Grounds to Believe

by Shelley Bates

  “Here?”

  Julia nodded. Now came the part where she was going to be evicted. “He’s been staying at a motel, but I think Kailey will be more comfortable here. She needs new clothes and decent food and a little bit of stability while Ross is in town. So they’ll be staying with me for a little while.” She took a breath and rushed on. “I realize that looks bad, and I understand it will reflect badly on you. So yes, I’ll be looking for another place to live. I just hope you don’t mind if it takes me a few days.”

  “I do mind. I mind very much.”

  Julia’s shoulders tightened with tension. “I’m sorry, Rebecca. I’ll try to find another place as fast as I can.”

  “I don’t mean about that, you ridiculous child. I mind very much that you think I would give you the boot for providing a temporary home for two people so obviously in need of one. What kind of heartless—” she cast around for a word bad enough “—wretch do you take me for?”

  Julia struggled to make sense of the collision between expectation and reality. “You’re not going to evict me?”

  “Evict you for caring for a child who was found in a homeless shelter? Great heavenly days, dear. I’m astonished at you.”

  Julia dropped on her knees beside Rebecca’s chair and hugged the older woman. Rebecca hugged her back, and Julia felt the strength of her bones.

  “There’s Ross, too,” she managed around the lump in her throat.

  “If it really bothers you that much, you can come and sleep in my guest room. But for pity’s sake, you have more to worry about here than lending a room to your friends. Your mother, for one thing. Dear Elizabeth is on the warpath with a vengeance.” Gently, she steered Julia to the couch, where Kailey had come out from under the afghan completely, and was busy braiding each tuft of the fringe. “She isn’t letting on, of course. If anyone but Melchizedek brings up the subject she freezes them out. But the Spanish Inquisition has nothing on her when it comes to interrogation. I finally had to lie and tell her I had a kettle boiling over to get her off the phone. May the good Lord forgive me.”

  “What I don’t understand is why all the fuss. I’ve been on overnight trips tons of times and no one has batted an eye.”

  “That’s what I came here to tell you, dear. Ryan’s condition is worsening, and most of the family has been at the hospital since last night.” She held up her hands as Julia leaped to her feet. Kailey snatched the afghan over herself again and blinked fearfully through the fringe.

  “There’s really nothing you can do. He was moved to intensive care, and Michael told them not to overreact and act as though he was on his deathbed, poor wee baby, but everyone went into panic mode anyway. I would suggest you clean up and change, and consider yourself warned.”

  “I can’t leave. What about Kailey?”

  “I’ll watch her until Mr. Malcolm comes. In fact, I think we might get along famously if she allows me to help her with some of those lovely braids.”

  Julia was becoming painfully familiar with the pediatrics ward. Even when she was concentrating on bringing Madeleine and Owen two cups of tea without spilling them, she avoided the corner of the carpet sticking up in the waiting room as automatically as she avoided the creaky board in her bathroom that had been known to wake Rebecca out of a sound sleep.

  She got to Ryan’s room without spilling a drop. Madeleine looked awful after a two-day vigil. Her skin was pale and drawn, and her eyes looked tearful to the point of flooding. Owen looked up from the Bible on his lap, which he’d been reading to them in lieu of going to Sunday Gathering, and got up to greet her. A cold feeling of unease tugged at Julia as she handed him his tea. If Madeleine looked drawn, Owen looked positively deathly. Julia suddenly realized that he was not the young, golden god she had always worshiped, but a middle-aged man whose greatest efforts and constant faith were useless against the unknown threat that stalked his son.

  “How is he?” she whispered.

  “No change.” Owen’s voice carried his pain the way damp air carried sound. He made an effort to smile at her. She had always been so much in awe of his position in the church she had never felt comfortable kissing him, but she did so now. “I’m glad you’re here, Julia.”

  She was selfishly thankful that her sister and brother-in-law were both so consumed with their son that they had no time for trivialities such as where she’d been lately and with whom.

