Long Way Home

by Tom Crown

  “Everything all right here?” he asked, looking back and forth from Jenny to Ryan.

  “No,” Jenny said, shaking her head, and Ryan instantly felt his heart pounding harder. “Not even close.”

  * * * *

  Jenny knew it was time to make up her mind about what to do. She had bought herself a few minutes by claiming she needed to take a shower, but now the sound of the running water in the bathroom made it impossible for her to think. Every single drop felt like a reminder of the white lie she had told, with a towel already in her hand, to get Steve to leave her alone in this room. But it was more than a white lie about taking a shower. She was making things up constantly now, and holding back even more, and she hated the fact that no one questioned her. Perhaps she was actually very good at this? Perhaps lying and cheating came naturally to her? She didn’t even want to know the answers to those questions. And she didn’t have time to dwell on it.

  The camera with the long telephoto lens was perched on the tall drawer by the window. It was the one Steve had used the night before, the one that contained pictures of her on the bed. Had she made a fool of herself? She had gone much too far, that much she was sure of.

  A sudden urge to see what Steve had seen made her cross the room to the camera and lift it up. It was heavier than she had expected. Solid. Expensive. She didn’t know anything about professional camera equipment, she only used her phone, but when she turned it over she quickly found the memory card slot. The camera probably had a wireless connection as well, a symbol next to the memory card slot suggested as much, but she didn’t know how to use that. The card you could pull out with your fingers, which made much more sense to her, and looking at Steve’s computer she could see the matching memory card slot even from this distance.

  It only took her seconds to wake the computer up and insert the card. The computer automatically opened the folder with its images and displayed them as thumbnails. The first were of different test cars. Jenny recognized most of them, a Volvo practically disguised as a BMW, an Audi that looked like nothing special but probably was all new on the inside, and some production cars she had seen outside the hotel. When winter came, a good photographer would be able to track down cars a lot more interesting than this, all-new models in jagged checkerboard paint disguising their forms and features. She even knew of a couple of cars that would arrive in late October and early November, both American crossovers, one of them electric. Thinking about it now made her realize she had actually made a place for herself in this community, thanks to the job at the hotel. It suited her perfectly, meeting all kinds of people from all over the world, helping them find their way around, and sometimes learning their secrets. It was exciting, and it had kept her dreams alive. But she knew she shouldn’t settle for that. Her dreams had to become something more than fantasies keeping her comfortable in the dark and cold. And the time was now.

  She moved on to the next picture.

  And then her heart stopped.

  She was looking at the Russian van. Before the crash. Why would Steve have photographed that? She could understand someone taking pictures after the crash, out of pure curiosity, or morbid fascination, but to take a picture before suggested some sort of connection between him and the Russians. The mere thought made her instantly uneasy. Mats connection to these people had been bad enough. Disastrous. Could Steve really be involved with them as well? It didn’t make any sense. He was a test car photographer, an outsider who didn’t know anybody here, and who wouldn’t stay long.

  A far more likely scenario was that she had trouble trusting people, now more than ever, and a strong tendency to turn away anything good coming her way. And she had promised herself she wouldn’t do that anymore.

  She looked over her shoulder. The door was still closed.

  The next several pictures were very similar to the first, shot from a distance through the forest, the last one even showing the faces Alex and Roman, and she realized she wasn’t actually looking at the van that had crashed. It was the second van, the one that had come to clean everything up. The one that had come looking for the money. Thinking about that made her nervous again, but at the same time, she was starting to feel elated. This practically proved that Steve had no connection to the Russians, he had simply come upon the crash site and taken pictures of everything he had seen.

  The next couple of pictures confirmed this conclusion, with close-ups of the van Katia had ridden in, and Mats’s pickup truck. It looked worse than she had remembered it, and she quickly turned her eyes away.

  What would Steve think of her searching through his file like this? Was she just sabotaging the beginning of her first mature relationship?

  It only took her another couple of seconds to find a photo of Ryan and Katia sleeping in the living room. She zoomed in on Katia’s bag and contemplated the money hidden inside. It was impossible to tell how much it was, but the bag was heavy, and she was sure it was enough.

  Her hand had unconsciously moved to her neck and was searching for the missing necklace. She stopped, then rubbed the scratched skin instead.

  Could she kill a man? She wanted to, when she thought of how Alex had pressed his mouth against hers. It hadn’t been a kiss, not even a terrible one, just a sickening act of violence. A punch in the face felt much better, the impact sudden, the contact minimal, the whole thing over before you even knew what had happened. Not so with a tongue in your mouth.

  She heard footsteps outside the door, followed by a soft knock.

  “Are you decent?” Steve asked through the door, with a humorous tone that made her practically see the slight smile on his face.

  “Just a second,” she called back. It would take too long to properly shut the computer off and put the memory card back in the camera, and it was very possible that the computer would make some instantly recognizable sound when she logged off, so instead she switched between the images until she landed on a rather seductive photo of herself. She decided to keep it on the screen and turned around.

