by Torey Hayden
What was happening with Jadie? Was she being abused? Were her stories true? Could they be true? Had some real child been murdered and Jadie made to drink her blood? The instant that thought came to me, the conversation with Hugh in the summer flashed back into my mind. Satanism.
Satanism? My concrete knowledge of such things was restricted to newspaper articles of cattle mutilations and the Manson family murders. I’d never been particularly interested in such subject matter. There were enough ordinary evils in the world to joust with; I’d never been attracted to the thought of worse and more unassailable ones. More to the point, I don’t think I could really believe in all that. I had no trouble in accepting that there were dangerously disturbed individuals capable of perpetrating unspeakable acts, and I had had enough contact with the fringes of society to accept that counterculture forms of religion, such as paganism and even devil worship, attracted a fair number of people, but I could not bring myself to believe there were large, wide-ranging networks of people regularly carrying out ritual murder andmayhem. These stories I’d always felt were mythic, the results of popular horror films and books and a few charismatic, headline-grabbing psychotics.
In terms of Jadie, I found it almost impossible to contemplate a connection with satanism. Even back when Hugh had first mentioned it, the idea had gone right out of my mind, simply because it seemed so farfetched. Now, alone after school, I touched the idea cautiously, like a tongue in a newly formed tooth socket, drawn to it, yet repulsed. Could Tashee have been a real child? How would Jadie have known about the taste of blood? What about the smashed dolls? Why would she make things like that up? How could she create such details, if she didn’t have firsthand knowledge?
Then as soon as those questions raised themselves, I was assailed by doubt. These were the things horror movies were made of. Indeed, some things Jadie had spoken of, like Miss Ellie putting Tashee’s bones back together and making her come alive again, could be extrapolated from the scenes of some quite popular and readily available horror films. Even the murder of a child and the drinking of its blood were pretty standard fare in some of the worse films. How would watching such movies affect an already disturbed child? Jadie had evidenced the year before that she was familiar with the operation of a video recorder. Did she have access to a collection of horror films, or worse, some of the pornographic ones? Was that why she had asked me if I had seen Miss Ellie killing Tashee on my TV, too?
Perhaps the worst part of all this speculation was the realization that whatever conclusion I came to, at this point I could do nothing. Horrific as it all sounded, I had no concrete evidence that anything was happening, and unless Jadie herself was willing to make accusations, I could not officially do anything. Much as I wanted to act, I knew that patience and alertness were all that was left open to me.
Friday found everyone tired and grumpy. Jeremiah had stayed up to all hours, doing God knows what, although how much of this was due to Halloween and how much to Jeremiah’s usual lack of parental supervision was hard to say. Jadie, too, complained of having stayed up too late and was now subdued and hollow-eyed. Change in routine made Reuben restless and distractible, and Brucie was cross about having missed the party. Philip, victim of Halloween excesses, did not come to school at all.
One of our regular class activities was journal keeping. All the children, except for Brucie, who had little control over a pencil or crayon, had a journal, and every day a certain amount of time was given over to writing and/or illustrating. I encouraged them to record their feelings, then ups and downs, their hopes, wishes, and dreams, as well as daily events. I tried to keep it an open, safe place where the child could express anything—even a negative opinion of me and my teaching methods—without fear of retaliation. I, in turn, wentthrough the journals nightly and left notes back to make it a form of useful communication.
Morning recess had been a trial that Friday. A pall of dank, dark, very Novemberish weather had descended on us in contrast to the bright day we’d had twenty-four hours earlier. It had been my turn at recess duty, so I’d stood out, shivering with the rest. Everybody seemed in a foul mood. Not only were my children prickly, but I pried apart two fifth-grade boys who were determinedly smashing each other’s faces into the asphalt, and I mopped blood off a first-grader, who had been tripped by an older child. Jeremiah fought with everybody in sight and finally finished recess in Mr. Tinbergen’s office. And some kid whose name I couldn’t remember was sick under the swings.
