by Sarai Walker
“She’s a good girl,” Soledad’s mother repeated many times through her tears, and then she added: “My Jenny wouldn’t do anything wrong.”
Soledad’s three sisters rose from their chairs in unison, demanding the interview be terminated, but it was too late. The agents had heard what their mother said.
After her connections to Leeta Albridge and captain Missy Tompkins were uncovered, federal agents interviewed Soledad’s other friends and her associates from the army. In the Inwood section of Manhattan, FBI agents searched the apartment of specialist Agnes Szydlowski and her husband. As medics in Afghanistan, Agnes and Soledad had saved each other’s lives. Agnes drank coffee and smoked cigarettes at her kitchen table as the agents dusted every surface in her home for fingerprints. “I love Soledad like a sister,” Agnes said, “but you’re wasting your time. She’s never been in my apartment.”
Investigators later discovered that Agnes and her husband owned a motorcycle, the same make and model as the one witnesses in Times Square described on the night Stella Cross and her husband were murdered.
“That motorcycle was stolen months ago,” Agnes said. She said nothing else until she had a lawyer.
Across the Atlantic, authorities in Scotland began to investigate British Army captain Gwendolen Campbell at the request of the FBI. During Gwendolen’s first deployment to Afghanistan, the Taliban shot down a helicopter she was riding in, leaving her blinded in one eye and missing several fingers. Despite her injuries and the deaths of her fellow soldiers, she survived the attack thanks to American medics on the ground—Soledad and Agnes. Rarely did a day pass without Gwendolen thinking of the two women who had saved her life. When she heard the news that Soledad’s daughter had died, Gwendolen felt wounded, as if it had happened to her own family. She traveled from her home in Glasgow to California to attend the funeral. After she returned home, her family and friends reported that she fell out of touch, which wasn’t in keeping with her normal character. No one had been able to find her.
Investigators searched every residence associated with Captain Gwendolen Campbell in England and Scotland. They received a tip about a Highlands farmhouse not far from the village where the Empire Media CEO’s nephew had been found wandering one morning weeks earlier, released by his kidnappers. There was no direct evidence that Gwendolen had been in the farmhouse, and the nephew could not identify her, but there was a knife in the kitchen with traces of blood and blond hairs on it, which were later proven to be a DNA match for the CEO’s twin brother. On the bathroom mirror was a message written with red lipstick: For Jennifer, with no regrets.
Gwendolen’s passport had recently been logged at the airport in Buenos Aires. Since then there had been no sign of her.
Soledad Ayala (Aliases: Jennifer Ayala, Jenny Ayala) was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, the only woman there, with a promise of a $100,000 reward for information leading to her capture.
In an interview with The Nola and Nedra Show, Cheryl Crane-Murphy said, “Before we send a lynch mob after this woman, might I remind everyone that Soledad Ayala earned the Silver Star for bravery in Afghanistan? She was not able to collect her award at the White House for obvious reasons, but she still deserves our respect.”
“Might one call her an American hero?” asked Nedra Feldstein-Delaney.
“One might,” said Nola Larson King.
• • •
ON FRIDAY, I WAS AWAKENED by the music: “. . . your mama’s in the trunk of Daddy’s car / no baby, she’s not gonna wake up / you see, Mama could never keep that big mouth shut . . .”
I placed the stacks of cash in white envelopes and stuffed them into a paper bag that Julia could take with her should I decide to give her the money. As I was folding up the bag, my phone rang.
“Change of plans,” Julia said, nearly breathless. “Come to the Beauty Closet right away.”
“Why can’t you come here?” I preferred Julia on my turf. Besides, I wasn’t allowed back in the Austen Tower.
“I’ll explain when you get here. Ask for me at the desk. We have all new security staff, so they won’t recognize you. Use a fake name. Hurry.”
I rushed to shower and dress. While lacing up my boots, I heard the doorbell ring. “Bomb threat!” Marlowe shouted from downstairs. I was ready to go. I’d folded the paper bag into a firm rectangular parcel, which I now stuffed under the waistband of my oatmeal skirt, where it stayed pressed against my belly. I put on a loose jacket and draped a scarf around my neck to hide the extra bulk.