  “As decent as I’m going to be,” she said. “Come in.”

  Steve opened the door, and she immediately thought she saw a flash of anger in his eyes. He stopped in the doorway.

  “I was just...” she said and gestured toward the screen. She didn’t offer an explanation, just a slightly embarrassed smile, but it seemed to be enough. His face was soft, his eyes warm.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  “Sure, I’m always hungry,” she said in a fun tone, with a tilt of her head, and a look from under her wet unruly hair that was meant to put him in a playful frame of mind.

  He stepped closer. The smile had worked, and perhaps too well. But then his attention drifted back to the screen right behind her. He just looked for a moment, studying her photo with the hint of a frown, and seemed to be considering his words carefully.

  “Perhaps I should have given you some more time,” he said.

  She took in his face, watching for trouble, but he just looked like a perfect gentleman, hardly capable of anger at all, at least not anger directed at her.

  There were so many ways to bring heartache into a woman’s life. Mats had been a brute, always jealous, but charming when he wanted to be, and he had protected her for the most part. He had been in love with her, in his own troubled way, she had never doubted that. Steve, on the other hand, was someone she still didn’t understand.

  Something broke through her memory and she felt tears stream into her eyes. She thought of the one time Mats hadn’t stood up for her. The one time she had really needed him. When people he had angered had taken it out on her. When it had mattered the most, he’d done absolutely nothing. Nothing but turn his back, and then ask for forgiveness. She realized now that she had never given it. Some things were simply unforgivable.

  “Hey, there,” Steve said softly. “Are you all right?”

  Jenny shook her head, but then nodded. “I’m just being emotional. I haven’t slept or eaten right. It’s nothing rea
lly.” She wiped the tears from her eyes, looked up, and smiled. “Thanks for asking. And, about last night, if that’s what you meant, I didn’t need time.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. He didn’t blurt things out the way she had a habit of doing.

  “I didn’t either,” he finally said.

  They looked at each other in silence for a long moment, until she finally looked down, feeling a blush coloring her cheeks.

  Steve turned his gaze back over her shoulder. “That’s certainly a masterpiece if I’ve ever seen one.”

  Jenny turned around and saw her photo on the screen. Steve leaned over her shoulder to look closer. She could feel his breath on her neck. Then he touched her. He was touching the scratch left by the necklace, and she tried not to react. She kept her eyes on the screen and only smiled slightly as he moved his finger over her skin.

  “Did I do that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “I don’t remember that,” he said.

  “No, I...” she began. His hand was still on her skin. She reached up. “Yes. Probably you did.”

  Their hands met on the scratch. “I’m sorry then,” he said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Don’t be.” She touched his face, and he seemed to brighten. He straightened and took a step toward the door. Jenny smiled and held on to his hand as long as she could, as he moved away.

  “So, hungry?” he asked. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

  “In Lapland? I wouldn’t survive a day.”

  Steve grinned and headed toward the living room.

  Jenny got up and closed the door behind him. She walked back to the laptop and brought up the photo of the bag with the money again. Katia may have earned that money, if you chose to look at it that way, but she had also stolen it.

  Jenny thought of Mats again and that last time he owned people serious money.

  This time, she was prepared. This time, she would protect herself.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  KATIA SAT ALONE on the back porch that overlooked the lake behind Steve’s cabin. She liked this particular spot, the open scenery, the vast sky. It made her think of people from long ago, Stone Age hunters who would probably have set up their primitive camp on the very same spot for the very same reasons. Somehow that made her feel connected to something. To humanity, or at least to life of some kind.

  She turned her eyes down, to her reflection in the mirror resting in her hand. She had taken a shower after Jenny had and was now applying makeup to her face. She hadn’t gone a day without makeup in a very long time. It had become a habit, but also a layer of protection, an illusion she had learned to live with and at times even use to her advantage. But it had kept her in their world, and she didn’t want to be there anymore. She didn’t want to look like they had made her look.

  She felt her hands start to tremble, and soon they were shaking so badly she couldn’t see her reflection anymore. Her heart was racing, her skin burning, and suddenly fear was overwhelming her.

  She closed her eyes and instantly realized this place wasn’t that different from the place she first had been taken to somewhere in northern Italy. A house in the country, remote, isolated. But that place had been run down, dark, and uninviting, somehow holding thirty girls cramped together like cattle. Half had been in the basement, half in the garage. Seeing so many of them and the rooms so crowded had sent her into complete terror. She hadn’t known that kidnappings took place on such an industrial scale. It was unavoidable to conclude that the men somehow had considerable influence. A lot of people had to know what was going on. It was too big an operation, too big a secret. It couldn’t really be a secret.

  The girls weren’t allowed to talk to each other, but some had anyway, and Katia had soon understood she had come to the place where new girls learned, where they were broken, and taught. The makeup. The smiles. Their place in the world. Every aspect of who they would be. They learned very quickly, or, as she had concluded right from the beginning, they died right there.

