Finding Claire Fletcher (31 page)

Connor jumped off the stretcher and limped a few steps. “Claire?” he said.

She looked around frantically. Half her face was distorted from what must have been a very hard blow. Baxter and another uniform approached her warily from either side, hands resting on their pistols. They called out to her, but she did not look at them.

Connor limped another couple of paces. This time he yelled. “Claire?”

She saw him, and he swore he saw a smile of relief in her good eye. “Connor,” she mouthed.

Neither of them could run, but they closed the distance between them as quickly as possible. They crashed into each other, the young girl’s body between them. Claire’s left hand was cushioned between the girl and her own body, but with her right hand she reached up to Connor’s face.

He pulled her to him and rested his hands on her shoulders. They both spoke at once, not giving the other time to speak.

“
My God, are you all right?” Connor said.

Claire touched his cheek. “I thought I was too late.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What did he do to you?” she murmured.

Connor ignored her question and studied her mangled face. “You need to see a doctor.”

“
I didn’t know what else to do. Who to go to.”

Then another voice, not their own, “Hey.”

They turned and saw Boggs standing two feet away, staring at them. When Claire turned her head, Boggs’ face paled. He stepped forward and peered at her as if she were an apparition. “No,” he murmured.

Stryker walked up beside Boggs and looked at each of them in turn. “What the hell is this?” he said.

Boggs reached up and pushed a mess of curls back from Claire’s forehead. “It’s Claire Fletcher,” he said. “Fuck me, its Claire fucking Fletcher.”

Stryker cocked a thumb toward Alison. “Dude, there’s a kid right here. She can hear you. You’re the one always telling me not to swear in front of
your
kids.”

Claire explained Alison’s presence as quickly as possible to Boggs and gave him directions to the house. She warned him about Tiffany, trying to explain the girl's willing presence to a baffled Boggs. She gave him the name of her captor—at least the name he had been using since they’d moved.

She wouldn’t be separated from Connor, so they rode together in the ambulance, sitting across from each other. Stryker followed in one of the cruisers, leaving the unmarked for Boggs, who was already on the phone to ten different people. The paramedics tried to pry Alison away from Claire in order to check her over, but she screamed so loudly, it echoed off the walls of the ambulance, rivaling the siren atop it.

“It’s okay,” Claire said, hugging Alison to her with her right arm.

Quietly, she listed her own injuries for them, and one of them cleaned her face as she stared across the narrow divide at Connor. He looked like a wounded soldier. He held the side of his head and blood soaked through the dressing on his leg. He smiled at her, and Claire wept.

The ER was packed full of people. It was disconcerting. The last time I had seen so many people in one place was at an assembly in high school. Nurses and doctors bustled, strode and ran. A child wailed loudly from behind a half-open door. I was grateful that we invited no stares. Those around us were nursing various injuries, faces haggard with pain, waiting to be seen.

With a flash of his badge and some fast talk, the plainclothes detective named Stryker arranged for the three of us to wait in a private room. A stout nurse wearing blue scrubs looked annoyed but ushered us to a small room nonetheless.

Alison clung to me, arms clasped tightly around my waist. She blinked rapidly against the harsh fluorescent lights like a baby animal entering the world for the first time. As she buried her face in my shoulder, it occurred to me that she had spent an indeterminate amount of time in darkness, locked away in a closet.

I shivered with the remembered knowledge of that darkness. I had spent years trying to forget it, banish it from my body’s memory. Through the thin frame of her body, I felt its cloying presence, the cold of it and the stark embrace of its terror.

The adrenaline that had allowed me to threaten Tiffany’s life, move through the crush of a hammer blow, break down a door and rescue this girl began to seep away. It left a stunning multitude of pains throughout my body.

I struggled helping Alison the short distance to the exam room, past bloodied and bandaged bodies and scrambling medical staff. Connor, in spite of a heavy limp and the fresh blood trickling down his bare leg from beneath a dark red dressing, held me up. He helped me step up and sit with Alison on a gurney. He took a chair beside us.

Until that moment, all thought was lost in my physical efforts. Now I was seized by panic. My spine slammed ramrod straight, muscles tensing in spite of exhaustion.

“My family,” I said.

Before Connor could speak, Stryker intervened. “Relax, Ms. Fletcher. Detective Boggs took a unit over there himself right after we left. In fact, I imagine your family won’t be far behind us.”

A new panic took hold. I hadn’t thought this through, hadn’t thought at all. I had to face them now. After all these years. There was no going back to my hell, which while torturous, held all of my darkest, most humiliating secrets.

Every part of me would be bared. I would be naked again, but this time the audience would be far bigger, their eyes probing me for all the great and small indignities, the humiliations I’d endured. I could not go back into hiding. They would want explanations, and I would have to offer up my shame for everyone to see.

Stryker studied me, perhaps sensing my panic. He used a soothing tone that clashed with his macho demeanor. “Right now you need to be seen by a doctor,” he said. “We can start by getting those cuffs off.”

I held up my left hand, which was so swollen the metal ring cut off my circulation. It was a deep purple.

“Stryke,” Connor said. “Has anyone called Farrell?”

Stryker nodded. “Yeah. He’s on his way. Now let me go and see if I can light a fire under someone’s ass around here before you lose a pint of blood. Sit tight.”

Stryker pulled the door closed behind him, leaving the three of us alone. I looked at Connor. The deep blue eyes I’d seen so many times in my dreams during the last few weeks were alive before me now, an oasis.

I was full of a million words. Novels, volumes to tell him. An encyclopedia of explanations.

