One Among Us

by Paige Dearth

  Juju raced up the hall behind Rock. “What happened?”

  “We found her,” Maggie repeated. “There isn’t much time. She needs a doctor.”

  Juju opened her hand and pushed it toward Rock. “I need your car keys,” she said without thinking, caught up in the panic.

  Rock let out a hearty laugh. “You’ve done lost your fuckin’ mind. I ain’t giving you nothin’ of mine.”

  “Then drive us to Dr. Purse,” Maggie said, remembering the doctor who had fixed Seth’s broken arm.

  Rock paused for a moment, and Maggie pressed further. “Joey will die, Rock. She barely has a pulse.”

  Rock had no attachment to Joey. His only motive at that moment was to protect his wife. It wasn’t hard to get rid of a dead body, but with Maggie, Juju, and Seth knowing about Joey’s condition, that option was just too complicated.

  “Bring her out front. I’ll drive,” he commanded, his voice deep and burning with resentment.

  They gently put Joey in the backseat of the car, still wrapped in the canvas drop cloth. Rock refused to allow Seth to go with them. Maggie had to assure him that she and Juju would take good care of Joey. She insisted that he go straight back to the apartment and wait there.

  “I want to be with Joey,” Seth shouted on the sidewalk, his voice overpowering the wind.

  Maggie gripped him by the shoulders. “There’s no time to argue. Do what I say. Joey needs a doctor right now, and cooperating is the best thing you can do to help her.”

  As Rock peeled away from the curb, he looked in his rearview mirror at Maggie. She’s a fine-looking bitch, he thought.

  Maggie caught him looking at her lustfully in the mirror. She looked down at Joey’s small body and the ashen color of her skin. She looked up into the mirror again and made eye contact with Rock. I hope you die, she thought.

  Chapter One Hundred Six

  Rock had just put the car in park when Maggie opened the back door and, with Juju’s help, gingerly lifted Joey out of the car. They rushed toward the back of Dr. Purse’s house. Maggie rang the doorbell frantically.

  A few moments later, his nurse opened the door. “Oh my, what do we have here?” she asked.

  “We don’t know what’s wrong. We found her outside in a shed, stuffed inside a toy box,” Maggie stated, glaring in Rock’s direction.

  “OK, well, let’s get her into an examining room,” the nurse said calmly.

  When they got Joey into the room, they put her on the table, and the nurse removed the canvas drop cloth. The child was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a winter jacket that was too small for her. On her hands, the nurse could see cigarette burns and small cuts. She proceeded to cut away the child’s clothing and discovered that she had small cuts all over her body, tiny one- and two-inch slices. Some of the cuts had begun to form scabs, but the deeper wounds were seeping and swollen.

  The nurse pulled a sheet out of a drawer and draped it over Joey. Then she put a heated blanket on top of the sheet. “Dr. Purse will be in shortly,” she informed them.

  “Tell him to hurry up,” Juju insisted.

  Dr. Purse came into the room a few minutes later. “Rock, good to see you, my man,” he said in a cheerful voice and shook hands with the ogre.

  “Now what do we have here,” the doctor asked, lifting the blanket and sheet from Joey.

  “My goodness,” he said with alarm, as he rested his hand on Joey’s abdomen. “Let’s take her temperature,” he told his nurse. “How long has she been like this?” Dr. Purse asked them.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Maggie responded. “It could’ve been a day or two.”

  “OK, I’d like you all to step outside while I examine her.”

  Dr. Purse was accustomed to tragic events in the lives of the children he treated. After all, his only clientele were pimps. The doctor bent over to listen to Joey’s lungs with his stethoscope. Her breathing was so shallow that it was barely audible. He took a pin from his pocket and poked at her feet and hands, but she didn’t react. He rushed over to a cabinet that contained bags of intravenous fluid. He pulled a bag from the left side of the cabinet.

  “We’re going to use warm, intravenous fluids on her,” Dr. Purse said to his nurse.

  “Her temperature is eighty-two degrees,” the nurse informed him, and put her hands around her own neck, a nervous habit she had when she thought that one of the children might die.

