Ghost Girl (25 page)

On Thursday of that week, it was my turn out on the playground, so morning recess found me leaning against the wall of the building, where it was warmest. It was a pleasant day for that late in the year. Weak sunshine shone through high, diffuse clouds, and although it was cold enough for gloves, it was not bitter.

Most of the period passed peacefully. Jadie and Jeremiah were out of sight, around the corner of the building. Reuben and Philip were together on the swings, and Brucie sat slumped in the sandbox, being solicitously entertained by a kindergartner. I stood alone, scanning the kids, my attention not focused on much of anything. Then, all of a sudden, a great caterwaul rose up from the vicinity of the monkey bars. Pushing myself off the wall, I went to investigate.

“Amber Ekdahl’s hurt herself!” one kindergartner yelled. “She’s got blood all over.”

I pushed through the throng of children to find Amber wailing, hands over her mouth, blood flowing through her fingers.

“She fell off the monkey bars from way up there,” one little boy said, gestering. “She should of been more careful, huh?”

“Come on, lovey,” I said and tried to encourage Amber to her feet. She wouldn’t budge. Finally, I pulled her up through the bars and carried her into the small first-aid room adjacent to the front office.

The injury to Amber’s face was a lot less serious than it had first appeared. There was a nasty scrape across her nose, a cut beneath it, and quite a large cut on her upper lip, but nothing was broken, and the cuts all responded well to a cold, wet cloth. Once away from the hysteria of the other children, Amber calmed down immediately, taking the cloth from me and holding it in place without any further fuss. This matter-of-fact response to the injury impressed me.

“You’re being very brave about all this,” I said. “I bet it hurt.”

She nodded.

“You’ve hardly cried at all, and you seem to know just what to do. That’s good thinking for someone who’s just six.”

“I am brave,” she garbled through the cloth.

“Yes, I can tell.”

“I’m like She-Ra, Princess of Power. She’s the bravest girl in the whole universe.”

I smiled down at her.

“She’s always beating Hordak. He’s the evil person. And that’s why I like her. He tries to get her, but she always wins.”

“Is that your favorite TV program?”

Amber nodded enthusiastically.

I took the cloth from her and rinsed it out before handing it back. “Do you watch much TV?”

“Yeah. I like TV.”

I eyed her. “Do you ever watch ‘Dallas’?”

Her brow furrowed, then a slight shake of the head. “I think that might be a grown-ups’ program. Mostly I watch cartoons.”

“Just wondered. Jadie seems to watch it.”

“Jadie watches lots of junk. My mom always yells at her.”

I had perched Amber on the tabletop while I cleaned her face, and now she sat, swinging her legs back and forth in a relaxed fashion. Taking down the bloodied cloth, she examined it. Her lip had already swollen to twice its usual size.

“I’m a little curious,” I said, trying to keep my tone conversational. “Does your sister’s friend Tashee come over to your house very often?”

Amber’s eyes went wide and she regarded me oddly, then she smiled. “Tashee’s not real. Didn’t you know that? Tashee’s just pretend, someone Jadie talks to.”

“A make-believe friend? She’s not a real little girl? Does Jadie have any other friends like that?”

Amber shrugged. “Jadie don’t act like everyone else. My mom says its ’cause she got borned the wrong way.”

“I see.” Inspecting her face one last time, I judged all the bleeding to be stopped, so I took the cloth from her. “Well, there you go. I think we have you fixed.”

“But what about my knee? I hurt my knee, too. Look. See? It’s blooded right through my pants.”

In the mayhem caused by her facial injuries, I’d completely forgotten about her knee. Lifting her down from the table, I bent and attempted to pull the leg of her rather too-small jogsuit
Torey
,” Lucy said, her voice almost plaintive up, but I couldn’t get it high enough without hurting her. “I think you’re going to need to pull your pants down from the top.”

“I’m not supposed to take my clothes off at school. I’m always supposed to ask my mom about these things first.”

