Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  Mephers was shocked when she came on her in the morning: look at you, Harriet, that nightgown soiled. You should be ashamed to be sitting here with that diaper leaking over you: you’d think you hadn’t learned any better than Beatrix or Mara here to keep yourself clean and sweet. The doctor will be very disappointed. We’ll have to throw out this nightgown: I’ll never be able to wash out this stain. What were you thinking of, anyway, to let this bad baby get you up in the night? If you start giving in to them when they cry, pretty soon they’ll cry just to manipulate you.

  After that, Harriet let the thin howling go on unanswered in the night. She would lie rigid in her bed, willing the noise to stop, thinking what a bad baby it was to be so demanding, not realizing until now, this moment lying here on the earth on the edge of Lake Michigan, that the wailing infant had been giving voice to Harriet’s own sorrow. In leaving the baby to cry uncomforted, she had lost all comfort herself.

  She fell asleep. When she awoke, it was after midnight. Her right cheek was sore, bruised from a rock she’d hit when she fell. She got to her feet, stiff from her long run and her nap on the hard ground, and walked slowly across the park. The moon overhead, cold and disapproving, showed her a handful of other bodies sleeping under tarps or bits of cardboard. She felt unbearably lonely and vulnerable, a target in the emptiness for anyone who might pass her with malice in mind.

  A police car slowed on its way up the lake path and shone its light on her. She froze, remembering the scene at the hotel, the patrolman hitting Judith Ohana over the head.

  As the men in the car studied her, Harriet tried to remember she was a Stonds, an important citizen by definition, as well as a member of the bar, but she was acutely aware of her dirtstained clothes and uncombed hair. She had always taken for granted that the police were there to defend her, Harriet Stonds, to safeguard her person and her possessions. Although her training had taught her in theory that no one was guilty until proven so in court, until now she’d believed deep down that the police didn’t arrest anyone if they didn’t deserve it, and police brutality was only a cry criminals raised to try to deflect attention from their crimes. Tonight at the wall, she’d seen that anyone could be vulnerable. Trapped in the searchlight, she tried to forget an impassioned account by Mara of a policeman raping one of the women at Hagar’s House.

  The men switched off their lamp and drove on. Harriet released a tight-held breath and continued to pick her way across the park to the highway. With some difficulty she flagged down a cab: to her humiliation, the driver insisted on seeing her money before he would take her back to her car at North Avenue beach.

  It wasn’t until she was driving out of the park that she realized she couldn’t return home tonight. Grandfather’s disapproving rage, Mephers’s hurt sulks, were more than she could face. She pulled over to the shoulder and counted the money she’d stuffed in her pocket. Fifty-three dollars. Could she even rent a hotel room on so little money? In her haste to leave home she hadn’t thought of bringing credit or bank cards. She hadn’t brought her mobile phone, either—she couldn’t call motels, she’d have to drive from spot to spot hoping she could locate something cheap but safe.

  She made a loop under the highway and headed south, into the heart of the city. She drove randomly through the downtown streets, looking for hotels, when she passed the massive complex of the Midwest Hospital. Perhaps Hector Tammuz was on call tonight. Grandfather’s prize loser. On television they said he spent a lot of time with the women at the wall. Maybe he had found Mara and had her safe. Abruptly she turned into the parking lot, found her grandfather’s space, and went into the building through the staff entrance.

  The hospital was ghostly after hours with nothing but empty chairs and gleaming file cabinets in the corridors. The fear she’d felt in the lonely park returned, and she was absurdly pleased when she reached the emergency room and found nurses and orderlies gossiping under bright lights. She ducked into a bathroom and cleaned her face. There was something unnerving about the calm oval in the mirror. She had been in anguish all night, but her eyes remained a clear, remote blue. Except for a bruise on her right cheek from her fall, her face gave back no record of her troubles.

  She walked out to the counter, her patina of authority so smooth that no one questioned her identity as Abraham Stonds’s granddaughter, nor challenged her demand that they page Dr. Tammuz.

