The Perfect Child(94)

I’d laid my hand on Hannah’s knee. “I’m so sorry,” I had said.

“This is a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. I keep thinking that it’s not happening.” The full weight of despair had shone on her face. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

I had put my arms around Hannah. Her body had been rigid and stiff, full of unspent emotion. Words had failed me. She’d been right. In all my twenty years of work, I’d never seen anything like this. I probably never would again. The case haunted me in ways I’d never imagined.

“What set Greg off?” Luke asked, bringing me back to the present.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows. One minute he was crying in the other room, and the next minute he was lunging at Christopher and Hannah.”

“He wanted to fight them?”

I shook my head. “He wanted them out of his house. He kept screaming that it was their fault Allison had died.”

Ron held up a nanny cam. “He’d seen this?”

“He had.”

We’d all seen it by now. It was set up above the fireplace in their basement and provided a full view of the stairs, ending at the landing. There wasn’t any sound, but you could tell by Allison’s and Janie’s movements that they were fighting, even though you couldn’t see their faces. They scurried back and forth across the screen. There was a split second when Janie’s feet rushed forward, and in the next, Allison plummeted down the stairs. She lay on the bottom, all her last moments captured in painful detail. Janie’s feet never moved from their spot—not for seven minutes and thirty-two seconds.





FIFTY-NINE

CHRISTOPHER BAUER

I hadn’t realized when they’d referred to New Horizons as a residential home for emotionally disturbed youth that it would look like a big house. I parked in a driveway behind a wooden gate. Trees dotted the property. A concrete sidewalk wove up to the front door, cutting through perfectly manicured grass. The house was nondescript, made of smooth gray concrete that gave no clue to what was hidden behind the door.

Flowers lined the porch, and there was an old-fashioned swing on one end. I took a moment to compose myself so I could give all my attention to Janie. I was still trying to shake my conversation from earlier this morning. The director of the Department of Children’s Services had called and informed me Piper was no longer going to be Janie’s social worker and was being replaced with someone named Elaine, effective immediately. She’d refused to say why, only that switching social workers was common and we were lucky to have been with the same one for so long. But I could tell by Piper’s voice when I had called her afterward that she was lying when she said it didn’t mean anything and that it happened all the time. She’d had no idea she’d been removed from Janie’s case.

Normally, I would have debated the scenario with Hannah, but we didn’t debate much of anything these days. I hated what all of this had done to her, and the medication only made things worse. It was her fifth day home, and she moved through each one like she was sleepwalking. Her doctors assured me it was only a matter of time before she was herself again, but she was forever changed.

She’d chopped her hair into a short bob framing her chin, and it made her look less skeletal. There was finally life in her skin again. But the way she carried herself had changed too. Her eyes bore the weight of what she’d been through; she seemed more like a soldier who’d been to war and returned home.

I took a deep breath and lifted my hand to knock, but a large woman wearing a flowing printed skirt opened the front door and stepped outside before I made contact with the wood.

“Welcome,” she said. “I’m the house manager, Viviane.” She stuck out her hand. Her eyes were framed by dark lenses. She had thick black hair that she wore in a braid falling down the middle of her back. “Come in.” She motioned me inside.

I scanned the foyer quickly, trying to take everything in all at once. A long staircase rose in front of us. Two hallways split from the foyer, one on each side of the staircase. Viviane veered to the hallway on the left, and I followed. She didn’t speak while we walked. The house was quiet despite the ten girls living there.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Things are very different here on the weekends. Many of the children go home because they’ve earned weekend visits.” She squeezed my arm. “I know it must seem like it will be forever before you get there, but I tell all my first-time parents that visits will happen before you know it.”

First-time parents? Children came here more than one time? I swallowed the anxiety creeping its way up the back of my throat.

“Normally, you would be in the common areas because it’s where we do supervised visits, but Janie’s been lying down all morning because she hasn’t eaten since yesterday.”

“Nothing?”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. I saw you’ve already spoken to the doctors about it.”

We’d spent over an hour on the phone yesterday. Janie was refusing food again. Last week, she’d gone three days, and they’d had to hospitalize her. Somehow, I had to find a way to convince her to eat today.

Viviane stopped when she came to the third door on her right. She knocked before entering, announcing her presence, not asking permission.