The Door to December

me.'
     'There's nothing painful about a session of normal length. But if you're going to be kept in a tank several days, your skin's going to wrinkle, crack. Sores are going to form.'
     'Ah.'
     'Then there's the damn catheter. At your age, you've probably never been so seriously ill that you've been incontinent, needed a catheter.'
     'No. Never.'
     'Well, see, after a couple of days, the urethra usually becomes irritated. It hurts.'
     'I would guess it does.'
     She wanted a drink very badly. She was not much of a drinker, ordinarily. A glass of wine now and then. A rare martini. But now, she wanted to get drunk.
     He said, 'So what was he up to? What was he trying to prove? Why did he put her through all this?'
     Laura shrugged.
     'You must have some idea.'
     'None at all. The journal doesn't describe the experiments or mention a single word about his intentions. It's just a record of her sessions with each piece of equipment, an hour-by-hour summary of each of her days here.'
     'You saw the papers in his office, scattered all over the floor. They must be more detailed than the journal. There'll be more to be learned from them.'
     'Maybe.'
     'I've glanced at a few, but I couldn't make much sense of them. Lots of technical language, psychological jargon. Greek to me. If I have them photocopied, have the copies boxed up and sent to you in a couple of days, would you mind going through them, seeing if you can put them in order and if you can learn anything from them?'
     She hesitated. 'I ... I don't know. I got more than half sick just going through the journal.'
     'Don't you want to know what he did to Melanie? If we find her, you'll have to know. Otherwise you won't have much chance of dealing with whatever psychological trauma she's suffering from.'
     It was true. To provide the proper treatment, she would have to descend into her daughter's nightmare and make it her own.
     'Besides,' Haldane said, 'there might be clues in those papers, things that'll help us determine who he was working with, who might have killed him. If we can figure that out, we might also figure out who has Melanie now. If you go through your husband's papers, you might discover the one bit of information that'll help us find your little girl.'
     'All right,' she said wearily. 'When you've got it boxed, have the stuff sent to my house.'
     'I know it won't be easy.'
     'Damned right.'
     'I want to know who financed the torture of a little girl in the name of research,' he said in a tone of voice that seemed, to Laura, to be exceptionally hard and vengeful for an impartial office,r of the law. 'I want to know real bad.'
     He was about to say something else, but he was interrupted by a uniformed officer who entered from the hall. 'Lieutenant?'
     'What is it, Phil?'
     'You're looking for a little girl in all this, aren't you?'
     'Yeah.'
     Phil said' 'Well, they found one.'
     Laura's heart seemed to clench as tightly as a fist: a knot of pain in her breast. An urgent question formed in her mind, but she was unable to give voice to it because her throat seemed to have swollen shut.
     'How old?' Haldane asked.
     That wasn't the question Laura wanted him to ask.
     'Eight or nine, they figure,' Phil said.
     'Get a description?' Haldane asked.
     That wasn't the right question, either.
     'Auburn hair. Green eyes,' the patrolman said.
     Both men turned to Laura. She knew they were staring at her own auburn hair and green eyes.
     She tried to speak. Still mute.
     'Alive?' Haldane asked.
     That was the question that Laura could not bring herself to ask.
     'Yeah,' the uniformed man said. 'A black-and-white team found her seven blocks from here.'
     Laura's throat opened, and her tongue stopped cleaving to the roof of her mouth. 'Alive?' she said, afraid to believe it.
     The uniformed officer nodded. 'Yeah. I already said. Alive.'
     'When?' Haldane asked.
     'About ninety minutes ago.'
     His face coloring with anger, Haldane said, 'Nobody told me, damn it.'
     'They were just on a routine patrol when they spotted her,' Phil said. 'They didn't know she might have a connection to this case. Not till just a few