Hidden Falls

by Newport, Olivia

  “Yes, Molly, this is it.” Lauren stood and brushed the boy’s hair out of his eyes. “This is Liam Elliott. I’m going to get him set up to help with the paperwork, and the nurse from the public health office will be here in just a few minutes to give the shots.”

  The boy stiffened. “I don’t want a shot!”

  “Christopher,” Molly said, “we talked about this.”

  He pushed away and started to run. Molly followed.

  Lauren grimaced at Liam. “Hopefully they won’t all be like that.”

  Liam offered a smile he didn’t feel. He didn’t have much experience with small children, but in his opinion, they lacked appeal.

  Lauren reached into a tub and took out a set of two pages stapled together. “Don’t worry. Your job is just the paperwork. It’s not complicated, and the nurse can answer a lot of questions.”

  Liam nodded at appropriate intervals as Lauren explained the essential information he should check for on the forms that parents filled out. She pointed to a few places on the sample form and then showed him the tub where the papers were, along with clipboards and pens for parents to use. Vaguely, he heard her caution against trying to leave too many forms on the table at a time. One ill-timed gust of wind could make a mess. Liam had an odd awareness that most of what Lauren said wasn’t sinking in but comforted himself with the thought that it couldn’t be too difficult to hand parents a form and then take it back.

  “Oh, here’s the nurse now.” Lauren turned to help the nurse with supplies and setup.

  Liam sat in the lawn chair behind a plastic folding table and tried to make his eyes focus on the questions the form asked. How long had he said he would do this? Had he promised all day? Liam wasn’t sure, but he hoped not. At least under the canopy he was out of the sun.

  A large hand thudded against the plastic table. Liam grabbed the jiggling edge. “Cooper, knock it off.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming.” Cooper rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  “If you say so.” Liam laid three pens across the front of the table. “How’s the crime spree coming?”

  “We’ve managed to put a stop to all that. No new crimes in three days.” Cooper cocked a smile. “Today we’re all about community service.”

  “I heard the mayor’s shop is opening today.”

  “Good news, eh?”

  Liam scanned the fair. “Is Sylvia here?” He would need a private moment to talk to Sylvia about what Dani found—though the fair might not be the right setting.

  “I saw Sylvia earlier,” Cooper said. “Not sure what happened to her.”

  Cooper rotated to the left, and Liam followed his line of sight. His brother was looking with great interest at Lauren Nock.

  “Cooper, is there something you want to tell me?”

  “About what?” Cooper didn’t turn his head.

  “I don’t know. Something new in your life?”

  “You know I can’t tell you anything about any cases I’m working on.” Cooper took four steps and grabbed a tub Lauren had bent to pick up.

  Throbbing pain shot through Liam’s gut—followed instantly by guilt. He ought to be glad for his brother, even if his own relationship had crumbled.

  “Oh, hello, Liam.”

  The voice was familiar, but it wasn’t until Liam turned to see the face that he made the connection. Miranda lived in his apartment building. He ran into her sometimes in the laundry room or at the mailboxes.

  She stood in the booth behind him, flipping through a box of brochures. “They have me handing out flyers about warning signs of heart disease and stroke.”

  Liam waved a form. “Checking immunization paperwork.”

  “I’m supposed to be walking around. Do you mind if I leave my box behind your chair?”

  “No problem. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Miranda pointed beyond Liam. “Looks like you’ve got a line.”

  Liam straightened in his chair and stared into the faces of four parents and seven preschool children. He clapped his hands. “Okay, then, let’s get this going.”

  He assembled clipboards, passed them out, and then glanced at the nurse with her vials and needles and labels and little yellow immunization cards. The first clipboard came back to him, and Liam read the lines, making himself see each question and each answer. He handed it to the nurse, who invited a mother with a tiny girl to sit in a chair. While the nurse asked more questions and reviewed the form, the line in front of Liam lengthened. Two parents returned their forms at the same time. Liam decided to stand up to move more easily and keep things sorted. His chair pushed against Miranda’s box and dumped the contents. When he lurched to correct his clumsiness, he only made things worse.

