“Here,” a voice said from behind her. Charlie whipped around. Simona was standing beside her. She reached out her bound hands and gestured impatiently to the box cutter. “Cut me free.”
Charlie awkwardly sawed through the plastic, and a moment later Simona’s hands sprang free. As soon as she was released, Simona pushed past Charlie, reached around the driver, and carefully grabbed two zip ties from the front seat. With brisk efficiency she secured the man’s wrists to the steering wheel. He moaned and stirred again. Simona stepped back hastily, shutting the door of the cab with a click.
“He goes nowhere now,” she said grimly. She massaged one wrist and then the other for a moment.
Charlie handed her the box cutter. “Free the others.”
With a quick nod, Simona took the tool and disappeared toward the back of the truck.
Charlie hesitated for a moment, looking at the truck keys in her hand, and then finally tossed them overhand into the stream. They made a long, lazy arc into the darkness and landed with a distant splash.
When she came around the truck again, all the women were huddled by the open doors, shivering in the cold. Simona was working her way methodically through the group, cutting the zip ties. Kinga had her arm around one of the girls, who was cradling her elbow and crying softly.
Monica reappeared then, beckoning them to follow her. Silently they did, winding down the road and up the stairs to the apartment. Charlie brought up the rear, keeping a sharp eye on the houses they passed and praying that no cars would come through. Nothing stirred, not even a curtain. Everything remained dark and quiet, but Charlie knew that didn’t necessarily mean that no one was watching.
Once in the apartment, Monica shut the door and bolted it, then turned to Charlie. “We have to get them away from here before the men who did this come looking for them,” she said, her tone quiet and urgent. “Charlie, these men, the kind who sell girls, they are very bad men. And these girls cost them a lot of money. They will come to find them, and when they do . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence, just glanced over Charlie’s shoulder to where the young women were sitting silently on the couch and floor, hunched over in self-protection and fear.
“What if we took them to the drop-in center in Belgrade?” Charlie offered, assessing the young women from the corner of her eye. “The center staff will know how to help them.”
Care Network ran a day center for women and children in Belgrade, Serbia, offering a hot lunch, job training, and basic medical care.
Monica bit her lip, thinking. Then she nodded. “Yes, good, but we need to go now.”
Charlie was already moving. “You get the van,” she said. “I’ll triage any injuries and get them ready to leave. We can call the center staff on the way so they know we’re coming.”
Monica slipped out the door and down the stairs like a ghost. Charlie surveyed the girls for a moment. They stared back at her, dazed, traumatized, and quiet.
“Simona, Kinga.” Charlie looked around the small room, spotting the two who spoke English, and beckoned them over. “I need you to translate. Tell the girls we have to leave immediately. We are taking you to Belgrade, to a place where you’ll be safe. Is anyone hurt?”
Simona asked the question in rapid Bulgarian and Romanian. Kinga repeated it in Hungarian. The girls stared at Charlie, eyes wide. One by one they responded, their voices barely above a whisper.
“They’re okay, just some little cuts. But this girl, Gabi, says her arm hurts.” Kinga motioned to the one cradling her elbow.
Charlie nodded. “Okay, I’ll be right back and look at her arm.” She headed for her bedroom and hastily stripped out of her pajamas, throwing on a pair of jeans and Keds and slipping back into her down coat. She spent a few minutes frantically stuffing items into her suitcase, then did the same in Monica’s room, thankful that the interpreter had already packed most of her items for their departure the next day. Rolling suitcases bumping behind her, she came back into the living room.
“Where’s Gabi?” she asked. The girl came forward. She was slight, with pale-green eyes and a curtain of straight dark hair.
“Szia,” Charlie greeted her in Hungarian.
Gabi looked startled but answered after a moment. “Szia.”
“Can I check your arm?” Charlie asked. Kinga translated the message in rapid Hungarian. Gabi looked uncertain but nodded slightly.
