My mother stared at us. She looked terrible. Her clothes were wrinkled. Her makeup looked like it had melted on her face. She looked old. Finally, she spoke, “Oh, so you can eat my food, but you couldn’t help me out with the police?”
I didn’t know what to say. If she had killed those infants...
Her shoulders sagged. She looked completely defeated by life itself. She said to me, “You wait. You just wait. I did nothing wrong. You just wait until my name is cleared. Then you can come to me on your hands and knees and apologize.” Then she kicked off her shoes and headed upstairs.
CHAPTER 28
The next week was the most horrendous week of my life. I lived in the same house as my mother, but I decided to completely ignore her. I refused even to acknowledge her presence unless I heard from the police—not from my mother, but from the police—that she had nothing to do with those dead babies or the missing girls. She sure as hell had something to do with the creepy guy connected to the house with the basement of horrors.
At school, kids made fun of me and stared at me and whispered behind my back. Sometimes they didn’t whisper and sometimes they said the most hurtful stuff right to my face. I found myself wishing for the good ol’ days of innocence when kids just made fun of my name.
I couldn’t even deal with The Tiger’s Den, once such a source of pride for me. People could be so hurtful, especially in high school. The mean girls started posting comments using that typical mean girl trick of saying things that were right on the border between stabbing you in the back and being socially acceptable. So the forum administrators couldn’t delete the comments or even respond to them in anger. But the hurt was there to swallow all the same. I swallowed a lot of hurt that week, as I scanned the forum looking for comments about Annie or the other missing girls.
Sometimes I just wanted to die.
Then on the last day of the week, I was called into Principal Lafferty’s office. When I got there, the secretary ushered me right into his office. As I entered, I saw the tall, blue-eyed police detective and two other police officers talking with Principal Lafferty.
He jumped up to greet me. He said, “Shade ... Shade, come right on in. Have a seat. These police officers want to talk to you. They have some news to tell you.”
He gave me the most comfortable seat in the room. He asked me if I wanted a soda. I asked for Coke. He had his secretary bring me Coke poured over ice in a glass.
From that point on, things got a little blurry. I actually had to ask the police officers to explain things to me twice, and the next day I used the business card the detective had given me to call him and ask him if I had understood everything correctly. Turns out I had.
The first time things were explained to me in Principal Lafferty’s office, the detective—whose name turned out to be Detective Mason Reynolds—started out by telling me, “Shade, we want you to know that you and your friends, Kailee Knight and George Williams, and also Gabriella Underwood are true heroes.”
I looked at him blankly. What? The world was surreal.
He continued, “We’ve been trying to crack the case of a human trafficking ring for over two years now. Every time we got close, they shut down operations and moved somewhere else. With all the information you gave us, we finally caught the bastards and locked them up behind bars.”
I asked one question, very timidly: “What about my mom?”
The detective laughed, then caught himself and answered more seriously, “Shade, your mother means well, but she’s pretty clueless. My understanding is that she went into counseling for drug and alcohol dependency. It was recommended to her that she do some kind of community service as part of her rehabilitation. During several stints with drugs after she fell off the wagon here in town, she bought drugs from a guy who’s turned out to be the ringleader of a human trafficking ring. She had no idea that he was involved in trafficking; she thought he was just a small-time drug dealer.”
The detective paused. He looked at me intently, probably trying to evaluate if I understood everything he was telling me. I felt numb. I just stared back. Finally, the detective cleared his throat and continued, “The last time this guy approached your mom to try selling her drugs, she told him she was in recovery, that she was turning over a new leaf, that she had a job at the local high school but was still in need of finding some community service work. She apparently shared a lot of information with him about her personal life. Too much information, if you ask me. Realizing her connection to high school girls, the guy told her that he runs a legitimate adoption agency and just sells drugs on the side to make extra money. He offered to pay your mother for reporting the names of pregnant girls to him—so that he can ‘help them,’ he says—and for collecting used maternity clothes for the pregnant girls signed up with his adoption agency who can’t afford new clothes and baby items. Your mom accepted the job. She actually thought she was doing community service work for a legitimate adoption agency while earning extra money to boot. Unknowingly, she was working for some very creepy guys who posed as an adoption agency when in fact they were trafficking girls and babies. The babies were being sold for cash, mostly to people who thought they were adopting them legally. The girls were being sold as slaves—for sex and other services, such as forced housekeeping.”
Then he stopped, became lost in thought, as though trying to decide how to proceed.
