Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  All he had by way of physical evidence was the body of a Jane Doe resting now on a slab in the morgue. At least now he knew where to look for her identity, the girl Jeni had called Polina. Poli. Probably with an "i" instead of a "y." Maybe Jeni was, too. That was a start. The ethnicity of those names … could have come from half a dozen Eastern European countries. Still, it was more than he'd known about her before.

  T.J. and Dobbs had parked themselves in Bailey's kitchen. They all were reluctant to leave, not until they could see Bailey, talk to her. And Brice had no intention of leaving even then. He would be here, on guard, until … until whenever. Bailey was not going to be left alone again.

  After the other officers left, Brice went to the kitchen and sat down heavily across the table from T.J.

  "Coffee's fresh," T.J. said. "We been downin' it so fast it ain't had time to turn into road tar." Brice got up to get himself a cup and when he sat down with it — steaming and black — T.J. tried yet again to apologize for not stopping the girl named Jeni when she ran out of the bathroom.

  Brice silenced him with a raised hand. "Why didn't I grab her? I knew who she was, you didn't. What's done is done. We need to figure out where to go from here."

  "Where exactly is here?" Dobbs asked.

  "'Here' is realizing the girl who was afraid of monsters that would eat her insides was not psychotic — just gullible. They kidnap the girls by making their parents a solid gold promise that they're an employment agency looking for girls to serve as au pairs, or in office jobs in the United States. Maybe the kidnappers even thought the girls were older — their parents could have lied to get them a good job in America."

  "I thought they'd given up on straight kidnapping," T.J. said.

  "Guess these guys must be old school."

  "If they don't kidnap them, how—?" Dobbs began.

  "They get around a kidnappin' charge by taking girls old enough to travel with their own passports. Course when they get here, they ain't greeted by the beautiful children whose picture the recruiter showed to everybody in the village. They wind up in some dark basement, bein' 'broken in' by their pimp."

  "Kidnapping's cleaner. No paper trail. The girls just vanish and all their parents know is they drove off in a nice car with a nice man who had an American accent and nobody ever hears from them again. Throw them in the bowels of some freighter for a month and they're so psychologically traumatized you get docile hookers who are young, fresh … and disposable. If some rich john goes over the top, the whole problem vanishes without a trace."

  "That Poli girl had some stones on her to try to escape," T.J. said.

  Brice was silent, then said softly, "Not necessarily."

  "Meaning?" Dobbs asked.

  "Meaning she didn't run because she had more guts than the rest of them. Jeni said Poli ran because … because of the note Bailey passed her telling her she was going to be murdered."

  "Whoa, you sayin' she wasn't plannin'—?"

  "She didn't intend to run away, only did it because of Bailey's note?"

  "That's what Jeni said." Brice let out a long breath. “And I don't know what to make of any of that."

  "I do," said a voice from the doorway. The men turned and saw Bailey standing just out of the spill of light. She looked like she had physically experienced all the trauma inflicted on the two girls she had painted. Her face was deathly pale. Her eyes looked like burned holes in her face. "It means that I'm responsible for her death. She wouldn't have run if I hadn't insisted we go looking for her."

  “You can't make them kinds of statements about the future," T.J. said. He got to his feet and went to Bailey. "Come on in here, child, sit down and let's talk."

  Bailey allowed herself to be guided into the room, was still dopey from the sedative they had given her. But her mind was clear enough to grasp the implications of what she had overheard.

  "Talk about what? What's there to discuss? I thought about all that before, with Macy and the dam. If I hadn't interfered, gone looking for that Adirondack chair, that guy wouldn't have blown up the dam."

  "You don't know that," Dobbs said.

  "Ain't no way to tell what that man was plannin'. Just 'cause he was down on a houseboat on the lake don't mean he was gonna blow up the casino. He coulda been plannin' to plant a bomb under that dam all along."

  "He wasn't. The explosion was my fault. This girl's death is my fault, too."