Charlie examined her arm. She thought it was just a bad sprain, but she noticed a row of cigarette burn marks that swooped across the girl’s collarbone like a necklace. It made Charlie feel ill to look at it. Her hands were trembling as she made the examination, and she had to force herself not to go back to that dark place—the lonely road, the taste of blood and dust in her mouth, the fear, paralyzing, suffocating her more than the weight of her assailant. She jerked herself back to the present, forcing a deep breath out through her nose. This was not her story, not her trauma. Not now. She had to be strong for these young women who needed her help.
“Who did this to you?” she asked, but the girl just stared at her, uncomprehending.
Simona overheard her and came over. “They promised us jobs,” she said in halting English. “Good jobs in Germany.” She shook her head. “But this is not what we get.” She made a spitting motion on the ground and muttered something under her breath. “They trick us and hurt us very much. They tell us lies.”
“Who told you lies?” Charlie asked her.
Simona shrugged. “My uncle promised me good job in Frankfurt, but his friends take me to Belgrade instead.” She balled her hands into fists. “I trust him because he is family. He says he gets good job for me to help my little girl.”
“You have a daughter?” Charlie asked, surprised. Simona looked young, barely in her twenties.
Simona nodded. “She is four years old. I leave my little girl with my mother and go for good job in Germany, but my uncle, he lies. He gets money for me,” she said angrily. “First we go to Belgrade to break us. Now they sell us to Turkey for work in club for sex.”
“They told you that?” Charlie asked in disbelief.
Kinga shook her head, joining the conversation. “We heard them talking. They sold us to the men who gave the most money. We were going to Turkey.”
Charlie stared at Kinga, remembering the last time she had seen the girl at the pastry shop, how excited she had been at the promise of a new adventure in Germany, how sparkly and full of life. It had seemed so innocent and enticing, a bright future discussed over slices of sour cherry strudel. Now Kinga was drawn in upon herself, her eyes hooded. She looked bruised, haunted, as though she had seen things she could not easily erase.
A soft knock came at the apartment door. Charlie opened it a crack, checking to make sure it was safe, and then opened it wider. Monica slipped in.
“The van is downstairs. We must go.” She motioned the girls forward.
“I got your stuff,” Charlie whispered, handing her the suitcase.
“Wait.” Simona stepped in front of the door, arms crossed. She looked from Monica to Charlie and back again. “Where do you take us?”
Monica frowned, then rattled off an explanation in Romanian. She turned to the other girls, raising her voice slightly at them. After a moment she turned back to Simona and motioned for her to come. Simona hesitated, glancing back at the other girls.
Kinga stepped forward and stood beside Charlie. “I trust her,” she said firmly in English. “She will help us. I am going with her.” She repeated the words in Hungarian to Gabi.
Simona looked at Charlie again, seeming to weigh her options.
“We will help you,” Charlie reassured her. “We will take you somewhere safe. I promise. Don’t you want to be able to get back to your daughter?”
Simona narrowed her eyes and studied her for a long moment, then nodded once and followed Monica and Kinga down the stairs. The other young women trailed in a silent line.
Once they were all seated in the van, Monica drove sl
owly through the silent town with the headlights off. Charlie kept glancing back over her shoulder, sure that they were being watched, that someone would stop them at any moment. But the town remained dark and quiet.
When they reached the town limits, Monica revved the engine and switched on the headlights, flooding the narrow road with a soft white glow. All around them were dark rolling hills and long open fields. With a glance in the rearview mirror, Monica accelerated, putting as much distance as she could between them and the scene of the accident.
Charlie kept her eyes on the rearview mirror for the first few miles, still expecting to be pursued. After twenty minutes she sighed and sat back.
“I think we got away,” she murmured to Monica. “I’ll call the center.” She pulled out her phone and punched in the number. “When will we get to Belgrade?”
Monica shrugged. “At least a few hours,” she said. “Maybe more because it is dark and some of the roads are not good.”
