The Summer Children

by Dot Hutchison

  “So why are we assuming that the digital files are the only ones the killer is checking? There’s a whole file room.”

  I don’t have a phone number for either of the Smiths, so I text Cass, who answers with a promise to have the Smiths poke at it.

  And then, an hour later, she calls the conference room extension and demands to be on speaker. “Sterling, you’re a fucking genius,” she announces.

  “Well, yes,” Sterling agrees, nonplussed. “Why this time?”

  “Because there are files missing from the records room. The administrator has to go through drawer by drawer to match the files to their spreadsheets and what’s been checked out legitimately, but we’ve got three missing from what he’s checked so far.”

  “Ava’s?”

  “No, it’s there, but not quite in the right place. Someone took it out and then put it back wrong. All the kids we’ve met are accounted for.”

  “Who reported the Levines to CPS?” I ask.

  “A neighbor. The fence between the two houses is chain link and she saw Ava in the pool. Bathing suit.”

  And a bathing suit was going to make that low belly very evident.

  “How far along is she? Do they know yet?”

  “Ava wasn’t sure, because she’s only ever had one period. They couldn’t count back. The OB says about eighteen weeks.”

  Four and a half months. Christ in heaven.

  “They’ve got Gloria down at the station for questioning, and a judge just signed off on a warrant to search her house and car. If she has those missing files . . .”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then we ask to expand the warrant to the other clerks and administrators. I’ll let you know.”

  We stare at the conference phone in the center of the table. “Does anyone know where my car is?” I ask after a minute.

  Eddison snorts, and Sterling smiles. “It’s in the garage here,” she informs me. “Level four, I think.”

  “Thanks.”

  A couple of hours later, when I pack up to head out, Sterling follows suit. “Can I be your DD?” she asks quietly.

  “I’m not going out drinking.”

  “No, but I’m guessing this has something to do with your visitor this morning, and you looked like someone told you there was a killer clown after you.”

  “A killer cl . . . What?”

  “So it’s emotional. And something you have to face anyway? I’m asking if I can be your designated driver, because when you’re that emotional, driving sucks. And it’s hard.”

  “Who was your DD when you and dickhead fiancé broke it off?”

  “Finney,” she says with a shrug.

  Her old boss, who sent her on to us when we needed an agent because he’d already been promoted out of the field. Vic’s old partner, for a long time, and that makes a lot of sense as to why she fits with us so well.

  I should say, No, I’ve got this.

  “Thanks.”

  I don’t.

  So she drives me to the hotel, and I’m willing to bet Vic is paying for the room, because my mother would never spend this kind of money on herself. It’s not fancy, not luxurious or expensive, it just isn’t twenty-nine dollars a night with a roach chorus. When I was a kid, my mother could barely countenance spending money on herself, and with God only knows how many grandkids now, I can’t imagine that’s changed much.

  I turn the card over and over in my hand, not moving even after Sterling parks the car, brings the windows down, and cuts the engine. She doesn’t ask, or poke or prod or push. She just pulls out a book of crosswords and settles in.

  “Do you have any makeup wipes?” I ask.

  “Glove box.”

  It feels strange, wrong even, to strip everything off in the middle of the day, but with the aid of the wipes and the sun visor mirror, I get off every bit of it. I look like hell. The bruises under my eyes, the sallowness of not enough sleep. The scars digging pink-white tracks down my cheek.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Sterling tells me, without looking away from her page. “Take as much or as little time as you need.”

  “Thank you.”

  Forcing myself out of the car, I head into the hotel and take the stairs to the third floor because the thought of trying to stand still in an elevator right now makes my skin crawl. The door for 314 doesn’t look any different from its neighbors: plain white with the heavy lock plate under the handle.

  Five minutes later, I still haven’t been able to make myself knock.

  And then I don’t have to, because the chain scratches in its track and the handle rotates, and the door slowly opens to reveal my mother’s face.

  “Mercedes,” she breathes.

  My mother.

  “You need to go back,” I tell her.

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was scared of the world.

  She thought, once, that it could get better, that it could be better. She’d wanted so badly to believe that, and she had for a time.

  But the thing with worlds, in the human sense, is that they come crashing down. When a whole world shatters and self-destructs, is it possible to be less than apocalyptic? Wasn’t that the very meaning of the word?

  She’d had a bad few days after leaving the prison. It wasn’t just her daddy’s words ringing through her head, not just his wide, triumphant smile. It was all the other things, too, all the memories crashing in. She’d taken a few days off work, trying to get her head around all of it. She’d taken off another few days and checked into a clinic. She just couldn’t stop shaking. Or crying. Or panicking.

  It was too much. It was all just too much.

  All those years of beatings and Daddy coming to her room at night, camera at the ready.

  Mama escaping without her.

  Those years of the basement and Daddy’s friends.

  The hospital and the trial and all the foster homes, the parade of horrors too infrequently interrupted by goodness or indifference.

  And now her father was going to get out of prison. He was going to have another baby girl. Another daughter that he’d . . .

  He’d . . .

  But she worked through the fear and sorrow and rage as best she could. It was absurd. If—and it was a massive if—her father was released early, there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d be allowed near his daughter. No man with her daddy’s history would be allowed near a little girl.

