Free Ghost Country by Sara Paretsky

where women can shower, and get a hot breakfast.”
    Suppose you can put up with a lot for safety, food and shower. Including prayer meetings or Bible study, whatever they call it.
    Sessions led on Wednesday night by a forty-something commodities trader who’s found Jesus and wants to bring him to the homeless women at Hagar’s House. Rafe Lowrie. Raspy voiced, but smooth, well-dressed, no light of fanaticism in his eyes, maybe motivated by need to be in charge of everyone’s life. He came along my second Friday to interrogate me about my methods and goals. Told me he doesn’t want me undoing the good he’s achieving with Hagar women through heightening their spiritual awareness.
    Thinking of some of the visions my patients are seeing, I suggested to Lowrie that tamping down their spiritual awareness might be a good thing. He became very huffy, said he had warned the parish council thatbringing a Jew in to work with the homeless not a good idea at all. Jesus cast out devils; if the Holy Spirit was really at work in the Orleans St Ch the parish ought to be able to pray these people well, I said, anything that could cure schizophrenia was fine with me, whether prayer or Prolixin, or both together. He stared at me for a several minutes without speaking—probably thought he was looking like Clint Eastwood staring down Lee Van Cleef, but looked more like a man who’s found a cockroach in his soup. Then in Eastwood style turned on his heel and slowly stomped off.
    So at the hospital I have Hanaper telling me I’m like a witch doctor because I prefer therapy to drugs, and here at the shelter I have this born-again Lowrie telling me I’m a heathen—worse, a Jew—who believes in medicine instead of prayer.
    Starting to have dreams in which I’m shaving, and my face comes loose. Sometimes behind the skin I’m a monster—a savage concoction of bone and blood. Sometimes I’m a woman. Always the question of—who am I really?
    As Dr. Boten warned Hector, most people who came to the Orleans Street clinic were in state of acute crisis. What he wasn’t expecting was the rough good humor with which many met life’s most trying conditions. He found himself looking forward to the visits of a number of regulars, including two women who always seemed to travel together. Jacqui and Nanette didn’t want separate sessions of therapy, just Hector’s empathic ear. They told him bloodcurdling tales of life on the street: that most women who were out there any length of time were raped, sometimes by homeless men, even by cops, but just as often by white businessmen on their way home to suburbs, wife, and family.
    Jacqui is black, Nanette white. Apparently on the streets racial differences stop mattering as much as they do aboveground. Last week, J & N told me they have a third friend, woman named Madeleine Carter, who has always had mental health problems, but now they’re seriously worriedabout her. Took some doing to get the story out of them—they were afraid I would either laugh or tell them to take the tale to Jesus.
    They say Madeleine thinks the Virgin Mary appeared to her on a wall on Underground Wacker. She won’t leave wall now, even in the foulest weather. The three women used to sleep at Hagar’s House, or sometimes, when they had enough money, rent an apartment together, but now Madeleine won’t leave the street at all. J & N found a big crate that a generator came in around the corner from Madeleine’s vision; when their money is short the two of them sometimes sleep there with her, and they fixed it up with blankets so Madeleine could get some shelter.
    J & N tried to persuade Madeleine to come to me, but she won’t leave her post at Virgin’s side. So—they want me to go to her. After a lot of arguing with them—I’m stretched too thin to visit people on the streets, I say—This isn’t just anyone, Doctor, she’s our friend. Imagine dozens of their friends scattered around town, they prodding me into