Trash Course

by Penny Drake

  “How do you know?” I countered. “Do you have a will or something that says they’re yours?”

  “I have tradition on my side,” Quentin said. “I’m a direct descendent of Luke Peale, who was a direct descendent of Roger Peale. And I’m the youngest son. Family tradition says the papers always went to the youngest son, and—”

  “Not the oldest?” I interrupted.

  “No. Roger Peale was the youngest in his family and he felt that the youngest always got the short end of any inheritance, so he stipulated that his papers would always go to the youngest son. After the Civil War, that was Luke Peale.”

  Uncle Lawrence burst in again. “Not true! Luke and Bradley Peale were twins, and no one recorded which was born first. Their father gave the papers to Bradley, but Luke got jealous and stole them when—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Quentin waved a hand. “He stole them when the Union army invaded Charlottesville. Your side of the family has been saying that so often, you think it’s true. Never mind that Bradley only claimed their father left him the papers. No will was ever filed.”

  “Because Luke found it first and burned it!” Uncle Lawrence said.

  “Right, old man.” Quentin leaned toward his chair again. “So you don’t think I’m an alien after all, do you?”

  “You’re a clone made by aliens,” Uncle Lawrence said. His chair vibrated again. “Made so you can pass for human. I read all about it in the coded messages the government put in the newspapers. But I gathered up thousands of newspapers and hid the coded ones among them. You’ll never find them now.”

  “We are wasting time,” Yerin said. “We have more important things to do.”

  “This is my country, Yerin,” Quentin said. “You’re not in charge here.”

  I was hoping Yerin would retort and keep the argument going, but he traded glances with Sergei and fell silent instead. I decided to step in.

  “So the Chicago Peales stole the papers from the Detroit Peales, and the Detroit Peales stole them from the Chicago Peales,” I said. “Until Victor’s house burned down in the forties and everyone thought they’d been destroyed.”

  “Dad knew how to fool everyone,” Uncle Lawrence said proudly. A bruise was darkening on his cheek where Quentin had punched him. “No one had any idea that Howard and I had buried the papers before Dad set the fire.”

  “He burned his own house down?” I said in surprise. This hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Yep, yep,” Uncle Lawrence said, nodding vigorously. “Made everyone think the papers had been destroyed, and the insurance money gave him an extra bit of cash. It made it easier for him to get out of publishing and into the automobile industry while the new house was being built. Dad knew how to fool ’em, yes he did. Yep, yep.”

  “Those papers are my birthright, old man,” Quentin snarled at him. “Where did you hide them?”

  “Howard hid them,” he said. “He said it was somewhere obvious, but I didn’t want to know in case you aliens got me.” His eyes grew misty. “But now Howard’s dead. At least I can’t tell you where they are. Go ahead and read my mind and you’ll see.”

  Yerin looked like he wanted to say something but stopped himself. Quentin turned to me. “Okay, girl—what’s your theory? Where are my papers?”

  I had no freakin’ clue. My mind was flying in a dozen different directions, though, and I was getting really tired of all the “girl” cracks. “What do you want me to say? ‘Four hundred and sixth box from the right’? I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

  “But you could show me, right? So all we have to do is take you to the house, right? So you can try to escape, right?”

  I remained silent, disgruntled that he had seen my plan. Quentin slapped me again, but almost as an afterthought, and it barely stung. The ropes digging into my wrists hurt worse. Yerin, meanwhile, gestured at Sergei, who stepped forward and grabbed the front of Uncle Lawrence’s shirt. His eyes widened in fear.

  “I want to know who else you told about the trafficking route,” Yerin said in a voice as cold as a shark’s underbelly. “You obviously told this girl. Who else did you talk to?”

  “I didn’t talk to anyone,” Uncle Lawrence protested. “You paid me. We had a deal.”

  That got my attention, or it would have if I had let it wander. “You paid him?” I blurted.

  “It was an enormous sum of money,” Yerin said.

  “Ten thousand dollars?” I said.

  That got Yerin’s attention. His eyes glittered as he turned to me. Sergei released Uncle Lawrence’s shirt.

