"First-line treatment is chemotherapy. Next is a bone narrow transplant. I tried both. There is no third option."
They sat in silence for a moment as a breeze rippled through the flower heads and rustled the trees. A smattering of red and orange leaves drifted down to settle upon the ground.
"Evan has always suffered from a lack of self-worth. It's important you understand that. His father had run up a tremendous debt and he was determined to show that he could overcome it. In trying to save the business, Evan accepted a very generous sum of money to help study Sarah and catalog the results. But he couldn't get her to cooperate. There was ... an accident. Two men died in a fire. Sarah felt responsible. She withdrew from him, fought him; he was frightened to death of her and what might happen if she lost control again. And he was beginning to feel the pressure. I finally convinced him that if we brought in someone who could relate to Sarah in a slightly less professional manner, connect to her as a friend and mentor, we could use that to our advantage."
"You have some sort of hold over him, don't you?"
"We have a history. I met him in grad school, there was something briefly between us, he thought it was more. He's still in love with me, even after all these years. I suppose I use it, just like anything else."
"What did you think would happen when I found out the truth?"
"That you would have won her trust by then, and that I might win yours in the end. That's it."
Jess watched a pigeon strutting across the grass, looking out of place here. Two people, dead. It made better sense to her now. Wasserman's evasive manner, his slow disintegration, the fear in his eyes. But something important was still missing. "Where did the money come from that kept the facility afloat? Who is the man in the blue suit?"
"Does it matter? People are interested in her for the same reasons they have always been interested in things like this. Power. They don't care where it comes from or why. They just want it."
Bitterness tasted sour at the back of Jess's throat and she swallowed it away. "You lied to me from the beginning."
Shelley shook her head. "I never really lied, Jess. I just didn't tell you all of it. As I've said before, you wouldn't have believed me."
"You should have given me the chance."
"Maybe so. But it's water under the bridge, isn't it?"
"You're still her legal guardian, you can move her. All you need to do is petition child and welfare services--"
"You haven't been listening to me. It's out of our hands now."
"But goddammit, why?"
"I'm tired," Shelley said. "There are too many others involved now. Sometimes you have to bow your head and admit defeat. Maybe you don't believe that. But you're young."
"What are they going to do to her? They're going to keep pushing her until she breaks, aren't they?"
"Now, don't you jump to conclusions. I'm sure she'll be treated gently enough. The Wasserman Facility is still a li-censed institution, Evan won't want to risk--"
"So you're not going to help me," Jess said. Anger made her cheeks feel hot and her skin prickle. "Goddamn you. You're a coward,"
"I want you to understand something, all right? I'm not an evil person. I'm not uncaring. I did what I could for her, and what I thought was best for all of us. But I don't have much time now, and I've got to make a choice. I have to choose how to live the last of my days. I can't be bothered with this anymore."
They sat in the silence of the afternoon. Jess rose to her feet and blinked back tears of frustration. Betrayal stung like acid. Shelley had been a mentor, someone she had trusted. No way. You're not going to see me break down. She turned to go.
"There's one other thing you'll want to know," Shelley said, stopping her in her tracks. "Remember I told you that there were signs of abuse on Sarah? Hitting little kids wasn't the only thing Ed Voorsanger was doing at that house. When Evan ran some genetic tests we found out that Ed was Sarah's natural father. He never admitted it and his wife wouldn't hear a word. Of course Annie never talked about it, never talked about the rapes, the sexual and physical abuse she must have been suffering from her father for years. She couldn't. But those tests proved it to be true.
"After that was when things really began. Suddenly Sarah became very interesting to a lot of people. It's in her genes, Jess, some sort of mutation, and something like that can be isolated. It can be enhanced. Replicated."
Jess turned away again. She walked in stunned silence across the spotless stretch of lawn, toward manicured shrubs and pine mulch, into the shadows of the house. She tried to keep her mind from dwelling on the images that had sprung unbidden into her head.
"You're fighting something you can't possibly win," Shelley called after her. "You can't turn back the clock. Even if you saved her, do you really think it would stop whatever pain you feel? Do you think it would silence those voices in your head?"
"Good-bye, Professor Shelley." The words felt strange in Jess's mouth. "God be with you."
--31--
As she left Shelley's drive, trees looming over the car like threatening hands, Jess calmed herself enough to think. She thought about how the psychiatric system might deal with a child that was out of control. Foster homes, juvenile halls, outpatient facilities couldn't hold her; this child was not only violent but utterly beyond the realm of anything humanity had ever seen, or could understand. Where would they put a child like that?
Buried, she thought, they would bury her where no one would ever come looking. In a maximum-security mental ward, for instance. Psychiatry preferred to bare its soul behind closed doors. But then why bring in anyone from the outside? Why risk the exposure?
An answer to that had already been given. Wasserman's desperate attempt to save the hospital had led to his involvement with some very bad people, and he had done every-thing possible to reach Sarah again and pull her out of wherever she had retreated to in her mind.
But that wasn't all of it. Jess still couldn't rationalize Wasserman taking such a huge gamble. He had to know the chances were good that she would find out what he was doing and expose him. There was something else happening here, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
She thought of Annie and the abuses suffered at her father's hands, the years of silence and the birth of an unwanted child. A genetic mutation. Annie carried it, and her father did too; mixing those genes again had produced something far beyond the capabilities of either of them.
Was that it? A twisting of genes, a double helix bent in upon itself, triggering the awakening of something long dormant and nearly forgotten?
Perhaps. But thinking of it in that way reduced Sarah to a lab experiment. She was more than that, much more.
I could petition for a hearing through Child and Welfare. I could call the police. But by the time anything was done, if anyone listened to her at all, she had a feeling Sarah would be gone. One way or another.
As she crossed the bridge and pulled into traffic on Cambridge Street, she glanced in the rearview. A dark blue Crown Victoria ran like a sleek, smooth shark three cars back. She had seen the same car ten minutes earlier. She watched as it turned into traffic and merged into her lane. Two men in the front seat, looked like maybe one more in back. Difficult to tell.
She turned left onto Harvard Avenue as the light blinked to yellow. The Crown Victoria swung across the intersection and through the red, causing others to slam their brakes, honk, and gesture out their windows. Boston drivers. She was worried now, but not much. Yet.
She debated whether to swing into the liquor store lot and see if the Crown followed, but decided to keep going. Traffic was always heavy here, with cars parked along both sides of the street and little stores lining the sidewalks. Thrift shops and unfinished wooden furniture stores attracted the college crowd. People darted and bobbed and weaved in and out of doorways. Nobody was paying any attention to the cars in the street.