Julia crawled over the mattresses to the young woman. “Bastard,” she said.
I followed her. “Who was that?”
“Myles. He likes to keep one of us for his own personal use from time to time. He thinks he’s doing us a favor. But he’s fucking sick, deranged. I’d rather screw ten guys at the bar than spend one night with him.”
Julia reached the bottom of the stairs and sat back on her heels looking at me. “The stuff he makes us do.” Her eyes dropped to her lap while she played some scene in her mind. She shook her head and looked up. “Don’t ask. Just pray he never wants you.”
She slipped her hands beneath the girl’s armpits and I took her ankles. Together, we dragged her back to our mattress, straightened her body, slipped off her shoes and pulled a blanket up to her chin. I brushed the girl’s dirty blond hair away from her face and looked down at Kira.
While Kira slept, I imagined what I’d say to her when she woke up. We’d met a few times when Griff and I first started dating. Kira had been about twelve. I’d spoken with her briefly at her mother’s funeral and hadn’t seen her since, so it wasn’t like she’d recognize me the minute she opened her eyes. Both of which were swollen shut. The deep purple spheres around them looked more like a Halloween mask than a young woman’s skin. Her lips were puffy and cracked. A rivulet of dried blood trailed from her nose to the corner of her mouth.
“How long was she with Myles?” I asked Julia.
“He took her three or four days ago. She’s been here for about a month, I think. It’s hard to judge time.”
Ruth said that Isaac had sold Kira to Lucas about a month before I arrived at the farm. So if both Kira and I had gone from Isaac’s to Clive’s, it made sense that these were the steps within the network. How far reaching the web, or whose house was next, I hoped we’d never find out.
I lay my head on the pillow beside Kira trying not to let my imagination conjure images of what she’d been through. Kira stirred and moaned. Her eyelids flickered as she struggled to open them.
“Shsh,” I whispered and laid my hand on her shoulder. “You’re okay. You’re eyes are swollen. I think your nose might be broken.”
A tear slipped from the corner of her closed eye. I wiped it with my finger. I wanted to tell her who I was and that I was here to get her out. But I didn’t want to make false promises. I also didn’t want the others to hear me. It was too soon to judge their loyalty to Clive. From what I’d seen and heard so far I doubted these women had the same sense of duty and gratitude like those at Isaac’s. But Stockholm Syndrome was unpredictable.
“You’re okay,” I said rubbing Kira’s arm. I knew she wasn’t, but what else could I say under the circumstances. I looked around the room for Julia. She was leaning against the wall in the far corner, dozing. “Is there something we can do?” I asked of anyone that might be listening. “Is there water down here? A cloth? Anything?”
A young girl, no more than fourteen, leaned up on her elbow. She shook her head. “They don’t give us stuff like that.”
“How do you wash yourself?”
“Clive takes us to the shower upstairs before we go to work.” She lay back on her mattress.
“Fuck him,” I said. Finding Kira had revived me. A way out was the next step.
I got up and headed for the stairs.
“What are you doing?” It was Julia’s voice.
“I’m telling them I need some water and a cloth and some ice for…for her.” I pointed to Kira, thanking God I’d caught myself before saying her name.
Julia laughed. “Are you crazy? You’ll probably get beat up for that.”
I laughed and pointed at my still bruised and swollen face. “I think I’m beyond that now. And we can’t just leave her like this. If they want to make any money off her she needs some attention.”
I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. The girls below me collectively held their breath.
The door swung open. Clive had a look of surprise on his face. “What?”
“I need some water and ice to take care of the girl. She’s no good to you looking like that. I’ll clean her up.”
“Who’re you, Florence Nightingale?”
“She can’t work like that. I’m just offering.”
He scratched the back of his head and looked me up and down then glanced at the kitchen sink and back to me again. Settling his hands on his hips he studied the floor for a minute then slowly raised his head. “Okay, nursemaid.” He walked to the sink and filled a bowl with water, lifted a dishrag from the counter and dropped it in then came back and handed it to me.
