Guilt by Association (5 page)

Leo fussed and fumed as Beverly took the time to shed her nightgown for a stylish woolen dress and camouflage her sags and wrinkles with a varied assortment of cosmetics, but in fact barely fifteen minutes passed before they were in the garage,
revving up the engine of the big black Buick and speeding out of Great Neck.

Now, as they paced and waited, it seemed a lifetime ago that they were awakened by the telephone call, but it was actually little more than six hours.

“What could be taking so long?” Beverly grumbled when she had tapped her way up and down the corridor for perhaps the hundredth time.

“There are some things you can’t hurry,” Leo responded mildly, “and surgery is one of them. You wouldn’t want them to rush,
and risk making a mistake, now would you?”

“No, of course not,” Beverly conceded. “It’s just the waiting—it’s so hard.”

Orderlies had wheeled Karen off to the operating room at nine-thirty. It was now two forty-five.

“Your daughter has been badly hurt,” Dr. Waschkowski told them when they hurried into the emergency room, having abandoned the Buick in the hospital parking lot. They had encountered very little traffic and no highway patrol cars on the Long Island Expressway at that early Saturday hour, and had reached midtown Manhattan in a record twenty-seven minutes.

“What happened?” Beverly demanded.

“Apparently, she was the victim of an assault.”

“An assault?” Beverly cried in dismay. “What are you talking about? There must be some mistake. She was at a party last night.
At the home of her best friend.”

“She was found in Central Park at approximately six-thirty this morning,” Tug McCluskey told them. “I got to the scene a little before seven o’clock.”

He didn’t want to tell these frightened parents what he found when he and the two medics followed the cab driver into the clearing.

“I brought your daughter here,” he said instead.

“What was she doing in Central Park?”

“We don’t know that, ma’am,” McCluskey said.

“What about her injuries?” Leo asked.

“My preliminary examination indicates that she sustained multiple contusions and fractures and there are signs of abdominal bleeding,” Waschkowski replied. “We’ve done a tracheotomy to give her a clear breathing passage.”

“Is she in a lot of pain?”

“No,” he assured them. “She’s unconscious.”

“Dear God,” Beverly gasped.

“That’s not unusual in these cases,” the doctor was quick to explain. “She’s had a considerable shock to her system. Aside from the trauma due to injury, we estimate that she was exposed to temperatures well below freezing for several hours.”

“Why would anyone do such a thing?” Leo pondered aloud. “It couldn’t have been a robbery. She wasn’t wearing any expensive jewelry. She wasn’t carrying much money.”

Waschkowski cleared his throat and shifted from one foot to the other. Next to losing a patient, this was the part he most hated about being a doctor.

“We—uh—don’t think the beating was necessarily her assailant’s primary intent,” he said as gently as he could, having found evidence of semen in her vagina, her mouth and her rectum. “She’s been raped.”

Beverly cried out and sagged against Leo. Of all the things that could happen to one’s child, this was a mother’s worst nightmare.

“My baby,” she wailed, “my baby.” Then she straightened up. “I want her to have the best possible care,” she said firmly.
“And I want her in the best possible facility.”

“Manhattan Hospital
is
the best possible facility,” Leo told her.

“Then I want top doctors in charge of her treatment,” she retorted. “No offense, Dr. Waschkowski, but I won’t entrust my little girl to a resident. I want the best.”

“I’ve already taken the liberty of calling in a number of specialists,” Waschkowski assured her. “There’s an oral surgeon,
an orthopedist, a urologist, a neurologist and a gynecologist standing by, all highly respected in their fields, and all in agreement that surgery should begin as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Leo said.

“Well, if they say so… “ Beverly muttered.

“One of you will have to sign the necessary papers.”

Leo had gone to do that and Beverly had stayed, waiting for the occasional glimpse she could get into the small white cubicle where nurses and technicians were preparing Karen for the operation to come.

“Your daughter’s going to be fine, ma’am,” Tug McCluskey tried to soothe her. “I’ve seen a lot worse pull through.”

“Thank you,” Beverly murmured.