  Right?

  She returned to work, still shaky but better. A little better. Getting there, maybe. She reminded herself of the good she did. She was helping children, more important now than ever.

  But this little boy . . .

  Here was this file on her desk, this beautiful little boy with eyes like hers, eyes that were bruised and a little broken and far too honest. There was so much proof that his parents were unfit, and yet, he’d been given back to them. Again. Because there were rules and technicalities and loopholes, because there were too many children in danger and not nearly enough money or homes or people to help.

  So this little boy with the shadowed soul and the too-honest eyes would get hurt again, and again and again.

  Ronnie Wilkins needed an angel.

  25

  “Nineteen years, Mercedes, and that’s what you have to say to me?” Mama’s face creases in still-familiar irritation, and she opens the door all the way. “Get in here.”

  “No. I’m not here to talk. You need to go back, or go wherever you want, as long as it isn’t to my job.”

  “I didn’t raise you to be this rude to your mother.”

  “No, you raised me to be molested by my father.”

  Her open hand cracks against my cheek, and she stares at her palm, horrified, because it’s easier than looking at my scarred face.

  “Esperanza told me about the prognosis,” I continue after a moment. “She told me about what you all want to do. Bring him to the house, let him die around family. But he’s not dead yet and if you think for one moment
I will ever even consider letting him around children . . .”

  “He never hurt any of the others.”

  “Hurting me was enough. I can’t stop you from doing the petition, but I won’t be putting my name to it. Not as a victim, not as an agent, and I’ll be writing the judge to speak against it.”

  “This isn’t a conversation to be having in the hallway,” she frets.

  “We’re not having a conversation, Mamá. I am telling you a thing I will never do.”

  Her hair is almost entirely silver but still thick and healthy, braided back into a coiled knot low at the base of her skull, single-hair wisps curling away from her scalp as they protest the severity. Her face is creased with wrinkles, her dark brown eyes are the same as I remember. She’s her and not her. Even her clothes are nearly the same, an embroidered white blouse and long, multi-tiered colorful skirt, the only things she’d ever buy for herself, because Papá fell in love with her in those skirts, she used to tell us. If the necklines are a little higher than they used to be, her arms thicker under the collar ruffle, well. It’s been decades.

  “Go home, Mamá,” I tell her, and despite everything, my tone is gentle. Almost kind. “Go home to everyone else and accept the fact that you lost your youngest daughter a very long time ago.”

  “But I didn’t lose you,” she insists, tears tracking down her weathered cheeks. “You are right here before me, more stubborn than ever.”

  “You lost me the minute I told you what Papá was doing, and you said I needed to be a good daughter.”

  “He was your Papá,” she says helplessly. “He was—”

  Part of me recognizes the oddity of her speaking English. English was for school and work and errands. At home we only spoke Spanish unless the older kids were working on homework. The entire neighborhood—literally, the entire neighborhood—was family, all the cousins and second cousins and aunts and uncles, the grandparents and almost grandparents, the older siblings who married and moved into houses just down the street or around the corner. Unless it was schoolwork, you didn’t hear English until you left the neighborhood and went past the corner stores. Even then, you were as likely to hear Spanish until you got deeper into town.

  I take her face between my hands, lean forward, and kiss her forehead. When Vic did it to me, it was support. Now, it’s goodbye. “Go home. Your daughter is lost, and she is never coming home. She found a better family on her own.”

  “That man, that agent,” she spits. “He took you away!”

  “He rescued me. Once from the cabin, and once from you. Goodbye, Mamá.”

  I turn and walk away, and there’s a part of me aware of the sobbing little girl in the back of my mind, the hurt child who couldn’t understand why her parents did what they did, why no one else cared. Be patient, I want to tell that little girl. It gets worse, but then it gets better. Then we get rescued.

  Sterling doesn’t ask how it went when I get in the car. She just starts it up and pulls out onto the road, headed to Manassas and home.

  Home.

  “Can we stop by my house?” I ask once we’re on the highway. “Something I need to do.”

  “Of course.” She watches me from the corner of her eye, most of her attention still on the road. “Cass called. So far the search of Gloria’s house hasn’t turned up anything suspicious.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “They’re still looking. Watts and Holmes have her at the station, but they haven’t questioned her yet. They’re waiting for the results.”

  “This is a terrible day, Eliza.”

  “Yes.”

  My house looks the same, my cozy little cottage with its quiet colors and Jason’s flowers blooming along the walk and the front of the porch. I’m not sure why I expected it to look different. It feels different now. Shouldn’t it look different as well?

  But it doesn’t, and the keys open it same as ever, and aside from the dust that’s accumulated over the past eleven days, the inside is also unchanged. Siobhan never kept very much here, just some clothes and toiletries and a couple of books by the bed. Her absence hasn’t changed it.

  Even the bedroom, the bed still unmade and probably still smelling of her a bit. I haven’t been in it since the night Emilia Anders knocked on my door. The black-velvet bear sits on my nightstand, and dozens of relatives line the shelf that wraps around the room.