“Amber, I’m sure it’s quite all right in this instance. I can’t get to your knee otherwise.” I reached over and pulled the pants down myself.

In doing so, I exposed a faint mark on her skin, partially obscured by the waistband of her underpants. “What’s this?” I asked in surprise. Putting a finger out, I gently eased the band down. The mark was a pale red and raised, a healing scar, and it was familiar—a cross with a circle around it. “What is this?”

“X marks the spot.”

I
go dead calm in crises. No matter how frightened or emotionally wrought I may be feeling immediately prior to it, the moment a situation pushes over into a state of genuine emergency, I’m flooded with an internal anesthetic. With it comes a sense of time winding down to move very slowly, each moment taking on sharp, freeze-frame clarity, and I get a faint sensation of being outside myself.

When I first saw the mark on Amber’s abdomen, a rush of adrenaline overtook me, making my ears roar and my heart rush. Here it was, the concrete evidence to substantiate Jadie’s claims. A moment of abject terror hit, as it came home to me just how horrifying this case was likely to be, how I was going to be right in the middle of it through all the police action, the courts, the social service intervention, and the undoubted media attention such matters attract, and how from this moment on, I would not be able to turn back the clock and uninvolve myself. Then came the calm. The noise in my ears faded; I could no longer feel my pounding heart. Amber took on unusual clarity.

“I think we need Mr. Tinbergen to come in here.”

At once, Amber began to cry.

“No, it’s all right, sweetheart. You haven’t done anything wrong. I just think we better have Mr. Tinbergen take a look at this.”

“What for?” she asked plaintively.

Then came confusion. Recess was over, so I had to make arrangements for Lucy to take my group temporarily. I had to stop and tell Alice that Amber was in the office, and all the while we were looking for Mr. Tinbergen.

At last Mr. Tinbergen was located in the boiler room with Mr. O’Banyon. Back in the small first-aid room, I closed the door behind him and then approached Amber. “This has been put here deliberately,” I said. “It’s healing over, but someone has intentionally carved this symbol on her.”

“How did this happen, Amber?” Mr. Tinbergen asked.

“I don’t know,” she whimpered.

“Oh, come on, honey. I can’t think you really don’t know.”

This reduced her to a wail.

“‘X marks the spot,’ that’s what she said.” I turned to Mr. Tinbergen.

He smiled in a warm, fatherly fashion and leaned forward to push wayward strands of hair from Amber’s face. “No one’s going to be angry with you, sweetheart. We’re here to help you, so it’s very important that we know what’s happened.”

“I’m not supposed to tell,” Amber said through her tears.

“I’m sure it’ll be perfectly all right to tell Torey and me. Come on now, sweetheart.”

Amber cut a pathetic figure. Like Jadie, she was attractive in a rather atavistic way, with her long, uncombed hair and her dark-lashed eyes, however, her paler coloring gave her a washed-out appearance and her ill-fitting clothes made her look less the untamed creature Jadie often seemed and more simply uncared for. Now, lumbered with the scratched, bloodied nose and a ballooning upper lip, she looked like a war orphan.

“Why are you not supposed to tell?” I asked. “Has someone warned you not to?”

There was a long pause. Amber cautiously daubed her streaming nose, but apparently it hurt too much, because she took the tissue away and let it run. Mr. Tinbergen and I stood, tense, alert, and silent.

At last Amber nodded. “My mama did.”

“Why is that?”

“’Cause my sister done this. ’Cause my sister took one of the knives in the kitchen and cut me with it.”

“Jadie
did that?” I asked, stunned.

Amber nodded. “And my mom says if we don’t keep good care of Jadie when she does awful things, they’re gonna come and take her away. She said I shouldn’t ever tell what kind of things she does.” Amber dissolved into tears again. “’Cause if she gets tooken away, it’s gonna be my fault.”

Mr. Tinbergen looked over at me to see my assessment of this matter. I widened my eyes to convey my own surprise at this unexpected turn of events.

