The little one, Linda, nodded, her expression very serious. It was Laura, the middle child, who said, hesitantly, “Can’t we just run away?”
“We talked about that, Linda.” Pauline nodded toward the hallway. “We don’t have any money, and you know he won’t let us go until men don’t want us anymore.” She picked up the remote and clicked on the television and flicked the channel to a local news show. The couple on-screen were attractive without being glamorous, and the woman, a brunette with long hair, had a motherly look to her. “I’ve been watching all the local news stations. I think this is the one.”
This time Linda squirmed. “Do we really have to tell them?” she said in a small voice.
“Yes,” Pauline said.
“Everything?” Linda said. She stared at her shoes. “Everything he made us do?”
“Everything Rod made us do, too?” Laura said, picking at her sparkly blue fingernail polish.
“Yes,” Pauline said. She muted the sound and nodded at the screen. “There’s a thing called sweeps week coming up. It measures how many people are watching every channel. It means the TV stations need lots of people to watch so they can charge more money for commercials. So they run stories they think people will watch the most.”
“And you think they’ll watch us?” Laura said.
“We’ll make them watch us,” Pauline said.
“And people will give us money?”
“Yes. We’ll get a grown-up to start us a bank account, and we’ll say we have no money, and everyone will send us some.”
“And we’ll get a real mother and father?” Linda said, still looking at her shoes.
Pauline’s eyes softened. “Yes.”
“Are you sure?” Laura said. “Are you sure they won’t make us go back to the village? Go back to …”
“I’m sure,” Pauline said. “But only if we tell them everything. The grown-ups will make someone take us, and”—she nodded at the screen—“those people will make everyone pay attention so they give us to someone good.” She put down the remote and picked up a yellow sticky note and held it out to Laura. “Here’s the number. In case it isn’t on the screen when … you know.”
“No,” Linda said, looking up. “It should be me. I should call. I’m the littlest. They’ll feel sorriest for me.”
Pauline’s eyes met Laura’s. “All right,” she said, and handed her sister the phone. “Don’t forget, leave the TV on until they come.”
She rose to her feet, the .357 held firmly at her side, and walked on steady legs down the hall.
2.
“THEY FOUND THE AKULURAK GIRLS?” Kate said, her expression lightening. “God, that’s great, Auntie Balasha will be so relieved, I can’t wait to …” Her voice trailed away.
“It’s not so great,” Jim said, scratching behind Mutt’s ears. Mutt’s tongue lolled out of her mouth, her eyes half closed in an expression of blissful idiocy. “Brendan says they killed their pimp.”
“Their pimp?” Kate said. And then she said, “They killed him?”
“That’s not the worst of it, Kate,” he said. “Believe it or not. They say that asshole Rod Jimmieskin has been molesting them ever since their mother died. They say that’s why they ran off.”
3.
“ISN’T THE GANG executioner’s weapon of choice usually a .22?” Kate said.
“Yeah,” Brendan said, “but the girls said the .357 was always right there on the nightstand.” He paused. “He trained the three of them on it, you know.”
“So they said.” On camera, on every channel, in every television studio in the state.
“Took them all out to the firing range. Taught them how to sight in, fire, reload. How to clean it when they came home.”
“I wonder whose idea that was,” Kate said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s kind of funny he didn’t take any of his other girls out on the firing range to practice with his personal weapon.”
“The sisters were living with him,” Brendan said. “His other girls had their own places. And he was engaged in a business that was not what you might call low risk. He wanted them to be able to protect themselves, is what they’re saying. That’s how their attorney is going to explain away the GSR. They’d been to the range the day before.”
“It is a problem,” Kate agreed.
He totally missed the irony. “He probably wanted them to be able to protect him, if it came to that.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Kate said. She read down through the case file. “Why did they call the station? Why not 911?”
“They said the television was on and the number was on the bottom of the screen.”
“Was it?”
Brendan nodded. “We looked at a tape of the news. KKAK runs a daily feature where they invite viewers to call or e-mail comments. They run the number and the address at the bottom of the screen through the whole feature. Linda said it was the first number she saw after they heard the gunshot.”
“Why did she call?”
“She was closest to the phone.”
Kate was silent for a moment. “They didn’t even run. They just sat there and waited for the cops to show. Why didn’t they run?”
He gave her a quizzical look. “Aren’t you testifying as a character witness for the defense, Kate?”
4.
“NOTHING PERSONAL, KATE, but you look kinda grubby,” Brendan said. He sniffed. “You smell kinda grubby, too.”
“Like, no showers at the mall, man,” she said, pouring coffee into a foam cup.
His eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. The mall?”
She sat across from him. “Yeah, man, like, you know, the mall.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. “The Dimond Mall?”
“That’d be the one.” She sipped, winced, and sipped again.
“Where Da Prez picked up the Akulurak sisters.”
“Where they say he did. Funny thing.”
“What?”
“Not one of the kids I talked to remembered seeing the girls there.”
He digested this in silence for a moment. “Not the most reliable witnesses, mall rats.”