  She turned to the bed. Ryan lay on the pillow, his head engulfed by its softness. He looked so small. So fragile, as if a word spoken too loudly would end his life. A tube ran into his nose.

  Julia looked over her shoulder. “They’ve put a feeding tube in?”

  Madeleine nodded, and leaned over to brush a lock of damp hair off Ryan’s forehead with the gentlest touch of her fingers. She didn’t seem to see the cardboard cup Julia held out to her, so she put it gently on the tray at the end of the bed.

  “He couldn’t keep his food down. At least this way we know he’s getting nourishment while they try to find out what’s wrong.”

  “Is it—is it the same as before?” Julia asked, frightened to put the thought into words. “It’s the flu, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t know,” Owen replied, subsiding into his chair again. “We’re hoping that’s all it is. It came on so suddenly.”

  “I’ve never thought it was flu,” Madeleine said with authority. She held her head so stiffly the cords in her neck stood out like bone. “I told Michael that from the first. If he’d listened to me sooner, we might have been able to act days ago.”

  “He’s acting now,” Owen said, looking at Julia. “They have a specialist coming up from Spokane in the morning.”

  “I still think we should have insisted on the GI man in Seattle,” Madeleine said stubbornly. “I was very impressed with his credentials. What can they know in Spokane, for goodness’ sake?” She adjusted Ryan’s blankets, then peered at the digital display on the apparatus next to the bed as if checking the doctors’ work.

  “If it does turn out to be flu, we’ll probably be glad he only came from Spokane,” Owen said with a trace of his old humor, watching her.

  “It isn’t flu, Owen. Why do you keep believing what Michael says?”

  “Because Michael’s a doctor, darling.”

  “Oh, and I’m not. I’m just his mother, and for your information, you forget I have nurse’s training.”

  “You were only there a year, Lina,” Julia said without thinking, and Madeleine rounded on her.

  “That’s a year more than either of you! I don’t need any comments like that from single people, thank you very much! Since when did you become an authority on children when you’ve never had any?”

  Julia stared at her sister. Her stomach rolled over with a nauseating thud.

  Owen gently led Madeleine to the other side of the room. “Come on, sweetheart, I know how hard this is on you. I know you’ve given the kids everything you had to give. Let’s go for a walk, all right? I could really use one.”

  “I’m not leaving Ryan.”

  “Julia can stay with him for two minutes. Please.”

  Madeleine allowed her husband to take her out into the waiting room, and Julia sat in the uncomfortable chair. The anxiety was getting to them all. Poor Madeleine was just developing stress fractures in her spirit.

  But it hurt. Deeply. No one in their family used such unkind words, or that tone of voice, either. Julia groped for some sort of spiritual strength, but there was nothing inside but a reverberating shock that anyone who professed to love her could speak to her that way. It was almost as if Madeleine hated her for voicing even the smallest of doubts about her ability to care for her children. For a few dreadful seconds she’d seen a stranger glaring out of Madeleine’s eyes.

  “Auntie Julia?”

  Ryan’s voice was hardly more than a whisper. Julia leaned over the bed, her uneasy thoughts vanishing. “Hi, big guy. I heard you weren’t feeling so good.”

  The little boy’s
eyes were huge in a face that had long ago lost its baby fat. His short eyelashes were clumped together, and his hair was stuck to his forehead with perspiration. Julia dipped a tissue in the water carafe and sponged his face.

  “Auntie Julia, I saw the angel from hell.”

  The back of Julia’s neck prickled.

  Ryan and Hannah had always been creative, imaginative children. Was Ryan really so ill that he could no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy? Or was there, as worldly people believed, really an angel of death hovering at this moment in the pastel-colored hospital room, waiting to take away the child she loved?

  Julia huddled in the chair by the bed, cold inside and out. When Owen and Madeleine came back a moment later, the look on her face betrayed her.

  “Julia, what is it? Is he worse?” Madeleine pushed the sock monkey aside and took Ryan’s wrist.

