Kate put her face in her hands. The woman was not going to leave without telling her what she thought Kate had to know. Kate might forcibly eject her, or lock herself in the bedroom until the woman went away, or plug her fingers into her ears and hum loudly, but by this time she was undeniably curious. She was, after all, a policewoman, to whom curiosity - nosiness - was both nature and training.
'Okay. All right. If you have to, then let's get on with it.' Kate sat back in the chair and crossed her grubby legs in the woman's face. The body language of noncooperation, she thought with an inner smile.
'It begins a number of years ago. In the years after the revolution in Russia. To put it simply, Jules's mother and her grandmother were both born as the result of rape.'
Kate's crossed leg came down.
'
'Jani's mother was born in Shanghai in 1935, of a Russian Jewish mother raped by a soldier, either Japanese or Indian. Twenty years later, the child of that event was caught up in a riot in Hong Kong, and she, too, was raped. Jani was born nine months later. When Jani was three months old, her mother took her to the local Christian missionaries, then went home and committed suicide.'
'Good… heavens,' said Kate weakly.
'Jani became the brightest student the missionary school had seen in a long time. She received a scholarship, then came to this country to go to university. She was a sheltered young woman who was nonetheless aware of her past, and it was an almost textbook example of the cyclical nature of abuse when she met and married a young man who loved her extravagantly, wanted desperately to protect her delicate person, and turned on her whenever she stepped outside the guidelines he set. He began to beat her. And although it was not at the time legally recognized that a husband forcing himself on his wife is rape, that is what it was.
'However, Jani was not living in a war-torn city, and she had a few friends and some very employable skills. She left him, and she saw a lawyer. A restraining order was granted, he violated it, and when they came to arrest him, he had a gun and he used it against one of the policemen, who fortunately was not killed. Jani was there when it happened, and Jules, who was about six months old, was sleeping in the next room. He was, somehow, granted bail, but when he came, inevitably, to look for her, she was already gone. She divorced him while he was in jail. He was killed a few months after the divorce was finalized, apparently in a prison brawl, but Jani had the satisfaction of knowing that she had broken free, that she, of her own will, had saved both herself and her daughter.
'You will understand now why it took her so long to accept Al.'
'Does he know all this?'
'Of course.'
'And Jules?'
'Jani told her the bones of it last summer, just after school was out. Not the details, not the extent of his violence nor that he had threatened Jani with a gun, just that he'd threatened her, she had divorced him, and he was later killed.'
'Last summer, huh?'
'The incident in Germany becomes more explicable, does it not?'
'What incident in Germany?' Kate asked, then kicked herself. She didn't want to know.
'Of course. Why should I think you knew about that? Curious. When they were in Koln, Jules disappeared from the hotel one morning, after what was apparently a mild argument with her mother. When she didn't come back by noon, Jani called the police. They found her just before midnight, coming out of a movie theater. Jules said that she'd spent the first part of the day in the park, and the evening in the theater, which was playing an American movie dubbed into German. Jules said she'd sat through it three times. She was trying to teach herself the language,she claimed, and chose the movie because she had seen it already in English.'
Kate had to laugh. 'You know, that sounds like Jules.'
'It's possible. Nonetheless, Jani was insane with worry.'
'Who wouldn't be? I'm not saying it excuses Jules, but it does sound like something a kid would do. A kid like Jules, anyway.'
'And would a kid like Jules have screaming nightmares regularly every four or five days? You need to be prepared for those, Kate. And would that kid attack a teacher the first week of school, following a writing assignment to describe one's family history?'
'Attack? Al told me there had been some trouble, but he didn't say she'd attacked anyone. Physically, you mean?'
'Verbally. The woman was in tears, shamed before the class. Young and inexperienced, she could have used a greater degree of tact in the assignment - after all, many children come from broken homes, and at that age they are going to be sensitive about it. Still, the degree of hostility shown by Jules was extraordinary. And quite devastating.'
Kate sat and listened to the silence for several minutes, then stirred.
'What else? Any attempts at suicide, or threats?'
'Strangely enough, no. I agree, it might have been expected.'
'Drugs? No, I would have noticed that. Tattoos? Body piercing? Shoplifting, for Christ's sake?'
'Nothing. She seems instead to have befriended a cop.'
Kate thought about this statement for a few seconds, then decided that although the woman had not actually meant to rank friendship with a cop alongside bodily mutilation, a degree of irritation, if not anger, might be allowed nonetheless.
'Mrs Hidalgo, I haven't heard —'
'Rosa, please.'
'I haven't heard anything that would even begin to justify your presence here.' Kate was surprised to find that the spark of irritation was actually something that burned hotter, and she gave in to it: straight for the woman's professional pride. 'Frankly, I don't think you had any right to tell me. I think that if Jules had wanted me to know, she'd have found a way of telling me herself. She's a tough young lady, and I don't know that you or her mother give her credit for that. Personally, I think she's coping very well with what must have been devastating news: some nightmares and a tantrum against a teacher who probably deserved it strike me as a damned healthy way to react. If anything, she seems in better shape now than she did a year ago.' Kate was working herself into a fine old rage, and enjoying every second of it. 'When I first met Jules, she talked like an eleven-year-old college sophomore. I'll bet she didn't have a single friend her own age. She was a prig with a big vocabulary, and if that isn't a defense mechanism to rival a brick wall, I don't know what is.'
'I didn't mean to —' Rosa Hidalgo tried to interject, but Kate plowed on.
'Now she's a human being, as close to being a normal kid as you can get with a brain like hers. She's got friends - kids her own age, not just one inappropriate friendship with a cop.' She put an ironic bite on the word
The final exhortation came out more as a whine than as a command: Kate's rage had deflated as quickly as it had grown, leaving her with a bad taste in her mouth and no choice but to sit while the woman across from her earnestly explained the need for therapy and guidance and supervision. By the time she got rid of Rosa Hidalgo, Kate was feeling like a sullen teenager herself, more firmly convinced than ever that Jules was on the rightest possible road.
But, oh my, she thought as she climbed back into the muddy rubber boots, it was fun to get mad.
Kate half-expected that after Rosa reported back on their interview, permission for Jules's plans would be withdrawn. However, the rest of that day and all the next went by with nothing said, so it appeared to be settled: Jules would come and stay with her from the wedding until New Year's.
With one adjustment to the plan.
On the phone, the afternoon before the wedding, Kate talked to Al, who was at his own place on the other side of town.
'Al, I was thinking. If it's all right with you and Jani, I thought Jules and I might go north for a few days over Christmas. Maybe as far as Washington.'