She drank more coffee. “So I spent the better part of the last five days hanging out there, Brendan. Talked to a lot of kids, and a couple of their pimps while I was at it. One of whom offered me a job, by the way. Said some of his clients liked ’em a little long in the tooth. Kinda perverted, but, hey, he had a business, he provided product for a price, whaddya gonna do.”
“Is he still living?”
“Barely.” She leaned forward, empty cup dangling from one hand. “The thing is, Brendan, they’ve all seen the Akulurak sisters on television by now. And none of them remember seeing them at the mall. Where the sisters say they hung out for a week, fighting for leftover pizza out of Round Table’s Dumpster, before Da Prez came along and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
“Doesn’t prove anything one way or another.” He looked at her, puzzled. “Kate, they are already caught. They’re going on trial for murder on Monday. Why pick holes in their story now? What’s the point?”
She looked down at the dog, who leaned against her knee and gazed up at her with big yellow eyes. “You said he was a relatively good guy, for a pimp.”
“And you said he was still a pimp.”
She shrugged. “It’s just interesting that fresh out of the village, first time in the big city, and the girls wind up with him.”
“No,” he said, “not really. It’s what he does. Did. He had a farm team of girls from the villages, stashed in his house and a couple of duplexes. He had a Web site, Kate. He advertised them on the Internet as Thai and Vietnamese.”
“The cops had him inside for a while about six months ago,” she said. She produced a piece of paper from the hip pocket of her jeans.
He took it. It was a printout of a year-old story from the local Anchorage newspaper about an arrest for assault in the firs
t degree made by one Dupré Thomas Jefferson, aka Da Prez. The victim was one Charles Louis Carson. Jefferson claimed he had simply been defending one Loretta Igushik, street name Sweetness. Igushik, Jefferson said, was a friend whom Carson had allegedly severely beaten in the course of a lovers’ quarrel.
Brendan said, “You mean about Carson being Senator Carson’s son?”
“Read down.”
He read some more. “You mean the quote from the unnamed source in the investigation saying at least Da Prez made sure the johns didn’t mistreat his girls?”
She stood up and hit the trash can dead center with the cup. “Swish, score, two points, big team, two points.” She looked at Brendan. “Did I mention, Brendan, that the Suulutaq Mine donated a satellite dish to the Niniltna School? And a computer for every desk in every room in the building? These days, school kids in Niniltna could log on to the International Space Station if they wanted to.”
5.
“WELL, KATE?” said the big man with the red hair and the food-spotted tie.
“Well what, Brendan?” Kate said.
He looked at the double doors that led into the courtroom. “Justice done?”
He was looking at the doors as if he could see through them, as if the three girls were still in sight. “Brendan,” she said, “you noticed there was a majority of men on the jury, right?”
He was still watching the doors. “Huh?”
“You didn’t even use up all of your peremptory challenges. Didn’t you think it might be better to have a balance of the sexes on a jury for a case like this one? On a jury you wanted to swing your way?”
“Yeah,” he said, unheeding. “Men. Jury. Sure.”
“Yeah,” she said. “What I thought. Brendan, look at me.”
She had to say it again before he turned his head. “You want to sleep with Pauline,” she said.
He blushed and looked furtive.
“Don’t despair, you aren’t alone,” she said. “Every man on the jury felt the same way. So did the judge. And you all wanted to adopt Laura, and you all wanted to pick up your lance and mount your destrier and slay anyone who laid a hand on Linda. I’d bet large on every man who watched any of this on television feeling the same way. Barring that, I guess you can all write checks.”
His blush subsided. “So what if we did?”
“I’m just trying to answer your question,” she said.
Irresistibly, his attention returned to the doors. To them he said, “What question?”
“Was justice done,” she said, and looked at Mutt standing next to her, ears up, yellow gaze flicking between them. For a four-footed mammal with incisors of that size, justice was pretty much summed up in a “Hurt me or mine, I eat you” ethos. Come to that, the Akulurak sisters weren’t that long out of the Alaskan Bush themselves.
“What?” Brendan said.
“Never mind,” Kate said.
Her words were lost in the din when the doors opened and the Akulurak sisters walked out at the head of what had all the appearances of a parade. It included most of the members of the jury.
Kate’s eyes met Pauline’s over the crowd as it swept by. Pauline, hand in hand with her sisters, paused for one infinitesimal moment, just long enough for Kate to get the uncomfortable feeling that she could read Pauline’s mind.
What else was I supposed to do? Let Rod keep on fucking me and Laura until Linda got old enough for him? It wasn’t like we got any help, from you or anybody else. We did what we had to do to get out, and then we did what we had to do to stay out. So, yeah, we chose Prez, and we killed Prez, and we lied and said somebody busted into the house and did it, and I made sure there was enough evidence that at least I would be tried, and I made sure every single filthy thing that bastard Rod and that bastard Prez made us do was in people’s faces every minute of every day. Now we’ve got a safe place to stay and a quarter of a million dollars in a bank account, and we’re good until I’m old enough to keep house for all three of us. You got a problem with any of that?
The parade swept by, still in thrall to the siren song of the three girls at its head.
