by J. A. Jance
Retreating to a waiting room chair, Ali set down her purse and the box of pasties, and then sent Sister Anselm a text announcing that luncheon was served.
A few minutes later, when Sister Anselm emerged from the nursery, Ali was shocked by her appearance. Everything about Sister Anselm looked bone weary. The sparkle was gone from her blue eyes. Her normally perfect posture was marred by the slump of her shoulders. In the few hours between the time Sister Anselm had left Ali’s house in Sedona and now, the nun seemed to have turned into an old woman.
Trying not to stare and looking for a way to cover her dismay, Ali attempted a bit of normal conversation. “Your patient’s a baby?” she asked.
“One of them is,” Sister Anselm said, sinking gratefully into a chair and lowering her voice so no one else in the room could hear what she was saying. “A baby and her mother.”
Ali knew better than to inquire about the condition of the two patients. She didn’t have to. She could tell from the grave expression on Sister Anselm’s face that the situation was dicey at best. Not wanting to voice her concerns about Sister Anselm herself, Ali sought refuge in a less difficult topic.
“Leland has all your best interests at heart,” she said. “He baked a batch of pasties this morning and sent two of them along for lunch.”
“Bless him,” Sister Anselm murmured, leaning back and closing her eyes. “That man is a wonder and a marvel.”
“He is that,” Ali agreed.
When Sister Anselm continued to sit with her eyes closed and with her head propped against the wall, Ali wondered if the nun had simply dozed off. Ali had known her friend for years, always marveling at her energy and industry. Usually she was able to stay at a patient’s bedside for days on end, sleeping in short power naps that would have left your basic finals-cramming college student in the dust. Now though, with Sister Anselm looking beyond exhausted, Ali forced herself to swallow her concern and busied herself setting out the food. Only when the pasties had been set on plates and the bottled water opened did she touch Sister Anselm’s shoulder. The nun awakened with a start.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to drift off like that.”
“It’s fine,” Ali said. “You must have needed the rest.”
For a time, they tackled their pasties without speaking. That wasn’t out of character—the two women often shared long periods of companionable silence in each other’s company. This time Ali sensed a disturbing undercurrent in what wasn’t being said. Sister Anselm had summoned her for some particular reason, but with the room filled with people coming and going, this wasn’t the time to ask.
Ali downed her pasty with relish, while Sister Anselm simply toyed with hers. The idea of Sister Anselm turning up her nose at one of Leland Brooks’s pasties was unheard of. At last, with a sigh, Sister Anselm put the plate and the remains of her pasty back in the box.
“I’ll put this in the fridge in the break room and finish it later,” she said.
While Sister Anselm left to put away her food, Ali cleaned up the remains of their indoor picnic. When the nun reappeared, she beckoned for Ali to follow. Somewhat revived and walking with at least some of her customary bustle, Sister Anselm led the way into a tiny conference room that held a small table, three chairs, and a box of tissues. Ali guessed that this tiny private room on the maternity floor was intended for delivering bad news rather than good.
“Wait here,” Sister Anselm said. She left the room, returning a few minutes later with a banker’s box and a pair of latex gloves. After placing both on the table, she turned back to the door and closed the blinds before sitting down opposite Ali and peering at her over the top of the box.
“This contains the personal effects of one of my patients,” Sister Anselm explained. “I’d like you to go through the items one by one and then tell me your thoughts. You’ll want to wear these,” she added, picking up the gloves. “In the meantime, I’ll go check on my patients. I have their vitals on my iPad, but I like to check on them in person all the same.” With that, she vanished out the door, leaving Ali alone.
Puzzled, Ali donned the gloves, removed the lid, and reached inside. First to emerge was a clear Ziploc bag. Inside were a pair of bloodstained blond braids, coiled around and around to make them fit inside the bag. Ali had worn braids until sixth grade when she had insisted on cutting hers off. Noting the circumference of the many coils, Ali estimated that the braids themselves had to be three to four feet long. Without the braids the hair would most likely be waist length or longer. Whoever had worn the braids had probably gone for over a decade without having a haircut.
Next up came a pair of shoes. Ali set them side by side on the table to examine them. They were cheap, off-brand men’s oxfords, not the kind of shoes a young woman of childbearing age would be eager to wear. They were ugly, dusty, badly worn, and desperately in need of a coat of polish. The laces were threadbare. There were several knots in each of them where they had been broken and tied back together rather than replaced. Picking up one of the shoes, Ali noticed that the sole had been worn through in more than one place and then inexpertly patched.
Holding the shoe in the air, Ali realized how smelly it was. This was footwear that had seen long, hard use without the benefit of socks. She guessed they were probably the same as a woman’s size eight, although the part of the shoe where the size might have been inked into the leather had been worn away long ago. There was no visible sign of blood on the shoes. Ali remembered that, as Sister Anselm was leaving the house, she had mentioned something about a traffic incident, so perhaps the shoes had been knocked off the victim’s feet by some kind of impact.
