by Kate Flora
The world would censure her enough. From this community, she needed sympathy and support.
“We know that in general, Heidi is not known to be a liar,” I continued. “She’s considered a good person and has been a good citizen of this community. And we know that this is a complicated situation, one that is going to take further investigation to understand. We know that such further investigation is essential, and that by the rules of this community, she is entitled to the benefit of all doubt until the full facts are known.”
Gareth looked like what I had just said wasn’t helpful. Under stress, people often fail to hear what is said, and need the information broken down into smaller bites.
“Okay,” I said. I tried to put it in context for him. “If a student were accused of cheating, or of lying, or stealing from another student, or some unacceptable act of violence, how would you proceed?”
I watched him consider.
“We’d withhold judgment until we conducted a full and fair investigation,” he said. “We’d remind the student body of that policy, and of the fact that we’re conducting that investigation, and urge them not to rush to judgment. When the facts were ascertained, we would present the situation to our discipline committee, which is made up of both faculty and students. It would be up to them to decide whether an infraction had taken place, and what the penalty would be. We’ve got a rule book. The standards are pretty clear.”
I watched him nod as he understood my point.
Elaine Purcell smiled wryly. “But there’s nothing in your rule book about child abuse or attempted murder?”
Who was the abused child, I wondered, as my lawyer’s daughter’s tendencies surfaced again. Probably there were two—Heidi and her little girl.
“Isn’t the critical issue here, from the point of view of her fellow students, intention?” I said. “Intention and state of mind? Doesn’t it matter what she believed? What her reality was at the time, not some external reality that assumes a person can’t be pregnant without being aware of it? Or that a person can’t have sex and not know it?”
I look at Dr. Purcell. “She could be telling the truth, couldn’t she? She could have been unaware of her pregnancy?”
“Absolutely. Girls her age can have pretty irregular periods. Pregnant women sometimes do bleed. It is entirely possible that she didn’t know. I’m not sure how likely, but it’s possible. And of course, if there’s trauma involved, in her life and particularly with respect to the events of the conception, if she was deeply in denial, she could have ignored the evidence of her own body.”
“And if she didn’t know she’d had sex?”
“Then it’s even more possible.”
“So whether it’s the result of psychological trauma, or physical trauma, Heidi’s version of what happened could be a genuine truth for her?”
“It could.”
Gareth looked helplessly from one of us to the other. “But I still don’t know what to tell them.”
I thought I’d just laid it out for him, but maybe he was uncomfortable with so much uncertainty. His population did like comforting certainties—teenagers did—even though the goal of their education was to teach them to question, analyze, and evaluate. They were learning to keep open minds and weigh different points of view until they reached their own conclusions. And, in matters pertaining to the community, to strive for consensus, even if it meant their side didn’t always win. They were also still teenagers without fully developed adult brains.
Before I could take another stab at laying things out, Dr. Purcell stood and reached for her coat. “I’ll need to continue to work with her, Gareth,” she said, “if that’s what she wants. I’ll need to get a much clearer sense of her before I have a good read on what this is. Whether her story is self-delusion, some form of traumatic amnesia, or, as Thea suggests, some kind of truth—a pregnancy as the result of drugs or alcohol, perhaps from sex she genuinely didn’t know she’d had. You’ll need a lot more information from her family. And Gareth, I know you aren’t going to like this, but I think you should share all of this with the police investigators. Whatever the circumstances under which she had sex, she was too young to consent. They’ve got resources for getting information that none of us have.”
She had that right. Once we got over the hump of convincing the police to consider the possibility that Heidi had not known she was pregnant, or was suffering from some significant trauma that had caused her to repress the knowledge, everything was cast in a different light and forced a different look at her behavior. And frankly, whether she had knowingly had sex or not, she was still a victim. They would have a lot more resources to put into finding out what might have happened and who the baby’s father was. Obviously there would be DNA, but DNA was only useful when there was someone to match it to.