  Liam scooped brochures back into the box. They would never be the neat piles Miranda would expect to find.

  The envelope slid out from between Heart Disease and Stroke and landed at Liam’s feet. It was just like the other—unmarked, sealed, and thin. Had it been there a moment ago, when Miranda was choosing flyers to carry around the fair?

  “Looks like you could use some help.”

  Jessica.

  He dropped the envelope back into the jumbled box.

  A parent set a completed form on the table. Jessica picked it up and ran a finger down the center of it.

  “We’re missing a phone number.” She handed the paper back to the parent. “Who’s next, please?”

  The line was growing now, but Liam watched Jessica seamlessly organize the traffic flow of paperwork into piles and small children toward the nurse.

  “What are you doing here?” Liam spoke when all the parents in line were occupied with their forms.

  “Two hours of community service. Everybody who works at the store has to do it.”

  Liam offered her the only chair. “But why here?”

  “They don’t know I dumped you.”

  Her tone stung even more than the words.

  He glanced at the bare ring finger on her left hand and then at the envelope sticking out from a pile of brochures. Volunteers moved back and forth between the tents. The lawn was full of visitors roaming the displays. Dozens of people might have had the opportunity to drop an envelope into that particular box. But Miranda was the one who left the box in a spot where Liam was likely to knock it over at some point.

  The boy who had run from the prospect of an injection when Liam first arrived was approaching the tent again. This time his mother had a firm hold on his hand. Liam tried out a smile on the boy—Christopher, wasn’t it?—and handed the paperwork to his mother. Jessica arranged the small tub of supplies where they could reach it more easily and tidied a stack of forms on the corner of the table. A few feet away, the nurse put a cartoon bandage on a tiny arm.

  Liam felt trapped in slow motion. Around him everything moved normally, but he couldn’t make his fingers close around the pen he intended to pick up. It rolled off the table. Liam watched it knock into his shoe and then bounce into the grass. His knees wouldn’t bend. He couldn’t pick it up. When another parent came to the table and Liam didn’t move quickly enough, Jessica stood up and gave the young father what he needed to begin the immunization process. Her arm brushed against Liam’s, but still he didn’t move.

  Jessica’s sigh of exasperation as she picked up the fallen pen finally pierced Liam’s inertia, and he stepped out of her way.

  In that moment, Liam made a decision.

  10:17 a.m.

  Behind a trifold screen with red paisley fabric stretched between its supports, Ethan pointed to the solid wooden table he was fairly certain once had been in a small conference room inside Our Savior. Maybe it still was the conference room table, but someone had wisely decided a surface for children’s health screenings ought to be sturdy enough to sustain the erratic movements that could result from poking and prodding small bodies. A strategically placed step stool helped independent climbers scale the height.

  Perm
ission to climb on a table was an attraction among the preschool set. A little girl attacked the task with exuberance, but in the end her mother had to help her get turned around and dangle her feet off the edge.

  “I hope you’re keeping that stethoscope warm.” Nicole sat on the other side of the screen. “I’d hate to think you would torture innocent little children.”

  “Shh.” Ethan made eye contact with the child to see how well she would respond. “Her mother is standing right here. You’re blowing my cover.”

  The mother chuckled.

  “Can I look in your mouth?” Ethan said to the child.

  “Open your mouth, Kimmie,” the mother said.

  Ethan took a fresh depressor and gently kept the girl’s tongue in its place while he looked down her throat and found everything right where it belonged.

  “Any particular concerns?” he said to the mother as he inspected the child’s ears and nose before using his stethoscope to listen to her heart and breathing.

  He moved quickly through the fundamentals of a well child physical. He wasn’t a pediatrician, but he treated enough kids when he was on call in the ER that he liked to think he’d spot a sick kid sitting right in front of him.

