Magic hour: a novel

by Kristin Hannah

Before she could say anything else, he walked away.

  Outside, he paused on the concrete steps of the city hall. All around him, reporters were talking among themselves and packing up their gear. An American flag flapped in the breeze overhead.

  Across the street, the white stone church sat huddled in the shade of a mammoth fir tree. When he looked closely, he saw the silhouette of a woman in the window.

  Julia.

  He used to be the kind of man who would cross the street now, go to her and offer help.

  Instead, he went to his truck, climbed in, and headed for home.

  As he drove down Lakeshore Drive, the sun began its slow descent toward the lake. At his battered mailbox, he withdrew the usual stack of junk mail and bills, then turned onto his driveway, which was a ribbon of potholed gravel road that unspooled through a nearly impenetrable forest. These were the acres his great-great-grandfather had homesteaded more than one hundred years ago, with the grandiose idea of building a world-class fishing and hunting lodge, but a single year in the wet, green darkness had changed the old man’s mind. He’d cleared two acres out of the one hundred he owned, and that was as far as he got. He moved to Montana and built his fishing lodge; in time he forgot about these wild acres tucked deep in the woods along Spirit Lake. They were passed from eldest son to eldest son as wills were read, until at last they came to Max. It was anticipated by the whole of his family that he would do with this land what had always been done with it: nothing. Each generation had checked on the value of the acreage; each had been surprised by how little it was worth. So they’d kept paying the taxes and ignoring their ownership of the land.

  If his life had unfolded as he’d expected, no doubt Max would have done the same.

  He parked in the garage, beside the Harley-Davidson “fat boy” motorcycle that was his favorite toy, and went into the house.

  Inside, he flipped the light switches.

  Emptiness greeted him.

  There were precious few pieces of furniture in the great room: to the left was a huge pine table with a single chair at one end. A gorgeous river-rock fireplace covered the eastern wall, its mantel empty of decoration. In front of it was an oxblood leather sofa, a battered coffee table, and a beautiful wooden cabinet.

  Max tossed his coat on the sofa, then felt beneath the cushions for a remote.

  Within moments a plasma TV screen rose up from the custom-made rosewood cabinet. He clicked it on. It didn’t matter what was on the screen. All he cared about was the noise. He hated a quiet house.

  He went upstairs, took a quick shower, and changed his clothes.

  He was at the steamy mirror, shaving, when he thought about her again.

  The pierced ear.

  He put down his razor slowly, staring at the tiny dot in his ear. It was barely visible anymore; he hadn’t worn an earring in more than seven years.

  But she’d seen it, and in seeing it, she’d glimpsed the man he used to be.

  “YOU DECIDED TO HOLD A PRESS CONFERENCE WITHOUT WARNING ME?” Julia couldn’t help yelling at her sister. “Why not just tie a yellow ribbon around my throat and toss me to the wolves?”

  “How was I supposed to know you’d stop by? You never came home last night, but I’m supposed to plan around your movements. Who am I? Carnac the Magnificent?”

  Julia sat back in the car seat and crossed her arms. In the sudden silence, rain pattered the windshield of the police cruiser.

  “Maybe the media should know you’re here. I’ll tell them how much we believe—”

  “You think it would be a good thing to show my face on camera? Now? My patient—a kid, mind you—beat me up. It hardly is a ringing endorsement of my skills.”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  “I know that,” Julia snapped. “Believe me when I tell you they won’t.”

  It was the same thing she’d told herself a dozen times in the last thirty minutes. For a moment there, when she’d seen those reporters, she’d considered revealing herself as the doctor on this case. But it was too early. They no longer trusted her. She needed to do something right or they’d ruin her. Again.

  She had to get the girl talking. And fast.

  This was obviously going to be a big story for a few days. Headlines would be everywhere; people would be speculating about the girl’s identity. The story would probably run that she was incapable of intelligible speech because of brain damage or unwilling to talk because of fear or trauma. Nothing seized the public attention like a mystery; the press would pull at every strand. Sooner or later, Julia knew, she would be part of the story.

