Judith McNaught Read Free Page B

unsuspecting Texas cousins, which is what I understand you intend to do."
    Dr. Wilmer shrugged. "Julie steals food or clothing or playthings, but she doesn't keep anything. She gives her booty to the younger kids at LaSalle."
    "You're certain?"
    "Positive. I've checked it out."
    A reluctant smile tugged at John Frazier's lips as he studied the little girl. "She looks more like a Peter Pan than a Robin Hood. She's not at all what I expected, based on her file."
    "She surprised me, too," Dr. Wilmer admitted.
    According to Julie's file, the director of the LaSalle Foster Care Facility, where she now resided, had deemed her to be "a discipline problem with a predilection for truancy, troublemaking, theft, and banging around with unsavory male companions."
    After
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    all the unfavorable comments in Julie's file, Dr.
    Wilmer had fully expected Julie Smith to be a belligerent,
    hardened girl whose constant association with young males probably indicated early physical
    development and even sexual activity. For that reason, she'd nearly gaped at Julie when the child sauntered into her office two months ago, looking like a grubby little pixie in jeans and a tattered sweatshirt, with short-cropped dark, curly hair.
    Instead of the budding femme fatale Dr. Wilmer had expected, Julie Smith had a beguiling gamin face that was dominated by an enormous pair of thick-lashed
    eyes the startling color of dark blue pansies. In contrast to that piquant little face and innocently beguiling
    eyes, there was a boyish bravado in the way she'd stood in front of Dr. Wilmer's desk that first day with her small chin thrust out and her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans.
    Theresa had been captivated at that first meeting, but her fascination with Julie had begun even before that—almost from the moment she'd opened her file at home one night and began reading her responses to the battery of tests that was part of the evaluating process that Theresa herself had recently developed.
    By the time she was finished, Theresa had a firm grasp of the workings of the child's facile mind as well

    as the depth of her pain and the details of her current plight: Abandoned by her birth parents and rejected by two sets of adoptive parents, Julie had been reduced to spending her childhood on the fringes of the
    Chicago slums in a succession of overcrowded foster homes. As a result, throughout her life, her only source of real human warmth and support came from her companions—grubby, unkempt kids like
    herself whom she philosophically regarded as "her own kind," kids who taught her to filch goods from stores and, later, to cut school with them. Her quick mind and quicker fingers had made Julie so good at both that no matter how often she was shuffled off to a new foster home, she almost immediately achieved a certain popularity and respect among her peers, so much so that a few months ago, a group of boys had condescended to demonstrate to her the various techniques they used for breaking into cars and hot-wiring them—a demonstration that resulted in the entire group of them being busted by an alert Chicago cop, including Julie, who was merely an observer.

    That day had marked Julie's first arrest, and although Julie didn't know it, it also marked Julie's first real
    "break" because it ultimately brought her to Dr.
    Wilmer's attention. After being—somewhat
    unjustly—arrested for attempted auto theft, Julie was put into Dr. Wilmer's new, experimental program that included an intensive battery of psychological tests, intelligence tests, and personal interviews and evaluations conducted by Dr. Wilmer's group of volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists. The program
    was intended to divert juveniles in the care of the state from a life of delinquency and worse.
    In Julie's case, Dr. Wilmer was adamantly committed to doing exactly that, and as everyone who knew her was aware, when Dr. Wilmer set her mind on a goal, she accomplished it. At thirty-five,