Dr. Sher’s eyes locked on Joe’s. “They make perfect sense. She’s singing in French.”
Chapter Sixteen
There was an advantage to working as a cop in a college town for almost fifteen years, Louis decided. Shockey not only knew the best doctors, but he knew lawyers and judges, too. One in particular, an arthritic old judge named Herman Fells. Fells, whose own daughter had been murdered twenty years ago, agreed to fit them in on his family court calendar between two other pending cases. Shockey had been forced to allow an agent from Family Services to attend the hearing, but because of his contacts, he had managed again to get someone sympathetic to keeping Amy out of the system.
Louis glanced at his watch. They had been inside the courtroom for more than an hour now — Joe, Shockey, and Amy. At first, he had been miffed that Joe had asked him to stay out in the hallway. Amy would be more relaxed — and lucid — if Louis was not in the small courtroom, Joe had told him. Louis hadn’t asked Joe why she thought Amy didn’t seem to mind Shockey being close.
It bothered him — but not enough to get in the way of things.
He looked at the doors. Shit, what was taking so long?
Maybe they didn’t have enough information. Dr. Sher had suggested that Amy get a routine exam to rule out any physical problems, and Amy had passed. And Dr. Sher’s own written assessment declared Amy competent to tell the judge how she felt about her father, Owen Brandt, and why she didn’t want to be with him. That had to be enough to get her into a custody hearing.
The other things — her memories or dreams, the strange blackouts — those were like defense mechanisms, Dr. Sher had said, the brain’s way of blocking out pain until it was ready to handle it.
He could understand that. He might not understand Amy, but he sure could understand the shield the brain brought down over some things. It had been only recently, on his last trip up to Michigan, that some of his own memories — the bad ones — had shoved forward. Like the time he had locked himself in a closet to avoid a belt whipping from one of his foster fathers.
But at least he knew that memory was real. Some of this stuff with Amy, like the smelly hole, the ropes, the dead kitten, he wasn’t so sure about. He supposed they could be based in reality, maybe filtered though an overactive imagination.
But Amy being able to sing in French — something she couldn’t do when she was awake — was one thing he didn’t understand.
He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out the paper Joe had given him last night. Dr. Sher, who had lived in Paris and spoke fluent French, had written out some of the words she had heard Amy singing. The English words he and Joe had heard had been only their own ears hearing the phonetic version. But Dr. Sher, listening to the tape over and over, had come up with a transcription of what she believed Amy was singing:
His own college French wasn’t good enough to read it, so he called Dr. Sher that morning for a translation and had written it beneath the French:
He stared at the words, shaking his head. There was a logical explanation behind it. There had to be.
Joe had been the one to bring up the idea that Amy might have a split personality. But Dr. Sher had discounted it as too rare. And even if it were true, it still meant Amy had to have learned French somewhere.
That morning, Louis had made a phone call to the Hudson police and asked one of the cops to take a more thorough look inside Geneva’s home. The cop had called back a while later and told Louis he had no found no foreign-language books, no keepsakes from places afar, and no brochures, photos, or magazines that suggested that Amy had ever ventured far from home. The cop also said there wasn’t even a television in the home. And school records confirmed that Amy had stopped attending in the third grade.
As for the neighbor, Mr. Bustin, the one Amy remembered for his Go Blue room, the cop found out that Amy had visited him only a few times, that he did not speak French or any other foreign language, and that he had nothing in his home that Amy could have picked up.
A soft tapping drew his attention down the hall. A family was huddled at the end, a black woman and five children. One of the kids, a girl who looked about six, was banging on the wall with a broken Barbie doll.
Louis folded the paper and put it back into his pocket.
He had almost bought Amy a doll that morning. Joe had sent him to Kmart to pick up things Amy would need for her court appearance. He had walked around the store for a long time before he actually started putting things in the cart.
His only experience shopping for kids was with Ben Outlaw. That was easy. Boys were quick, picking out T- shirts usually based on the cartoon graphic on the front. If things didn’t fit perfectly, Ben never cared. He’d just roll up the sleeves or cut off the cuffs.
But Joe’s list for Amy had been very specific.
Plain,
The bra had almost done him in. He finally found a clerk who helped him with that one.
Before he left the store, he had decided that he wanted to get Amy something personal, something Joe hadn’t put on the list. After ten minutes of walking around among the toys, he gave up and headed toward the checkout. As he passed the jewelry counter, he saw a display of cheap necklaces. He settled on a small heart- shaped locket on a silver chain.
He hadn’t shown it to Joe or Amy at the hotel room, because he wanted to give it to Amy in private. He hoped it would help him make a connection that Amy hadn’t yet allowed him to make.
The courtroom doors opened with a soft bang. Louis rose quickly as Shockey came toward him.
“What happened?” Louis asked.
“The kid was great,” Shockey said. “Judge Fells said he believed her stories about Brandt’s abuse, but he didn’t completely buy the fact that she may have seen Brandt murder her mother. He wasn’t willing to dismiss it totally, either. He wants Dr. Sher to dig deeper.”
“How long did he give us?”
“Ten days,” Shockey said. “In the meantime, Family Services will notify Brandt that he has a hearing coming up. Brandt will have to get a lawyer and fight to get her back. He still might be able to do that if we don’t come up with something to prove him unfit.”
“Where does Amy stay until then?” Louis asked. “If Brandt even suspects she’s remembering things, she’ll need to be protected.”
“Fells knew that,” Shockey said. “Amy understood it, too. Fells told her she had two choices. She could stay in the juvenile jail, or he could order a cruiser to sit outside her new foster home twenty-four hours a day.”
“What did Amy choose?”
Shockey smiled. “It was the damndest thing I ever saw,” he said. “The kid stood up and said, ‘How come I can’t stay with Miss Frye? She can protect me. She has a gun.’ So the judge turned to Joe and said, ‘What about that, Sheriff Frye?’”