“Bomb threat!” Sana yelled, leaving three rapid knocks on my door. A bomb was the least of my worries. I was more concerned about being mugged.
I followed the women out the front door, careful to avoid eye contact with the policewoman who was shepherding us out. If something went wrong, it was possible I wouldn’t be returning to Calliope House. I looked at it over my shoulder on my way to Sixth Avenue, its plain brown exterior belying the beating red heart inside.
The other women took their places on the benches, but I hailed a taxi. “Just where do you think you’re going, Sugar Plum?” Sana said. “Bomb threats are a group activity.”
“She’s abandoning us,” Verena said.
“You’re going to miss out on ice cream,” Marlowe added.
I slipped into the back seat of a waiting taxi. “I’m not abandoning you,” I said before closing the door. “I have errands to do and then I’ll come home. I promise.” Driving away, I watched them through the back window: Verena and Rubí, Marlowe and Huck, Sana—the usual gang, my friends. For them it was an ordinary day.
In Times Square, crowds on the sidewalks stood still, gazing up at Soledad’s face on the jumbo screen, as if toward some celestial event. It was too soon to know whether Jennifer—Soledad’s all-American girl who had morphed into something else—was an out-of-control blaze leaving only destruction or a controlled burn intended to purify. I patted my stomach as I weaved through the people, feeling the money under my clothes, as well as my thumping pulse. I entered the Austen Tower and went through the metal detector. I gave the guard a name, not my real name, and waited for Julia. When she arrived, I saw that her façade was already crumbling. A bit of flab hung over the waistband of her pants; her straightened hair was beginning to frizz and coil; her makeup had faded, leaving nothing but a faint outline of her features, her face that of an old china doll that had been bleached in the sun.
She didn’t speak until we were in the elevator. “Can you believe they offered to throw me a goodbye party this afternoon?” Julia snorted.
On the outside of the door to the Beauty Closet was a sign that read INVENTORY IN PROGRESS. ENTRY FORBIDDEN! Once we were inside, Julia locked the door and disarmed the keypad. The Beauty Closet matched Julia in its disarray. Hundreds of tubes of lipstick and mascara had crashed to the floor, as well as bottles of a perfume called Hussy, which had shattered, leaving liquid and glass everywhere. There was a stench, the sweat of a thousand hussies, which made it painful to breathe.
“How much money did you bring?”
“Twenty thousand,” I said, gazing at the door, longing to open it and flee.
“What did you tell Verena?” Julia was stuffing files from her desk into her bag.
“I didn’t tell Verena anything. This is my money.”
Julia opened her mouth as if to speak, then reconsidered. Her lips, in Muted Rose, turned into a half-smile, and she nodded. “I’m sorry I’ve lied to you, but I didn’t want to involve you unless it was absolutely necessary. When she came to me, I had to help her. You understand, don’t you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Julia attempted to tame her wild hair, smoothing it with her hands, but it made no difference; each flattened curl sprang back up. She was serious and fearful. She didn’t even flirt with me. Crushed cakes of purple and blue eye shadow bruised the white floor around her. “Come with me,” she said.
I followed her down the Lips aisle, left at Mascara, right
at Concealer, to the end of the Blush corridor. Julia wasn’t wearing her heels, just simple brown flats, and I had never seen her move so quickly. I struggled to keep up.
At the end of the corridor was a pile of boxes sitting in front of a blank space of white wall. Julia pushed the boxes aside, grunting and puffing. Once the boxes were cleared away, I saw a cutout line in the drywall. Julia wrenched it open with a crowbar, revealing a hidden space.
The space was glowing with yellow light coming from two lamps balanced on a steel beam; beyond the lamps it was black. Julia bent over and stepped inside. She motioned for me to follow, but my limbs were heavy. I couldn’t move.
“You wanted the truth,” she said. “It’s in here.”