  "We all decided to try to prevent the future painted in those paintings," Dobbs said.

  "Didn't nobody twist our arms to get us to cooperate."

  "And that girl was obviously terrified she was going to be killed," Brice said. "She didn't suddenly decide her life was in danger because of a note from a stranger."

  “You can't go poking 'round in that," T.J. said. "Did that first little girl who got strangled — the very first paintin' my mama ever done — was that child murdered 'cause my mama went to the sheriff and tried to save her? Course, she didn't. The twisted pervert who'd been molestin' her for months was 'fraid he was about to get caught and that's why he killed her. My mama's painting didn't have nothin' to do with it one way or the other."

  "But …"

  "If you hadn't said nothing, had just took that picture of Macy out in the back yard, made a bonfire with it and cooked marshmallows … Macy Cosgrove would be dead right now.”

  "Not if that Osbourne guy had intended to bomb the casino, and only blew up the dam because we—"

  "Then a whole buncha other folks'd be dead. Fact is, didn't nobody die but the sick crackhead." He paused, then added in a soft voice colored with revulsion, "And if we hadn't tracked down that kidnapper …"

  He didn't have to say any more. None of them wanted to go there.

  "I want to believe you, T.J."

  T.J. cast a sideways glance at Dobbs before he continued.

  "When me and Dobbs was kids, we … we decided we was gonna go watch what one of Mama's paintings predicted."

  Dobbs stiffened, his muscles going rigid as if tensing for a blow.

  "We ain't never talked 'bout it since that day, never mentioned it, not a word."

  "Why not?" Brice asked.

  "Something like that — a couple of little boys see …" Dobbs said by way of explanation, which didn't seem to Brice to be an explanation at all. "We pretended it never happened."

  "It was a train derailment." T.J.'s voice had a flat quality — either emotionless or so full of emotion he had clamped hold of it to keep it steady. "A trestle give way and a coal train fell off into the river." Again, he looked at Dobbs. "We was close, watched it happen just like Mama painted. Then we … heard a man screamin' from the wreckage. So we went runnin' down there."

  He seemed to have lost steam to continue, so Dobbs picked up the story, though Brice could tell he didn't know why T.J. had started the tale to begin with.

  "At the bottom of the pileup, it was the engineer, I think — he was buried up to the waist in coal, pinned down by the wreckage, and he was hollering, 'Help! Help!' He saw us and begged us to save him."

  "But there wasn't nothin' we could do," T.J. took the story back. "The two of us couldn't move that car off of him and pull him out. More'n that, though, the coal — hundreds of thousands of tons of it — was still settlin'. It was slidin' down toward him, toward us. If we'd tried to save him, we'd have been buried with him."

  "So you were what, eight, nine years old, and you watched this man die?" Brice asked.

  "We run from the slidin' coal. But I looked back. I seen."

  He took a moment and Brice was trying to figure out where T.J. was going with the story.

  "I ain't never told Dobbs the next part.” Dobbs had been wearing a hundred-yard stare, his eyes unfocused, and his look snapped to T.J. "After I got home, we run all the way, cryin', both of us. Time I got to my house I's a mess and my mama wanted to know what was wrong and I just blurted it all out, told her what we done. She was horrified that I even knew 'bout the painting, let alone that I'
d looked at it and gone to watch it happen.

  "I was all tore up, cryin’ and carryin' on, sayin', 'We tried to save him. I climbed up there tryin' to get to him, but then the coal started to slide.' I tole her I's sorry I'd sneaked around behind her back and went to see it and now I wished I hadn't seen nothing. She wiped my nose and waited 'til I had a'hold of myself again. Then she took me out to the chicken house and pulled that painting out from under the straw where she'd hid it."

  Dobbs had stopped breathing.

  "I didn't wanna see it, but she brought it out into the bright sunshine and pointed to the bottom of the paintin'."

  T.J. looked at Dobbs as he said the rest of it. Some kind of unspoken communication passed between them.

