Crimson Rain

by Meg O'Brien

  “No, I was waiting for Mrs. Bradley to get here. The thing is, this director, this Mrs. Ewing? I talked to her and she says she really doesn’t know where Angela is. It seems Angela was never adopted again. She lived at Saint Sympatica’s till she was sixteen.”

  “Sixteen?” Paul and Gina said simultaneously. “My God,” Gina whispered. “All that time?”

  “Then she ran off,” Duarte said. “Nobody’s heard from her since.”

  He sighed and added, “I hate to have to say this, but I think we can assume she may have been on the streets a while, got hooked up with maybe some bad people…” He spread his hands in a shrug. “A lot can happen to a kid like that.”

  “Oh, God,” Gina said again, covering her face with her hands. “Oh, my poor, poor baby.” In that moment, she wasn’t sure if she was thinking about Rachel, Angela, or both.

  “Do you know why she ran away?” Paul asked Duarte. “Did she leave a note? Tell a friend why she was leaving?”

  “Not a word,” Duarte answered. “Just disappeared one day. Personally, what I think is, you should go and talk to the people there. They might open up to you more than anybody in authority.”

  Paul stood and began to pace. “I don’t want to leave here until we know Rachel’s all right.”

  Duarte cleared his throat and met his eyes. “What I’m saying is, I think you, Mr. Bradley, should go there right now. See if you can get a lead on this twin’s whereabouts.”

  Paul stared. “You really think she’s done something to Rachel, don’t you?”

  “Let’s just say I have a hunch,” Duarte said. “And I’ve learned to listen to my hunches.”

  “I guess I could make a quick overnight trip,” Paul said uncertainly.

  “If you’re going,” Gina said, standing, “I’m going with you.”

  “If I could make one more suggestion,” Duarte said, coming to his feet and facing them, “I think you should stay here, Mrs. Bradley, and wait for word.”

  “You mean from Rachel?” Gina said. “In case she calls, or comes home?”

  “From anyone,” Duarte said.

  From Angela, he means. In case she’s got Rachel. The knife that went through Gina’s heart felt just as real as the one Angela had thrust into Rachel sixteen years ago.

  Dear God, keep her safe, she prayed. Keep them both safe.

  That night, Paul caught a red-eye to Minnesota. Arriving too early in the morning, he had breakfast at a café until he thought the Ewings would be up and around. Then he drove along Summit Avenue in Saint Paul, one of the most exclusive areas in the city. Mansions of all sizes and styles lined the street, most of them backing up to the river and with rolling green lawns in front. Making a turn near the end of the street, he saw the large mansion ahead that housed Saint Sympatica’s orphanage. It had been willed to the Ewings for this purpose over twenty years ago, by a wealthy donor who had no family and wanted to support their work with orphaned children. Set on several acres of landscaped grounds, it overshadowed most of the luxury homes on Summit Avenue. The donation had been a lucky break for the dedicated Ewings who, up until then, had been taking care of children in their own rather small home and barely making ends meet.

  They had done a good job, no doubt about it. After a few years their work had been featured in the local newspapers, and other wealthy donors had appeared almost overnight. Finally a board had been appointed, and the Ewings had only to see to the children; the business end was taken care of for them.

  Several minutes later Paul sat across from Anita Ewing, who alternated between twisting her hands to toying with papers in front of her. She hadn’t yet met him fully in the eye.

  Well, I can’t blame her for feeling uneasy, he thought. He himself felt as if he were about to jump out of his skin. He wanted to get this over with and get home. He needed to be doing something more, and if he were at home, he could go out and look for Rachel himself. He would scour the entire city, if that was what it took.

  “It’s been a long time,” he began conversationally, trying to put the director at ease.

  “Yes. Fifteen years or so,” Anita Ewing agreed. “Time does have a way of speeding by, however.”

  “It seems as if you have less staff now than when I was here last,” he noted.

  “Well, we’ve had to cut back a bit,” she said, her tone defensive. “But we still give our children very good care.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing,” Paul said quickly. “Just noticing a difference.”

