by Olive Balla
Mort studied the woman’s face. “Brown?” How could he have forgotten about the dye he’d found in Jillie’s bags when he’d searched them? He forced himself to nod in understanding. He’d thought Jillie was just a dumb kid, but this whole time she’d been doing some serious planning. “Yeah, that was, um, from my mom’s box of hair color.” He forced a chuckle.
“Our manager said the poor little thing would have cleaned out the walk-in fridge if she’d had the chance.” The assistant manager cocked her head, the look on her face suddenly suspicious.
Mort could almost hear the gears grinding as the woman mentally ran through a dawning litany of reasons why a kid would run away from what appeared to be such a loving home and family.
He forced his mouth into a smile. “Thank you so much for your kindness to our little Jillie.” He pulled out his wallet. “Let me pay you for the food she ate.”
The look on the woman’s face softened, and she shook her head. “No, sir. The manager said she paid what was asked.” She pulled a pad of paper and pen from a pocket in her apron, placed them on the counter, and pushed them toward Mort. “If you’ll leave your name and number, I’ll call if your niece comes back. Another call won’t hurt.”
“Another call?”
The woman raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Janey, that’s our manager, called the police nearly as soon as the little girl came in. She said she figured somewhere a mother was tying herself in knots with worry. But the kid bolted out the back just as the police drove up.”
Mort bowed his head to hide the expression on his face. The police would notify social services, who’d check up on the Elliotts. He could almost feel his dreams of a new life slipping through his fingers.
With what he hoped to be a sincere look of gratitude on his face, Mort raised his head. He looked earnestly into the woman’s eyes, allowed a tear to form in his own, and reached for the tablet and pen.
No sooner had he written a fake name and phone number than he realized his mistake. Too easy for the police to figure out who he was once the old bag behind the counter described him. And by trying to hide his identity he’d essentially made himself a person of interest.
Resisting the urge to jerk the tablet back out of the woman’s hand, he mentally shook himself and smiled. “Thank you so much for your help.”
The woman smiled back, a look of sympathy on her face. “Jillie, now that’s a lovely name. We’ll all be on the lookout for her.”
Mort turned to go, his teeth grinding. Mistakes were beginning to pile up.
And while he’d been wasting time hanging around the train station in Belen per Margo’s command, the kid had been eating breakfast in Los Lunas. He shook his head at the memory of his mother’s rampage when he suggested the kid might have left the state.
Red-faced, veins popping out on her forehead, she’d shrieked at him, “If you had half a brain, you’d know she’d try to get to the hospital. And how would she do that?” Pause. “I asked you a question.”
“She’d have to take the train.”
“Exactly. But it would never occur to you that she’d be obsessed with seeing her sister’s body, would it? The whole love-of-family thing never took root in the mass of jelly that passes for your brain. She’s still a kid; she doesn’t understand the concept of death.”
“Seems she understood it enough to do Digger—”
Margo interrupted, a look on her face that could have turned a pile of rocks into lava. “And once she learns her sister’s still alive, all our plans are down the toilet.” She’d sneered. “Why can’t you be more like your cousin Toby?”
“Wait, wait, is this the same Toby who wet the bed until he was a teenager? The same guy who killed our cat and spray-painted Lucia Alton’s car after she broke up with him because he was creepy?”
Margo sniffed. “At least Toby went to college, something you couldn’t manage to do. He wants to better himself, even has a library card and all.”
“Right. He dropped out of college after the first semester and now he lives in a trailer house at the back of our property.”
“Our property?” Margo puffed air through her nose, setting her skin flap horizontal. After that, she’d screamed at him until he’d had enough and left the house.
By the time Mort turned ten, he’d stopped calling the woman who’d birthed him Mommy and began referring to her as Maggot, after the flesh-eating, carcass-cleaning worms that lived off others’ putrefaction.
And now that scrawny little kid Jillie was holding the keys to his freedom.
Mort envisioned himself scuba diving off pristine coral reefs around the world, skiing in Austria, and going out with beautiful European women. People would bow and scrape to him.
He complemented himself on what he called his most superior Master Plan of Action. And it all hinged on one word: patience.
He had no need to waste time and gas money looking for the kid, because no one who loved someone like that kid loved her sister was going to stay away for long. She’d eventually turn up, and then the sisters would go home. That’s when Mort would make his move.
Always best to keep things simple. Sooner or later—three simple little words that summed up his Master Plan.
Something cold and hard settled in his gut. He started his engine and pulled out into traffic.
Chapter Thirteen
From inside his pickup parked along the curb at a city park, Toby Dinkins took a bite of breakfast burrito. He turned on the radio, and his favorite pop music from the eighties poured into the enclosed air. But the music failed to soothe his jangled nerves.
After diving for lost change among his sofa cushions, he’d barely scraped together three dollars for a mini-burrito—the cheapest thing on the fast-food menu. Not the life he’d envisioned for himself.
What he needed was to win the lottery. No, what he really needed was to find a treasure. And, based on what his cousin Mort told him, that was within the realm of possibility.
Toby’s upper lip curled. How he hated what he had to do to pay his bills. Gigolo was such an ugly word, and the job description was getting harder and harder to take.
