The Letter Keeper

by Charles Martin

  “Really?”

  She nodded.

  I sat on my heels. “Everything I just said, and that was your takeaway?”

  Another nod.

  The difference between what she heard and what I intended, or even what I thought I said, is evidence that the stuff in the pipe is real. That what we breathe in and what we breathe out can actually alter the words that are spoken so they fit a false narrative. But pain, like fear, is a liar. And it has but one lie: This love is too good to be true, and even if it were true, you don’t deserve it.

  Which is a lie from the pit of hell.

  I know. We battle it every day on the streets of Freetown.

  It is true and we do deserve it.

  I shook my head. “I need to work on my communication.” I paused, staring at myself from outside myself, and then spoke primarily to myself. “Next time I’ll write a letter.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “There’s no next time. There’s just this time.”

  Oddly enough, I was still holding the ring aloft. An offering.

  Slowly, her eyes shifted from the water to the ring and then to me. She held both of my hands in both of hers. “I know all this about you.”

  “You do?”

  She nodded matter-of-factly.

  “How?”

  “I’m a woman.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say something?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say it.”

  “Is that the way this works?”

  She nodded again. “I hope so.”

  There it was. That one word. The singular remedy.

  I scratched my head. “My experience in this conversation is like backing up a trailer. If I want to go right, I turn the wheel left. And don’t, under any circumstances, try to navigate by looking through the rearview. Turn around.”

  She laughed, wiped her face on my sleeve, and held up her naked hand. “You have to put it on me.”

  “Somebody should offer a class on this.”

  “They do.” She smiled. “They’re called dance lessons.”

  I slid the ring on her finger, staring at her as it came to rest where her finger met her hand. “Summer, I—”

  She lifted her right index finger, pressed it to my lips, then kissed me and smiled. “Shhh . . . You’re perfect.”

  Given the two-hour difference, the plane landed at Freetown shortly after 8 p.m. where, thanks to the crew who had helped me plan this, a party was waiting. They were beaming. They’d strung lights, chilled champagne, lit seven fire pits, and filled the air with Summer’s favorite classical music: Pachelbel. Angel and Ellie were giddy. Clay broke out his best suit and penguin wing tips. Even Bones looked satisfied that after weeks of planning we’d pulled it off and I hadn’t messed it up. At least not that they knew.

  Bones stood alongside me. Sipping wine. Bumping shoulders. The butt of his Sig imprinted beneath his flowing white robes. Firelight danced across his chiseled face, adding a sheen to his white hair. We were staring at Summer, who was in the process of giving gifts to Angel, Ellie, Casey, and Clay. A mother hen and her chicks.

  Bones nodded, smiling smugly. “She said yes.”

  “You seem surprised.”

  He looked at me. “Are you?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  He wrapped an arm around me and said nothing. Which said everything.

  I had no idea what was involved in planning a wedding, but evidently women are born with this thing that kicks into gear when a wedding is to be planned. The following morning my trio of wedding planners woke with the sun and began doing whatever women do that involves a “Yes, I will, and yes, I do.”

  I stared across and down at them from the mountain. Sweat pouring off my face. I had awakened early, hit it hard, and was met at the trailhead by Bones. Ten years my senior and still taking me to school. Several times I tried to lose the old man, but neither Gunner nor I could shake him. A little more than an hour later, we stood on the porch of the Eagle’s Nest and sipped Nicaraguan coffee. Something he’d read about in a book about a drug runner who ends up in love with a girl in Nicaragua who owns a coffee plantation with this storied well. He told me I should read it.

  I gestured with my coffee. “I’m going to start calling you Superman. Or the Freak. Something other than Bones.”

  He nodded. “Not as easy as it used to be.”

  “Fooled me.”

  “Residue on the Whaler fragments suggests a rare and expensive explosive. Military grade. Recorded satellite images show three men exiting the water, setting the bombs in less than seven minutes, and disappearing back into the water.”

  “They knew what they were doing.”

  “Precision.”

  “You think they can get to us here?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t think they could get to you there.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  Bones studied me. “Why so tense?”

  I held up my phone. “Keep waiting for you to send me a picture of some innocent soul in a bad mess and I’ve got to flip my switch, exit this fantasy, and get back to the real world where people are living and dying.”

  He took my new phone, only days old, and sailed it like a Frisbee out across the vast expanse before us. It spun saucer-like through the air and fell to the rocks some thousand feet below where it bounced and shattered. He sipped the last of his coffee. “Race you down.”

  Chapter 23

  My publisher discovered quickly that Casey’s story sold itself. Between the quality and transparency of the writing, interview requests poured in. With growing attention, Casey’s dread rose in equal measure. The idea of having to jump into and out of her story, day in and day out, made her physically sick. Summer was the first to point out that Casey wasn’t eating. I took this as clear evidence she’d never survive a book tour. Knowing what a book release would require and wanting to protect her, I suggested we control the ground. If they want the story, they can come to us. No one liked that idea more than Casey.