  “How much do you know?” Yerin demanded.

  Stall, stall, stall. “I know that Mr. Peale paid off his property taxes with a sudden large deposit to his savings account. I saw his financial records in the house.” I paused to lick my lips, which were dry as sandpaper. “Could I have a drink? I’m parched here.”

  “Talk first,” Yerin said. “Go on.”

  “Mr. Peale was spying on you for months. He even set up a little nest on top of the warehouse and wrote down every time you brought a parcel—” I spat that last word, “—into Detroit and when it left for Chicago. Once he had enough evidence, he blackmailed you. Ten thousand dollars for his silence. But you didn’t believe he’d keep his mouth shut, which is why you sent guys to pick the lock on his house and search for the evidence. You weren’t looking for the treasure at all. But one of your guys—I forget his name. The one from Georgia.”

  “Ilya,” Yerin said. “He was clumsy.”

  “That’s for sure. He tripped one of Mr. Peale’s deadfalls and suffocated under a pile of magazines. Mr. Peale didn’t call the police, either because he was afraid of them or because he was worried about being linked with you, or both, so the body just stayed there. He was unable to throw that out, either, I guess.” Ew. “Then I showed up and started searching.”

  “You mean we,” Yerin said, tapping his foot with impatience. “We know all about Hawk Enterprises and your photographer lover.”

  “He’s not my lover,” I shot back. “He only wishes.”

  An accompanying thought landed like an airplane: I wished it, too.

  The sudden knowledge—okay, admission—dropped hard on me, and I felt unexpected tears come to my eyes. I was probably going to die, and I’d never hear Zack’s voice again. We’d never hold hands or kiss or talk on the front porch while the moon rose. Stupid thing to be thinking about under the circumstances, but I couldn’t help it. The tears threatened to spill over, and I blinked them back hard. These guys would only think I was crying because I was scared of them. Not that I wasn’t scared of them—I just didn’t need them thinking I would cry over it.

  “Anyway,” I said, suppressing the quaver in my voice, “with all these people going in and out of his house—including me—Mr. Peale became more and more nervous. Finally he fled and hid in the Arboretum.” I cleared my throat. Still dry. “There’s one thing I don’t understand, though.”

  “And what’s that?” Yerin replied, on cue.

  “How Mr. Peale here found out about you in the first place.”

  “I saw him,” Uncle Lawrence said. “I was looking for equipment. Sometimes the CIA hides stuff in dumpsters. No one would think to look for it there, except me. I know the truth. Once, I was down at the docks in Detroit—the FBI building is there, and they’re just a shell organization for the CIA—and I saw the Quentin clone. He’s my sixth cousin. Or he was, before the aliens kidnapped him and put a clone in his place. I thought the warehouse was a secret clone farm, so I started watching it. No one pays attention to an old man going through dumpsters. That’s how I learned everything.”

  “What is this nonsense?” Yerin said. He paced back to the door. “I suppose it does not matter whether the old man talked or not. Too many people know about the warehouse in Detroit. The route has been compromised. We must change it before we bring in any more parcels.”

  “Why don’t you just call them children?” I couldn’t help asking. “Th
at’s what they are.”

  “Kill her, Sergei,” Yerin said in the same sort of voice most people ask for fries with their hamburger. “We don’t need her anymore.”

  An ugly pistol appeared in Sergei’s hand, and I found myself wondering how he had managed to smuggle one into America. Stupid last thought to have. Sergei’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Wait!” Quentin snapped, and Sergei paused. “I still want to know where my family papers are. This girl is my only chance.”

  “It is too dangerous to let her live,” Yerin snapped back. “Especially for a handful of stupid papers.”

  “Those papers are my birthright,” Quentin thundered for the second time since this conversation had begun. “I won’t let an old man and a simple girl keep them from me.”

  Man, this guy had some serious control issues. Me, I was floating in a small cloud of relief that I was still breathing.

  “Do with them as you wish, then,” Yerin said. “But they will not leave this house.”

