He tilted his head in a suggestion of a shrug. “I guess.”
He was propped up in bed, his arms unmoving at his sides. His right leg was in a cast from thigh to calf, to stabilize the knee. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, but I couldn’t read his expression past the bandages, the bruises that looked like deeper shadows.
“O’Connell says you don’t remember anything,” I said.
“One minute I was with her and Louise and the guards. The next, lying there next to the water, screaming my head off.”
“You don’t remember anything else—running after me, diving in?”
“Should I remember something?”
Run.
Faster.
“Nah. Get some sleep.” I pushed myself slowly out of the chair.
“Mom’ll be here in the morning and your sleeping days will be over.”
“But now you’ve woken me up.”
“You want me to read you a comic book?” I said.
“Hm?”
“Nothing. Mom told me about when we were kids. She said you used to sit with me and read me—” I got a clear image of Lew, holding up a page from The Flash. It was Flash versus Dr. Light, and Flash was moving in a red-and-yellow blur that was faster than light.
“You okay?” Lew said.
“I just . . .” My voice caught. “I just need to get to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I used the door frame for support and shuffled into the hallway, managed to make it back to my room without getting busted by the nurses. I sat on the edge of the bed, unable to get that image out of my head: seven-year-old Lew in the chair, holding that Flash comic. How many nights had he sat there, waiting for his little brother to come back? Waiting for the wild boy who’d maimed his mother to go away. And Mom, reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel over and over.
O’Connell asking, What do you mean, you loved it?
I clicked on the bedside lamp. My vision was blurred, and it was hard to make out the instructions on the phone’s faceplate, but I finally got an outside line. The call was picked up after only two rings. Louise sounded exactly as she had the night I’d phoned from Lew’s house in Gurnee: tired and annoyed.
“This is Del,” I said, trying to control my voice. “Del Pierce.” Stupid: How many Dels could she know? How many had she just taken to the hospital? “I need to reach Mother Mariette. Can you tell her to call me at the hospital as soon you see her? Hello?”
The phone had gone silent. I thought she’d hung up, and then O’Connell came on the line. “What is it? What’s happened?”
I cleared my throat, ran the back of my hand over my eyes. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew before the commander showed up.”
“Knew what, Del?”
“I shouldn’t remember them reading to me. I shouldn’t remember being the Hellion.”
“No. Probably not.”
“When I took Lew, I could feel him, feel him fighting me. Fighting me just like—”
“Del, I’m coming over there. Don’t do anything. I’m giving the phone to Louise for a minute, so please stay on the phone . . .”
Oh God. The Hellion was still inside me, clawing at my skull. Kicking out the posts. And the walls were coming down.
THE LITTLE ANGEL
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 1977
When the large black Mercedes pulled up to the curb, Dr. Wayne Randolph left the shelter of the awning and hurried into the rain like an eager doorman, umbrella at the ready. He didn’t care if he looked desperate. He liked to think he was smart enough not to pretend.
He opened the passenger door, and the old woman looked up at him from under her hat. She favored him with a brief smile. “You must be Dr. Randolph,” she said in a soft Swiss-German accent. They’d met years before at the first ICOP, but of course she wouldn’t remember him; he’d been just a medical student then. Dr. Toni Wolff, however, was the same as he remembered her from twenty years before: ancient, tiny, and somehow invulnerable, like a well-preserved insect specimen. She wore a formal black evening gown, and held a very informal brown leather bag on her lap.
“Thank God you could come so quickly,” he said. She’d made it across town in only twenty-five minutes, a New York miracle. “I’m sorry to interrupt your evening.”
“Thank you for calling Red Book,” she said. “Some of your colleagues
stubbornly refuse our help.” Her voice, too, was as he remembered it: cigarettes and Switzerland. The driver, a trim, fortyish man dressed in a tuxedo, hefted an oldfashioned wooden wheelchair from the car’s voluminous trunk and set it up beside the car. “Hi, I’m Frederick,” he said. He’d just gotten Dr. Wolff into the chair when headlights slewed into the entranceway. A small white MG
skidded to a stop just inches from the Mercedes’ rear bumper. A young woman in a sleek red dress hopped out from behind the wheel and ran around the back of the sports car, somehow managing to move gracefully in six- inch clogs. “Sorry I’m late!” she said. Her black hair seemed to shine in the rain. The dress was some kind of silky wrap, tied at the hip, that threatened at any moment to become not a dress at all.
“And this is Margarete,” Dr. Wolff said.
Frederick leaned close to Dr. Randolph’s ear. “We’re getting a bit wet,”
he said.
Dr. Randolph came to himself and hopped forward to lead them through the sliding doors. “We’ve got her locked in one of the observation rooms. I told her we lost the keys, as you suggested on the phone, but she’s not very happy. She’s, uh, throwing a bit of a tantrum.”
“What does she look like?” Margarete asked.
“Just like in the papers—little girl, maybe ten years old, white nightgown. Beautiful long curls.” He turned right and led them into the oncology wing. “She looks like Shirley Temple.”
“Has she kissed or touched any of the patients?” she asked.
“One, we think,” Dr. Randolph said.
“You think?” Frederick said.
“We’re not sure if the girl did it, or if the excitement was too much for the woman. She was very old.” He suddenly realized what he’d said, but Dr. Wolff didn’t seem to take offense. “Anyway, we can’t get in there with her.”
“She’s still in the room with the patient?” Dr. Wolff said. Dr. Randolph winced inwardly. “We had no choice. That was the room the girl was in when we found her.”
They heard pounding, then shouting. A high-pitched voice yelled, “Or
