The roar of an ocean engulfed her ears. There was now an itching, tearing pain across her upper back, and she feared she’d somehow injured herself. Then the taste of saltwater filled her mouth and stung her nostrils, making tears form at the corners of her eyes.
Goodbye
She didn’t remember hitting the floor, but could now feel the cold tile against her left cheek and arm.
The photographer rushed to her side. Gently taking her right arm, he said, “Easy sweetie, easy.”
Her vision hazily restored, Amy reached for the stool to steady herself, but missed. Her right hand landed on the lower edge of the photographer’s backdrop, a watercolor miasma of grays, whites, violets, and blues. Then, as if some supernatural sponge, her hand began to absorb the colors from the canvas. Surging just beneath the skin, those tinctures spiraled around her wrist, then into the rest of her exposed arm, giving the limb the appearance of having been hideously bruised.
She found the stool with her other hand, pulled herself up to her feet.
The photographer stumbled backward, tripping over one of his umbrella reflectors. He fell hard on his butt, then shuffled backward on palms and heels until he wedged himself into a corner, not once taking his eyes from the cyclonic attack.
Amy stared at her predicament with attentive wonder, unsure if her eyes were playing tricks, or if her hand was actually sucking up the cloudy colors. She was experiencing no pain, just a droning in her arm; a tingling, as if its circulation had been crimped.
Very afraid now, she tried to jerk her hand away, but found that she could not. Instead, her efforts seemed to have the opposite effect, her hand plunging deeper into the canvass. She didn’t feel like she was being forcefully pulled in; rather, it felt more like she was sinking. There was no doubt in her mind that the rest of her body would soon follow.
Crying now, she tugged again and again, harder and harder. Turning her wide, wet eyes to the photographer, she pleaded, “Make it stop. P-please make it stop.”
The man’s jaw moved up and down, up and down, but nothing audible fell out.
Everything below her elbow was now gone.
Within seconds the backdrop was drained of color.
Nearly hysterical now, Amy planted her right foot against the wall, then yanked with all her might. To her surprise, her hand slid free. Off-balance, arms flailing, she pirouetted away like a drunken ballerina. Her left arm struck the photographer’s tripod, sending it and his camera crashing to the floor, while nearly sending herself there as she tripped over one of his splayed legs. The man recoiled in fear. He pulled his knees tight against his chest and warned her to stay away.
Catching her balance, Amy held out her hand. This was not an obligatory gesture to help the man up, but to inspect the colors swirling tempestuously within her arm. Then, quickly, the pigment of her pale, freckled skin returned as the colors submerged, taking with them the pin-prick sensations that had grown to an electrical buzz.
She glanced back at the wall and noticed that her hand had not filched all the colors from the backdrop. There were still a few smudges left. And as her vision returned to near-normalcy, she believed that those smudges were actually words.
Wiping her eyes, she inched closer until she could read them. Yes, they were words; easy words. She had no difficulty reading the sentence they formed. It was deciphering the sentence where she found she was having trouble.
HE KNOWS WHERE YOU’VE FLOWN
Then another flash blinded her.
The room went topsy-turvy, and she spiraled into a bottomless sea of silver.
5.
As Rachel and Duncan stepped through the emergency room entrance of the hospital, they were greeted by Amy’s school principal/English teacher, John Kincaid, who had called them with the news of her accident. They’d met Kincaid before, mostly at award ceremonies honoring students who’d made the Principle’s Honor Roll. Not much taller than a schoolboy himself, Kincaid looked even mousier next to Duncan’s six-three, bear frame. The principal’s thinning white hair and weary stoop made him look twenty years older than he probably was, which, Duncan guessed, was somewhere in the mid-forties.
“Not to worry, not to worry,” Kincaid said with practiced, soothing urgency, sounding as he did over the phone. “She’s just fine. Took a tumble off a chair is all.” A broad smile widened his face. “I assure you both that her admittance here is purely cautionary.”
