Almost at once the door opened, and a man said, “Gwyn, we’ve missed you coming around.”
I couldn’t see him because I kept my head down, afraid that my ski mask was insufficient disguise, that he would know me by my eyes.
She said, “I’m no less like I’ve always been, Walter, so there aren’t a lot of days I go anywhere. But tonight is … special.”
With considerable apprehension, I followed her into a foyer with a plank floor and a round, flowered rug. A solemn voice issued from a television in a nearby room.
When Walter said, “This must be Addison,” I said, “I’m sorry my shoes are wet,” and Walter said, “It’s nothing, just a little snow.”
I liked his voice. He sounded kind. I wondered about his appearance, but I didn’t raise my head to look.
Gwyneth said, “Remember Addison’s rules like I told you,” and Walter said he remembered, and she said, “Where are the children?”
“In the kitchen. They know to stay there.”
“I’d love to see them, I really would, but this is hard on Addison.”
I wondered how neurotic Walter thought I was. He probably thought I was past neurotic and all the way to crazy.
He said, “Janet’s in the kitchen. She was getting dinner when you called, but she’s putting it on hold.”
“I’m sorry I gave you such short notice.”
“You’re like family, Gwyn. We don’t need any notice at all. I’ll go see if she needs help with the kids or something.”
When just the two of us were in the foyer, Gwyneth said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m all right. Are you okay?”
She said, “I’ve been better.”
I raised my head and scoped the foyer. An archway on the right led to the living room. Everything was clean and neat and bright and pretty, a place of harmony, absent of conflict. I thought that those who lived here must feel safe, and I was pleased for them, more than pleased, happy that such a life was possible for them and for so many people.
The voice on the television said that the plague in China had actually begun across the border in North Korea.
A woman entered the hallway from the kitchen, and I lowered my head once more. She greeted Gwyneth and introduced herself to me—she was Janet—and I said that I was pleased to meet her, though I looked at nothing but the round, flowered carpet.
Janet led us to the second floor. We waited at the top of the stairs while she went along the hallway to a room at the end, where Cora, the older nurse, tended to the nameless girl.
Because I felt that someone of bad intent had quietly ascended the stairs behind us, blocking the way out, I turned to look, but no one followed us.
Janet and Cora came out of the patient’s room, went into another directly across the hall, and closed that door.
“This is important,” Gwyneth said.
“I guess it must be.”
“I know now why I brought you here.”
“Why?”
Instead of answering me, she went down the hallway to the open door, and I went with her. At that threshold, she hesitated. She raised her hands as though to cover her face, but then she closed them into fists, and on the one nearer me, the faux tattoo of a blue lizard flexed as if it might come to life and spring off her skin. Brow furrowed, eyes tight shut, jaws clenched, pulse visible in her temple, she appeared to be in pain or struggling to repress great anger. But then I thought—I don’t know why—that perhaps this was the posture in which she prayed, if she prayed at all.
She opened her eyes and lowered her fists. She went into the room. In consideration of me, she switched off the overhead light and used the dimmer on a reading lamp to soften its glow to the point that, within my hood, my eyes could not easily be seen.
I looked at the closed door behind which Janet and Cora had retreated. I looked back toward the head of the stairs.
Crossing the threshold, I saw upon it the cryptic inscription that I had found at the entrances to Gwyneth’s apartment.
The large room contained two armchairs, side tables, a dresser, nightstands. There were also two beds, the farther one neatly made and accessorized with decorative pillows, the nearer one a hospital bed.
The upper half of the motorized mattress was elevated, and upon it, reposing in a realm deeper than mere sleep, lay a girl of perhaps six. If she had been an avatar, the incarnation not of a goddess but of a principle, her face would have been befitting for the avatar of peace or charity, or hope, and if she had been capable of expression, her smile might have been miraculous in its effect.
Standing beside the child, looking down at her but speaking to me, Gwyneth said, “If Ryan Telford kills me, if anyone kills me, you have to take care of her. Protect her. At any cost. Any cost.”
THE HOMELESS MAN HAD IN THE NIGHT COME to the bottom of his current bottle, and subsequently he had awakened repeatedly from dreams of deprivation in which everyone that he had failed during his life returned to thwart his every attempt to acquire even just one more pint of the distiller’s art. He was therefore on the move at first light, which was not his habit, to search the commercial alleyways in his territory, seeking redeemable soda cans and other humble treasures in the set-out trash that had long sustained him.
So it was that in a Dumpster he found the badly beaten, naked body of a girl of about three, which he thought was a corpse until from it issued the thinnest mewl of abject misery, like that of a kitten he had once found run down in traffic, with still a minute or two of this world in it. Most of his life, he had chosen to flee from responsibilities. But at the core of him remained the dry kernel of the better man that he had once hoped to become, and the child’s muted cry spoke to that remnant. He discovered that he yet had the capacity for pity.
In his worn-thin, patched, and greasy clothes, tangled hair bristling from beneath a stained and half-crushed brown fedora not otherwise seen on the head of a city man in decades, eyes bloodshot blue, nose scrawled over with visible capillaries, he kicked open the door to a popular doughnut shop a block from the Dumpster. With the battered child draped over his long, bony arms, weeping bitterly, shouting “Ambulance, ambulance,” he entered among the incredulous customers waiting to place their orders, two of whom were police officers.
Initially but not for long, he was suspected of being the party responsible for the girl’s condition. But his discovery of her in the viscous mounds of trash had wrenched something askew in his fragile constitution, and when the girl was taken from his arms, he could no longer stand upright or control his shaking hands, which alternately scrabbled at the floor in useless gestures and plucked at his face and chest as though something offensive clung to him that he was desperate to cast off. He ended the morning not in a jail cell but as a patient in the same hospital to which the girl had been rushed.
The doctors determined that she had been not merely beaten but also tortured, and not once but often, perhaps for half or more of her estimated three years. The authorities were not able to locate her parents. The wide circulation of a pencil portrait of her did not lead to any useful tips from the public, and a photo of her, taken after the bruising on her face faded, likewise brought no leads. They reached the conclusion that she had been imprisoned for most of her short life, hidden away, and in such cases it was with rare exception the mother and father, or one of them, if both were not present in the home, who committed the abuse.
The girl became a ward