Because of the unsettled nature of the day, I decided to allow the children to work on their journals immediately after morning recess instead of doing the activity planned. This was greeted with cheers from Jeremiah, who loathed the post-morning-recess period, because it was usually a time for serious academic work. Jadie and Reuben took their journals out with a little more decorum.
For the first fifteen minutes, I sat with Brucie, doing one-to-one work while the others were busy. Our goal of getting him to dress himself wasn’t progressing too speedily, and after two months, he could just about manage his underpants. Thus, I spent a scintillating quarter hour repeatedly pulling Brucie’s pants down for him to pull up again. His patience for this pastime exceeded mine, so whenhis interest finally began to wane, I gratefully turned him loose to scribble on a piece of newsprint with a crayon.
Coming over to Jadie, I pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. She hadn’t written anything in the journal but was, instead, making a picture with felt-tip pens. The first figure, carefully drawn, was of a standing cat. Next was a bell-shaped figure with eyes, legs, and nothing else. The next figure was even less distinct, and as she progressed, she drew as if she’d been powered by clockwork and was slowly running down. Each figure grew smaller and less distinct.
“That looks interesting,” I said.
“It’s supposed to be my family,” Jadie mumbled, her voice sounding weary, as if she weren’t too pleased with the results.
“Ah, I see.”
“That’s Jenny,” she said, pointing to the cat. “She ain’t with us anymore, but that don’t mean she ain’t part of the family. She is, ’cause I still remember her. She was my best pet.”
Jadie paused, laying the pen down and sitting back. “She had stripy fur. Did I tell you that before? Sort of gray-brownish with black stripes on it. I looked it up in a book at the library once, and it said you call those kinds of cats tabbies. And she had an orange nose and pink lips. That was my favorite part, her pink lips.” Jadie picked up a pink pen to amend the picture.
I was anxious to discuss the human figures in the picture, but I managed to keep quiet while shelavished attention on the drawing of the cat. At last she laid the marker down. “And who’s this?” I asked, pointing to the bell-shaped figure.
“That’s me. And that’s Amber. And that’s Sapphire. And that’s my mom and my dad,” she said, pointing to each figure in turn. She paused and again touched the last two figures, which were nothing more than minute blobs on the paper. “I didn’t do them so good, because I got sick of drawing. I don’t really feel much like doing this today.”
“Yes, I can tell.”
Jadie didn’t respond.
Leaning forward, I examined the picture more carefully. “What made you feel like drawing a picture of your family in your journal today?”
She, too, leaned forward to look at it, but she didn’t answer.
“What I notice is that you and Jenny are the only two important ones in this picture. Everyone else gets smaller and smaller. Your parents are much smaller than you. Do you feel like you’re the big one sometimes?”
Jadie shrugged. “I dunno.” A pause. “I feel like I’m the one who’s got to take care of everyone.”
“Usually that’s the mom and dad’s job, isn’t it?”
“Well, maybe they’re not there. Maybe they’re far away. Somewhere else. Then someone else in the family’s got to do it.”
“Is that what happens in your family sometimes?”
/>
She frowned but didn’t speak.
I examined the picture in more detail. “You know, the only one in this picture who has a mouthis the cat. Look, you haven’t drawn a mouth on you or Amber or anyone else.”
“That’s ’cause everyone’s ghosts there, that’s why.”
“Oh.”
“Ghosts can’t talk. They can talk to other ghosts and that’s how come Jenny can understand me, but ghosts can’t talk to people. People can’t hear them, so they don’t really need mouths.”
“I see. You’re saying there’s no point to talking, because people don’t hear you anyway.”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
The following week started very quietly. Sated by their Halloween excitement, all five settled down and worked hard. There were few disruptions.
Jadie, like the others, seemed more settled. She hadn’t been in after school since the Monday before Halloween, and we went the first four days of that week with no visits. Then, on Friday, while I was cleaning out the rabbit’s cage, she turned up.
“Do you mind if I play with those dolls?” she asked from the classroom doorway.
“Sure, that’s all right. I’m just about done here anyway. You go ahead, and then I’ll be in shortly to do my plans.”
