She shrugged, made a face. "It could be. But there's stuff that doesn't fit. Most Munchausen mothers have a background around the edges of medicine-nurse's aide, something like that." Margaret, according to the background check, had left school at fifteen and worked in Jacobs's biscuit factory until she got married. "And check out the admission records. Half the time Margaret's not even the one bringing Katy into the hospital: it's Jonathan, Rosalind, Vera, once it's a teacher… For Munchausen-by-proxy mothers, the whole
"So we rule out Margaret?"
Cassie sighed. "She doesn't match the profile, but that's not definitive; she could be the exception. I just wish we could have a look at the other girls' records. These mothers don't usually target one kid and leave the others alone. They skip from kid to kid, to avoid suspicion, or else they start with the oldest and then move on to the next when the first one gets old enough to kick up a fuss. If it's Margaret, there'll be something weird in the other two's files-like maybe this spring, when Katy stopped getting sick, something went wrong with Jessica… Let's ask the parents if we can look at them."
"No," I said. All the floaters seemed to be talking at once and the noise was like a heavy fog coating my brain; I couldn't focus. "So far, the Devlins don't know they're suspects. I'd rather keep it that way, at least until we have something solid. If we go asking them for Rosalind and Jessica's medical records, it's bound to tip them off."
"Something solid," Cassie said. She looked down at the pages spread out on the table, the jumble of computerized headings and scribbled handwriting and photocopy-smudges; at the whiteboard, which had already blossomed into a multicolored tangle of names, phone numbers, arrows and question marks and underlining.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
The Devlin girls' school records had that same ambiguous, mocking quality. Katy was bright but not outstanding, solid Bs with the occasional C in Irish or A in PE; no behavioral problems bigger than a tendency to talk in class, no red flags except the stark patches of absence. Rosalind was more intelligent, but also more erratic: streams of straight As, broken up by clumps of Cs and Ds and frustrated teachers' comments about lacking effort and skipping class. Jessica's file, unsurprisingly, was the thickest. She had been in the "special" class since she and Katy were nine, but Jonathan had apparently hassled the health board and the school into running a battery of tests on her: her IQ was somewhere between 90 and 105, and there were no neurological problems. "Nonspecific learning disability with autistic features," the file claimed.
"What do you think?" I asked Cassie.
"I think this family just keeps getting weirder. Going by this, you'd swear that, if one of them's being abused, it's Jessica. Perfectly normal kid up until she's around seven; then all of a sudden, bam, her schoolwork and her social skills start going downhill. That's way too late for the onset of autism, but it's a textbook reaction to some kind of ongoing abuse. And Rosalind-all that upsy-downsy stuff could just be normal teenage mood swings, but it could also be a response to something weird going on at home. The only one who looks just fine-well, fine psychologically-is Katy."
Something dark loomed up in the corner of my vision and I whipped around, sending my pen skittering across the floor. "Whoa," Sam said, startled. "It's only me."
"Jesus," I said. My heart was racing. Cassie's eyes, across the table, gave away nothing. I retrieved my pen. "I didn't realize you were there. What've you got?"
"The Devlins' phone records," Sam said, waving a sheaf of paper in each hand. "Out and in." He put the two bundles on the table and squared off the edges carefully. He had color-coded the numbers; the pages were striped with neat lines of highlighter pen.
"For how long?" Cassie asked. She leaned across the table, looking at the pages upside down.
"Since March."
"That's it? For six months?"
That was the first thing I had noticed, too: how thin the piles were. A family of five, three adolescent girls; surely the line should have been busy nonstop, someone constantly yelling for someone else to get off the phone. I thought of the underwater hush in the house the day Katy was found, Auntie Vera hovering in the hall. "Yeah, I know," Sam said. "Maybe they use mobiles."
"Maybe," Cassie said. She didn't sound convinced. I wasn't either: almost without exception, when a family cuts itself off from the rest of the world it's because something is badly wrong. "But that's expensive. And there's two phones in that house, one in the downstairs coat closet and one on the upstairs landing, with a cord long enough that you could take it into any of the bedrooms. You wouldn't need to use a mobile for privacy."
