In the night room Page 0,107
of caution.”
“She was here, though,” Tim said. “Lily Kalendar.”
“She had literally nowhere else to go. As I told you on the phone, she was taken into care at the age of nine. According to her father, the girl’s mother had run off two months earlier, and he could not cope with raising two children. The son was being trained as a carpenter, but the girl gave him problems he couldn’t solve. The caseworkers agreed, and she came to us. Later, we thought he’d sent her away to save her life. And maybe it was the only way he could stop abusing her.”
“I knew he loved her,” Willy said.
“What exactly is your role here?” asked the matron.
“Willy is my assistant,” Tim told her. “She’s been very involved with this project.”
“And you say the project is a book about Lily Kalendar. My first question is, will it be fiction or nonfiction?”
“Probably some combination of the two.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Underhill, but what is the point of mixing genres? Doesn’t combining fiction with fact merely give you license to be sloppy with the facts?”
“I think it’s the other way around,” Tim said. “Fiction lets me really get the facts right. It’s a way of reaching a kind of truth I wouldn’t otherwise be able to discover.”
She smiled at him. “Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m a big fan of your work. I love those books you wrote with your collaborator.”
He thanked her.
“Let’s go back to the subject of your good fortune. As you will surely understand, I have to be very scrupulous. We make our records open to the public, which includes researchers like yourself, only if the person in or formerly in care, or the legal guardian, gives us permission to do so. Your first bit of luck was that one of your readers is the head of this institution. I made two phone calls on your behalf. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s worth two hundred dollars to our Big Brothers Big Sisters program.”
Tim nodded, forcing himself to appear relaxed.
“As a result of these calls, I can give you the following information.” She opened a folder on her desk. Then she put on a pair of reading glasses and peered down. “The Kalendar girl was first taken into care in 1974. The matron in those days was Georgia Lathem, and she made some unusual notations in the girl’s file. It seems Miss Lathem found the girl exceptionally closed off, emotionally numb, prone to acts of violence against the other children, liable to nightmares. She also observed that the girl was extraordinarily intelligent and strikingly beautiful.”
She looked up. “Now, you see, Miss Lathem and all the rest of the staff would have been quite aware of the Kalendar girl’s background. I don’t mean murder, because in 1974 no one knew about that, but the site inspections had made it pretty clear that the child had been raised by a very disturbed man.
“We are always looking for good foster parents for the children in our care, and Miss Lathem eventually came upon a couple that seemed perfect. Guy and Diane Huntress had successfully fostered three children some years before—they seemed to specialize in turning around some of our most damaged children. Miss Lathem arranged a meeting, the Huntresses agreed to take Lily into their home. Things went on, lots of ups and downs but mainly ups, until 1979, when Guy Huntress unexpectedly died.”
Mercedes Romola looked directly at Tim. “And what else happened in 1979, Mr. Underhill?”
“Joseph Kalendar was arrested for multiple homicides. The police found only a few fragments of the bodies, because he burned most of his victims in his furnace.”
“The Kalendar scandal exploded. Mrs. Huntress feared what might happen to the child in school. It seemed to her that Lily would fare better back here in the shelter. But children can be so cruel—she went through two really lousy years. It’s no fun being an outcast. She was humiliated over and over. Face in the toilet, things like that.”
“What school did she go to?” Willy asked, with the air of one sticking an oar into a swiftly running river.
“While she was with Diane Huntress, Grace and Favor Elementary School in Sundown, Slater Middle School, and Augment High. Why?”
“I was under the impression she went to Lawrence Freeman.”
“The elementary school down in what they used to call Pigtown? Why would you think she went there?”
“Sorry, sorry, my mistake,” Willy said.
The matron looked back at her papers, then glanced up