by Matthew Iden
“You’re okay with taking advice from the crazy homeless guy?”
“I wouldn’t have looked for you if I didn’t,” she said, then gave him a small smile. “And, for the record, you don’t seem that crazy to me. But I’ve been told I’m not a good judge of character.”
He snorted. “Then I guess we should get started.” He glanced at the stack of binders, notes, and newspaper clippings. “Your research?”
“All of it.”
Elliott raked a finger down the stack. “Files are good to have, but if I’m going to help you, I need to know more. Tell me about Lacey, about yourself. About the day Lacey was taken. Give me the details, as much as you can stand.”
Amy paled, but collected herself and started talking. Details began spilling out. The dry, technical points at first—her age (ten), her hair color (blonde, like her mother), her eyes (blue)—in the litany she’d had to repeat countless time for the police. Memories slipped in. The two of them walking to school, watching TV at night, falling asleep on the couch together.
The good times merged with the bad ones. How Darren, a deadbeat not ready for fatherhood, had left the picture. How she’d worked a succession of low-paying jobs, having to move into smaller and smaller apartments, eventually winding up in the closet they were sitting in now.
When Lacey turned ten, Amy began letting her ride to friends’ houses alone, even though they were in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. But you couldn’t lock a ten-year-old girl up forever. On a clear Saturday in June, she went out on her bike and never came back. Calls to the friend’s mother revealed that, yes, she’d been there . . . she’d just never come home. Frantic, Amy called the police.
“Right after Lacey was taken,” she said, “the police were like a swarm in here. I was terrified, of course, but the sheer activity was reassuring. They asked questions, they put out bulletins, they contacted the press.”
“When did the investigation wind down?”
“After a few weeks, when we didn’t get any results, the energy started to drop. They went from calling several times a day to once, then to once a week. From the start, I’d kept my own notes and cribbed information where I could, but when they stopped taking my calls I knew I had to do it all myself. For months, I was out beating the streets every night, working with child-abduction watch groups, building my own files. I even crawled through some pretty horrible websites and chat rooms just, you know, in case . . .”
Elliott nodded, then gestured toward her tower of notes. “This was the result?”
“I call it my database,” she said, resting a hand on top of the two-foot stack. “It’s anything and everything I could scrap, salvage, print, or steal on child abductions in the DC area for the last five years. Every night before the trash is picked up, I rifle through my neighbor’s recycling for the paper and pull out any articles I think might even remotely fit Lacey’s case.”
“How have you organized it?”
She lifted one binder as tall as her fist to her lap. Papers, tattered and stained, stuck out from the pile. “This file is my MISSING: FOUND. It contains all the runaways, throwaways, and others who eventually made it back.” She riffled through the papers and Elliott got the impression of blurry grade-school portraits and line upon line of text.
She put the binder aside and picked up another, much smaller, binder. “This is my MISSING: NOT FOUND file. It contains dozens of children between eight and fourteen who simply disappeared.”
“Is Lacey’s case in there?” She looked away. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“I keep it separate. I study the others constantly, hoping some little piece of information might’ve been overlooked or misfiled, but I haven’t found anything yet. I’ve been stumped for weeks.”
“Which is where I come in.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to waste time going over what the police did. Dave Cargill is a good cop, works with good people. They know what they’re doing, and I’m not going to second-guess their methods. They obviously thought they took Lacey’s case as far as they could and came up empty. That doesn’t mean they didn’t miss something, but let’s assume they did their job.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t agree?”
“I like Detective Cargill.”
“But?”
“He didn’t seem to look for anything beyond the obvious, and I think the other detectives followed his lead. They questioned me, they talked to my ex, they scoured the neighborhood. Those are all good things, I guess, but they never talked about whether there were other connections.”
“Connections?”
“The tissue that keeps all in touch. There are cosmic strings, webs between us all.”
Elliott pressed a finger into his temple, made small circles there. “I . . . like what? Could you be more specific?”
“I don’t think Lacey’s kidnapping was a single event,” she said simply. “I have a feeling that she was part of a larger scheme and that other kids may have been kidnapped, as well.”
“A larger scheme? Like trafficking? A gang?”
“Or a cult. Or a single crazy person who’s done this before. As far as I know, the police spent a day or two on the idea, then dropped it and focused all of their energy on hounding my ex and my neighbors. It’s been up to me to look for that connection.”
“Have you found it?”
“Not yet. But I’m hoping with your help, we can.” The look on her face was fragile. “Do you think we have a chance?”
He was quiet for a moment. Like he’d told Dave, he wasn’t here to con her, to pretend to help while waiting for her to get over it. If he was in, he was all in. Finally, he said, “If I’m here to help you, we have to work under the assumption that Lacey is alive and that there’s a way to find her.”
“Thank you, Elliott.” Amy’s eyes were shining and he dropped his gaze, embarrassed. After a moment, she said, “How do we start? Should I take you through my notes?”