“Ice.” I said, taking the bowl from him.
“Take what you get.” He waved me away with his hand and closed the door behind me.
Descending the steps I was aware of my shaking hands and rubber knees, but in spite of that, I smiled. At the bottom I looked around the room, six pairs of eyes met mine in disbelief. I made my way to Kira and promised that fear would not be my demise.
She dozed on and off as I cleaned the blood from her face as best I could. I remembered Eve saying ‘don’t rub’ when I’d applied a warm towel to the welts on her back and I did the same now to Kira. Touching the cloth to her skin gently, dabbing, not wiping the blood away. She reached out and took my hand, not to stop me, just to hold it. I squeezed back, letting her know I understood.
The door opened and Clive came halfway down the stairway.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The girls immediately rose and walked to the stairs. I didn’t move.
He nodded to Kira. “Is she awake?”
I shook my head. “Still unconscious,” I lied. “She shouldn’t be left alone. I’ll stay with her. You probably don’t need a dead whore on your hands.”
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” He turned and went back up the stairs. “Let’s go,” he said again over his shoulder.
In procession, the girls mounted the stairs and the door closed behind them. The lock clicked into place.
Kira squeezed my hand. I lay down on the mattress beside her and rested my head close to hers. “There are things I need to tell you,” I whispered. “The others are gone now, but when they’re here we can’t speak of any of what I’m about to say. Do you understand?”
Her eyes were still closed, but she nodded and turned her head toward me.
“My name is Britt. I’m a friend of your father’s. I work as a private investigator. He got your postcard from OK and I went into Isaac’s farm looking for you.”
Tears ran from her eyes through her hair and into the mattress beneath her head. She gripped my hand in both of hers.
“I met Ruth. She told me that she taped the postcard back together and mailed it. She loved you.”
Kira nodded and I thought I saw the hint of a smile on her cracked lips.
“Anyway, it was just the luck of the draw, if you can call it luck, that I was sold to Clive and now we’re both here in Shangri-La. Some things are meant to be. Your father has never stopped looking even though the police did. They called you a runaway. Were you?” I asked her.
She started to shake her head, but winced. Her lips parted. “No,” she whispered. “Well, yes, at first. I drifted from one friend’s house to another. They hid me. Then I started going to the homeless shelters. I didn’t go to school because I knew my father would find me. I wanted to make him suffer. I blamed him for my mother, my mother’s…” She started to cry. “He had nothing to do with it. I know that now. He loved her. But I had to blame someone.” She raised her hand to wipe tears from her cheek, but moaned and dropped it back to the mattress. “I was in the park. It was at least a year ago, but longer I think. I’m not sure. Isaac approached me. He said if I went with him for a couple of days I’d feel better. I missed my mom. I felt alone and still so angry. I wasn’t ready to go home. I was stupid and selfish. I deserve this. I deserve what’s happened to me.”
“Don’t cry,” I said, dabbing away her t
ears with the cloth. “No one deserves this.”
“There’s no way to leave. If we try they’ll kill us. You see how I look? Myles did this because I opened a window in the bedroom. He said someone could have seen me. I can’t take the beatings anymore. I’ll do what they say from now on. I want to live even if it means living like this.”
“Forced sex and beatings are not my idea of living.”
“You don’t understand.” She turned her head away from me. “But you will,” she whispered.
I lay back and stared up at the ceiling listening to the steady breathing of her sleep, the best thing for her on many levels. She was so beautiful and too young to be harboring the demons she lived with. It had never occurred to me that Kira would be anything but overjoyed to see me and that together we’d plan our way out. Now, not only did I have to figure out how to escape. I had to convince her that it was worth the risk.
Tomorrow I’d play the guilt card and tell her how much her father needed her. How his life had fallen apart without her. It was my last ditch effort to give her the resolve she needed, but for now I had to work on my own. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the feel of Griff’s hand holding mine. Denying the voice in my head that said I’m tainted goods and that he’d never want to hold my hand again.