  “OK, we need to move quickly,” the doctor said.

  He inserted a needle into Joey’s hand, and as the warm liquid started to enter her bloodstream, he removed the blanket and folded it to the width of her stomach. He placed the blanket on her core, grabbed another warm blanket, and did the same with the second one.

  The nurse grabbed a third heated blanket and covered Joey from the waist down.

  “No,” Dr. Purse barked. “Take the blanket off her legs and feet.”

  “But they’re blue, Dr. Purse. She’s freezing,” his nurse said.

  “Take it off now. The key is to keep her core warm. If we heat up her extremities before her core, we can put her into shock and cause more damage. Now, let’s take a look at these cuts and burns…”

  The doctor felt a tingly sensation in his spine as he looked over each of the cuts. From what he could tell, she’d been cut with either a sharp knife or a razor blade. Some of the cuts were deep and required stitches; others were oozing puss, and he could easily see that they were infected.

  Dr. Purse couldn’t know that Thelma and her girlfriend had gotten so stoned that they decided it would be fun to see how much pain Joey could take. She was a tough little girl, and they wanted to see if they could break her. They had stripped her down to her underwear and tied her to the kitchen table. They started by burning her with cigarettes, but when she didn’t beg for mercy, they decided to take turns cutting her with a razor blade. Joey had eventually passed out, so they had dressed her and put her in the toy box in the shed. They were only going to leave her there for an hour. But they forgot all about her as they continued to get blitzed. Thelma had no recollection of what she and her girlfriend had done that cold winter night, nor did she really care.

  The doctor couldn’t help but think of his own children, warm and safe at home with his beautiful wife, as he scrutinized each cut and burn on Joey’s body. It had clearly been extreme abuse, one of the worst cases he’d seen since he began working for the criminals who were his clients. He took a deep breath and collected himself. “I’ll need you monitor her to be certain her temperature rises. Oh, and please start the bag of antibiotics I left on the table over there. I’m going to talk to Rock,” he said.

  Dr. Purse went out to where Rock, Maggie, and Juju were waiting. “Well, there isn’t anything you can do here. Best to just go home,” he advised.

  “Wait! What’s wrong with her?” Juju asked.

  “First of all, she has hypothermia, so we’re going to warm her up and get her body temperature back to normal. I’m also going to give her antibiotics. A lot of those cuts and cigarettes burns are infected,” he said casually.

  “OK, thanks. Let’s go,” Rock said to Juju and Maggie as he started to leave.

  “We can’t just leave her here all alone,” Maggie wailed.

  “Um, yes we can. You heard the doc. Ain’t nothin’ we can do now, so there ain’t no need in stayin’ here,” Rock ordered.

  “Oh, please, Rock, let me stay with her,” Maggie begged.

  Rock watched Maggie as she pleaded with him to let her stay. He enjoyed watching her break down and become desperate; it made him feel powerful. He thrived on the grief and anguish of others.

  Rock burst into hearty laughter that came from deep in his wretched soul. Then he stopped abruptly and stepped closer to Maggie. “Get your ass in the car before I fuck ya up so bad that even Dr. Purse, here, won’t be able to save you. You gotta get back to work ’cause I need money to buy me the things I want,” he growled.

  Maggie looked at Dr. Purse.r />
  “Joey will be OK. We’ll take good care of her,” Dr. Purse said in a reassuring voice. “It may be a while, and you’ll need to pay for twenty-four-hour care for someone to be here with her, Rock. I’ll call you when you can come back and get her.”

  “Yeah, yeah, if it weren’t for Thelma, I’d let the little bitch die,” Rock stated. “Do what ya gotta do to keep her alive. When she’s older, I’ll turn her out on the street, and she’ll pay me back every penny it cost to save her life.”

  An hour later, Maggie and Juju walked into their apartment. Seth was sitting on the floor, his knees pulled up to his chest, and his arms wrapped around them tightly. He was rocking back and forth in a trancelike state. Maggie bent down and put her hand on the top of his head, “She’s going to be OK, baby. The doctor is going to take good care of her,” she explained.

