HARD FAL

by CJ Lyons

  “I don’t understand,” Lucy said, trying to curb her impatience. “Are you here because of one of your civil suits?”

  June planted both her palms on the tabletop and shifted in her seat as if uncomfortable. “We’re here because you and your team might be able to stop the child predators from killing the case before it ever goes to the Supreme Court.”

  “How so?” Lucy asked.

  “There have been threats. Against June’s life,” Oshiro put in from where he’d planted himself near the door. “At the last trial, they also threatened the judge, so the Marshals got involved. But they’ve smartened up. This time it’s only June they’re targeting and since it’s a civil proceeding, we can’t offer her protection. Not officially, at any rate.”

  “But Oshiro here,” Seth nodded toward the big man, “gave us some names—retired agents. Even with their protection, even living like fugitives, the bastards still found us.” Bitter anger colored his voice.

  June pushed to her feet, obviously impatient with all the rhetoric, revealing her extremely pregnant belly for the first time. “It’s not just me they’re threatening. This time they want our baby.”

  The Girl Who Never Was: Memoirs of a Survivor

  by June Unknown

  How I Got My New Last First Name

  IT WAS THE social worker who gave me my name.

  “Jane Doe is no name for a girl her age,” she told the doctor and policeman—this one different from the first two, he wore a suit and wouldn’t look at me.

  I was sitting on the floor in the corner of a small room that smelled like Daddy does after he comes back from running. Looking up at the adults sitting at the table and standing above me made me feel tiny, like if I squeezed myself small enough, I could escape through a crack in the wall and run home to Daddy.

  But Daddy had left me. I didn’t know where home was. The green elephant man never came—maybe he knew where Daddy was.

  Daddy told me to sit and wait and I’d disobeyed. I was a Bad Girl, and we’d just have to do something about that, but sitting here cold and shivering and my stomach strangling it was so twisted and my hair and face sticky with tears and snot and my fingernails torn from clawing at the grate in the car they locked me in when they took me from the mall…what was I going to do?

  Follow Daddy’s rules. Baby Girls are to be seen and not heard. I hadn’t said a word.

  Do as you’re told. No one had told me to do anything, except the policeman who kept yelling “Stop fighting!” when he and his partner put me in their car. And then the doctor who took my dress up clothes and touched me all over and took pictures but his camera wasn’t anything like Daddy’s, he said to hold still. So I did.

  “We need a name for our report,” the new policeman was saying.

  There was a nurse. She lied. Told me everything would be okay. It wasn’t. I was a Bad Girl, I hadn’t stayed and waited like Daddy told me to, and now I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t like her. Nurse Liar.

  “She’s got to have a name,” Nurse Liar said. “She’s at least eight or nine years old.” She kept touching me, patting my hair, helping me on with the new clothes they gave me, squeezing my arm. I didn’t like her touching me. Nobody touched me but Daddy. That’s the way it should be.

  “Maybe older,” the doctor said. He was an old man with a beard that hid his face. “I’d guess ten. From the x-rays. The radiologist can tell better.”

  Social Worker—I kind of liked her. She looked me in the eye and had hair that was red, almost as bright as the leaves on the sugar maple in our backyard when the weather got cold. I always tried to make that color red with my crayons and paints, but never got it right. Not shiny and bright like her hair. She bent down so her face was the same level as mine. “Please, honey. You’re safe here. We’re not going to hurt you. Just tell us your name so we can find your mommy and daddy.”

  That got my attention. I don’t have a mommy—not sure I ever did. I never met a woman (outside of the ones on TV) before. But if she could find Daddy, then I could go home, that was a good reason to break a rule, right? And she’d almost asked a question—I was supposed to answer if Daddy asked me a question, so maybe it was okay to answer her? All I had to do was give her my name.

  “Baby Girl,” I answered.

  Everyone went quiet and stared at me. I focused all my attention on Social Worker. She was the one who said she could find Daddy for me.

  “Your full name, honey. What’s your first and last name?”

  I stared at her blankly. Do people have names at first and then make new ones? Daddy only gave me one name. Maybe I’m not old enough to have a last one?

  She tried again. “How about your parents? What are their names?”

  That one was easy. “Daddy.”

  There. I’d answered her questions. She said that was what she needed to find my Daddy. I folded my arms across my chest and stared at the wall, painting a picture on it with my mind since they took my crayons and coloring book away. And I waited for her to go get Daddy.

  Instead, she stood and huddled with the others. I caught a few words. Most of them I didn’t understand. “Severely traumatized.” “Prolonged captivity.” “NCMEC.” “Long term care and placement.” “What’s the date?” “How’s that for a name? Better than Jane Doe?”

  That’s when they erased my first name, Baby Girl, and gave me my last name: June Forth.

  Then they took me away again and I was lost, Daddy nowhere to be found. I did my best to be a Good Girl and said nothing, not even when they asked questions. Daddy always said never talk to strangers, never trust anyone, he was the only one I should listen to and obey.

  He was right. I never felt scared with Daddy. He took care of me, he loved me.