  Ellie pulled up in front of the library. The building, an old converted taxidermy shop, sat tucked up against a stand of towering Douglas fir. Night was falling fast, so the gravel path to the door could barely be seen. “I sent everyone home for the night,” Ellie said, reaching into her breast pocket for the key. “Just like you asked. And Jules . . . I am sorry.”

  “Thanks.” Julia heard the wobble in her voice. It revealed more than she would have liked. And Ellie heard it.

  If things had been different between them, this was the moment when she would reach out to her sister and say I’m scared to face the media again. Instead, she cleared her throat and said, “I need somewhere private to work with the child.”

  “As soon as we find a temporary foster parent, we can move her. We’re looking for—”

  “I’ll do it. Call DSHS. There shouldn’t be any problem getting me approved. I’ll get the paperwork filled out tonight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. I can’t help her an hour a week, or even an hour a day. She’ll be a full-time job for a while. Get the paperwork started from your end.”

  “Okay.”

  Headlights came up behind them, illuminating the cab. Moments later there was a knock at the car window that sounded like gunfire.

  Julia opened the car door.

  Penelope stood alongside the passenger door, waving happily. Behind her was a battered old pickup truck. She was already into her sentence when Julia stepped out. “—said you could borrow old Bertha for a while. She was his daddy’s hay truck when they lived in Moses Lake. The keys are in it.”

  “Thank you, Penelope.”

  “Call me Peanut. Heck, we’re practically related, with Ellie being my best friend and all.”

  Julia had a sudden memory of Penelope at Mom’s funeral. She’d taken care of everything and everyone like a den mother. When Ellie had started to cry, Penelope bustled her out of the room. Later, Julia had seen her sitting beside Ellie on the end of her parents’ bed, rocking a sobbing Ellie as if she were a child.

  Julia could have used a friend like that in the past year. “Thanks, Peanut.”

  Ellie got out of the cruiser and came around to where they stood. Her police-issue black heels crunched the gravel. As they stood there, the clouds drifted away to reveal a watery moon. “Get in the car, Pea. I’ll walk her to the front door.”

  Peanut fluttered her fingers in a sorority girl wave and lowered herself into the cruiser, slamming the door shut.

  Julia and Ellie walked up the gravel path to the library. As they neared the entrance, moonlight fell on the READING IS FUN! poster that filled the front window.

  Ellie unlocked the door and opened it, leaning forward to flick on the lights. Then she looked at Julia. “Can you really help this girl?”

  Julia’s anger slipped away, along with the residue of her fear. They were back on track, talking about what mattered. “Yes. Any progress on her identity?”

  “No. We’ve input her height, weight, eye and hair color into the system, so we’re narrowing the possibilities down. We’ve also photographed and logged the scarring on her legs and shoulder. She has a very particular birthmark on her back left shoulder, too. That’s the one identifying mark we know has always been on her. The FBI advised me to keep it secret—to weed out the kooks and crackpots. Max sent her dress to the lab, to look for fibers, but
I’m sure the dress is homemade, so it won’t give us a factory. Maybe DNA, but that’s a real long shot. Her fingerprints don’t match any recorded missing kids. That’s not unusual, of course. Parents don’t routinely fingerprint their kids. We’ve got her blood, so if someone comes forward, we can run a DNA test.” Ellie sighed. “In other words, we’re hoping that her mother reads tomorrow’s newspaper and comes forward. Or that you can get her to tell us her name.”

  “What if it was her mother that tied her up and left her to die?”

  Ellie’s gaze was steady. It was obvious that she’d thought the same thing. They both knew that the overwhelming number of child abductions were by family members. Cases like Elizabeth Smart were incredibly rare. “Then you’d better get the truth out of her,” she said quietly. “It’s the only way we can help her.”

  “Nothing like a little pressure.”

