Michael Crichton - A Case of Need

The campus is beautiful, particularly in autumn, when the leaves are turning. Even in the rain, it’s beautiful. I went directly to the college information office and looked up Karen Randall in the paperback directory of students and faculty. I was given a map of the campus and set out for her dorm, Henley Hall.

It turned out to be a white frame house on Wilbur Street. There were forty girls living inside. On the ground floor was a living room done in bright, small-print fabric, rather foolishly feminine. Girls wandered around in dungarees and long, ironed hair. There was a bell desk by the door.

“I’d like to see Karen Randall,” I said to the girl.

She gave me a startled look, as if she thought I might be a middle-aged rapist.

“I’m her uncle,” I said. “Dr. Berry.”

“I’ve been away all weekend,” the girl said. “I haven’t seen Karen since I got back. She went to Boston this weekend.”

I was in luck: this girl apparently didn’t know. I wondered whether the other girls did; it was impossible to tell. It seemed likely that her housemother would know, or would find out soon. I wanted to avoid the housemother.

“Oh,” said the girl behind the desk. “There’s Ginnie. Ginnie’s her roommate.”

A dark-haired girl was walking out the door. She wore tight dungarees and a tight poor-boy sweater, but the overall effect remained oddly prim. Something about her face disowned the rest of her body.

The desk girl waved Ginnie over and said, “This is Dr. Berry. He’s looking for Karen.”

Ginnie gave me a shocked look. She knew. I quickly took her and steered her to the living room, and sat her down.

“But Karen’s—”

“I know,” I said. “But I want to talk to you.”

“I think I’d better check with Miss Peters,” Ginnie said. She started to get up. I pushed her gently back down.

“Before you do,” I said, “I’d better tell you that I attended Karen’s autopsy yesterday.”

Her hand went to her mouth.

“I’m sorry to be so blunt, but there are serious questions that only you can answer. We both know what Miss Peters would say.”

“She’d say I can’t talk to you,” Ginnie said. She was looking at me suspiciously, but I could see I had caught her curiosity.

“Let’s go someplace private,” I said.

“I don’t know…”

“I’ll only keep you a few minutes.”

She got up and nodded toward the hall. “Men aren’t normally allowed in our rooms,” she said, “but you’re a relative, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

Ginnie and Karen shared a room on the ground floor, at the back of the building. It was small and cramped, cluttered with feminine mementos—pictures of boys, letters, joke birthday cards, programs from Ivy football games, bits of ribbon, schedules of classes, bottles of perfume, stuffed toy animals. Ginnie sat on one bed and waved me to a desk chair.

“Miss Peters told me last night,” Ginnie said, “that Karen had…died in an accident. She asked me not to mention it to anyone for a while. It’s funny. I never knew anybody who died—I mean, my age, that kind of thing—and it’s funny. I mean peculiar, I didn’t feel anything, I couldn’t get very worked up. I guess I don’t really believe it yet.”

“Did you know Karen before you were roommates?”

“No. The college assigned us.”

“Did you get along?”

She shrugged. Somehow, she had learned to make every bodily gesture a wiggle. But it was unreal, like a practiced gesture perfected before the mirror.

“I guess we got along. Karen wasn’t your typical freshman. She wasn’t scared of the place, and she was always going away for a day or the weekend. She practically never went to class, and she always talked about how she hated it here. That’s the thing to say, you know, but she meant it, she really did. I think she really did hate it.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because of the way she acted. Not going to class, always leaving campus. She’d sign out for weekends, saying she was going to visit her parents. But she never did, she told me. She hated her parents.”

Ginnie got up and opened a closet door. Inside, tacked to the door, was a large glossy photograph of J. D. Randall. The picture was covered with minute punctures.

“You know what she used to do? She used to throw darts at this picture. That’s her father, he’s a surgeon or something; she threw darts at him every night, before going to sleep.”

Ginnie closed the door.

“What about her mother?”

“Oh, she liked her mother. Her real mother; she died. There’s a stepmother now. Karen never liked her very much.”

“What else did Karen talk about?”

“Boys,” Ginnie said, sitting on the bed again. “That’s all any of us talk about. Boys. Karen went to private school around here someplace, and she knew a lot of boys. Yalies were always coming to see her.”

“Did she date anyone in particular?”

“I don’t think so. She had lots of guys. They were all chasing her.”

“Popular?”

“Or something,” Ginnie said, wrinkling her nose. “Listen, it isn’t nice to say things about her now, you know? And I have no reason to think it’s true. Maybe it’s all a big story.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you get here as a freshman and nobody knows you, nobody’s ever heard of you before, and you can tell people anything you like and get away with it. I used to tell people I was a high-school cheerleader, just for the fun of it. Actually I went to private school, but I always wanted to be a high-school cheerleader.”

“I see.”

“They’re so wholesome, you know?”

“What kind of stories did Karen tell you?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t exactly stories. Just sort of implications. She liked people to believe that she was wild, and all her friends were wild. Actually, that was her favorite word: wild. And she knew how to make something sound real. She never just told you straight out, in a whole long thing. It was little comments here and there. About her abortions and all.”

“Her abortions?”

“She said she had had two before she ever got to college. Now that’s pretty incredible, don’t you think? Two abortions? She was only seventeen, after all. I told her I didn’t believe it, so she went into this explanation of how it was done, the complete explanation. Then I wasn’t so sure.”

A girl from a medical family could easily acquire a knowledge of the mechanics of a D & C. That didn’t prove she’d had an abortion herself.

“Did she tell you anything specific about them? Where they were done?”

“No. She just said she’d had them. And she kept saying things like that. She wanted to shock me, I know that, but she could be pretty crude when she wanted. I remember the first—no, the second weekend we were here, she went out Saturday night, and she got back late. I went to a mixer. Karen came in all a mess, crawled into bed with the lights out, and said, ‘Jesus, I love black meat.’ Just like that. I didn’t know what to say, I mean, I didn’t know her well then, so I didn’t say anything. I just thought she was trying to shock me.”

“What else did she say to you?”

Ginnie shrugged. “I can’t remember. It was always little things. One night, as she’s getting ready to go out for the weekend, and she’s whistling in front of the mirror, she says to me, ‘I’m really going to get it this weekend.’ Or something like that, I don’t remember the exact words.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said, ‘Enjoy yourself.’ What can you say when you get out of the shower and somebody says that to you? So she said, ‘I will, I will.’ She was always coming up with shocking little comments.”