  Anita Ewing nodded and seemed to relax. “Our support has dwindled a bit in past years. Some of the donors who gave so freely when we first opened Saint Sympatica’s lost money in the stock market a few years ago. Others have died.” Her smile was rueful. “Young people these days don’t seem to donate to as many causes as their fathers and grandfathers did. I suppose they have tight budgets, children to put through college.” She sighed. “I’m very grateful for the check you’ve been sending us each year, Mr. Bradley. It’s helped enormously.”

  “I’m glad to be able to do it,” Paul said. “After all, you gave us a beautiful daughter in Rachel. And you cared for Angela all those years.”

  Mrs. Ewing picked up a cobalt-blue paperweight that she held in her palm and studied, rather than look at him, it seemed. “I’m afraid we didn’t do so very well with Angela.”

  “But that wasn’t your fault,” Paul said. “I’m sure you did everything you could.” He sat forward. “Mrs. Ewing, I really need to know more about Angela. It’s urgent, now.”

  “Urgent?” Her gaze swung up to his.

  “Yes. Rachel…” He could barely say the words. “Rachel has disappeared.”

  She seemed to not comprehend his words. “I don’t understand. Why would you think…” Her eyes widened. “Disappeared? Rachel is gone? How? When?”

  “She’s been home in Seattle for Christmas vacation,” Paul said, “but we’ve had no word from her since she left the house yesterday morning. We think Angela might…well, that she might know where Rachel is.”

  The director dropped her paperweight with a thud. “What you really mean is that you think Angela has done something to her. Again.”

  “I don’t want to think that,” Paul said quickly. “But the thing is, Rachel believes she saw Angela on the campus at Berkeley in California, where Rachel has been going to school. We need to know if it really was Angela, or if Rachel just imagined it. Because if Angela has been hanging around, there’s no telling what she might do.”

  “Good God.” Mrs. Ewing paled and visibly shook herself, then became businesslike suddenly. “Tell me what I can do.”

  “Well, for one thing, I’d like to talk to Dr. Chase, the psychiatrist. And I’d like to see that photograph you have of Angela when she was sixteen. I believe you told Detective Duarte from the Seattle police department that it was taken shortly before she ran away?”

  “The photograph won’t be a problem,” Mrs. Ewing said. “I faxed a copy of it to Detective Duarte this morning, in fact. And the original is here in my files. Unfortunately, Dr. Chase is an entirely different story.”

  “He’s no longer with you?” Paul asked, disappointed.

  “Dr. Chase, I’m afraid, is no longer alive.”

  “He died?” Paul couldn’t hide his surprise. Lewis Chase had been around his own age, a young doctor in his first years of practice when he and Gina adopted the girls from here. “He was ill?”

  “Not ill,” Anita Ewing said flatly. “Dr. Chase was murdered.”

  The director suggested they walk to a bench near the bank of the river and talk there. She wore a heavy winter coat, but Paul, more accustomed to the mild temperatures in Seattle, had to pull his short jacket tighter around himself to fend off the cold. His Reeboks crunched on snow that had fallen and then frozen in the night. Gray skies hung over the river, and he knew why he could never live in the Midwest or the East. His spirits, already flat, felt crushed by the lowering clouds.

  “It’s a long sto
ry,” Mrs. Ewing said, casting an eagle eye toward a group of children who played in the snow at the bottom of the hill. A young woman—a recreation assistant, it seemed—was with them. The children were throwing snowballs at one another, running away, laughing, then attacking again. Mrs. Ewing smiled and turned her attention to Paul.

  “I know you must be in a hurry to get home. But I think you should hear this, and I wouldn’t want to talk about it inside where some child might overhear.”

  They sat, and Mrs. Ewing scraped a handful of snow off the bench beside her. Working it into a ball, she rolled it between her hands, over and over in a nervous gesture. Finally she let it drop to the ground and began to relate to Paul a story his mind could barely take in.

