Mary Moran 08/02/1976 23 years 02/19/2000 $15,000.00
I stared at the first page in the ledger. Ran my eyes across each entry line and down each column. Tried moving my eyes in circles to sweep the page in a circular way, attempting a new approach to uncover any possible pattern.
Nothing. I had nothing.
I studied the page harder.
Then I realized a couple of things. First of all, the ledger was not an old historical document, not if each sale had taken place in the year 2000. Second of all, the sales in my ledger ... and I flipped through the pages to verify this ... all took place in the year 2000. I wondered if the books that George and Kailee took home with them covered different years.
I quickly texted both of them. A few minutes later, I got my answer: George’s book covered the year 1995; Kailee’s book, the year 1997. They asked me why I had asked. I told them my ledger only covered the year 2000 and suggested that they add that information to their consideration when trying to figure out what the ledgers might mean.
Two hours later, Kailee texted George and me. I had fallen asleep in my bed, still wearing my clothes, apparently drooling on my pillow, from the wet feel of my pillow case.
I jumped when the cell phone lying next to me on the mattress caused a rumble to travel across the bedding and into my head.
I had the vague sensation of ghosts flitting through my room, but it turned out to be sleep goop in my eyes distorting the light in weird ways.
Sleepily, I grabbed the cell. I tried to read it. I thought it said: Looking at paters grape idea. Meet my horse tomorrow? Rubbing the glop out of my eyes, I smiled. The real message said: Looking at patterns great idea. Meet at my house tomorrow?
I texted back: Sure, sounds good.
Immediately falling back to sleep, I woke up early the next morning, took a shower and headed off to school.
The entire day dragged. As soon as the final bell rang, I scooped up my books and tossed them in my backpack.
I was almost out the door when Principal Lafferty stopped me in the hallway. Why on that particular day he decided to make an attempt to chat with me in a fatherly way ... a long-winded fatherly way, I might add ... I have no freaking idea. But there ya have it, my continuous bad luck with grown-ups.
He came rushing out of his office. Standing in front of me, flattening down wisps of wild gray hair surrounding his bald spot like thin antennas, he said, “Hey there, Shade. I hoped I’d catch you before you left school for the day. I just wanted to tell you what a fantastic job you’re doing on all the projects you’ve taken on. The school newspaper and forum are doing great. My own daughter reads your Leotard Girl comic, so I started reading it myself. It’s wonderful.” Suddenly, I felt incredibly self-conscious that I had chosen to wear red leotards on that particular day. I had just wanted to feel empowered when I went to the super-intelligent Kailee’s house. He continued, “Eleanor Sims called me yesterday from The Daily Buzz. She said you’re doing a fantastic job there as well.”
Cripes, did all the adults in the entire world talk to each other? For an instant, I pictured them as buzzing bees, flitting from their hive to the outside world, gathering sweet, juicy gossip like pollen and bringing it back home to share with all the other grown-up bees. Ha, maybe that’s why the town newspaper was called The Daily Buzz.
I pictured my mom all dressed up in a black-and-yellow-striped bee suit, flitting around on a flower petal. I pictured the Principal dressed the same...
Oh my God. I snapped out of it, wiped those images right out of my mind. I blushed and said, “Thank you. I really appreciate that.”
Principal Lafferty’s face changed. He looked tired, even older than he had a minute earlier. He said, “Have you heard anything at all, any rumors or anything about your missing friend Annie or the other two girls that are also missing?”
Tears welled up in my eyes. “No. Nothing at all. It’s kind of scary, actually, that we haven’t heard anything, not even one phone call.”
Principal Lafferty reached out and touched me on the shoulder. I wished he hadn’t. Ugh. He said, “Don’t worry, Shade. We have police detectives monitoring the situation. I’m sure they’ll figure it out eventually.”
Hopefully, before they’re dead, I thought; but I just answered, “Yeah. That would be good.”
Principal Lafferty said, “Well, have a good night. Keep up the good work, Shade.” Then he turned around and went outside to supervise the kids getting on school buses and leaving for cars in the parking lot.
I hopped on the bus that drove to Kailee’s neighborhood. I felt incredibly happy and relieved to find both George and Kailee already there, sitting next to each other in the back. As though trying to avoid the serious issues we’d soon be tackling, we mostly joked around and talked about stupid stuff.
Eventually, the bus took us into a neighborhood of large old houses. When the driver stopped at the corner of exquisitely designed homes, Kailee announced, “We’re here.”
Boy, I had picked a perfect day to wear my Leotard Girl tights. Otherwise, I think my inferiority complex would have caused me to curl up into a little ball or something.
How many kids at my school came from money, anyway? I could not compete with this.
Kailee chatted nonstop on our way from her bus stop to her house. Even though the reason for our get-together was hardly a festive one, she seemed happy to be having us over. That made me feel good. I hardly felt worthy, but I did feel honored.
