Dark Turns (14 page)

T
he bus pulled away, stranding Nia in Claremont. Even though it was Monday, the bus didn’t run regularly at midday. The next one wouldn’t come for two hours. If she didn’t time her conversation with Detective Kelly just right, she’d risk missing her individual lesson with Lydia. Nia didn’t want to disadvantage her student. Moreover, she couldn’t miss her afternoon class and give Ms. V a new reason to believe her irresponsible.

She briefly regretted not asking Peter to drive her, but the decision was for the best. She couldn’t spill Marta’s secret to
anyone else, especially not to someone inclined to repeat it at school in order to clear his favorite student’s name. She felt bad enough telling the cops.

Nia rounded the corner to the address on her phone. The state police complex lorded over a four-lane road, more minicity than office building. She jogged up the steps to brick columns flanking a glass entrance. Words etched into the double doors read, “Connecticut State Police.”

She approached a long, mahogany countertop in front of a glass wall cordoning off uniformed officers from visitors. A heavyset policewoman sat at the counter. She wore her hair pulled back in a severe bun. The style suited her unfriendly expression.

“Hi. I’m here to speak to Detective Kelly about the Lauren Turek murder.”

The officer examined her face, staring into her eyes, a pit bull challenging a Pomeranian. The reaction took Nia off guard. Wouldn’t the police be happy that someone was coming forward with information?

“He gave me his card and said to talk to him if I thought of anything.”

The female officer sat back in her chair. She picked up a clipboard from the desk and handed it to her. A pen rested on top.

Nia expected the attached form to resemble the documents she’d filled out at doctor’s offices.
Name. Age. Social Security Number
. Instead, the first question asked that she check a box if the crime involved a minor.

“I’ll page him,” the officer said.

Nia spied gray plastic chairs in the corner. She moved to one and read the form. Most of the questions involved a suspect. She didn’t write anything on it.

Detective Kelly stepped from behind a frosted-glass door at the end of the hallway. He wore a navy-blue suit with a red tie. He’d cut his gray hair shorter since she’d last seen him. It sat close to his head, military style. Maybe seeing himself on the nightly news had encouraged him to get a cleaner cut. Nia felt suddenly underdressed in the zip-up sweatshirt covering her leotard and leggings.

He held the door open and motioned for her to come through, as if directing a reluctant car into an intersection. “The dance teacher that made the awful discovery. Good to see you again.”

How was she supposed to respond to that greeting? “I hope I can be of some help.”

She handed him the clipboard as she entered. He tucked it under his arm, apparently unconcerned about the contents.

“Sorry about the quiz. The media attention has attracted a lot of fake information.”

Nia followed him into an open room lined with blond wood desks of the IKEA variety. Papers and manila file folders were stacked atop most of them. The air smelled like newspaper.

Kelly settled in a rolling desk chair. He motioned to an empty one beside him.

“So, you said on the phone that a student told you that she saw Theo, but she doesn’t want to come forward?”

Guilt hollowed out Nia’s insides. Marta was a very troubled teen. But she still couldn’t stand by with information that could establish someone’s innocence. She’d help her deal with the fallout.

“Yes. I’m the RA in the junior and senior girls’ dorm. A girl on my floor told me that she saw Theo at a Claremont bus stop on the Saturday evening when Lauren went missing.”

Kelly’s eyebrows rose in an inverted V. “What time?”

“Sometime around five o’clock. She’d be able to narrow it down.”

“Who’s the girl?”

Nia swallowed her guilt. “Marta Hovnanian.”

He scratched at his temple and leaned forward in the chair, ready to share a secret of his own. “Maybe this girl is just a friend of Theo’s trying to help his reputation at school. I mean, if she really saw him, then why wouldn’t she tell us? Maybe because it’s not true.”

Nia scooted forward another inch on her seat. She needed Detective Kelly to take her seriously and he didn’t want to. The police had a suspect. News that they’d charged the wrong guy would not be welcome.

“No. It’s true. Marta was in Claremont to visit a family planning clinic. Her parents don’t know that, um, she’s become active in that way. She is very concerned that, if she comes forward, the police may tell them.”

