“Write it for me, honey.”
The girl squeezed the pen so hard that her knuckles were white and nearly as sharp as the knuckles on a skeleton’s fleshless hand. She looked down at the notebook. She stopped retching, but she continued to quiver.
Carol crouched beside the wing chair, where she could see the notebook. “What is it you want to say?”
Her hand shaking like that of a palsied old woman, Jane hurriedly scrawled two words that were barely legible: Help me.
“Why do you need help?”
Again: Help me.
“Why can’t you speak?”
Head.
“Be more specific.”
My head.
“What about your head?”
The girl’s hand began to form a letter, then jumped down one line and made another false start, jumped to a third line—as if she couldn’t figure out how to express what she wanted to say. At last, in a frenzy, she started slashing at the paper with the felt-tipped pen, making a meaningless crosshatching of black lines.
“Stop it!” Carol said. “You will relax, dammit. Be calm.”
Jane stopped slashing at the paper. She was silent, staring down at the notebook on her lap.
Carol tore off the smeared page and threw it on the floor. “Okay. Now you’re going to answer my questions calmly and as fully as you can. What is your name?”
Millie.
Carol stared at the handwritten name, wondering what had happened to Laura Havenswood. “Millie? Are you sure that’s your name?” Millicent Parker.
“Where is Laura?”
Who’s Laura?
Carol stared at the girl’s drawn face. The perspiration was beginning to dry on her porcelain-smooth skin. Her blue eyes were blank, unfocused. Her mouth was slack.
Carol abruptly flashed a hand past the girl’s face. Jane didn’t flinch. She wasn’t faking the trance.
“Where do you live, Millicent?”
Harrisburg.
“Right here in town. What’s your address?”
Front Street.
“Along the river? Do you know the number?” The girl wrote it down.
“What’s your father’s name?”
Randolph Parker.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
The pen made a meaningless squiggle on the notebook page.
“What’s your mother’s name?” Carol repeated.
The girl surrendered to a new series of spasmic tremors. She retched soundlessly and put her hands to her throat once more. The felt-tipped pen made a black mark on the underside of her chin.
Apparently, the mere mention of her mother frightened her. That was territory that would have to be explored, though not right now.
Carol talked her down, calmed her, and asked a new question. “How old are you, Millie?”
Tomorrow’s my birthday.
“Is it really? How old will you be?”
I won’t make it.
“What won’t you make?”
Sixteen.
“Are you fifteen now?”
Yes.
“And you think you won’t live to be sixteen? Is that it?”
Won’t live.
“Why not?”
The sheen of sweat had nearly evaporated from the girl’s face, but again perspiration popped out along her hairline.
“Why won’t you live to see your birthday?” Carol persisted.
As before, the girl used the felt-tipped pen to slash angrily at the notebook.
“Stop that,” Carol said firmly. “Relax and be calm and answer my question.” She tore the ruined page out of the book and tossed it aside, then said, “Why won’t you live to see your sixteenth birthday, Millie?”
Head.
So we’re back to this, Carol thought. She said, “What about your head? What’s wrong with it?”
Cut off.
Carol stared at those two words for a moment, then looked up at the girl’s face.
Millie-Jane was struggling to remain calm, as Carol had told her she must. But her eyes jiggled nervously, and there was horror in them. Her lips were utterly colorless, tremulous. Beneath the rivulets of sweat that coursed down her forehead, her skin was waxy and mealy white.
She continued to scribble frantically in the note-book, but all she wrote was the same thing over and over again: Cut cut off, cut off cut off… She was bearing down on the page with such great pressure that the head of the felt-tipped pen was squashed into shapeless mush.
My God, Carol thought, this is like a live report from the bottom of Hell.
Laura Havenswood. Millicent Parker. One girl screaming in pain as fire consumed her, the other a victim of decapitation. What did either of those girls have to do with Jane Doe? She couldn’t be both of them. Perhaps she wasn’t either of them. Were they people she had known? Or were they only figments of her imagination?