Free Cat Deck the Halls by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page A

dump this child into the gaping jaws of the state bureaucracy. Watching the sleeping child, one hand curled now in a more relaxed gesture, not clenched rigidly, and her black lashes thick and soft on her pale cheeks, Juana told herself again that the child’s silence was indeed caused by trauma and that with rest and love and quiet, she would speak again—and, thinking like a cop, and then maybe we’ll have a witness .
    A frail, frightened little witness. How much would a six-year-old remember as it had really happened? How much would she be able to make clear to an adult? To a judge or jury?
    How much of the testimony of a six-year-old child would grown-ups believe?
    All night the child had clung to her, at first hadn’t wanted anyone else to touch her, her dark eyes huge with dread, her ivory skin clammy and damp. Was it her father who had been shot? Shot as they stood looking up at the wonderful Christmas tree?
    For the rest of this child’s life, what would her Christmases be like? Chestnuts and blood. Bright lights and rocking horses heralding death.
    But Juana had known one thing from the first moment she saw the little girl. She wasn’t taking her to Children’s Services. Not now, not in the morning that was fast approaching. Neither she nor the chief nor Dallas liked the lax security at Children’s Services, even in the Protective Division. Although some of the caseworkers were conscientious and understanding, too many were hard-nosed paper pushers, political climbers, or just plain incompetent. As if the children in their care were so many packages to be sorted, held in will-call, and delivered when required.
    Some ugly stories about Children’s Services had reached the department, and then when young Lori Reed was found last year hiding in the library basement, and had refused to have anything more to do with the caseworkers, and after Juana and the chief had talked with Lori and looked into the handling of the child, they felt even more strongly that the County Department of Children’s Services would benefit from a good housecleaning. Nine vanished children whohad never been found and whose cases were still open. A boy in foster care for five years when all Children’s Services had to do was pick up the phone and check information, in order to to locate the child’s relatives in Seattle. And too many “accident” cases among the foster homes, logged in to hospital emergency. Children with old scars, and with new bruises that could not be accounted for.
    Lori Reed, after spending nearly a year on the East Coast, in the custody of Children’s Services and a number of foster homes, before being returned to her father, had told Juana other ugly stories that enraged her.
    Lori had run away from a seriously depressed father who, in his secret and unrevealed fear for Lori, had inadvertently terrified her. He had boarded up their windows, padlocked the doors, and had forbidden her to leave the house even to go to school. With Lori’s mother dead of cancer, with no one to explain to her the real cause of her father’s distress, and with her fear of being sent to another foster home, the twelve-year-old had taken matters into her own hands—had packed a blanket and some food, and found a very clever and safe place to hide.
    But Lori Reed was twelve, not six years old, and had been far more skilled and resourceful in solving the problems that were dumped on her. This child was hardly more than a baby.
    And the fact that she might be the only witness to a murder was more than sufficient reason not to turn her over to a lax bureaucracy where anyone could get at her.
    Without opening the draperies, Juana stepped behind them and looked out through the slider to the balcony; standing in the shadows, in the predawn silence, lookingdown at the village, she considered other options than keeping the child too long in her apartment, where the coming and going of