  Seth’s jaw was clenched, his facial muscles tight. “What’s wrong with her? What did Thelma do?”

  Maggie wanted Seth to know the truth. There was no reason to hide anything from him. “Joey has hypothermia. That means she got so cold that it began to hurt her body. The doctor is warming her up slowly.” Maggie paused for a moment. “She also has cuts and cigarettes burns on her body.”

  Seth sprang up from the floor. “Aggie! I told you we had to tell Rock to let Joey live with us. See what happened now?”

  “We do see what happened,” Juju erupted, stressed by the whole ordeal. “But that doesn’t change anything, Seth. Rock does what he wants to do, and if we piss him off, he’ll just make life harder for all of us. What would happen if we pissed him off and he said you had to go back and live with them? Huh? What would happen then? So stop blaming Maggie for the nasty things Thelma did to Joey. It ain’t right!”

  Seth, startled by Juju’s reaction, felt immediately sorry that he’d attacked Maggie. “I’m sorry, Aggie. I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at Thelma,” he said with remorse.

  “It’s OK, Seth. I know you’re not really mad at me. Right now, we need to be patient until I can figure something out. I promise we’ll do whatever we can to help Joey, but she’ll probably have to live with Thelma for a few more years,” Maggie admitted.

  Maggie had reflected on what Rock had said in the doctor’s office about Joey being turned out in a couple of years. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if Joey was forced to prostitute. She wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone. Rock’s words about Joey’s future turned over and over in her mind, haunting her. She felt nauseous and feverish. She, too, felt as though they hadn’t done enough to help Joey. Thelma had gone too far this time.

  Joey would have died that night in a toy box in a cold, dirty shed, had it not been for Maggie, Juju, and Seth.

  Maggie didn’t know how to help her, but she had to do something before Joey died or was forced to sell her body to strangers. If that happened, it would be Maggie’s fault, and Maggie would never be able to live with herself.

  Chapter One Hundred Seven

  It was a quiet Sunday afternoon when the phone rang. Rae Harker was calling to ask Lorraine and Rob to meet him at an address he gave to Rob without any other details. The detective needed their help.

  Within a couple of minutes, Lorraine and Rob were in their car, starting the thirty-minute drive. Arriving at the address Harker gave them, they turned into a long, tree-lined driveway. Rob and Lorraine looked around in awe. Rob parked the car, and they sat looking at a breathtaking, three-story mansion with steep roof angles and a rugged stone exterior. The landscaping was flawless. Even the driveway looked like it was cleaned on a regular basis.

  “This house must be worth millions,” Lorraine said. “Who the hell are these people?”

  “I’m not sure. Harker didn’t give me any information other than what I told you already. He wants us to talk to the parents. The police found their kid, and things aren’t going so well. I told him we would come and give it our best shot,” Rob explained to her a second time.

  “Well, with all their money, you’d think they’d have plenty of professionals to help them,” Lorraine stated, already intimidated by the couple she hadn’t met yet.

  Rae Harker pulled up behind them and parked. Lorraine and Rob swiftly got out and met him as he walked toward their car.

  “Thanks for coming. I can always count on you two,” Harker said with sincerity.

  “No problem,” Lorraine said. “What do you need us to do?”

  “The Wilsons have recently been reunited with their daughter, Darla. She was kidnapped when she was fourteen. She’s been missing for three years. When they found Darla, she was institutionalized for three weeks before they could even begin to figure out who she was,” Harker told them.

  “Three weeks? Why so long?” Rob asked.

  “Well, Darla was so strung out on heroin that it took a considerable amount of time to get her through withdrawal and sober enough to be released. Her parents, the Wilsons, need help coping with everything. They love their daughter, but they are confused about how to help her,” Harker explained.

  “How can we help, Harker? I mean, what are we supposed to do for them? Maybe some professional counseling would be better for them,” Lorraine suggested.

  “Let’s go inside and meet them. Then you can tell me if you might be able to help. Sometimes all people need is one person to listen as though they actually care. That’s where you two come in,” Harker said. “You’re the most caring couple I’ve ever met.”

