Killer Image (An Allison Campbell Mystery) by Wendy Tyson Page B

offended—before incarceration or, for the sickest kids, a psychiatric hospital. This meant rules. Lots of them: no smoking, no cursing, no physical contact. No hairspray (flammable), no nail-cutters (weaponry), no boys (temptation). Lights out at nine; wake up at six.  Mail was read, beds were inspected, delousing was mandatory. And the list went on.
    The rules went for staff also: no fraternizing, no friendships, no fun. The Meadows was a serious place where serious counselors performed the wizardry of therapy on seriously disturbed adolescents. The Meadows was the place Allison worked during graduate school. The Meadows was where she met Violet.
    Allison recalled her first glimpse of the girl. During intake, Violet had sat hunched over on the nurse’s stool, a thermometer dangling from her mouth, her legs drowning in baggy brown corduroy. A beat-up blue duffle bag, barely large enough to fit gym clothes much less the worldly possessions of a teenage girl, had been propped next to her.
    “New kid,” the nurse said, her heavy chest heaving with the exertion of filling out forms and sorting through paperwork. “She’ll be ready to go to the dorms soon enough.”
    The girl didn’t move, didn’t look up from beneath her bangs. Allison saw purple bruises on her jaw line and aged, white scars on the backs of her hands.
    “She has her period. We’ll send her up with pads.” The nurse pulled the thermometer from the girl’s mouth, glanced at it, and stuck it back in a jar of alcohol. “Wait a minute, Allison, and you can take her with you. She doesn’t talk much, this one. But she’s no dummy. Don’t let her fool you.” She handed Allison a stack of paperwork and a white bag full of pads and tampons. “Good luck.”
    Allison motioned for the girl to follow her. “What’s your name?” she said.
    The girl stared stonily ahead.
    “Violet Swann,” the nurse called from down the corridor. “With two n’s. Not like the bird.”
    Violet Swann. A stoner fourteen-year-old with stringy brown hair and a waist that spanned the length of one of Allison’s outstretched hands. A self-mutilator. Defiant. Allison had read her case file with a mixture of grief and rage. The fourth time Violet ran away she was raped by a teenaged neighbor looking for a way to prove his manhood. Six days after the rape, Violet set fire to his parents’ garage, earning her the hard-to-place label “fire-setter.” After nine placement rejections, her caseworker finally sent her to the Meadows.
    Allison knew Violet didn’t have a chance, really. The details of her history had read like any clinical file in any residential treatment program in any state in America. Abuse, neglect, drugs, sex. Probably in that order. Two therapists at the Meadows fought to have Violet taken off their caseload. She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t even shower unless a staff member dragged her kicking and screaming, her hand clutched around an ancient, eye-less, smelly stuffed hippo. She needs a psychiatric placement, they said. She’s psychotic, they said. But no one listened. Poor Violet was too sick for foster care and too well for a psych hospital. The truth was, she had nowhere else to go.
    So eventually Allison asked her boss, Dr. Nutzbaum, to transfer Violet to her caseload. Doc shook his head and said, “Allison, don’t bet on a sore loser. She has a 145 I.Q. and spent the last ten years of her life wasting it, one I.Q. point at a time. She’s oppositional, probably has Borderline Personality Disorder, and is incapable of bonding. Find a better use for your graduate education. Use it on someone who has a chance at making it.”
    As she pulled into the mall parking lot now, a sullen Maggie beside her, Allison tried to picture Violet’s face, but all she saw were sunken gray eyes and the dark hole where her right eye-tooth had been. She knew that wasn’t really fair; there were moments when Violet had looked beautiful. Specks of gold