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  “Did your car break down somewhere out here?”

  “No.”

  “You got family that lives around here?”

  “I don’t have a family.”

  Despite his passenger’s brusque tone, Charlie, who had three grown sons of his own back in New York, had the distinct feeling the boy was exerting every ounce of his control to keep his emotions in check. He waited a few minutes before asking, “You got a name?”

  “Zack . . .” he replied, and after a hesitant pause, he added, “ . . . Benedict.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Wherever you’re going.”

  “I’m going all the way to the West Coast. Los Angeles.”

  “Fine,” he said in a tone that discouraged further conversation. “It doesn’t matter.”

  It was hours later when the young man spoke voluntarily for the first time. “Do you need any help unloading this rig when you get to Los Angeles?”

  Charlie looked sideways at him, quickly revising his initial conclusions about Zack Benedict. He dressed like a rich kid and he had the diction of a rich kid, but this particular rich kid was evidently out of money, out of his element, and down on his luck. He was also perfectly willing to swallow his pride and do ordinary manual labor, which Charlie thought showed a certain amount of grit, all things considered. “You look like you could handle the heavy lifting easy enough,” he said, casting a quick, appraising eye over Benedict’s tall, well-muscled body. “You been working out with weights or something?”

  “I used to box at—I used to box,” he amended shortly.

  At college, Charlie finished mentally, and maybe it was because Benedict somehow reminded him of his own boys when they were his age and trying to tough things out or maybe it was because he sensed that Zack Benedict’s problems were pretty desperate, but he decided to give him some work. Having readied that decision, Charlie held out his hand. “My name’s Murdock, Charlie Murdock. I can pay you much, but at least you’ll get a chance to see an honest-to-God movie lot when we get to L.A. This truck’s loaded with props that belong to Empire Studios. I got a contract to do some of their hauling, and that’s where we’re going.”

  Benedict’s grim indifference to that information somehow added to Charlie’s conviction that his passenger was not only broke but probably had no idea of how to rectify the problem in the near future. “If you do a good job for me, maybe I could put in a word for you at Empire’s hiring office—that is, if you don’t mind pushing a broom or using your back?”

  His passenger turned his face to the side window, staring out into the darkness again. Just when Charlie had reversed his earlier opinion and decided that Benedict actually thought he was too good to do menial labor, the young man spoke in a voice that was hoarse with relief and embarrassed gratitude. “Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

  1

  1978

  “I’M MRS. BOROWSKI FROM THE LaSalle Foster Care facility,” the middle-aged woman announced as she marched across the Oriental carpet toward the receptionist, a shopping bag from Woolworth’s over her arm. Gesturing toward the petite eleven-year-old who trailed along behind her, she added coldly, “And this is Julie Smith. She’s here to see Dr. Theresa Wilmer. I’ll come back for her after I finish my shopping.”

  The receptionist smiled at the youngster. “Dr. Wilmer will be with you in a little while, Julie. In the meantime, you can sit over there and fill out as much of this card as you can. I forgot to give it to you when you were here before.”

  Self-consciously aware of her shabby jeans and grubby jacket, Julie glanced uneasily at the elegant waiting room where fragile porcelain figurines reposed on an antique coffee table and valuable bronze sculptures were displayed on marble stands. Giving the table with its fragile knickknacks a wide berth, she headed for a chair beside a huge aquarium where exotic goldfish with flowing fins swam leisurely among lacy greenery. Behind her, Mrs. Borowski poked her head back into the room and warned the receptionist, “Julie will steal anything that isn’t nailed down. She’s sneaky and quick, so you better watch her like a hawk.”

  Drowning in humiliated anger, Julie slumped down in the chair, then she stretched her legs straight out in front of her in a deliberate attempt to appear utterly bored and unaffected by Mrs. Borowski’s horrible remarks, but her effect was spoiled by the bright red flags of embarrassed color that stained her cheeks and the fact that her legs couldn’t reach the floor.

