In The Valley Of The Kings: Stories - Plot & Excerpts
The first case of which any record survives was reported in a small-town daily in upstate New York. Tabitha Van Order, the brief item reads, age five, was brought into the county hospital’s emergency room with “strange markings” on her face and hands. “She was playing with the newspaper,” her mother reported. “I thought it was just the ink rubbed off on her.” But the marks did not respond to soap or turpentine. At the hospital, initial examination determined that the marks were subcutaneous, and the child was admitted for observation. They looked, according to the triage nurse, as though someone had been striking the child with a large rubber stamp. “They look like bruises,” the emergency-room physician told the Journal reporter. The department of social services was looking into the case. This alone might not have warranted even three inches on page eight of a sixteen-page paper. What attracted the attention of the editor at the county desk (whose sister, a nurse in the E.R., had phoned in the story), and earned Tabitha’s case even that scanty initial notice, was one peculiar feature of those bruises, one fact about the case that stood out from the face of an otherwise unremarkable, seemingly healthy little girl.
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