If his plans solidified, however, that lifestyle would soon be history.
He watched as kids shouted at one another, laughed and shrieked, happy to be out in the open. Mommies watched and chatted with other mommies—despised creatures Toby referred to as Breeders.
Toby had never fit into the mass of human cattle, even as a kid. He could almost feel sorry for the poor beasts. They with their slow wits, their bestial habits, their enmities and hatreds. They coddled their dogs and cats while destroying their children.
The world was a battlefield, and survival required vigilance. But no one paid attention nowadays. No one took the time to walk around and observe, or to just sit and think. Too busy yakking on their phones, staring into tiny screens, texting everyone in the world, chirping out their miserable activities—as if anyone cared. A turnip was more aware than today’s average Homo sapiens.
But from the moment of his birth, Toby had perfected a level of hyper-vigilance that would make the CIA look like cub scouts. As a result, although he’d never before been to the park where he sat, within three minutes of his arrival he could have closed his eyes and described the milieu in detail.
Six children ranging in ages from toddler through about eight or nine cavorted on, around, under, and through the playground equipment. Their laughter floated on the breeze as they flitted in their element.
A brief and quickly squelched feeling of sadness pulsed through Toby’s mid-section. Cute little kids, but really just malleable Tabulae Rasae mirroring their parents’ behaviors until they actually became their parents.
Four Breeder-mothers kept vigil over their offspring. Perched like exotic birds on a couple of benches at the edge of the playground, they chatted and laughed. Their watchful eyes darted back and forth among each other and their fledglings. Occasionally, one jumped up and ran to a fallen little
one to kiss a boo-boo. Then the child would run back to play, everything made better by the mommy-smooch.
Something toxic moved in Toby’s gut. Some boo-boos couldn’t be kissed away—just one of the many life lessons he’d learned at the knee of his own Mommy-Dearest.
And then the images before him morphed into another life lesson.
A middle-aged man leaned against a huge elm tree at the edge of the park, his hooded eyes fixed in an unblinking stare at the scene, his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his khaki slacks.
Toby clenched his jaws nearly tight enough to crack his tooth enamel. Although he didn’t know the guy, he recognized the type: a bottom feeder, preying on those too young and weak to defend themselves.
Of course, there’d be those who’d point a finger in Toby’s face and call him a hypocrite. Maybe even call him evil. But evil was open to definition, wasn’t it? One man’s evil is another man’s survival strategy.
He chuckled as the words of a television psychologist popped into his head: Nearly guaranteed recipe to bake a disturbed personality? Continuous, prolonged criticism, neglect, and lack of affection by the caregiver.
Some might call Toby a disturbed personality, but so what? He’d read enough to know no one could be characterized as completely sane. Every human had glitches, some more than others. It was all just a matter of degree.
Drumming his fingers on the bottom of the steering wheel, Toby looked back and forth between the breeders and the pervert. He’d bet money that if he knuckle-knocked on any given breeder-head, the resulting sound would be like a mallet striking a wooden block.
He jiggled his right leg up and down on the ball of his foot while wondering if the adoring mommies would grab up their offspring and run screaming back to their hidey-holes if the law of psychic osmosis miraculously kicked in and allowed them to divine what the old man by the tree was thinking? What he wanted to do to their little ones?
He studied the women’s faces. Not one of them reflected an iota of awareness of the world beyond their personal space. They all chatted and tittered the forced laughter required in social settings, careful not to allow their glances to stay overly long on another’s out-of-style hairdo or too-worn footwear. Plastic smiles firmly in place, they assessed each other’s status.
A light breeze wafted through the pickup window, carrying snippets of conversation. “We feel it’s important for our little Moonlight to meet people outside our usual orbits,” one breeder said, “so we come here at least once a week.”
The second mother nodded sagely. “Oh yes, a social conscience is so important to balanced development.”
As the women continued their vapid conversations, Toby fought down the urge to jump from his vehicle, strip naked, and run toward them just to see what they’d do. He snickered at the mental image of the mommy-mob shrieking and grabbing up their little ones, their mommy-hands covering the wide-eyed little faces.
Then again, maybe they’d pretend not to see him as long as he didn’t get too close. Humanoid turnips, that’s what they were. Nothing more than dark green-leafed plumage presented to the world, while their bulb-heads stayed safely jammed into the dirt.
They assumed everyone else thought and felt as they did. But, of course, that was the tragic mistake made by those who just wanted to live and let live. They didn’t want to hurt anyone, so no one could want to hurt them. No hard reality would be allowed in their cotton candy lives.
The never-happen-here attitude was a phenomenon Toby called the Normalcy Bias. And this scene was a prime example.
The Bias made people blind and vulnerable to those who’d moved outside the constraints of morality, humanity, or conscience. It made them prey. It made people ignore the instinctive twinges in their gut and told them bad things always happened to someone else.
The Bias assured them the hideous stuff people perpetrated on others—the horrors splattered across the front page and heard on the nightly news—could never touch them or theirs. It filled their heads with white noise and told them to look neither to the left nor to the right.