  She had been put in the basement, with the difficult ones, and the rats. There had been no light, no water, no bathroom. She understood what would happen to her, more or less, in such a place, and she began plotting a way out even before it all started. She understood what would happen, those first hours, but she hadn’t been prepared for the brutality of it. To be chained on a dirt floor. To get food only once a day. To watch the girls fade, hour by hour. It had struck her as wasteful and wrong in every way, even from her kidnappers’ point of view, but she soon learned that brutality and wastefulness were ever-present in the world they had created. The girls were so easy to replace. They were expendable, and supposed to know that.

  Already the first night some of the girls had been auctioned off. They had gone upstairs, in small groups, and only some had come back. Some were crying, others were stumbling as they came down the stairs with fresh bruises and stains of blood.

  Katia had cowered in a corner that first night, and in the morning she had continued to stay down, avoiding attention, avoiding getting hurt. It hadn’t been that difficult the first couple of days. There had been so many girls, some rebellious, others striking and impossible not to notice. Katia had tried to position herself in the middle, or just below that hopefully, definitely somewhere uninteresting.

  “Hey, shy girl!” a heavy-set Serbian man had called out on the third day. “Natasha!” They always used that name, as a joke, as a way to emphasize that these girls were all the same to them. A couple of the girls were actually named Natasha, but they looked away like everyone else. The man unbuckled his belt and wrapped it once around his right hand. He stepped down from the stairs and strode into the middle of the room. The girls moved away, looking down, avoiding attention just like Katia had during the days before. All that was over for her now. Everything was over.

  Her plans for escape had been futile, and in a way she had known that truth from the beginning. It had been a way to stay sane for at least another couple of days. A way to survive. She had learned many different techniques since then. Detachment. Blame. Indifference. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Collaboration. And of course, her never-ending plans of escape.

  The latter had been particularly true along the E55 highway that ran between the Czech Republic and Germany, where girls lined the road for miles and miles. Katia only worked there for a few days but still remembered a woman, a tourist in a passing car, who had rolled down a window.

  “Go home to your family!” she had called out with an accusing glare. That car had passed quickly, but the look on the woman’s face and the tone of her voice had made Katia certain she would have said more if given the time. She would have explained that Katia needed to pull herself together, get off the street, and go back to school.

  If only they had stopped the car. But only customers stopped. And worse, the police.

  Katia had watched the car go, and then glanced over at the BMW where Jiri had been sitting. He hadn’t noticed the exchange. If he had, there would have been a lot of trouble. She was only supposed to interact with customers.

  All of that was a year ago now. She’d been through a lot since then. The Lapland winter. The never-ending darkness. She didn’t know if any of it would have been easier somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and sunny. Perhaps the scenery would have made absolutely no difference. Perhaps it would have made things even worse. But she couldn’t take another winter, that much she was sure of.

  She noticed Ryan watching her from the window and put down the mirror, wondering what he was thinking. She knew there were good men still in this world. Her father had been a good man, and Ryan seemed to be one too. She stood up and smiled at him hesitantly, but she couldn’t see his reaction from the reflection in the window.

  Suddenly Steve stepped out beside her. Katia flinched and almost tripped over her feet.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you there.”

  Katia turned around and instantly felt her entire bod
y tense. Behind him, through the open door, she could see Jenny leaning over the backpack Katia had foolishly left on the sofa, and her intent was obvious.

  Katia took a step forward just as Jenny reached out and wrapped her fingers around one of the straps. She opened her mouth to call out but stopped herself before any words came out. Jenny was already lifting the backpack from the sofa, and doing so with a purposefulness that plainly revealed she knew what she was after. Katia moved past Steve into the living room, but by then Jenny had already backed away and slipped into the bedroom.

  Katia crossed the living room floor with a pounding heart.

  She had gotten too comfortable. Not anymore.

  The bedroom door swung shut in her face. She pushed it open and saw Jenny on the bed, already counting the money.

  Jenny looked up, a bill in hand.

  “What are you doing?” Katia struggled to keep her voice from breaking.

  “Is this yours?” Jenny grabbed the bag from the bed and took an angry step forward. “There’s almost a hundred thousand!”

  “So?” Katia stepped inside the room. “You’ll take it then? You’ll just—“ She lunged for the bag, but Jenny pulled away. The bag fell open and the remaining money and the passports spilled out onto the floor. A hundred thousand looked like a lot, but it wasn’t. Alex could get that much in a week in the wintertime when everyone worked around the clock.

  Katia looked at the money now on the floor. She made no move to bend down. She wasn’t that stupid. Jenny’s feet were close to it, close enough to kick her in the face, and even if Jenny wasn’t a fighter, getting down on the floor was an unnecessary risk to take.

  Jenny, however, did just that. She knelt on the floor and began to gather everything and push it back into the bag, the passports in a side pocket, the money to fill the bag from the bottom up.