Once I get passport and money, I can get e-ticket, so Tong cannot find plane ticket. He searches everything. I can hide money in my mattress. He makes me go buy beer every day, so I will take cab to airport. I have to find out how much money it need for bribe officials, then I tell you.
What officials do you need to bribe?
Airport security. They need to put entry stamp on passport. You tell me this.
Sure. And anyone else?
Maybe someone at the airport who see me. If Tong follow me, he will bribe, so I have to be ready to bribe same. It’s really bad now. You understand?
I won’t let you down.
Thank you. U r all I have. Everyone betray. I trust no one. You tell your parents about me? They know I come?
Rachel thought about this one.
Yes, I told them. You are loved and welcome here.
I never forget your help. I have HIV test last week. It come negative today. So glad.
That’s great. Great news.
Men don’t want condom. Insist no condom.
Rachel didn’t write anything.
And ten, fifteen men a day. I don’t like to give you my problem.
As God is my witness, I’ll get you out of there.
God bless you, sis. We have five minutes. Tell me again about New York.
New York?
How beautiful life in New York.
Rachel put her face in her hands.
It’s a beautiful and peaceful place where you can be anything you want to be. And the city is most beautiful at night when you can see millions of lights. When you come here, we’ll go shopping in the mall and see the movie stars in Times Square.
That sound heaven. I go back now or they catch me.
When will I see you?
I try come back tomorrow. I love you.
Why would Olivia have hidden this from her? What else was she hiding? Rachel lay in bed unable to get Brother Horace’s words out of her mind.
Stone ho.
he next morning, Rachel confronted her parents.
“How could you have kept it a secret from me all these years?” said Rachel. “It tore me apart when she had to go back to a whorehouse and I stayed here in my warm safe bed. This explains a lot.”
“She was already adopted when we found Olivia,” said Ed Wallen.
“We would have never separated them,” said her mother. “We were told her sister had already been adopted by a rich European family. What were we supposed to do?”
“You could have told me. Did you tell Olivia that she had a twin sister?”
“Why tell her about someone who wasn’t part of her life and who she would probably never meet?” said her mother.
“Well, they did meet―how?”
“Online. Bookface, whatever,” said her father.
“So this is going on for four months and what―I’m not part of this family?”
“We didn’t want to upset you,” said her mother.
“You didn’t want me to side with Olivia.”
“Even if we were willing to take her in…”
“Take her in? Is that how you put it?”
“Calm down,” said her father. “It’s not as easy as it was when we adopted your sister. Once immigration found out that she’s a prostitute, they’d probably deny her entry. I made that phone call to an attorney.”
“She’s an underage sex slave. People get asylum in this country for a lot less than that. Did you ask that question?”
“Even if we could get her entry―I’m an accountant, not a commando. How was I supposed to get her out of there?”
“Did you even try before giving up? Your sixteen-year-old daughter has more fight than you. Do you know what that poor girl is doing right now?”
“Enough, Rachel! Right now I have to deal with getting my own daughter back―your sister.”
“We can’t deal with these two things at once,” said her mother. “I just want my baby back.” She had that bug-eyed look that was beyond reason or persuasion. Rachel left the room before saying something she’d regret.
Rachel slammed the door of her room and had to steady herself on the edge of the bunk bed. She was starting Columbia in four days and her world was collapsing. Anger was now her best friend as it had been so often.
In times of great strife, Rachel found refuge in The Box. She took it down from the top shelf of her closet and removed a key from her drawer to open it. Inside was the sum total of Rachel Amanda Wallen’s worldly accomplishments. There was her valedictory speech from Northport Middle School, the medal for writing, the medal for social sciences awarded for her essay on the philosopher kings in modern society. There was a medal given to her by the town of East Northport for saving a seventy-year-old man by administering the Heimlich maneuver in a Burger King when she was twelve. There was the rosary blessed by John Paul II.
Then there was the Intel Award.
The Intel was the Nobel Prize of high school. Each entry had to be an original piece of work in one of the sciences, and students from all over the country vied for one of the top forty slots that sent them to Washington D.C. for the selection of the final ten winners. Anyone who gets into the top forty was guaranteed admission to virtually any college in the United States. The top prize was a hundred thousand dollars.
She unfolded the letter notifying her that she was going to DC. If she ever won a real Nobel Prize, she didn’t think it would give her the same transcendent joy.
It is our pleasure to inform you that your entry, “Characterizing Human and Chimpanzee Sera Immune Reactivity Against V1/V2 Regions of the HIV Envelope Protein” has been selected for the Semifinalist round of the Intel Science Talent Search to be held in Washington DC…
Nothing, not even children, could ever give her this happiness.
She returned from D.C. with thirty thousand dollars––sixth place nationwide. With this money and the fourteen thousand dollar scholarship, Rachel had enough to get her through the first year-and-a-half at Columbia.
