The Broken Ones (21 page)

Alone on the Industrial Relations floor, he logged on to Prophet.

In the Missing Persons files, Oscar counted thirty-seven teenagers around the state with physical disabilities or who’d had a leg injury at the time they vanished. Half those were boys, and of the girls he could eliminate most as too young or too old. Of the remaining six, one was Asian, one was too short, another was blonde, one was profoundly disabled and needed a wheelchair, and one was an amputee. He was down to one.

He stared at the photograph of a fourteen-year-old girl with chestnut hair cut into a quirky bob, dressed in a black T-shirt emblazoned
with the street spray art of the winking ghost in congress with a buxom woman. The girl in the photograph held the handle of a forearm crutch in one hand, the gray plastic cuff out of focus around her arm. With her other hand she pointed to her T-shirt and winced comically, as if to wonder, Is this for real? Oscar supposed that, if anyone could know for certain, she now did. He looked at her name.

Penelope (Penny) Adeline Roth, daughter of Carole and Paul. Oscar reread the names. Carole and Paul Roth. Familiar, but he couldn’t place them. He read on. Penny was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age three. He gazed at her photo again. A plain but pleasant-looking girl with brazen eyes. Fun. Impudent.
Alive
. The mental jump from this cocky snapshot to the skull with a split jaw and no face was impossible.

Oscar clicked to the next page, to see who had reported Penny missing, and from where.

He didn’t like the answer at all.

Chapter
12

T
he house had once been a filigreed gem, a Federation masterpiece in the Queen Anne–revival style. Narrow, white-framed windows with tiny colored top glasses; generous gables trimmed with fretwork as delicate as a wedding cake’s icing. Tall, slender columns above dark brick walls crawling with ivy; curved sunrooms topped by spires that prodded up between half a dozen tall brick chimneys. But the paint was flaking. Green-glazed edging tiles had chipped and hadn’t been replaced. The peppertrees and flowering plum were overgrown and turning wild. A wisteria pergola that had once been a shaded floral walkway was now a dark, throatlike nest that promised not refuge but spiders and hidden things. Ferns conspired under windows, and the summerhouse was black shadow inside.

Elverly House easily fitted into a pattern of spiraling neglect. Since Gray Wednesday, federal and state revenues had plummeted. Key services were forced to run on budgets stretched as tight as piano wire; nonessential services lost funding altogether. Aged care, child care, and disability services received the bare minimum, and so relied almost exclusively on volunteers and private moneys, both of which were in short supply. Wards of the state brought in a small stipend. Already it was common to see the chronically disabled at train stations and bus exchanges with cups in hand, begging for coins.

Oscar’s feet crunched on gravel overrun by chickweed and cobbler’s pegs. A perilously leaning signpost pointed one direction to A
LL
D
ELIVERIES
and the other to R
ECEPTION
. Elverly House and its rambling grounds were starkly incongruous with the plain, tall brick faces of warehouse buildings that boxed them in, making Oscar feel as if he were miniature and walking at the bottom of a box in a diorama
creation of a secret garden that had somehow been corrupted by being left too long in shadow.

He climbed a low set of granite steps to a tiled porch and pushed open the heavy door. Elverly’s foyer was a study in dark wood and old brass. Thin light washed in through a stained-glass window depicting native lizards climbing a fire-wheel tree. Oscar rang the bell and listened to the chime echo down the halls.

“Hello?” he called.

No one answered. Somewhere, a child cried. Through a window, Oscar could see a boy with an overlarge head being pushed on a swing by a short, stocky woman who was also trying to prevent two other, more robust but hobbling children from fighting over what might have been a doll or a stick. Behind them stood a figure watching Oscar. The dead boy with the wormhole eyes shifted on his feet and tentatively raised a hand in greeting. Oscar felt a flash of anger. Here of all places, he thought, and struck the bell sharply again.

On the other side of the counter was a door with the word O
FFICE
in gold and black paint. Oscar waited a few more moments, then stepped behind the counter and tried the door handle.

The office was surprisingly cheerful. Two tall windows shined daylight on pale lemon walls. Freshly picked flowers were pleasant blinks of bright color on each of the two desks. On one wall hung a series of photographs of center directors, certificates of appreciation, and children’s art in vivid colors. Crayon drawings of cows, rockets, houses, smiling boys and girls in wheelchairs, walking frames, crutches. Oscar scanned the pictures until he found a paper smudged in palm-size slashes of yellow and green. “Flowers,” a caregiver had written in the corner, “by Megan M.”

Against another wall were three filing cabinets. On a third wall hung two whiteboards: one was a staff roster with in/out columns and magnets in each; the other was a table showing thirty-six rooms, under each of which was written the occupant’s name. Oscar found the same name—Megan M.—and went looking for the room.

Above the door was a fretwork breezeway, all Edwardian filigrees curving and curling around the stylized forms of two kookaburras.
The birds were beak to beak, devoid of humorous charm. The shapes wreathing around the predators arrested Oscar, reminding him of the arcane symbols carved on the dead girl’s abdomen. Through the dozens of tiny sawed holes of the breezeway came what was either laughter or sobs. Oscar noted the deadlock latch above the handle. He rapped softly and opened the door.