Who knew how forthcoming her custodial family would be?
I was already anticipatorily pissed off at her family. At her mother. How could Heidi have spent two weeks at home and no one noticed her condition? True, folks here at Simmons had missed it. But this was her mother, a woman who had watched her daughter grow from a newborn. She should have been deeply familiar with her daughter’s body, her appearance, the way she carried herself. Pregnancy changed those things. I was already changing. And didn’t mothers take their daughters shopping for spring clothes during spring break? I wasn’t supposed to prejudge, but I already thought I didn’t like Mrs. General Norris.
Poor Heidi.
Gareth wanted to know if Dr. Purcell could attend the assembly, in case the students had questions, but she shook her head. “I cleared enough of my schedule to meet with Heidi, and to meet with you, but now I’ve got to get back to work. My time, you know, is not my own. Like you, Dr. Wilson, I have a lot of people depending on me.”
He looked stricken, and she put a comforting hand on his arm. “I think you’re in good shape for your meeting, and you’ve got Thea. I’ll plan on coming back tomorrow to see Heidi again. It will likely be in the afternoon. As I told you, this is not a simple thing. She’ll need some kind of therapeutic relationship, possibly for a long time, to help her deal with this. For that, of course, we’ll need parental consent.”
She checked her phone, tapped a few times, and named a time.
Gareth nodded.
She rose and headed for the door. Then she paused, and turned. “You should know that she’s very anxious about seeing her parents. She says she’d like to see her mother, but is adamant that she doesn’t want to see her stepfather. She says he openly dislikes her and that he frightens her. Right now, she doesn’t feel like she can handle that.”
After another pause, she said, “If it appears that he’s likely to insist on seeing her, you can use the old ‘against doctor’s orders’ line, and back him down. I’m no expert, but I expect he doesn’t have any legal rights with respect to her. He’s not her biological father.”
She wanted badly to be gone, and I understood the pressures of a demanding job, but I had one question before she left. “Dr. Purcell, did she say anything about her biological father?”
Again, she hesitated. “Just that she hoped he’d come, but usually he was too busy for her. Then she seemed to regret having said that and said he wasn’t really too busy, just that he traveled a lot and that anyway he would be no help. I didn’t get a chance to probe that any further. The impression I got was that ‘too busy for her’ was a phrase someone had imposed on her, not something she really felt. Maybe by her mother and stepfather? And it was wistful, like she wished things were different and really wanted him here.”
She shook herself a bit, like she was frustrated at not having said this earlier. “You know that I am only telling you this because Heidi gave me permission to talk to you. Otherwise, everything she said would be confidential. If I continue to work with her, you may need to get the school an expert of its own. I can suggest someone. And one more thing. You can share what I’ve told you with the investigators, if necessary, but she
’s not to be questioned by the police. Not today. Not in the state she’s in right now. And that is also ‘doctor’s orders.’ I’ve given her a sedative, in any case, and instructed the nurse that they’re to keep her sedated at least until tomorrow, so that, in my professional opinion, at present she isn’t competent to be interviewed. I’ll send you a list of expert psychiatrists the school might want to consult.”
In a quick, economical motion, she crossed to the door and was gone.
Gareth and I looked at each other. “Whew!” he said. “She sure saved it up for that last blast, didn’t she? It’s as though she didn’t want us asking any more questions.”
“Busy woman,” I said, shaking my head. “And very impressive.”
Changing the subject, I said, “What about keeping the police away from Heidi? Will you be able to do that?”
He shrugged. “They spoke to her very briefly yesterday. Otherwise we have so far been able to protect her to give her some time to recover. I’m glad that Dr. Purcell left instructions with the staff that she’s not to be disturbed. The sedative was an interesting touch, though.”
It was indeed. And clever, if her goal was to keep the police away. No police officer wants to take the chance on questioning a vulnerable young woman under those circumstances. Not if he or she wants it to hold up in court. Not a good cop, anyway. Bad cops will do anything they can get away with. I had no idea which we were dealing with here, though Gareth seemed to believe they were sympathetic.