  I’ve never likened the sight to my family’s neighborhood before.

  Grabbing trash bags out from under the kitchen sink, I stalk back into the room and pull bears from the shelf, shoving them into the bags. But every last goddamn bear is off the shelf, even if some of them are spilling across the floor. My hand closes around the black-velvet one, with the faded red heart and the smart bow tie, and I . . . I can’t.

  Clasping him to my chest and trying not to think of Ava holding those damn angel bears the same way, I lean against the wall and sink to the floor, my feet sliding into the space under the bed. After a few minutes, Sterling picks her way between the bears, not stepping on any of them, and moves some aside so she can sit next to me.

  I’m not sure how long we sit there in silence. Long enough for the light coming through the windows to shift to dusk, for shadows to stretch across the room and distort perspectives.

  “Once upon a time, I was the youngest of nine,” I whisper eventually. “I used to share a room with my two next youngest sisters, but when I was five, I got my very own room up in the attic. I was so proud of it. It had a pretty pink canopy princess bed, and a white chest for dress-up clothes. And it had a lock all the way up on the top of the door where I couldn’t reach. The night of my birthday party, my very first night in the room, I found out why.” I turn the bear so he’s braced against my thighs, his worn face more squashed than usual. His stuffing is so old, he doesn’t bounce back the way he used to. “For three years, my father molested me, and the rest of the family ignored it. My siblings, all the adults, they knew, but the people of their generations, back in Mexico . . . you just don’t talk about things like that. So they closed their eyes and turned away.”

  “Three years,” Sterling repeats, her own voice whisper soft. Maybe it’s the kind of secret, maybe it’s the twisting light vanishing across the bedspread. There’s something about the moment that says anything louder will shatter.

  “My father also gambled. The family didn’t know about that. They would have been less forgiving. All the different pieces of the family relied on each other to get by; his gambling meant he put the whole extended family in jeopardy. He got in over his head with a private group. He couldn’t even sell the house to cover it. The entire neighborhood was family, so he would have had to explain. It wasn’t enough to cover it anyway.”

  “So he gave them you.”

  “He sent me to play in the woods behind the house, and when no one could see me, they grabbed me. They had a cabin deeper in the woods, too deep for anyone to really go.”

  “How long?”

  “Two years.” Sometimes I wake up and can still feel the rough boards beneath me, and the manacle around my ankle, hear the heavy chain that rattled across the wood with every movement I made. “There were some other kids there. Collateral, maybe, or winnings. They were never there long, but a couple of the men had taken a liking to me. Said they liked my fear. I’d been there almost two years when I got a chance to escape. The cabin wasn’t well-made; the wood wasn’t finished. We’d had a wet summer and everything was rotting, and I pulled up the ringbolt attached to my chain. Wrapped it around me like a feather boa so it wouldn’t clank, tiptoed past the men as they were sleeping, and ran like hell into the woods.”

  “You don’t like woods,” she says after I fall silent. “Eddison always goes in, if there’s a way for it not to be you.”

  “Sí. It was night, and dark, the trees too thick for moonlight. There were little ravines all over. I ran and ran and ran. I fell so often, but I dragged myself back up, more and more scared every time. And I couldn�
��t find a way out. I was too afraid to scream. Maybe it would bring help, but it was more likely to bring the men.”

  “They found you?”

  “In the morning. They came out looking for me when they noticed I was gone. The chain had gotten caught in a root system, and when I tried to work it loose, I fell over the edge of a ravine. The manacle caught and broke my ankle. I was just hanging there. They beat me for trying to escape.” Using the bear’s soft paw, I trace the scars on my cheek. “Broken bottle.”

  She leans her head against my shoulder and waits.

  “They put me in the root cellar after that. It was stone and the trapdoor had a lot of locks. I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to try again, to be honest; it didn’t matter. But a few days later, I woke up to yelling. Yelling and gunshots. I was huddled there in the dark, and the locks scraped and the door opened and there was a big man standing there. I was terrified. It could only get worse, right? But someone handed him a flashlight, and he made it dance around my feet, and he came down the stairs and knelt in front of me, and said his name was Victor.”

  I can feel her surprise, a full-body startle that ends in almost the same posture. “Our Vic?”

  “Our Vic. He told me I was going to be okay, that those men were never going to hurt me again. The men had taken the shirt I lived in, so Vic wrapped me up in his jacket while someone brought down tools to take the manacle off. Someone else—Finney, I think—brought a blanket and a teddy bear.” I wave at her with the bear’s paw and feel more than hear her soft huff of laughter. “Vic picked me up and carried me out into this mess of stand lights, dozens of people milling around. Some of the men who had imprisoned me were dead, but most were injured or handcuffed. And as we passed, there was this momentary . . . hush. A bubble of silence as everyone stopped to stare, and then went back to what they were doing.”

  “I know our side of that hush.”

  “There wasn’t a road that deep into the woods, no way to drive through. Vic carried me two and a half miles to the closest access point, and the cars had their lights flashing like crazy. He took me to an ambulance, and I didn’t want to let go, so he sat in there with me as the paramedics worked on my face and ankle, and all the other wounds. He said he was going to take me home to my parents.”