Shade

by Marilyn Peake

  Before I could share my observations with Brandon, he took matters into his own hands. He caused strong winds to kick up in the front yard of the house. As tree branches bent and shook, he thumped on the roof of the van.

  Despite all that ruckus, the guys managed to load the girls into the van and zip away down the street.

  Brandon started swearing and swooping around.

  I went over to him. “Can’t you follow them? See where they’re going? Maybe rescue those girls?”

  Brandon sighed. “I think I’m supposed to stay here with you. We need to search this house right now while those guys are away. I’m going to slip inside and open the front door. Hurry up and follow behind me.”

  Kailee, George and I crossed the front lawn. As soon as Brandon turned the lock and pulled the front door open, we walked inside the house.

  Everything looked OK. We went from room to room, investigating. Brandon told us to wait while he searched the basement. It didn’t look like anything strange or bad or unusual had been happening inside the house. There were no signs of struggle. No indication that people had left in a hurry or anything.

  The living room had nice furniture and a big screen TV. The kitchen had granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. Even though the house was a Victorian, the inside had been done in a more modern style.

  As we were admiring the dining room—table polished to a high gloss, crystal chandelier, chairs covered in tapestry-style fabric—Brandon came flying into the room. He appeared troubled. He said, “We have a problem in the basement.”

  He made sure the front door was locked, then led us downstairs. The way to the basement involved walking down a long flight of rickety wooden stairs that were more like planks than stairs. I grabbed onto a metal railing. The only light for our descent was a lightbulb suspended from the ceiling over the middle of the staircase. I could see more light pooling out from the basement, so I assumed Brandon had flicked the lights on for us down there.

  Kailee asked Brandon, “What if someone comes back to the house? I do not want to get trapped down here!”

  Brandon said, “Don’t worry. You know how you get a feeling about things about to happen—you know, intuition? Well, for ghosts, we have that feeling multiplied many times over. If I concentrate ... and, trust me, I’ll be concentrating on this ... I’ll be able to sense anyone approaching this house, even if they’re blocks away. I can hone in on their intent.”

  We reached the bottom of the stairs. The basement was nothing like the rest of the house. Maybe I didn’t have intuition as advanced and finely tuned as Brandon’s, but I could tell beyond any shadow of a doubt that things were seriously wrong with that basement. The entire level had been divided into tiny bedrooms off a narrow central hallway.

  The bedrooms were highly disturbing. The walls had been painted an institutional shade of gray. The beds were narrow and dirty. Next to every bed, handcuffs hung from a pole.

  We investigated every bedroom. They were so disgusting, I felt afraid to touch anything. Most of the time, I just crossed my arms.

  When we reached the end of the hallway, we came to a set of double doors. Brandon opened them. I put my hand over my nose and mouth—both from shock and to avoid the smell. At first, I had no idea what I was looking at. There were at least a dozen bassinets and several cribs. The stench of vomit, urine and poop was pretty overwhelming. The room looked like a nightmare of a baby nursery.

  George said, “You know what? We need to get photographs of this, and of all the bedrooms. This looks horrific. I’m thinking this basement may contain a bunch of holding rooms for people being trafficked. We need as much evidence as possible ... for whatever’s going on here. At the very least, I gotta believe there’s some pretty bad child abuse happening in here.”

  God ... Why hadn’t I thought of taking pictures? Of course we needed to do that! George, Kailee and I walked from room to room, snapping photographs with our cell phones.

  In the nursery, I looked for specific details to photograph. Most of the bassinets had baby pacifiers in them, some dirty and disgusting. There were also baby blankets. They didn’t look particularly clean; but they were cute, with cats and dogs and cars and trucks and other baby designs on them. The cribs had a few toys and stuffed animals in them, but they looked old and worn.

  I aimed my cell phone at the inside of one crib and snapped a picture of a stuffed bear lying on its back against a pink sheet. In the middle of that sheet was a brownish-yellow stain.

  Looking at the crib next to it, I noticed a set of handcuffs latched onto one of the crib bars, tucked in tightly next to the mattress. I photographed the hell out of that, feeling ill and emotionally disturbed the whole time. I felt too numb to feel rage, but I knew that would creep up on me later.

  There was a walk-in closet at the end of the room. Inside, I discovered stacks of baby clothes, unopened boxes of diapers and extra baby blankets. I photographed it all. As I was just about to leave, I noticed a green book tucked under a box of diapers on a high shelf. I pulled it down. It was this year’s ledger! Before I had time to think about it, I grabbed a baby blanket and wrapped it around the ledger. I was taking it with me. Let the bad guys fight amongst themselves about who might have lost the ledger. They’d never guess that a bunch of high school kids and a ghost had been inside the house and taken it.

  When we felt we had gotten enough pictures of the basement, we went back upstairs. Talking quickly in the kitchen, trying to decide what to do next, we came to the conclusion that we should go over to Gabriella’s house immediately to show her what we’d found.

  Brandon locked the front door of the house, then eased out through the keyhole or something. All I know is: first he was flat as thread, then he was his normal size again out in the front yard.