  We spent a month prepping for the release party. The idea of a dozen media trucks parked along Main Street in Freetown didn’t appeal to us. Too much we couldn’t control. What happened when some ignorant reporter decided to interview one of the girls who was not Casey and then plastered her face across the six o’clock news where she could be quickly identified by her exploiter? Not good. We chose a town thirty minutes away and then cut the security team loose to control the ground.

  Which they did with a vengeance.

  My publisher cranked up the marketing engine, word spread, and media outlets brought in giant, antenna-topped trucks en masse in anticipation of Casey’s emergence. We also tripled security. While we wanted to give her a chance to tell her story, we did not want Casey exploited for that story. Too many girls like her had been rescued out of slavery only to be further undressed by media talking heads pushing ratings. Which meant we would protect her like hawks. At the first hint of inappropriate questions or too much emphasis on the horror rather than the resurrection and the hope, we’d lift her out. Period. No questions.

  What the media did not know was that sixty percent of our security were dressed as news personalities and cameramen. The guys loved the change in decor.

  By 7:00 p.m. on a Thursday night, the auditorium was three-quarters full. Several of the top talking heads in the country had traveled from Los Angeles and New York City to interview the girl with the funny last name. Those who had not would regret it soon enough. Casey sat offstage, one knee bouncing nervously, chewing one nail to the quick. When Bones introduced her, Ellie and Angel escorted her, holding her hands and standing alongside her at the podium. Everyone, me included, thought it best if I remained in the shadows. Unknown. Throughout both the writing and the lead-up to tonight, Casey had promised never to mention my name. Only to call me Wilby. Clay stood prominently behind her. His presence alone said both “caretaker” and “bouncer.”

  Casey had prepared a short summary of her s
tory. Something to break the ice. A beginning. She had spent the last two days rehearsing it before the mirror. Her life in twelve minutes. She grasped the podium, blinked under the spotlights and camera flashes, and swallowed. Then the caterpillar cracked the shell of her cocoon and opened her mouth.

  Two minutes later, she had them eating out of her hand.

  Trafficked across continents from porch to palace to trailer park, sold multiple times on the black web and across coffee tables and the hoods of cars, subjected to multiple forced abortions, she was used, discarded, then found, only to be used, injected, and sold again. A pattern that repeated more than her mind could remember. Casey had purposefully worn a sleeveless shirt, unwilling to hide the holes the needles had torn and the self-inflicted scars on her wrists. When I asked her if she was sure she wanted to do that, she’d responded, “If I’m going out there, then me is going out there.”

  Seven minutes in, after she’d detailed her addiction and second suicide attempt, she paused and lowered her face, and I wondered if we’d lost her. If she’d climbed back in her shell. Did we push her too hard?

  I took a step toward the stage when Bones placed a hand on my arm. “Give her a minute.”

  After a long, quiet minute in which her right hand traced the scars on her left arm, she lifted her head, smiled, and waved her hand across all of them. “I’d like all of you to know that we brought you here so we could steal your cars.” Laughter rippled across the audience. “That’s happening as we speak. But don’t worry, it’s only a twelve-mile walk to town. Most of which is downhill.”

  When she finished, the room fell awkwardly quiet. Even the cameras were quiet. Casey put a hand on her hip and broke the silence. “I rehearsed that little speech a dozen times in the mirror using my toothbrush as a microphone. Was it that bad?” The laughter was good for all of us. Over the next hour, she fielded one question after another. Never stumbling. Never faltering.

  While uneducated beyond sixth grade, she surprised us on several levels. One interviewer asked her, “How many languages do you speak?”

  Casey weighed her head back and forth. “I can speak in seven and write five.”

  Bones turned to me. “Did you know that?”

  “No idea.”

  The interviewer continued his questioning in French. Which Casey answered in French. The interviewer then asked his question again. This time in English. “How is this so, given that you have had no schooling beyond sixth grade?”

  Casey laughed. “Oh, I went to school. Just my classroom probably looked a little different from yours.” More laughter. “Early on, while I was still”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“desirable, I was moved around a lot and the people who owned me liked to make customers comfortable, including their surroundings, so they’d put me in places that looked like homes. And given that most homes include books . . . I read.” She tilted her head. “In between . . .”

  At this point, several reporters were firing questions. “What’d you read?”

  “Everything.”

  “How many books have you read?”

  Casey shook her head. “Thousands.”

  “The title, The Resurrection of Casey Girl. Why’d you choose that?”

  “My birth certificate is a bit of an anomaly. My first name is listed as ‘Casey.’ My last name is listed as ‘Girl.’”

  Casey let the truth of that sink in while whispers rippled through the crowd.

  “You just described yourself as ‘still desirable.’ What do you mean by that?”

  Casey considered how to answer. “One of my owners liked to bet on greyhounds. He’d set me up in a room, take the client’s money, and walk to the window. This meant I spent a lot of time at the track, but I never watched the races. When I wasn’t working, I’d wander out back where they walked the older dogs—the ones who once won them a lot of money but now had lost a step. Rather than rest and feed them, they walked them down this long straightaway followed by a blind right turn. Minutes later, they’d return carrying the leash. One day I wandered back there. On a board above the shed where they stack the bodies, someone had spray-painted, ‘Undesirable.’”