Tug cleared his throat, much the same as Waschkowski had earlier. “I just wanted to say, ma’am,” he added, “how sorry I am.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“What I mean is, I’ve got granddaughters of my own, you see, and well, if I ever find the guy who did this to your little girl, I might just kill him.”

“Ohhh,” Beverly groaned, turning away. The thought of all these people knowing what had happened to her baby was almost more than she could bear.

Medical personnel bustled in and out of Karen’s cubicle in a constant stream, while Beverly waited helplessly outside. Then,
in twos and threes, they emerged, discussing what they had seen in brief sentences peppered with technical terms that were difficult for Beverly to understand.

But, she thought now, pausing outside the doors to the surgical suite, she didn’t understand much of anything at all, except that Karen had left home at six-thirty yesterday evening to go to her best friend’s party, and twelve hours later had been found unconscious in Central Park. Her bright, pretty, well-behaved daughter—after all the times Beverly had warned her not to have anything to do with strangers, how could this awful thing have happened?

“Maybe we should telephone Jill,” Leo interrupted her.

“What for?” Beverly replied. “Surely you don’t think the Hartmans had anything to do with this, do you?”

“No, of course not,” he murmured. “I just thought Jill might know something that would help us figure this whole thing out.”

“What’s there to figure out?” Beverly moaned, looking down on her husband’s shiny bald head. “It’s all painfully clear, wouldn’t you say?”

“But shouldn’t we at least… ?”

“Why don’t we wait a bit,” Beverly said. “There’ll be time to talk to Jill. It’s bad enough that the police are already in-
volved. Until Karen herself can tell us exactly what happened,

the last thing we need is more publicity.” Leo nodded slowly. “I guess I didn’t think of that.” He was a myopic little man who, at the age of twenty-six,

had traded one mother for another without ever knowing the

difference.

They brought Karen out of surgery at twenty minutes to four. An exhausted Stanley Waschkowski met the Kerns in the recovery room.

“She came through just fine,” he told them. “There was more internal damage than anticipated, but we’re confident we were able to take care of everything.”

Later, he thought, when they were stronger, he would give them the details, but they were in no emotional condition to listen now.

“She’s going to be pretty uncomfortable for a while,” he said. “But in time she’ll be up and about again, and all this will be nothing more than a bad dream.”

“Is she awake?” Beverly asked.

“No, not yet.”

“Can I see her?”

“Why don’t you wait an hour or so, until we move her into the special care unit. She may be awake by then.”

“She needs special care?” Leo asked.

“In cases like this, where there’s been severe trauma, we don’t take chances,” Waschkowski replied. “Your daughter was unconscious when she was admitted. That might be the result of shock, or it might be an indication of some kind of intercranial pressure buildup. We want to watch her closely for a possible kidney involvement as well. With constant monitoring, we’ll be on hand to detect any problem and act immediately.”

By ten o’clock in the evening, Karen was running a fever of 105 degrees.

“What is it?” Beverly cried.

“Pneumonia,” Dr. Waschkowski said. “We had hoped to avoid it but it wasn’t unexpected, given her condition.”

“Is it critical?” Leo wanted to know.

“At this point, unfortunately, everything is critical.” The senior resident sighed. “But we’ve started her on a program of penicillin, aspirin suppositories, and alcohol baths, and that should help fight the infection. The good news is, so far,
there’s been no indication of any abnormal cranial pressure or kidney failure.”

Around midnight, the exhausted Kerns were persuaded to leave the hospital.

“There’s really nothing you can do, even if she does regain consciousness,” Waschkowski assured them. “And it may be as much as seventy-two hours before we know if we’ve beaten the pneumonia. I’m going to be here all night, and I’ll call you immediately if there’s any change.”

“No matter what the time?” Beverly asked.

“No matter what the time,” he promised.

They went to Edna and Harry Kern’s spacious apartment on Seventy-sixth Street. Despite the hour, Leo’s brother and his wife were still wide awake.

“We didn’t even realize that Karen wasn’t here until we got your call,” Edna sobbed. “We left the key and went to sleep, just like we always do.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Leo said. “You had no way of knowing this would happen.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Beverly added, and making the only possible decision, as far as she could see, she planted her foot firmly on the first rung of the ladder of lies that she would climb in the weeks and months and lifetime to follow. “How could anyone possibly have known there would be such a terrible … accident?”

