“The little girl we spoke about?”
“Right, the one in the child porn case. How do you want to set it up?”
“Why don’t you have the mother give me a call?” said Silverman. “I’ll be in at eight-thirty Tuesday morning.”
“I’ve got her here right now,” said Sparrow.
“The girl?”
“No, the mother. I understand the girl’s still too shook up to go out. Want me to put her on?”
Without removing her coat, Cathy Silverman sat down and reached for her appointment book. “Sure,” she said, “put her on.”
Cathy Silverman - her patients called her Dr. Silverman, even though she wasn’t a physician, and it would be two full years before she’d earn her Ph.D. - had worked for the state for six years as a child protective services worker. A year and a half ago, she’d resigned and opened her own practice, a hybrid of clinical testing, counseling, and psychotherapy for what she liked to call children at risk. Her self-anointed specialty - and primary source of clients - was to serve the court system as an evaluator, an expert in substantiating claims of child sexual abuse. Until recently, the preferred term had actually been validator, but that term had fallen out of favor when critics began suggesting that the word itself implied a built-in bias on the part of a supposedly neutral professional.
“Hello, Dr. Silverman,” said a woman’s voice with just an edge of a whine to it. “I’m Ada Barrow.”
“Hello, Mrs. Barrow. I understand I’ll be making an evaluation of your daughter.”
“That’s right. When can we come see you?”
Silverman opened her appointment book and thumbed the pages until she came to next week. “How about Tuesday or Wednesday?” she asked.
“You can’t see us Monday?”
“Monday’s a holiday,” said Silverman.
“What kind of a holiday?”
“It’s President’s Day.” It said so right in her book.
“This is awfully important,” said Mrs. Barrow.
“How about right after school Tuesday?” suggested Silverman.
“Oh, I’m not letting her go back to school yet, no way. At least not until I know if she’s, you know, okay.”
Silverman thumbed back a page. “I could see her tomorrow,” she said, “Saturday. If you can have her here by nine, that is.”
“How ‘bout in the afternoon?”
“I only have hours in the morning,” explained Silverman. “So it’s nine o’clock, or else it’ll have to wait till Tuesday.”
“I guess we’ll see you at nine. Oh, and wait a sec, my lawyer wants to talk to you again.”
“Cathy?” It was Jane Sparrow, back on the line.
“Yes?”
“I saved the best news for last. Judge McGee ordered Daddy to pick up the tab.”
Cathy Silverman smiled as she hung up the phone, glad she’d decided to pick it up in the first place. It was beginning to look as though she could go ahead and order that new side-by-side refrigerator, after all.
“Of course you’ve got to get off the story,” Neil Witt told Theresa Mulholland over lunch. “And anyway, no one wants to read that a man who takes dirty pictures of his kid is really a nice guy. Besides which, you could be called as a witness if the case ever goes to trial.”
“A witness!”
“You saw him drop off the photos to be developed. You said so yourself.”
“How does that make me a witness?”
“You’re in a position to testify that he was acting furtively, tried to hide his face, looked nervous, whatever. State of mind, consciousness of guilt, that kinda thing. Besides, Tom Grady’ll be back Monday. He’ll pick it up from here.”
“From here to where?”
“Wherever it takes him. I hear they found some pretty weird stuff at his home when they went there with the search warrant.”
“Like what?”
“Forget it, Terry, you’re off it. And do yourself a favor. Stay away from the guy. He’s going down.”
At that particular moment, Stephen Barrow wasn’t thinking about going down; he was far more worried about going in. Judge Wainwright had given him until Tuesday afternoon to either come up with $50,000 in cash, or convince a bail bondsman to accept as collateral a house that had virtually no equity in it. The chances of Stephen’s being able to do either of those things were nonexistent. And from what he’d already seen of the judge’s no-nonsense approach to things, Tuesday afternoon was beginning to look a lot like go-to-jail day for Stephen.