When we got to Kailee’s house, I had to work extra hard not to feel intimidated. Her house was practically a piece of artwork. On the outside, you could see weathered cedar shingles and stained glass windows. In the yard, pine trees stood over red, violet and yellow flowers blooming in the chilly weather. Wow. It was like living in a fairy tale. So unlike my life where the only bits of fantasy were ghosts in an attic and a wicked stepmother who, alas, was my real-life biological mother.
I smiled. I was gonna play this like Cinderella at the ball. Except no glass slippers for me, thank you very much; just the red tights of a superhero.
When we went inside, Kailee started yelling for her mom. A small, friendly lady came out of a back room, rubbing her hands on a white apron. Her blonde hair had been pinned up on top of her head, but strands were escaping everywhere. Her blue eyes sparkled. “Oh, hi, Kailee. Who are your friends?”
Kailee introduced us. She explained that her mom was an artist. She asked her mom what she was working on. Her mother explained, “I’m making some clay pots for a craft show next month.” Before leaving to return to her work, she said, “There’s milk in the fridge and peach pie in the pantry. Help yourselves.”
The pie was amazing. Kailee said that her mom had baked it the night before with canned peaches from their backyard. Wow. I could totally live here, no doubt about it.
When we went upstairs to Kailee’s room, the atmosphere changed to a combination of art and high tech. Kailee’s room had been painted mint green. A set of three stained glass windows showed fairies in colorful gardens. But the border at the top of the walls displayed scientific things: microscopes and Chemistry lab stuff like beakers and test tubes. It all went together really well. On two separate desks were three computer screens. Beneath the desks sat two computer towers.
Kailee turned on the computers and plopped onto her king-sized bed which was covered in a dark blue quilt decorated with constellations of white stars. She said, “OK, here’s what I think we should do today ... Let’s type the first few pages of each of our ledgers into a computer here and let the computer search for a pattern.”
I groaned. “That’s a lot of typing.”
George perked up with a much more positive attitude. He asked Kailee, “Did your friend have the program you mentioned?”
Kailee jumped off the bed to check something on her computers. She answered, “Yup.” Then she turned to me and explained, “I have a smart computer nerd friend in Alaska, a place I used to live, who developed a progr
am to uncover patterns in data. He’s pretty sure it will work on these ledgers if there’s a pattern to be found.” She smiled.
I smiled back. I felt excited. This sounded hopeful.
For the next few hours, we entered data from the ledgers into the computers.
Then we waited.
We played board games.
We had dinner with Kailee’s mom. Her dad was out of town on business, so George and I didn’t get to meet him. But Kailee’s mom was really nice. As I ate salad with feta cheese, cranberries and homemade champagne vinaigrette dressing and answered questions about my Leotard Girl comic strip, it once again hit home how badly I had lost out in the lottery when the universe assigned mothers to children of my generation. Kailee’s mom seemed genuinely interested in our school classes and projects. She also talked with us about her artwork and current events going on in the world.
We had dinner at the dining room table under a chandelier made from teardrop-shaped crystals. Sunlight streamed into the room through white lace curtains, passed through the teardrops and danced on the white walls as happy little rainbows.
While we ate, two striped cats came into the room. Kailee’s mom gave them a few scraps of food from the main course which included chicken, fancy yellow rice with peas in it and green string beans tossed with butter and almonds.
The cats licked up their treats and then bounded out of the room to play with toys. I could hear bells tinkling as they batted their toys across the floor in the next room. Every once in a while, we’d hear a loud “Meeeeowww,” as the cats fought over something.
Mostly, the dinner was peaceful.
We had chocolate cake and glasses of milk for dessert. Then we went back upstairs. Kailee checked the computer program, to see if it had found anything.
She sat down at one of her desks, waved us over and stared at the computer screen. When we were next to her, she pointed at the screen. “Look at this...”
George and I read the results. The computer program suggested in its analysis that the most likely scenario for these ledgers was that they kept a record of sales of human beings: illegal adoptions and human trafficking of people to be used as slaves. It spelled out the ways in which modern slaves are used and the traffic patterns for where people are kidnapped and sold.
I laughed. “This is a joke, right? A pretty sick joke; but a joke all the same, right?”
George looked up from the computer. “Actually, I had some of this in Current Events. Global slavery markets actually exist today. And girls are kidnapped from our own country all the time...”
Before he finished his sentence, Kailee sucked in her breath and covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God,” she said, “Is it possible that this is what happened to Annie? And to Misty Perkins? And Ursula Wooten?”
I gasped, much in the same way that Kailee had. “You know, before she disappeared, Ursula had posted some weird stuff in The Tiger’s Den that made me wonder if she was pregnant. First, she asked questions about whether or not there was a way to safely abort a baby at home. It gave me the creeps. I was going to talk to you guys about it, ask if you thought we should talk to Dr. Campbell about her, to see if Dr. Campbell wanted to call her in for a counseling chat. But then, a couple of days later, she started asking questions about where to buy cheap maternity clothes and how to put a baby up for adoption.”
