Melissa was nine months pregnant and her time had clearly come. She came in from the storm, pushing open the plate glass door with her shoulder and stumbling into the lobby of the Bayou Memorial Clinic, holding her swollen belly with both hands, her fingers laced tightly in front of her pubic bone. She was barefoot and her clothes were soaking wet.
The old man was the first one to notice her. He was slouched in his Naugahyde chair, glumly gazing through the front doors and watching the rain come down. He had been watching TV along with everyone else, but President Ford’s second Christmas address to the nation was about to be re-run and he didn’t want to hear it again. He got the message the first time through – the economy was a mess, the government was a mess, and the world was a mess. But aside from that, everything was fine. Merry Christmas.
He instinctively tried to get to his feet to help her. He was raised to be a gentleman and she seemed like such a fragile thing, but the malaria he picked up on Guadalcanal had come back again and he could barely stand. He dropped back in his chair, frustrated by his infirmity, and watched her wobble toward the reception desk. My Lord, he thought, where’s her family?
Lucien rolled his mop bucket into the hall closet and closed the door. The flu was going around, and that was the third time this evening he had to clean up in the lobby. His rheumatism was acting up with all the cold rain; he could hardly wait till midnight came around to punch out and go home. The grandchildren would all be snug in their beds; he could sit a while by the Christmas tree and drink his beer in peace. They’d wake him at dawn, tearing into their presents. It was his favorite moment of the year.
He headed back to the lobby to change the channel on the console TV. Johnny Carson was coming on any minute, and Lucien never missed his monologue if he could help it.
The moment Lucien stepped out of the hallway, he saw the young lady weaving on her feet toward Miss McKay, behind her typewriter at the reception desk. She was already signaling little Bobby, the other orderly, to go fetch the gurney down the hall.
Bobby dashed past Lucien and came back with the gurney by the time Lucien and Miss McKay got to the young lady. Everyone in the lobby watched the three of them help her lie down, and two of them even helped keep the gurney steady.
The girl was soaked to the bone. Lucien unfolded the gurney blanket and covered her up to her chin, then gently brushed the wet hair out of her eyes. He held her hand and talked softly to her, walking beside the gurney as Bobby rolled her into the hallway toward the elevators. Miss McKay was already on the phone, calling up to the maternity ward.
Her eyes were much too wide, and he sensed that she must be delirious, but he was no doctor. He leaned in close to tell her she would be fine, though he had no way of knowing whether that was true. She gripped his hand tightly and kept gasping something he couldn’t quite hear.
Bobby stopped the gurney and punched the elevator button. As they waited, Lucien leaned closer and she repeated what she said. He smiled and patted her hand, but she said it again, louder, and insisted that it was the gospel truth.
The young orderly heard what she said the third time around when she raised her voice, and he swapped a private grin with Lucien as they rolled her into the elevator. Lucien smiled back, but he felt a touch of sympathy for her. If she really believed what she said, then his suspicions were right on the money. The poor girl was delirious.
Johnson stood with Mas and Kaddouri in what used to be the clinic lobby, surrounded by the rusted remains of the Naugahyde furniture frames. Someone had scavenged the cushions many years before. The console TV, the typewriter, and the phones behind the reception desk were long gone as well, but several old magazines from the rack by the front door were scattered around the room. The tornado had tossed them about, then over the years the wind came through the broken windows and stirred the mess around.
“There was a walk-in that night,” Peter Johnson told them. “Nobody knew who she was, or where she came from. She was already in labor; they didn’t have time to make a file for her. She said her name was Melissa, but she never gave a last name.”
He turned toward a shattered picture window and they followed his lead. The parking structure could be seen beyond the saplings that had taken up residence on the front lawn. The ’65 Bonneville was still on the first floor, a twisted, rusting hulk that the tornado had shoved into a pile of other cars. The rear passenger door of the Bonneville was open and the back seat was plainly visible.
He squinted at the wreck and noticed the license plate number – 2112. It was another confirmation of his theory. He gripped the notepad in his pocket, but decided to commit the number to memory and jot it down later. He didn’t want to call any more attention to his research. He would present his findings to Mas and Kaddouri when he was done. He had the feeling it wouldn’t be long now. Eleven dead Christmas babies so far. Only two more to go.
Johnson took his hand out of his pocket and pointed to the Bonneville. “They found her body on the back seat the next morning. Her nurse ID’d her.”
By first light on Christmas morning, the fire crews had gone through every room of the clinic and discovered to their relief and amazement that aside from the atrocity in Room Three, not a single person had perished in the entire building. The tornado had cut a wide trench through the lawn outside the maternity wing and tore up the parking structure before it continued into the bayou, spinning out of existence as quickly as it materialized.
Sergeant Flanders gingerly picked his way through the tangle of cars on the first floor of the parking structure. It was his duty to look for casualties, not to become one himself. He spent a good ten minutes walking the perimeter before he set foot inside the structure itself. From what he had been able to tell, it was stable enough for him to poke around and look for bodies. He didn’t expect to find any, but with tornadoes you never knew.
There was a large puddle of dark red fluid below the back door of a Bonneville. The front end of the car was sitting on top of another one, both of them maliciously twisted like broken toys. All the safety glass of the Bonneville had shattered, but none of the panes had popped out. At first he thought the puddle was transmission oil, but telltale streaks had stained the sill below the back door. Something in the back seat was leaking red fluid. A single drop fell to the puddle below, and then another one.
He couldn’t see through the shattered glass, and the door handle didn’t work. He pried the door open with his crowbar, and gasped at what he saw.
Johnson finished his coffee, and tossed the cup into a windblown pile of trash in the corner of the lobby. Mas and Kaddouri did the same; they weren’t in the habit of littering, but considering their surroundings, it was pointless to be fussy.
“She had two abdominal traumas,” Johnson told them. “One looked like a stab wound, and the other one was like an emergency Caesarean, but it wasn’t done by a surgeon and it wasn’t done with a scalpel. It could have been from a piece of flying metal...”
He trailed off and shrugged, to convey the puzzlement that everyone felt about the case at the time. “It didn’t add up,” he concluded.
Mas frowned. “Why not? Maybe the perp aborted her like the woman.”
Johnson shrugged again. “Yeah, except there’s one thing she kept saying the night she came in. Everyone brushed it off as crazy talk, but it kept coming up in an interview I conducted with one of the orderlies, right before I retired. The rest home thought he had dementia, so no one believed him. But I did.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that Melissa swore up and down she was a virgin.”
“That’s impossible!” Kaddouri blurted out.
Johnson just glanced at him. “It’s happened once before, Mark.”
Kaddouri didn’t respond. He learned long ago not to argue with a belief system. He fought for years with his Muslim fundamentalist grandfather until they were both blue in the face, and neither one of them had ever budged an inch. In college, he discovered that Christians could be every bit as stubborn. He drifted a look at Mas, and she turned to Johnson.
“What else, Peter?” Mas asked him.
Johnson looked away through the broken picture window, out to the parking structure, and nodded his chin at the mess. “A lot of those cars got tossed around pretty bad in the tornado, so the autopsy was inconclusive.”
“What do you think happened to her baby?”
“Well, I have my theories,” he said, gazing at the Bonneville outside. “But one thing’s for sure – the autopsy concluded that she really was a virgin after all.”
Kaddouri looked at him and blinked, then glanced at Mas. She caught his expression, but her eyes drifted away. She was stunned as well.
“Jesus...” she breathed.
Johnson looked back to them. “Yeah,” he said. “That was my guess, too.”