“How did she respond?” Ron asked.
It was just the two of us in the room now. Luke had gone to get us coffee. We’d been sitting in the room for over an hour, and we all needed a pick-me-up. I should have told him to grab me something from the vending machines too. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
“During the times we met before, I only asked her yes-or-no questions, so I brought my iPad with me because I thought I’d need to use the TAP program with her. It’s a program that helps me communicate with nonverbal autistic children. Even though she was six, we figured her language was probably way behind. But I didn’t need it. She was able to answer all my questions. Once she opened up and started talking, I couldn’t believe how well she spoke, since she’d probably never been to school.”
“She provided you information about her mother?” His interest was piqued again.
I shook my head. “Sorry.” I hadn’t meant to mislead him. I needed to be more intentional with my words. “She still refused to talk about her mother, or any person for that matter, but she opened up about where she lived.”
“She described the trailer?”
“Almost perfectly, even down to the black garbage bags on the windows.”
Investigators had always suspected Janie was from the trailer park, and they’d gone door to door with her picture, but nobody had reported seeing her. It had been Janie’s description of two dogs tied up in the front lawn next to a dilapidated bird feeder that had led them to the correct place—the last trailer on the left side of a dead-end street. Officers had expected to find tubing running through glass jars and odd-size bowls, since meth was what the trailer park was most known for, but they had found a ransacked trailer reeking of urine and spoiled food instead. It was clear from the holes in the walls and dried blood on the floor that there’d been a struggle. Maybe more than one. But it was the closet in the back bedroom that had shocked everyone the most.
Ron splayed out the pictures of the closet on the table like he was laying down his hand at a poker game. He pointed to the picture with the zip ties and dog collar. I hated that one even more than the blood-marked walls. I was glad he had the pictures, though. It was something you couldn’t describe in words unless you’d seen it, and I’d thought I’d seen it all.
“Did she describe this?” he asked.
“No. She wouldn’t talk about the back bedroom.”
“Understandable. Hard to imagine any kid ever wanting to talk about that.”
I forced the images from the closet out of my mind. “But her information about the trailer gave us a physical address that led to a name.”
“Becky Watson?”
“Yes.”
The trailer had been rented to Becky Watson for the last four years. Nobody else was on the lease. The police had spoken with the manager at the park, and he hadn’t remembered her at all, said she must’ve kept to herself. The only personal thing he could tell us about her was that she had always paid her rent on time, but he had given us an even more valuable piece of information anyway—her social security number. It wasn’t long before we had Janie’s birth certificate and confirmation that Becky Watson was her mother. It had also confirmed Janie was six and not three.
“What led you to the GoFundMe accounts?”
“Once child-protection investigators had a name and started digging online, they discovered Becky had been pretending Janie had cancer and creating fake GoFundMe accounts to get people to donate money for her medical expenses. It was why Janie’s head was shaved. She had seven fake accounts for Janie posted under various names with different cancer diagnoses, all of them with pictures.”
They’d traced the GoFundMe accounts to the computer in the trailer. Becky’s account history showed the transfers from PayPal into her personal checking account, and the bank had her on camera cashing all the donation checks. There hadn’t been any activity since the day before they had found Janie.
“And the blood in the trailer?” Ron asked.
“It matched the blood that was on Janie.”
I didn’t know why he was asking questions he already knew the answers to. Maybe it was some kind of test. The police at the initial scene in the parking lot had thought Janie was injured because of the blood on her hands and shirt. It wasn’t until after they’d gotten her cleaned up at the hospital that they had discovered the blood wasn’t hers. She had had plenty of old wounds and scars covering her body, but nothing fresh.
“The blood belonged to her mother?” he asked.
I nodded.
SIX
CHRISTOPHER BAUER
I dashed down to the third floor to hang out with Janie whenever I had spare time during my day. The more time I spent with her, the less sorry I felt for her and the more amazed I was at the capacity of the human spirit to overcome unimaginable horrors. There was this part of her that was still innocent and untouched despite what she’d been through. I saw it in her eyes whenever she looked at me.
Janie’s entire day was structured around different therapies and meeting with various doctors. Everything she worked on in the hospital had a specific purpose and goal, so I took it upon myself to teach her how to have fun. Go Fish was the first game I played with her, and she loved it.
“Go fish, Dr. Chris! Go fish!” she’d squeal, bouncing on her bed like it was a trampoline.
I let her beat me because her reaction was one of the best parts of my day. I even started skipping my lunch breaks so I could spend them with her instead.
“What are you going to do once she’s not here?” Dan had asked after I’d raced back upstairs just in time to see a patient after one of my visits.
I didn’t like thinking about when she left, even though more and more of her case consultations shifted to discussions about potential discharge dates and her outpatient medical care. I wanted Hannah to meet her before she was gone. She hadn’t wanted to before, but she might want to now, since it would be her last chance.
“I really want you to meet Janie,” I said that evening as she and I sat in the living room working on our latest jigsaw puzzle. We’d been competing with Allison and Greg for years over who could find the most difficult one. We were constantly trying to stump the other couple. The one we were working on now was a series of cats with no edges. Greg had said it had taken them over three weeks to complete. So far, we were two weeks into it and not even close to finishing.
Hannah was hunched over the table, searching for a piece. Her fiery red hair was pulled into a ponytail with runaway strands trying to escape that she constantly brushed off her forehead while she studied the puzzle. She didn’t bother looking up.
“You should see how much she’s changed. She gets better every day. It’s really inspiring,” I said, remembering how she’d shown me how one of the nurses had taught her to write her name. She’d been so focused as she’d painstakingly drawn each line and so proud of herself when she’d finished. “There’s something really amazing about watching someone transform before your eyes. It’s like witnessing a small miracle. I don’t want you to miss it.”
She finally raised her head. “Christopher Bauer, I would say you are officially smitten.”