Frown lines pulled down Kelly’s lips like puppet strings. “How old is she?”

“Sixteen.”

He brushed the top of his head, as if dusting dandruff off his crew cut. “Well, unfortunately, we would probably have to talk to her parents. We typically can’t question a sixteen-year-old without at least trying to involve the guardians.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to say why she was in Claremont.”

“We always try to be discrete.” He shrugged, advertising that he didn’t really care about protecting a kid’s reputation.

“She’s really vulnerable. When she came to me, she was extremely broken up about it, and she’s very afraid of her parents’ reaction. Could you, maybe, not ask too many questions about why she went to Claremont?”

“Like I said, we’ll try.”

Kelly pulled a notebook from atop a stack of files. He removed a pen from a coffee cup that read, “World’s Best Dad.” Nia wondered whether a father would be more or less likely to help a kid hide her sexual activity from her folks. Probably less.

“Okay.” Kelly exhaled as if his day had just gotten a lot longer. “Tell me everything from the beginning.”

“O
kay, you really have to listen to me this time.”

Nia spoke with her hands, emphasizing each word like a conductor hitting the downbeat. Joseph paid more attention to movement than to words. She needed him to hear her before they started practicing again.

“Boat lifts aren’t like a press lift where you can be a little off and no one will notice. If your hands aren’t right or you overarch your back, I could topple over your head.”

Joseph folded his arms across his chest and leaned back, the picture of defiance. “I’ve done these before with Aubrey. She never had a problem.”

Nia rubbed her forehead, staving off a coming headache. Aubrey was Joseph’s answer to every criticism.
Aubrey was fine with it. Aubrey maintained balance
. It was as though he never expected to dance with anyone else.

“However Aubrey compensated doesn’t change the fact that your hands are in the wrong position. They need to be above the hipbone.”

“Maybe you’re just top-heavy.” He spoke under his breath, but she heard the insult.

Bickering with Joseph would only bring her down to his level. She looked out the dance studio’s wall of windows and took a deep breath. Another gray September day. Northeastern autumns were either extended summers or wet and chilly. This one had morphed from eighty degrees to sixty in the matter of a week.

“Joseph,” she started, but he cut her off.

“My hands are fine.”

Nia blamed his attitude on her age and appearance. He didn’t act this way around Ms. V. Joseph mistook her for a peer, probably because she didn’t really look older than the schools’ seniors. All the dancing kept her body relatively small compared to other women her age.

She put up a hand, mimicking Ms. V’s
I’m done arguing
move, trying to emphasize her authority. “I’m not debating this. Your palms need to be flat, just above my hipbones. Put them there. Are you ready?”

His eyes rolled up to the ceiling. He opened his arms. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

Nia put one foot in front of the other. She ran several steps and jumped, as though she intended to leap over him rather than into his arms. The forward momentum helped with the lift, for an experienced partner.

Thumbs dug into the soft area below her pelvic bone. Fingers pressed into her buttocks. Her hips grazed the top of his head.

“Wait, you don’t have it—”

Joseph extended his arms. She was too off balance to maintain the look of flying above him. Her body pitched forward. She threw her head back, trying to reverse direction and not tumble onto the floor below.

Joseph’s arms wobbled. She reached for his shoulders, hoping to brace herself and slide down his body to the ground. The shift in her weight seemed to throw him. He stumbled backward and released her.

Her feet hit the ground hard. A burning sensation, like an electric shock, went straight from her heel through her entire leg. She fell backward, putting her hands out just in time to soften the impact on her tailbone.

Nia writhed on the hardwood, pressing her fingers into her heel in hopes of squashing the source of her pain. Her eyes filled with tears. Had the tendon ruptured? No. She would have heard a pop. There hadn’t been a pop. Had there?

“You were going to fall on top of me. I didn’t—”

“Get Ms. V.”

Joseph’s hands dove into his hair. “I didn’t mean to. I—”

Her breath came out in gasps. “Get Ms. V.”

