Lost Girls

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Lost Girls Page 15

by George D. Shuman


  The halls of the hospital were cool. Rolly King George led them through corridors to an elevator that descended into sublevels. They crossed an entire wing to a door where he asked them to wait. “It is a private waiting room, a chapel for relatives,” he said.

  He left them there to meet Carol Bishop.

  Brigham marched in circles until Sherry made him stop. Twenty minutes later the inspector opened a locked door.

  “Mrs. Bishop has identified the body, Miss Moore. It is indeed her daughter,” he said solemnly, “and I am sorry you came all this way for nothing.”

  Sherry was silent.

  Brigham stood. “Well, you are about to become one very busy man, Inspector George. We can find our own way out.”

  The inspector hesitated a moment. “I told Mrs. Bishop you were here in the hospital, Miss Moore. She asked me why. I explained as best I could. She asked me if you would stay a few more minutes so she could greet you.”

  Sherry didn’t know what to say, but she felt Brigham’s disapproving eyes on her.

  The inspector, still holding open the door a few inches, looked to Brigham and raised a finger. “Please wait. Just a little while longer.”

  “We’ll be here,” she said, looking up toward Brigham. “Go and tend to Mrs. Bishop, Inspector.”

  The door closed and Brigham turned on his heels. “I’m giving him fifteen minutes, then I’m getting you the hell out of here. This whole thing is going to explode into a media extravaganza and you very well know it.”

  Fifteen minutes later Brigham was still pacing the floor when they heard footsteps and the doorknob turned.

  “Miss Moore, Mr. Brigham, this is Carol Bishop,” the inspector announced, ushering a woman into the room and pulling the door closed behind her. The inspector stepped back while everyone shook hands.

  “Please sit,” Carol Bishop said to Sherry. Brigham moved to a corner with the police inspector, letting the women sit next to each other.

  Carol put her hands on her knees. “I don’t know quite where to start,” she said softly. Brigham saw that her eyes were swollen. Her hands trembled, fingernails digging into the skin beneath the hem of her shorts.

  “I have two daughters,” she said.

  Sherry noted that she used the present tense.

  “Theresa, my oldest, is in law school at the University of Michigan. Her classes are in session and she’s been quite busy before the midterm break. I know Theresa misses her sister, but they were two very different people, Theresa always so serious and Jill so idealistic. She liked art and music, Bob and I were worried that she would drop out of school and join the Peace Corps or something equally stupid.” She laughed a little hysterically. “She was constantly taking up causes and raising money for this group or that, volunteering at crisis centers, telethons, walkathons, you name it and Jill did it. She was one of life’s optimists. The kind of people who believe they can make a difference. I didn’t know until she went missing, and mostly from her sister, Theresa, that Jill was feeling the pressure we were putting on her over school. How silly we were in hindsight. How fucking silly.” She stamped a foot hard against the floor and bit down on her lower lip.

  Carol Bishop leaned forward in her chair, sun-browned elbows on her knees, rough hands wringing as she spoke. Brigham thought she looked like a shipwreck survivor that had been found long marooned on some island.

  “My husband travels and we don’t talk so much anymore.” Carol Bishop’s look was one of resignation. “He needs to know that I found our daughter, of course, but not this very minute, not just yet. There are other things that matter more to me now. There are things even more important than grieving.”

  Carol leaned forward, knees close to Sherry’s.

  “Inspector George told me about you.” Carol Bishop made a face. “I mean, certainly I know who you are, but I never expected to meet you under the circumstances.”

  Sherry held her tongue, not knowing where this was going.

  “The FBI hasn’t spoken to me in two months.” Carol smiled. “I only get excuses from them these days. When I call to ask if anything’s changed they tell me the case agent is out of the office. You know how it gets when all the leads go cold. They know she isn’t coming back, they know…” Her voice got shrill and then faded as tears began to fall. Carol used the back of one hand to wipe her cheeks. “You really can’t blame them. I mean, what can they say to me anyhow?”

  She thumped the heel of her hand against her knee.

  “But I was right about what happened in Santo Domingo. Something bad did happen to Jill in that marketplace. And now that I’ve seen her lying here looking like she does, I know that something bad was happening every day since.”

  Carol started to bawl. Brigham pulled tissues from a dispenser and handed them to her.

  Carol dabbed her eyes, looked up at the ceiling; her eyes glazed over, she was somewhere else for a moment, not there. Then she cleared her throat and crushed the tissues in a balled fist.

  “I know I’m not making myself clear”—she looked at Brigham, then at the inspector—“not making sense to any of you, but you see I can’t just go back to the United States and forget all of this happened.” She shook her head. “I can’t go back to living with what has happened to my daughter. My husband might be able to do those kinds of things. He’s a move-along kind of man. He would remind me that we have another daughter to care for, that we have our own lives to think about, he would say that life does go on.”

  Suddenly Carol grew tense.

  “But life doesn’t go on for Jill. Someone took that from her and when they did, they took it from me. They were saying that my daughter’s life didn’t matter anymore. That all those years I bathed and cuddled her and watched her dance and sing and grow into a beautiful young woman, didn’t matter. That she was something they could brand with a tattoo and treat like an animal until they were done with her.”