I entered the space. A figure was sitting atop a sleeping bag in a dim corner to my right. As I moved closer I saw she was wearing a gray tracksuit, her arms and legs pulled tight around her, headphones dangling around her neck. Her dark hair was nearly shaved off. She squinted up at me, a tiny, startled creature.
“Leeta?”
Julia moved one of the lamps so I could see her better. Her face was scrubbed and pale. Without the long hair and eye makeup, without the colorful tights and boots, she was pared down, almost naked.
“It’s Plum.”
“I know who you are, Louise B.” Her voice was raspy, unused. She scooted out from the corner where she was sitting, moving into the light. She wasn’t the looming figure I’d seen on the screen in Times Square, but I was finally beginning to recognize her face, that face that had haunted me for so long.
“It’s really you.”
Behind me, Julia was sweeping up the concrete floor, trying to remove all possible traces of Leeta from the hiding space. “Go on,” she said over the broom handle. “She won’t bite.”
I unbuttoned my jacket and wriggled out of it, leaving the paper bag under my waistband, and maneuvered myself onto the hard floor to face Leeta. “Your hair is so short,” I said.
She turned away, fidgeting, reaching for the locks that were no longer there. “I’m not what you expected. I’m being hunted like an animal, so I’ve become one.” She backed into her corner again, pulling the gray hood up over her head. The face that peeked out at me from beneath the heavy fabric, now darkened by shadow, had been spotted all over the country, all over the world, but Leeta had been hiding beneath fifty-two stories of Stanley Austen’s media empire the whole time. I thought of the barricades outside the building and had to smile. The enemy was inside.
“Did you bring money?” she asked.
I kept staring at her, only semi-aware that she had asked me a question. She asked again. “Money. Did you bring it?”
I reached under my shirt and removed the paper bag, but I didn’t hand it to her. Julia wheeled a large brown crate into the hiding space. “Five minutes,” she said.
Leeta bounced her legs up and down, slipping her hand beneath the hood to reach for her hair again, then moving her hand to her mouth and nibbling one of her fingers. She eyed the crate. “I want to see the sun. Even if they capture me or shoot me, at least I’ll have a taste of freedom one last time. Nothing feels as good as freedom.”
The playful girl from the café was gone. Leeta, stuck in a dark cave for months, hunted by the police with their guns and dogs and helicopters—she was the reality of everything that had been happening. I worried about what they would do if they found her. She seemed so alone down here, as if she’d been abandoned.
“What happened to Soledad?” I felt an almost electric charge saying the name to someone who knew Soledad, the woman whose grief and rage for her daughter burned as brightly as a star.
“All the women have scattered. I don’t know where.”
“How did you meet Soledad?” I knew what I’d heard on the news, but the details had been vague.
Leeta was silent, as if she’d closed up in her dark corner, but then she began to recount the story. In college, she was required to sign up for a community service project. She volunteered at a women’s clinic; Soledad worked there and trained Leeta to become a rape crisis counselor. The clinic offered abortions and birth control in addition to rape counseling. “Working there was intense,” Leeta said. “Bulletproof windows and an armed guard outside. Women had to pass by a guy with a gun just to get rape counseling, which is fucked up. Working there, it was easy to feel that it was us against the world—and the world didn’t care. Sometimes me and Soledad would go for drinks after our shift, to cope with hearing so many awful stories and seeing so many women cry.” Soledad was used to it, but Leeta said she struggled with the job.
Soledad’s house in Santa Mariana was an hour away, but Leeta went there for barbecues and movie nights sometimes, which is when she spent time with Luz. “When I got homesick, Soledad mothered me. How embarrassing to need a mother at my age, right?” Leeta’s eyes, which had been wide and alert, softened. She blinked slowly. “Do you want to know what I did for Luz and Soledad, Louise B.? I think you need to know.”
“Tell her,” Julia said as she continued cleaning. I was still holding the paper bag and set it down on the floor next to me, wiping my palms on my knees, conscious of my colorful tights and boots, wondering if Leeta thought me a fool.