  “On both of us, believe me. Until this week, my toughest law enforcement job was taking car keys from people at The Pour House on Friday night.”

  “We’ll take it one step at a time, I guess. First off, I need a place to work with her.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Good.” Julia smiled. “Don’t wait up for me. I’ll be home late.” She stepped over the threshold and onto the serviceable brown carpeting.

  Ellie touched her shoulder. “Jules?”

  Julia turned. Her sister’s face was half in shadow and half in light. “Yes?”

  “I believe you can do it, you know.”

  Julia was surprised by how much that meant to her. She didn’t trust her voice to sound normal, so she didn’t say thank you. Instead, she nodded, then turned on her heel and went into the brightly lit library. Behind her, she heard Ellie sigh heavily and say, “I believe in you, too, big sis. I know you can find the kid’s family.” Then the door banged shut.

  Julia winced. It had never occurred to her to return the sentiment. She’d always seen her sister as indestructible. Ellie had never needed approval the way she had. Ellie always expected the world to love her, and the world had complied. It was unsettling to get a glimpse of her sister’s inner nature. There was a vulnerability in there somewhere, a fragility that belied the tough-girl-meets-beauty-queen exterior. So, they had something else in common after all.

  Julia walked around a grid of tables to the row of computers. There were five of them—four more than she’d expected—sitting on individual desks beneath a cork bulletin board studded with book covers and flyers announcing local events.

  She pulled a legal-sized yellow tablet and a black pen out of her briefcase, then scouted through the interior pockets for her handheld tape recorder. Finding it, she added new batteries, turned it on and said: “Case file one, patient name unknown.”

  Clicking the Stop button, she sat down on the hard wooden chair and scooted closer to the screen. The computer came on with a thump-buzz. The screen lit up. Within seconds she was surfing the Net and making notes. While she wrote, she also talked into the recorder.

  “Case number one, patient: female child, age unknown. Appears to be between five and seven years of age. Name unknown.

  Child presents with limited or no language ability. Physical assessment is severe dehydration and malnutrition. Extensive ligature-type scarring on body suggests some serious past trauma. Socialization impairment appears to be marked, as does her ability to interact in an age appropriate manner. Child exhibited utter stillness for hours, broken by period of high excitability and irritation. Additionally, she appears to be terrified of shiny metal objects.

  Initial diagnosis: autism.”

  She clicked the recorder off, frowning. It didn’t feel right. She Googled autism, symptoms of, and read through the list of behaviors typically associated with autism. None of it was new information.

  • Language delay

  • Some never acquire language

  • Lack of pleasure at being touched

  • Unable/unwilling to make eye contact

  • Ignores surroundings

  • May appear deaf, due to ignoring of sounds/world around him/her

  • Repetitive physical behaviors common, i.e., hand clapping, toe tapping

  • Severe temper tantrums

  • Unintelligible gibberish

  • Savant abilities may develop, often in math or music or drawing

  • Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to age level

  The list went on. According to the DSM IV criteria, a patient who exhibited a set number of the symptoms could reasonably be diagnosed as autistic. Unfortunately, she hadn’t observed the child fully enough to answer many of the behavioral questions. Like: did the girl like to be touched? Could she exhibit reciprocal emotions? To these, Julia had no concrete answers.

  But she had a gut response.

  The girl could speak, at least some, and she could hear and understand some limited amount. Strangely, Julia was convinced that the girl’s responses were normal; it was the world around her that was wrong.

  There was no point in running through the related diagnoses—Asperger’s syndrome, Ratt’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, or PDD NOS. She simply didn’t have enough information. On her pad, she wrote: Tomorrow: study social interaction, patterns of behavior (if any), motor skills.

  She clicked the pen shut, tapped it on the table.

  There was something she was missing. She went back to the computer and started searching. She had no idea what she was looking for.

  For the next two hours she sat there taking notes on whatever childhood behavioral and mental disorders she could find, but none of them gave her that Aha! moment. Finally, at around eleven, she ran a Google search on lost children. That took her to a lot of television movies and kidnapping sites. That was her sister’s job. She added woods to the search to see how many similar cases there were of children lost or abandoned in a forest or national park.

