The Door To December

'Yeah.'

Phil said' 'Well, they found one.'

Laura's heart seemed to clench as tightly as a fist: a knot of pain in her breast. An urgent question formed in her mind, but she was unable to give voice to it because her throat seemed to have swollen shut.

'How old?' Haldane asked.

That wasn't the question Laura wanted him to ask.

'Eight or nine, they figure,' Phil said.

'Get a description?' Haldane asked.

That wasn't the right question, either.

'Auburn hair. Green eyes,' the patrolman said.

Both men turned to Laura. She knew they were staring at her own auburn hair and green eyes.

She tried to speak. Still mute.

'Alive?' Haldane asked.

That was the question that Laura could not bring herself to ask.

'Yeah,' the uniformed man said. 'A black-and-white team found her seven blocks from here.'

Laura's throat opened, and her tongue stopped cleaving to the roof of her mouth. 'Alive?' she said, afraid to believe it.

The uniformed officer nodded. 'Yeah. I already said. Alive.'

'When?' Haldane asked.

'About ninety minutes ago.'

His face coloring with anger, Haldane said, 'Nobody told me, damn it.'

'They were just on a routine patrol when they spotted her,' Phil said. 'They didn't know she might have a connection to this case. Not till just a few minutes ago.'

'Where is she?' Laura demanded.

'Valley Medical.'

'The hospital?' Her clenched heart began to pound like a fist against her rib cage. 'What's wrong with her? Is she hurt? How badly?'

'Not hurt,' the officer said. 'Way I get it, they found her wandering in the street, uh, naked, in a daze.'

'Naked,' Laura said weakly. The fear of child molesters came back to hit her as hard as a hammer blow. She leaned against the counter and gripped the edge of it with both hands, striving not to crumple to the floor. Holding herself up, trying to draw a deep breath, able to get nothing but shallow draughts of air, she said, 'Naked?'

'And all confused, unable to talk,' Phil said. 'They thought she was in shock or maybe drugged, so they rushed her to Valley Medical.'

Haldane took Laura's arm. 'Come on. Let's go.'

'But…'

'What's wrong?'

She licked her lips. 'What if it's not Melanie? I don't want to get my hopes up and then—'

'It's her,' he said. 'We lost a nine-year-old girl here, and they found a nine-year-old girl seven blocks away. It's not likely to be a coincidence.'

'But what if…'

'Doctor McCaffrey, what's wrong?'

'What if this isn't the end of the nightmare?'

'Huh?'

'What if it's only the beginning?'

'Are you asking me if I think that… after six years of this torture…'

'Do you think she could possibly be a normal little girl anymore,' Laura said thickly.

'Don't expect the worst. There's always reason to hope. You won't know for sure until you see her, talk to her.'

She shook her head adamantly. 'No. Can't be normal. Not after what her father did to her. Not after years of forced isolation. She's got to be a very sick little girl, deeply disturbed. There's not a chance in a million she'll be normal.'

'No,' he said gently, apparently sensing that empty reassurances 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 semen in the vaginal tract,' Pantangello said. 'No bruising or bleeding of the labia or the vaginal 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.