He cleared his throat. “I think we should look through everything you’ve got, but not before we have a chance to review—”
A heavy knock on the door interrupted him. Amy, confused, stood and answered the door. Standing on her porch, his arms full with banker’s boxes, was Dave Cargill. He peered at them from around the stack.
“Someone order delivery?”
11
Charlotte
“But why does i come before e?”
She and Maggie were sitting on the couch in the living room, reading Melton Goes to Montana—Sister’s favorite book as a child, she’d said, and the one she’d told her to teach to the younger girl. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why can’t it be the other way around?”
She looked down at the page in front of her. Melton was a platypus who traveled the world discovering objects and learning new words, but the book was so old it was hard to recognize some of things that the author took for granted. It also smelled bad, like a box that had been left in the basement for too long, and the cover was peeling at the corner, exposing a thousand leaves of paper.
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“Why?”
She made a face. Maggie could be a whiner, and if she started the “why” game, it wouldn’t end until she got tired of it or you told her to shut up—at which point she’d burst into tears. “It’s just a rule, Maggie. Like when Sister tells us we can’t go outside.”
Maggie pouted, sensing that her game was going to be cut short. “But why?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you ask Sister why when she tells you to do something?”
“No.” She dropped her eyes to the ground.
“This is the same thing. Just treat it like a rule.”
“But we don’t tell Sister everything,” Maggie said, suddenly struck by an idea. “Like you haven’t told her about—”
“Let’s just read the next page,” she said, talking over her.
“Told Sister abou
t what?” a voice from behind them asked, making them jump.
Tina looked down at them from behind the old floral couch. The girl was tall and as thin as a stick. Her long limbs made her gawky and a little clumsy, but she could be surprisingly quiet when she wanted, which was often, since she liked to sneak around the house. Catching one of the others breaking a rule and tattling on them was one her favorite things to do. The only time you knew Tina was coming was when she sang to herself in a high-pitched whisper.
I’m older than her, Charlotte told herself. “None of your business. Anyway, Sister told me I’m supposed to teach Maggie reading every day. Do you want to tell her that you didn’t let me do that?”
Tina paled, but then her face got mean and, quick as a snake, she reached out and pinched Maggie’s upper arm, hard. The little girl’s eyes widened for one quiet second, then she screamed bloody murder.
Tina slipped away, cackling as she fled to the kitchen and down the basement steps. She spent most every day down there, had explored every nook and corner setting up booby traps and playing her own dark games. No one went after Tina once the cellar door had banged shut.
Charlotte tried to comfort Maggie, but her concern turned to disgust when she saw the pinch hadn’t even left a mark. “Oh, grow up,” she said when Maggie wouldn’t stop crying, but that just brought on a new burst of tears, followed by a round of screamed accusations that faded as Maggie fled upstairs to her room.
Charlotte curled up in a corner of the couch, drawing her knees to her chest and rubbing a cheek against the rough, worn fabric of the cushion. Exhausted and depressed, she let her eyes droop, but Charlie’s pale face appeared in her mind’s eye and they flew open again.
Charlie had been her first real friend in a long time, even counting the days before . . . before Sister. It had taken weeks for the shock of her abduction to finally fade and for her to settle into her new existence, but throughout it Charlie had looked after her, showing her small kindnesses that meant so much living under Sister’s iron rule. She’d tried to return the favor, and eventually they’d forged a kind of alliance that had been sealed with a whispered conversation in his bedroom.
“Maggie and Tina and Buddy . . . ,” she started, hesitating, wondering if it was even a mistake to ask. Sister had special punishments for those who mentioned the past. “Those aren’t their names, right? Their real names?”
He looked at her, his gaze wide and very still. “Why do you think so?”
“They don’t sound right,” she said. “And, well . . .”
“What?”
“My name isn’t Charlotte,” she blurted.
Charlie slid off the bed and checked the door. He came back and, leaning close, put his lips next to her ear. “I know. My name isn’t Charlie.”
They stared at each other; then, silently daring the other, both blurted their names at the same time. It made her want to laugh and cry at the same time—saying her name out loud was the first real thing she’d felt in weeks. She shouted it over and over, unable to help herself.
He clapped a hand over her mouth and they sat there, terrified. It didn’t matter that Sister wasn’t home—her presence seemed always around them, the threat of her anger hanging just over their heads.
Long minutes passed and nothing happened; then the words began to tumble out of Charlie, though in a whisper so light, she had to lean in until their faces almost touched. He told her about his life before and how much he missed his parents, even though they were divorced and fought all the time. Charlotte started to tell him about herself, but her throat got tight and scratchy.
He was reluctant to touch on some things, like how long he’d been there, but she wheedled and pleaded. Four years, he finally told her, so long that I’ve forgotten what outside looks like. He got excited, realizing she could tell him about all the things he’d missed, like what the cars looked like and what music was popular and what his favorite baseball team was doing. She exhausted herself, telling him as much as she could remember, though it made her sad when she realized she’d eventually lose those things, too.