Jadie had located the key in my desk drawer and locked the door into the hall by the time I came into the cloakroom. Shutting and locking the other one, she returned the key to my desk and then went to pull the box of dolls up onto the right-hand bench. I settled down to do my plans for Monday.
Several minutes passed in total silence as Jadie bent over the box and pawed through the contents. The boy and girl dolls were all laid out, except for the blond-haired one, which Jadie still had at home, yet these didn’t seem to satisfy her. She pawed deeper into the box, extracting handfuls of doll clothes and laying them on the floor. Then she came across one of the baby dolls. On previous occasions Jadie had never shown any interest in the baby dolls, and as a consequence, this one still wore the clothes put on it by some long-ago child. Now, however, Jadie lifted the doll up and inspected it.
“My sister’s a baby,” she said casually. “She’s one now, but that’s still a baby.”
“You mean Sapphire.”
“Well, my other sister’s not a baby, is she? She’s six.” There was a note of annoyance in her voice.
A pause.
“Me and Amber, we’re big. We know things. We understand things. But babies don’t. Babies know hardly anything.”
Bending over the doll, she started to remove its clothing, her fingers delicately attempting to unfasten the minute buttons on the cardigan. “Babies, really, they’re sort of like animals. You got to do things for them all the time. And you got to be nice to them, ’cause they don’t understand when you’re being mean.”
“Do you like babies?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Not a lot. They’re too big a bother.”
At last the cardigan came off and Jadie held the doll up to examine it. Then she laid it back in her lap and continued to undress it. When she finally undressed it completely, she removed its diaper. “Hey, look!” she cried. “It’s a boy! Look here at what it gots. A peanut.” Looking up, she giggled coyly. “That’s what I call it sometimes. A peanut.”
I smiled good-naturedly.
“None of them other dolls got this, none of them big boys. They’re just dolls. But look at this baby. Look what it gots.”
Jadie regarded the doll’s tiny penis for several moments and then touched it gingerly with her index finger. Unexpectedly, she blew a loud, derisive raspberry. “That’s what I think. And you know what I’m going to do? This.” And she spat heartily between the doll’s legs before flinging it across the cloakroom. The doll hit the opposite wall with a resounding thud and fell to the bench below.
“Seeing that penis seemed to make you feel very angry,” I ventured.
She had a strangely defiant expression on her face, although it was inward and not directed toward me. “They make us play peanuts,” she murmured, her voice brittle. “J.R. and Bobby and them. They take out their dickies and then everyone says, ‘Peanut, peanut, who’s got the peanut?’ and me and Amber, we got to …” Her voice trailed off.
Oh God.
“Actually,” she said, “I hate them.” She glanced in my direction, I suspect to gauge my reactions. Not trusting my words, or, for that matter, even my voice, I simply nodded.
The silence came then, washing in around us, but it wasn’t divisive. There was an unexpected sense of fellowship. The silence soothed, spanning the distance between us and joining us.
“I don’t want to see them take Sapphire,” Jadie said at last, her voice quiet. “And they’re going to. I guess they already have.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the other night, last week, they put her upside down on the stick.” Jadie twirled her hands in demonstration. “Me and Amber, when we go upside down, we have to put our legs around the stick and they tie them, but Sapphire was too little for the ropes to reach, so they did her like this.” Jadie looked over to see if I understood her gestures.
“When you’re on the stick,” Jadie continued, “the men come around and put their dickies in your pranny or sometimes up your bottom. But the other night, when Sapphire was on the stick, they put their fingers in instead. I think ’cause she was too little. But everybody had to do it, even me and Amber.” Jadie lifted her left index finger and regarded it. “When it was my turn, I kissed Sapphire afterwards, to make her feel better. I wanted her to know I was sorry, that I wasn’t doing it ’cause I wanted to.”
Stunned into silence, I just sat.
“I hate ’em doing that to me and Amber, but with Sapphire, it’s just too much. It hurts a lot.
I know, ’cause it hurts me, and she’s just little. She’s only a baby and you’re supposed to take care of babies. Even when they cry.”