P
eter pulled the car into a massive parking garage. Each level connected to the six-story New Haven Center for Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Surgery. Peter parked the BMW in the first open spot on the third floor, a few feet from a glass elevator bank. A wheelchair sat beside the door, waiting for a patient. Nia’s stomach dropped at the thought that it might be waiting for her.

Peter hurried around to her door and then slipped his arm behind her back and beneath her armpit. “Okay, just take it slow.”

She leaned into him. The pain had subsided since the initial impact, though her foot still throbbed. Ms. V had run into the studio and insisted that she take a golf cart to the school medical facility. The staff nurse there had taken
one look at her gnarled, calloused toes and urged her to see a specialist. Nia had then called Battle, who had made the appointment with “his guy.” He’d told her not to worry that her health insurance hadn’t kicked in. The school would pay a worker’s compensation claim.

She leaned into Peter as they waited for the elevator. What would she do without him? If not for Peter volunteering to drive her ninety minutes to New Haven, she wouldn’t have gotten to the appointment in time. The orthopedist had put her in that afternoon as a favor to Battle.

Silvery sunlight slipped through the parking ramp’s open walls. It haloed the wheelchair’s metal frame. She avoided looking at it as they stepped into the industrial-sized elevator.

Instead of numbers, the elevator buttons included fine print department labels. First floor: admitting, consultation. Second floor: diagnostics, testing. Third floor: pain management. Fourth floor: podiatry. Fifth floor: physical therapy. Sixth floor: surgery.

Nia double-tapped the first-floor button. The elevator descended. She relaxed with the motion. The farther away from the surgery department, the better. Surgeries had long recoveries. By the time she finished physical therapy, she might be too old to get a job with any company.

Inside, a woman behind a glass partition handed her a brown clipboard with several papers attached to the front. Nia had déjà vu from the police station. She brought the paperwork to one of several empty chairs.

The first page concerned billing. She filled out her details and initialed beneath a line stating that she understood she was responsible for the cost of all services rendered. Bill collectors used more affable language.

Peter paced in the lobby as she filled in the blank lines beneath “description of injury” and “history of past hospitalizations.” Besides her Achilles tendonitis, she’d never had any notable health problems. She’d never broken a bone. She’d never suffered a serious infection or illness. She didn’t take any medications.

She wrote a detailed explanation of her problem and then signed one more line acknowledging that she was responsible for any charges before returning the forms to the front desk. The secretary handed back her ID card with instructions to walk back to room 4E.

Peter followed behind as she limped past a series of closed wooden doors. The door marked 4E rested half ajar, revealing a leather chair with extended footrest covered with hospital-standard wax paper. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in a real hospital. The campus facility didn’t count.

Wax paper crunched as she settled into the chair. A male nurse, identifiable by the green scrubs that hung around his body, entered the room. He took her blood pressure then told them to wait for Dr. Murthi.

Peter walked to a counter with a model foot, cut open to show all the muscles and tendons. He touched the plaster cast. “So the Achilles is right there.”

She didn’t look to where he pointed. Her pain told her well enough where her Achilles was located. More than that, she didn’t want to see a foot—even a fake one—cut open. It made the prospect of surgery more present.

A fit Indian man with thick dark hair and high cheekbones entered the room. He was younger than she’d expected for a surgeon. He was also better looking. The man looked more like a soap opera actor that played a surgeon on television than an actual doctor.

“Hello, Ms. Washington.” Dr. Murthi even sounded like an actor. The man’s voice was clear and accentless. Television news anchors aspired to sound like this guy.

The doctor scanned the documents on the clipboard. He pulled a swivel stool from beneath the desk holding the model foot and swung it in front of her chair. He sat level with her feet. Her reclined position suddenly felt as awkward as sitting in the stirrups in the OB-GYN office. She wanted to see his face.

He slipped her shoe off the injured foot. “I understand that you’re a ballet dancer and you have Achilles pain in your right foot. Achilles ruptures are common in your field.”

Her gut wrenched at his words. Tendon ruptures ended careers.

He pressed his thumbs into the back of her heel. She grimaced preemptively, anticipating the pain that came with the Achilles cramp.

