Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 by Nevada Barr

auburn waves, creating a strange sweet mix of mother, Magdalene and wicked child.

"There's good and bad news," the chief ranger said. "The good news is it's over. The bad news is it's over."

Anna must have looked as baffled as she felt because Lorraine explained.

"Right after I got off the phone with Beth Dwayne's mother, she called the other parents, then the lawyers." She nodded at the mulish man.

"The girls are not to be rape-tested, not to speak with a psychologist, not to be questioned by law enforcement without a parent or guardian present and only to be given life-saving medical care."

"Are they crazy or what?" This from Dr. Gwen Littleton, who stood forgotten at Anna's elbow.

"Let's hope they are crazy," Chief Knight said. "'Or what' is too grisly to contemplate."

S I X

The chair might not have been a cone of silence, but it did strong duty as a cloak of invisibility. It was as if, once terminally seated, Heath had dropped below the spectrum of human sight: like the high notes on a whistle, only dogs were aware of her. Since she'd been given a life sentence to sit in it, Heath had inwardly-and sometimes outwardly-raged against the phenomenon.

This was the first time it had worked to her advantage. While the others were shut out, she'd been whisked into the room along with the limpet, parked in a corner, and promptly forgotten like a piece of portable equipment.

Heath had become accustomed to hospitals: the smell, the sounds- muted and annoying, as if bad things were happening just out of earshot-the impersonal intrusions of total strangers coldly intimate. Hospitals no longer frightened her. Though the emotion shamed her on a level too deep to question, she felt at home in them. They were the only place her disability served as a membership card; she was supposed to be there. In hospitals everyone was broken. Too fucking pathetic, she casti-gated herself and renewed a vow she made, broke and remade a thousand times a day, to be a good little cripple: strong and brave and cheerful.

Doctors and nurses came and went, muttered and poked. The limpet was attached to an intravenous tube. She cried silently but made no protest when the borrowed sweat suit was peeled off of her and her soiled underthings removed.

One nurse-or maybe she was a doctor, with gender no longer a factor and everyone wearing what amounted to medical pajamas-startled Heath by actually seeing her.

"You the mother?" she asked in a business-only tone of voice.

Heath shook her head, for once annoyed that she'd been noticed. The woman turned away and Heath again disappeared. The question launched an unpleasant train of thought. She was not the mother. She was not a mother. And now she never would be. Even at forty-one she'd always thought there'd be time. Now there was time, endless time, and nothing with which to fill it.

To derail this wretched locomotive, she concentrated on the limpet. Not praying. Praying was bullshit; she was done with that. Should she still believe in a personal benevolent god who saw each sparrow fall, she would have cursed the son-of-a-bitch for not catching them before they broke their little birdy backs on the rocks, never to fly again.

She did still believe in the power of emotional support, one lonely marooned human heart to another. Anyone who had climbed for a while did. On a cliff-face there was only the rope, the rock and the person with whom you climbed. Rope and rock were unforgiving. She'd learned the value of the person. Inching her chair closer, she took Beth's hand so the child would know she wasn't alone.

Busyness ended. The parade of people in scrubs dwindled to nothing. Time hitched by one palsied minute at a time on the classroom-sized clock on the wall. Heath began to wonder where the others were-the cops. the rangers, the shrinks-wonder if both she and the limpet had been forgotten.

Still holding Beth's hand, she laid her head down on the bed and drifted. A dream came, the same dream she always