  45

  Supplicant Lawyer

  He was floating in an underwater grotto without fins or a mask: he was not only able to breathe, but eat and drink, for he realized he was holding a cup of coffee in his right hand, from which he sipped now and then. Sea grasses swayed in the currents of the deeps, and fishes, as gold and red as poppies, glowed in their midst.

  Little drops were falling like rain outside the grotto—drifting slowly down from the surface to the ocean bed. He gave a fish-style twist with his legs, and moved to the grotto entrance. Another drop drifted past and he plucked it from the water. It was a pearl, pink and ivory, and even this far from daylight glowing as if the sun shone on it.

  He looked up. A woman was weeping on the water’s surface. He couldn’t tell who it was—his mother, or Jacqui. She wanted to dive down to him, but couldn’t—the water that he moved in so easily was like glass to her. Her tears were turning to pearls as they cut through the glassy barrier, jewels for him to harvest.

  The pearl in his palm began to grow, until it was the size of an ostrich egg. It cracked open, and Starr floated out. Her black hair came uncoiled in the water and streamed around her, reaching to her ankles. With one bronze arm she pushed it from her face. With the other, she drew Hector to her and kissed him briefly, sweetly, then she somersaulted and spun away.

  He was left alone with the fishes, and the pearls, but he felt for once happy, and wholly at peace. Only briefly: a giant freighter was moving overhead, the vibrations of its engines shaking the grotto. He swam toward the surface, determined to move the ship away from his sanctuary.

  His pager was vibrating against his thigh. He was in the residents’ bunkroom at the hospital, without any notion of how he had arrived there. He remembered being at the beach, with the head of the hospital’s security department. He had grabbed the man’s bullhorn, and shouted a warning to Starr, and the man had turned on Hector in anger.

  “That was pretty stupid, if you don’t mind me saying so, Doc,” the security chief said. “Dr. Hanaper warned me you might feel divided in your loyalties and I see what he meant: that kind of message will scare off these gals, and our job is to make them want to come to us for help.”

  Sweat leaked down Hector’s neck into his shirt collar, making him shiver in the warm night air. His warning had been the impulse of a moment; he still didn’t know how he came to shout it out. He thought he’d felt Starr’s presence when they came to the prairie grasses, some special fizziness in the air that made his blood race—although in his current state he couldn’t tell the difference between desire and its object, and didn’t know if he imagined the tingling in his blood or not. Still, at that moment he envisioned Starr flinging him from her side, her flat black eyes reflecting back to him his own weaknesses—Hector, the bravest of all the Trojans, collapses once again; Luisa would pipe up, Starr doesn’t want you near her, now or ever again. He grabbed the bullhorn from one of the guards and yelled through it.

  As he strained to hear Luisa or Mara, or a grunt from Starr over the other voices in the park, he barely listened to the security chief’s reproof. It seemed to Hector he heard a hasty thudding of many feet running inland.

  “There are some benches near the water here,” he said. “When they come here that’s where they set up camp.”

  He was pleased with himself for thinking of so clever a lie. It would move the patrol north, toward the edge of the promontory, and allow Starr—if she indeed had been there, indeed was running—to slip into the body of the park and find a hideout elsewhere. To his dismay, after a short discussion (whose side is this guy o
n, anyway, do we trust him? Hanaper warned … maybe he doesn’t want …) the other three men fanned out along the spit of land.

  Hector held his breath, not moving seaward with the posse. He was waiting for the eruption of sound and fury that would come when someone tried to put handcuffs on Starr’s massive arms. In the end, though, the men returned only with a sleeping bag and a McDonald’s sack containing two uneaten burgers.

  The security chief said, “Looks like someone abandoned this in a hurry. Suggest anything to you, Doc?”

  Under the powerful police lamps Hector recognized the soiled blue bag as Mara’s, but he shook his head “no” in answer to the question. Mara wouldn’t have abandoned her bedroll unless she had fled too hastily to stop for it. He must have shouted his warning in time.

  Relief flooded him: the women had escaped. Starr would love him best now, she wouldn’t fling him from her. The wave of joy washed past, and exhaustion pushed on him like a boulder. After a month without rest, his days and nights alternating between frantic searches for Starr and his time at the hospital, he didn’t have strength to think or move. He tried to say something that might draw the security team further away from Starr, but collapsed mid-sentence onto the sand.

