by Ruth Parker
In his rearview mirror, he saw three black Crown Victorias speed into the strip mall parking lot, the flashers on the front dashboard shining blue and red. Nice try, he thought, and drove back home, eager to see his beloved twins.
Tonight was going to be perfect.
Madison wasn’t sure how long they’d been gone. Melissa was no help—she slept almost constantly since they’d come here. They were in a room without windows. A basement. She’d never been in a house with a basement before. It wasn’t like the ones she’d seen in movies, all cement and bare light bulbs hanging from chains. There was carpet, the walls were white and smooth, and there was a nice set of bunk beds on one side of the room and a small couch and TV on the other side. The TV didn’t hook up to anything but an old VHS player with even older cassettes of things that had been recorded off television a long, long time ago.
In the morning, the man would come down with a tray of food—usually some eggs and toast, plus some sandwiches and milk for later. Madison assumed that he left for work, because he wouldn’t come back for many hours. When he did come back, it was tea time.
During tea time, you didn’t screw around.
They had to wear a blue dress, with white gloves and white hair ribbons. He told them to put on just one squirt of perfume and touch up their nail polish if there were any chips in the paint.
He would bring down a tray with a steaming pot of tea, cups and saucers, and a variety of cookies and little finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off. They had to say please and thank you and hold the teacups with their pinkies sticking out. They had to have their napkins on their laps and take small bites of the cookies.
Madison didn’t notice the first time, but the tea would usually make them feel a little sleepy. It made Madison feel weird—not like the champagne that her grandma had let her sip at midnight last New Year’s Eve. It made her feel like she didn’t care about anything. After she drank the tea, when she thought about going home to Mom and Dad, she felt… nothing. He was putting something in the tea. There was no way around it. They couldn’t refuse the tea.
The first time, she was grateful for that feeling she got after drinking the tea. It was better than that hot and festering guilt in the pit of her stomach. This whole thing was her fault. She’d been so incredibly stupid. Deep down, Madison had known something was fishy about the modeling contest. She had known, but she’d still entered. She knew that the perverts used all sorts of tricks to kidnap girls.
Madison kept waiting for the night when the man would come down for tea time and then make them take off their clothes. That was why perverts kidnapped girls. But so far, he hadn’t done anything like that. After drinking the drugged tea, Madison probably wouldn’t even care if he did. After the drugged tea, she didn’t care about anything.
He hadn’t hurt them. He hadn’t been mean. He only got mad one time when Melissa said she didn’t like tea. He had yelled and thrown the tray of food. After that, they drank the tea.
All this had gone on for… two days? Three days? Four? She wasn’t sure how many tea parties there had been. Unless the police came soon, she didn’t know what would happen, but she knew that it wouldn’t be good.
On the way home from school a few days ago, she’d heard something on the news radio that her grandma always listened to in the car. The report had said that the bodies of two girls had been found in the woods. They said that the girls were twins that had been missing. Madison knew it was the same guy. A guy who liked tea parties. And twins. And murder.
The girls were beautiful. Just as his own sisters had been. He didn’t have a single photograph of his sisters, but he remembered their long, crazy hair, their smooth skin, their innocent eyes.
He remembered their pain, their screams, their pleas for help.
He couldn’t wait to see the girls, but he had to prepare the tea first. The tea set was in the dish rack, drying from last night. He washed it carefully by hand, making sure to scrub the bottom so the tea wouldn’t leave ugly brown rings. He took the pills from the orange bottle. Just two pills tonight, enough to make the girls relax. They were still in shock; they hadn’t come to accept that this was their new home. While the water was boiling, he got the powder ready, crushing the tablets with the back of a spoon, making sure everything was ground to a smooth powder.
It was a technique he had learned from his mother, after the girls stopped voluntarily taking their ‘vitamins.’
One night when he was fifteen and his sisters were twelve, his mother was getting ready to go out. Nothing strange about that; she went out most nights. She used to go out to bars, but she’d stopped that, instead going to friends’ houses. He knew that his mother was doing a lot more than just drinking beers at her friends’ houses. His mother had never been beautiful, but lately she’d turned into a shrunken and wrinkled hag. She had scabs on her face that would never heal because she couldn’t stop picking at them. Her arms were once strong from carrying her children, but instead of a hard lump of muscle under the skin, her arms now looked like twisted strips of beef jerky. She was doing drugs and not the sort of party drugs that the movie stars did.
“I’m going out,” his mother had said, all those years ago.
“Whatever,” he’d said.
“I’m going to be back in a couple hours.” He’d looked at the clock. It was only seven in the evening.
“Okay,” he’d said. He preferred it when she left. He could have some peace and quiet. The girls could play without his mother yelling at them to keep it down. She was always paranoid that the neighbors were going to call the police, even though their nearest neighbors were at least a quarter mile down the road. With his mom gone, he could at least try and do his homework after he made dinner and checked to make sure the girls did their homework.
“Make sure the girls take these.” His mom handed him a white envelope that had grimy creases from where it had been folded up inside the pocket of a dirty pair of jeans.