The next item in the layered collection of belongings was a carefully folded Navajo blanket, which Ali lifted out of the box. Hefting it in her hand, she found it to be surprisingly heavy. The weight alone hinted that it was of the genuine handmade variety. Here and there on the blanket ugly stains had turned the vivid reds and whites of the patterns to a rusty brown. Ali didn’t need a spray of luminol to tell her that the brown stains indicated where blood had soaked into fibers of the closely woven fabric.
She studied the blanket as she set it on the table next to the braids and the shoes. The three items told surprisingly contradictory stories. The shoes said that whoever had worn them was poor—too poor for new shoes or even new shoelaces; too poor for socks. The blanket, on the other hand, if it was genuine, was probably quite valuable. It indicated that the victim might have had some kind of connection to the Navajo nation, but the blond braids suggested otherwise—an Anglo victim rather than an Indian one.
Next came a bag—a homemade drawstring pouch, made of faded gingham and worn enough for the threads to be frayed at the bottom. Long ago Ali had made one just like it in Girl Scouts. Since the bag evidently functioned as a purse, Ali pulled it open and peered inside, expecting to find some kind of ID. That expectation was met with disappointment. The purse contained none of the usual jumble one would expect in a woman’s purse—no lipstick tubes, compact, wallet, or wad of tissues. It contained only three items—a Bible, a small pair of scissors, and a spool of white thread with a single threaded needle poked into the side. Returning the contents to the bag, Ali focused once again on the box.
The next item out was a jacket—a lightweight, single-layer denim jacket, not the kind of heavy-duty outerwear yesterday’s weather would have warranted. There were bloodstains on the jacket as well, especially at the back of the neck. It looked as though whoever had been wearing the jacket had lain in a pool of blood until the jacket was saturated through. There were also some stains on the front of the jacket, especially on the lower right-hand side. So perhaps the woman had suffered two separate wounds, a head wound and some kind of damage to her body as well.
As Ali refolded the jacket, she heard a small rustle that seemed to come from one of the side pockets. Reaching into it, she pulled out a piece of crumpled wax
ed paper. Then her searching fingers encountered something else. A tiny scrap of paper had been stuck so deep in the bottom seam of the pocket that it might easily have been overlooked. There was writing on the paper. Something barely legible had been scribbled with a dull number two pencil. Holding it up to the light, Ali saw a telephone number and a single name—Irene.
Ali suspected that the injured woman had yet to be identified. Had her loved ones been notified, no doubt they would have arrived at the hospital by now. Realizing that the scrap of paper might be a vital clue in the identification process, Ali set it aside. It was not her place to make the call. That would have to be up to law enforcement or else to Sister Anselm.
The next item to surface was a set of underwear, or at least what was left of them. A jagged cut ran down from the elastic top and then came to a T from leg to leg. Ali knew that drill. An EMT wielding a pair of scissors had made the cut to remove the victim’s clothing and get it out of the way.
Closer examination revealed that the garment resembled men’s boxers more than it did any kind of women’s underwear. The legs were loose rather than tightened with elastic, and the elastic waistband had been stretched to the limit, most likely to accommodate the growing baby.
The material itself was stained and stiff. It looked as though it had been soaked through with some kind of a yellowish liquid and then laid out flat to dry. There was no manufacturer’s tag saying “Made in China” sewn into any of the seams. In fact, there was no tag at all, and the jagged stitching around the thick elastic top told Ali that the panties were most likely homemade and sewn on a machine that was close to giving up the ghost. So, Ali asked herself, who in her right mind makes her own underwear?
The item that came next passed for a full-length slip, but it was really more of a simple, shapeless shift made of some lightweight cotton material. The shift, like the underwear, had been cut straight up the middle, from bottom to top, again most likely by an EMT. This item of clothing might have started out as white sometime in the distant past, but it was now a grimy gray and smelled as though whoever wore it had little access to soap and water, bleach, or even deodorant.
Ali stood up and held the shift in front of her. Whoever wore it was fairly tall—about Ali’s height, perhaps. Then her eyes were drawn to the bottom of the shift. It had been cut off in a careless, ragged fashion. The small, jagged cuts indicated that scissors used for this had been much smaller and not nearly as sharp as the pair used to cut through the underwear and shift. Not only that, the way the cuts came together, with the back much shorter than the front, made Ali wonder if the person doing the cutting hadn’t been wearing the garment at the time it was shortened.
Finally she removed the last item from the box and shook it out. It was an old-fashioned shirtwaist dress with buttons and buttonholes up and down the front, and with a billowy, gathered skirt. The EMTs had hacked their way through all that, too. The buttons were all still buttoned. The material was a faded check that might have been blue and white at one time but was now more of a dim shade of lavender and white. The buttons were the serviceable white kind that might have been snipped off a man’s shirt and reused on something else. Like the other clothing, the dress was bloodstained, especially on the back of the fold-down collar, and stiffened with yellow on the skirt.