She explained that after Luz’s funeral, Soledad insisted that her relatives return to Texas right away. Alone at home in Santa Mariana, she invited Leeta over and told her that her friend Missy was going to kidnap Wilson and Martinez. They couldn’t get to the other rapists, who were locked up, so the two ringleaders would pay for all their sins. “I asked Soledad why she wanted to kidnap the men—I was stunned at what she was suggesting—but she just said they were going to get what they deserved. This wasn’t the Soledad I knew.” Leeta tried to talk her out of it for Soledad’s own sake, so she wouldn’t risk going to prison, but she’d made up her mind.
Soledad couldn’t be directly involved in the kidnapping because she would have been an obvious suspect, so she asked Leeta to go to the bar where Wilson and Martinez hung out and lure them to a vacant lot, where Missy would be waiting for them. “I would be the bait in a short dress and blond wig,” Leeta said. “I wasn’t in my right mind then. What’d happened to Luz was the worst thing that’d happened to anybody I’d ever known. I just kept thinking of her and all those crying women at the clinic and how this was never going to end. Despite my shock at Soledad’s plan, I began to wonder if she was right. Maybe we needed to go to the source of the problem.”
It wasn’t difficult to lure the men from the bar. They followed Leeta to the car, eager and excited at the thought of sex, and she drove them the ten miles to where Missy was waiting. “Being in the car with them made me sick. Those two scumbags killed Luz, each of them and the other men taking a piece of her, and I wanted to pull the car over and run into a field and scream, but I couldn’t do that, so I drove and screamed in my head. The men were talking to me in the car but all I could hear was my screaming.”
When they arrived at the darkened lot north of town, Missy was waiting with a black van. “They suspected something was wrong. They were scumbags but they weren’t stupid.” Leeta said they were reluctant to get out of the car. When they finally did, Missy Tasered them and tied them up. Leeta helped Missy load them into the back of the van and then Missy told her to drive away and keep going, out of Santa Mariana and as far away as she could get.
I had no idea how to reply. Leeta stared from beneath her hood into the darkness that surrounded us. I could only imagine the scenes that played in her mind, that would always play. In my head I saw the Dirty Dozen dropped into the desert, the Harbor Freeway interchange, and all of the other attacks linked to Jennifer. “Did you know this was the beginning of something bigger?”
Leeta said she didn’t. Days after the abduction, she called Soledad from the desert motel where she’d taken refuge and asked again what she was going to do with the men. “She said she’d let them linger for a while, that they weren’t going to be first. I didn’t know what she
meant by first. I didn’t ask. That’s the last time I talked to her.” After the Jennifer attacks began to unfold, the first publicized attack with its link to the military, Leeta wondered if they were connected to Soledad and Missy. She tried to contact Soledad again, but it was Missy who replied. She and Leeta talked on the phone and through email, but Missy never admitted to anything. After Wilson and Martinez were killed with the rest of the Dirty Dozen, she knew for certain. “Missy was worried that I’d go to the police, so she wanted to keep tabs on me. I didn’t go to the police, but I told my roommate I knew who Jennifer was. I just couldn’t keep it inside anymore.” Leeta knew she’d made a mistake by telling her roommate. That’s when she went underground.
“How have you coped with hiding down here?” I asked, tugging on my collar. Finally, I was getting the answers to my questions, but what I really wanted to do was leave the suffocating hiding space. Leeta and I had both been underground—she in the Beauty Closet, me in Verena’s basement. New York was full of these dark places.
“During the day I know Julia is on the other side of the wall, but at night . . . sometimes there’s that screaming in my head again.”
“Why don’t you turn yourself in? Your sentence might not even be that long.” I was out of my depth, but this seemed like the sensible thing to suggest. Prison couldn’t be worse than this hiding space.
“The police wouldn’t believe anything I’d tell them. They’re out for blood. They’d want me to turn against Soledad, and I’m not going to do that. The truth is, I’m scared.”