Uncertainty about my mother’s emergency bothered me like an itch I couldn’t scratch. I needed to try to contact her again. Call the office and see if Magda had reached anybody and if there was an update on what the emergency was. I needed to know so I could stop filling the information void with dire stuff.
But it was time to meet with the school’s attorney, and Gareth wanted me with him. Like a knight readying for a joust, I slammed my helmet shut, raised my lance, and rode forth to meet our next challenge.
Four
The law firm had sent a no-nonsense woman who looked like she ate nails for breakfast and styled her hair with a chainsaw. Not the comforting and reassuring person we’d want for talking to Heidi. But as someone to protect the school? A few minutes of conversation showed that she was perfect. It was undoubtedly sexist of me, but I’d been afraid that they would send us an attractive young associate who would provide good visuals if we needed to hold a press conference, but wouldn’t have the gravitas or experience to lead us through the complexities of the civil and criminal issues Simmons and Heidi faced.
Janet Connor knew her stuff. Her questions regarding the school’s role, knowledge, timeline of the events, and issues of possible negligence, were focused and precise. She wasn’t warm and fuzzy, but the school had other people for that. Still, at the end of her billable hour, Gareth and I were both ready for the grilling to be over. MOC and I, at least, were ready for a short nap. It’s a fact of the business, though, that naps are never on the agenda.
She left us with a list of items she needed—names and contact information for Heidi’s housemother, advisor, teachers and close friends. Names, contact, and employment information for her mother, father, and stepfather, as well as friends, teachers, neighbors, or others we could identify as having been close to Heidi back home. She wanted Heidi’s medical records and school records from back home as well as here. She wanted to find a time, sooner rather than later, to interview Heidi.
“I know it’s a lot,” she said, “but the cops will want this stuff, and we’d like to get out ahead of them, if possible. Cops have a tendency to tell the people they interview not to talk to anyone else, which makes it a lot more difficult for us to provide an adequate defense.” She waved a hand to ward off Gareth’s questions. “Of course we don’t know if there will be charges. We hope to avoid that. But we absolutely know there will be an investigation. If what you’ve said about the situation—and her version of events—is true, or we can persuade them it’s true, they’ll be looking to charge whoever is the father of that baby.”
She shoved her notes into her briefcase, and then asked a question we’d both been wondering about, too. “What about the baby? Any idea what will happen with her? Is there a family member who will be looking for custody?”
“We don’t know,” Gareth said. “Social services has taken temporary custody. Her parents haven’t arrived yet. There’s been no opportunity to discuss it.”
“Any likelihood that the mother will want to keep her baby?”
“She’s been in no shape for that conversation,” Gareth sounded like he was running out of patience. “Anyway, she’s barely sixteen, almost a baby herself.”
“But she’s the mother. You need to at least keep that question on the table. She wouldn’t be the first sixteen-year-old to raise a baby.”
We both thought she was done, and were heaving inward sighs of relief, when she delivered her final thought. “And of course, assuming that the father is identified, there will be questions about his paternity rights.”
I could tell, from Gareth’s face, that he wanted to say these issues, at least, weren’t ones for Simmons to deal with. She must have seen that, too, for she said, “I know custody is not your problem. But someone has to raise these questions with her parents. Who would do that, except you?”
I was thinking it should be the Department of Children and Families, or a social worker when, with a swiftness resembling Dr. Purcell’s, she was gone.
“I feel like I was just flattened by a steamroller,” Gareth said. “Two steamrollers.”
“You sort of were.”
He shook the list he’d made so the paper rattled. “Looks like we’ve got more homework. As if we didn’t have enough—”
“Peggy can do a lot of that,” I said. “The records part, I mean. The information about friends and others back home we’ll have to get from Mrs. Norris.”