  But the little boy had drifted back into sleep. Not for worlds would Julia tell them what their son had seen.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  With a white maintenance overall covering his clothes in case someone walked in, Ross paced the hospital laundry room. He hated not having his hand in everything to do with a case. Bad enough he’d had to entrust Kailey to Rebecca and dash down here with no warning, once he’d heard about Ryan’s downturn. But oddly, Kailey seemed to like Rebecca, and the woman had been introducing the little girl to the wonders of making peanut butter cookies when he’d left.

  Meanwhile, where was Rita? They had too narrow a window to risk any deviations from the plan. He’d seen Ryan himself earlier. Time was running out.

  Soft footsteps sounded in the corridor outside, and Rita slipped into the room, closing the door behind her. “Sorry. Swing shift got called into a staff meeting and they always run long.”

  “What’s the status?” Ross asked, hands loosely on his hips.

  “I saw Julia just now, on her way out. Owen will probably leave in the next half hour or so. He’s been here all evening. My colleague says that Madeleine usually runs down to the machine on the next floor around nine for a snack. That gives us about five minutes to get the sample.”

  “Did any of them see you?”

  “Of course not,” Rita said. “They know I work here, but I keep out of their way. If anyone discovers I’m working with you, I’ve had it. I hope you don’t plan to stay long.”

  “No. Once you get his blood sample, I’ll meet you in the parking lot. It’ll go in the priority courier to Seattle and with any luck, we’ll have some results from Dr. Chang in a day or two.”

  “Let’s hope. But tell me something. If they find isopropyl alcohol, it will only prove that someone is poisoning Ryan. How will you prove it’s Madeleine and not one of us nurses?”

  Ross nodded in acknowledgement of the risk. “Dr. Chang told me the best way was to catch her at it on video. But I don’t see how we can do that. I’m not going to stand on a ladder and drill a hole for a camera above his bed. Getting the approvals alone could take days. And from the look I got at Ryan a while ago, we don’t have days.”

  “He’ll be lucky to make it through the week, if you want my opinion. My colleague says his condition is so fragile that if Madeleine gets to him even once more, it could send him under.”

  Not for the first time that day, Ross clenched his teeth and prayed. It was an incoherent jumble of pleading and emotion, but the Father, the all-knowing and all-loving, would translate.

  “What are you going to do?” Rita asked when the silence extended past her comfort zone.

  “I think we need to bring Archer in to help us.”

  Rita snorted. “Get real. He’s in love with her. And he’s true-blue Elect.”

  “But if that sample comes back positive, he’ll have to listen. He can’t argue with the facts.”

  “Ross, my big leather-clad innocent, the Elect have been denying the facts for a hundred years. Look at Melchizedek and that arrogant prune, Phinehas. They think they’re prophets, leading the people to heavenly glory, when Melchizedek is just an unemployed mill worker named Mitch Duckworth. Phinehas has been running this scam for so long I don’t think anybody knows who he used to be.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “What about the generations of McNeills and the wandering prophets and having the Elder’s position handed down and all that?”

  “He’s a wandering prophet, all right. All of them are. They wander right in and start where the last one left off, getting weirder with every generation. Don’t fool yourself. Denial of reality is an art form here.”

  Ross thought about the torture in Michael Archer’s eyes at his inability to diagnose Ryan correctly. If Madeleine really had been toying with him for most of Ryan’s life, imposing her own reality on his and playing a game that pitted her cunning against his knowledge and the authority of the entire hospital system, the effects were beginning to show. And that could just work to Ryan’s advantage.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Archer craves an answer. He feels he’s failing as a man and as a doctor because he can’t come up with one. If we give him that answer, the shock might just push him onto our side.”

  “I think it’s a mistake, but this is your show,” Rita said flatly. “Now, I’ve got to get back to work and you’ve got to disappear.”

  More than anything, Ross wanted to slip upstairs and watch while Rita took the blood sample, to make sure Ryan was still breathing. Maybe poke around and see if he could find any evidence of what Madeleine was up to. But he couldn’t. He’d looked in and Ryan had opened his eyes for a moment. He couldn’t risk it again.