As with the shift, it was the hemline that drew Ali’s attention. Examining it, she could see that someone had gone to a lot of effort to cut through the material and then bind the jagged edge into a rough roll of whip-stitched hem. There had been no need to make the bottom of the shift straight. The person who had cut that off had known the shift wouldn’t show. But the dress? Ali stood up and held it in front of her. The faded garment had probably been much longer at one time, but now, with some of the material cut away and with a rudimentary hem, it came to just below Ali’s knees.
Sister Anselm reentered the conference room just then, closing the door behind her, nodding as she did so. “I believe the two of you are about the same size in terms of height,” she said.
Ali turned back to the box, expecting to find something more, but it was empty. “No bra?” she asked.
“No bra,” Sister Anselm confirmed. “What you found in the box is all there is except for her wedding ring.”
She took a seat across from Ali, then placed her folded hands on the table. The gesture reminded Ali of tapes she had seen of law enforcement interrogations done in locked interview rooms. The words Sister Anselm uttered next made the resemblance all the more striking.
“This is all my fault,” she said.
“Why do you say that?” Ali asked in surprise. “How’s that possible?”
Sister Anselm sighed deeply. “My patient was struck by a moving vehicle near a gas station twenty miles north of Flagstaff. It happened about eight-thirty last night.”
“At eight-thirty?” Ali interjected. “You were miles away at the time. In fact, I believe we were still sitting in my dining room and had just finished eating dinner. How can any of this be your fault?”
“Because this isn’t the first time something like this has happened,” Sister Anselm said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “I’ve seen it before.”
She stopped and didn’t continue. “Tell me,” Ali urged.
With effort, Sister Anselm gathered herself. “There was a similar case a dozen years ago. The victim was a girl probably a few years older than this one, seventeen or so. She was found naked and savagely beaten on a road leading to the Hualapai Mountains. That Jane Doe wasn’t as lucky as this one. She was taken to the hospital in Kingman. Her baby was delivered by cesarean. The mother died a day or so later, and the baby a week after that. I cared for the baby through her all too brief life, and I was holding her when she died.”
Overcome by the telling, Ali watched as two tears slid down Sister Anselm’s checks and dripped unnoticed onto the Formica-topped table. Ali said nothing, not because she was unmoved, but because she could see that Sister Anselm’s wound, whatever it might be, was too deep for mere words. Anything spoken right then would have been meaningless.
Noticing the tears at last, Sister Anselm took a tissue from the box on the table. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and then mopped up the tears that had dropped onto the table. Finally she continued.
“When Baby Doe died, her mother’s body was still in the morgue in Kingman in the hope that eventually someone would turn up to claim her. After the baby died, Bishop Gillespie arranged for both mother and daughter to be buried in a single casket and with a single marker, one that reads ‘Jane and Baby Jane Doe.’ They’re in a shady corner of Holy Name Cemetery near downtown Kingman. Whenever I’m in that area, I always visit the grave and I always pray that somehow we’ll learn who they were and where they came from.”
Sister Anselm paused and let her hand sweep over the table and the collection of items resting there. “I’m afraid this is God’s answer to that prayer—another victim—a mother and her infant child.”
Another long silence ensued. At last Ali said what was in her heart—the only thing that made sense. “This is not your fault.”
“But it is,” Sister Anselm insisted. “Don’t you see? When the sheriff’s department let that first case go cold, I should have insisted that they keep it alive. The victim had no family to intervene and make sure she and her child weren’t forgotten. I was their patient advocate, and I failed them. Now, that means I’ve failed them all—that girl, this one, and both babies.”
“How do you know the two girls are connected?” Ali asked.
Sister Anselm reached across the table and picked up the Ziploc bag containing the bloodied braids. “These,” she said. “The first girl wore her hair the same way—in braids wrapped around the crown of her head. It’s a very distinctive style that tells me they must have come from the same place,” Sister Anselm asserted. “They fled the same place, and, according to David Up
ton, last night’s victim begged that neither she nor her daughter be sent back there.”
“Who is David Upton?”
“The young man who hit her with his car. He may well be the last person she spoke to.”
“Is Mr. Upton a suspect?”
“Not as far as I can tell. So far the investigation seems to bear out Mr. Upton’s claim that he was already slowing down to pull over when she ran across the pavement directly in front of him. Hitting her was unavoidable. I’ve been told that the right-hand turn signal on his vehicle was still blinking when deputies showed up to do their investigation.”
Ali studied her friend’s face for some time. “That’s why you wanted me to come today and look at all this, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s also why you had me wear gloves. The victim’s personal effects are here because she came in an ambulance and was admitted to the hospital. If she dies, everything here will become part of a police investigation.”
Sister Anselm nodded almost imperceptibly.
“And you’re hoping that somehow I’ll be able to help identify her?”
“Yes,” Sister Anselm answered.
“But why? Why not let the cops do it? She’s the unidentified victim of a motor vehicle accident. I’m sure they’ll do their best to ascertain where she came from.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Sister Anselm admitted. “I’m afraid they’ll figure it out. At that point, the father will most likely assert his parental rights, and the baby—assuming she survives—will be taken back to the very place her mother tried so desperately to escape. It’s possible the mother might be sent back there as well.”