  When Ethan was finished, he lifted the girl off the table and pointed the mother toward a vision screening station. No one else was waiting at the moment, so he stepped around the screen to see what Nicole was up to. She sat in one chair with her foot propped up on another and her crutches on the ground beside her. In her lap were several sheets of paper and her iPad opened to the most helpful Morse code site they’d found yesterday. They’d stayed at the cemetery as long as Old Dom’s patience lasted, copying sequences of dashes and dots. In the dim light, Ethan took the best photos he could of the ledger pages that seemed to have interested Quinn the most—if the markings were indeed Quinn’s.

  Ethan was inclined to think they were.

  “These phrases just don’t make sense.” Nicole chewed the top of her pen. “Maybe we mixed up some dots and dashes.”

  Ethan’s photos captured the handwriting squiggles and flourishes of Old Dom’s father well enough that he and Nicole could read the information recorded in cryptic phrases, but most of the images didn’t capture the faint points of contact between Quinn’s pencil and the thickly textured paper that swallowed up ill-placed markings. For that, they had to depend on their best guesses.

  “What have you got that you’re sure of?” Ethan asked.

  “Not much.”

  Nicole reached for her foot as if she wished she could scratch it. It was probably swelling under the boot cast.

  “Boy ill,” Nicole said. “But that could be any number of boys who died as children. It’s a cemetery record, after all. Then there’s right age, but that was pages and pages later.”

  “Nothing else?” Ethan glanced up at a mother and son he suspected were coming in search of his services.

  “Both. Here before. Sure. Not sure.”

  “Can’t make up your mind?”

  “No, I mean that’s what it says. Sure. Not sure. About six pages apart.”

  The boy approaching the booth had a yellow balloon tied to one wrist. His feet halted, and he seemed to stare at Ethan. After a few seconds, his mother picked up his hand and tugged. The boy looked up at her and then at his balloon as she led him forward again.

  “I’m Molly,” the young woman said. “This is my son, Christopher.”

  Ethan took the paperwork she offered. “How old is Christopher?”

  “He just turned five.”

  Ethan left Nicole to her puzzling and escorted Molly and Christopher behind the screen. Christopher hesitated once again.

  “Come on, Christopher.” Molly ran her hand down the side of her son’s face. “Let’s not daydream right now.”

  At the stimulation of her touch, Christopher blinked his eyes.

  “Does that happen often?” Ethan helped Christopher up onto the table.

  “The daydreaming? Some days I notice it more than others.”

  He’s the right age, Ethan thought. The boy’s mother couldn’t be expected to know that the condition could emerge at this age.

  “I just have to remind him to listen,” Molly said. “He gets so caught up in what he’s thinking about.”

  Ethan found nothing else wrong with the boy in the cursory examination he was able to do behind a screen on the church lawn.

  “I’d like your son to see a doctor,” Ethan said.

  “I thought you were a doctor.” Her face paled.

  “I am. But I’m only visiting in Hidden Falls, and I’m leaving later today. Christopher needs to see a neurologist.”

  Her eyes flicked wide open. “Something’s wrong with his brain?”

  “I can’t be sure just by looking at him.” Ethan remembered Lauren had said there would be a public health nurse at the fair. Maybe she would know the name of a pediatric neurologist. “Why don’t you bring Christopher, and we’ll see if we can connect you to the right help.”

  Molly lifted Christopher, and the child wrapped his legs around his mother’s waist.

  Ethan scanned the activity and spotted the sign announcing immunizations hanging from one of the blue-and-white tents. The couple at the table seemed to have a system going, though the dark-haired man appeared the more frazzled of the two.

  Christopher thrashed against his mother’s hold, and Ethan turned rapidly, thinking the child’s condition was worse than he’d realized.

  “I don’t want another shot!” Christopher shouted.

  Molly tightened her grip. “Sorry. We were here a few minutes ago.”