Kailee stood up and paced around the room. “Wow. Could she have been pregnant and trying to sell her baby through an illegal adoption?”
George’s face became quite animated. “Hey, we should go back to the clubhouse, see if there’s a ledger for this year ... See if it includes the names of Annie, Misty and Ursula.”
Kailee’s face blanched. She said, “Oh, God ... Yeah, definitely we should. Do you wanna go now? I’m thinking we should. I’ll tell my mom we’re going for a walk. There’s a lake near here that’s pretty at night. One of our neighbors owns it. It’s at the edge of their property, and they never mind if we go there. I’ll tell my mom I want to show you the lake.” She ran over to her window, parted the curtains and looked outside. “Luck is on our side. There’s a clear sky tonight. I’ll tell my mom I want to show you how pretty it is when the moon reflects in the lake.”
I felt confused. “Wait. What? We’re going to look at a lake right now?”
Kailee said, “No, no, not at all. But I can’t tell my mom where we’re really going.”
I said, “Why not? She seemed pretty easy to talk to.”
Kailee explained, “Well, yeah, about some things: art, current events, schoolwork, computers, my work on the forum, stuff like that. But other things, not so much.” She laughed. “If I told my mom we had broken into a house and adopted it as our very own clubhouse, she would freak out ... freeeak out!”
I absorbed that information. Oh. A mom who cared about ... what? Safety? The morality of the situation? I just said, “Oh, yeah, sure. That makes sense.”
Kailee saved the computer results, turned off her computer and went downstairs to talk to her mom. About ten minutes later, she came back, holding a camera. “My mom said it’s fine with her if we go for a walk.” She wrinkled her forehead. “She asked me to take some photos of the lake, though, so now we’re going to have to stop by there first. Hey, hold on...” And, with that, she disappeared.
After about another ten minutes, she was back again. She looked at George and me. “Hey, I think it’s gonna be a long night, but the work we’re doing could end up being very important. I mean, if we could find the missing girls ... that would be incredible. My mom said you guys could both sleep over, if George sleeps in our guest room.” She grinned.
George called his parents on his cell phone to ask permission. I pretended to call my mom. In reality, I called Brandon who didn’t answer. I acted like he had answered, though, and left a long-winded message about staying overnight at Kailee’s house.
Then we headed out to see what we could find.
We took photos at the lake. That was a pretty cool experience. The trees were bare and stark against the moonlit night. The lake reflected back the moon like china floating in dark water.
Kailee set up a tripod. She showed me how to capture images at night using timed exposure. This stuff was all new to me. George, on the other hand, was so familiar with the process, he asked Kailee if he could use her camera and then got some really cool photographs of bats hovering around a lamppost and the moon floating lazily in the lake behind them.
Eventually, we packed up the camera equipment. Kailee said, “I think my mom will be happy with these pictures.”
Then we headed on over to house number 1052. I was glad I wasn’t alone. As we approached the block with our clubhouse on it, the moon ducked behind clouds. Gusts of wind picked up, sending pieces of trash skittering down the road. When we got to our house, the wind was causing small branches to rustle against the side of it.
From inside the kitchen, those branches sounded more like rat claws. We locked the back door and hurried downstairs to the basement.
We threw back the lid of the old trunk. It was made from dark brown leather and had a tarnished metal lock on it. We searched feverishly through all the ledger books, looking for one with the current year’s date on it.
Then George suggested we organize the books, go through each one, check the year of sales it covered and stack them in order by year of sales. We agreed.
There were a lot of ledgers, forty-one altogether. It turned out that more than one ledger were devoted to each year. Several had differently labeled columns. Some listed expenses for the year.
Organizing by year, we discovered that seventeen years were covered—from 1995 to 2011. The current year, 2012, was missing.
We looked around the basement, thinking that maybe the 2012 ledger was being used and might be found lying around somewhere outside the trunk. We searched upstairs, on tables and chairs and beds. It was nowhere to be found.
We stacked the ledgers by order of year back in the tru
nk. George stared at them for a bit and then asked, “How many more do you think we could get away with taking before someone might miss them?”
I was thinking maybe three or four more.
Kailee had a different idea. “Probably all of them.” She explained, “If these are records of the illegal sales of human beings, who’s going to check them? I mean, it’s not like anyone’s going to be checking these records for income tax purposes or anything. Most likely, whoever’s doing this just needs the records temporarily, to make sure they get their money or to make sure the person sold was actually delivered to ... what would you call them? ... their customers? ... you know, more immediate stuff like that.”
George thought about it and answered, “Yeah; but, even if that’s true, we got another problem. This year is almost over. My guess is that whoever’s keeping these ledgers might want to add the latest one to the trunk when the year’s over. It would be bad if they discovered missing ledgers and started hanging around here, trying to figure out who took them.”
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