Guilt by Association (7 page)

“I’ll call you,” he said. “You get someone to hold the phone for you and then tell me that you’re hearing what I’m saying.
Of course, you’d better not let anyone else hear what I say,” he added with an impish grin. “That might be very embarrassing.”

Karen wondered what could possibly be embarrassing to a staff of professionals who had seen and heard every single thing there was to see and hear about her since the moment she had been brought in out of the Central Park bushes.

On her thirty-fourth day in the hospital, she said her first word.

It was early afternoon and her mother sat in one of the
striped chairs beside the bed, knitting. She was wearing a black suit over her matronly figure, and had on too much rouge.

“To cover my hospital pallor,” she said with a chuckle.

Her hair was swept stylishly up on top of her head and her eyelashes were coated with an extra layer of black mascara. It occurred to Karen that her mother had been wearing a lot of black lately and it was not a particularly becoming color.

On the day Karen was moved to the private room, flowers had begun to arrive. They came from friends and relatives all over the country, from neighbors, and even from her father’s patients, until the combined fragrances of roses, chrysanthemums,
tulips, gladiolas and delphinium almost succeeded in disguising the acrid smell of disinfectant. As soon as one bouquet began to wilt, another appeared to take its place. When there was no space left, Beverly would pluck the sender’s card from the arrangement and direct an aide to take it down to the charity wards.

In addition to the flowers, dozens of cards came in the mail. Beverly would perch her eyeglasses on the end of her nose and read some of the clever ones aloud. Later, she would reply to all of them, thanking each one, in Karen’s name, for the good wishes. She had also sent a heartfelt note of thanks to Margaret Westfield.

On this day, Beverly had just finished with the mail when Julie van der Meer brought in a huge vase of roses.

“I believe this is the third bouquet from Jill and Andy,” Beverly said after a quick glance at the card. “I beg your pardon,”
she amended, scanning the whole message. “This one is from Jill and Andy—and
Rebecca Karen,
born January twenty-third, seven pounds, two ounces, twenty-one inches, ten fingers, ten toes, all perfect.” Beverly put the card on top of the pile and resumed her knitting. “A girl. How nice. How sweet to name her after you.”

Jill wanted to come to the hospital to see Karen, but Beverly put her off, as she put off everyone else except Peter, and that was only out of necessity. She explained that just the immediate family was allowed to visit, which was true—Bev-
erly had issued those instructions herself. So the cards and flowers had come instead.

“Shall I take these down to the ward?” Julie asked, the roses still in her hands.

“No, not these, dear,” Beverly replied. “I think we’ll find a place for them here.”

Beverly knit two and purled one. Julie looked for a place to set the vase. Karen looked from one to the other.

“Ba-by,” she said.

It was a half whisper, half groan, hoarse and wheezy, but it was most definitely a word, not a gurgle.

Beverly dropped a whole row of stitches. “Did you hear that?” she asked, turning to Julie. “She spoke. I think she said
baby.
Did you hear?”

“I heard,” Julie replied with a broad grin and hurried off to spread the news.

Beverly jumped out of her chair and leaned over the bed. “That’s right, darling,” she encouraged, speaking slowly and distinctly as though her daughter might be hard of hearing or mentally retarded. “Ba-by. Jill’s had her ba-by. Can you say it a-gain?”

“No,” Karen wheezed with an inward smile, wondering whether her mother actually thought she had lost her mind along with her voice.

But Beverly missed the sarcasm. She was much too busy laughing and crying and jumping up and down all at the same time. Her little girl had spoken. In all the weeks of having to sit by and watch the mending process inch its way along, this was what she had been waiting for, praying for—proof that the damage to Karen’s body had not affected her brain. Broken bones could be explained, but what could be said about a broken mind?

She had spent countless sleepless nights listening to Leo’s staccato snoring and contemplating the possibility of her daughter’s emerging from this disaster little more than a vegetable, unable to think or do for herself. Injury aside, minds had been known to crack under a lot less stress than Karen had endured.