  Humbled by the compliment, Rob and Lorraine followed Detective Harker to the front door. The Wilsons answered the door together.

  “Detective Harker, good to see you again,” Todd Wilson said. His voice was lifeless, and his wife stood behind him silently.

  “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson,” Harker said, “This is Lorraine and Rob.”

  “Please call me Wendy,” Mrs. Wilson stated, addressing all three of them. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “I would love a cup of coffee,” Lorraine told her.

  “Good. Let’s go into the kitchen,” Wendy said, walking toward the back of the house.

  As Lorraine followed Wendy through the house, she took in the vaulted ceilings, immaculate furnishings, and the sunlight that poured in through massive, floor-to-ceiling windows. The home was spectacular. Every detail and piece of furniture harmonized. It was a home to be envied. As they entered a kitchen that was the size of the entire first floor of the Clarkes’ home, Lorraine paused a moment to take in its beauty.

  Wendy broke the silence. “Detective Harker tells us that you have a daughter who’s missing.”

  “Yes, her name is Maggie. She’s been gone for over seven years,” Lorraine answered with deep sadness.

  “It’s unbelievably hard to manage,” Wendy shared. “No one can really understand the hollowness when you have a child that’s missing. It felt as if someone had reached inside of me and pulled everything out until I was nothing more than bones covered with skin. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. It became almost impossible to get out of bed in the morning.”

  “And now that Darla is back? How are you coping?”

  Wendy took a deep breath and exhaled for several seconds. “I feel much the same as I did before she returned. To be honest, Todd and I aren’t coping at all. I think we expected to get back the child who was stolen from us. But that just isn’t the case. Darla has been through so much, and at this point, we aren’t even sure what they did to her. The doctors have confirmed that Darla was sexually assaulted. She has several scars on her back, and when she walks, which isn’t often, she has a limp. Before Darla was taken, she was a straight-A student and a strong athlete. She had a lot of friends. Darla was an outstanding swimmer, and her dream was to compete in the Olympics, she had real potential…”

  Wendy’s voice faded away as she thought about the child that Darla once was and the drastically different child who had come home to her.

  “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m delighted that we have Darla back with us
. However, I wasn’t prepared for her to be so different. What I’m really trying to say is that my thirteen-year-old Darla was frozen in my mind. You must think I’m a very self-centered woman for what I’m telling you,” Wendy added shamefully.

  “No, I don’t think that at all. To be honest, I still picture Maggie as the sweet, eleven-year-old girl who was happy and loved to be with her family. I don’t know that any parent is capable of imagining how a missing child is maturing,” Lorraine said.

  “I love Darla. I love her with all my heart. And I just don’t know how to make up for the time we’ve lost. I want those years back. I want to pick up where our lives ended—from the moment she was taken from us. Now I have a daughter who is a heroin addict. Our doctor told us that she will probably fight addiction her whole life,” Wendy said.

  Lorraine leaned forward in her chair and took Wendy’s hand. “None of this means that you can’t recapture some of the past. I’m sure it won’t be easy, but if you try hard enough, I think you’ll make it work.”

  Still holding Lorraine’s hand, Wendy stood. “Come with me.”

  Hand in hand, they walked up the ornate, marble, spiral staircase. When they reached the second floor, they walked to the second door on the right. Wendy opened the door slowly. The first thing Lorraine noticed was an in-home nurse, who turned and smiled at the two women. Then Lorraine spotted the back of someone’s head. She was sitting in an oversized chair facing the window. Lorraine assumed that she was Darla.

  Beyond the window was the largest and most elaborate swimming pool Lorraine had ever seen.

  Wendy and Lorraine walked across the large room and stood facing Darla. Lorraine couldn’t control the low, eerie sound that escaped from her throat. The breathtaking bedroom began to close in on her. It felt more like a dirty, damp, bug-infested crawl space as she stared at the young girl.

  Darla’s hair was tangled and knotted; she was catatonic and looked like zombie. Her eyes were unfocused and jumping around to different places on the window and wall. The muscles in her arms and legs hung and wiggled when she moved. She was drooling and making odd noises, soft moans, and grunts.