69

Athens, Ohio

Mitch and Morgan stood on the wide white-painted porch outside the office of James Jacobs, MD.

Morgan was agitated. He lit up the last of his pack of cigarettes and puffed with slit-eyed intent, then walked over to a rough-barked old maple and leaned against it.

Kaye had insisted after a lunch stop that they look up a family practice doctor in the white pages and take Delia in for a checkup. Delia had reluctantly agreed.

“We didn’t do anything criminal,” Morgan said. “We didn’t have no money, hey, and she had her baby and there we were.” He waved his hand up the road.

“Where was that?” Mitch asked.

“West Virginia. In the woods near a farm. It was pretty. A nice place to be buried. You know, I am so tired. I am so sick of them treating me like a flea-bitten dog.”

“The girls do that?”

“You know the attitude,” Morgan said. “Men are contagious. They rely on me, I’m always here for them, then they tell me I have real boy cooties, and that’s it, hey. No thanks, ever.”

“It’s the times,” Mitch said.

“It’s lame. Why are we living now and not some other time, not so lame?”

In the main examining room, Delia perched on the edge of the table, legs dangling. She wore a white flower-print open-backed robe. Jayce sat in a chair across from her, reading a pamphlet on smoking-related illnesses. Dr. Jacobs was in his sixties, thin, with a close-cut and tightly curled patch of graying hair around a tall and noble dome. His eyes were large, and both wise and sad. He told the girls he would be right back, then let his assistant, a middle-aged woman with a bun of fine auburn hair, enter the room with a clipboard and pencil. He closed the door and turned to Kaye.

“No relation?” he asked.

“We picked them up east of here. I thought she should see a doctor.”

“She says she’s nineteen. She doesn’t have any ID, but I don’t think she’s nineteen, do you?”

“I don’t know much about her,” Kaye said. “I’m trying to help them, not get them in trouble.”

Jacobs cocked his head in sympathy. “She gave birth less than a week or ten days ago. No major trauma, but she tore some tissue, and there’s still blood on her leggings. I don’t like to see kids living like animals, Ms. Lang.”

“Neither do I.”

“Delia says it was a Herod’s baby and that it was born dead. Second-stage, by the description. I see no reason not to believe her, but these things should be reported. The baby should have undergone a postmortem. Laws are being put in place right now, at the federal level, and Ohio is going along…She said she was in West Virginia when she delivered. I understand West Virginia is showing some resistance.”

“Only in some ways,” Kaye said, and told him about the blood test requirements.

Jacobs listened, then pulled a pen from his pocket and nervously clicked it with one hand. “Ms. Lang, I wasn’t sure who you were when you came in this afternoon. I had Georgina get on the Web and find some news pictures. I don’t know what you’re doing in Athens, but I’d say you know more about this sort of thing than I do.”

“I might not agree,” Kaye said. “The marks on her face…”

“Some women acquire dark markings during pregnancy. It passes.”

“Not like these,” Kaye said. “They tell us she had other skin problems.”

“I know.” Jacobs sighed and sat on the corner of his desk. “I have three patients who are pregnant, probably with Herod’s second-stage. They won’t let me do amnio or any kind of scans. They’re all churchgoing women and I don’t think they want to know the truth. They’re scared and they’re under pressure. Their friends shun them. They aren’t welcome in church. The husbands won’t come in with them to my office.” He pointed to his face. “They all have skin stiffening and coming loose around the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the corners of the mouth. It won’t just peel away…not yet. They’re shedding several layers of facial corium and epidermis.” He made a face and pinched his fingers together, tugging at an imaginary flap of skin. “It’s a little leathery.

Ugly as sin, very scary. That’s why they’re nervous and that’s why they’re shunned. This separates them from their community, Ms. Lang. It hurts them. I make my reports to the state and to the feds, and I get no response back. It’s like sending messages into a big dark cave.”

“Do you think the masks are common?”

“I follow the basic tenets of science, Ms. Lang. If I’m seeing it more than once, and now this girl comes along and I see it again, from out of state…I doubt it’s unusual.” He looked at her critically. “Do you know anything more?”

She found herself biting her lip like a little girl. “Yes and no,” she said. “I resigned from my position on the Herod’s Taskforce.”

“Why?”

“It’s too complicated.”

“It’s because they’ve got it all wrong, isn’t it?”

Kaye looked aside and smiled. “I won’t say that.”

“You’ve seen this before? In other women?”

“I think we’re going to see more of it.”

“And the babies will all be monsters and die?”

Kaye shook her head. “I think that’s going to change.”

Jacobs replaced his pen in his pocket, put his hand on the desktop blotter, lifted its leather corner, dropped it slowly. “I won’t file a report on Delia. I’m not sure what I’d say, or who I’d say it to. I think she’d vanish before any authorities could come along to help her. I doubt we’d ever find the infant, where they buried it. She’s tired and she needs steady nourishment. She needs a place to stay and rest. I’ll give her a vitamin shot and prescribe antibiotics and iron supplements.”

“And the marks?”

“Do you know what chromatophores are?”

“Cells that change color. In cuttlefish.”

“These marks can change color,” Jacobs said. “They’re not just a hormonally induced melanosis.”

“Melanophores,” Kaye said.

Jacobs nodded. “That’s the word. Ever seen melanophores on a human?”

“No,” Kaye said.

“Neither have I. Where are you going, Ms. Lang?”

“All the way west,” she said. She lifted her wallet. “I’d like to pay you now.”

Jacobs gave her his saddest look. “I’m not running a goddamned HMO, Ms. Lang. No charge. I’ll prescribe the pills and you pick them up at a good pharmacy. You buy her food and find her a clean place to get a good night’s sleep.”

The door opened and Delia and Jayce emerged. Delia was fully dressed.

“She needs clean clothes and a good soak in a hot tub,” Georgina said firmly.

For the first time since they had met, Delia smiled. “I looked in the mirror,” she said. “Jayce says the marks are pretty. The doctor says I’m not sick, and I can have children again if I want.”

Kaye shook Jacobs’s hand. “Thank you very much,” she said.

As the three of them left through the front office, joining Mitch and Morgan on the front porch, Jacobs called out, “We live and we learn, Ms. Lang! And the faster we learn, the better.”

The little motel sported a huge red sign with TINY SUITES and $50 crowded onto it, clearly visible from the freeway. It had seven rooms, three of them vacant. Kaye rented all three and gave Morgan his own key. Morgan lifted the key, frowned, then pocketed it.

“I don’t like being alone,” he said.

“I couldn’t think of another arrangement,” Kaye said.

Mitch put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll stay with you,” he said, and gave Kaye a level look. “Let’s get cleaned up and watch TV”

“We’d like you to stay in our room,” Jayce told Kaye. “We’d feel a lot safer.”

The rooms were just on the edge of being dirty. Draped on beds with distinct hollows, thin and worn quilted coverlets showed unraveled nylon threads and cigarette burns. Coffee tables bore multiple ring marks and more cigarette burns. Jayce and Delia explored and settled in as if the accommodations were royal. Delia took the single orange chair beside a table-lamp combo hung with black metal cone-shaped cans. Jayce lounged on the bed and switched on the TV. “They have HBO,” she said in a soft and wondering voice. “We can watch a movie!”