It didn’t matter that both Dr. Waschkowski and the neurologist had told her, over and over again, that there were no indications of any brain damage. What did doctors know anyway? As long as there was even the slightest chance that they could be wrong,
Beverly would wait, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

There would be no question of keeping Karen at home, if it came to that, she was quick to realize. The town gossips would have a never-ending field day with it, and there was Leo’s dental practice to consider, not to mention Laura. And now, with one little word, Karen had erased all her mother’s fears.

“Sweetheart, it’s so good to hear your voice again,” she cried, the tears of joy running down her over-rouged cheeks, tracking her mascara with them. “I was beginning to think I never would.”

“No-such-luck,” Karen rasped.

“Now, don’t overdo it,” Beverly instructed. “We can’t have you wearing out your vocal cords the very first time.”

“I-want-to-tell-you…” Karen croaked, letting the sentence dangle.

“I know, dear, but not now,” her mother said hastily.

The last thing Beverly wanted to hear from her sweet, innocent daughter, she realized, were the gory details of what a madman had done to her. It would be so much easier to believe there really had been an accident.

“You need your rest,” she said. “We’ve waited this long, we can wait a little longer. Right now, I’m going to go call your father and tell him the wonderful news.” She gathered up her knitting and prepared to flee. “When you’re a little stronger,
the three of us will sit down and have a nice chat.”

A nice chat, Karen thought. How like her mother to put a Hans Christian Andersen face on an Edgar Allan Poe tale. She didn’t know anyone who could do it better.

“What do you say, darling? Isn’t that the best plan?”

It was difficult enough to challenge Beverly when Karen was well. Now it was impossible. She blinked once, out of habit.

T
he word spread like a brushfire, whipping down the hospital corridors. “She spoke,” one joyfully told another.

“That’s wonderful,” came the response.

Doctors, nurses, technicians and aides whom Karen hardly knew were suddenly stopping by to exchange greetings. People she didn’t know at all were pausing at her door to give her a friendly smile and a thumbs-up sign. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be a part of her success.

“I understand you had something to say today,” Dr. Waschkowski said that evening, a big grin covering his dear homely face.

Karen looked up, her throat sore from responding to the steady stream of well-wishers.

“Too-much,” she wheezed.

“I guess what they say is true—you can’t keep a woman quiet for long.”

“Fuh-ny,” Karen said.

“Here,” he said, bending over her. “Let me teach you how to talk through that tube in your throat.” When he had shown her how to place her fingers over the little air hole, he sat
down in one of the striped chairs. “So,” he asked, “what do you have to say to me, after all this time?”

There had been a measure of protection in her silence, an excuse for not having to participate, not having to communicate.
Karen had gotten used to the idea of listening and observing, used to hiding behind the simplicity of one blink or two. She thought about all the questions everyone would now want to ask and the explanations she would be expected to give.

“I want to go back to blinking,” she said.

Sergeant Tug McCluskey arrived the next day accompanied by a thin man with a pinched face, horn-rimmed glasses and a dark-blue suit.

“I don’t expect you’d have any way of remembering me,” Tug said kindly, “but I was there. I mean, I was one of the ones who
… who found you.”

Karen nodded as best she could. The burly policeman had small blue eyes, a prominent nose, and a weathered face, and the jacket of his uniform pulled a little too tightly across his girth.

The other man cleared his throat. “I’m Michael Haller,” he said. “Investigator for the district attorney’s office.”

Karen shifted her attention. Almost skeletally thin, the investigator’s dark suit hung poorly on him, reminding her of a hastily assembled scarecrow. His starched white collar was at least two sizes too big and he had the smallest hands Karen had ever seen on a man. His thick horn-rimmed glasses kept sliding down his nose, and every few seconds he would reach up with his right pinky finger and push them back.

“Now that you’re able to talk,” he was saying in a brisk impersonal voice, “I’d like you to tell us what happened.”

Karen looked at him in dismay. She had spent a lot of time thinking about what she would say to her family and her friends,
framing the words carefully, but she never realized she would have to talk to the police.

“Is this really necessary?” she replied, pressing her fingers
over the tracheotomy tube as Waschkowski had taught her to do.