  “The children were all at breakfast,” the director said, “when we heard one of the housekeepers scream. I ran from the dining room and up to the second floor, where it seemed the scream had come from. When I got there, the housekeeper, May, was standing outside Dr. Chase’s bedroom door, her hands covering her mouth. I ran up to her, then looked into the room as she pointed. She was shaking all over, and I put my arm around her. It was a horrible sight, Mr. Bradley. Dr. Chase lay on his bed, his arms and legs outstretched. He had been tied to the bedposts with pillowcases that were wrapped around his elbows and ankles. He was naked, and there were cuts all over his body. Cuts and stab wounds. Blood had spattered the walls and soaked into the sheets. There was blood on the floor, on the nightstand…everywhere. His hands lay over his genitals—which had been severed from his body.”

  Paul’s stomach turned as Anita Ewing continued. “Some of the children had followed me up there, and May and I had our hands full keeping them from seeing into the room. Rodney came running from the gardens, and it was he who called the police and waited for them there. May and I ushered the children down to the dining room again. It was then that it struck me.”

  She paused and looked at Paul. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  His heart was pounding, but he nodded. He felt certain he already knew what she was going to say.

  “Well, the children had all heard May’s screams, and everyone knew something terrible had happened. The ones who hadn’t followed me up the stairs were already buzzing about it, talking back and forth with each other excitedly in the dining room. Except for Angela. Angela was sitting in her chair, eating her breakfast as if nothing had happened. My first thought was, She hasn’t missed a bite. Her plate is almost clean.”

  The director folded her arms tight against her chest and shivered. “Of course, Angela’s attachment disorder, if that’s what it was, kept her from having normal feelings for people. But even so, it seemed strange to me. No reaction, nothing at all. Not even when we had to tell the children that Dr. Chase was gone.

  “We didn’t go into detail, of course, but they knew. Somehow, children always do. Over the next few days I watched for some sort of acting out by Angela. She had spent more time with Dr. Chase, perhaps, than most of the other children. Only she and a couple of the boys needed the kind of intensive psychiatric care he provided. I thought she might have developed an attachment to Dr. Chase, or at least a bit of a fondness for him. They used to take walks out on the grounds together, and it seemed to me that perhaps he had taken on the role of a substitute father to her. I thought that had to be a good thing—Angela developing an attachment to someone, anyone at all.”

  She paused, took a deep breath and went on. “There was a police investigation, of course. The older children were all questioned and cleared. You asked me earlier about fingerprints. There was so much blood, the police couldn’t find any that were legible. There never was any proof that any of the children here, or for that matter, any of the adults, had murdered Dr. Chase. And there was no reason to suspect anyone. Or so we thought. But then a few weeks later, one of the older girls came to me. She said she had heard Dr. Chase and Angela arguing the day before the murder, and that Angela had screamed at him, threatening to kill him.”

  Paul stared off into the icy river. When he could find his voice, he said, “How old was Angela at the time?”

  “She had just turned sixteen.”

  “My God.”

  Anita Ewing nodded. “I was appalled, of course, and to be honest, I didn’t know whether to believe it. The girl who told me this wasn’t entirely reliable. She had been in constant trouble here.”

  Paul thought of something. “You said a couple of the boys were under Dr. Chase’s care. Were they questioned?”

  “Everyone was questioned, with no exception. Both boys left here when they were eighteen. One of them, Billy, seemed a nice enough boy, always trying to please. A bit too much so, in fact. He was placed with us at the age of thirteen, when his father and mother were killed in an auto accident. According to Dr. Chase, Billy’s mind wasn’t a place you would want to journey in. Underneath the pleasant exterior, he apparently could be quite deceitful. At any rate, Billy swore he never went near Dr. Chase’s room the night he was murdered, and there seemed no reason to disbelieve that. Billy had never been violent, and there were no witnesses who could place him at the scene of the crime.”

  She reached over to Paul and touched his arm. He saw that there were tears in her eyes. “Even though you had returned Angela to us because she tried to kill Rachel that night, I really thought she had been improving. She was such a delightful child, you know, so bright and funny…so easy to love. I’d come to care for her as if she were my own.