  He wasn’t aware of the patrolmen carrying him back to the car. He didn’t hear the security director phone the hospital, with a command that a clerk start calling women’s shelters all over the city to see if anyone fitting Starr’s description had shown up tonight. He didn’t hear the negative messages start to trickle in as they drove south: no one in the search party combing North Avenue had found her. No one at Foster. Negative from Rachel’s Rest, Lucy’s Place, Angela’s House. Definitely not at Hagar’s House, where Patsy Wanachs would have notified Dr. Stonds at once.

  Hector didn’t even stir when a call came in from Dr. Stonds and one of the guards tried to shake him awake to talk to the surgeon. The man had to tell Stonds that they might have come on Starr and Mara, and that Hector, shouting to them, could have scared them off. The surgeon was understandably furious, but Hector was oblivious to the scratchy ranting crackling through the car phone, Finally, back at the hospital, two officers half carried, half dragged Hector to the residents’ bunkroom. He was on call tonight, as on every Friday night since Hanaper had assigned him to the Orleans Street clinic. The patrolmen knew about Friday nights in the hospital—they placed just as much demand on the security staff as on the doctors. Fridays brought in people whose thin veneer of stamina snapped at the thought of a long weekend alone, they brought runaway children, disoriented tourists, attempted suicides, overworked business travelers breaking down after too much work and too little sleep. Their help was in the hands of this exhausted resident. Glad that their lives didn’t depend on Hector, the men dusted their hands and returned to the ward room.

  In the familiar bunkroom Hector’s protective sleep lightened. When the emergency staff paged him at ten—for the third time—he finally rose to the surface of consciousness. This was a mercy, the clerks agreed, since the place was filling up faster than usual, with the shattered survivors of the violence at the hotel wall.

  Millie Regier, the night charge nurse, who’d been stiff with Hector ever since their night with Starr and Luisa, made a point of telling him that Dr. Stonds wanted to speak to him as soon as possible. The surgeon was very very angry with Hector for driving away Starr and Mara tonight.

  Hector, still half asleep, blinked at Millie without answering and went in to deal with a man who’d heard a private message from Michael Jordan during a car commercial, telling him his wife was a dangerous criminal and should be asphyxiated. When Hector finished with the man he turned to a South Dakota woman who’d been hit on the head at the Pleiades garage. After that he was listening, soothing, and dosing for the better part of two hours.

  He had just returned to bed, and was drifting back into sleep, when Harriet paged him. Hector stuck his feet into his shoes and stumbled to the wall phone outside the bunkroom to answer the call. Millie Regier, still abrupt, told him that Dr. Stonds’s granddaughter was waiting to see him. Clinic Room A.

  Hector felt the familiar tightening across his groin: if Mara had come to the hospital, then Starr would be nearby. And if Mara was there, some busybody would already be on the phone to her grandfather. His hair was wild, but he couldn’t waste time on grooming. He trotted down the hall to Clinic Room A, his shoelaces flapping, and stopped short at the sight of Harriet.

  Before he could back away in confusion, Harriet sprang to her feet. “Dr. Tammuz? I’m Harriet Stonds. I’m sorry to barge in on you, I know what it’s like when you’re on call, but I need to find my sister. I hoped—I thought—”

  She was clasping and unclasping her hands, but he didn’t note these signs of distress: she was the lawyer who had caused all his ills, by pitting the Pleiades against him and his homeless women.

  “If Dr. Stonds sent you, you’re wasting your time,” Hector said, not bothering to come all the way into the room.

  “My grandfather?” Harriet was so sure he would be empathic that she didn’t at first notice his coldness. “No, no, he doesn’t know I’m here. I had to use my name—his name—otherwise they wouldn’t have paged you for me, but don’t you see—oh, you don’t know us, you don’t know him—he wants to lock Mara up, my little sister. I thought—you know where they are, don’t you? They said on TV you often are with them.”

