by Jana DeLeon
Hustle crossed the street and walked up what was left of the sidewalk to the house. The weeds had taken over the lawn and were growing through cracks on the walkway. He pushed them out of the way, but the stalks rubbed against his arms and made them itch. The porch was missing planks on one side and he pressed his foot on the boards, testing them, before taking a step off the concrete steps and onto the failing structure. He moved slowly to the front door, avoiding the boards that showed the most signs of rot until he reached the entrance.
The door wasn’t even closed all the way, much less locked, so he pushed it open and stuck his head inside. A squatter could be inside, and they didn’t like people walking into their territory. He scanned the room but saw no signs of life. The dust and grime on the floor was free of footprints or any other indication that someone had passed through recently. Two of the four windows were still boarded up, but the others were open to the elements, the glass broken out long ago, by either storm or human. The broken windows allowed some light to enter the room, but with the clouds thickening overhead, it was only enough to cast a dim glow across the depressing room.
He stepped inside and heard a creak from the back of the house.
“Shaye?” he called out.
“It’s me,” she said. “I figured it was better if I came in the back.”
He smiled. She caught on quickly. Or maybe it was her subconscious, bringing out the things she would have understood from her time living with Lydia. Shaye was eight years old when she’d been sold by Clancy. You didn’t make eight years in the Ninth Ward without developing some street smarts.
A door in the back of the room swung open and Shaye stepped inside. Her expression was serious and it was clear she was concentrating on the house, trying to force herself to remember. He stood silently and without moving, not wanting to break into her thoughts.
He’d done his part. The rest was up to Shaye.
12
Shaye stepped into what must have been the living room and moved to the center before stopping. She scanned the walls with their peeling light green paint, trying to imagine herself here. There would have been a couch or chairs, maybe even an old television. Would the couch have been against the side wall or the front? She looked at both, trying to imagine furniture in the space, but nothing was forthcoming.
Trina, sitting on a couch or maybe the floor, watching cartoons.
She shook her head. Even the name didn’t jog her memory any. She’d thought if she could find her birth name that it might unlock everything, but the name sounded as foreign to her as this room felt. Clamping down on her rising frustration, she moved off to a door on the opposite side of the room and pushed it open to find the kitchen. She stepped inside and sucked in a breath. What was left of the yellow wallpaper with red cherries was hanging in long strips off the wall, surrounded by big stretches of crumbling drywall.
But those strips were all she needed.
She heard quiet footsteps behind her and turned to look at Hustle, who stood in the doorway. “I remember the wallpaper,” she said, struggling to contain her excitement. It was just one small thing. It didn’t mean anything yet.
Hustle nodded and she knew he was being quiet so he didn’t interfere with her process. She moved forward until she stood next to a row of cabinets where a stove used to be. None of the appliances were there any longer. They’d probably been removed or stolen long ago. But when she looked at the empty space, she saw the yellow stove that used to be there. It was dark yellow, almost gold, and had big dials on it.
She turned and took two steps to the eating area and lifted a long strip of the wallpaper. “I picked this paper,” she said. “There was a big, sweaty man. He brought a book of colored paper to the house and my mother told me to pick.”
She whirled around and stared at Hustle. “Oh my God. I remember her.”
Hustle motioned with his hand for her to keep going.
“She was sitting at the breakfast table right here. Her hair was twisted on top of her head in a messy knot and she was wearing a dirty pink bathrobe. The man must have been the landlord. I remember standing at the table on my tiptoes, looking at the pages as he flipped them over.”
“You were young,” Hustle said, finally breaking his silence.
Shaye frowned, not getting the correlation, then realized he had clued in to her barely being able to see onto the table. “You’re right. I must have been a lot younger than eight. Four, five maybe? Guess it depends on how fast I grew.”
Hustle nodded.
She blew out a breath. “I need to remember much later.”
“You just got here. Give it time.”
We don’t have time.
It was the most prevalent thought in her mind ever since Jackson had told her about the other girl. But Hustle didn’t know about the girl and she wasn’t about to tell him. He’d promised not to ever investigate on his own again, but if he found out the man who’d held Shaye hostage had another victim, Shaye knew he’d be combing the streets looking for her. He had too big a heart to sit at the hotel and hope for the best.
“I’m impatient,” she said. “I know. Let’s find my bedroom.”
She headed out of the kitchen and back into the living room. There was an opening to a hallway on the far wall. She went down the hall and poked her head into the first room. It was small and had brown walls. Nothing tickled her memory, so she kept walking. The bathroom was next but the tile and tub had been redone sometime in the last ten years. The design was too recent to have been there when she’d occupied the house.
She continued to the last door and stepped inside. This was it. Her bedroom. A big window on the far wall looked into the backyard. A shrub below the window had grown so large, it blocked almost any light from entering, but she knew she’d spent hours standing at this window, watching thunderstorms. She crossed the room and pulled open a door to the tiny closet. It couldn’t have been more than two feet square, but her belongings still hadn’t filled it. She could picture the precious few garments hanging inside, the colors faded, the material threadbare. The two pairs of shoes—one a pair of worn brown loafers and the other a pair of cheap pink running shoes—and a purple backpack.