  "I looked, and seen what me'n Dobbs never seen in the dim light inside that chicken house. That man, the one trapped in the coal — he was in the painting. It was in the bottom corner of the canvas, a spot not two inches wide. But there he was, stuck under that train car, all that coal in slidin' piles above him."

  T.J. took another breath, like it was taking more air to tell the story than he could keep in his lungs at one time.

  "The man, he wasn't lookin' at the coal hangin' up above him. He was lookin' at something that wasn't in the picture, facing the river, had his hands out …"

  "He was looking at us!" Dobbs gasped. "She painted the man looking at us. He was begging us to save him."

  "Mama said she didn't understand how the past and the future fit together, how today and tomorrow was 'ranged in the mind of God, but she didn't think it was all laid out in a straight line, one thing after the other."

  T.J. wasn't looking at Dobbs anymore or at anything else in the room. He was standing in the bright sunlight beside a chicken house, listening to his mother talking: "It's like life's a parade and we's looking at it through a knothole in a fence and the onliest thing we can see is whatever is in front of that knothole. God sees the whole parade, though. He sees the folks way back at the end, just babies some of 'em, the people we gonna meet next week or next year, a'comin' up toward that knothole. And he sees the people that passed by the knothole 'fore we even started lookin' through it."

  T.J. paused and came back to the present.

  "She told me 'the painting knowed you was there. So you was s'posed to be there. The parade's all laid out even though we can't see but a little bitty bit of it.'"

  "What are you saying, T.J?" Bailey's voice was haunted.

  "My mama would have said you was s'posed to give that girl that note. You didn't cause nothin'."

  "Do you believe that? What if you'd warned the engineer before the train left the station, would he still—?"

  "I don't do what-ifs!" T.J. snapped, a door slamming shut with a loud bang. "What-ifs will drive you daft."

  Then the fierce look left his face.

  "I ain't sure even to this day what I b'lieve about how the past and the future's hooked up. I b'lieve we changed what mama painted when I went to your house that night and then you didn't hold that gun steady and that's why you ain't dead like the painting showed. And I b'lieve we kept Macy Cosgrove alive. Just 'cause I can't fit it all into my head and explain it, don't mean it's unexplainable. They's some logic to it that directs forces at work we can't see. All we can do is what we think's best, actin' out of a desire to help people. That's all we's responsible to do. The rest … it ain't up to us."

  Bailey shook her head slowly.

  "I don't know what I think anymore."

  She reached down and picked up the puppy, who was happily chewing on the rawhide lace of her moccasin, and buried her face in his soft fur.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Bailey sat at the table as the men talked, not participating, just listening. No, not even really listening, just hearing words but assigning no meaning to them. She could feel the effects of the narcotics they'd given her gradually wearing off and she was becoming more alert as she sat there. Well, that and the coffee were bringing her around.

  She had almost been murdered tonight, came within seconds of being dragged out from under the bed and strangled. At least, that's what she'd thought. But the others didn't think so.

  "They didn't come here to kill Bailey," Brice said. "What good would that do?"

  "What did they want, then?" Dobbs asked.

  "To find out what she knew," Brice said.

  "And how she knew it," T.J. added. "And who she mighta told about it."

  "The way Fletch and the cavalry came thundering in to rescue her, they probably figure she alerted every law enforcement agency between here and Nova Scotia," Dobbs said.

  "I imagine that is exactly what they think," said Brice dismally.

  "Why's that a bad thing?" Bailey asked. They looked a little startled, apparently had just about forgotten she was sitting there quietly sipping coffee and listening.

  "They blew it, missed their chance to get answers. So now … they're going to close up shop fast."

  A phrase flittered on moth wings through her mind — have to cut bait — and was gone before she had a chance to think it.

  "How exactly do they close up shop?" she asked.

  Brice spread out his hands. "I wish I could read this some other way, but I think it's obvious what their next move is going to be."