  These people, these strangers, I don’t know why they wanted to hurt me, why they wouldn’t let me go home to Daddy, but I couldn’t trust them.

  They didn’t love me. Not like Daddy.

  Chapter 5

  LUCY STARED AT the pregnant woman. Below the table top, out of sight of the men, her hand clenched the cane so tightly sweat dripped down its aluminum casing. She was angry. At her damn foot that kept trying to distract her with its never-ending Morse code drumming. At the Bureau with their cost-cutting strategies.

  Most of all, at the men who treated women and children as disposable objects, used for their pleasure and profit, then discarded.

  Men like June’s father. He’d used her for his sexual depravities since she was an infant. Raised her to obey him, taught her that pleasing him was her only reason for living. Then, when she’d grown too old, sold her to another pervert.

  Investigators working the case over the past fourteen years since June had been found had an abundance of theories—all which led to more unanswered questions. Like what happened to her mother? Had June’s father killed her or had June been stolen from her? Was he even her biological father or was being “Daddy” part of his twisted fantasy? Had he done this before or since? Where was the man who he’d sold June to? Arrested? Detained? Or just cold feet?

  Their working hypothesis was that the man who called himself “Daddy” worked in IT or software development. All of the images of June, including the ones dating back to when she was an infant, remained untraceable to any originating computer or ISP address. Even after hundreds—thousands—of man-hours working the case, Daddy remained a mystery.

  But those man hours had eventually, nine years after she’d been left in that mall, identified June as the subject of the Baby Girl photos and videos. Thanks to the work of Isaac Walden and Seth Bernhart.

  Lucy knew how much this case meant to Walden. No way in hell would she let him down. “Tell me about these threats.”

  June paced the small area between the table and Lucy’s desk, knuckles pressed against the small of her back. She glanced at Seth, obviously giving him permission in the shorthand body language of married couples. Seth slid a photo from his pocket and set it on the table betwee
n him and Lucy.

  It was an ultrasound. Of a baby.

  “That’s my latest ultrasound,” June said. “Taken two weeks ago.” Her voice cut off abruptly. Lucy glanced over her shoulder at the pregnant woman, but June had turned her back on everyone to stare out the window behind the desk.

  There wasn’t much to see except a glimpse of the Steeler’s training field. And the row of plants that had wilted in Lucy’s absence.

  “Yesterday,” Seth took over for June. He slid another sheet of paper onto the table. “This was posted on Backlist.” A Craig’s List type of site that had been tied to human trafficking, murder for hire, and other criminal activity.

  The paper was a screenshot of an ad. It included the same ultrasound image with a caption: Looking forward to adding my Baby Girl’s baby girl to my Collection! Daddy.

  The Girl Who Never Was: Memoirs of a Survivor

  by June Unknown

  The Knock on My Door that Changed Everything

  I DIDN’T MAKE it past my first year of art school. Away from home for the first time, living on my own, surrounded by men—you can probably guess why.

  Dr. Helen, my foster mom, had taught me how to appropriately interact with guys, at least enough to get me through adolescence, but she’d died of a heart attack the summer before I started college and now she was gone.

  I tried to keep her words alive in my memory, but they were soon overridden by anxiety and a need to seek comfort the only way I’d ever learned how: in the arms of a man. The girls my age avoided me, sensing I only pretended to be like them. The guys my age quickly figured out I was an easy mark, passive, willing to do anything they wanted—a cheap date, they thought.

  But my needs went much deeper than that and I began to turn to the older men on campus: my professors, the TAs, even the doctor who ran the student health clinic and the campus minister. No one was off bounds if I thought they could give me what I craved: the security I’d felt as a child when it was just me and Daddy.

  Ten months later, I was miserable. Every relationship whether a one night stand or a month long fling had ended the same way: with them walking out and me feeling dirty, wretched, and alone. It didn’t help that every single man told me it was my fault, blamed me for starting things, seducing them.

  They were the innocent pawns and I was some kind of manipulative schemer out to ruin their lives with my clinginess and neediness.

  It was during that year that I, for the first time in years, began to have flashes of memory. Me and Daddy. The way he smelled when he wrapped his arms around me at night. The rough scrape of his beard stubble against my skin. The smiles I’d work so very hard to earn.

  I thought maybe I was going mad. I ran away from school and used the inheritance Helen had left me to flee to her cottage in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. She used to take me there for vacation and I’d fallen in love with the quiet of life on the water, the color and light blossoming on my palette and in my paintings. Now that she was dead, leaving me as her only family—how pathetic was that, a woman with no family trying to raise a girl with no concept of family?—the cottage was mine.

  There, busy painting, alone, I felt almost at peace.

  Until one day there was a knock on the door.

  At first I didn’t hear it, I was so enmeshed in creating the exact pale yellow of the sky at dawn that morning, but it came again, louder this time, jolting me from a cloud of pigment. My mind still filled with sunlight and dawn mist, I stumbled to the door and opened it without thought.

  Two men stood there. A white man with dark, wavy hair, wearing a dark colored suit that was already wrinkling from the heat and humidity. With him was a black man in his forties wearing slacks and a polo shirt along with a pistol at his waist.

