Magic Hour

“They’re waiting for proof of kidnapping or a solid identification. It could just be a lost girl from Mystic or Forks. Technically we have no proof of a crime yet. They recommend we canvass the town . . . again. And the DSHS is putting pressure on us to identify a temporary foster parent. We’ll need to get on that. She can’t stay in the hospital forever.”

“Did you call the Laura Recovery Center?”

“And America’s Most Wanted. And the attorney general. By tomorrow this girl is going to be front page news.” Peanut’s face pleated into worried folds. “It won’t be easy to hide Julia.”

This story was going to be a hurricane of publicity, no doubt about it. And once again, Dr. Julia Cates would be in the eye of the storm.

“No,” Ellie said, frowning. “It won’t.”

GIRL IS COILED UP LIKE A YOUNG FERN IN THIS TOO-WHITE PLACE. THE ground is cold and hard; it makes her shiver sometimes and dream of her cave. While she was asleep, the Strangers changed her. She smells now of flowers and rain. She misses her own scent.

She wants to close her eyes and go to sleep, but the smells in here are all wrong. Her nose itches most of the time and her throat is so dry it hurts to swallow. She longs for her river and the roar of the water that is always leaking over the steep cliff not far from her cave. She can hear the Sun-Haired Her breathing, and her voice. It is like a thunderstorm, that voice; dangerous and scary. It makes her scoot closer to the end of the place. If she were a wolf, she could burrow through it and disappear. The idea of that makes her sad. She is thinking of Her . . . of Him, even. Of Wolf.

Without them she feels lost. She can’t live in this place where nothing green is alive and the air stinks.

She shouldn’t have run away. Him always told her it was cold and bad beyond their wood, that she had to stay hidden because in the world there were people who hurt little girls worse than Him did. Strangers.

She should have listened, but she’d been so scared for so long.

Now she will be hurt worser than the net.

They are waiting to hurt her when she comes out, but she will be too small for them to see. Like a green bug on the leaf, she will disappear.

SITTING ON AN UNCOMFORTABLE PLASTIC CHAIR IN THE CHEERILY decorated playroom, Julia stared down at the notebook in her lap. In the last hour she’d talked endlessly to the girl hidden beneath the bed, but had received no response. Her notebook remained full of questions without answers.

Teeth—dental work?

Deaf?

Stool—any evidence of diet?

Toilet trained?

Scars—age of

Ethnicity

In the early years of her residency it had become clear to everyone that Julia had a true gift for dealing with traumatized and depressed children. Even the best of her teachers and colleagues had come to her for advice. She seemed innately to understand the extreme pressures on today’s kids. All too often they ended up on the dark, back streets of downtown wherever, selling their thin bodies to pay for food and drugs. She knew how exploitation and abuse and alcohol marked a child, how families lost their elasticity and snapped apart, leaving each member adrift and searching. Most importantly, she remembered how it felt to be an outsider, and though she’d grown up and merged into the traffic of adulthood, those painful childhood memories remained. Kids opened up to her, trusted her to listen to them, to help them.

Although she hadn’t specialized in autism or brain damage rehabilitation or mental challenges, she’d dealt with those patients, of course. She knew how autistics functioned and reacted.

She knew, too, how profoundly deaf children acted before they’d learned sign language. Astoundingly, there were still places in this country—backwoods settlements and such—where deaf/mute children grew up with no ability to communicate.

But none of that seemed relevant to this case. The child’s brain scan showed no lesions or anomalies. The girl under the bed could be a perfectly normal child who’d been lost on a day hike and was now too terrified to speak up.

A perfectly normal girl who traveled with a wolf

—and howled at the moon

—and seemingly didn’t know what a toilet was for.

Julia put down her pen. She’d been silent for too long. Her best hope with this child lay in connecting. That meant communication. “I guess I can’t write my way to understanding you, can I?” she said in gentle, soothing tones.

“That’s too bad, because I enjoy writing. Probably you prefer drawing. Most girls your age do. Not that I know your age, exactly. Dr. Cerrasin believes you’re about six. I’d say you’re a little younger, but I haven’t really gotten a good look at you, have I? I’m thirty-five. Did I tell you that? I’m sure it seems old to you. Frankly, in the last year, it’s started to feel old to me, too.”

For the next two hours Julia talked about nothing. She told the girl where they were and why they were here—that everyone wanted to help her. It didn’t matter so much what she said as how she said it. The subtext on every word was Come on out, honey, I’m a safe place. But there had been no response whatsoever. Not once had so much as a finger appeared out from beneath the bed. She was about to start talking about how lonely the world could sometimes feel when a knock at the door interrupted her.

There was a scuffling sound under the bed.