His stream of questions were endless, and she finally stopped him with one of her own.
“I’m not the first Charlotte, am I?”
He looked at her strangely. “Why?”
“We have to wear these weird clothes,” she said, plucking at the ancient blue blouse Sister had insisted she wear, then pointing to his green button-down. The sleeves stopped three inches short of his wrists. “These were someone else’s, right?”
“I guess.” His eyes slid away from hers.
“So what happened to them? Where are they?”
He was quiet for a long time. “There was . . . another girl. She waited all day for Sister to come home, hiding in the hall; then she tried to just run past her. I guess she thought maybe Sister would be so surprised she wouldn’t know what to do. But Sister caught her by the neck before she’d made it out the door.”
The blood drained from her face. “What happened to her?”
“Sister tied her to a post in the basement,” Charlie said grimly. “And left her there for a week.”
Charlotte covered her mouth with her hands.
“She cried all day the first day and some of the second. Then . . . nothing.”
“Is she still down there?”
Charlie snorted. “Do you think even Tina would go to the cellar if she was? Sister snuck her out while we slept.”
“She killed her?”
Charlie shrugged. “She never came back.”
“She couldn’t just . . . murder all of us. There wouldn’t be anyone left.”
He looked at her sadly. “There’s always someone new, Charlotte.”
“What do you mean?”
“You showed up the next week,” he said and touched her arm as if to make sure she was there.
She let his words sink in. “She replaces us?”
“I think so. I’ve been here so long, I’ve known different Buddys and Tinas and Maggies and Charlottes. Two Buddys, actually.”
“Hasn’t anyone tried to escape? I mean, really escape . . . something smarter than just running out the door?”
His voice dropped even lower, and he told her of all the things that kept them prisoner. About the triple locks on the front door and the plywood-covered windows, about the bars on the basement windows and the coal chute that had been welded shut long ago. That there were NO TRESPASSING signs posted everywhere, and Sister had threatened to shoot the last stranger who had come to the house.
“You made that last part up,” Charlotte accused. “How do you know there are signs if you haven’t been outside?”
“I told you, I’ve been here four years. How else could it be that no one’s come to the front door in all that time?”
Her heart sank. “So there’s no way out?”
“It’s all been tried before,” he said, then added mysteriously, “but I’ve got some ideas.”
But what they were, he wouldn’t tell her, and as far as she knew, he hadn’t attempted to escape since their conversation. And now Charlie was gone. His fight with Sister, followed by his birthday party, had happened suddenly, surprising them all. Just like the Charlotte before her, apparently.
She sat up. Which meant whatever Charlie’s ideas had been, he hadn’t had a chance to put them into action. And, between whatever she’d been up to late last night and having to go to work this morning, there’d been no time for Sister to clean his room or search his things.
Charlotte slowly uncurled and slipped off the couch. Padding quietly into the kitchen, she pulled a chair over to the basement door and jammed it under the knob, locking Tina in the cellar. Next, she crept up the stairs and peeked into her own room, where she found Maggie—exhausted by her tantrum—sprawled facedown on the bed, breathing deep. She backed away and padded down the hall. Through a crack in the door, she saw Buddy on his bed, reading a book by the light of the tiny overhead lamp Sister had allowed him.
Charlotte crept to the end of the hall where Charlie’s and Sister’s rooms—the latter a thick oak door that was always locked—faced each other. Interior doors, even bedrooms and bathrooms, remained unlocked except when Sister distributed punishment by isolating one of them in a room for a day, a week, or a month. The rest of the time, the thick skeleton keyholes watched them unwinkingly, a reminder that even the little bit of freedom they had, to roam about the house, could be taken away. Feeling like a thief, she slipped into Charlie’s room.
She’d been there before, of course, and the first thing she always noticed was the smell. With all the windows in the house shut and boarded, there was never any fresh air, and the smell here was a strange musk of body odor and dirty socks and . . . boy, a different kind of odor than she was used to. It mixed poorly with the recycled air that came through the registers, the crude oil and rust smell of the old furnace in the cellar.
She turned to search the room. The bed was unmade. The pillow was on the floor, the sheets were tangled, and the blanket missing. She crept closer to look at the bed, then wrinkled her nose. Maggie had wet their shared bed a few times, so she knew what the puddle-shaped discoloration was. She left it alone.
There were no closets, only a wardrobe in the corner with a flimsy wooden door that squealed as she pulled on the knob. Inside were the clothes she’d grown used to seeing Charlie wear: a pair of patched and stitched jeans, more gray than blue. Brown corduroys that she knew he’d hated because of the swishing noise they made when he walked, despite most of the ridges having been worn away. Two white undershirts, stains at the pits. One plaid shirt that he’d been unable to button because it had been bought for someone even thinner than he was, and you could almost see through him. His favorite clothes, a pair of green work pants and a faded cowboy shirt, were missing.