  After a moment she wriggled up from the uncomfortable position and looked with dread at the card the receptionist had given her to complete. Knowing she’d not be able to figure out the words, she gave it a try anyway. Her tongue clenched between her teeth, she concentrated fiercely on the printing on the card. The first word began with an N like the word NO on the NO PARKING signs that lined the streets—she knew what those signs said because one of her friends had told her. The next letter on the card was an a, like the one in cat, but the word wasn’t cat. Her hand tightened on the yellow pencil as she fought back the familiar feelings of frustration and angry despair that swamped her whenever she was expected to read something. She’d learned the word cat in first grade, but nobody ever wrote that word anywhere! Glowering at the incomprehensible words on the card, she wondered furiously why teachers taught kids to read dumb words like cat when nobody ever wrote cat anywhere except in stupid books for first graders.

  But the books weren’t stupid, Julie reminded herself, and neither were the teachers. Other kids her age could probably have read this dumb card in a blink! She was the one who couldn’t read a word on it, she was the one who was stupid.

  On the other hand, Julie told herself, she knew a whole lot about things that other kids knew nothing about, because she made a point of noticing things. And one of the things she’d noticed was that when people handed you something to fill out, they almost always expected you to write your name on it . . .

  With painstaking neatness, she printed J-u-l-i-e-S-m-i-t-h across the top half of the card, then she stopped, unable to fill out any more of the spaces. She felt herself getting angry again and rather than feeling bad about this silly piece of paper, she decided to think of something nice, like the feeling of wind on her face in springtime. She was conjuring a vision of herself stretched out beneath a big leafy tree, watching squirrels scampering in the branches overhead, when the receptionist’s pleasant voice made her head snap up in guilty alarm.

  “Is something wrong with your pencil, Julie?”

  Julie dug the lead point against her jeans and snapped it off. “The lead’s broken.”

  “Here’s another—”

  “My hand is sore today,” she lied, lurching to her feet. “I don’t feel like writing. And I have to go to the bathroom. Where is it?”

  “Right beside the elevators. Dr. Wilmer will be ready to see you pretty soon. Don’t be gone too long.”

  “I won’t,” Julie dutifully replied. After closing the office door behind her, she turned to look up at the name on it and carefully studied the first few letters so she’d be able to recognize this particular door when she came back. “P,” she whispered aloud so she wouldn’t forget, “S. Y.” Satisfied, she headed down the long, carpeted hall, turned left at the end of it, and made a right by the water fountain, but when she finally came to the elevators, she discovered there were two doors there with words on them. She was almost positive these were the bathrooms because, among the bits of knowledge she’d carefully stored away was the fact that bathroom doors in big buildings usually had a different kind of handle than ordinary office doors. The problem was that neither of these doors said BOYS or GIRLS—two words she could recognize, nor did they have those nice stick figures of a man and woman that told people like her which bathroom to use. Very cautiously, Julie put her hand on one of the doors, eased it open a crack, and peeked inside. She backed up in a hurry when she spotted those funny-looking toilets on the wall because there were two other things she knew that she doubted other girls knew: Men u
sed weird-looking toilets. And they went a little crazy if a girl opened the door while they were doing it Julie opened the other door and trooped into the right bathroom.

  Conscious of time passing, she left the bathroom and hurriedly retraced her steps until she neared the part of the corridor where Dr. Wilmer’s office should have been, then she began laboriously studying the names on the doors. Dr. Wilmer’s name began with a P-S-Y. She spied a P-E-T on the next door, decided she’d remembered the letters wrong, and quickly shoved it open. An unfamiliar, gray-haired woman looked up from her typewriter. “Yes?”

  “Sorry, wrong room,” Julie mumbled, flushing. “Do you know where Dr. Wilmer’s office is?”

  “Dr. Wilmer?”

  “Yes, you know—Wilmer—it starts with a P-S-Y!”

  “P-S-Y . . . Oh, you must mean Psychological Associates! That’s suite twenty-five-sixteen, down the hall.”

