“That she’s alive?”
Abe nodded.
“Blimey,” Liam muttered, kicking at a rock with his huge boot. “Orla sensed things if she touched them.”
Abe frowned, made a note.
“How so?”
“She, ummm…,” Liam reached out and cupped his fingers, “got feelings when she touched objects. If she touched my car keys, she could tell me the last place I drove, or maybe the song I was singing in the car. It was weird, but cool. We experimented with it a lot as kids, and she was dead-on every time. It scared the stuffing out of her ma. But my mom, Effie, said God had blessed Orla. Tomayto- tomahto, you know?”
Abe scratched words onto his notebook, puzzling at the ink letters.
“So, if she touched this pen, what? She could say I wrote the word ‘blessed’?”
Liam nodded.
“And she could probably say you were talking to me, and add something quirky like how you felt when you wrote it.”
“A psychic ability?”
“Sure, yeah. It’s not like we ever had a name for it. She started wearing gloves as we got older, because it bothered her. She knew things she shouldn’t. Sometimes she learned things that upset her. She was dating a guy in high school, and she touched his locker one morning and saw him standing there making out with somebody else.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure that was the least of it. She probably sensed some pretty terrible stuff. After we were about fifteen, she rarely took the gloves off.”
Abe drove home and mulled over his conversation with Liam.
His eyes flicked between Orla’s picture and the road.
He wondered if she’d kept one of the kittens, named it something quirky like Gatsby. According to Hazel, Orla loved both the novel and the movie that had come out the year before. Abe too had loved The Great Gatsby, required reading in twelfth grade English, but found Daisy to be a frustrating object of affection for the much more complex Gatsby. He had read the book several times over, and often imagined Daisy had a secret internal world of depth and mystery that Gatsby instinctively sensed, even if the author never managed to portray it.
Abe considered Orla’s strange ability to sense things. It troubled him.
The sun cast a harsh glare in Abe’s eyes and he reached up, pulling his visor down. A piece of paper fluttered out, and he caught it before it drifted into the backseat.
He read the series of letters and numbers, trying to place it. Then he remembered the gold car sitting in the parking lot at Birch Park. He had meant to call his friend at the police station and ask him to run the plate. He made a mental note to call it in the following day.
Chapter 18
Orla
Dr. Crow watched Ben wrap gauze around Orla’s head, covering her hair and face, even her eyes. He left only her mouth and nose exposed.
“Orla,” Crow said, his voice close, as if he’d stepped right to the bed. “We’re taking you down the hall for a shower. You are to remain silent. If you ignore my orders, I will punish you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Orla mumbled, though she had no intention of remaining silent.
Crow didn’t want anyone to recognize her.
He’d sedated her hours earlier and the drug still held her, made her head heavy, eyelids droop, but she fought to hold onto a shred of consciousness.
She listened as the wheels on the gurney slid over the floor, the rhythmic pat, pat, pat as they spun. Bright lights, brighter than she’d seen in days, pierced the flimsy gauze. They had strapped her arms down, but her legs were free. She waited until she heard voices, and then she screamed.
“Help me!” she shrieked, thrusting her head up on the bed, turning her head from side to side, where she could see the silhouettes of other people. “Please, they have taken me against my will. My name’s O-”
But someone had thrust a wet towel over her head, covering her face from her nose down to her chest. It didn’t merely lay there, but pressed hard, flattening her nose into her face. Orla couldn’t breathe. She choked against the towel and tried to cry out, kicking her legs and thrashing. She threw her lower body sideways. It slipped off the gurney, and the towel pulled free.
“Orla,” she howled, but the towel was already back. The gauze had slid down, and for a split second she’d glimpsed a man wearing blue jeans and a green sweater, his eyes wide.
Her head jerked back as Crow snapped the towel down hard. Rough hands shoved her legs back on the gurney and secured them with straps.
She could hear Crow’s breath, unsteady. The young man too, Ben, huffed and let out a little moan, as if he’d strained a muscle. But she couldn’t concentrate, because again the towel - heavy, thick, immovable - suffocated her. She bit at it with her teeth, tried to turn her head from side to side, panic building. The lights dimmed, and she felt a soft prick in her arm. Orla slipped into unconsciousness.
She woke with a searing headache and burning eyes.
Lying still, she listened.
“Never again. Never again,” Crow’s insistent and angry voice repeated.
She cracked open her eyes and saw a shadow moving to her right. Tilting her head, she watched him.
He slammed his fist down on a metal table, and glass bottles flew to the floor, shattering.
“Clean those up,” he barked.
Orla shifted her head to the other side and saw Ben hovering near the door. He dropped to the floor, and with bare hands brushed the glass and pills and liquid together.
“Are you a goddamn fool?” Crow shrieked, walking over and kicking Ben’s hand aside. “If you cut your hand and get insulin in your wound, you’re liable to go into insulin shock right here on the floor. Fucking idiots, the lot of you. Get up.” He yanked Ben up by the scruff of his shirt. “Get the broom.”
Orla trembled.
She wanted to touch her nose, which felt raw and sore where the towel had crushed it. She’d passed out. The man had suffocated her with the towel until she passed out.
“Give her a goddamn shower. Never again,” he hissed. “She can rot in her own filth, for all I care. The stink will kill her as quickly as anything else.”
He ripped his coat off, dropped it on the floor, and stormed from the room.
Chapter 19
Abe
“Can you run a background check on this guy?” Abe handed Deputy Waller the sheet of paper containing the license plate number from the gold car.
“Already got a suspect?”
“Hardly. I saw him at the park where Orla might have gone hiking the day she disappeared. Just chasing a hunch, I guess.”
“Sure you don’t want to be a cop? You’ve got more fire under your ass than half the guys I work with.”
Abe slapped his friend on the back.
“I’m afraid I’d shoot myself in the ass. I like to track ‘em down and leave the hard part to you.”
Waller grinned.
“I’ll call you tonight.”
Abe hung up the phone. The man’s name was Spencer Crow with an address at 311 Sapphire in Leelanau County. No prior record, nothing so much as a speeding ticket on his license plate.