She took a step closer and a flash of the past coursed through her so intense, it took her breath away. This is where she used to hide when the men were here. She didn’t like the men. They brought the stuff that made her mother sleep for days and they always looked at her in a weird way. So when the men came, she hid in this closet.
The child, Trina, didn’t know why the men’s staring bothered her, but the very adult Shaye knew exactly why. Had the abuse started before Clancy bought her? Had her mother traded her for drugs? She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be certain. Not yet.
She heard the floor creak behind her, and she turned to face Hustle. “This was my room,” she said. “I remember the window and the closet.” She didn’t tell him the rest. Hustle had already seen and heard enough of the dark side of humanity. He didn’t need anything else to process.
“That’s good,” he said, but he didn’t sound nearly as excited as she felt.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
She shook her head. “If I’m not allowed to hedge things with you, then why do you think you’re allowed to do it to me?”
He sighed. “Look, I want you to get answers, and I want the guy who did those things to you to pay—you have no idea how much I want him to pay—but I can’t help thinking sometimes that maybe you’re better off not remembering. I mean, look at what those people who bought Jinx were doing. That’s the most fucked-up shit I ever heard of in my life, and I’ve heard a lot. What if what happened to you was worse? What if it’s something you can’t live with?”
Shaye felt her heart break just a little. The fact that this boy, who’d been through so much, was worried about her emotional health was so touching that she wished she could do exactly that—let it all go and move on with
her incredibly blessed life. But she couldn’t. Any chance of moving forward and leaving the past forgotten had been blown apart when Lydia’s name appeared in Clancy’s journals. Knowing there was another victim out there only cemented her decision.
“I have the best support system in the world,” she said. “I have my mom and Eleonore and friends like you and Jackson. None of you will let me get into a dark place. If it’s too much for me to handle, you guys will help me carry the load.”
Hustle shrugged. “Yeah. I guess so.”
She walked over to stand in front of him. “I promise you, I will be all right. No matter what I find, not knowing is worse. Walking down the street and knowing that half the men I see could be the guy who did this to me and I don’t even know is a far worse way to live. Besides, as long as he’s still out there, other people are at risk. I can’t live peacefully knowing that.”
He studied her for a while, then finally nodded. “I get it,” he said, “and I know this is the only way to get the guy, but it still sucks.”
Thunder boomed overhead and they both jumped. Hustle glanced nervously out the window as the room grew dimmer.
“I’m not trying to rush you or anything,” Hustle said, “but that storm sounds bad.”
“Yes. It does.” She pulled out her cell phone. “I’m going to take some pictures and then we should get out of here. It’s getting late and with the storm, it will be dark soon. I’m going to guess that this isn’t the neighborhood we need to be hanging around in after dark.”
“Don’t need to be hanging around here in broad daylight. Passed dealers two blocks up from here. I’m sure they’d love your car.”
“Drug dealers?” Shaye frowned. “I saw two women with a stroller, but not anyone else.”
Hustle raised one eyebrow. “The two women with the stroller was the drug dealers. They ain’t got no baby in there.”
“Oh!” Just when Shaye thought she’d figured a few things out, something came along and surprised her. “I’ll hurry.”
She took pictures and video of each room, documenting every single square foot, even the inside of the cabinets. A lot of it probably wouldn’t be useful, like the remodeled bathroom, but she was grasping on to a sliver of hope that the pictures would suffice and she wouldn’t have to come back here. There was a feeling of doom in this house, like the dark cloud that currently hung over it was always there, just sometimes invisible to the naked eye.
“Let me get one more shot of the window in my bedroom,” she said. “The one I took is overexposed.”
They headed back down the hallway to the bedroom and she snapped several pictures of the window, both with the flash and without. “That’s it,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Another clap of thunder sounded overhead, this time shaking the frail walls of the house. Shaye started to head out of the room, but Hustle grabbed her arm and put his finger to his lips, then pointed toward the front of the house. She froze and a couple seconds later, she heard boards creaking as someone walked across them.
It was impossible to tell if the footsteps came from the porch of if the intruder was already inside, but either way, they were trapped. The utility room was at the other end of the living room and there was no access from the hallway. The entire living room was easily visible from the front door. No way they could slip out without being seen.
Hustle pointed to the window and she nodded. They eased over to the window and they tugged on the old latches. For a minute, Shaye was afraid they were rusted in place and no amount of hand strength was going to get them loose, but they finally managed to get both of them open. Saying a silent prayer that the window hadn’t been painted shut or nailed shut from the outside, she put her fingers under one of the decorative ridges and pulled it up.
It didn’t budge.
A loud creak traveled down the hall and Shaye knew that this time, it hadn’t come from outside. Someone was in the house with them. She looked over at Hustle, who tugged on the window again. His anxiety was starting to show and she knew they were in a bad situation. She grabbed the molding again and motioned to him with her head.