“If she gives it to us,” he said gloomily. In his business, he had to develop a facility for quickly reading parents. In their limited contacts, there had been a marked lack of willingness to cooperate.
I thought again that I was not looking forward to meeting Mrs. Norris, but tried to banish my negative thoughts and give her the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t her fault that I’d dealt with far too many difficult private school parents. I didn’t yet know whether she’d be the “leap to her child’s defense” type, or the “none of this is my fault” type. I’d seen both. But Gareth’s comments so far inclined me to think we’d be dealing with “not my fault,” “my child is such a trial,” and “please, I really don’t want to be bothered.”
Hoping Gareth wouldn’t notice, I patted MOC and vowed to be an involved, but not a helicopter parent.
“Where are we?” he asked, and then, without waiting to see if I had an answer, “It’s early, I know, but let’s get some lunch.”
Lunch sounded like a great idea. The bagel was long ago, and these days, I was perpetually hungry.
We finally got lunch after a journey repeatedly interrupted by faculty and students. Gareth was unfailingly patient and shared what he could, but he was looking more frayed by the moment. Over healthy salads and delicious homemade bread, we talked strategy until Gareth’s phone interrupted.
The caller’s agitated voice was loud enough for me to hear. A woman, identifying herself as Ruthie, said, “There’s a man in Heidi’s room. A strange man. I’ve called Security, but you should get over here.”
“Someone’s in Heidi’s room,” he told me, already on his feet and moving.
I hurried after him, sadly abandoning the lunch I’d been enjoying. It was a challenge to keep up with his taller stride, made longer by his sense of urgency. I was panting by the time we got to the dorm.
We arrived at the same time as three security officers. “Watch this door and the rear one,” he told two of the officers, “if he comes out, grab him.” He instructed the third, a Middle Eastern looking man with a thick black beard and fier
ce eyes, to come with us as he hurried inside, taking the stairs two at a time.
At the top of the stairs we found an agitated woman waiting for us. “The dorm door was locked, Gareth. It absolutely was. You know how careful we are about that. I have no idea how he got in.” She paused for a breath. “Sorry. This is no time for explanations. Just this way, Gareth. Joel is blocking the door.” She smiled when she said it, a smile I didn’t understand until I saw Joel.
The man blocking Heidi’s door was the size of refrigerator, and his bulk didn’t look like fat. Whoever had invaded Heidi’s room without permission wasn’t going anywhere. As the man she’d called Joel stepped aside for Gareth, the intruder in the room jumped through the door, knocked Gareth aside, and bounded for the stairs. That little trespasser was fast! And he was heading straight toward me. Maybe thinking if he knocked down the pregnant lady, it would distract the others and he could escape.
Well, sorry, but I wasn’t having that. Not with MOC to protect. I stepped back and stuck out my foot. He tripped over my leg and went sprawling. A notebook fell from one pocket, and the phone he dropped as he tried to break his fall landed at my feet. I scooped both of them up as Joel the Refrigerator, and the man from security, both looking like no one a sensible person would tangle with, grabbed his arms and hauled him to his feet.
“Ruthie,” Gareth said, ignoring the man’s increasingly agitated demands for the return of his property, “can you check Heidi’s room and see if you can tell whether anything has been disturbed. And Joel and Amad, will you keep a firm hold on this gentleman while I check and see if he’s taken any of Heidi’s possessions.”
Not only did the man struggle with those holding him, he actually tried to bite Gareth as his pockets were searched. I couldn’t tell what he did, but the security guard Gareth had called Amad just seemed to move his hand slightly, and the intruder gasped and stopped trying to bite. He was short, maybe five eight or so, skinny and probably, from the speed with which he’d attempted his escape, a runner. He was also, the credentials in his pocket revealed, a reporter. And yes, also a thief. An inside pocket held photos of Heidi and her family, Heidi and a friend, Heidi with a guitar, along with her iPod and a small turquoise notebook decorated with sequins and paisley swirls.