But heaven had not yet finished pouring forth its blessings. She had completed her Intel project under the mentorship of Dr. Nandagopal Singh, the Nobel laureate and director of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She opened the envelope with the recommendation she had sent to every Ivy League university in the country. They all accepted her.
Dear Sir:
For the past eighteen months, Ms. Rachel Wallen has conducted research under my mentorship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The subject of her research was the characterizing of human and chimpanzee sera immune reactivity against V1/V2 regions of the HIV envelope protein, a subject of formidable complexity. I found her grasp of theory and laboratory technique to be remarkable for an investigator of her age. I was particularly impressed with her ability to think originally in the design of her experiments. She also possesses the one quality I hold above all others in this field: tenacity. She is a consummate scientist in every sense.
Yours truly,
Dr. Nandagopal Singh, Director,
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
It would take more than tenacity to get her two sisters back. And she was going to get them back.
irsten Schrodinger’s battered image was sent across the world to her admirers. She had entertained them well and they had paid well. She was on her knees chained to a concrete wall. The Webmaster now presented her for the next round of torment.
“We’ll begin the bidding.”
Twenty-thousand.
Twenty-five.
Thirty-five.
Forty.
“Come gentlemen. This is a blonde, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old. A rare find from Minnesota. Let your imaginations run free. Think of the possibilities. Let me offer a few suggestions…”
The bidding resumed.
“Sold to Client Number One for sixty-three thousand. A fine purchase. Please submit in detail the procedure I am to follow.” An email instantly arrived. Client Number One was prepared. The We
bmaster decrypted the email and quickly read it. He was impressed with the depravity of the request.
“I’ll have to purchase a few items to perform this, sir. Please log in tomorrow at the same time and we’ll have a private session. The three of us.”
The man entered Home Depot and went to aisle five. He tossed a pair of gauntlet rubber gloves into his cart, then had ten feet of chain cut to length. This was followed by a propane torch, four large D-clamps and fifteen feet of rope. Next was the paint department where he gathered a plastic drop cloth, vinyl floor knife, and telescoping paint handle. In the tool aisle, he found a heavy duty drill. Two huge Rubbermaid storage bins with covers completed the purchase.
Next he had to pick up more insulin for the other kid or she’d croak before she made him any money. The Webmaster was riding high, money was rolling in. He had a trip lined up for Thailand after delivering the final downloads for these two girls. Of course, he had to keep mining for more kids.
When he got back he logged in to his Yahoo Messenger.
Hi, u there? wrote thirteen-year-old Alice.
Waiting for you, wrote the Webmaster.
hat’s a remarkable story,” said Detective John McKenna.
“Would you like some coffee, detective?” asked Ed Wallen.
“No thanks, sir. What else can you tell me about Olivia’s sister―Achara?”
“She’s a stranger to us,” said Elizabeth.
“All we know is that she was adopted by a well-to-do family from―Norway, I think,” said Ed. “That’s what we were told.”
McKenna noticed how Ed Wallen had to complete that thought for his wife, who was clearly falling apart.
“And Olivia wanted to bring her to America?”
“First, we would have to get her out of the place where―”
“The brothel,” said Rachel, interrupting her mother.
“I’m not a rich man,” said Ed Wallen. “We don’t even know where she is. In Chiang Mai somewhere. There’s a brothel on every street corner in that country. We just couldn’t help her.”
“How did Olivia plan to help? You mentioned she was waiting for a passport?” asked the detective.
“That’s right,” said Rachel. “I didn’t want to start from scratch or she would know I wasn’t Olivia.”
“Why did you pretend you were Olivia? Once you realized who she was, why not just tell her you’re Olivia’s sister? She might know that Olivia had planned to meet someone or go somewhere.”
“I didn’t know who she was at first, then after, it would have been like I was lying to her. She might have cut me off right there. She’s very suspicious, and she doesn’t need the news that her twin sister, and only hope in life just disappeared.”
“There’s nothing new on your end, detective?” asked Ed.
McKenna figured the father was waiting for him to volunteer this. He regretted not bringing it up first. “We’ve gone through all her emails and know that Olivia was corresponding with several men throughout the country. She was a member of a sort of mail-order bride site. A site where American and European men meet Asian women. Local police have questioned all these men and so far we have no reason to believe any of them were involved in her disappearance.”
“And how old are these men?” asked Ed.
“Thirties to mid-forties.”
“Isn’t it sick for these old guys to be chatting with a sixteen-year-old?”
“In all the correspondence, Olivia was posing as an eighteen-year-old. They might be dirty old men, but it’s not illegal.”
“Why on earth would she be doing that?”
“Maybe Olivia was trying to get someone to fall in love with her sister by posing as her. Then he might get her out.”
“Possible,” said McKenna. He wrote that one down in his notebook. McKenna was a prolific note-taker. He observed the interior decoration, the CD’s people owned, if there was dust in the air vents. Ninety percent of it was useless, but occasionally a valuable clue was buried in things he had written down months before.