SUNDAY
Beside me, Kira stirred as two of the girls crawled past us toward the bagels that had hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs. They tore into the bag like wild animals. Kira and I scrambled with the others, claimed our share of the slim offering and retreated to our lair, sinking our teeth into chewy dough.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Better,” she said. “You learn to heal pretty fast. If you don’t, they have no use for you.”
We took a few bites in silence.
“Does anyone else know?” she whispered.
I looked at her and raised my eyebrows, unsure of the question.
“Who you are. Why you’re here?”
I shook my head. “We have to keep it that way.”
“I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Escape?”
She nodded.
“You have to.”
She looked across the room, her eyes somewhere beyond the filthy walls.
“You want to stay here forever?”
She looked at me, teary. “I’m scared.”
“That makes two of us.”
To pass the time I tried to talk with some of the women being held in the basement. A couple of them turned their heads away from me, fearful as trapped animals, which wasn’t far from the truth. Marta had been a senior in high school and welcomed my questions. She seemed desperate for someone to care.
“My mother wouldn’t answer me,” she said. “I was screaming at her to make him stop.”
“Him?”
“My uncle, her brother. She was alone with four kids. I’m the oldest. I told her I’d work. But my uncle said he would pay her right then. He waved a roll of bills in her face and said it was more than I could make at some low-level job. She took the money and closed the door. He put me in his car and brought me here.”
Louise was mid-twenties, a prostitute that Clive had taken a liking to.
“Don’t you ever think about escaping from this place?”
She looked at me and shook her head. “You’re new. That’s what everyone thinks about when they first get here. But sooner or later you give in.”
She was quiet for a few minutes, twisting a strand of ratty hair around her finger. “I once watched Clive beat a girl to death for trying to leave. I was sitting in the van outside Rusty’s. She tried to run into the woods, but he caught her.”
“Are you sure he killed her?”
“He threw her body into the back of the van. Said he was taking her to the hospital after he dropped us off. I could see her eyes. They were open, but there was nothing there.”
Julia had been in her second year at the university. These weren’t lost souls like the women at Isaac’s. These women had been taken from their lives, traded for money by boyfriends, uncles and hard as it was to believe, in Marta’s case, her mother.
I went back to my mattress and lay down, pushing the images Louise’s story had painted from my head. Kira and I were getting out. I would not succumb to fear. I’d been dozing off and on but came fully awake when Clive descended the stairs.
“You, you and you,” he said pointing at Kira, Julia and me. “Shower, now.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder directing us to the floor above.
“We’re going to the bar tonight,” Kira said as we roused ourselves from our mattresses. “We always shower before we go.”
“I wish we could shower after we go,” Julia added climbing the stairs behind me.
The bar. I said the word over in my head imagining what that would entail. I thought about my initiation in the basement at Isaac’s and my stomach turned over. I couldn’t do it again. No stranger would grope my body. I’d cut his hands off first. I had to get out of here, tonight. I’d watch for a moment of opportunity at Rusty’s. And when it appeared I’d grab it without a second thought. I’d have to keep Kira close at hand.
We walked down a hallway on the first floor of the house. Shades were drawn over the windows. The floor was gritty beneath my bare feet, salt and sand from the winter street outside. We took another flight of stairs and filed into a bathroom at the top of the landing.
“Hurry up,” Clive said.
As I stepped past him, he handed me the pile of clothes he held in his hand. White jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers.
“Not quite in season,” I said. But I was freezing, so anything was better than the mini skirt and sequined tank top I was still wearing from Isaac’s.
Clive pushed me through the doorway, ignoring my comment.
Julia closed the door behind us. “I’ll go first,” she said and stripped down to her skin, dropping her clothes in a pile on the floor. She stepped into the shower and pulled the curtain.
I grabbed Kira’s arm and turned her toward me. “Tonight,” I whispered. “At the bar. We’re getting out.”