  Normally, Julie would have pretended to understand and continued going into offices until she found the right one, but she was too worried about being late now to pretend. “Would you spell that out for me?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The numbers!” she said desperately. “Spell them out like this: three—six—nine—four—two. Say it that way.”

  The woman looked at her like she was an idiot, which Julie knew she was, but she hated it when other people noticed. After an irritated sigh, the woman said, “Dr. Wilmer is in suite two—five—one—six.”

  “Two—five—one—six,” Julie repeated.

  “That’s the fourth door on the left,” she added.

  “Well!” Julie cried in frustration. “Why didn’t you just say that in the first place!”

  Dr. Wilmer’s receptionist looked up when Julie walked in. “Did you get lost, Julie?”

  “Me? No way!” Julie lied with an emphatic shake of her curly head as die returned to her chair. Unaware that she was being observed through what looked like an ordinary minor, she turned her attention to the aquarium beside her chair. The first thing she noticed was that one of the beautiful fish had died and that two others were swimming around it as if contemplating eating it. Automatically, she tapped her finger on the glass to scare them away, but a moment later they returned. “There’s a dead fish in there,” she told the receptionist, trying to sound only slightly concerned. “I could take it out for you.”

  “The cleaning people will remove it tonight, but thank you for offering.”

  Julie swallowed an irate protest at what she felt was needless cruelty to the dead fish. It wasn’t right for anything so wonderfully beautiful and so helpless to be left in there like that. Picking up a magazine from the coffee table, she pretended to look at it, but from the corner of her eye she kept up her surveillance of the two predatory fish. Each time they returned to prod and poke their deceased comrade, she stole a glance at the receptionist to make sure she wasn’t watching, then Julie reached out as casually as possible and tapped the glass to scare them off.

  A few feet away, in her office on the other side of the two-way mirror, Dr. Theresa Wilmer watched the entire little scenario, her eyes alight with a knowing smile as she watched Julie’s gallant attempt to protect a dead fish while maintaining a facade of indifference for the sake of the receptionist. Glancing at the man beside her, another psychiatrist who’d recently begun donating some of his time to her special project, Dr. Wilmer said wryly, “There she is, ‘Julie the terrible,’ the adolescent terror who some foster care officials have judged to be not only ‘learning-disabled,’ but unmanageable, a bad influence on her peers, and also ‘a troublemaker bound for juvenile delinquency.’ Did you know,” she continued, her voice taking on a shade of amused admiration, “that she actually organized a hunger strike at LaSalle? She talked forty-five children, most of whom were older than she, into going along with her to demand better food.”

  Dr. John Frazier peered through the two-way mirror at the little girl. “I suppose she did that because she had an underlying need to challenge authority?”

  “No,” Dr. Wilmer replied dryly, “she did it because she had an underlying need for better food. The food at LaSalle is nutritious but tasteless. I sampled some.”

  Frazier flashed a startled look at his associate. “What about her thefts? You can’t ignore that problem so easily.”

  Leaning her shoulder against the wall, Terry tipped her head to the child in the waiting room and said with a smile, “Have you ever heard of Robin Hood?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Because you’re looking at a modern-day adolescent version of Robin Hood out there. Julie can filch the gold right out of your teeth without your knowing it, she’s that quick.”

  “I hardly think that’s a recommendation for sending her to live with your unsuspecting Texas cousins, which is what I understand you intend to do.”

  Dr. Wilmer shrugged. “Julie steals food or clothing or playthings, but she doesn’t keep anything. She gives her booty to the younger kids at LaSalle.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Positive. I’ve checked it out.”

  A reluctant smile tugged at John Frazier’s lips as he studied the little girl. “She looks more like a Peter Pan than a Robin Hood. She’s not at all what I expected, based on her file.”