He dialed Flynt Adams’s number and caught him, even though it was Friday and after five. “Don’t you ever go home?” he asked him.
“Soon,” said Adams, “soon. What’s up?”
“Suppose I can’t make the bail,” Stephen said. “What happens then? I mean, what jail do they put me in?”
“The Columbia County Detention Facility, right over in beautiful downtown Hudson. You and those two crack dealers you saw this morning, and a dozen or so of their buddies. Why?”
“No reason,” said Stephen. “I mean, I was just wondering, you know.”
Adams had given him the phone numbers of two bail bondsmen to call. Now he asked Stephen if he’d done so.
“Yeah,” said Stephen. “I left messages for both of them.”
“Don’t worry. They’ll get back to you.
“Don’t worry, be happy.
Who was to say those crack dealers were such bad guys, anyway?
Ada and Penny Barrow showed up at Cathy Silverman’s office at 9:25 Saturday morning. “Sorry we’re late,” said Ada. “This one finally slept, for the first time in a week, would you believe, and I didn’t want to wake her up. She’s been through so much, you know. Right, sweetie?”
Penny shrugged. Silverman’s first impression of the child was that she looked pale and drawn, seemed nervous, and was reluctant to speak. Hardly the textbook picture of a normal six-year-old girl. “Why don’t we sit down,” she suggested, “and get ourselves acquainted?”
For the next twenty minutes, as Penny sat between the two women in near silence, Silverman had Ada Barrow describe her daughter’s behavior over the course of the past week. A few of the doctor’s questions were open-ended, such as, “How has she been acting in general?” But only a few. Most were specific to the point of being suggestive, what lawyers tend to object to as leading questions. “Have there been any episodes of bed-wetting?” the doctor wanted to know. “Is she having nightmares?” “Has she been sucking her thumb?” “Throwing temper tantrums?”
Ada answered yes to just about all of them. There finally came a time when Silverman asked Ada to step outside and have a seat in the waiting area, so that she could speak with Penny alone.
“Is that really necessary?” Ada wanted to know. “I mean, she’s so nervous. Even with me here.”
Silverman explained that it really was necessary. “Suppose I’m asked at some point if I ever bothered to interview her without your being present,” she pointed out. “It would look much better all around if I could say yes.”
Ada complied reluctantly, but she complied. In a later written report describing the session, Silverman would make a point of commenting on the mother’s obvious devotion to her daughter.
“So,” she said, finally turning her full attention to the little girl seated in the adult-sized chair, “how are we feeling today?”
“Fine,” said Penny.
In a gentle voice, Silverman asked her if she loved her mommy.
“Yes.”
“How about your daddy?”
“I love him, too.”
“I see. You and your daddy were living alone, is that right?”
“No.”
“No?”
“We weren’t living alone,” Penny explained. “We were living with each other.”
“I see,” Silverman said again. “Tell me, did you ever used to get into your daddy’s bed?”
“Yes, when it was cold.”
Silv
erman made a written note of this. Personally, she considered it a taboo, parents allowing children of the opposite sex to get into bed with them. She couldn’t understand why so many people did it. Pen poised in hand, she asked, “What happened on the times you got into bed with your daddy?”
Penny took a moment before answering, leading Silverman to suspect she was on to something. Finally Penny said, “I got warmer?”
“No. I mean, did your daddy tickle you?”
“In bed?”
“Yes, in bed.”
“No.”
“But he did tickle you?”
“Sometimes.”
Silverman made another note. She considered tickling highly problematic. “How does it make you feel, when he tickles you?”
“I don’t know. I laugh.”
“Tell me, Penny. Do you like it when your daddy takes pictures of you with his camera?”
A shrug.
“How about when you have no clothes on?”
Another shrug.