She whispered, “One, two, three.”
On three they both pulled as hard as they could and the window flew up, crashing into the top of the frame.
“Go,” she said.
Hustle threw one leg over the ledge and flipped over into the bushes. She was right on his tail as he burst out of the bushes and ran through the tall weeds that made up the backyard of her old house and into the backyard of the house behind it. They veered to the left as they rounded the corner of the other house and she tugged her keys from her pocket, unlocking and starting her SUV as they ran. She yanked open the car door and jumped inside, then shoved the key into the ignition and tore away from the curb as Hustle was slamming the passenger door shut.
He whirled around in the seat, looking behind them.
“You see anything?” she asked, peering into her rearview mirror.
“Nothing, but someone was there. That wasn’t no cat made the floor creak that way. Wasn’t cops, either. They tell you who they are when they enter.”
She rounded the block and turned back toward the street where her old house was. She inched up to the corner and they both looked down the street. The rain that had been threatening to fall started to come down in giant sheets, reducing visibility even more.
“I don’t see anyone,” she said.
“Well, if they’re still inside, they’re not coming out in this.”
Shaye eased off the brake and pulled away, anxious to get out of the neighborhood and back to the area she knew. Most likely, someone had seen Hustle go inside and followed him. Shaye would like to think it was to make sure Hustle wasn’t up to no good, but most likely, it was someone who was up to no good themselves and thought the teen might have something of value that they could take.
The drug dealers on the corner that she hadn’t even noticed were stark reminders that she was out of her element here and that all kinds of danger lurked around the corner, not just the kind she was looking for. If something had happened to Hustle, she would have never forgiven herself for going inside that house.
It was stupid, and if she’d been thinking correctly, she would have known better. She liked to think she was fairly street-smart and capable of avoiding most problems but she’d been fooling herself. This might have been her life at one point, but it wasn’t now. Trina Johnson probably knew the dangers of the streets. Shaye Archer had a ways to go.
“Hey,” Hustle said. “Why didn’t you pull out your gun?”
“If we hadn’t gotten out the window, I would have. But to answer your question, my gun is a last resort. I don’t want to kill anyone unless I don’t have a choice, and from a professional and personal standpoint, I don’t need the trouble that would go along with it.”
Hustle nodded. “Makes sense. The news would be all over that—New Orleans socialite goes on shooting rampage.”
“Ha. That sounds about right.”
She took in a deep breath and slowly blew it out, loosening her grip on the steering wheel as she relaxed. With every inch of road she put between herself and the house, the pressure that had been squeezing her chest started to lessen until finally, it was gone.
Her cell phone signaled a text message and she lifted it to check. She’d been expecting the text but now that it came, she almost wished the timing had been different. Part of her wanted to hurry home and pore over the pictures and video she’d taken of the house. Then the practical part of her said she needed to take a break and this was the perfect way to do it.
She looked over at Hustle. “I’m starved. How about we grab a burger and shakes?”
“I can eat. What about Saul?”
“I told him we might be out for a while, and our evening just got longer. That was a text from Cora LeDoux. She and Jinx would like us to pay them a visit tonight and maybe have some chocolate chip cookies.”
Hustle�
�s eyes widened. “I’m gonna get to see Jinx?”
Shaye smiled, his excitement infectious. “If you want to.”
“Shit yeah. I mean, that’s great. I been talking to her some on the phone but it ain’t the same. I want to meet her aunt and see where she’s living. I wonder if her aunt will bring her to meet Saul sometime so Jinx can see the painting I’ve done.”
“You can ask her tonight.”
13
New Orleans, Louisiana, Winter 1945
It was almost midnight but he sat behind the ornate desk in his office, waiting for the arrival of the one person he’d hoped he’d never see again. As soon as he’d turned seventeen, he’d inherited all of his deceased father’s holdings. He’d immediately sold the plantation. The only thing contained there was disappointment and death. His mother had gone back east to her people right after his father’s death, leaving the working hands to run the plantation and an attorney to oversee the money until the boy was seventeen, the age his father’s will had indicated he could inherit. The attorney had insisted he spend those five years learning how to manage his father’s vast real estate holdings, but the boy had never had any interest in the plantation, and that would never change.
He learned enough to know if the hands were running things properly and spent the rest of his time learning about manufacturing. As soon as he came into the inheritance, he sold the plantation and used the money to open a plant in New Orleans, making supplies for the war. It seemed ironic that the only reason he’d avoided serving is because of a leg that had never healed properly after his father had broken it. The thing that had made him weak physically had made him strong financially. War was a lucrative business, and his father’s riches quickly turned into his own wealth.
The only thing he’d kept from the plantation was the desk he sat at now.
It had belonged to his father, who’d always considered it one of his prize possessions. Once, when the boy had accidentally scratched one of the legs with his pocketknife, his father had struck him so hard that he couldn’t chew for a week. He’d told the boy he was never allowed near the desk again. Nothing gave him more pleasure now than sitting behind that desk and looking at all the scratches he’d put on it that his father couldn’t touch him for.