As they passed the admitting desk, Duncan noticed two paramedics working listlessly over documents, talking quietly to one another; whispering. They both looked up as Kincaid ushered him and Rachel by, their eyes following them down the gleaming corridor. By their grim, round-eyed expressions, Duncan supposed that they’d just brought in the lurid remains of a homicide victim, or something equally gruesome.
They checked in at the security desk, a mandatory procedure.
The guard, a retired cop (Duncan could spot them a mile away), ran his finger down the computer screen. “Amy McNeil, you said? Admitted within the last hour or so?”
“That’s right,” Duncan said, launching sarcastically into cop rhetoric: “Adolescent Caucasian female, ten years old, approximately four-and-a-half feet tall, reddish-blond hair, greenish blue eyes, usually has in her possession at least one item with a Barbie logo.”
The guard looked up, not amused. “She’s not showing up on my—”
“The child from Jefferson Elementary,” Kincaid reminded, stepping out from behind Duncan. “I arrived shortly after the ambulance. I’m her principal.” He pointed to the visitor badge affixed to the lapel of his modish jacket. “Surely you remember me.”
“‘Course I do,” said the guard, swiveling the monitor around. He pointed to the screen. “But the girl you’re referring to was registered as Katherine Bently, not Amy McNeil.”
Duncan and Rachel exchanged bewildered glances.
Kincaid sighed. “A mistake, sir, just as I authenticated initially. And one which you obviously failed to correct in the interim. Now please, these are her parents—”
“Alright, alright, I believe you,” insisted the guard, smiling now. After retrieving the necessary information, he issued Duncan and Rachel visitor badges.
“Bay four,” said the guard. “It’ll be the second door on your right.”
“‘Bay’ four?” Duncan said, insulted for his daughter. “What, is she getting her tires rotated?”
The guard shrugged, brandishing another impish grin at Kincaid as he walked by, as if the man were a drag queen instead of a self-respecting principal.
They paused in the doorway. Amy lay on a bed, appearing to be asleep. A male nurse was standing over her, adjusting a saline drip that had been inserted into her right hand.
The nurse saw them in the doorway and motioned for them to enter.
“I’ll leave you folks alone,” Kincaid said. “If someone should need to speak with me, I’ll be in the waiting area.” Then he disappeared down the hallway.
“You must be Katherine’s parents,” the nurse said with an appeasing smile. “She’s going to be fine. Probably just had the wind knocked out of her.”
Rolling her eyes, Rachel said, “Her name is Amy.” She reached into her purse and removed a pen. “Here,” she said to the nurse, “you might want to scribble that down somewhere.”
Taking in the scene, Duncan was beginning to wonder if Amy’s situation might be a little more serious than they’d been led to believe.
He followed Rachel to the bed, then bent down and kissed Amy’s cheek. “Hey, baby cakes,” he whispered in her ear.
Rachel, worry sagging from her face, softly placed a hand upon her daughter’s forehead.
The nurse was reading the admission form. “Well, there’s obviously some mistake. She’s been registered as Katherine Bently.” Hunching his shoulders, he looked up at them. “Name ring a bell?”
Disgusted, Rachel shook her head.
Although the name wasn’t arousing any carillons in Duncan’s b
elfry, he had to admit that it was giving the rope a slight tug.
“Being her parents and all,” Duncan said, “we’re almost positive her name is Amy McNeil.”
The nurse studied the admission form some more, then the papers beneath. “Well, what obviously happened is the people at admissions copied the information straight off the medic’s report. The ambulance driver just got his names mixed-up,” he said, as if that kind of cute little blunder happened all the time. He made some notations on the forms, referenced the new name, then handed the clipboard to Duncan. “Go ahead and look over the paperwork and feel free to make any other corrections. Once you’re through, just go ahead and give it to the doc. And don’t forget to go by the front desk and give those folks the right info. They’ll want to know what insurance to bill, as well.” He stepped out of the “bay” and began pulling the curtain closed. “Constance Strickland is the ER doc on duty. She’s already checked Amy out. I’ll see if I can track her down for you.”
“Thank you,” Rachel said.
“Yes, do that,” Duncan urged.