  It was very dark out on the street. Gabriella had turned off her Christmas lights, which usually lighted our way. When we reached her front door, the tiny angels clacked in shadow as they moved their wings. The dragon, forever vigilant, stared at them.

  We picked up the knocker and banged it a few times against the door. Gabriella appeared, wearing a white nightgown.

  Kailee asked her, “Oh, have we woken you up?”

  Gabriella said, “No, no, not at all. I was resting on the couch is all. I had a premonition that you’d be stopping by tonight.”

  Inside her warm, comforting living room, I placed the ledger still wrapped in a baby blanket on the coffee table.

  Gabriella padded over in slipper socks. Looking intently at what I had set down, she asked, “Oh, my, what have we here?” She picked up the ledger and paged through it.

  Looking at us with sadness in her eyes, Gabriella said, “I believe I was absolutely right about human trafficking. Look at this...”

  She pointed to several lines in the ledger. I think parts of my brain knew what I was seeing before my conscious mind actually admitted it to myself.

  There were names my emotions told me shouldn’t be in that ledger. I had feared it all along, but still it seemed too unreal to be true.

  Under the category of Names, three different lines read:

  Green, A.

  Underwood, U.

  Perkins, M.

  Next to the names were ages. I thought I might be sick. I put my hand over my mouth as I started to sob. Tears streamed down my face. The age next to Green, A. was 17. Next to Underwood, U.: 16. Next to Perkins, M.: 16. These names had to be Annie Green, Ursula Underwood and Misty Perkins. Those were their exact ages.

  Next to the names, under a column labeled Costs, were all sorts of things. On the line for Green, A. there were different kinds of food plus sanitary napkins, several over-the-counter medications. Oh no, was Annie sick? I looked more closely at the list of medicines. OK, nothing major—mostly cold and headache stuff, a couple boxes of Pamprin for period cramps, some Neosporin and Band-Aids. Man, these people were horrible. They listed stuff used for the very basics of human care under Costs. Really, they could
n’t spare a Band-Aid without keeping track of it in a ledger?

  Then the column I almost couldn’t bring myself to read: Sold For. Green, A. had apparently brought in $90. What? I read that several times. It would not sink in. The price of a human life, quite possibly Annie’s: $90. That was it? All the horror of being trafficked and you are only worth $90?

  Perkins, M. brought in more. Actually, different figures had been penciled in: $150, also $3,000 and $10,000. I had no idea what that meant.

  Now, Wooten, U. was different. She had a long list of expenses in the Costs column next to her name, including Midwife. Then, Sold For read: $90 plus $30,000.

  I looked up at Gabriella. She put her arms around me. She gave me a warm, supportive hug. I asked her what all the information in the ledger meant.

  Gabriella explained. “Everything seems to be coming together now. The images I had of teenaged girls and babies, a dirty hospital room, chains and surgical equipment—I’m almost positive this is all related to human trafficking. I believe that Annie and Misty were sold directly. I believe that Ursula was pregnant and used for her baby. The Sold For listing of $30,000 next to her name was probably the price an adoptive person paid for her baby.

  All the rage I had been numbing suddenly poured into my body. My heart pounded. My head felt like it was going to explode. My voice shaking, I asked Gabriella, “Who would do that? Who would buy a baby? Who thinks it’s OK to pay cash for a baby, like you’re buying a car or something?”

  Gabriella answered, “Oh, I doubt the adoptive parent knew anything was wrong. Most likely, it was presented to them as a totally legal adoption.”

  George asked, “So, what would people like this do with Ursula? Sell her, too?”

  Gabriella answered, “Well, it depends...”

  Very timidly, as though afraid of the answer, Kailee asked, “On what, exactly?”

  Gabriella answered, “It depends on how the birth went. If Ursula was OK at the end of it, she was probably sold for the other figure next to her name: $90.”

  Gabriella told us to put the ledger in a safe place. “Whoever owned this ledger will be frantic when they find it missing. Don’t show it to anyone else right now. You don’t want anyone in a human trafficking ring coming after you.” Then she picked up her crystal ball and set it down on the coffee table in front of her. She waved her hands over it. After peering inside the orb for a few minutes, she told us, “Next, you are going to need to find the stream and the tree shaped like the number four. That is the place where you’ll find your next set of clues, I’m sure of it.”

  CHAPTER 26

  We decided to spend the next day just going about our normal lives ... well, as normal as they could be at that point in time ... while brainstorming possible ways to find a stream with a tree shaped like the number four near it. Even Brandon felt he needed time to think and to consult his grandmother.

  In a stroke of irony, my mother helped me get back to normal. She took advantage of me. She insisted I decorate our house, inside and out, for Christmas. She said she’d help to some degree. She explained, “I have a bad back. I can’t bend and twist like you can. I’ll put the tree together, but I need you to decorate it. And the lights outside—I could never hang those. I’ll need you to do that.” I’m sure I looked less than enthusiastic. She added, “Now, Shade, I want you to do a good job with the lights. The neighbors will see them. I don’t want it to look like we’re sloppy or anything.”

  Seriously? I had no words.