“I need you to answer in words,” the doctor explained. What she didn’t explain was that she needed an answer to that question in particular. It was, to a social worker, what was called a win-win question. If the subject answered no, it demonstrated her discomfort with her father’s behavior and indicated that the behavior was therefore forced upon her and abusive. On the other hand, if the subject said yes - meaning she liked it when her father took naked photographs of her -that would reveal a pathological relationship between the two, and would be even more suggestive of abuse.
“If you tell me,” said Silverman, “I promise not to tell anyone else. Okay?”
Penny’s thumb went into her mouth, prompting the doctor to make a written note of the fact. “I need my Baba,” said the little girl.
“Who?”
“My Baba.”
“Who’s your Baba?”
But no explanation was forthcoming. “Tell me,” said the doctor. “Does Daddy ever hurt you?”
“No.”
“Are you ever afraid of him? Even a little bit?”
“No.”
“Does he ever make you do things you don’t like?”
No answer.
“What kind of things does he make you do, that you don’t like to do?”
Still no answer. Penny’s thumb was back in her mouth.
“I’ll tell you what. If you can tell me just one of the things, that’ll be enough, and we’ll stop.”
The thumb came out just long enough for Penny to answer. “Sometimes,” she said, “he makes me eat broccoli.”
Because she considered the response an obvious effort on the child’s part to deflect a difficult question, Silverman didn’t bother entering it in her notes.
Outside in the waiting area, Silverman drew Ada Barrow aside. “Who’s Baba?” she asked in a whisper.
“That’s what she used to call her blanket,” Ada explained. “She carried it around with her all the time, when she was a baby. Why?”
“Well,” said the doctor, “it might be a good idea for you to let her bring it next time.”
“Next time?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know there’d be a next time.”
“Oh, yes,” said Silverman. “I’m pretty sure there’s something going on here.”
At noon on that same Saturday, a real estate appraiser showed up at Stephen Barrow’s home. The appraiser had been recommended by Flynt Adams, and did a lot of grumbling about having to come out on such short notice. “You ought to fix this door better,” he said, “and straighten up the inside a little, before you put this on the market.”
“I’m not putting it on the market,” Stephen explained. “I’m trying to put it up for collateral on a bail bond, and I was told I’d need an appraisal first.”
“Oh,” was all the appraiser had to say about that. For the next fifteen minutes, he poked around the place, making little clucking noises every time he came across something he didn’t like. Finally, he handed Stephen two pieces of paper. One was an appraisal form, declaring that the current market value of the property, structures included, was $145,000. The other was a bill for his services, which came to $350.
After he’d written out a check and said good-bye to the appraiser, Stephen called the bail bondsman, as Adams had instructed him to.
“Free at Last,” answered a gravelly voiced man.
“Excuse me?”
“Free at Last Bail Bonds. Manny speaking. What can I do for ya?”
“My name is Stephen Barrow. My lawyer-”
“Yeah, yeah, Flynt tole me aboutchoo. Wha’d the appraisal come in at?”
Stephen glanced at the form. “A hundred and forty-five thousand,” he said.
“And whaddaya owe?”
“Owe?”
“How much ya got left on the mawgage?”
Stephen found his latest statement and read from it. “One hundred and thirty-one thousand, five hundred and sixty-two dollars, and fourteen cents.”
“Which means ya got less than fourteen thou clear, right?”
Manny’s math was a lot faster than Stephen’s. “I guess so,” he said.
“And the bail is fifty, right?”
“Right.”
“Sorry, pal. No can do.”
“But Mr. Adams told me-”
“Pardon my French, but I don’t give a flyin’ fuck what Mr. Adams tole ya. I got a bidness to run heah, not some kinda charity. Whadelse ya got?”
“Excuse me?”
“Cash, bankbooks, jewelry, guns. That kinda stuff.”
Stephen thought for a moment. “I’ve got a car,” he said. “It’s worth $1,600.”
“I don’t take cars.”
“A lot of books, a snowplow, some tools.”
“Forget about that shit - I ain’t a friggin’ pawnshop. Call Flynt, tell him he better go see the judge, get your bail cut. The way things are, I can’t do nuthin’ for ya. Fuckit, I’ll save ya the trouble. I’ll call him myself.”