“Does that hurt?”

Nia relaxed. The touch didn’t bother her. “That’s where I feel the pain most often, but not as much right now.”

The doctor nodded. He slid his thumbs down her foot. He pressed into the arch. Flaming pins and needles jabbed into her nerves. She grabbed the edge of the chair.

“That hurt?” The question seemed sadistic. She pulled her foot from his grasp. The reflex nearly sent her knee slamming into her chin.

“I’m actually quite a fan of ballet. Mind showing me some of your footwork?”

Dr. Murthi extended his hand to help her out of the chair. She placed her good foot on the floor and walked into a small space in the center of the room. She brought her right leg into an arabesque
en attitude
, bending her knee behind her so as
not to knock over any of the trinkets on the desk. She rose to the toes of her left foot.

The doctor smiled. “Beautiful. But I think I need to see you with the weight on your right foot. Can you take a few steps toward me and then do that again?”

Nia flushed with embarrassment. Of course the doctor didn’t care for ballet. He wanted to see how her injured foot reacted when all her weight rested on its toes. She did as instructed, walking toward him before switching working legs and repeating the arabesque. Pain pulled at her heel as before. But this time, she became aware of a pricking sensation in her arch.

“Where does it hurt?”

“My heel still. But also where you pressed before.”

The doctor motioned for her to sit back on the chair. “I didn’t press hard enough to hurt it. I don’t think you have a real Achilles problem. I think you have an inflammation of the tendon in the arch and, given the swelling on the side, a minor sprain from your fall today. Pain is funny. Sometimes our body sends signals that mask the point of origin. I’m pretty sure it’s plantar fasciitis.”

Latin. Latin wasn’t good. Latin sounded like surgery.

“How do you treat that?”

“In very serious cases with surgery.”

The ax fell. All sound stopped in the room. A scream curdled in Nia’s head.

“Fortunately, I don’t think that your case is that serious—though I have no doubt that you have considerable soreness and cramping. The tendon has been strained from all the dancing. But you don’t have a heel spur and your toes don’t show any upward inclination, which would indicate the need for more invasive treatment.” He pushed back on his chair, scooting toward the counter with the sectioned
foot. “We’ll confirm with MRI, but I’ve treated the condition enough to eyeball it. I think you have a moderate case.”

A tear dribbled down Nia’s cheek. She brushed it with the back of her hand.

“How do you treat it?” Peter asked the question that she was too emotional to utter.

“You have to rest it for a few weeks. Take it easier on the dancing. There are also braces to wear at night that will stretch the tendon so it doesn’t seize up in the mornings and orthotic inserts for your street shoes. I’ll write prescriptions. But the brace is really the key.”

The doctor pushed his chair by the desk. He opened a drawer. When he wheeled back, a tissue lay between his fingers.

Nia hadn’t realized how many relieved tears had fallen from her eyes. The wetness of her cheeks surprised her. She patted the tissue on her face, too overwhelmed to say thanks.

“The night brace can be a little uncomfortable at first. It’s like a sock, but it’s made out of an Ace bandage–type material, so it compresses your foot and cuts down on swelling. It also has a strap in the front that pulls up on your toes at night, stretching out the arch.”

Compared to surgery, a tight sock was nothing. Nia almost giggled.

“My guess is you’ve been massaging the heck out of your heel because you thought the pain came from the Achilles. It probably helped a little. But I bet the only thing that really helped was icing the whole foot, right?”

A hot blush filled her cheek. How could she not have noticed that only attention to her whole foot relieved her pain? Why had she seized on the Achilles?

The doctor tapped his pen against the clipboard. “So let’s confirm with an MRI. You’ll head up to level two. Then,
if everything’s as I think, you’ll pick up the prescriptions at the front desk.”

Nia could have hugged the man. Perhaps Peter sensed it; he tensed up beside her as she stood. “Thank you.”

A grin lit the doctor’s face. “Maybe you’ll send tickets someday.”

“You can count on it.”

Peter stood by her side. His arm slipped around her waist. “Well, then. Nia, let’s head to the next level.”