A
t first there were no days or hours or minutes, no way of measuring time or distance. There were no thoughts, no feelings,
no recognition, just the murky black of nothingness that cradled her body and wrapped itself protectively around her mind.

Then the darkness began to give way to a thick gray fog, layer on top of layer, roiling around her, tangible, almost touchable,
relentlessly propelling her toward unwanted sight, lurking just beyond her mind’s grasp.

In the end, despite every ounce of resistance she could muster, awareness overtook her. It began with the voices. She could hear them through the fog—soft, urgent, too low for her to catch the words, annoying. Next came the smells, unfamiliar and unpleasant, that stung her nose with each laborious breath. And finally, there was the realization of pain, and with it, the last agonizing thrust into the harsh light of reality and horror.

Karen opened her eyes.

She was lying in a bed that was not her own, in a place she had never seen before. Shards of bright sunlight slanted through a large window in the opposite wall. Unknown people in white hovered around her. Everywhere she looked,
there was white—the gown that clothed her, the sheets that covered her, the pockmarked ceiling tiles above her. She wanted to ask where she was, she wanted to tell someone about the pain, but she couldn’t seem to move her mouth or produce anything but a curious gurgling sound.

“Julie, go get Dr. Waschkowski,” a lady with gray hair pulled back into a bun instructed the aide beside her. “I think she’s awake.”

“Yes, ma’am.” A petite strawberry blonde with enormous china-blue eyes dashed from the room and the gray-haired lady leaned over the bed and smiled. Wisps of hair had come free of her bun and drifted around her kindly face.

“You’re quite safe,” she said in a reassuring voice that floated gently over Karen. “You’re in the special care unit at Manhattan Hospital. You were brought here after your, uh, after your accident. Now, you’re not to worry about a thing. The doctor will be right along and he’ll answer all the questions I know you must have.”

Karen tried again to say something and again failed. She tried to raise her right arm to see if she could feel what was holding her throbbing head immobile, but the arm was encased in something white and heavy. She looked out of the corner of her eye at her other arm. It was anchored to a white board, palm up, with a needle protruding from a vein in her wrist. Tubes and wires seemed to be coming out of every part of her. Karen’s eyes widened fearfully. She wanted to scream, but as before, only a gurgle escaped.

“Now, now,” the lady in white soothed. “You just relax, dear. Don’t try to talk. You’re going to be just fine. Trust me, all this paraphernalia looks much scarier than it really is.”

Rose Thackery had been a nurse for forty-one years. She wasn’t sure she could think of anything much scarier than what had happened to this poor girl.

Karen shut her eyes as tears began to ooze out the sides and drip onto her pillow. The pain came from everywhere, her head,
her eye; her nose, her mouth, her chest, her arms, her abdomen, her leg. It hurt to move, it hurt to lie still, it hurt to breathe. She dimly remembered being in Central Park with
Bob, but that had been at night, and now it was day, and she didn’t know what had happened in between. She hoped the nice gray-haired lady had called her aunt and uncle. She didn’t want them to worry that she wasn’t there for breakfast.

“Karen?” a voice asked. “Karen, can you hear me?”

She opened her eyes again. The sunlight was gone. It was dark outside the window. A tall man stood beside the bed. In the shadows, he looked like Bob. Karen gasped and began to thrash about. This time, she knew she had to get away from him, and that gave her the strength to ignore the sharp pains that attacked her from every corner.

The Bob-man said something over his shoulder and a woman in white hurried over and handed him something. He leaned down and,
flinging aside the bedclothes, plunged a long needle into Karen’s hip.

A peaceful warmth flooded through her. She was dancing in a lush meadow and the scent of wildflowers filled her nostrils.
The sun was hot on her face.

“Karen?” the voice said again. “Can you hear me?”

She didn’t want to answer. She wanted to stay and play in the meadow.

“Karen, I want you to wake up now.”

The meadow began to slip away, the vibrant greens and the sky-blues fading into colorlessness, the sweet fragrance of flowers and grass turning sour, like disinfectant. She awoke reluctantly. The white world of agony greeted her.