Ghost Girl

by Torey Hayden

  I drew my lower lip in between my teeth and bit it, concentrating on the pain, willing the pain to overwhelm the rising sense of panic. The confinement of the car intensified my feelings. I was acutely aware of being unable to jump up and run away, which I dearly longed to do.

  Beside me, Jadie fought for control of her tears. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers tightly against her temples.

  “Jadie, you must tell,” I said, when I could finally trust my voice again. “This can’t go on. It needs to come out into the open.”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “You can. If the things you’re telling me are true, then we must stop them. I can’t do it alone. I can’t do it without your help, but it has got to stop. These are wrong, bad, terrible things and they should never be happening to anyone.”

  “I can’t tell,” she said again, plaintively, the tears thickening her voice.

  “Then, if you can’t, let me tell.”

  Jadie didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she lowered her head and stared at the can of pop still in her lap. I sat quietly, listening to the tinny dashboard clock going pink, pink, pink around the dial.

  “I can’t tell,” Jadie whispered at last.

  I turned to look at her. “You won’t die. Whoever told you that is wrong. Nothing will happen to you that is any worse than what already has. Nothing will be as bad as what Miss Ellie is doing to you.”

  “But the police’ll come. They’ll put us in jail.”

  “Little children don’t go to jail, lovey.”

  “But they can make my mom and dad go to jail. They can make me and my sisters go to live in a children’s home and never see our folks again.”

  Extending my hand, I gently pushed the hair back from her cheek. “Is that what’s worrying you?”

  “Would that happen?”

  “Are your mom and dad part of this? Do they know what Miss Ellie’s doing?”

  “I think my mom and dad are always asleep.”

  “Well, it’s a policeman’s job to make sure people follow the laws of the land. One such law says that hurting children is wrong, so if someone really was hurting a child, the police would make him or her stop. This doesn’t necessarily mean they would go to jail. That’s not for the policemen to decide. There are judges and other people, who get together in a court and try to decide what’s best for everyone.”

  “What happens to the children?”

  “Well, they need a safe place to stay. Usually, it’s a foster home. Like Philip lives in. Usually there’s a foster mom and a foster dad to take care of the children and help them get over what’s happened to them.”

  “I don’t want that. I want to stay with my family.”

  “Well, if your mom and dad aren’t part of this, then you probably could.”

  “But would we get tooken to a children’s home first?”

  “There might be a bit of time away, but probably not in a children’s home. Probably just in a foster home. Like Philip has, and you know how much he likes his.” I paused to regard her. “Really, Jadie, it’d be better than what’s going on now, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t want to get tooken away. I don’t want Amber and me and Sapphire to get put in different places. I don’t want not to be able to see my mom and dad. I don’t want anyone to go to jail. I don’t want nothing, except for it to stop. That’s all I’m asking.” She raised her head and looked over at me. “This isn’t fair. Why do I have to decide this?”

  I gazed into her eyes, the purity of their blueness obscured by the orange-shaded gloom of the parking lot, and I felt deep anguish, because I knew I had no answers. Child abuse is such a patent evil that exposing and rectifying it should possess only black-and-white clarity—abuse identified, child rescued, perpetrator gets what’s coming to him. Sadly, I knew it was never so. The reality always included the ruins of small, shattered lives, destroyed relationships, and broken hearts. Good and evil are not absolute, but relative.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The hanging plants were restaging “Day of the Triffids” over the table to which Brad, our waiter for the evening, escorted me. Not having Arkie’s guts, I failed to mention to him my preference for tables occupied only by humans and was seated next to a monstrosity of a cheese plant with a menacingly inclined main stem. Gently, I tried to rearrange the trailing strands and hooked the worst of the spider plant’s offspring over the back of the booth. The cheese plant seemed to take offense at this and leaned a little closer to me, so I stopped.

  “Jeee-sus,” Arkie muttered, when she arrived. “This is like a night out in the Congo. I should have brought my machete.”