  A hush fell across the room.

  A female reporter in the back of the room spoke up. “Can you explain the scars on your arms?”

  Casey lifted her arm, revealing the holes. “Needles tear the skin when you have the shakes. You’re just trying to hit your arm, much less a vein. And . . .” She turned her left wrist to the cameras, which clicked rapidly. “Box cutters.” Then, exposing her right arm, she said, “A thirty-second-story windowpane.”

  A voice from the crowd. “Were you thinking about jumping?”

  Casey looked at me. Then at the voice. “Yes.”

  “What stopped you?”

  Casey shrugged. “The thought of meeting the concrete.”

  More laughter. Casey had a beautiful way of making people comfortable with her own story and the pain that accompanied it. A gift unparalleled. I’d never seen anything like it.

  The last question was the one we’d all anticipated. While Casey was a story unto herself, she was, in some ways, only half the story. Someone had rescued her. They wanted that person. “Casey, what can you tell us about the one who rescued you?”

  Casey shrugged and locked arms with Angel, who featured prominently toward the end of her book. “She’s standing next to me.”

  “What about the man you call Wilby?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is Wilby his real name?”

  “No.”

  “Why that name?”

  “I named him after William Wilberforce. A member of British parliament in the nineteenth century.”

  “Why him?”

  “He spent his life, his fortune, and sacrificed his political career to help eradicate the East India slave trade.” She shrugged. “Because of him, the powerbrokers and elite of Britain willingly gave up several hundred million pounds sterling. The name fit.”

  “What’s he like?”

  She considered this. “Quiet. More comfortable in shadow than spotlight. And he has no interest in you.”

  “Will we ever meet him?”

  “Not if he doesn’t want you to.”

  “But, Casey, you of all people must understand that his story deserves to be told as well as yours.”

  She found the voice in the crowd and zeroed in on it, pausing briefly. “And you, of all people, must know that there are tens of thousands of girls just like me. Still flat on their backs. Raped repeatedly for profit. Right this second. Day after week after month after . . .” You could have heard a pin drop. “And if you focus your attention on him, then you’re not focused on them.” She scanned the crowd. “During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, men whose only aim was profit would retrofit cargo ships with decks and shackles. Stacking people eight and twelve deep, where the urine and the feces and the vomit drained downward. Those on the bottom often drowned. Those who survived the crossing were sold again to equally evil men who put them to work during the day and forced them to lie flat at night.” She paused, studying contorted faces. “Do my words offend you? Make your stomachs turn?” She held up her book. “I was one among many stowed below deck. Drowning. If Wilby were here, he’d tell you to spend your resources and talent finding and exposing the masters of the ships. Doing so will free those shackled below.”

  The ovation lasted ten minutes. And while I knew she meant well, her words would only serve to heighten the search for Wilby.

  By the time the antennae trucks had cleared, Resurrection had climbed the charts and was flirting with number one on Amazon. In the comm center, Bones and the team were fielding calls for interviews that would keep Casey busy for weeks. Most requested her presence in studios on either coast, but Bones was resolute. “Nope, we hold the high ground. They come to us.”

  Casey weathered the storm, and we all watched in wonder as her story caught a rocket ship to the moon. She was everywhere
. Given the increased attention, scrutiny, and people, we doubled security again and hung HD cameras on every lamppost, telephone pole, and building apex in Freetown. Not to mention the satellite coverage Bones occasionally tapped into. The comm center looked like mission control at NASA.

  Watching the frenzy, I pulled Clay aside. “I need a favor.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I can’t be everywhere, so I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind—”

  He held up a hand. “Done.”

  From that moment, wherever Casey went, she found Clay had already been there. And whenever she stood still, she did so within the boundaries of his shadow. While this was good for Casey, it wasn’t so good for Clay, which I would later discover.

  With every question, every interview, we watched in wonder as Casey emerged from her broken shell and became the voice of the unheard and the silenced. One night, in a prime-time interview, the lady asked her, “If you could reach back into time and speak to yourself, if you could speak to those like you, what would you say?”

  Without blinking, Casey turned, looked into the lens, reached through the camera, and spoke. “You in the darkness with the water rising around your neck. You with the needle hanging out of your arm. With the palm full of pills . . . the blade resting on your wrist . . . you’re not alone. And no matter what the voices say, you are worth rescue.” She leaned closer. “I know you don’t believe me. I didn’t either. Until somebody found me. You’re not invisible.”

  Her world would never be the same.

  And while that was good for the story, it was not good for us. This, too, we would learn too late.

  A few days after the press conference, Casey found Summer and me on the porch watching the sunset. She was staring silently at the ground as she stood in my doorway. Saying nothing.

  I prompted her. “You okay?” She didn’t look it.

  “Was wondering if you could help me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you have a favorite girl’s name?” She paused. “It’d be better if it wasn’t someone you knew. Like if it wasn’t already attached to a face.”