The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,58
accompanied every word with a fierce jab of her finger. “But when you brought the child here, you sat right there.” She pointed to the staircase. “And you confessed! You told me what had been going on. You may have forgotten, but I haven’t.”
He broke into tears.
“I took that baby in, and I saw the state she was in. She was barely alive and she was terrified. It was months before she could sleep alone and not wake up screaming in the middle of the night. You can go on telling that shitty lie to anyone you want, but not to me!”
Juan’s face lost its color, and he looked like he was about to be violently ill. “The girl has forgotten all that,” he whispered, wiping away snot with the back of his hand. “Rosario doesn’t remember. Why can’t you forget too?”
Engrasi’s smile was bitter. “I know you, Juan. You’re not a bad man, but you’re a coward. That’s not a crime in itself, but you let yourself be manipulated by your wife. You let her drag you down into a morass of evil. Think about that.”
Juan wiped off his tears with the sleeve of his Sunday best suit. “I don’t want to talk about this.” He turned to go.
“Just a minute. I have something for you.” Engrasi pulled out the little key she wore on the chain about her neck. She leaned over and inserted it into the lock of the drawer. She took out a thick envelope and tossed onto the table an X-ray image of a human skull. A child’s skull.
He came back. “What’s that?”
“When you brought the girl here, she could scarcely speak. She was deeply disturbed. I was afraid she might have internal bleeding. I took her to a neurologist, as I told you, but I also took her to a physician friend of mine, a pathologist. He drew up a detailed diagnosis of the girl’s trauma.” She pointed to a thin white line on the X-ray. “Here, on the side of her head. That’s where the first blow from a blunt object struck her. I also have the X-ray of the fingers of her right hand, fractured when she tried to protect herself. And look here, at the second blow. She didn’t defend herself, because she was unconscious on the floor. The identical downward trajectory. It started from the same place and was delivered with a great deal more force. This is where the edge of the steel rolling pin fractured her skull.” She fixed Juan with a ferocious, accusing glare. “It was meant to kill her, and it almost did.”
Juan gaped at the X-ray as if about to have a heart attack.
Engrasi dumped out the rest of the contents of the envelope: X-rays, photos, and a thick typewritten report. “The girl also had an abrasion around her neck, produced when Rosario seized the cord that the child wore to carry her bakery key. A lesion caused when she was yanked back and forth with tremendous force. The scrapes on her calves, her rear, and her elbows occurred as Amaia was crawling across the floor trying to escape.”
“You had those reports prepared so you could . . .”
She gave him a disgusted look. “Don’t be absurd. I took the child to the doctor to make sure she would heal, but yes, I kept the results. And now I see I was right to do so.”
“If you go waving that around now, you’ll be sorry!” Her brother’s threat took her breath away.
“The difference between you and me, brother, is that I am ready to do anything at all to protect the girl, no matter what the cost.”
Witless and speechless, Juan stared at the pile of documents.
“Go on, take them. I have copies safely stowed with a friend.”
He looked up in alarm.
“Tell your wife to show them to that lawyer of yours to get an idea of what the judge will think of them, because the conclusion will be obvious to anyone. It wasn’t an accident; it was attempted murder.”
Juan went toward the door, and Engrasi pursued him with the documents in hand. “This was premeditated. Rosario followed the girl to the bakery when she knew there’d be nobody around. She could have confronted the child at home, but she waited until she could corner Amaia without witnesses. Rosario lied to you about where she was going when she left the house; she followed Amaia to the bakery to make sure no one would stop her