by David Zeman
Justine took a deep breath.
“I thought I had died and gone to hell. I really did. Part of me couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Another part thought that this was what I had heard about all my life, this was the fate reserved for girls who were bad. I couldn’t move, but I also couldn’t close my eyes.”
She crossed her arms over her breast. “They started playing again. Someone took the tail off Jane. There was music, and laughing. Betting. I saw another man coming forward, blindfolded like the other one. This one was taller, but like the other one he was flabby, out of shape. He came toward Jane at first, but then he came toward me. They were calling out encouragement . . .”
She looked at Susan. “Do I have to tell you the rest?”
Susan had turned pale. She shook her head.
“They kept us there until the wee hours,” Justine said. “Each of us must have been raped seven or eight times. I realized they had positioned us intentionally so that each one could see what was being done to the other. My heart went out to Jane when I saw what they were doing to her. And I realized that our ability to see each other, Jane and me—our compassion, our horror—was all part of the game to them. When I understood this, I had the most profound sense of evil. Beyond anything I had ever imagined at my tender age.”
She breathed in, then out again.
“The most horrible thing of all was that empty look in Jane’s eyes. I kept wondering whether she was too out of it to know what was happening, or whether that empty look was because what they were doing was simply beyond anything she could bear.”
She looked at Susan. Now Susan understood the reason for that strange glare in her eyes. A glare that shone eloquently to an outside observer, but that seemed directed inward above all. It was the glare of her shame at being a victim, and of her impotent rage. Susan glanced at the cut marks on her wrists.
“What happened then?” she asked.
“In the end I passed out,” Justine said. “The effect of the drug, my exhaustion, my terror—I don’t know.”
“What about Jane?”
“I never saw her again.”
There was a silence. Susan didn’t know how much of Justine’s story she should believe. It might be an elaborate fantasy, the product of a tortured mind.
“Did she survive?” she asked.
“Yes. But she never woke up. She’s a vegetable. She’s in a nursing home in the Boston area.”
Susan clenched her eyes shut. Then, with an effort, she opened them. Justine was looking at her steadily.
“Did you ever see any of the—of the men again?”
Justine smiled. “Of course.”
“You mean they kept you?” Susan asked.
“No. I was free when I woke up. I never saw any of them in the flesh again. But I did see two of them in the media.”
Susan’s voice trembled as she asked, “Which two?”
“The man who was in charge of the game. The master of ceremonies, as it were. Colin Goss.”
Susan kept her eyes averted as she asked, “Who was the other?”
“The young man who picked us up on the street. The one who invited us to the party.”
“Who was he?” Susan’s voice shook.
“Michael Campbell.”
Susan could not move. She tried to speak, but words would not come. She felt paralyzed. She thought of Justine’s story, of the paralysis Justine had experienced while the game was going on. An inability not to see, an inability to close one’s eyes. That was how Susan felt now.
Justine had sat down again and was looking at Susan with eyes full of pity.
“Now it comes full circle,” she said. “The world is teetering on the brink of the fate your husband has planned for it. No one knows the truth. No one wants to know. The world’s eyes are closed, Susan. But you and I have made them see one thing. We have made them see that Michael Campbell must choose between the White House and the wife he claims to love. The whole world has heard this.”
Susan nodded, staring at nothing.
“What is he going to decide?” she asked.
“You mean you don’t know?” Justine asked.
“Please,” Susan said in a small voice. “Just tell me.”
“He’s going to refuse to withdraw,” Justine said with a cold smile. “He’s going to let you die.”
———BOOK THREE———
THE EMPEROR’S
NEW CLOTHES
* * *
All the courtiers were on their knees, admiring the Emperor’s new suit of clothes. The commoners, assembled by the thousands, applauded him. They had never seen anything so beautiful.
But suddenly a little girl, holding her mother’s hand in the throng, pointed at the Emperor and said, “Mommy, the Emperor is naked! He has no clothes on at all!”
—“THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES”
No one believed the little girl. Her mother shushed her and she was forgotten. The people went on admiring the Emperor’s new clothes.
—JUSTINE’S EMENDATION, AS TOLD TO SUSAN
60
—————
Boston
April 11
OF THE fourteen young girls who had been abducted in Boston, all were accounted for except one: the girl who had accompanied Jane Christensen the night she went out to seeTerms of Endearment and did not return.
Her name was Justine Lawrence. According to Jane Christensen’s mother, Justine was never seen again after the night she and Jane disappeared.
Karen Embry was at a crossroads in her investigation. She could drop the Boston connection now and concentrate her efforts on finding out where Susan Campbell was. Or she could continue her inquiry into the past—and perhaps find a more indirect route to Susan.
Karen decided to follow the instinct that had guided her journalistic career from the beginning. She would do the aggressive thing. Follow her own hunch, go for the big score, and damn the consequences.
The parents of Justine Lawrence were gone. The mother had committed suicide years ago. The father, a notorious alcoholic, had disappeared.