  "It's the only move they got," T.J. said. "They got to get rid of the girls. All of 'em, however many 'all' is."

  "You mean … kill them?"

  Brice nodded. "Have to. They have to get rid of the evidence."

  "And then get the hell outta Dodge."

  "So, they're just going to … what?" Bailey was trying to shake off the remnants of the narcotic and think. "You mean, shoot them and dump their bodies in the lake?"

  "I wish that's what I thought they were going to do." Brice's face was a grim mask.

  Bailey suddenly went cold all over.

  "A couple of things he said …" Brice turned to Bailey. "When the guy was through beating Jeni, what did he say to her?"

  Bailey didn't want to pull the image back into her mind, but concentrated, trying to get his exact words.

  "He told her the only way to keep a mouse from squeaking was to stomp the mouse." As Bailey said the words, the meaning blew away the remaining fog in her brain. "No, before that, when he was talking about a brochure or a video."

  That part was too fuzzy to make sense of. The other one, the ugly one, had said something about pictures. A video, too, maybe. Yes, the star …?

  "I'm sorry. I don't … I can't …"

  "If he's plannin' on making an example of 'em …" T.J. was blunt. "He's gonna kill 'em and video it!"

  It was like all the air'd been sucked out of the room. Bailey wanted to protest, to argue, but she didn't. Because she didn't have breath to argue. And because she thought he was right.

  "We keep talking about the 'other girls,'" Dobbs said. "How do we know there are others?"

  Bailey found herself getting to her feet, discovered what she was thinking when she heard her thoughts come out of her mouth.

  "Jeni and Poli weren't the only people in that painting."

  "There's a limited amount of space under a bed — how many could there be?" Brice asked.

  "I'm going to find out."

  She turned and started out of the room toward the studio, knowing if she didn't do this right now, act on what she had realized was their final option, she wouldn't have the courage to do it at all.

  "Bailey, I think you ought to—" T.J.'s voice was so full of fear and concern she wanted to hug him.

  "Find out?" Dobbs was lost. "How?"

  "She's gonna paint them other girls," T.J. said.

  "Oh, no she's not." Brice stood up in front of her like the giant squid rising out of the sea before Captain Nemo.

  She was amazed and encouraged by the strength she could hear in her soft words. "It's not up to you."

  Bailey felt a weariness of body, mind and spirit that was not commensurate with her physical exertion for that day
. Of course, she had lived through torture and come within a hair's breadth of being murdered. There was that. She wondered how many calories that kind of activity burned. She'd never seen it on any chart.

  Okay, her mind was ping-ponging. Get a grip.

  She fought the debilitating fatigue that washed over her in waves. It seemed to take all her strength to lift her brush, add dollops of paint and smear them around on the pallet. She tried to gird herself for whatever was on the other side of the doorway that opened up when she painted a picture, the portal through which horror and madness flowed.

  Her mind ping-ponged again and she thought about her childhood obsession with ski jumpers.

  The Winter Olympics on television had been magical — ice skaters and skiers and that sled-thingy that went so ridiculously fast. But ski jumpers … oh, my!

  She'd asked every grownup she knew and never got a satisfactory answer to the question, "How do they learn that?" Even a child could figure out they couldn't have merely assumed the position at the top of a ski jump one day — hands on poles, elbows out — slid down the incline and gone flying out into space. How did they practice a thing like that?

  Her magical paintings — they were ski jumps. She'd been forced to assume the position with a paintbrush in each hand and … She didn't get to practice, to work up to them slowly, maybe paint a couple in a safety harness just to get the feel of it.

  She stood there now at the top of the jump.

  The darkness under the bed had taken over that whole side of the portrait, disproportionately large to show the image of Jeni's face, and Bailey looked beyond it into the gloom. The darkness there concealed the girls the Beast hadn't asked about … so Jeni hadn't told him.

  Inhaling deeply, Bailey picked up a brush and took off down the slope, touching it to the dark canvas beyond Jeni's face.

  Nothing happened.