Charlie placed the call, alerting the drop-in center staff to their arrival, then handed back a box of Band-Aids and some antiseptic wipes from the first-aid box. She followed the basic supplies with bottles of water and a few packages of cookies and granola bars they had left over from the trip. The girls were spread out over the two rows of seats. They all swayed back and forth as Monica took the turns as fast as she dared.
Charlie studied the young women in the dim dome light as Kinga handed out supplies and issued instructions. They were young, probably between sixteen and twenty. A few were pretty. Most looked as though they’d lived hard lives. They were just ordinary girls. If Charlie had passed them on the street, she would have thought nothing of it. But she had not passed them on the street. She had found them locked in the back of a transport truck, about to be sold like cattle.
She shuddered as the reality of what they had been headed for sank into her brain. She knew that human trafficking in central Europe was a major problem. Anyone who worked with aid organizations in the region was aware of the issue. Men and women were promised a good job in another country, then coerced into prostitution or forced labor, kept as slaves and physically or sexually exploited. Thousands of people a year disappeared from their villages in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, lured by the false promise of work. It was a silent problem, shadowy, tied to organized crime in a very efficient but almost invisible system. Charlie had glimpsed it now and then in her time with Care Network, but just the corners, the edges, the tail end. She had never stared it in the face until now. She glanced at Kinga in the rearview mirror, at the girl’s drawn, blank stare, and something shattered inside of her.
“How often does this happen?” she asked Monica, pitching her voice low so the others couldn’t hear her. “How often are women trafficked like this?”
Monica tapped the brakes as a stray dog ran across the road ahead of them. She sighed and shrugged. “No one knows for sure how many, but many girls. Thousands. It is all so secret. One day a girl is just gone. You talk to her family and they say she got a good job in Germany or Moscow, but no one ever hears from her again.”
“Do they ever come back home?” Charlie asked.
Monica shook her head, her expression bleak. “No. They disappear. Like they never existed.”
“But how can this keep happening?” Charlie protested, horrified. “Why doesn’t someone stop it?”
Monica shifted gears and gained more speed as they reached the top of a hill and began the descent. There was nothing as far as the eye could see, no lights or other vehicles, just their white van and a long stretch of road.
“It’s the money,” she said matter-of-factly. “The girls want to make money. They see the TV—the Kardashians and Desperate Housewives. They want to be like the West, but there are no jobs in their villages, no way to make money. Everyone is desperate, very poor. Maybe they have a child to support, or a sick parent. All different reasons but all the same desire: a good job when there are no good jobs. So they go to other countries. Everyone does it, goes to London or Madrid, and sometimes it is okay. There are real jobs there. They work in a hotel or as a house cleaner. But sometimes . . .” She inclined her head toward the girls. “Sometimes you just disappear and no one knows what happened to you.”
Charlie swallowed hard. She remembered Tamas’s words the last time she’d bought strudel. How he’d shrugged and said that no one had heard from Kinga. If not for the accident tonight, no one would have ever known the truth. She would have vanished like so many others. Charlie would have thought of her occasionally when she went for strudel, wondered how Kinga was liking her new life in Germany. She felt sick at the thought.
“So what happens to these girls now?” she asked.
“There is a safe house in Belgrade,” Monica said. “Run by Baptist missionaries. I think probably the girls will go there. The people who run the safe house will help them get home. But in a year or two they may try to take another job. It could happen to them again.” She hesitated. “Charlie, these people, the ones who sell girls . . .” She stared out the windshield into the darkness, frowning. “They are very bad men, and they have lost a lot of money tonight. If they find out what we’ve done, who we are . . . We need to be very careful.”
Charlie nodded, instinctively glancing back at the road behind them. She put one hand on her stomach, over the gentle swell of the baby. She had not considered the danger she might incur by rescuing the young women. But what else could she do? It was unthinkable not to help them escape. She watched the road in the rearview mirror for several more minutes. Nothing moved. There were no cars anywhere in sight. No one could possibly know where they were taking the girls. They were safe. They had gotten away. But even as she tried to reassure herself, she could not shake a lingering sense of unease.