  Carol Bishop’s lips formed a strange smile; she dabbed at her tears. Brigham watched the transformation taking place, first around her eyes, the circles of exhaustion beginning to straighten into hard lines. The look of utter grief was replaced by something more primal.

  She squeezed Sherry’s hand, her jaw set, resolute. “But they were wrong.” Her voice was barely audible, and Brigham, sitting by the air conditioner, found he was drawn forward in his seat to hear her speak.

  “I want to know who did this to my daughter and I want them to share my pain. Then and only then will I attempt to go on with what is left of my life.”

  “Mrs. Bishop, the police can only do—” Inspector George began to say, but Bishop’s hand flew up to silence the inspector.

  “It isn’t always about the law.” She shook her head. “It isn’t always about books and codes and borders.” She looked around the room. “Jill was my daughter, my blood, my genes. My commitment to her childhood didn’t end when she walked out the front door of our house and it doesn’t end now because we happened to have left the confines of the United States. We are all human beings, for Christ’s sake.”

  She looked at Sherry Moore’s face, seemed to study it a moment. “You came here because you thought you could help the inspector somehow. So I have a request to make, a favor to ask of you, Miss Moore. The FBI has had their opportunity. They have done what they could. Now, since you are already here and since you were going to do this thing before you knew who my daughter was, I would appreciate if you would go see her and tell me about my daughter’s last moments on earth.” She held on to Sherry’s hand. “Would you please try to do that?”

  Sherry looked her way for one long moment, trying to imagine the woman’s face.

  “Mrs. Bishop,” she started, but Carol reached up and touched Sherry’s lips gently with a finger.

  “Before you say no, I am begging you, Miss Moore. You must have thought there was at least an outside chance you would learn something from my daughter’s last seconds alive. You wouldn’t have come all this way otherwise.”<
br />
  She coughed out a laugh. “I’m sure you don’t get called every time some young woman is found floating in the Caribbean, which means there is already something I don’t know. Something about her triggered a reaction. Something more than a body found in the sea prompted the inspector to call you. You know something I don’t. All of you.”

  She sighed, looked around, meeting all of their eyes. “Don’t you?”

  “We were taking a very long shot, Mrs. Bishop,” Sherry said.

  Carol wasn’t listening. She was still concentrating on Sherry’s face. “It’s the tattoo, isn’t it? That’s what was different about her. The tattoo means something special to you. Isn’t that right, Inspector George?”

  She turned to him. “Look how my poor daughter was beaten. Just look at her body. What happened to her before you found her? Why was she beaten before they dumped her in the water?”

  Bishop sat back, a weary look on her face.

  My God, Sherry thought. She doesn’t know yet how her daughter died. She is probably under the assumption her daughter had spent many days in the sea.

  Sherry looked at Inspector George. “You will be speaking to Mrs. Bishop, I assume? Officially, I mean.”

  “We haven’t talked at all, Miss Moore. There is much to cover.”

  Carol Bishop looked at them, first at Sherry, then at Brigham, last at Inspector George. “What? What is it? What do we have to cover?”

  “Do you mind?” Sherry asked the inspector. “If I tell her?”

  “No, ma’am,” the inspector said politely. “If you are sure?”

  “Mr. Brigham, would you mind waiting outside with the inspector for a few minutes?” Sherry reached out to tug his sleeve. “Please, Mr. Brigham,” she said.

  Brigham stood reluctantly, George with him, and a moment later the door was closed.

  “Mrs. Bishop, I will be frank with you, but I will not share things told me in confidence. I know you have waited a long time for this, to learn what happened to your daughter, and I think you should know sooner than later. But I warn you it will be hard to hear. You must be sure you are ready for this now. Would you like me to call one of the doctors? Perhaps to give you something.”

  Carol, hands clasped tightly together, rocked back and forth in her chair, “Now,” she said. “Please tell me what you know now.”

  “Your daughter did not die of a beating, Mrs. Bishop. Nor was she found floating in the water as the news reported. She was seen falling from the door of an airplane off the coast of Jamaica. Inspector George himself witnessed your daughter’s death.”

  Bishop made a sound that Sherry had never heard before, animal-like, a cry of intense pain.

  Then Carol tried to stand, but doubled over as if she had been punched in the solar plexus. She went to her knees.

  “Mrs. Bishop!” Sherry came off her chair, reaching for her. “Mrs. Bishop, are you all right?” She tried to put her arms around the woman, but the wailing turned to a moan and Sherry heard her body hit the floor. She lay down next to her, holding her, rocking her back and forth.

  Carol Bishop, she knew, was still processing the words, was no doubt conjuring images, and the horrible marks on her daughter’s body would suddenly be making sense.

  “Can you understand, Mrs. Bishop, why I might not be able to help you?”

  Carol took a full minute, but then slowly nodded; she was still unable to get complete words out. The noises she made were inaudible.

  Sherry waited. Waited until Carol finally turned and she felt the stale hot breath as Carol’s face came near.

  “Please go see my daughter. Please.”

  “Mrs. Bishop…” But then she stopped midsentence. The woman was right. She had come all this way. There was no good reason to deny her.