The nurse drew the curtain closed, leaving them to their privacy.
Duncan shuffled through the papers, wanting to confirm for himself what the nurse had just told them.
Rachel leaned over and cooed into Amy’s ear. “Mommy’s here, baby. Everything’s all right now.”
Amy stirred restlessly but remained asleep.
“They’ve got everything wrong,” Duncan said, comparing documents. He was seething now. “Fucking incompetents. None of this is right. Christ! This is someone else’s information! The phone number’s all wrong, the address—” He stared at the address.
Rachel glanced back at Duncan with a look that said she was growing a little perturbed with his seemingly misguided concern.
“I wonder why she’s sleeping so hard,” she said. “Did they give her something, you think?”
“Hawthorne Avenue, Rock Bay,” Duncan said, more to himself.
“Uh-huh,” Rachel said, obviously not listening. She was craning over Amy, looking like she wanted desperately to grab her shoulders and shake her out of her stupor.
“Rock Bay,” he repeated, louder. “Little coastal town in Massachusetts. Your home town, my dear. You know, the one we were married in.”
She turned, giving him her full attention. “What?”
He showed her the papers. “Katherine Bently, 1402 Hawthorne Avenue, Rock Bay, Mass.” And as he spoke those words, heard his own voice say them, an ambiguous memory glittered in the deep darkness of his mind, like a lone firefly trying to illuminate a vast, starless night. It was so brief, so transitory that he barely noticed it before it was gone.
“Small world,” Rachel said.
Duncan, however, wasn’t ready to believe the world was that dinky.
*****
Doctor Constance Strickland was a tall woman, lanky, and had a face that Duncan instantly labeled a “Two-Hundred Yarder,” an old cop expression for homely women: not nauseatingly ugly, but definitely a few football fields away from ever gracing Vogue.
She entered ebulliently, so much so that Duncan wondered if she was writing her own prescriptions for amphetamines.
The doctor introduced herself, extending a hand to Duncan, then Rachel. “I understand that there’s been a mix-up with your daughter’s name?” She regarded them with subdued suspicion, as if they might be impostors.
“The paramedics apparently got her confused with another patient, or something like that,” Duncan said, bewilderment having tempered his anger.
Doctor Strickland took the clipboard from Duncan’s hand. “Strange,” she said. “I saw her when she first came in, and she clearly told me her name was Kathy Bently.”
Duncan lifted his eyes to the ceiling.
“Oh, you know,” Rachel offered suddenly, “I don’t know if this means anything, but Amy had an imaginary playmate by the name of Kathy for…well, a good while.”
Strickland didn’t seem concerned. “About how old was she when you stopped hearing about this playmate?”
Rachel looked at Duncan. “Oh, say four? Maybe five?”
Duncan had forgotten all about “Kathy” until just now. He thought a moment, needing to catch up with Rachel. He finally nodded. “Yeah, four or five.”
“Well,” Strickland said, “it may be coincidental, it may not. But I’ll make note of it.”
“Why is she sleeping so hard?” Rachel said. “I can’t seem to rouse her.”
“We’ve given her a sedative,” Strickland explained. “She was quite upset when she came in, and from there became uncontrollable. Please understand—we needed to calm her down for her own safety.”
The concern on Rachel’s face surrendered to fear.
“What the hell happened to her?” Duncan quietly demanded. “Did she hit her head, suffer a concussion?”
“She was apparently having her picture taken at school and, according to her principal, just slipped off of her chair and fell to the floor,” Strickland said. “And as far as suffering some kind of head injury, I’m not convinced. There’s no signs of trauma or swelling, anything like that.” She sighed. “But in light of her apparent identity crisis, I’d like to go ahead and schedule her for a CAT scan, just to be sure. I would also like to keep her here overnight, for observation.”
“Yes, of course,” Rachel said.
“If she doesn’t have a head injury,” Duncan persisted, “then would you please tell us why she would suddenly assume someone else’s identity?”
Doctor Strickland removed the patient’s blank medical history form from the clipboard, then craned over it with a pen, seeming to ignore Duncan’s question. “Has your daughter ever suffered from seizures?”