“I’m afraid so,” Haller replied, fishing a pad and pen from his jacket pocket. “You see, the way it works is, Sergeant Mc-Cluskey here files a report, and then my office investigates.”

“I see,” Karen conceded. “What is it you need to know?”

“Do you remember the events of the night in question?”

“Yes,” she replied, thinking how pompous he sounded.

“Why don’t you tell us about it?”

She looked from one to the other, wondering whether she could suddenly develop amnesia, but she didn’t suppose they would go away until they’d gotten what they’d come for, so she took a deep breath.

“His name was Bob.”

“He told you his name?”

“Yes. At the party.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“Maybe you should start at the beginning,” the policeman suggested.

Karen shut her eyes as images she didn’t want to see flooded her mind, images she didn’t want to share with these strangers.
It took almost an hour for the whole story to come out, in bits and pieces and tears. By the time Haller ran out of questions,
Karen’s mind was numb, her throat ached, her sheets were damp with perspiration, and her pillow was soaked with tears.

“Why did he do such an awful thing?” she rasped. “Why?”

Tug sighed. “There doesn’t always have to be a reason,” he admitted. “There are a lot of psychos wandering around.”

“He didn’t seem like a psycho.”

“Some of them don’t, until something sets them off.”

“I can’t promise that we’ll get this guy,” Haller said, returning his pad and pen to his pocket. “These kinds of cases are difficult at best, and we don’t have very much to work with.”

“But don’t you worry about that right now,” Tug told her. “You just concentrate on getting well, and leave the rest to us.”

The scarecrow was already halfway out the door.

Karen blinked, but the significance was lost on the two officers. She watched silently as they left. Maybe it was the way they probed for every tiny detail, almost like voyeurs, going over and over the same ground, but it was as though they had raped her all over again—coldly and callously violating the fragile sense of self she needed so desperately to protect.

She took a small measure of comfort in knowing that, after this, telling her parents and her friends and Peter would be easy.

“Don’t you think you were a little hard on her?” Tug asked as he walked with Haller down the front steps of the hospital.

“It’s how you get at the truth,” the investigator said with a shrug.

“So, what do you think?”

The investigator shook his head in disgust and sighed. “It’ll never get to court,” he said.

“You don’t think you can find him?”

“Oh, I’ll probably find him, if I look hard enough, if his name really is Bob, if he really does go to Harvard. But what’s the point?”

“Jesus, Haller,” Tug protested. “He shouldn’t get away with what he did to that girl.”

“Come on, Sergeant, don’t go getting soft this late in the game. She knew him, for God’s sake. They were partying, they were drinking. She went for a walk with him. At two o’clock in the morning. For all I know, she could have been a willing partner and things just got a little out of hand.”

“You didn’t see her the way I did, dumped under those bushes,” the veteran policeman replied. “I don’t think you can call that a little out of hand.”

“So maybe she teased him, led him on a bit and then, when it was too late, changed her mind and went virginal on him, and he lost his temper. That kind of thing happens all the time, you know. Women say no when they mean yes, and yes when they mean no, and who knows what they really want?”

“I don’t think so.” Tug shook his head. “I think it happened exactly the way she said it did.”

“You may be right, Sergeant,” Haller said with another shrug, “and I’ll follow through on the investigation because that’s what I get paid to do, and because maybe I feel a little sorry for her, too, all beat up like that. But take my word for it,
the DA won’t prosecute. You know as well as I do these cases are tough enough to prove even when there are half a dozen eyewitnesses,
a ton of physical evidence, and we’re dealing with a known offender. But a guy from Harvard Law School? Jesus, he could represent himself and still make mincemeat out of that girl.”

“He shouldn’t walk,” Tug insisted.

“Maybe not,” Haller agreed, pushing his glasses up his nose and reaching for his car keys. “But in the end, it’ll be her word against his.”

“If it was one of my granddaughters lying there, looking like that, I’d rip the balls off the bastard.”

Haller sighed again. “If she were my granddaughter,” he said, “I’d tell her to go home and forget it—and be more careful the next time.”