  “I’ll do it,” Sherry said. “I’ll do it, Mrs. Bishop.”

  Sherry helped the woman up off the floor and then to a seat. She rapped on the door and the inspector walked in, thinking Carol Bishop looked catatonic.

  “I’d like to see Mrs. Bishop’s daughter,” she said. “Can you take me while Mr. Brigham looks after Mrs. Bishop?”

  The inspector hesitated. “Mrs. Bishop?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Take her. Take her to my daughter please.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Sherry knew what Brigham would be thinking. That they should have gotten out of here before this turned into something else. Inspector George could hardly be expected to lie when the FBI began to inquire about who had been near the body before they examined it. But there was no leaving this woman without an answer. For Carol Bishop the pain was in not knowing what happened to her daughter.

  “Right this way, Miss Moore.”

  The inspector led Sherry down the hall, opened doors, and guided her to a room.

  “She is not well,” the inspector said.

  “She’s not going to be well anytime soon.” Sherry shook her head.

  “Is there anything I can do to prepare you?”

  “Just a chair,” Sherry said. “I’d like to sit next to her.”

  “A moment,” he said, excusing himself, and seconds later returned with a straight-back wooden chair.

  “Do you want me to stay with you?” the inspector asked.

  Sherry shook her head. “I’ll be fine alone.”

  “I’ll be right outside then.” The inspector backed out the door.

  When he was gone Sherry found the edge of the table and sat. It was a stainless-steel table, the cadaver lying level with her face.

  She took a moment to be silent, to clear her head. She could still hear Carol Bishop’s primal wail; it was not a sound you forgot. Not ever.

  It mattered not how many morgues she’d sat in over the years, how many autopsy tables she’d rested her arm against, the sensations, the smells, the apparent sameness was anything but. Every hand was like the first hand she ever picked up. They all had a place in her mind, every one. They all brought a different memory to surface—the little boy in Luray, Virginia, the little girl in Norwalk, Connecticut. Their hands were as different as their faces would have looked. They formed a league of souls in her mind, and the memories of those souls included many of the monsters she held at bay in her cerebral zoo.

  She reached across the table, fingers grazing the cool skin of the girl’s hip, found a thumb, picked up the hand, and squeezed like Carol Bishop had done in the waiting room.

  Then she settled in the chair and waited……. a middle-aged black man, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a machine gun on his lap. He was wearing a dirty black T-shirt and grinning to expose a gold tooth; she saw a field of sparkling lights, she was reaching out to touch them, arms extended, palms open, a warm green wind in her face; she was sitting in front of a cake full of candles, a woman stood behind her, hand on her shoulder; a black cat balled up on a bed; a dome-shaped yellow car; a black man standing over her, he had one brown eye and one white eye that was lifeless; a dark-haired Caucasian woman, she was gaunt, her eyes sunken, hair tangled on her shoulders. She had a tattoo on her face, of a grinning skull wearing a top hat; an olive-skinned woman in a white blouse and gold-trimmed capris, a van, it was pink and full of clothing; the spires of a stone building, a castle-like building…in a jungle…

  Sherry dropped the hand and jerked back in her seat. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  She put her hands on her knees and bent over, taking deep breaths, the image of the castle foremost in her mind. She was there. Jill Bishop was there. That was the building. That was where Sergio Mendoza had seen the woman in the red room.

  There was more, Sherry knew, more of Jill Bishop’s memory to see. For the first time in her life, she didn’t want to go on with it. She was afraid of what lay before her.

  Minutes passed; her heart began to steady, at last, but ever so slowly she reached for Jill Bishop’s hand. And took it again….

  …a tabletop bar, a pretty young woman facing her, pink drinks with plastic palm trees, a glea
ming white ship, a sandy-haired woman in a hammock; bright sunlight, the black man with the gold tooth is crouching now, waving his machine gun at her, she can see blue sky next to him, they are in an airplane, she rises, she is walking toward the man, she steps out into the light and reaches for the dazzling green glitter, something small and white, it is a boat rolling gently in the tide, rushing up to meet her…

  20

  KINGSTON, JAMAICA

  Carol Bishop spent a final hour with her daughter, sitting in the same straight-back wooden chair, holding the same cold hand that Sherry had held. She cried until she could cry no more.

  She had been thinking about what Sherry Moore had told her.

  It was unfathomable that her daughter could have willingly stepped out of an airplane. The only thing left to imagine now was, what had those men done to her to make her want to die? What had they made her do that was so awful she couldn’t hang on another day?

  Carol put her head in her hands, nails digging into the soft skin of her temples. She groaned again and then the groan turned into a growl.

  She wondered what Sherry Moore could do with what she learned from her daughter. The FBI would give no credence to what Sherry claimed she saw. No one would attempt to identify the men her daughter saw or the dark-haired girl with a tattoo just like Jill’s. And what about the castle in the jungle? The Bishops had traveled the world over with their children when the girls were growing up. Carol didn’t recall ever seeing such a place. Certainly she would have remembered such a building herself, so the memory had to be fresh. Had to be her daughter’s alone.

 

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