  “Shush,” I whispered and gestured toward the cheese plant. “We’re outnumbered.”

  As with our previous visit to Tottie’s, Arkie and I quickly fell into amiable conversation while browsing through the menu and wine list. We put in our orders and the repartee continued until well after our food arrived. Wistfully, I wished it could continue all evening.

  “To say I’m having problems with Jadie is a bit of an understatement,” I began.

  “Yes,” Arkie agreed. “I sussed that. I think we all have. Glen was just mentioning it to me the other week, saying you’ve got something going with her.”

  “Mr. Tinbergen said that?”

  Arkie nodded. “I think he’s worried. I mean, what with June Harriman last year and all that, he tends to get concerned about his teachers pretty easily. It’s understandable. But I told him he probably didn’t have anything to worry about, as far as you’re concerned. You’ve had a lot of experience, and if you got into trouble, you’d have the good sense to ask for help. You wouldn’t try to solve the world’s problems on your own.” She looked over. “And I assume I told him right.”

  I found this information embarrassing. Mr. Tinbergen was worried about me? Did I appear that out of control?

  “You aren’t getting in over your head, are you?” Arkie asked.

  “No, I’m okay. It’s Jadie Ekdahl … I keep thinking that I finally understand what’s going on with this kid and just about get to the point where I think I can help, then poof! Like a house of cards, all my assumptions fall flat and I’m back at the beginning again. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a situation where I’ve changed my mind more times. Or where I’ve felt more helpless.”

  “I think what’s worrying Glen is that you’re not talking to any of the rest of us about this. It’s going to be frustrating, if that’s what’s going on, but you shouldn’t try to do it on your own.”

  I fell silent. She was right, if she meant I didn’t sit around down in the teachers’ lounge, discussing Jadie the way Alice discussed Ben Soames’s hopeless table manners or Lucy bemoaned Matthew Grinstead’s inability to understand subtraction. Arkie wasn’t right, however, about my not giving anyone else a chance. What did she think I was doing here and now?

  Arkie perceived my discomfort and smiled reassuringly. “So, I’m all ears.” She leaned across the table and touched my arm. “How can I help?”

  “She’s abused.”

  “Yeah, I remember you saying you thought that some while back. Have you got something we can take to court?”

  “No. Not if Jadie doesn’t back me up.”

  Arkie’s brow furrowed.

  “It’s damned slow business getting facts out of Jadie, for one thing. She can be incredibly specific about some things, things you’d never imagine a kid her age could make up, so you just assume they’ve got to be true. Then you ask her about the basic stuff—who, where, when—and she never seems to know any of this. I mean, what I’ve got is a girl who can tell me in excruciating detail how she and her sisters are molested, but she can’t tell me who’s doing it.”

  “She doesn’t know who’s abusing her? Is it a stranger?”

  I shook my head. “No, she just has different names for them. Code names, I think. That’s these ‘Dallas’ characters I’ve told you about before. What she’s talking abou
t is very, very serious abuse, but she only knows them by these names.”

  “They’re real people?” Arkie’s voice had a skeptical tinge.

  “Well, I think they’re real people.” A pause. Arkie had gone back to her meal and I sat, watching her, my brain revving up, like a car at a stoplight. “What I’m going to say here … I know I’m going to sound a little far-fetched.” I reached for the wine bottle and poured myself a second glass. “But if I’m going to be credited with having the good sense to ask for help when I need it, I’d better say it.”

  Arkie looked up, fork poised halfway to her mouth.

  “Some of the things Jadie talks about … well, I was up in the city last summer and talking with my boyfriend … and I got this book at a bookstore there … and just sort of putting things together … I’m wondering if she isn’t being abused in some kind of … well, ritualistic way.”

  “What?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, and this is why I haven’t been talking much to anyone about what’s going on. I feel crazy just for thinking it.”

  “You mean like Moonies or something?”