  He pushed open the door to the glassed-in staircase on the outside of the building and began the descent to the ground floor. At the landing, he ran smack into a woman.

  “Oops! Sorry, miss, I—”

  Julia looked up at him and smiled, as if his mere presence were a gift. Her hair glowed in the last of the daylight like Spanish gold. Longing rippled through him—longing for a warmth and promise that would be chilled forever in just about two minutes, after he’d said what he’d been holding back for weeks. Well, there was nothing left to lose, now. To do his best for her nephew, he had to tell her the last of his secrets.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  For a moment, her heart raced. Julia took a deep breath and tried to calm her responses to his closeness and the intensity in his eyes. That penetrating look always affected her, and she was too close to coming undone as it was.

  “Is Kailey all right? Honest, Ross, I didn’t mean to leave her so suddenly, but when Rebecca told me about Ryan, I had to come. She’s okay with Rebecca, isn’t she?”

  “She’s fine. Rebecca’s showing her how to make peanut butter cookies. And probably how to eat them, too. I mean I need to talk to you about your family.”

  She had already reached the turn of the stairs, but that stopped her. “My family? Why, did my father call and ask about your intentions, or something?” That was all she needed right now. So far she’d managed to avoid her parents, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  “Here, sit down.” He stripped off his white overall and laid it on a step. She did as he asked, his odd tone and hooded eyes preventing her from doing what she wanted to do, which was to touch his forehead and smooth away the frown that seemed permanently lodged there.

  He paused a moment, as if trying to choose words. “I need to come clean with you about what I’m doing here,” he began.

  She gazed at him curiously. “Here at the hospital? You mean you didn’t come to find me? I might have known.” Her attempt at humor fell flat.

  “Not here at the hospital. I told you I was on vacation, taking a spiritual break, and that was true. At the beginning. But two days into my ride I was called to Hamilton Falls on a case. It involved a group we suspected was abusing its children.”

  Surprise stiffened her spine, and she stared at him.

  “The guys at the station had me pulled off leave because crimes by small groups are a specialty of mi
ne. I managed to gain entry to the group and began investigating the most current case. This hasn’t been easy for me. I want to get that out on the table first of all. I’ve felt pulled in two different directions since I started, but the well-being of the victims has to come first.”

  “But what do abused kids in some organization have to do with my family?”

  “I’m getting to that. A pattern became clear in the life of the most recent victim that worried me, so I did a little investigating. It seemed that whenever there was a major event in the family, like a wedding or a graduation or the start of a new job, the child got sick.”

  “That sounds like us,” Julia said gloomily.

  He paused, long enough for Julia to look up. She felt a prickle of unease. His eyes were gunmetal-gray, the way she’d first seen them.

  “Right. Well, in my mind there might be a reason in this particular case. There’s a disorder called Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy where a mother hurts her child to get attention whenever the family’s attention is pulled elsewhere. Ever heard of it?”

  “Never.” Goose bumps broke out on Julia’s arms, and she wished he would talk about something else instead of some grisly case.

  “I believe there’s a strong possibility the mother in this case has this disorder. And she’s damaged her little boy almost to the point of killing him. I intend to find out for sure, and if I’m right, stop it.”

  He seemed to be asking her to think about this, as if he wanted help with it. Julia ran over a list of all the people she knew. Who on earth would have done such a thing in Hamilton Falls? Nothing like that had ever been in the paper. She’d never heard a whiff of gossip. The only thing that came close was—

  She stared at Ross in horror. “You’re not saying—you can’t possibly think—”

  “I do, honey,” Ross said in a gentle tone. He took both her hands in his. “I’ve been investigating the Elect. It could be that Madeleine has the disorder. There is a very good possibility she is slowly killing your nephew.”

  “No.” Even to herself, her voice sounded high and wobbly. “My sister loves Ryan. She’s a godly woman. The Elder’s wife. You must be crazy.”