“Not now,” he said as I opened my mouth to speak. “Later. Right now I just want to look at you.”

My laugh was throaty and thick. I shook my head but he smiled.

“Believe me,” he said. “Nothing has ever looked better to me.”

I sniffled. “Connor?”

“Yeah.”

“Whatever happens, don’t leave me alone.”

His smile widened to a grin. “You’re stuck with me now, babe,” he said.

The medical staff descended on us in a fury. Nurses, doctors, Connor, Stryker and even a female uniformed officer tried to coax Alison away from my body, but she refused to budge. Together, we squeezed our eyes shut as they sawed the metal bracelets from my wrists.

Both Connor and I required x-rays and we went together, Alison too, our bodies close together making it clear we would not be separated. Stryker fielded all comments and complaints from the staff. The three of us returned to the exam room. As a doctor stitched Connor up, the gentle coaxing for Alison to free herself from me began again. She would not move.

A half hour later, Alison’s parents arrived. Her mother burst into the room, tears streaming down her face. She called her daughter’s name, and Alison raised her head warily. She stared at her mother for a moment as if she didn’t quite believe the woman was real. Then she twisted away from me and opened her arms.

Her mother scooped her off my lap, enveloping her until she disappeared into her mother’s trembling form. Until they were one. I felt empty, bereft without my burden. The mother opened her eyes to me over Alison’s head. She saw past my bruised melon face and looked right into the place where Claire Fletcher, the girl I used to be, still lived. Her penetrating eyes caused a lump to form in my throat.

“Thank you,” she said.

The father approached me tentatively. He moved as if to hug me but stopped, afraid of hurting me. With my good eye, I met his wet gaze head on.

“It’s okay,” I said.

He gathered me in his arms gently and squeezed me. His whole body hiccupped with sobs, which were muffled in my hair. He kept saying, “Thank you. You just don’t know.” But he could not finish the sentence. I let him pour his grief over me, taking his sobs like ocean waves rolling over my body.

The moment Alison and her family left, I was placed on a stretcher and whisked four floors up to surgery. Connor lurched madly along beside me. Before they could operate on my hand, I was called back to the ER. With her parents on either side of her, Alison allowed the staff to examine her, but she would not consent to a rape kit unless I was there.

It was just the two of us, one female doctor and one female nurse. They told me Alison was eleven and this was her first pelvic exam. I sat by her head. With my right hand, I stroked the hair gently from her face. I turned her head so she was watching me.

“Just look at me,” I said. “It’s okay.”

That is all I said, and looking at her, I knew it was all I needed to say. There was a tacit understanding in her eyes. She knew without being told that I, too, had been in that closet. Now, if I showed her that submitting to this invasive exam was necessary, she would trust me. She would endure it because she knew that I knew that few things were worse than the darkness that had been visited upon us.

Connor waited outside the door for me, having kept his promise not to leave. Once more, he followed as I was shipped back upstairs for surgery. I was brought into a tiny room and the nurses began stripping my clothes away. One of them asked Connor to step outside, but he placed himself in front of the doors, arms crossed over his chest.

“No,” he said.

Before the nurse could object, I touched her arm. “It’s okay,” I said. “He can stay.”

Once I was garbed in a flimsy hospital gown and the anesthesiologist pumped several different medications into my veins, Connor asked the staff for a moment alone with me.

The drugs worked quickly. I could hardly lift my head from the pillow as he approached. It was so silent now. Connor touched my shoulder and his face came into view, floating above me.

“Just don’t go,” I managed.

He leaned down and I felt his dry lips on my temple. “I’ll be right outside the door.”

“They won’t let you come in, will they?” I mumbled.

He laughed. “No, I think I’m pushing my luck as it is. But when you wake up, I’ll be here.”

I wanted to say more, but my lips didn’t work. My body was heavy with sleep. The last thing I felt was Connor’s hand sliding into my good one.

Connor watched as two nurses and the anesthesiologist wheeled the gurney with Claire on it through the double doors to the operating room. He stood for a moment. The doors flapped and Claire’s sleeping form receded, finally disappearing into another room. He turned and nearly knocked Farrell to the ground.

Mitch steadied himself. “Watch out, kid.”

“Where’s Boggs?” Connor asked.

“
On his way up,” Mitch replied. “Jenny’s here.”

“What took so long?” Connor asked.

“Press,” Mitch said.

Connor swiped his free hand through his hair. “Shit.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. She was talking to Boggs when I left her. She’ll be right up. Brianna and Tom won’t be far behind. I talked with Rick. He’s booking the first flight out.”

Connor’s head snapped up, causing a wave of nausea to sweep upward from his stomach. He put one hand on the wall and bit back the bile rising in the back of his throat. The attending physician in the ER had given Connor industrial-strength painkillers for his leg. Thankfully, the stab wound was not serious enough to warrant surgery, but Connor would be on a heavy duty course of antibiotics. His body wasn’t used to the drugs. Silently, he cursed himself. Had he realized at the time that they’d make him woozy and lightheaded, he would have refused them. At least until Claire’s abductor was in custody.

“
Did they get anything?” Connor managed.

Mitch shook his head. “I don’t know. Boggs will be up shortly to brief you. I brought you some pants.”

Mitch pulled a folded pair of khakis from under his arm. “They’ll be a little big, but your house is still a crime scene so they’ll have to do.”

Connor smiled and took them under his own arm. “Thanks,” he said.

Mitch jammed his hands into his pockets. The two men looked up and down the halls, waiting for Jenny and Boggs. Connor briefed Mitch on the night’s events while they waited.

“You want to sit down?” Mitch asked.