Free Ghost Country by Sara Paretsky Page A

visiting all of them, but there’s something about the friendship between J & N that moves me, so I agree to go, on Monday afternoon after finishing up at the hospital.
    The woman at the wall was reading a Bible. When Hector arrived with her friends, Madeleine marked the place and put the book away in a plastic bag.
    Before Hector could work his way into an interview Jacqui said, “This here is Dr. Tammuz, Madeleine. He’s come to talk to you about your wall.”
    Madeleine turned and touched a crack in the concrete. Hector looked at it intently, but could see no Rorschach that looked like a face. The concrete was split by a line that looked like a flattened sine curve; by tilting his head to one side he supposed he could make out the shape of a woman’s breasts, or a child’s rendition of a bird in flight, but no face.
    A faint reddish liquid oozed from the crack, rust from the rebars behind it. Madeleine dipped her fingers in it and sucked them. Hector tried not to let his disgust show in his face.
    “Her blood,” Madeleine explained to Hector. “The Mother of God weeps tears of blood. I was looking for the place in the Bible where it says it but I can’t find it. All I can see is the place where Jezebel was murdered and her blood splashed on the wall. But I know this isn’t Jezebel, this isn’t the blood of a whore, I can tell by the taste.”
    She looked fiercely at Hector, as if expecting him to argue the point with her. Instead he asked her how long she had known the Virgin was present in the wall.
    “Since She spoke to me one night when I was walking by. Some man had been doing his business on me and I came by here and She spoke to me out of this crack. She tells me I’m Her daughter, I’m as pure as She is, and She’s crying because the rest of the world isn’t pure enough, they won’t listen to Her, but I listen to Her. I loved my own little girl, I wouldn’t never leave her but they made me go. The Holy Mother says She loves me just that much as I love my own little girl.”
    “That’s right, honey,” Jacqui said. “You need the Virgin Mary to look after you, but you need to eat, too. You tell her, Doctor.”
    Persuaded her to go around the corner to their generator box to perform a cursory exam. M very frightened of men, understandable, if they’ve been “doing their business” on her, so Jacqui and Nanette promise to stand right outside, talk to her while I examine. Underneath the layers of coats and socks M a wraith, skin transparent from weeks out of the sun. Seems to be a case of acute schizophrenia, probably intensified by vitamin deficiencies, oh, not to mention lack of sleep, fear of rape, etc.
    Ought to be hospitalized, but would mean a trip over to County, and she won’t leave her “face.” Under prodding from her friends agreed to an injection of Prolixin. Worry about ethics of dispensing medication in such a setting, how can she give an informed consent?
    The next week Jacqui and Nanette came to Hector, ecstatic: the shot he’d given Madeleine had changed her dramatically, Shewas eating now, and would leave the wall sometimes to get some sunlight in the world overhead. She’d even spent the night at Hagar’s House a few times. She was still guarding her “face” on the wall, but not drinking rusty water from the crack as much as she’d done before.
    Jacqui and Nanette bought him a potted daisy at Woolworth’s to show their gratitude. They also started spreading the word on the street that Hector was a miracle worker, a sympathetic man who would listen to their troubles, and give them the kind of drugs that could really help. The two women started bringing patients in to see him. Hector tried telling Jacqui that she shouldn’t force anyone to come against their will.
    Jacqui shook her head. “You’re thinking of poor Ashley, Doctor. You don’t know her life. She ran to the streets to get away from her mother’s boyfriends, that was when she was thirteen, and she ran