  Ethan put up both hands in a stop gesture. “Then let’s not torment him. I just want to talk to the nurse. You can wait here if you’d like.”

  Molly nodded.

  Ethan waited for the nurse to finish an injection before interrupting the flow of the line. He introduced himself and explained what he needed.

  The nurse shook her head. “There’s Dr. Glass, but he’s mostly retired. We don’t have as many neurologists around here as we could use, and none of them are pediatricians.”

  “I need to give her a name.” Ethan was almost certain Christopher was having seizures that lasted a few seconds at a time and needed an EEG.

  The nurse reached for a scrap of paper and wrote on it. “She could try this place in Birch Bend. If nothing else, they’ll give her a good referral.”

  “Thank you.” Ethan turned around and found the spot where he’d left Molly empty.

  “Did you see where they went?” The man behind the table looked vaguely familiar.

  “Who?”

  “The young woman who was standing right here.”

  “Oh, the one with the kid who screams.”

  “I don’t know if he screams or not, but I need to find them.”

  “He saw Lauren Nock and took off like she was his long-lost friend.”

  Ethan glanced back at his own station. Nicole was upright on her crutches talking to a couple of families and handing them forms. That would give him some time.

  “Which direction?” he asked.

  “Toward the church. I think they went inside.”

  Ethan pivoted and faced the brick structure of Our Savior. He hadn’t been inside the church—or any church—for ten years.

  But that little boy needed to have a workup.

  And it was just a building.

  Ethan crossed the lawn, smiling vaguely at a couple of people who seemed to recognize him and trying to recall how well they knew his parents. He entered the side door of the church.

  “Would you like to use the prayer room?” a woman said. “We have someone available to pray with you, if you like.”

  “No thank you.” Ethan looked past the woman into a dimly lit room with a makeshift altar and candles. “I’m just looking for a woman with a little boy. Five years old, blond hair, skinny. Have you seen them?”

  “Molly and Christopher?”

 
“Yes, that’s right.” Ethan scanned the hall.

  “They’re right inside.” She gestured.

  “In the prayer room?”

  “You’re welcome to quietly step inside and have a seat.”

  Ethan pressed his lips together and looked away. He didn’t see another place to sit, and he didn’t want to risk losing track of Molly altogether. He sucked in his breath and slipped into the prayer room, where he found a lone chair against a back wall. Other chairs were arranged in pairs or trios around small tables with Bibles opened.

  Molly was there, with Christopher on her lap and both their heads huddled with Lauren’s. Wondering how many more parents were at his booth, Ethan waited for Lauren to finish praying aloud.

  When she looked up, Molly saw Ethan. “I’m sorry. Christopher wanted to see Lauren, and then we stayed to pray.”

  “It’s all right.” Ethan stood up.

  “I admit I got scared when you said something was wrong.”

  “I have the name of a practice for you.” Ethan handed her the scrap of paper the nurse had written on. “You can tell them I said Christopher may have a seizure disorder. If I’m right, it’s very treatable.”

  Lauren stood with an arm around Christopher’s shoulders. “Thank you, Ethan. There’s no telling how long it would have been before another doctor noticed something. I’ll make sure Christopher gets an appointment.”

  “Good.” Ethan turned to leave. “Nice to meet you, Molly.”

  He walked across the grass, which now had the beginnings of trodden paths as the size of the crowd increased. Back at his paisley screen, three families waited.

  Nicole waved a sheet of paper at him.

  “Did you find something more?” he asked.

  “It says, this matters. It was next to a notation about a death in the Tabor family in the 1930s.”

  Her green eyes captured sunlight and spun it back out of her face. Ethan was going to have a hard time getting in his Lexus and driving away in a few hours.

  11:02 a.m.

  Jack saw the little fist on a trajectory that would take it not only to the table but straight into a small square pod of purple face paint.

  If his kids had moved that fast when they were this little, he didn’t remember it.