“That shouldn’t be happening. That definitely shouldn’t be happening. Not to Sapphire, and not to you or Amber either.”
“Miss Ellie says we gotta. They don’t do it every time, but when they got their faces on, you know it’s going to happen.”
“No, you don’t ‘gotta,’ Jadie. That’s wrong, what they’re doing. Putting fingers in your vaginas? And in your bottom? And men putting their penises in. That is what you’re saying in all this, isn’t it?”
Jadie nodded faintly.
“That is something they should not do, and I’m very glad you’ve told me.”
“You believe me?”
“Yes, I definitely do.”
An expression of such obvious relief broke over Jadie’s face that I was instantly overwhelmed by regret for not having pressed this matter harder, sooner.
“What we need to do now is stop them,” I said.
The relief still relaxing her features, she smiled and nodded. “Yeah. You can stop them, can’t you? I told Amber that. I said if we told you, you could make them stop.”
“You bet I can. And the first thing I think we need to do is go down and talk to Mr. Tinbergen. That’ll probably be the best place to start.”
Bewilderment overtook Jadie. “Mr. Tinbergen? What do you mean?”
“Well, first we’ll talk to Mr. Tinbergen and then—”
“No!” she cried, cutting my words off. “No! We can’t talk to anybody. We can’t tell. Just you. You’re the only one I want to know about it.”
“Jadie, I have to tell.”
“No.”
“Jadie, I have to. To get help. Those people are doing something very, very wrong to you and Amber and Sapphire and we must stop them.”
Jadie went into an absolute panic, leaping up from the bench in terror. “No! You can’t tell anybody. Don’t you understand? I’ll die! I mean it, I’ll die. You’ll die! Oh, please, you can’t tell anybody else. You can’t! Please don’t. Please, please, please, please!” In a frenzy, she ran for the door, then realizing it was locked, ran b
ack for the key, rumbled with it, dropped it. This proved too much for her and she sank to her knees, sobbing.
I rose from my place and approached her. “Lovey, come on,” I said and physically lifted her from the floor. She trembled in my arms.
“Please, please don’t tell anyone else. Don’t tell them I told. I’m going to die, if you do. Please, don’t. Promise me. Please, please promise me.”
“All right,” I said, overwhelmed by the intensity of her distress and not knowing what else I could say.
“I just want you to make it stop,” she said amidst her tears, “but I don’t want you to tell anyone else. I shouldn’t even have told you. If Miss Ellie knew I did, she’d make me die.”
“The problem is, lovey, this isn’t the sort of thing I can stop by myself.”
“But you can. I know you can. You’re God.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m not God. I’m a person, like you are. I need help sometimes, too.”
“But I want you to be God,” she said, dissolving into tears again.
I felt like crying myself, then.
Chapter Nineteen
Once again, I found myself sitting alone in the cloakroom, feeling overwhelmed to a point of nauseous numbness. There was only one question: what was I going to do? And it seemed damned near unanswerable.
There was little doubt in my mind that Jadie was being sexually abused, although the wild framework within which she set her account remained a mystery to me. If what she said was true, I was obliged by law to report what she had told me. Turning my head, I gazed at the half-ajar door through which Jadie had departed. What should I do? If she told me what she had in confidence, clearly expecting it to go no farther, did I have the moral right to take it farther without her permission? On the other hand, how would I live with myself, if I knew a child was being brutally abused and I allowed the abuse to continue even a moment longer?
Then, as always, the suspicions began to creep back. Despite Jadie’s graphic account, I had no facts. I didn’t know who was involved. I didn’t know where it was happening. I didn’t even know for certain what was happening, other than the specific abuse. Why was Jadie always so hazy on the details? Where on earth were her parents? Just who, precisely, were all these people she referred to? Where did they come from? Where did they disappear to when their sessions with Jadie and Amber were over? I had reported other cases of suspected abuse in my career, and I knew the kinds of details the police would require. I didn’t have them in this case. I could tell the police, but what, realistically, could they do, if I didn’t know who was committing the crime?