  “She surprised me, too,” Dr. Wilmer admitted. According to Julie’s file, the director of the LaSalle Foster Care Facility, where she now resided, had deemed her to be “a discipline problem with a predilection for truancy, troublemaking, theft, and hanging around with unsavory male companions.” After all the unfavorable comments in Julie’s file, Dr. Wilmer had fully expected Julie Smith to be a belligerent, hardened girl whose constant association with young males probably indicated early physical development and even sexual activity. For that reason, she’d nearly gaped at Julie when the child sauntered into her office two months ago, looking like a grubby little pixie in jeans and a tattered sweatshirt, with short-cropped dark, curly hair. Instead of the budding femme fatale Dr. Wilmer had expected, Julie Smith had a beguiling gamin face that was dominated by an enormous pair of thick-lashed eyes the startling color of dark blue pansies. In contrast to that piquant little face and innocently beguiling eyes, there was a boyish bravado in the way she’d stood in front of Dr. Wilmer’s desk that first day with her small chin thrust out and her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans.

  Theresa had been captivated at that first meeting, but her fascination with Julie had begun even before that—almost from the moment she’d opened her file at home one night and began reading her responses to the battery of tests that was part of the evaluating process that Theresa herself had recently developed. By the time she was finished, Theresa had a firm grasp of the workings of the child’s facile mind as well as the depth of her pain and the details of her current plight: Abandoned by her birth parents and rejected by two sets of adoptive parents, Julie had been reduced to spending her childhood on the fringes of the Chicago slums in a succession of overcrowded foster homes. As a result, throughout her life, her only source of real human warmth and support came from her companions—grubby, unkempt kids like herself whom she philosophically regarded as “her own kind,” kids who taught her to filch goods from stores and, later, to cut school with them. Her quick mind and quicker fingers had made Julie so good at both that no matter how often she was shuffled off to a new foster home, she almost immediately achieved a certain popularity and respect among her peers, so much so that a few months ago, a group of boys had condescended to demonstrate to her the various techniques they used for breaking into cars and hot-wiring them—a demonstration that resulted in the entire group of them being busted by an alert Chicago cop, including Julie, who was merely an observer.

  That day had marked Julie’s first arrest, and although Julie didn’t know it, it also marked Julie’s first real “break” because it ultimately brought her to Dr. Wilmer’s attention. After being—somewhat unjustly—arrested for attempted auto theft, Julie
was put into Dr. Wilmer’s new, experimental program that included an intensive battery of psychological tests, intelligence tests, and personal interviews and evaluations conducted by Dr. Wilmer’s group of volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists. The program was intended to divert juveniles in the care of the state from a life of delinquency and worse.

  In Julie’s case, Dr. Wilmer was adamantly committed to doing exactly that, and as everyone who knew her was aware, when Dr. Wilmer set her mind on a goal, she accomplished it. At thirty-five, Terry Wilmer had a pleasant, refined bearing, a kind smile, and a will of iron. In addition to her impressive assortment of medical degrees and a family tree that read like The Social Register, she had three other special attributes in great abundance: intuition, compassion, and total dedication. With the tireless fervor of a true evangelist dedicated to saving wayward souls, Theresa Wilmer had abandoned her thriving private practice and was now dedicated to saving those helpless adolescent victims of an overcrowded, underfunded state foster care system. To achieve her goals, Dr. Wilmer was shamelessly willing to exploit every tool at her disposal, including recruiting support from among her colleagues like John Frazier. In Julie’s case, she’d even enlisted the aid of distant cousins, who were far from wealthy but who had room in their home, and hopefully in their soft hearts, for one very special little girl.

  “I wanted you to have a peek at her,” Terry said. She reached out to draw the draperies over the glass, just as Julie suddenly stood up, looked desperately at the fish tank, and plunged both her hands into the water.

  “What the hell—” John Frazier began, then he watched in stunned silence as the girl marched toward the preoccupied receptionist with the dead fish cradled in her dripping hands.

  Julie knew she shouldn’t get water on the carpet, but she couldn’t stand to see anything as beautiful as this fish with its long, flowing fins being mangled by the others. Not certain whether the receptionist was unaware of her or simply ignoring her, she walked up close behind her chair. “Excuse me,” she blurted in an overloud voice, holding out her hands.