Another police officer said, “We found Annie Green...”
Before he could say anything else, I jumped out of my seat. I let out a shriek. I dropped my glass of Coke all over the floor. I screamed, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Where is she?”
The police officer gently put a hand on my shoulder. He asked me to sit back down. Principal Lafferty unrolled a bunch of paper towels and dropped them over the spilled ice and Coke. He picked up the glass and set it on a table. The policeman told me, “Annie’s fine. She’ll be able to see you soon. She’s in the hospital.”
I started to sob. In between stomach-wrenching spasms, I asked, “Hospital? Why? What happened to her?”
The police officer sat on the edge of Principal Lafferty’s desk. He looked me straight in the eye. In a calm, matter-of-fact voice, he said, “Annie was sold for sex. She became pregnant once. She had a forced abortion. She’s been gang-raped once. She’s been through a lot of abuse. She seems strong, though. The doctors expect her physical health to return. She’s going to need a lot of support and a lot of counseling, though, to get through all the emotional trauma.”
He waited for the information to sink in, for me to understand it. Then he said, “Misty Perkins was also sold into slavery. But...” He paused a moment, then continued, “We don’t know where she is right now. The ledgers suggest that she was sold to someone in Romania. We’re going to work with Gabriella to see if she can sense the best way to start searching for her and we’re going to try to work with the Romanian authorities to bring her back.”
I shook my head. Then I asked, “And Ursula?”
The police officer leaned in closer. He said, “I’m sorry. Ursula Wooten is dead. Those creeps who had her tried to deliver her baby themselves. They wanted the baby much more than they wanted her. The baby brought them $30,000. Ursula would have brought them maybe $90. They botched the delivery very badly, ended up giving her a homemade C-section. She bled out and died on the table.”
I was a total mess for the entire next week. I mean it took a lot longer than a week for me to get back to anywhere even resembling normal; but for that week, I actually had to be medicated. I had horrible nightmares. I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
Ms. Sims from The Daily Buzz called. She congratulated me for being a hero. She told me to take as much time off from work as I needed. She said, “I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through, all the courage it took to do what you did.” She told me The Daily Buzz would be publishing a front-page article about me and my friends the next day. The title was: Hometown High School Heroes Bring Down Human Trafficking Ring. She also
told me that the local business community would be presenting Kailee, George and me with checks to cover our first-year tuition wherever we decided to go to college. She added that she was certain they’d continue to cover our tuition every year for our entire college careers.
Somewhere in the murkiness of my traumatized brain, I decided that I would go to college to study Journalism. I decided that that would be my ticket back to sanity. By solving the riddles of unjust human tragedy throughout the world and reporting on it, I would glue back together my own shattered soul.
CHAPTER 29
As I flitted in and out of episodes of drugged sleep, Brandon and his grandmother and Brandon’s little brother Neil appeared by my bedside. Whether or not they were really there or just hallucinations, I couldn’t be sure. But they seemed real enough.
At the end of the week, when I stopped taking the strongest medications and became more lucid, Brandon and his entire family appeared up in my attic bedroom. Brandon and Neil handed me flowers. Brandon gave me back the cell phone and stylus I had given him. He said to me, “Shade, our journey together has come to an end. I’m so sorry to leave you. Perhaps we’ll meet again. My grandmother says most likely we will. She told me I’ll be allowed to visit you at least one more time to check on you, to make sure you’re OK. She says you might not be able to see or hear me, but you may be able to sense that I’m with you. You’ll always be a part of me, though. You helped me accomplish what I needed to do in order to get out of the prison where I was stuck somewhere between death and moving forward into eternity.”
With that, a tunnel of brilliant white light appeared in my bay window. One by one, Brandon and his family hugged me, then flew into that light.
When the hole closed up and my window returned to normal, the silence was deafening. Needing to keep my hands and mind busy, I returned to working on Leotard Girl. I drew her wearing red tights and a red sweater. Then I drew a hospital room around her. She was standing at the bedside of her best friend. I created a thought bubble above her head. She was thinking: I can cure you. I know the secret. It was in the Martian soil. Now the ability to heal is within me. I will help to make you better if it’s the last thing I ever do.
I sketched a rip in her leotards. I made the tear longer. I drew a scene in which she looks down at the leotard. A new thought bubble appears: Darn! I need to make time to repair my own damage. I must restore my own personal power. Then I will heal those I love.
And up on Mars, Curiosity continued to zip around, blasting rocks, unleashing the power to save the human race.
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