She shook her head. “There’s no way. They watch every move. You’ll see.”
“No,” I said, angry that I had to convince her. “You’ll see. And when I say let’s go, you better be ready.”
“They’ll kill us if they catch us. I’ve seen girls try. And I’ve never seen them again.”
“Because they got away,”
“Because they caught them. They won’t put up with us if we give them any shit. There’s plenty more girls where we came from. Ones that obey.”
Julia pulled back the curtain and stepped out. Kira stepped in and our conversation ended. When my turn came for the shower, I turned away from them as I undressed so they wouldn’t see the red welts on my stomach. The scars on their bodies were from unthinkable acts of violence perpetrated by men they were forced to please. The ones on my stomach were self-inflicted.
Back in the basement we waited while the others showered.
“What time do we go?” I asked when all the women had had their turn upstairs..
Kira shrugged. “Whenever they feel like it.”
“Are you okay?” Her eyes were still swollen. The blue beneath them was tinged with yellow. Her nose was puffy and red.
“What difference does it make?”
“I need you to be strong.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“We’re not gonna die. We’ll make it. We have to.”
She turned her head and looked at me. “I’d rather live like this than not live at all.”
“Your father’s falling apart. He’s drinking. He’s one step away from losing his job. He’s been a mess since you disappeared. He has nothing. He needs you.”
She looked at me and was about to answer when the lock at the top of the stairs clicked and the door swung open. “Let’s go.” It was Clive’s voice.
Everyone stood and walked robotically to th
e stairs, ascending in single file.
The air was crisp and cold. I sucked it into my lungs, grateful to breathe something other than sweat, blood and the aftermath of sex. We climbed into a van, filling the three rows of bench seats. Myles slid into the passenger seat and Clive got behind the wheel. Myles wore a wool cap and when he turned to grin at all of us, his gold tooth glinted in the moonlight.
We drove through darkness, winding our way down a one-lane road. The headlights offered no details of our whereabouts, illuminating only pine trees lined up like sentries.
After twenty minutes or so lights broke through the blackness and a building took shape ahead of us. As we neared, I could make out the sign, Rusty’s, and ten cars in the lot. The side of the van slid open and we stepped out one after the other. Clive and Myles each had a rifle hanging from a strap over their shoulders. They nodded us into the building. Inside there were two or three times as many men as cars in the lot. It would be a busy night if we were taking care of all of them. I needed an out fast.
We were claimed almost before we got all the way inside the bar. A young guy with a scar on his cheek and a knife in his belt took Kira by the arm and pulled her toward him. “What’re you drinking?” he asked her.
I tried to follow, not wanting to lose sight of her, but felt myself being pulled in another direction. Turning, I saw a burly man in a red plaid jacket reeling me in. Yellow teeth appeared in crooked line between his mustache and beard. My stomach dropped. He handed me a shot glass and for the one and only time that night, I was grateful. He pulled me onto his lap after I sucked down the drink and groped my t-shirt. Several more shots were lined up on the table. I risked one more.
Above the bar there was a television playing the nightly news. The sound was turned down, but I almost leaped to my feet when Griff’s face appeared with John beside him. I looked for Kira, but her back was to the bar. No one was paying attention. Across the bottom of the screen a ticker tape scrolled: Prostitution ring busted in St. Bart, Maine. Isaac’s face appeared and the farmhouse loomed behind him. Then Chief Stebbins was on the screen. Town official arrested, the tape went on. I wondered how they got Stebbins. Had Isaac talked or was Stebbins still at the house when they raided it? Isaac was the tip of the iceberg in a prostitution ring, but hopefully they’d have figured that out. It would come to light as long as Isaac gave up his connections in Canada. But what if Isaac and Stebbins refused to talk and Griff and John had no idea where I was? What if Isaac didn’t know what happened to the girls he sold to Lucas? What if Griff never realized that Kira and I had crossed the border? I could hope I was wrong, but hope wasn’t going to get me out of here.
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