  “Like satanists. See, there’s this symbol Jadie is always drawing, and my boyfriend was the one to mention that it’s a Black Mass symbol. And then a couple of weeks ago, I was up in the city and went to this occult bookstore. I got a couple of books on satanism and in this one …”

  Arkie’s fork went down with an audible clink.

  “Some of what Jadie talks about fits what they say in this book. Some of it doesn’t, admittedly, perhaps most especially the fact she’s never mentioned Satan or a master or that sort of thing. This woman, this Miss Ellie, seems to be the leader of this group Jadie’s involved with. But a lot of what they say in this book … well, it could explain some of the gaps in Jadie’s stories. Like, for example, they talk about how these groups often drug kids, legal drugs as well as illegal ones, and Jadie’s always saying how Miss Ellie wakes them up at night and gives them Coke to drink. Maybe they’re being drugged before they’re taken to wherever it is, and that’s why she never remembers how she gets there.”

  “So what do you think this means Tashee is?” Arkie asked. “You think Tashee is a real girl? This—‘group’—has murdered a real six-year-old without anyone else ever knowing it? Without anyone ever reporting her missing? Without any evidence at all? Wouldn’t there have been a birth register? Wouldn’t she have been in school somewhere?”

  “Well, in this book they talk about ‘brood mares,’ women who have babies specifically to be used as sacrifices …”

  “We’re not talking about a baby here, Torey. We’re talking about a six-year-old girl. A first-grader. Someone old enough to have undoubtedly encountered doctors, teachers, and countless other outside adults. Old enough to be missed and yet not so old that she’d be classed a runaway. If these people were genuinely into human sacrifice, I would have thought a child of that age would be a particularly bad choice.”

  Arkie’s expression was glazed with skepticism, her tone of voice vaguely patronizing, and I was quickly being overwhelmed by humiliation. How close I was treading to the lunatic fringe had always been something I was aware of. When reading the book on satanism that I’d bought at the occult bookstore, I had often found myself suspicious of the content. Certainly, it had an answer for everything, particularly substantiating the use of humans as sacrifice, saying that these were either offspring of the “brood mares” or fetuses from abortion clinics. Bodies were disposed of by sympathetic undertakers, who included them in freshly dug graves, and so on and so forth. In fact, I found myself unsettled by just how pat all the solutions were. I think I would have been able to believe more easily if the authors of the book had occasionally said that they thought these things were going on, but they didn’t know how the satanists kept getting away with it. Yet, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I was willing to give it all the benefit of the doubt, particularly in light of some of the things Jadie had talked about. On the other hand, hearing myself actually say this stuff aloud, I was only too aware of how ridiculous it sounded. The fear of being thought silly, or worse, unprofessional swamped me.

  “I mean, not that I necessarily believe any of this,” I added hastily. A sigh. “I don’t know. I’m grasping at straws at this point.”

  An expression of tremendous relief crossed Arkie’s face, and she dropped her fork in mock collapse. “God, you really had me scared there for a second, kid. I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, she’s gone native on me.’ Know what I mean? Good-bye New York Times. Hello National Enquirer.”

  I laughed, too.

  A pause came between us and grew into silence. I looked down at the food remaining on my plate. As before, it was nothing more than a sandwich with pretensions. Frankly, I would have preferred a steak, calories, cholesterol, and all, to this green version of the emperor’s new clothes.

  “I suppose I think like you do,” Arkie said at last, “that there must be some truth at the bottom of this. But what? I’m not sure. The only thing I can think is that Jadie has fragmented the abuser. Perhaps it’s Dad. Or Mom and Dad. And she just can’t face it. She’s created this assortment of personas to help her cope with Mom/Dad as abuser and as loving parents. And I agree with the basic difficulty: that we can’t go charging in there to do something until Jadie somehow indicates who’s the guilty one.”

  “You don’t think there’s any possibility—faint possibility—that Jadie might be telling the truth about these people and there are a lot of them?”

