*

Amelia hunched against the side of the hospital gurney hugging her thinly clad stomach, rocking back and forth, keening. Her make-up had run and smeared creating a swirled, twisted impression of a clown face.

She had stopped breathing in the ambulance, been revived, then thrown up what apparently looked like an entire bottle of pills. When Jake first saw her in the emergency department she’d been screaming, ‘You shouldn’t have brought me back! You shouldn’t have brought me back!’

Her mother— who had recovered from her faint—sat next to her in the curtained emergency department bay, tears drowning her cheeks.

Amelia moved her hands to cover her face. Under the harsh lights, Jake could see where each of her long, pink fingernails had been ripped off, presumably by Amelia herself. The nailbeds beneath were red and swollen, the source of the rivulets of blood now caking her fingers, hands and forearms.

Jake looked at Mary, who appeared to have aged ten years since this morning. ‘What happened?’

‘Not long after you left she started moving around again. I thought she was fine. She wouldn’t say much, only…’ Amelia’s mother hesitated.

‘Please, Mary.’

‘… Only that she thought you’d come to help her, but instead you seemed to think she was guilty, so maybe she is.’

Kelly’s words to Jake in the car as they drove to the MacDonald’s house rang in Jake’s ears. ‘We don’t want to make things worse for the MacDonalds, but we have to consider whether this is a sign of the girl’s guilt.’

Mary sat upright in her rigid plastic chair, looking at Jake, aghast at what she had said. ‘I don’t mean she’s actually guilty of anything. She hasn’t been near Ms O’Brien in years. She’s just always struggled with a sense of guilt.’

Jake dragged the cubicle’s other chair across to sit next to Mary. ‘About what?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know … but it’s one of the reasons I kept her out of school. There was always this stupid’—she spat the word—‘idea that she came from a home for bad girls. I’ve heard all kinds of people say it since we adopted her, and before.’ Mary’s voice caught in a sob. ’After her first day at school I found her in the shower screaming and tearing at her skin. I home-schooled her after that.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, it sounds terrible.’

‘She’s so brave, so smart,’ Mary continued. ‘But she just can’t beat whatever’s tormenting her.’

A doctor appeared in the doorway.

‘Detective, could you please step outside?’ she said, drawing the cubicle curtains. ‘I’m going to examine Amelia.’

‘Of course.’

Jake went into the waiting room where the lanky teenage boy from the MacDonald’s house was sitting, an older man by his side. Though the teenager’s facial features and colouring underlined that Amelia was not a close genetic relative, his concerned expression was every bit as brotherly as if they had been twins.

‘Andrew, is it?’ Jake asked.

He gave a small nod.