“You mean like epilepsy?” Rachel said.
“No,” Duncan said. “Never.”
“Has she ever sustained a severe head injury?”
“No,” he repeated, feeling his chest tighten with each question.
“Any history of diabetes in either family? Psychiatric disorders?”
They shook their heads.
Doctor Strickland asked more questions, the final one eliciting a murderous gaze from Duncan.
“Drugs?” he hissed. “You’re barking up the wrong tree!”
Strickland remained composed. “I realize she’s only in elementary school, but I have to ask. Sadly, it’s not uncommon anymore to see children her age abusing drugs.”
Rachel took Duncan’s hand, and this calmed him.
“Test her for drugs, then,” he said. “I’ll guarantee that you won’t find her peeing anything stronger than Kool-Aid.”
The doctor smiled sympathetically, shook her head. “Mr. McNeil, I’m pretty sure drugs aren’t to blame. Although she didn’t display all the classic symptoms, I’m inclined to believe that your daughter suffered some sort of seizure, most likely provoked by an outside stimulus.”
“Such as...?” Duncan said.
“The strobe flash of a camera,” Strickland said, as if that should have been highly obvious.
6.
Duncan left Rachel with Amy and hurried his way back to the ER waiting area, hoping that Amy’s principal had not yet left the hospital.
With each step he felt more like a neglectful parent. Contrary to Rachel’s ambivalent ogling back in the “bay,” he was concerned for Amy; passionately so. But he just couldn’t ignore his gut instinct, and right now it was telling him that something wasn’t right; that perhaps something had been missed. This perception wasn’t entirely palpable, just a scent in a mild breeze. But if it was already raising his hackles at this early stage then he would give it his full, undivided attention.
Katherine Bently, he thought. Damned if that doesn’t have a peculiar ring.
He was reminded that he’d not had such potent intuitions, at least in any constabulary sense, since his days on the force. Back then, his inklings and hunches had always proven themselves dead-on, and more than one among his peers had,
at one time or other, cast their suspicion that his charmed nose was more precognitive than instinctive. Perhaps even divine. Duncan had just thought himself streetwise, and a good judge of character; still did. Whatever the reasons, he’d quickly garnered a reputation worthy of any blue-ribbon bloodhound.
And any dust that may have settled on those olfactory glands since had just been blown away. Clean away.
Duncan found Kincaid sitting in a small waiting area gazing up at a television screen and eating pumpkin seeds, shells and all. He appeared engrossed with some Japanese chef, who was passionately demonstrating the fine art of shucking shrimp and the English language.
Eight chairs were arranged in an L-pattern in the small room. A giant, balding black man was rocking slowly back and forth in his seat. He held a blood-soaked bandage over his right shoulder, chanting “Cecil Mendez, that cocksucker,” as if practicing his court testimony. In the corner opposite Kincaid sat an elderly couple, weeping quietly as they held one another.
“Kincaid?” Duncan said, standing over the man. “We need to talk.”
Kincaid looked up and smiled. “Of course, of course.” He jubilantly patted the cushion next to him. “I was just about to come check. How is Amy feeling?”
Duncan remained standing. “We’re not really sure. Listen, I want the name, address, and phone number of the photographer who took my daughter’s picture. I’m assuming it was a man.”
“That’s correct,” Kincaid said, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly, his smile dimming at the edges, forming an expression that said he knew where this was heading: straight to court. “But Mr. McNeil, I can assure you that the person in question is beyond reproach. Why, he’s been photographing our kids for years, the old-fashioned way, and we’ve never had a—”
“I’m not accusing him of any wrongdoing. I just want to talk to him.” Duncan shrugged. “Call me silly, but being a parent and all, I guess I’m just a bit concerned.”
Discomfited, Kincaid thought for a moment, then said, “I’m not comfortable at this time to reveal that information. Please understand my position. If I give you the man’s address and phone number, then, as an acting representative of the school, I might be inviting a lawsuit should something…unpleasant come of it.”
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