One time, he was working a cold case of a murdered woman. The husband was distraught throughout the initial investigation. Cooperated fully with the police, appealed to the public. Inconsolable. Police got nowhere. Two years later, McKenna was reviewing his notes on the case. He had observed that a golf club was found in the garage. The head had been cut off and replaced with a magnet. McKenna figured at the time that it was for picking up metallic parts like screws that had fallen into tight places. Sometime after that, he had watched the Discovery Channel where they called it a meteorite stick, used to test rocks for their magnetic properties. You need three things for meteorite hunting: a metal detector, a meteorite stick, and a pickaxe. The metal detector and meteorite stick were in his notes, but no pickaxe. McKenna figured that was buried in the back yard. Long story short, there it was. The murder weapon. Case closed.
“When did Olivia first tell you that she had found her sister?” asked the detective.
“About four months ago,” said Elizabeth, who was staring into empty space.
“How did she react when you were reluctant to bring her here?”
“We argued. It flared up on several occasions,” said Ed. “We just couldn’t talk about it in a civil way. I tried explaining that getting her out of there was going to be next to impossible. You have to bribe people every step of the way in that country. We’d have to go there and get the local law to help us, the same law that protects the brothels. And even if I could do this without getting killed, we don’t have the money for that kind of a fight. I’ve got two daughters starting college.”
“Did she ever threaten to leave?”
He shook his head. “She became distant. I know she was resentful, but my mind was made up. You can’t save the whole world.”
“Before the issue of her sister came up, did you notice any change in her behavior?”
“I always thought she had too much on her plate. Academics, fencing, cello, volunteering. But she always pulled a victory out of it. Champion fencer―who knew? So I never told her to pull back. I was amazed by how much she could do. It was so much more than I ever did.”
“And she never mentioned anything that was bothering her, besides Achara?”
“Olivia was never the kind of girl to express her feelings openly,” said Elizabeth. “Opinions, yes. Feelings, no. She would say things like ‘I love you,’ but she never talked about herself. So you never really knew what was going on inside her.”
“Have you gotten any tips from the Amber Alert, Detective?” asked Ed.
“All dead ends so far. It seems she had to be hiding something if she said she was going to attend a lecture when there were no lectures that day. Unless she was mistaken about the date. Is that likely?”
“She never went anywhere without getting online first and doing a MapQuest and finding out everything before setting out,” said Rachel. “She hated having her time wasted. Olivia wouldn’t have left the house without being certain that there was a lecture. And the lecture she described wasn’t even scheduled, so it’s not like she was just mistaken about the date. There was no lecture on Atlantis at the Museum of Natural History.”
So she was hiding something, thought McKenna.
“According to everyone at her school, she was an extremely popular girl. And you’re sure she had no boyfriend? Would you know if she did?”
“She never talked about it to me,” said Rachel.
McKenna noticed the blank faces on the others. Not a lot of communication in this family, if they didn’t know that. He should talk.
“Is it possible she joined a cult of some kind? That’s common.”
“That doesn’t sound like Olivia,” said Ed. “She wasn’t exactly a regular Catholic, but neither are we. And she was just too sharp for that. She could see through people.”
“Mind if I look through her room again?”
The detective went right for the bookcases, scanning the titles. No Hare Kris
hna material, no Scientology stuff, no Church of the Cosmic Consciousness, etc. Lots of science fiction, SAT practice books, chick lit, The Castles of Europe, Wuthering Heights―he’d seen the movie, never read the book. Photos of her in her fencing outfit and medals were all over the walls.
The pictures reminded him of his own daughter, Brittany. She was seventeen now, and living with her mother, but vanished from his life.
Olivia’s cello case leaned against the wall. A complete person. And completely missing. No sign of any dissatisfaction strong enough to make her leave home and abandon a brilliant future. He didn’t have a good feeling about this.
“I’ll keep you posted,” he said on his way out. “It’s good that you were on the news yesterday. Every chance you get to appear on TV is valuable in keeping the case before the public and getting Olivia’s face out there.”
“It worked in the Elizabeth Smart case,” said Rachel. The detective didn’t add to that.
After McKenna had left, Rachel went to her room and called him on his cell.
“There’s something else I didn’t want to say in front of my parents, and you can’t tell them either. I went to Transcendence House yesterday and spent the night there as a runaway.”
“Go on.”
“One of the boys there told me that Olivia had been a prostitute. A ‘stone ho,’ he said.”
“Who told you this?”
“His name is Brother Horace. He’s a runaway there. And I believe him.”
“Rachel, don’t do that again. Stay home and give your parents support. Anything else?”
“Yes. The priest who runs that place. Father Massey―he said that when they went on a retreat with the staff of Transcendence House, that Olivia had separated from the group. That he found her a half mile away sitting in a stream with her street clothes on. That can’t be. Olivia went camping with us when she was ten and we were playing in a river. She went out too far and got caught in a whirlpool that sucked her under. She was drowning in five feet of water. It took my father and five other men to pull her out, the suction was so strong. From that day on, she never went near water again.”
The Schwarzschild Radius Page 3