  He turned on his heel and strode for the door with Sergei in tow. Quentin went after him.

  “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “To oversee my men,” Sergei said over his shoulder. “We need to remove every trace of our presence on this island. I am thinking we should set fire to the house just before we leave. It will be easiest.” He left.

  “What?” Quentin raced after him. “You aren’t going to burn anything. I paid a fortune for this—”

  The door slammed shut, cutting off his final words. Once their footsteps had receded down the hallway, I gave my ropes an experimental tug. No slack, no way to wiggle free. I swore under my breath. Maybe I could find a way to break my chair. No, too noisy. I wanted to scream in fear and frustration.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve managed to work your hands free and were just biding your time until they left,” Uncle Lawrence said. His eyes were remarkably clear for a man who’d been babbling about aliens and the CIA mere moments ago.

  I glared at him. “Faker.”

  “Of course.” The wild look stole back over his face. “The CIA has bugged my house and they report everything to the Mercurians, yep, yep. You bet.” His expression returned to normal. “You can get away with a lot when people underestimate you.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “My equipment belt and the weapons in it are at the bottom of Lake Erie along with your truck. No one knows where we are or how to find us. We’re both tied up tight by a bunch of thugs who are going to sell a dozen terrified little kids into prostitution. They’re also going to burn this house down, probably with us in it. Have I underestimated anything?”

  “Me,” said Uncle Lawrence. “I have a knife.”

  I blinked at him. “You do? Why didn’t they find it?”

  “It’s zipped into a secret pocket at the back of my belt,” he said. “Just in case my hands were tied behind me. I can’t reach it, though—the chair slats are in the way. Can you scoot around and get it?”

  It took some scooting, but eventually our chairs were back-to-back. Every scrape and thump made my heart jump, but the door never opened. I reached backward with my bound hands and groped around until I was able to reach between the ladder-back slats and grab Uncle Lawrence’s belt. That done, I inserted a finger and found the tab of a small zipper. The tab was small and kept slipping through my fingers. Uncle Lawrence’s back was warm, and I could feel the knobs of his spine. His clothes were gritty with dirt. It felt strange to be in such close contact with him.

  “Hurry,” he said. “My cousin might come back. And my left arm is killing me.”

  “Not that I’m ungrateful or anything,” I said as I worked at the zipper, “but I thought the paranoia was just an act.”

  “It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.” He was panting, as if he couldn’t breathe right. “I found this belt in a trash can ten years ago and stored it away just in case I might need it. Once all this nonsense started up, I figured the time had come to use it.”

  I worked the little compartment open and my fingers found a sliver of metal. A sharp pain told me I had sliced a finger on it, and I hissed a little.

  “How come you pushed those pans down on me?” I asked. “And why did you keep running away from us? We were trying to help.”

  He shrugged, and the motion made me lose my grip on the stiletto. I swore, and he apologized. “I didn’t know who you were,” he said. “People kept breaking into my house, and all of them shouted that they didn’t want to hurt me, that they just wanted to help. And you were with a woman who spoke with a Russian accent.”

  “Slava,” I said. “She’s actually from Ukraine.”

  “Goodness, the difference was so obvious,” Uncle Lawrence said. “How was I supposed to know?”

  I managed to get the stiletto out of the pocket and reverse it so I held it by the handle instead of by the blade. “You should have known because you yourself pointed Belinda toward Hawk Enterprises.”

  “Ah. Figured that out, did you?”

  “Belinda said she’d found a Hawk Enterprises business card among the promotional pamphlets at her motel.” I pressed the blade against a bit of rope that felt promising and started sawing. Hard to do when you can barely move your wrists. “Hawk Enterprises doesn’t advertise, and even if we did, we wouldn’t place ads among pizza pamphlets and zoo flyers. You put that card in there, hoping Belinda would come to us and we’d come looking. What’s up with that?”

  Uncle Lawrence sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault you’re here, isn’t it?” He paused, still panting for breath. “I’m not…I’m not a good person, Terry. You don’t mind if I call you Terry, do you?”