  I stomped off to the basement. Finding the box marked Xmas Tree, I hauled it upstairs and dropped it on our living room floor with a thud. Then I marched off to tell my mother it was there and she could put it together. I was going to point out that she could help decorate it as well, but then I realized: Be careful what you wish for. I did not want this to turn into a holiday family event where my mother insisted we hang out together and decorate the tree.

  I clenched and unclenched my fists. Dammit! I would be decorating forever.

  As I got into the job, though, it helped me for brief moments at a time to almost forget the intense fear I felt for Annie and Misty and Ursula.

  I started with the outside of our house. I though about Gabriella’s Christmas lights. I decided I’d do something similar to her Tree of Life. I’d arrange some of the lights into a shape that people could see at night.

  I hung strands of multi-colored lights from the eaves. I framed our front door and downstairs windows in white lights. And then I shaped strands of red lights into a train of rover shapes on our front bushes. Our house would have Mars rovers ... and an Easter egg to Leotard Girl! That thrilled me no end.

  I knew, of course, that my mother would hate it.

  Delighted with the red rovers, I set to work inside. I wrapped garland around the banister leading upstairs and then twirled miniature white lights around that. I placed electric candles in all the windows at the front of our house.

  Becoming totally involved with the artistry of changing a house from bland to interesting, I decided to decorate my own bedroom. Placing three electric candles in my bay window, I discovered it added charm to the window seat area. So I decided to string miniature white lights in a canopy shape suspended from the ceiling right above the cushions. I liked it so much, I wish I had done it sooner. I wondered if I’d have to fight my mom to keep the decorations up year-round. She never actually came up to my room, but she’d see the lights from outside.

  The last touch I added were strands of miniature white lights around my desk. It would make things more cheerful when I worked there.

  Thinking that enough time had gone by for my mother to have finished assembling our fake tree, I tiptoed downstairs to find out what was going on. She had indeed finished putting the tree together ... and she was nowhere to be seen.

  I sighed the deepest sigh of relief and started decorating the tree. I wrapped silver garland around it, followed by strings of multi-colored lights. Then I set about taking decorations out of boxes and hanging them up.

  It was weird seeing the decorations that had special meanings. My mom actually had a Christmas decoration commemorating my first Christmas. I could never picture her caring for a newborn baby. And yet there was the evidence that she had cared: an angel holding a scroll on which were printed my complete name—Galactic Shade Griffin—and my birth date and the words, Baby’s First Christmas. I hung it on a branch facing the couch.

  After I got through all the special decorations, I finished filling the tree by adding generic shiny Christmas balls in silver, green and red.

  By the time I started putting the empty boxes back in the basement, it was dark outside, so I took a minute to plug in all the lights and check them out. The Mars rovers looked great! I was very pleased with that.

  We had take-out pizza for dinner. My mom commented that she liked the “Christmas train” on our front bushes. I did not explain that they were Mars rovers.

  After dinner, I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted. I decided to spend time online, looking over the forum and Annie’s Twitter feed and searching for pictures of streams and oddly-shaped trees, hoping to find a tree that matched the photograph Annie had posted.

  There were a bunch of discussions taking place in The Tiger’s Den that I ordinarily would have found interesting and important for me to become involved in as a forum administrator. There was a discussion on anorexia and bulimia and whether or not popular media plays a role in encouraging that. Hell, yeah, it does! It might not cause it, but it sure as hell encourages it. For any female with low self-esteem or any female struggling to repair cracks in her self-esteem—which is basically 99.9 percent of all teenaged girls—encountering dangerously thin but otherwise flawless females in every single form of media makes it extremely difficult not to feel pressure to mimic such godlike creatures. And those media images are everywhere. Everywhere! Magazines in racks as you check out of drugstores and grocery stores, movies you watch, trailers and ads for movies you
might watch, video games you play, TV shows you watch, ads during the TV shows you’re watching, billboards when you’re outside. It’s freakin’ everywhere. It’s total brainwashing! Be pretty. Be thin. Be pretty. Be thin.

  So, anyway, like I said, I ordinarily would have jumped right into this discussion. I quickly scanned the comments to make sure no one was in the kind of trouble I should report to the school counselor. But everyone seemed to be OK. I felt completely irked by one of our school’s most flawless mean girls insisting there was no bias toward thin girls in the media, that she personally found being fat an indication of a serious character flaw and why should the media ever encourage that, anyway? Seriously, she was so mean, if any type of character flaw could turn you fat, she’d be waddling around like a walrus.

  There were also a couple of fun discussions going on about science fiction and fantasy.

  As I read the discussion topic titles, I felt shocked to discover one called Leotard Girl: How Might Her Leotards Affect Her Genetics? I was thrilled to discover that this was a serious discussion, part science, part science fiction, about whether or not the Martian elements in the leotards might seep into Leotard Girl’s skin and cause her genes to mutate. Several students expressed the belief that if this happened, she would permanently retain her superhero powers and no longer need to wear the leotards to accomplish superhero feats. Another student said that this might not happen to Leotard Girl herself, but it could be handed down through her mutated genes to her offspring.