CHAPTER 12
February
The Simply Perfect television studio
Greenwich, Connecticut
Oh, I’m glad that’s over,” Waverly sighed, kicking off her red stilettos and curling up in her ample office chair. She took a sip of the signature Valentine’s Day hot chocolate drink she had concocted for a special five-minute segment that would air on Good Morning America the following week. The show had called just a few days before with a cancellation by another Food Network celebrity, and Waverly had jumped at the chance to fill in. Her video clip would be featured on the show to promote her cocktail-hour entertaining book. It was a golden opportunity, but the last-minute nature had the entire team scrambling. She took another sip of the hot chocolate, considering the elements—bitter Peruvian dark chocolate, whipping cream, cinnamon, a touch of cayenne pepper, and manuka honey—all served in a martini glass with a dollop of whipped cream on top. It was a traditional French drinking chocolate with a warming twist. She called it Honey Bee Good. It was decadent and delicious.
On the cream leather couch across from her, Beau sat with his ever-present clipboard, ready to discuss the coming week. Fatigued from the hectic morning prepping and shooting the impromptu video, Waverly closed her eyes and took another sip, basking in the glow of a job well done.
“Boss, we need to talk.”
Waverly’s eyes popped open at his serious tone. She set her glass down. “I’m listening.”
Beau laid his clipboard aside, clasped his hands together, and leaned forward, looking ill at ease. “I got a call from Susan at the Food Network today.”
Waverly watched him curiously. What was going on? Was there bad news? “Yes,” she said slowly, prompting him.
“There’s buzz about Simply Perfect from the higher-ups.” Beau glanced down at his hands and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Buzz?” Waverly asked, mystified.
“Some people, Susan wouldn’t say who, but some decision makers at the network feel that Simply Perfect isn’t as . . . fresh as it once was. They feel like we might have peaked.” Beau hazarded a glance in her direction.
“Peaked?” Waverly was offended by the very notion. “Except for that little dip l
ast quarter, we’ve been showing steady growth in viewership every quarter for the last five years,” she protested. “The new book is selling well. Simply Perfect is a successful show.” She stared at Beau indignantly.
He held up his hands as though warding off her ire. “I know, I know. But, Boss, television isn’t what it used to be. There are so many choices now; it’s a viewer’s market. And cable networks are getting nervous, they’re looking for sure bets. They want rock-solid ratings and superstar shows—Rachael Ray plastered on every Walmart cookbook end cap. That sort of thing.” He sighed in resignation. “Simply Perfect is a good show, a solid show. It’s just not the biggest show around, and the network, well, they’re not taking the chances they used to. Susan was just giving us a heads-up. We need to be thinking about how to bump the show up another level, boost ratings and visibility. We need to go from good to great if we want to stay in the game.”
Waverly sat back in her chair. It was true that Simply Perfect’s numbers had dropped slightly last quarter, but so had a lot of good shows. And their two-part Christmas entertaining special had been very popular, the highest viewership yet. Surely the network wouldn’t drop them, not when they were growing, not when things were going so well. But still, she knew Beau was right; viewers had hundreds of options now, all vying for their precious minutes. Was Simply Perfect dynamic enough to capture their interest and hold it? If she were honest with herself, Waverly had to admit that she wasn’t sure. Neither was the Food Network, apparently.
She leaned her head back and massaged her temples, where a stress headache was beginning to bloom behind her eyes.
“Don’t worry yet. Nothing’s for certain,” Beau said, trying to placate her. “Susan called as a personal favor to me. It was a warning, okay? Not a done deal. But we need to think about our strategy.”
“What can we do?” Waverly asked, still baffled by the turn the conversation had taken. She sat up straight. “Did you tell Susan about the Good Housekeeping endorsement?”
Becoming the Talbot Sisters Page 11