  Feral children came up. It was a phrase she hadn’t seen in print since her college days. Below it was the sentence fragment: . . . lost or abandoned children raised by wolves or bears in the deep woods may seem . . .

  She moved the cursor and clicked. Text appeared on the screen.

  Feral children are lost, abandoned, or otherwise forgotten children who survive in completely isolated conditions. The idea of children raised by wolves or bears is prevalent in legend, although there are few scientifically documented cases. Some of the more celebrated such children include:

  • The three Hungarian bear boys (17th century)

  • The girl of Oranienburg (1717)

  • Peter, the wild boy (1726)

  • Victor of Aveyron (1797)

  • Kaspar Hauser (1828)

  • Kamala and Amala of India (1920)

  • Genie (1970)

  The second most recent case listed had been in the 1990s. It featured a Ukrainian child named Oxana Malaya, who was said to have been raised by dogs until the age of eight. She never mastered normal social skills. Today, at the age of twenty-three, she lived in a home for the mentally disabled. In 2004, a seven-year-old boy—also reportedly raised by wild dogs—was found in the deep woods of Siberia. To date he had not learned to speak.

  Julia frowned and hit the Print key.

  It was unlikely as hell that this girl was a true wild child. . . .

  The wolf pup

  The way she eats

  But if she were . . .

  This child could be the most profoundly damaged patient she would ever treat, and without extensive help, the poor girl could be as lost and forgotten in the system as she’d been in the woods.

  Julia leaned over and took the stack of papers from the printer. On top lay the last page she’d printed. A black-and-white photograph of a little girl stared up at her. The child looked both frightened and strangely fixated. The caption below it read: Genie. After twelve years of horrific abuse and isolation, she became a media sensation. The modern equivalent of the wild child raised in a California subu
rb. Saved from this nightmare, she was brought into the light for a short time until, like all the wild children before her, she was forgotten by the doctors and scientists and shuffled off to her shadowy fate; life in an institution for the mentally disabled.

  Julia couldn’t imagine being the kind of doctor that would use a traumatized child for career advancement, but she knew that sooner or later those kinds of people would come for the girl. If the true story were as bad as she thought it could be, it would make front page news.

  “I won’t let anyone hurt you again,” Julia vowed to the little girl asleep in the hospital. “I promise.”

  SEVEN

  BY EIGHT O’CLOCK THAT EVENING THE PHONES FINALLY STOPPED ringing. There had been dozens of press-conference-related, fact-checking calls and faxes and queries from the reporters who’d been here and those who hadn’t bothered to come but had somehow gotten wind of the story. And, of course, the locals had arrived in a steady stream until the dinner hour, begging for any scrap of news about Rain Valley’s most unexpected guest.

  “The quiet before the storm,” Peanut said.

  Ellie looked up from the stack of papers on her desk just in time to see her friend light up a cigarette.

  “I asked. You grunted,” Peanut said before Ellie could argue.

  Ellie didn’t bother fighting. “What about the storm?”

  “It’s the quiet before. Tomorrow all hell is gonna break loose. I watch Court TV, I know. Today there were a few local channels and papers here. One Flying Wolf Girl headline and that will change. Every reporter in the country will want in on the story.” She shook her head, exhaling smoke and coughing. “That poor kid. How will we protect her?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “And how will we trust whoever comes to claim her?”

  It was the question that haunted Ellie, the root of her disquiet. “That’s been bothering me from the get-go, Pea. I don’t want to hand her over to the very people who hurt her, but I have damned little evidence. Gut instinct doesn’t go far in today’s legal system. I’m actually hoping there’s a kidnapping report; how sad is that? I’d love to return a little girl who was outright stolen from her home. Then there might be blood samples and a suspect. If it’s not that simple . . .” She shrugged. “I’ll need some help from the big boys.”