“Please take off your shirt,” Mr. Tinbergen said, and when Amber did, he thoroughly examined her back and arms, looking for evidence of other marks. There was none. He then had her remove her pants; however, aside from the bruised knee and the encircled X, there were no other marks there, either. “I think we need to see Jadie,” he said and rose to go get her.

Alone with Amber, I looked at her. “Is that
really
how you got that mark?”

Warily, she glanced in my direction. “Yes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“We need the truth here, Amber. The
real
truth.”

Her eyes filled with tears again.

“You must tell us what really did happen there. I want to know the truth, and I’ll find it out one way or another, but it’d be best if you told me yourself.” My words came out sounding like a threat, and despite my sympathy for Amber, I suppose that’s how I meant them.

“Jadie done it.”

I didn’t speak.

“Jadie does awful things. Once, she killed our cat.” Amber looked up at me. “But she can’t help it. That’s just the way she is.”

When Jadie entered and saw Amber standing in her underwear, her face went gray. She wavered on her feet and for a moment I feared she might faint.

When Mr. Tinbergen asked for an explanation, Jadie gave no response. Indeed, she gave no word, no nod, no sign of any sort that she’d even heard the question.

“Jadie, the time’s come for us to talk to Mr. Tinbergen about what’s going on,” I said.

“No,” she mouthed, although the word had no sound. Tears came immediately to her eyes and spilled down over her cheeks, and she made no effort to check them. She only lowered her head.

“Come on, Jadie. We must talk about things.” I rose to my feet to come toward her.

“No,”
she cried and it was a plea.

“There’s no reason to get upset, sweetheart,” Mr. Tinbergen said tenderly. “Like we said to Amber, we’re not going to get mad at anyone. We just want to find out what’s happened.”

Head down, face crumpled into tears, Jadie didn’t respond.

“Amber says you did this,” Mr. Tinbergen continued. “Is that true?”

There was a tiny pause, like an abrupt intake of breath, and then Jadie raised her head. “Yes. It was me that done it,” she said, then she began to cry bitterly.

“We-e-elll,” Mr. Tinbergen replied in a fatherly way and reached his arm out to her, “that was a
very
naughty thing to do, wasn’t it? And I can see you know it was wrong. You’re not ever going to do anything like that again to your little sister, are you?”

Jadie continued to weep inconsolably.

“There, there, there,” he said and hugged Jadie to him with one arm. With the other, he reached out to touch the mark on Amber’s abdomen. “I’m sure your mommy and daddy have gotten after you quite enough for this, so nobody’s going to get mad about it here. Besides, it doesn’t look very serious. Just a scratch, really. And nearly healed.” He looked at Amber. “This was a very, very silly thing for your sister to have done to you, wasn’t it?”

She nodded.

“All right, then. You get your clothes back on and both of you may go.”

After the girls had departed, Mr. Tinbergen turned to me. “I think you were right to query it. These days you never can tell. Better safe than sorry, hey?” He paused. “But I don’t think this was very serious. I daresay, I did even worse things to my brother when we were kids. Got him through the shoulder with a penknife once.” Mr. Tinbergen laughed. “Accidentally, of course, but then we should probably never examine the motives of siblings too carefully.” And he laughed again.

Deeply troubled, I returned to my class. I didn’t know what to think now. While the degree of Jadie’s disturbance had always been an issue in interpreting the things she told about, it had never crossed my mind that she, herself, might actually be the perpetrator. This threw everything into an entirely different light, and I was horrified by the implications. The worst of all for me was Amber’s chance remark about Jadie’s killing a cat. Had that been Jenny?

My instinct was to confront Jadie regarding all this, and had we been going back to a situation where we were alone together, I probably would have. Instead, we returned to the hurly-burly of a class upset by the unexpected change in routine my time in the first-aid room had caused, and I had my hands full getting everything back under control. The desire to confront her faded very quickly, to be replaced by a weary sense of confusion, wherein nothing made much sense to me. I realized that any confrontation I might bring about would be more to assuage my own feelings of having been duped than to help Jadie.