Maybe Kate didn’t have a problem with it. Maybe it was justice, of some kind.
“Come on, Mutt,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
LESS OF A GIRL
by Chelsea Cain
SOPHIE SAYS NOT TO WORRY—that fourteen-year-old girls get a lot of practice cleaning up blood. She says they are experts at it. They scrub it off the crotches of their underpants, she says, and off their blue jeans. They clean it out of their bedsheets and mattress pads. They wipe stray drops off the bathroom floor, off the toilet seat, off their hands, out from under their nails. They bleed like stuck pigs, Sophie says. They hemorrhage. She says, watch a fourteen-year-old girl stand up from a chair, and half the time she’ll glance behind her to make sure she hasn’t left blood on the seat.
She says I should stop staring and get the paper towels.
“Under the sink,” she says, “in the kitchen.”
Her bedroom door is painted the color of an infected sore, and is covered with posters of actors wearing fake vampire fangs. Last year the door was yellow, and papered with pictures of horses.
It has been a long time since I’ve been out of the room.
I like it here, in the room. The smell of cherry lip gloss, piña-colada-scented candles, cotton-candy-scented hair spray, the Tide laundry detergent her mother washes her sheets with, hamster pee and sawdust, an orange peel that’s been rotting in the trash can under her desk for two weeks, talcum powder, and glue.
But now I can smell none of that.
Now it is sweat and blood and butchered meat.
“Paper towels,” Sophie says again. She looks down at Charlotte’s corpse, at the blood on the carpet, and frowns.
I reach for the doorknob and open the door to the hall.
“Don’t let my mother see you,” Sophie calls.
It’s like walking the plank, going off the high dive.
The hallway is thirty-seven steps. Framed color photographs of Sophie and her family line the walls. Their eyes follow me. They are wearing sweater vests. They are wearing white turtlenecks. Now they are wearing denim and leaning against hay bales. Now they are lined up on the beach in front of the cold Pacific Ocean.
I am walking, but I can’t hear my steps on the carpet.
Now they are dressed in holiday velvet in front of the Christmas tree. Now they are lying side by side making snow angels.
There are seventeen stairs down to the first floor.
I can see the pale blue glow of Sophie’s mother’s laptop. It smells like hair dye and charred wood and rotten grapes. She is sitting on the couch, with her feet up on the coffee table next to a glass of wine.
I have made a life out of moving silently, avoiding detection. I can stand against a wall so still that in the right light I am practically invisible. I am the thing you think you see at night in your room, before your eyes adjust and you decide it’s just a sweater slung over the back of a chair. When your hand slips off the mattress at night, I am the creature you fear will grab it from under the bed. I am Sophie’s naked, hairless twin. Her exact shape. Her budding breasts. Her skinny legs. I have her scars, her bruises.
The paper towels are under the kitchen sink. Sophie’s mother buys Brawny. It’s expensive. But Sophie says that her mother likes the guy on the package.
I slip the paper towels under my arm and back out of the kitchen, the ripe stink of rotten food in my nose, through the living room, past Sophie’s mother’s back, the blue glow of her computer, the smell of her red wine, up the seventeen stairs and down the hall to Sophie’s bedroom door.
Her twin bed is against the wall in the corner. The blue floral bedspread is pulled up neatly over the pillow. Postcards and pictures torn out of magazines are taped on the wall over the headboard. The bookshelf is crammed with books and horse show trophies and a few collectible dolls that she’s never been allowed to play with.
There’s a sticker on her desk that she put on the outside of a drawer when she was eight and hasn’t been able to get off. It’s a castle, but the edges are torn where she’s tried to peel it from the wood. There’s another bookshelf on the other side of the room, this one lined with stuffed animals. They are grouped into families: all the bears together, all the dogs, all the cats. The pink and orange lava lamp on her bedside table oozes and glows. The ceiling is covered with glow-in-the-dark stars. There are seven empty Diet Coke cans on the dresser.
Charlotte lies dead on a polyester sleeping bag on the floor next to Sophie’s bed. It is a Hannah Montana sleeping bag.
Sophie is digging out one of Charlotte’s eyes with a spoon.
You know when someone is trying to pop the pit out of a not-ripe avocado? That’s what it looks like.
Eyes smell like seawater and newspaper ink.
Sophie’s got one hand on Charlotte’s forehead and her other elbow akimbo, the spoon pressed into Charlotte’s optical bone, fighting a tide of thick red ooze.
She looks up at me. “Close the door,” she says.
I close the door and lock it.
The red eye slime slides down Charlotte’s cheek. Sophie has zipped the sleeping bag halfway up, so that Charlotte is tucked in, like this is a sleepover. Hannah Montana smiles happily.
The spoon makes a wet squishing sound.
The swollen flesh of Charlotte’s tongue sits limply between her braces. Dark bruises, dotted with broken blood vessels, encircle her neck and lower jaw. Her head is tucked back, chin up, so that the jagged wound across her throat is pulled wide, a crevice of bloody tissue and fat. Her hair, still blond from summer, is a bird’s nest, crusted with blood.
I stay by the door.
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