Chapter Two

      I’d been working on the unit almost two years. Feeling frustration with the attitude of the administration in Washington toward special education and foreseeing the inevitable cutbacks and job losses that would result from administration policy changes, I had decided to take a break from teaching. Some years earlier, I’d completed my psychology credentials, so this seemed the right time to move in that direction. My intention had been to join a small clinic where a friend of mine worked. It was located in a city I had lived in previously, a city I knew and loved well and where I already had a good social network. What had attracted me most, however, was a chance to work with the clinic’s director. He not only had a formidable reputation in child psychiatry, which was reason enough to want to learn from him, but he was also a skilled administrator, known for his creative thinking. Breaking free from the often restrictive attitudes of psychiatry, he had sought to set up the clinic with a more holistic approach, drawing together professionals from several allied fields – child psychology, psychiatry, pediatrics, social work – to work together in a broad, cross-disciplinary manner. This ability to “think outside the box” appealed to me greatly.

      How I’d left the small town where I had been teaching with the intention of taking up a position in that wealthy, well-funded, broad-minded private clinic and ended up instead working in the claustrophobic world of a closed psychiatric crisis and assessment unit for children in a metropolitan general hospital was somewhat of a mystery even to me. It had involved one of those encounters one can only write off later as “fate,” when a colleague of a colleague contacted me late one Sunday afternoon, saying something about being familiar with my former project in elective mutism and would I be willing to give an in-service to staff at the hospital. While on the unit to do the in-service, I found out they were desperately looking for a specialist in psychologically based language problems. I was not such a specialist, but I was free for a few months, since times had not quite coordinated between the end of the school year and the opening of the position at the clinic. I said if they were interested, I’d be willing to give it my best shot. They were and I did. And months zoomed by. The position at the clinic came and went and I remained at the hospital.

      It was a good choice. No doubt the clinic would also have suited me well, and I still had occasional idle dreams of switching over at some later date, but I loved the gritty, front-line feel of working in a hospital. We were a shortterm facility, designed primarily for diagnosis and assessment, as well as acute crisis intervention, and as a county-funded institution, many of the cases referred to us came from the poor under-belly of society. The continual struggles for enough time, enough money, enough choices never went away, lending a certain frisson to the work and provoking among the staff an attitude akin to that of comrades-in-arms in a MASH unit. Like a good political debate, this kind of edgy atmosphere stimulated me. I enjoyed, too, the flexibility of my position, which allowed me to continue liaising with many of my patients long after they had left the hospital unit and returned to their homes and schools, and I enjoyed being a “language specialist,” of seeing the many variations of one presenting problem.

      Which is how Cassandra came my way.

      In the beginning Cassandra Ventura’s life had looked promising. Her father was a security guard. Her mother had been a secretary but gave up work when Cassandra’s elder sister, Magdalena, came along. During those years, the family exuded the American dream. They worked hard, were committed members of their church, helped out in community activities. Dad was a regular on the company bowling team. Mom baked cakes that won prizes and sewed enviably well, providing the two girls with elaborate costumes at Halloween, new dresses at Easter, matching outfits for the school pictures.

      Behind closed doors, however, it was a very different scene, one of drug problems and domestic violence. Mr. Ventura claimed never to have abused the children until that final incident. Before that point, it had been only his wife who had suffered the cruel put-downs, the beatings, the dishes smashed over her head. But then on that night, six-year-old Magdalena had tried to intervene, getting physically between her arguing parents. Mr. Ventura swung out at her, meaning only to push her aside. She fell and was knocked unconscious. That proved the breaking point for Mrs. Ventura. She could no longer keep up the pretense of being a happy family. Taking the girls, she fled to a women’s refuge. The next day she went to the police.

      It unraveled swiftly from there. As well as the domestic abuse, Mrs. Ventura also revealed her husband had long-term drug problems and had been using his position as a security guard to procure a regular supply of cocaine. The criminal trial that followed was ugly and rancorous and made worse because it required testimony not only from his wife but also Magdalena. Mr. Ventura was jailed for eighteen months.

      Mrs. Ventura rebuilt her life with rather disconcerting speed. All within the space of time her husband was in jail, she managed to file for divorce; meet and move in with another man, whose name was David Navarro; relocate to a new community about an hour’s drive from the city; and give birth to a third daughter, Mona.

      Cassandra had been three at the time of her father’s imprisonment. Two years later, when she was in kindergarten, she came out of school to find a car waiting for her. When the man in the driver’s seat said he was Daddy, she hesitated. She didn’t actually remember her natural father well, so she didn’t know if this was him or not. When he tried to call her over, she replied that she needed to wait until Magdalena came out. He said, “I have some of your old toys here. I thought you might want them.” So she went to see.

      When Magdalena came out from her third-grade class, there was no sign of her younger sister. Her mother was called. The police were called. Nothing. No trace. Cassandra had disappeared.

      The Navarros’ efforts to find Cassandra were unrelenting. Police bulletins, news reports, searches over several states, posters in the local grocery store, on the side of milk cartons, efforts through Mr. Ventura’s parole officer – everything anyone could think of was tried in an effort to find out what happened that afternoon – but nothing turned up. It was as if Cassandra and her father had, as the old cliché goes, simply vanished into thin air.

      Twenty-six months passed without any word of Cassandra’s whereabouts. Then three states away, a young man working in a 7-Eleven convenience store discovered a small girl in the alley behind the store going through their garbage. Suspicious that she was there to steal something, he gave chase when she tried to run away, and caught her. When she wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t answer his questions about her name or where she lived, he called the manager. The manager realized immediately that the girl was too young to be