“Thanks,” said Stephen. “In the meantime, what should I do with the appraisal?”
“That? Ya wanna roll that up real tight like. Then ya wanna bend over an’ give it a good shove, all the good it’s gonna do ya. Sorry to have to break the news to ya, pal. Ya seem like a nice enough guy. Don’t take it personal.”
As she sat at her desk typing her preliminary report on Penny Barrow, Cathy Silverman began to realize that she had a problem. She’d been called in by the court to make an evaluation of the child and determine if she could benefit from therapy. Silverman had already concluded that she could. (In fact, since she’d been in practice, Silverman had yet to conclude that someone could not benefit from therapy. This consistency was no doubt driven by her heartfelt confidence in her own powers to treat; but it may have also had a little something to do with the fact that she made her living from providing the continuing therapy, once she’d decided it was called for.)
What bothered Silverman at the moment was her strong suspicion that in addition to needing therapy, Penny Barrow had been sexually abused, and the abuser was most likely her own father.
All the classic signs were present: the nervousness, the withdrawn and self-protective body language, the reluctance to speak, the sleeplessness, the nightmares, the bed-wetting, the thumb-sucking, the temper tantrums, the sudden need of her blanket, the reversion to baby talk. (Never mind that all of these symptoms might easily have been attributed to the trauma of Penny’s being wrenched from her father and placed with her mother, in surroundings that were at best strange and uncomfortable; to Silverman, they had abuse written all over them.) Equally telling to Silverman were Penny’s transparent attempts at denial: her pitiful insistence that she was just fine, that she loved her daddy, and that the only thing he ever made her do that she didn’t like was to tell her to eat her broccoli. How was that for a textbook case of denial? (It has long been one of the sacred axioms of child-abuse evaluators that denial of abuse is in itself often a
telltale sign of abuse - in spite of the obvious Catch-22 consequences of such thinking.)
To Cathy Silverman, it was all there. And when she added in the fact that Stephen Barrow had been caught with nude photos of his daughter, in which her private parts had not only been visible, but actually displayed for the camera, there was simply no room for doubt.
In 1973, a well-intentioned United States Congress had passed the Mondale Act, providing millions of dollars in federal matching funds to states that established programs to prevent, detect, and prosecute cases of child abuse. It took several years for the states to meet the compliance guidelines, but after a lag period, the results that began coming in were dramatic. In 1976, the number of child-abuse reports nationwide was 670,000; by 1993, it was 3 million. In terms of reports specifying child sexual abuse, the 1976 figure was 21,000; by 1993 it had soared to 320,000, an increase of more than 1,500 percent. One of the original requirements of the Mondale Act was that, in order to qualify for matching funds, states designate “mandated reporters” - physicians, therapists, teachers, and others - who would be required to report all instances of suspected abuse they came across. Their failure to report a case - whether that failure was willful or simply negligent - could subject them to criminal prosecution, a fact that put them under tremendous pressure to err on the side of reporting cases, even when they had little to go on other than a vague suspicion.
Cathy Silverman was a mandated reporter.
Priscilla McGee was a judge who didn’t mind being disturbed on a weekend, providing it was a matter that needed her immediate attention. When the phone rang, it was her court clerk calling, who, in turn, had been chased down by someone in the sheriff’s office.
“Judge, I’ve got a doctor on the line, says it’s real important she speaks with you. Name’s Silverman, Cathy Silverman. Want me to put her through?”
Judge McGee knew Cathy Silverman well, having appointed her on a half-dozen cases over the past year and a half. Silverman was a serious young woman who wouldn’t be calling simply to waste the judge’s time.
“Yes,” she told her clerk, and waited while he performed whatever magic was required to splice one call onto another.
Eventually, she heard a “Go ahead,” followed by Silverman’s “Hello?”
Best Intentions Page 15