  “As long as I can call you Uncle Lawrence,” I said. My wrists were getting sore, but the rope was parting, strand by strand.

  “Sure.” Another pause, and I sawed through another strand. “Part of what I said is the truth. I did happen to see my cousin Quentin down by the docks, and I did start spying on him. I knew about his Chicago dealings, and I was curious what he was doing in Detroit. I found out about the…the children, and I started keeping a log of all their activities. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to do. I figured the police wouldn’t believe me if I called them. I was still trying to figure out what to do when…when Howard died.” His voice grew thick, but he kept going. “I was so sad, I could barely get out of bed in the morning. I couldn’t even bear the thought of making funeral arrangements. It was too much, too overwhelming.”

  I felt a twinge of sympathy for the old guy. “He was your brother and your best friend,” I said.

  “I never married, never had children,” he said. “It was just me and Howard. I couldn’t eat or sleep or go out to hunt new stuff. I also stopped writing to Belinda. After a couple months, though, I started spying on the warehouse again, mostly for something to do. One day I was hiding in a trash bin and overheard some of the men talking about how two women from a group named Hawk Enterprises had messed up their operation in Moscow. Yerin had to flee the country, in fact, and that’s why he’s here now. I did some detective work of my own and learned you were based in Ann Arbor—a lucky break for me!”

  “Right.” The rope was about halfway cut. My wrists were on fire and my arms ached, but I gritted my teeth and kept at it.

  “I scrounged around your dumpsters and eventually found a card. I even called you once, but you told me you only worked for women. Do you remember?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. “We get about a dozen calls a month from men, actually. I’m supposed to be polite, then hang up.”

  “You were that,” Uncle Lawrence said. “Then Belinda showed up, and I realized that you wouldn’t work for me but you might work for her.”

  “Why didn’t you just go talk to her yourself?” I asked. I could barely feel my wrists now and was sawing on simple faith.

  “Because I didn’t want to put her in danger. If Yerin or Quentin saw me talk to her, they might decide she knew somethi
ng about their operation and hurt her. So I bribed a motel worker to put the Hawk Enterprises card under her door with some flyers, hoping she’d call you. She did. So you see—it’s my fault you’re here.”

  The rope parted and my left hand jerked sideways. I was so surprised, I dropped the stiletto. It clattered on the floor. I had been sawing through my own ropes. I quickly worked my hands free. Pins and needles lanced through them and I took a few seconds to shake some life back into them.

  “Where does the blackmailing fit in?” I asked, untying my ankles.

  A long pause. I untied the last rope and turned to face Uncle Lawrence. The back of his neck was bright red.

  “I told you I wasn’t a good person,” he said in a small, gasping voice. “See, I was desperate. The last of Dad’s money was gone, and I was going to lose the house and all my possessions forever. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Quentin. I know I should have gone to the police with my notebook, but I told myself they wouldn’t believe an unwashed, ragged old man like me. It was a lie, of course. I was just too scared to face them, too ashamed of…of my house. Dozens of children were sold into slavery while I watched and did nothing.”

  I didn’t say anything. He was right. How many children had paid for his inaction? On the other hand, I couldn’t hate him. In many ways, he had spent his life trapped in a terrible prison. I picked up the stiletto and started work on his ropes.

  “No!” Uncle Lawrence gasped. “I’m old, and I’ll slow you down. Get the kids out of here first—they’re more important. Every second counts.”

  I didn’t want to leave him, but I also didn’t want to argue. Uncle Lawrence was right—I had to save the kids and he would only slow me down. I darted over to the window. With one last look at the old man, I opened it, climbed out, and dropped to the ground below.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The fresh night air tasted sweet after the nicotine poison I’d been breathing inside. I dropped to the ground and scuttled into the shadows well away from the house. What time was it? I’d completely lost track, and my timetable had been bumped up. Originally I had been thinking of searching the island for a rowboat or canoe and running for help. That, however, would take several hours, well past the time Yerin planned to torch the house and flee. I had to get Uncle Lawrence and the children off the island tonight. Now.