  “This is FBI Special Agent Isaac Walden,” the first man made introductions. His voice was as warm as that elusive morning sunlight I’d been struggling to capture. Reassuring beyond his years—he wasn’t that much older than I was. It made me forget my original intention of making an excuse and shutting the door. Instead, I leaned toward him, anxious to hear more. “I’m Assistant US Attorney Seth Bernhart. Are you June Forth?”

  They held up IDs and I nodded numbly as I examined them. It’s funny what goes through your mind when something totally unexpected happens. I’m not sure why, but my first thought wasn’t of Daddy—rather it was of my mother, a woman I’d never met, at least I never remembered meeting.

  I didn’t even know what mothers were until I figured it out for myself watching TV—I was old enough to know better than to ask, even when Daddy gave me permission to speak. Somehow I knew any talk of mothers would make him angry at me for being a Bad Girl.

  Yet, now, in this moment, facing these men, I blurted out, “You found her. You found my mother.”

  The two men glanced at each other. Seth—somehow in my mind he was already Seth, especially after my words turned his expression sorrowful, his shoulders drooping as if I’d given him an extra burden to carry. “No. We’re here to talk about the man who raised you when you were young. Could we come inside?”

  And that was the start of it. We sat at my kitchen table drinking sweet tea, me apologizing for the mess since there were half-finished paintings and sketching materials covering every surface. No one except Helen had ever been inside the cottage with me before and I had no idea how to play hostess to men like these.

  They were uncomfortable, stiff at first, skirting around the issue of Daddy, but Helen had prepared me well. I knew someday this would happen: men in suits wanting to know the details.

  More than that, they said they had pictures. And videos. From the time I was a baby to when I was ten and he left me at the mall.

  Said thanks to new computer technology they’d finally figured out that the girl abandoned in the mall that June day was the same girl in those images. Me.

  I was nineteen and knew enough to understand exactly what they were saying. I wasn’t even surprised, thanks to Helen. But I was curious.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why come to me now? After all this time?”

  The black man remained silent as he had for most of the conversation. But Seth leaned forward, his gaze meeting mine, seeing my agitation, and silently asking permission. Then he placed his hand over mine. It felt good. Warm. Protective. Like I was a part of something bigger than just me alone.

  If I was honest with myself, I would have realized that it felt a lot like being with Daddy.

  “Because,” he said, his voice low and soothing yet still filled with power, “if you’re willing. If you’re strong enough to face the men who have entertained themselves by collecting your images all these years, I’d like to put you on the witness stand.”

  I frowned. Even Helen had never been able to help me sort out my feelings about the possibility that Daddy had shared his pictures and films with strangers. Daddy loved me and that was a fact. It was also a fact that he’d been a bad man. Evil some people would have called him.

  But I could never think of him that way—not even now, knowing the truth that I’d never understood as a child.

  “Me? Testify? I don’t know those men.” It wasn’t the going to court that had my mind whirling, it was the thought that being in court, in front of the TV cameras and sketch artists and reporters, maybe Daddy would see.

  Maybe he would find me after all these years.

  I took a sip of tea but couldn’t taste it. How did I feel about that? About Daddy coming back into my life? I had no idea. Fear. Excitement. Dread. Ecstasy. Anger.

  None of Dr. Helen’s names for emotions fit. Not a single one. They all pinched like those too-small shoes Daddy had dressed me in that last day.

  “I’ve already gotten my convictions,” Seth was saying. “What I want is for you to go on record, explaining how much damage they’ve done to you. How your life is changed because of what your father did. How the fact that men like him gain pleasure from looking at those images of you has forever impacted you.” />
  “What good would that do?”

  “It will help me to convince the judge to give them the maximum sentence. So they can’t ever hurt another child again.”

  I almost said no. I wanted to say no. The last thing I ever, ever wanted to do was to face the men who had seen the intimate moments that Daddy and I shared. I was old enough, nineteen, to understand how awful it was—the things in those pictures and videos. But no amount of time could ever make me hate Daddy. He didn’t do anything to me; we’d done things together. He loved me the only way he could.

  But those men, the strangers who paid to see what should have been private between me and Daddy?

  Those men I hated. The word for my emotions came and it fit, along with more. Those men, prying into private moments, stealing bits and pieces of my life, they were the ones who made me feel ashamed, dirty. They deserved to be punished.

  “Would it really make a difference?” I asked, my voice sounding as soft and uncertain as a child’s.

  Seth squeezed my hand. I felt safe with him. He would protect me.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think it will. I think together we might be able to make a huge difference.”

  He had me at “together.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Chapter 6

  LUCY FOCUSED ON the ultrasound images in front of her. The baby’s face was tilted toward the viewer, her perfect features seeming to smile out from the womb. Innocence defined.

  She barricaded her emotions and focused on the immediate threat. Which meant getting answers Oshiro and Bernhart might not be forthcoming with if June remained. “Walden, could you grab Taylor so the two of you can go over June’s recent movements? Online and off. We need to know how someone could access her ultrasound.”