Karen flew back to Boston and went to the Brookline neighborhood where Justine Lawrence had lived. She talked to the neighbors. All of them remembered Justine’s mother, a friendly but neurotic woman, and her father, a nasty drunk who had noisy fights with his wife. A neighbor lady recalled that the wife often bore black-and-blue marks after their quarrels.
“Justine, too, once in a while,” she said. “I couldn’t swear to it, but I got the feeling he hit her, too. That was why Justine was a little bit wild, I think. The family wasn’t very good for her.”
Unfortunately, there was no sibling for Karen to look for. Justine Lawrence had been an only child.
But Karen managed to locate a sister of Justine’s late mother. The woman’s name was Grace Cowlings. A widow who lived alone in North Boston, Grace was a devout Catholic still shamed by the memory of her sister’s suicide and still hopeful that Justine was alive somewhere.
The Lawrences’ house had long since been sold along with all the furniture, but Grace Cowlings had kept the few personal possessions her sister left behind. These included photo albums and family mementos. She let Karen look through the albums, which depicted Justine as a little girl and later a junior high school cheerleader.
“Justine was a good girl,” Grace said. “She became a problem when she hit her teens, but that was mostly high spirits. And her father’s troubles, of course. He was pretty much out of control by then, and there were terrible fights between the parents. Justine had good grades, she found time for her cheerleading and her studies, and she was quite religious.”
“I don’t suppose there are any home movies of Justine. Anything like that,” Karen asked.
“Not from the later years, I don’t think,” Mrs. Cowlings said. “Dick broke the video camera, and they never bought another one. I might have some tapes of Justine when she was little.”
She went up in the attic and retur
ned with a couple of videotaped compendiums of the eight-millimeter home movies the Lawrences had made. The tapes showed Justine as a pretty little girl with pigtails, and later as a slightly overweight seventh-grader singing in her class’s performance ofThe Pirates of Penzance . There were few close-ups of Justine’s face. Her voice was that of a child.
“That was the year Dick smashed the camera,” Mrs. Cowlings said with unconcealed contempt for her sister’s husband. “There isn’t any more.”
“How about Justine’s personal effects?” Karen asked.
“Yes, I have a few. I saved them in case we ever found her.” Mrs. Cowlings left the room again and was gone for several minutes. Karen glanced around the sad blue-collar house with its overstuffed furniture and family portraits. It reminded her uncomfortably of the house she herself had grown up in. She needed a drink badly. She also needed a cigarette, but it was easy to see from the lack of ashtrays and the smell of the room that no one had smoked here in twenty years, if ever.
Mrs. Cowlings returned with a cardboard box full of Justine’s belongings. There were dolls, a diary, some snapshots of friends, a few report cards. There were also several books, including a biology textbook that had been pointlessly saved. There was an ancient Walkman that dated from the 1980s, and a small collection of audiotapes. Most were prerecorded: Carly Simon, Blondie, Bruce Springsteen. Two were blank tapes without labels.
Karen eagerly looked at the diary. Unfortunately it was a dead end, the last entry having been made when Justine was a ten-year-old in grade school. She found a handful of letters held together by a rubber band. These also were useless, dating from the girl’s junior high school years.
Karen turned to the two blank audiotapes.
“Do you know what’s on these?” she asked Mrs. Cowlings.
“I have no idea,” the woman said. “I don’t listen to music.”
Karen picked up the Walkman. “I don’t suppose you would have a couple of double-A batteries around,” she asked.
“Let me look.” Mrs. Cowlings got up with a sigh and went into the kitchen. She returned a few moments later with a package of batteries.
Karen got the little machine working and put on the first of the tapes. It contained rock music, obviously dubbed from a friend’s tape player or compact disc player.
The second tape contained what sounded like a home recording of a slumber party or other gathering. The sound quality was poor, but the voices were clearly audible. They were all girls, talking and laughing uproariously as music played in the background.
“Tell me if you hear Justine’s voice,” Karen said to Mrs. Cowlings.
On the tape the girls were exchanging stories and gossip. At one point the music in the background was turned off and a TV was turned on. The girls continued their conversation over the sound of the TV.
“Wait,” said Mrs. Cowlings suddenly.
“Yes?” Karen said, stopping the tape.
“Turn it back a little.”
Karen rewound the tape. One of the girls was shushing the others. “Shut up, you ninnies,” she said. “I hear my mother. Shutup !”
Mrs. Cowlings pointed at the little machine. “That’s Justine,” she said. “I would know that voice anywhere.” Tears had welled in her eyes. “Poor girl . . .”
Karen played more of the tape. The raucous slumber party went on for a few more minutes. Then more dubbed music came on. She fast-forwarded in search of more conversation, but there was none.
“Mrs. Cowlings,” she asked, “would you mind if I borrowed this tape? I’d like to play it for a friend of mine who does professional sound recording. If Justine is still out there somewhere, it might help me find her.”
The woman looked skeptical. “Go right ahead,” she said. “That’s mighty old, though.”