  “You mean the possibility that Larry Hagman is dancing around her living room? Do you? Cutting out all the sensational newspaper reporting, all the seamy books and horror films, now, have you, with your experience, your background, your travels, actually ever encountered evidence—concrete evidence, not hearsay—of something like this? As opposed, say, to the number of times you’ve come across schizophrenic-type children obsessed and often hallucinating about blood, gore, monsters, or whatever?”

  I had to admit I hadn’t ever.

  “More to the point, you could never keep a large group underground in a small town like this. Not the way everybody knows everybody else’s business.”

  “But it does happen,” I said.

  “Sure, it does. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but we’re the professionals here, Torey. There’s God knows how many folks out there to worry about witches and ghosts and aliens from outer space and all the mischief they get up to. But it’s your responsibility and mine to remain rational, to judge each of these incidents by educated standards, and then see this child gets the treatment she so desperately needs.”

  I nodded.

  “The real problem in Jadie’s case is that she is one heck of a sick child,” Arkie said. “When Glen told me about that mark on Amber, my stomach turned. I mean, can you imagine her doing that? Holding Amber down and cutting her like that? And, of course, the other question I think we’re forced to ask ourselves is how safe are we with this girl in a public school? Here’s a kid hallucinating about people coming off the television and molesting her baby sister. About seeing a little girl murdered and then magically put back together. About playing with this little girl’s ghost. Indeed, about becoming a ghost herself. And now, this incident with Amber. I mean, if you were a parent, how thrilled would you be to have your boy or girl in the same school as a delusional child with access to knives?”

  Contemplating Arkie’s words, I realized there was a great deal of sense in what she was saying. Indeed, it felt good to be back on familiar ground, dealing with a disturbed child. No doubt Jadie was deeply psychotic and I hadn’t encountered anything of such a distressing nature before, but this was work I knew I was good at. In fact, it was the mystery of mental illness that had always attracted me to working with it. The similarities among types of disturbances was enough to give a toehold, yet each individual’s problems were always challengingly unique, providing me with an ultimate sense of mastery on those occasions when I could su
ccessfully intervene. As Arkie talked, my mind began chasing quickly down the maze of possibilities for such a complex disturbance in an eight-year-old girl.

  “The only thing I can think of,” Arkie was saying when I tuned back in, “is to call a conference with her parents and insist they take her back to the mental health clinic. They were going there for a while when Jadie was about five, but they broke it off because of the trouble in traveling weekly between Pecking and here. That, and, of course, the fact that Jadie wouldn’t talk to the therapist. Seemed a bit of a waste of money at the time. But none of us appreciated what a disturbed child the mutism was cloaking. I think we now need to impress upon Mr. and Mrs. Ekdahl that this isn’t something Jadie is going to grow out of. I think we might even mention the possibility of short-term psychiatric hospitalization if Jadie doesn’t show signs of improving. That might be one of the best ways of tackling the situation, if it’s abuse related.”

  “Yes, that might be a good idea.”

  “And this should take some of the burden off you. If she can establish a good relationship with a therapist, a lot of this counseling role you’ve fallen into should be lessened.”

  I nodded.

  Arkie leaned down and retrieved her handbag. Taking out her Filofax, she paged through it. “Who I’d really like to have see Jadie is a woman named Phyllis Ruiz. She’s a psychiatrist at the mental health clinic who’s had a lot of experience with severely disturbed children, and she holds some very enlightened views. Not just pills and theory. You’d like her. I’ll see if I can contact her on Monday and find out what her schedule’s like.” Arkie snapped the diary shut and looked over, grinning. “There. Great. I always feel better when I’ve settled on some concrete action, don’t you?”

  The weekend of Thanksgiving arrived, and the whole school was involved putting on a Thanksgiving “pageant,” as Mr. Tinbergen liked to call it. The third-and fourth-graders were doing a play they had written about Pilgrims, while the rest of us contributed songs, dances, and poems. My group were to represent the Native American point of view, all except for Brucie, who had been aptly designated a pumpkin and simply had to sit on the stage in his orange costume while the rest of the children sang and offered up their baskets of food.