, really it will, you're safe now, safe with me now, safe with Mommy, thank G.o.d, safe, thank G.o.d.' As she spoke, tears burst from her, and she wept with a lack of selfconsciousness and control that she had not experienced since she had been a child herself.

If only Melanie had wept too. But the girl was beyond tears. She didn't return Laura's embrace, either. She hung limply in her mother's arms: a pliant body, an empty sh.e.l.l, unaware of the love that was hers to receive, unable to accept the succour and shelter that her mother offered, distant, in her own reality, lost.

Ten minutes later, in the corridor, Laura dried her eyes with a couple of Kleenexes and blew her nose.

Dan Haldane paced back and forth. His shoes squeaked on the highly polished tiles. From the expression on the detective's face, Laura guessed that he was trying to work off some of his anger over what had happened to Melanie.

Maybe some cops cared more than she thought. This one, anyway.

Dr. Pantangello said, 'I want to keep Melanie here at least until tomorrow afternoon. For observation.'

'Of course,' Laura said.

'When she's released from the hospital, she'll need psychiatric care.'

Laura nodded.

'What I was wondering ... well, you don't intend to treat her yourself, do you?'

Laura tucked the sodden tissues in one coat pocket. 'You think it would be better for a third party, an uninvolved therapist, to work with her.'

'Yes.'

'Well, Doctor, I can understand why you feel that way, and in most cases I would agree with you. But not this time.'

'Usually, it's a bad idea for a therapist to treat one of his own children. As her mother, you're almost certainly going to be more demanding of your own daughter than you would be of an ordinary patient. And, excuse me, but it may even be possible that the parent is part of the problem in the first place.'

'Yes. You're right. Usually. But not this time. I didn't do this to my little girl. I had no part in it. I am virtually as much a stranger to her as any other therapist would be, but I can give her more time, more care, more attention than anyone else. With another doctor, she'd be just another patient. But with me, she'll be my only patient. I'll take leave of absence from Saint Mark's. I'll shift my private patients to some colleagues for a few weeks or even months. I won't expect fast progress from her because I'll have all the time in the world. Melanie is going to get all of me, everything I have to offer as a doctor, as a psychiatrist, and all the love I have to offer as a mother.'

Pantangello seemed on the verge of issuing another warning or offering more advice, but he decided against it. 'Well ... good luck.'

'Thank you.'

When the physician had gone, leaving Laura and Haldane alone in the silent, antiseptic-scented corridor, the detective said, 'It's a big job.'

'I can handle it.'

'I'm sure you can.'

'She'll get well.'

'I hope she does.'

At the nurses' station, at the end of the hall, a m.u.f.fled phone rang twice.

Haldane said, 'I've sent for a uniformed officer. Just in case Melanie witnessed the murders, in case someone might be looking for her, I thought it was a good idea to post a guard. Until tomorrow afternoon, anyway.'

'Thank you, Lieutenant.'

'You aren't staying here, are you?'

'Yes. Of course. Where else?'

'Not long, I hope.'

'A few hours.'

'You need your rest, Doctor McCaffrey.'

'Melanie needs me more. I couldn't sleep anyway.'

He said, 'But if she's coming home tomorrow, won't you have to get things ready for her?'

Laura blinked. 'Oh. I hadn't thought about that. I'll have to prepare a bedroom. She can't sleep in a crib any longer.'

'Better go home,' he said gently.