“What’s this?” He unfolded the envelope and peered inside, finding two little pills.
“Vitamins,” she said. “Be back later.”
“Don’t I get one?” he asked. It would be hard to pinpoint which of her three children was her favorite, as she neglected them all equally, and he found it odd that she was looking out for the girls.
“No,” she said. She left the house, bolting the door shut behind her.
He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but he gave the girls their pill during dinner. He heated up a couple cans of soup in the microwave and put a few pieces of bread in the toaster. It was a feast, by normal standards. That was another weird thing. His mother had a little extra money lately and had actually gone grocery shopping. He pushed the pills across the food-splattered table and told the girls to take them.
“I don’t need a vitamin,” Susie had said.
“I don’t like swallowing pills,” Samantha had said.
“Just do it,” he pleaded. “It’ll help so you don’t get scurvy.”
“What’s scurvy?” Samantha had asked.
“It’s what pirates got,” Susie said.
“Yes,” he said. “They got it because they ate crappy canned food all the time and it gave them sores on their skin and their hair and teeth fell out.”
“I think mom has scurvy,” Samantha said.
He wished that scurvy was the extent of their mother’s troubles.
“Just take it,” he said. The girls had exchanged a worried glance, but they each reached out a slender white hand and took the pill from the table, swallowing it with a drink of water.
“There,” Susie said. “You owe us a tea party.”
“Aren’t you too old for tea parties?” he asked. Truth was, he loved sitting at their cramped little table. He’d be bitterly disappointed if he could not join them and drank the warm tap water out of the small teacups. He loved to see their little faces pretend to be serious and stoic, the way they imagined fancy rich people acted when having high tea.
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“We took your stupid vitamin, so you owe us a tea party!” Susie repeated.
“Okay, okay!” he said, trying to act like he didn’t want to do it. “Let me check your homework, while you get everything set up.”
He looked over their school work while the girls got ready. They didn’t have any real tea, so they would drink tap water out of the little teacups. The girls had a small plastic table that was scuffed and stained, but they kept it clean. They arranged the tea set on the table and scavenged a few stale saltine crackers from the kitchen to serve with their tea. “We should have scones,” Susie said.
“You don’t even know what a scone is,” Samantha said.
“I know you eat them with tea.”
“Well we don’t have tea, so it doesn’t matter that we don’t have scones.”
“We’re ready!” they’d yelled in unison.
He went to them, the table set up in the small bedroom that the three of them shared. He sat down, his knees bunched up in the small chair, but he sat with them, commenting on the lovely array.
“What’s an array?” Samantha said. She yawned loudly.
“It’s like a selection,” he said.
“Then I thank you sir for your kind words,” Susie said. She giggled. Her words had sounded weird. In fact, she sounded like when their mom would come home from the bar, like her tongue was heavy.
He tweezed a saltine with his thumb and forefinger, sticking out his pinky finger in a burlesque gesture of delicacy and refinement. He took several tiny, quick nibbles, spraying crumbs everywhere.
The girls laughed and screamed for him to stop. “You made a mess!” Samantha said. She reached over to take the crackers away from him, but she knocked over her teacup. When she went to sit back down, she missed the chair and landed on the floor.
He wondered what was that pill he’d given them, because it sure as shit wasn’t a vitamin. Susie leaned over to help her sister, but she tumbled to the floor, landing on Samantha. Whatever was going on, he knew he should get them in bed. The girls shared a full-sized bed and he slept in his own twin mattress that was shoved in the corner, on the floor, without a box spring or frame. He’d get them in bed, then try and finish up his own stupid homework. School was such bullshit; all they gave you was a bunch of busy work that a chimp could be trained to do, then complained if you didn’t do it.
He picked up Susie and walked her to bed. She was still wearing her jeans and sweatshirt, but she could sleep in it. The house was bitterly cold even in the spring. She crawled into bed, her limbs flailing loosely as she pawed for the blankets. He got Samantha into bed too, making sure both of the girls were lying straight and underneath the blankets. He closed the bedroom door and went to the dinner table where he’d left his school books. After trying to read the same stupid chapter in the same stupid science book, he crammed the book back into his backpack and turned on the TV. But the TV shows were just as stupid.
At ten, he retired to his room, turning on the small lamp next to his bed. He could hear his sisters sleeping, their breathing loud and grating. He reached underneath his mattress and pulled out a battered old paperback called Sharing Is Caring. He’d found it at a used bookstore; it was about perverted old married couples that all had sex with each other. He’d read it cover to cover three times and it still hadn’t lost its appeal. He’d just started to read a particular raunchy passage involving a husband who bet his wife’s virtue in a poker game and lost when he heard keys jangling in the front door. Great. His mom would stumble in and start asking him to do things, to bring her something to eat, find the remote control, go out to the car and get her purse. He reached over and turned off the lamp. He’d pretend to be asleep so she wouldn’t bother him.
There was someone with her. He strained to hear the voices. A man. It wasn’t shocking that she’d bring one of her loser druggie boyfriends over and have a long, loud screw session in the next room. There was a reason he had two orange foam earplugs in his nightstand drawer. He was fishing around in the drawer, trying to find the second earplug, when his bedroom door opened.