In the corner under the single, narrow window, a girl of sixteen was fighting her young caregiver. The girl’s arms batted and struck the young woman who was trying to lift her from a wheelchair; tears squeezed from eyes screwed shut against the world. She moaned, an awful calf-like holler. Oscar stared. He had not seen Megan McAuliffe since the trial three years ago, when the girl’s father had wheeled her into the courtroom. Then she’d still looked something like the adolescent he’d broken under his car on Gray Wednesday. Now her flesh had lost its vigor. It was pale and soft, her hair was lank, and her once pretty face looked as puffy and wildly confused as a sick infant’s. Megan lashed out with barely coordinated hands.

“Come on, Meggie,” the caregiver said. “Take my hands.”

The young woman was in her early twenties, with short hair and a sharp, foxlike face; she took the slaps without flinching, and her calming voice never rose. “Come on, Meggie-pie. Take my arms, we’ll be done in no time.”

Megan wailed louder, her mouth open wide not in pain but in some deeper misery. The cry fell over Oscar like a pall, cloying and awful. He stepped into the room on feet as heavy as stone.

“Can I—” He cleared his throat. “Can I help you?”

But the caregiver didn’t hear him because Megan yowled again. Her wet eyes flashed open and rolled around savagely. They fell on Oscar, and held on him a moment—a strange, slippery stare that may have been recognition or just a momentary fascination with someone new.

The young woman followed Megan’s stare to Oscar. It was like having something honed and dangerous waved at him. The young woman wore no makeup, which made her acid-green eyes look larger; her skin was lightly freckled. She tensed like a cornered bird, ready either to fly away or to spear and scratch. Oscar raised his hands, palms forward, then slowly walked to the wheelchair.

“Let me help,” he offered. “I’m a police officer.”

The young woman watched him a moment longer, then gave a resigned nod.

“Okay, Meggie-pie,” she said, her eyes not leaving Oscar. “Here we go.”

Oscar slipped his hands under Megan’s armpits and felt the fine, damp hair there. He watched the caregiver for her cue.

“One, two … three.”

They lifted. Despite her thrashings, Megan felt light. She was about the same weight as the cadaver he’d carried into Kannis’s cold room. He didn’t like that thought. They put her on the bed, where an adult diaper was waiting. On her back, now, Megan grinned. The caregiver ran her hands over Megan’s face, and the girl suddenly giggled—a sad, oafish trilling. The caregiver turned to look at Oscar. No smile.

“You should go now.”

“Listen, how is Megan doing?”

“Hello?”

The voice from the doorway made Oscar turn.

A late-middle-aged woman watched Oscar with the suspicion of a terrier that’s sensed a rat. She wore sensible clothes—pants and shirt, a wood bead necklace her only concession to fashion. Her hair was up and out of the way. On one shoulder, a child of three or four slept soundly.

Oscar showed his ID. “Oscar Mariani.”

The woman took the badge carefully and scrutinized it, then him: a juror’s stare. “Detective Mariani. So you’ve finally come to visit Megan?”

Oscar felt the sharp-faced caregiver’s stare on the side of his face. He shook his head.

“I’m here to talk about Penelope Roth.”

“I reported Penny missing last Thursday.”

As she’d walked Oscar along the narrow corridors to another room, the woman had introduced herself as Leslie Chalk, Elverly House’s Director of Care. She moved briskly, and Oscar noticed dark circles under her eyes.

“It must be a challenge. Running a place like this,” he said.

“We all have our crosses to bear, Detective.” She smiled bitter-sweetly. “There are benefits.”

They stopped outside a numbered door, and she placed the sleeping child in Oscar’s arms while she reached into her pocket for a key. The child suddenly cried out in his sleep, and Oscar awkwardly patted his bottom; the child rolled a little, sucked his thumb, and dozed again. Chalk unlocked the door, swung it open, and extended her arms to take the child back.

Oscar stepped inside.

“When did you notice that Penny was missing?” he asked.

“That morning. She wasn’t in her bed. We searched the building, then the grounds, then the streets.”

Penny Roth’s room was almost identical to Megan McAuliffe’s: narrow, one window with bars. The bed was stripped and the small wardrobe hung open and empty.

“You’ve packed up quickly,” he said. “Where are her things?”

“We sent them back to her parents. We badly need the room. We have a girl moving in this afternoon.”

Oscar tested the bars. Solid. “You weren’t expecting Penny back?” He looked at Chalk.

She smiled understandingly. “Detective, this isn’t paradise and only a fool would pretend it is. We do what we can to keep them, which is to say we feed them and clean them and give them what physical therapy our staff are trained to deliver. But boys and girls try to leave—all the time. The grass is always greener. So when they do run off we report them straightaway, for what that’s worth. But if they get it in their minds to run away again and again, there really isn’t much we can do. Penny had run away from here four times in the last two years. She was getting good at it. So, sadly, no; I wasn’t expecting her back.”