  “I did tell the police,” she added, “what the girl—Mary, I think her name was—said about the argument between Angela and Dr. Chase. But I also told them about Mary’s penchant for causing trouble. The police questioned Angela for hours, and came to the conclusion that she knew nothing about Dr. Chase’s murder. Shortly after, Angela left here. She disappeared one night, taking only a few clothes and forty-eight dollars from my petty cash box. I haven’t heard from her since.”

  There was a long silence while Paul sat with his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets. He felt frozen, not from the frigid temperature, but Anita Ewing’s story. Finally he said, “May I see that photograph of her?”

  “Certainly. I can allow that, since Angela was never adopted and she’s come of age now. Besides, under the circumstances…”

  The director stood and Paul followed her back into her office. Crossing over to a file cabinet, she motioned to him to take a seat, and pulled out a folder. “I’m afraid it’s a group photo, and not very clear. I don’t know how much it will help you.”

  Paul took the photograph and searched the children’s faces. There were four rows, perhaps forty children in all, but no one he recognized as the Angela he remembered.

  “Which one is she?” he asked softly. All these years he’d been thinking that he’d know her on sight. It seemed incredible to him now that he didn’t recognize her at all.

  Mrs. Ewing pointed to a tall girl in the back row. “This is Angela, the one with the dark hair all the way down to her waist. Bangs, too. She cut them herself, but never would let me cut the rest. In fact, she fought me all the way when I suggested it, because some of the children had lice. ‘I’ll pick them off and eat them if I have to!’ she raged. ‘You aren’t cutting my hair!’”

  The director shook her head. “She frightened me at times with that anger. But then she’d change in a split second and have me laughing. That girl had so much spirit. There were times when I actually admired that about her.”

  Looking at Paul, she said, “I’ve never told you about the twins’ mother, and what they were up against from birth. At the time you and Gina adopted the girls, it seemed best to put the past behind them. But perhaps now it would help in some way. Would you like to hear about that?”

  “Yes, I would very much like to know,” Paul said.

  “Please sit down, then. It isn’t a pretty story, I’m afraid.”

  Mrs. Ewing sat at her desk, folding her hands and clearing her throat. Stark winter light from the frosted
window behind her touched her silver hair, turning it white.

  “As you know,” she said, “the twins were left on our doorstep with little information about them, so what I’m about to tell you came from a friend, a civilian with the local police department.”

  She paused, as if expecting Paul to object to her not telling him this before. When he didn’t, she continued. “Rose, the twins’ biological mother, was apparently ‘normal’ until she was a teenager. There is a kind of mental illness, I’m told, that doesn’t show up until adolescence. A young girl can be a good student, a great daughter, someone everyone loves. Then one day in her teens, she—or he, it can as easily be a boy—picks up a knife and kills his or her mother, father, siblings. Or takes a gun to school and shoots everyone in sight.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of that,” Paul said.

  “No one seems to fully understand,” Mrs. Ewing said, “what causes a child who, up to then, has seemed like every other child, to do this sort of thing. My personal view is that it has something to do with hormones. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. If I had my say, we’d be putting all children on medication to even out their hormone fluctuations from the time puberty sets in.”

  She waved a hand. “Sorry. I have a tendency to get on a soapbox at times. Another theory is that there’s something in the brains of these children that kicks in during the teenage years. So far as I know, there isn’t a cure—in other words, nothing that can be done to prevent this before it happens.

  “As for Rose, who was seventeen at the time she became pregnant, I was told that she never wanted a baby in the first place. She confessed to the police that when she learned she was carrying twins, she actually tried to kill them in the womb. She would beat on her abdomen, fall down stairs, anything she could think of to abort. Nothing worked.”

  “My God. Why didn’t she have a medical abortion?”

  “Apparently, she didn’t have the money for it. Also, her parents had raised her to believe that abortion was a sin.”

  “Yet she tried to kill them in the womb? That wasn’t a sin?”