Karen’s friend, a recording engineer who often worked for news departments, had some experience in voiceprint technology. She thought he might be able to enhance the recording of Justine’s voice and possibly to print it.
“Mrs. Cowlings, you’ve been a great help,” she told the woman. “I’ll get this tape back to you. If I find Justine, I’ll let you know right away.”
“Good luck,” the woman told her. “It’s been fifteen years, and the police haven’t done a thing. You’re the first person who’s cared.”
Karen took her leave with a handshake and a hopeful smile. She got into her rented car and immediately lit up a cigarette.
The car had a combined tape/CD player. Karen pushed the audiotape into the player and listened to the voices of the girls.
“Bullshit. You idiot . . .”
“Shut up, you ninnies! I hear my mother. Shut UP!”
Karen closed her eyes, inhaling the smoke with a deep sigh. Then she rewound the tape for a few seconds.
“Jane’s got a boyfriend, Jane’s got a boyfriend . . .”
“Bullshit. You idiot . . .”
“Shut up, you ninnies! I hear my mother. Shut UP!”
Karen had spent her entire life as a reporter listening to voices. She had scribbled down official comments at news conferences, strained to hear snatches of overheard conversation in restaurants and hallways, importuned reluctant phone sources to repeat their mumbled, evasive answers to her questions.
Indeed, she would ask her friend to enhance the tape. But his results would only confirm something she knew already.
The voice of the giggly teenaged girl on the tape was the same as that of Susan Campbell’s crank caller. Younger, more innocent, sweeter—but the same.
It was also the voice that had made the demand that Michael Campbell refuse to become vice president of the United States.
In all probability Susan was with Justine Lawrence now.
If she was alive, that is.
61
—————
“I WOKE up under an underpass on the interstate, about a hundred miles from Boston,” Justine said.
The roar of a plane taking off outside made the windows rattle, but Susan had no trouble hearing Justine’s low voice. She had learned to tune out the continual airport noise.
“I didn’t know who I was,” Justine went on. “At first I barely knewwhat I was. I was like an animal, just breathing and trembling from the cold. But somehow I got on my feet and staggered to the nearest rest area. I locked myself in a stall in the ladies’ room and curled up in the corner, not moving, just sitting. I drifted in and out of sleep. The drug was very powerful. I felt like an insect that somebody had sprayed with a giant can of Raid. Paralyzed.”
Susan sat on the bed, listening. She had pulled the comforter over her, for she felt cold. Her eyes never left Justine.
“Eventually a janitor knocked on the stall and told me I had to leave,” Justine went on. “Thank God, it was a woman. When she saw the condition I was in, she took me home with her. She wanted to call the police, but I wouldn’t let her. I didn’t tell her what had happened. I think she just assumed I was a rape victim.”
Justine took a deep breath.
“She was very nice. She had kids of her own. She had a house in a little town not too far from where I woke up. I stayed with her for a couple of days. Her husband wasn’t home; he worked on the road. A truck driver or something. She fed me soup, she helped me wash. She seemed to realize I couldn’t talk, so she did all the talking. She wasn’t educated, but she was quite understanding.
“If she had asked me who I was, I doubt that I could have told her. I was in a daze. That whole period is still fuzzy to me. In a sense I never completely came out of the drug. It left me changed. Why it didn’t kill me, I don’t know. It killed the others, or at least ruined them.”
Justine looked at Susan.
“I was content to stay where I was, for the time being at least. But then I heard her talking on the phone to somebody about me. I was afraid it was the police. I ran away that night. I hitchhiked into the country. I headed south for the warm climate. I ended up in North Carolina. I was just wandering the
interstates, sleeping at rest stops. It was amazing no one raped me during that time. I hitched rides with truck drivers, strange men . . . I don’t know. Some sort of providence was watching over me.” She shrugged.
“One day I was walking along the side of a road when a woman stopped in a pickup and asked me if I needed a ride. I still wasn’t able to talk much, but she got the idea I was shell-shocked in some way. She had a small farm nearby, and she took me there. She had two daughters and a son who was in the army. Her husband had abandoned the family. They were dirt poor. I went to work for her—cleaning, working in the fields, cooking, whatever she needed—and got my room and meals in return.
“It wasn’t a bad life. She was a Southerner, her people had been poor for generations. Hiring a drifter to help out was not a new thing to her. She managed to put food on the table, and she was actually rather genteel in her way. I got to know her daughters. They were nice girls.”
Justine got up and stood looking at the blacked-out window.
“I stayed with them for about a year. I had total amnesia about who I was, where I had come from, what had happened to me. I kind of enjoyed it, the amnesia. I felt like I was free of the entanglement of an identity. I would joke with her children about it. They were fascinated by me. They thought I was a sort of free spirit, a freak.
“Then the husband came back and they reconciled. He didn’t want me around, so I had to leave. The wife dropped me off at the bus station. She gave me a hundred dollars. I didn’t want to take it, but she insisted. The money was in small bills and change, obviously taken from her cookie jar or somewhere. I was very touched by that. I couldn’t express it, though. I just took the money and got on the bus.”