  “And you think I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t tell the hospital security staff or your grandfather? After what you’ve done to me, and to the women under my care?”

  Harriet stared at him as he raged at her: the hotel’s determined persecution first of Madeleine Carter, then of Starr, Luisa, and Harriet’s own sister … the spikes on the wall, her church’s refusal to let homeless women into Hagar’s House if they were seen at the wall … the attitude that the needs of the wealthy counted for everything and that the poor existed only to prove by their suffering that the rich were powerful … now, tonight, the worst excesses of all as the police attacked a group of defenseless women.

  “You say I don’t know your grandfather, Ms. Stonds, but believe me, I do. I feel his personality every day in this hospital. When he speaks, everyone must bow down and obey. Now I’ve done the unthinkable: I dared to say no when he said yes, and he threatened to have me beheaded. When that didn’t cow me he sent you to coax me into obeying him. Well, I don’t care if I never practice medicine again in my life, I won’t do it.”

  “Oh, don’t! I can’t take it!” Harriet’s tears covered her face like a layer of glass that would splinter at a wrong touch. “I’ve never stood up to him before tonight, and it’s too hard. Everything’s awful, my mother’s death, he lied about it just like Mara always said, he’s always been cold, he never loved me for what I was, only for what he wanted out of me. He drove—we drove—poor Beebie away, but I want her back, I want to find her—before he gets to her—and shuts her up.”

  By now she was heaving so violently that Hector could barely understand her. “They’ll listen to him—I know how—the courts are—with mental fitness—I have to take her—take her someplace—safe.”

  Looking at her Hector saw, finally, not his mother, Lily, not the senior resident, Melissa, who’d chewed him out that afternoon, not even the cold Harriet who had frozen his bones over the phone the afternoon her sister ran away, but a woman in misery. He filled a paper cup with water at the sink and made her drink it.

  “Try to calm down, Ms. Stonds, so we can talk this through together.” You mustn’t touch patients, but she was so desolate that he patted her shoulder.

  “I ran up and down the beach looking for her, because the man at the garage said that’s where she went, but I couldn’t—couldn’t—find her.” She was swallowing her sobs heroically. “Do you know—know where she is, Dr. Tammuz?”

  He shook his head and led her to a chair. When she’d calmed down enough to listen, Hector told her about the search the hospital had mounted at her gran
dfather’s command.

  “You know your sister better than anyone, Ms. Stonds. Do you have any idea where she’d flee? What friends she might run to?”

  “I don’t know her very well: she’s thirteen years younger than me, and I’ve always been judging her, not knowing her.” Harriet blew her nose. “She only has one friend that I know about, Cynthia Lowrie. But Cynthia lives with her father, he’s a dreadful man, he beats her horribly. If Mara showed up there he’d send straight for the police.”

  “Rafe Lowrie? I’ve met him. No, I agree, not a place for your sister, let alone Starr and Luisa.”

  It felt strange to discuss Starr in such a remote way, without his usual yearning seizing hold of him. It was as if in warning her he had somehow lessened his need for her. The thought made him feel bereft, and he turned his head away as he tried to rekindle his desire.

  “Where should I look next? I don’t want to sit here, waiting to hear that she’s been brought into the hospital. I wouldn’t be able to get into the—the locked ward, she’ll do like Beatrix, like our mother, find something sharp and dig a hole in her veins, she’ll never submit to being locked away.” Harriet started to shudder again.

  Hector gave up his efforts to conjure Starr’s image. “You should go home and get some sleep, Ms. Stonds. There’s nothing anyone can do at one in the morning.”

  “Home?” she whispered, as if she’d never heard the word. Was home that immaculate apartment with its pale drapes and walls, its glass and marble surfaces, Grandfather and Mephers breathing out white puffs of dry ice? If she walked past them and climbed into her own chill white bed, she would be dead of frostbite by morning.

  “I’d take you to my own apartment, but I’m on call tonight and we’re terribly overworked.” Hector’s beeper had been vibrating almost without pause for the last ten minutes. “And even though I’m worried about your sister, and about Starr, I can’t abandon the fragmented people showing up in the emergency room.”