“Shh,” his mom said.
“I’m being quiet,” the man said.
“They’re in the bed,” his mom said. “Fifteen minutes. Touching only. Fifty bucks. That was the deal.”
“I know, I know,” the man said.
He tried to peek, but he couldn’t see what was going on. He saw his mother’s shadow in the doorway and a hulking figure approach his sisters’ bed. The man sat on the edge of the bed and carefully peeled back the blankets—
But that was a long time ago. Over twenty years ago.
And the two little girls who liked to have tap water and stale saltine cracker tea parties were long since dead.
Things might have been different if he hadn’t given them the pills or if he had gotten out of bed and screamed and ran to the neighbor’s house and called the police. The three of them would have been split up, put into foster care, but at least his sisters would still be alive.
That night was only just the beginning.
It had all been his fault. He had told them to take their vitamin. He had lain in bed—doing nothing—while that hulking man climbed into bed with his innocent sleeping sisters.
Everything that had happened after that night was his fault. His mother was a monster, but he was the one who had let her run free, unchained and hungry.
Twenty years had been a long time to think about it, for the regret to fester inside his guts, turning into a rotten and putrid mass that poisoned his soul. If he could only get things right, have the perfect tea party with the perfect girls—then release them from the horrors of this world—then maybe the sick and nagging ache would finally leave him.
And it would be perfect.
He had two new little girls who got to drink real tea with neat pressed sugar cubes and real cream. They had perfect fancy outfits and beautiful faces and that wild curly hair. Things would be different this time. Everything would be perfect. He could send them away to a place far away from the pain of this world, far away from hulking shadow-men who peeled back blankets and got to touch for fifteen minutes so long as they paid the price.
He would send them away to a place where the need to be high would never consume the love a mother had for her children. They could go away innocent and unspoiled, unhurt and pure, where they could never be ripped from each other’s arms, screaming for their mother.
Soon. He would release them soon. Maybe even after tonight’s tea party.
Fourteen
His finger hovered over the little recycle bin in the corner of his computer desktop screen. He should delete it, even if it made him look guilty. It was only a matter of time before the cops came. The last twenty years of his life, whenever anything in the neighborhood went wrong, the cops always came. Forget it, he thought. He didn’t delete the folder. Let them come; I don’t have anything to hide. As if that mattered.
Three hours later, his wife knocked on the door of his home office, a weary look in her eye. Greg Pratt had been right. The cops were here. That look of defeat on her otherwise beautiful face made him hate the cops, hate her parents—but most of all hate himself.
“There’s some detectives here to see you,” she said. She was only thirty-two but at times like this, she seemed older, her skin slacker than it should be, the line between her brows deeper.
“Alright,” he said. He got up out of his chair with a sigh.
In the living room there were three detectives in rumpled suits sitting on the couch. They rose to greet him. “Hello, Mr. Pratt?”
“What do you want,” Pratt asked. He knew you caught more flies with honey, but couldn’t bring himself to kiss ass. Not now, not after being harassed for his entire adult life.
“Have you been watching the news?” one of the detectives asked. He had a small, squished nose and sneaky eyes. “Two girls have been abducted.”
“Christ,” Pratt said. “You want to check the place? Be m
y guest.”
“We don’t think you have the girls held hostage in your house,” another detective said. He was tall—even sitting down, Pratt could tell that the detective wasn’t the sort of guy you’d want to get into a fight with. He looked like he might cram the constitution down your throat.
“Then why are you here?” Pratt asked. He was just glad that his kids weren’t home. They were old enough to understand, but that was the problem.
“What can you tell us about these?” the tall detective asked. He tossed the photos on the coffee table. The photos that Pratt had been about to delete off his computer.
“I took the girls’ pictures. They came to my studio and said that they wanted professional photos taken. They only had twenty dollars, so I only took a few shots and let them pick one pose. That’s all I know.”
“When was this?”
“I’m not sure exactly, but it was last week.” Pratt thought for a moment. It had been the night they had spaghetti for dinner. “Wednesday, I think. I can check the exact dates for you.”
“Mind if we look around?” the tall detective asked. Of course, he would want to look around without a warrant. Pratt knew they could get a warrant and come back with an even more hostile disposition. They would come back when his kids were home. He hated to just bend over for them, but he had no choice. This was his life and he had no one to blame but himself.
“Fine,” Pratt said. “But don’t make a mess.”
Fletcher didn’t think Pratt was the guy. He didn’t fit the profile. Still, Fletcher methodically searched the house, opening drawers and looking under beds, because he’d seen enough to know not to trust anyone. Ever. Least of all himself.
In Pratt’s home office, Fletcher sat behind the computer and moved the mouse. The monitor turned on. Fletcher opened up the internet browser and Pratt’s email. There were two addresses logged in on the computer, a personal account and his business account. He looked through the sent folder of the business account and examined the emails that Pratt had sent last week. Sure enough, he saw that there was an email to M_Webb2005. Fletcher opened it up and read. It was a standard business email. Thank you for your business; here are your pictures.