Lippman, Laura Read Online Free PDF

frailty to the woman in bed, and not just the usual shakiness of an accident victim. The woman
was
a bruise, her skin about as effective as an eggshell in keeping the pain of the world at bay. The fresh cut on her forehead was nothing compared to the wounded eyes.
    “I’m Kay Sullivan, one of the social workers on staff here.”
    “Why do I need a social worker?”
    “You don’t, but Dr. Schumeier thought I might be able to help you get an attorney.”
    “No public defenders. I need someone good, someone who can concentrate on
me
.”
    “It’s true, they do carry heavy caseloads, but they’re still—”
    “It’s not that I don’t admire them, their commitment. It’s just—I need someone independent. Someone not reliant on the government in any fashion. Public defenders get paid by the government in the end. In the end—my father always said—they never forget where their bread is buttered. Government workers. He was one. Once. And he disliked them intensely.”
    Kay couldn’t be sure of the woman’s age. The young doctor had said forty, but she could have been five years younger or older. Too old to be speaking of her father in such reverent tones, at any rate, as if he were an oracle. Most people outgrew that by eighteen. “Yes…” Kay began, trying to find a footing in the conversation.
    “It was an accident. I panicked. I mean, if you knew the things going through my head, how I hadn’t seen that stretch of highway for—How’s the little girl? I saw a little girl. I’ll kill myself if…Well, I don’t even want to say it out loud. I’m poison. Just by existing, I bring pain and death. It’s his curse. I can’t escape it, no matter what I do.”
    Kay suddenly recalled the state fair up at Timonium, the freak-show tent, how at age thirteen she had worked up the nerve to go in, only to find just slightly odd people—fat, tattooed, skinny, big—sitting placidly. Schumeier had her pegged, after all: There was a bit of voyeurism in her mission here, a desire to look, nothing more. But this woman was talking to her, drawing her in, babbling as if Kay knew, or should know, everything about her. Kay had worked with many clients like this, people who spoke as if they were celebrities, with their every moment of existence documented in tabloids and television shows.
    But at least the woman in the bed seemed to
see
Kay, which was more than some self-involved clients managed. “Are you from here?”
    “Yes, all my life. I grew up in Northwest Baltimore.”
    “And you’re what? Forty-five?”
    Ah, that hurt. Kay was used to, even liked, the version of herself she glimpsed in mirrors and windows, but now she was forced to consider what a stranger saw—the short, squat body, the shoulder-length gray hair that aged her more than anything else. She was in good shape by every internal measure, but it was hard to convey one’s blood-pressure, bone-density, and cholesterol numbers via wardrobe or casual conversation. “Thirty-nine, actually.”
    “I’m going to say a name.”
    “Your name?”
    “Don’t think that way, not yet. I’m going to say a name—”
    “Yes?”
    “It’s a name you’ll know. Or maybe not. It depends on how I say it, how I tell it. There’s a girl, and she’s dead, and that won’t surprise anyone. They’ve believed she was dead, all these years. But there’s another girl, and she’s not dead, and that’s the harder part to explain.”
    “Are you—”
    “The Bethany girls. Easter weekend, 1975.”
    “The Bethany…oh. Oh.” And just like that it came back to Kay. Two sisters, who went to…what, a movie? The mall? She saw their likenesses—the older one with smooth ponytails fastened behind the ears, the younger one in pigtails—remembered the panic that had gripped the city, with children herded into assemblies and shown cautionary yet elliptical films.
Girls Beware
and
Boys Beware
. It had been years before Kay had understood the euphemistic warnings