Midnight Rain: A Detective Jack Dunning Novel by Arlette Lees Page A
Authors: Arlette Lees
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stony ground to the administration building.
The janitorial staff has arrived, their truck parked outside the main entrance. She enters the double doors and sees no one in the hall, just a broom and floor buffer against the wall, the crew busy on the second floor. She hurries to the records room, closes the door and snaps on the desk lamp.
Patty Gregson. Velma Becker. Sarah Levin. Once she heard the names spoken into the short wave she couldn’t get them out of her head. She’s convinced that something other than their disappearances links the three girls. They’re listed as runaways, but she doesn’t think it’s that simple.
Penny sets her key ring and flashlight on the desk. In the top drawer is the key that opens the metal file cabinet. She pulls the girl’s charts and takes a seat at the desk. She starts with Patty Gregson and flips through the text. Age thirteen. Grade seven. After giving birth to Patty’s little sister, Patty’s mother kept repeating, “Thank God, I finally have a perfect child.”
Feeling worthless and rejected, Patty smothered the baby in retaliation. She attempted suicide twice before confessing to the crime. After counseling at Saguaro, she’d become less self-destructive and her grades went from straight F’s to D’s and C’s. Penny studies the snapshot in Patty’s file. Patty is a waif with limp blond hair and a purple birthmark that covers the entire right side of her face, not the child her mother felt she deserved.
Penny sets the file aside and opens Velma Becker’s chart.
Velma Becker, age fifteen, grade nine, smashed the statue of St. Bernadette and poured bleach in the grotto, killing the goldfish at St. Sebastian’s Church in Dry Rock. She accused Father Jerome of seducing her and her mother of aborting her when she became pregnant with his child. Both the priest and mother vehemently denied the accusations. Since her incarceration, Velma has developed a violent stammer and finally stopped talking entirely. Her photo reveals a bitter, smoldering fury… the look of a child betrayed.
Next is Sarah Levin, the only girl with whom Penny is acquainted. Sarah is endowed with Biblical beauty: deep brown eyes, shiny black hair and golden-olive complexion. When Sarah’s mother died, she left Sarah a college fund. When her father remarried, his new wife purchased a sable coat, draining the account. Sarah sent the fancy fur through the wash cycle of the Maytag and squeezed it through the ringer. The girl was a straight A student and only had a month to go before release from Saguaro. Why run away with only 30 days to go? It made no sense.
The three girls are different from one another in age, grade and offence, yet they vanished at the same time. Before that night it’s doubtful they came closer to one another than passing in the hall. Mrs. Coleman, the dorm matron, said they never made it to roll call on the night they went missing. It was assumed they hid on the grounds, then fled under cover of darkness. Penny doubts that scenario.
She examines each file one more time, squinting at photos, rereading the text. She closes her eyes and concentrates. Patty had a birth mark, Velma, a stutter. That’s a vague connection, but only between the two. Sarah has neither disfigurement nor disability.
Blut. Reinheit. Mangel.
The words spin inside her head.
Blood. Purity. Defect.
Penny lets out a gasp and tosses the files back in the cabinet. She turns off the lamp, drops her flashlight and retrieves it. When she rises, her heel catches her hem and rips her skirt. Suddenly, everything makes sense and a frightening, almost incomprehensible, theory takes shape.
The housekeeping staff starts down the stairs to the clatter of buckets and mops. Penny snaps off the light, bolts down the hall and out the door. It isn’t until she’s outside that she realizes she’s left her key ring behind and the key to the unlocked file cabinet is still in her hand.
* * * *
Hedy Greiss watches
The janitorial staff has arrived, their truck parked outside the main entrance. She enters the double doors and sees no one in the hall, just a broom and floor buffer against the wall, the crew busy on the second floor. She hurries to the records room, closes the door and snaps on the desk lamp.
Patty Gregson. Velma Becker. Sarah Levin. Once she heard the names spoken into the short wave she couldn’t get them out of her head. She’s convinced that something other than their disappearances links the three girls. They’re listed as runaways, but she doesn’t think it’s that simple.
Penny sets her key ring and flashlight on the desk. In the top drawer is the key that opens the metal file cabinet. She pulls the girl’s charts and takes a seat at the desk. She starts with Patty Gregson and flips through the text. Age thirteen. Grade seven. After giving birth to Patty’s little sister, Patty’s mother kept repeating, “Thank God, I finally have a perfect child.”
Feeling worthless and rejected, Patty smothered the baby in retaliation. She attempted suicide twice before confessing to the crime. After counseling at Saguaro, she’d become less self-destructive and her grades went from straight F’s to D’s and C’s. Penny studies the snapshot in Patty’s file. Patty is a waif with limp blond hair and a purple birthmark that covers the entire right side of her face, not the child her mother felt she deserved.
Penny sets the file aside and opens Velma Becker’s chart.
Velma Becker, age fifteen, grade nine, smashed the statue of St. Bernadette and poured bleach in the grotto, killing the goldfish at St. Sebastian’s Church in Dry Rock. She accused Father Jerome of seducing her and her mother of aborting her when she became pregnant with his child. Both the priest and mother vehemently denied the accusations. Since her incarceration, Velma has developed a violent stammer and finally stopped talking entirely. Her photo reveals a bitter, smoldering fury… the look of a child betrayed.
Next is Sarah Levin, the only girl with whom Penny is acquainted. Sarah is endowed with Biblical beauty: deep brown eyes, shiny black hair and golden-olive complexion. When Sarah’s mother died, she left Sarah a college fund. When her father remarried, his new wife purchased a sable coat, draining the account. Sarah sent the fancy fur through the wash cycle of the Maytag and squeezed it through the ringer. The girl was a straight A student and only had a month to go before release from Saguaro. Why run away with only 30 days to go? It made no sense.
The three girls are different from one another in age, grade and offence, yet they vanished at the same time. Before that night it’s doubtful they came closer to one another than passing in the hall. Mrs. Coleman, the dorm matron, said they never made it to roll call on the night they went missing. It was assumed they hid on the grounds, then fled under cover of darkness. Penny doubts that scenario.
She examines each file one more time, squinting at photos, rereading the text. She closes her eyes and concentrates. Patty had a birth mark, Velma, a stutter. That’s a vague connection, but only between the two. Sarah has neither disfigurement nor disability.
Blut. Reinheit. Mangel.
The words spin inside her head.
Blood. Purity. Defect.
Penny lets out a gasp and tosses the files back in the cabinet. She turns off the lamp, drops her flashlight and retrieves it. When she rises, her heel catches her hem and rips her skirt. Suddenly, everything makes sense and a frightening, almost incomprehensible, theory takes shape.
The housekeeping staff starts down the stairs to the clatter of buckets and mops. Penny snaps off the light, bolts down the hall and out the door. It isn’t until she’s outside that she realizes she’s left her key ring behind and the key to the unlocked file cabinet is still in her hand.
* * * *
Hedy Greiss watches
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