The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(70)
24
Ava Levine is a twelve-year-old girl who practically glows with health, giving us all confused smiles as she sits on the hospital bed with a pair of familiar teddy bears in her lap. Her brown hair is well tended, she’s a good weight for her age and height, and she doesn’t have a single visible bruise.
But when she follows the doctor’s instruction and lies back on the bed, her oversize sleep shirt drapes around the swell of what is either a baby bump or a really bad liver. I don’t think any of us actually need the doctor to confirm it’s the former.
“Shouldn’t my parents be here?” she asks when the doctor has finished her exam and helped her sit up.
Holmes checks her phone. She was definitely called straight from bed, her hair shoved back haphazardly in a clip that doesn’t quite manage to hit contained. She’s in worn jeans and a shirt so faded it’s impossible to tell what the lettering used to read, her feet shoved into two different kinds of sandal. “Detective Mignone is almost to your house, sweetheart.”
What the shit?
Nancy, sitting in a chair by the bed, looks up at us anxiously.
It’s the same bear. It is absolutely, definitely the same bear, and this is very clearly a pregnant twelve-year-old. So why is the rest of it so bizarre?
“Ava,” Watts says calmly, standing at the foot of the bed. “Did you know you’re pregnant?”
“Well, yeah,” the girl answers, still looking politely baffled.
That’s not the answer Watts was expecting, but she’s too good to show it. “Do you know who the father is, Ava?”
“My daddy.”
El mundo está en guerra. Por lo que solo hay que dejar que se queme.
“I’ve been asking for a little sister for years,” she continues, oblivious to the carefully contained reactions of the rest of us. “Mom said she got hurt when I was born, and can’t have any more kids in her belly, so I’m doing it.” Her brilliant smile falters a bit when we don’t say anything. “What’s wrong?”
“Your mom knew?”
“It was her idea, but it made Daddy really happy. He called us his smart girls. What’s wrong?” she asks again, starting to look a little worried.
Holmes tilts her phone toward me, the screen bright with a new message from Mignone. Parents are dead. Negative spaces indicate there was only the killer. Tylenol PM packets in the girl’s room.
“Ava, do you ever take anything to help you sleep?”
She nods slowly. “Growing a baby is tiring. Mom says I have to get lots of sleep so my sister and I will both be healthy. She looked it up and everything.”
So if a pregnant child took an adult dose of a sleep aid, the killer probably couldn’t wake her up enough to register what was happening.
“Why is everyone so . . .”
“Ava, what your parents did . . . it’s illegal, sweetheart, and it’s not healthy.”
“No, Mom has been getting me all my vitamins and everything. I’m fine.”
Watts shares a look with Nancy, who leans forward in her chair. “No matter what you’re taking or how you’re eating or sleeping, Ava, your body isn’t ready for everything that being pregnant or delivering a baby requires. As you get further along, you’re going to be in a lot of danger. And when Agent Watts said it was illegal . . . legally you can’t consent to anything like that until you’re older. For a parent to do it—”
“No,” Ava retorts, clutching the bears tightly. “My parents love me and we’re all really happy. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
Holmes looks exhausted. She’s undoubtedly been juggling other cases with this one, which means she probably hasn’t had a solid night’s rest in weeks.
I cross the room to stand between Watts and Nancy. “Ava, do you remember how you got to the hospital?”
She frowns at that, her fingers running anxiously along the crinkling gold halo of one of the bears. It’s strikingly similar to praying a rosary, and it’s everything I can do not to close my eyes against the sight, the memory of a string of metal and glass around my mother’s palm. “Not really,” she says eventually. “I fall asleep to the TV sometimes. My dad carries me to bed.”
“You were brought here by a stranger, Ava, someone who knew that your parents got you pregnant and was really angry about it. She brought you here so you’d be safe until you were found, but . . . Ava, I’m really sorry, but she killed your parents.”
There is no good way to tell a child that. I don’t know if there’s a good way to tell anyone that, if it comes to it, but certainly not a child.
She blinks, and stares at me blankly. “What?”
“Detective Mignone went out to your house to find your parents,” I remind her gently. “He found your parents dead. Someone had killed them. And because she brought you here, because we recognize the bears she gave you, we know it’s the same person who’s killed other kids’ parents recently.”
“No.” Her head shakes, increasingly frantic. “No, you’re lying. You’re lying!”
Nancy and the nurse both rush in to calm her as she breaks into hysterics. No tears yet—the shock is too fresh—but her screams are piercing and pained and the heart monitor is shrieking right along with her.