Sara Paretsky - A Woman’s Eye

“First thing in the morning, call the school. Ask for the principal. Whoever you get, find out Elena’s last name, her phone number…”

The woman laid her hand on Julie’s. “Please, will you call? Say it’s for me, Señora Rodriguez. Say I don’t speak very good English. That’s the truth, no?”

“Mrs. Rodriguez…”

“Please, you call me Rose. We are friends, no?”

Julie could not go back to sleep. She listened for Juanita’s father to come home from work, a tired, bemused man who moonlighted on a second job while his wife moonlighted in her fashion. Juanita had grown up a silent, angry child who beat her dolls and pulled off their arms and legs. Now she and Julie were putting them together again with glue and heavy thread, a Christmas project for the really poor. It had taken Julie a long time to make her smile, then laugh, to make her see the dolls as little Juanitas. A lot of her own angry childhood had gone into the making.

Mr. Rodriguez came home. Julie waited for the explosion, the reverberations of which would run through the building. But none came. The woman would have persuaded him the child was asleep in her bed. Julie sat up and phoned the local precinct. The only complaints involving children were drug related: downtown bookings, parents contacted.

“How about the prostitutes-any young ones?” The wildest possibility.

“They’re all young-and as old as Magdalene,” the desk sergeant said. Then: “This wasn’t a sweep night, Julie.”

Nothing came of inquiries to the local hospitals.

Julie lay back and thought about when she had last seen the youngster. Late afternoon yesterday. Probably when she was coming home to ask permission to go to Elena’s. What was she wearing besides the red, white, and green streamers? Julie couldn’t remember. The Italian colors were for the Columbus Day Street Fair. Nor could she remember Juanita’s ever mentioning Elena. She was only beginning to make friends. So, thank God for Elena. Sleep finally came.

The girl opened her eyes. She seemed to be dreaming of waking up, but she had to be still asleep. She was lying in a huge, strange bed under a blanket with her clothes on. The room was dark except for a patch of gray light in the ceiling. Curled up on her side, her thumb in her mouth, she stared at the light. It looked more like a sheet floating up there, but the flickering lights of a plane appeared and moved quickly out of sight again. She heard the roar go away. It was a skylight in the ceiling, something she had seen only in a movie.

She tried to wake up. She bit her thumb, and when it hurt she knew that she was already awake. Then she remembered what had happened to her before the sleep: the woman and a man in the dirty lobby of an old theater where she had gone to see the puppets. At the fair the woman had told her about them and promised to show her how they worked. She had wanted to learn how to make puppets and how to make them act. The woman said she was a natural. She and Julie might even use the dolls and make their own puppet show. But there weren’t any puppets, and she knew the minute the door had closed behind her that she should never, never have gone there. The woman grabbed her and covered her mouth when she started to scream; the man held her legs and roped them together, then knocked them out from under her, sat on her, pinned her arm down, and must have stuck a needle in her. The place in the hollow of her arm hurt now when she touched it. She distinctly heard him say, “Five minutes.” She tried to scratch and bite. The man swore at her and the woman said, “For Christ’s sake, Danny, do you want her looking like a battered child?” Her memory stopped right there. Now the important thing was she had to go to the bathroom.

She inched her way to the edge of the bed in the direction she was facing. Something white stood on the floor a few feet from the bed-a bucket, she made out after a few seconds of study. She would have to use it, and maybe that was what it was there for. She crawled to it. It seemed safer to stay close to the floor. She wondered if her shoes were in the bed but didn’t think so. She squatted over the bucket but nothing happened. While she waited she made out the shapes of some scary figures on the other side of the bed-a lot of chalky white people just standing. They seemed to be moving toward her. She tried to cry out, but couldn’t, and her legs were shaking. She was sure she was going to fall. She managed not to, and the figures didn’t come round the bed. They weren’t even moving. Statues? If that was what they were, could one of them be the Blessed Virgin? “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” She heard her own voice mumbling the prayer, then the beginning trickle of her water, then the gush, noisy in the pail.

She had just finished when the door opened behind her and sent a splash of light across the room. The man came in and lit a lamp on a table near the door.

“Figured out what that was for, did you? You’re a smart girl.”

She made no sound or move.

“Get back into bed and stay there till she brings your breakfast. I don’t want you messing round the studio. Do you know what a studio is? It’s where artists work.”

If she ran for the door, what would happen? He was too close to it and she couldn’t run. She couldn’t even move. Only her heart bumped inside her.

“Did you hear me? Into bed!”

“No,”

He grinned at her and took the hypodermic needle from his pocket.

She lunged, stumbling, toward the bed.

The guidance counselor, Dr. Alverez, sent Elena Cruz back to her classroom. Julie used the counselor’s phone to call Mrs. Rodriguez and tell her the news was not good. “You’d better waken your husband and then call the police, nine one one. Juanita did not go to Elena’s house at all last night. Elena was at her aunt’s house for dinner. In other words, Juanita has been missing since you last saw her. You simply must call the police.”

“Julie, please!” The woman’s voice rose hysterically.

“I’ll call you later,” Julie said and hung up.

The counselor was watching Julie with an appraising eye. “You know, don’t you, you’re the best thing that ever happened to Juanita.”

“Doesn’t help much now, does it?”

“If there’s anyone she’ll get in touch with it’s you.”

“So if I don’t hear from her, where is she? What’s the worst possibility you can think of, doctor?”

The counselor gave an enormous sigh. “That she was abducted. But if she was, she must have set herself up for it willingly-the lie about dinner at Elena’s.”

“Her mother thinks it’s all about boys,” Julie said.

“I wish it were. Ridiculous of me to say that, but the boys are a lot more interested in Juanita than she is in the boys.”

“Do you know what her home situation is like?”

Alverez nodded. “Her father works long hours. Whatever her mother does while he’s away, Juanita’s ashamed of it.”

“She usually stops at my place on the way home if I’m there. Yesterday she didn’t. I just happened to see her go by. I think she’d been to the street fair. If you’d ask her class-mates whether anyone saw her-where and what time-it would be great. When I went out not long after I saw her, I found a flyer stuck in my mail drop. Now I wonder if she put it there. Maybe. You try to think of everything. This was about a rally of the West Side women to close up the porn shops in the neighborhood.”

Alverez smiled. “Well, I can tell you this: If there’s a budding feminist in the sixth grade, it’s Juanita Rodriguez.”

“Take a bite, honey, or I’ll eat it. Didn’t your mother ever say, If you don’t eat it, I will’?”

Juanita did not answer. She was sitting at the table, the big woman between her and the door. It was daylight, but the room was lighted mostly by long tubes in the ceiling. There weren’t any windows except the one in the roof. The man, Danny, was poking around among the statues and moving some boxes. There were paintings, too, one on a three-legged stand and others stacked on their sides. Danny wasn’t doing anything, only moving things around. With his little eyes and skinny moustache he didn’t look to her like an artist.