Undoubtedly put in place by Mother Nature to help keep the population in check, the Bias was strongest in the minds of those who’d never had to fight to survive, who’d never had to stay home from school until broken bones mended and bruises faded. Or who’d never stared into the darkness of a soulless breeder intent on obliterating their spirit.
Strange sounds in the night? The Bias says it’s just the wind. Shadows on the wall? It’s only the trees scratching at the windows. Whispers in the darkness? You’re imagining things. Sleep well, children, our world is safe.
With a heavy sigh, Toby studied the man whose gaze was riveted on a spot hidden from Toby’s view by a tall hedge. With his hands shoved deep inside his pockets, had the guy been a bird dog, he would have been in full point mode—target spotted and locked.
As if sensing he was being watched, the man looked toward Toby. Their eyes met, and the man quickly dropped his gaze to study the grass in front of him.
Toby shot a look toward the breeders to see if they’d finally registered the elevated danger. No surprise that after a perfunctory glance, none of them paid further attention to either the pervert or him.
That’s right, don’t look. If you don’t look, the danger’s not there.
Then, like dogs responding to a whistle only they could hear, the mothers gathered their chicks and flocked toward the parking lot. They waved at each other, called out their goodbyes, and promised to return soon.
Of course, some of the oh-so-loving-mommy attention would evaporate once behind closed doors. Then some of the pseudo-doting breeders would turn into flesh-shredding, eviscerating, soul-cauterizing harpies, weaving their webs of enmeshment—
Toby interrupted the flood of thought before it spiraled upward into what he’d dubbed a “Hate-Spate.” He ordered himself to breathe slowly.
Left unchecked, a hate-spate could override his caution and catapult him into doing something reckless, something that would make the police take an interest in him. He couldn’t have that now, not when a new life was so close, he could nearly smell it.
Toby finished his cold burrito, wadded up the wrapper and started the engine. Before pulling away, he took one last look around the park.
As if the pervert’s shoes had suddenly caught fire, he scuttled toward a small compact car at one end of the park. But instead of getting into the vehicle, he reached through the open passenger side window, pulled out a brown paper bag then retraced his steps.
A kid wearing a baseball cap stepped out from behind the bush and hurried away. Too far distant for Toby to ascertain gender, the kid broke into a run and disappeared up an alley. The pervert furtively glanced toward the mommies as if to ensure they hadn’t noticed him, then followed the kid.
Evil is, as Evil does.
Toby sucked air through his teeth. Never taking his eyes off the pervert, he started his engine and followed the follower.
Chapter Fourteen
When Jillie arrived at the park, she found a spot behind a large bush hidden from view of anyone on the street. She laid her backpack on the grass, unzipped it and retrieved the napkin-encased sausage she’d saved from the fast food joint.
A light breeze blew the smells of dry grass against her face, and noonday sun warmed the back of her neck. Through gaps in the bush she watched yelping kids play on the slide and swings as an old man looked on from the park’s edge.
Did the children have any idea how lucky they were to have the freedom to play in the sun? Did even one of them know what life would be like if their moms were suddenly no longer there to see to them?
She looked like she hadn’t washed or changed clothes in a month. The café manager’s words had stung.
Other than her hair color, Jillie hadn’t given much thought to her appearance. She’d been too busy trying to avoid getting caught by the Elliotts or the police.
She heaved a sigh. She hadn’t planned to return t
o the trailer for her suitcase until after she had Beth’s ashes. But, although the thought of back-tracking made her insides sink, it would be a bitter pill to get caught just because she hadn’t taken the time to clean herself up.
Beth was counting on her.
As Jillie hefted her backpack and slipped her arms into the straps, her eyes were drawn to movement just beyond the bush behind which she’d eaten. The old man who’d been standing around suddenly hurried toward a car at the side of the park, glancing over his shoulder in her direction every couple of steps.
The words from one of Pop’s survival speeches rang in her head: If something doesn’t feel right, never ignore it. Pay attention to your gut.
Jillie picked up her pace.
Once back at the trailer, she hauled the suitcase up onto the ragged sofa and removed two outfits from it. She stuffed a clean T-shirt and pair of jeans into her backpack then removed her dirty clothes and slipped into the second clean outfit.
Her eyes rested on the huge yellow suitcase. The stupid thing might as well have been a neon sign that said Here’s Jillie Ross, runaway. She needed to ditch it.
A sudden loud knock on the door interrupted her thoughts and made her jump. She gulped, and her heartbeat sped up.
Maybe the owner of the trailer had come back. Or maybe the police had spotted her in the park and tracked her down.
“Hello in there.” It was a man’s voice, kind of gargly sounding. The man coughed, hawked, and spat. “I know you’re in there girlie,” he said a little louder. “I been watching you. I followed you from the park.”
Her only thought to get as far away from the front door as possible, Jillie grabbed her backpack, jumped over the hole in the hallway, and climbed onto the platform. Pulling her knees up tight against her chest, she pressed her back against the wall of the trailer and held her breath.
“I just wanna help. A little girl all alone can get into trouble, especially a cute little thing like you.” When Jillie remained silent, the man added, “I brought you a burger. You must be hungry, not having a home and all.”