Crossroad
Page 28
Her head snaps around at the call of a bird in the forest. When she turns back, she lets out a noisy breath. “Shelby Pride, okay? Now can we get the hell out of here?”
FORTY-NINE
Needful Girl
When I wake up, Shelby Pride is sitting on a stool at my side, her eyes fixed on the empty space above my head. I don’t know where we are.
After she led me away from the gully, we followed the canyon rim downhill, chased by morning birdsong, and crossed a groomed trail. From there the trees thinned, but I struggled to keep my feet on the uneven ground. My ankle throbbed, and the growing daylight made my head pound. Before long, Shelby was forced to half-carry me. When she finally pushed open a door and led me into a dark, airless space smelling of ash, I half-believed she’d brought me to a crematorium. She told me to lie down, and I didn’t argue. I welcomed the flames.
I’m lying on a narrow camp bed with a couple of blankets for padding. My boots and socks are off, exposing my purple, swollen ankle. Ante mortem lividity. She hands me a tin cup. The water is earthy and metallic.
“I have to pee,” I say.
“There’s an outhouse around back. Can you walk?”
“I better try.”
She offers me a pair of old rubber clogs. “I checked them for spiders.” With her help, I hobble through the low doorway of what turns out to be a small log cabin built on a ridge overlooking the Palmer River Valley. Under the late afternoon sun, the river is a molten ribbon winding through a basin of ochre, red, and blocks of irrigated green. Another time I might find the view breathtaking.
My ankle holds up well enough on the short walk to the rickety outhouse. Flies and mosquitoes buzz around my head as I relieve myself.
Back inside, Shelby returns to the stool, and I drop onto the bed. I seem to have slept the day away, but the short foray has worn me out. In the heavy silence, I scan the cabin. There’s an old kitchen table with a pair of mismatched chairs and a wooden rocker in front of a stone fireplace. Shelves hold cups and plates, an iron skillet and a Dutch oven, plus a couple of ancient paperbacks: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh. A wall calendar shows a faded photo of a mountain lake. August 2002.
My eye stops on an exquisitely carved wooden leg mounted above the cold hearth. Though I’ve never seen it, I know at once who made it and wore it. Eugène de Bouton.
A sudden sadness comes over me. “This cabin belongs to my uncle.”
“I had to break in.” Shelby’s face colors. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“I’m sure he won’t mind.” The Rémy who picked me up at the train station wouldn’t. “How did you find this place?”
“After the crash, all I wanted was to get away, even though I could barely walk.”
“Were you hurt?”
“Not in the crash.” She puts her hand on her stomach and laughs quietly. Sadly. “Somehow I made it to the trees. From there, I just kept going. But every little noise scared me, made me think they—”
She shakes her head, not ready to talk about them, or why she’d been at the crossroad. She’s telling her story backward, but I don’t press. It’s enough to listen for now.
“I had this idea that I should get to a phone, but who would I call? My dad, maybe, though I half-thought he’d just turn me over to the cops. I suppose that sounds crazy, but I was pretty messed up. I kept thinking how maybe I deserved whatever happened to me.” Her voice breaks a little. “Not that it mattered. There were no houses, no people. Just trees.”
She’d climb a hill, rest, trudge down the other side. She drank at streams, rested whenever her legs threatened to give out. From ridges, she could see the desert far behind. The distance made her feel safe, but at one point she heard a gunshot. That drove her deeper into the forest. Then, late in the afternoon she rounded a hogback and realized just how far she’d come. Across the dell, at the top of a sloping lava field, she saw the place she’d barely escaped the day before. An old building inside a stone wall beside a tumbledown cemetery.
“The Hensley Asylum,” I say, almost to myself.
“I turned and ran. No idea how far, but finally I came over a hill and saw this place a ways off. No one home. I had to break the padlock with a rock.” She drops her gaze. “There was a little canned food, blankets, the bed. But no power and no phone.”
Afraid to light a fire, she ate cold expired soup.
When no one came that night or all the next day, she ventured out. In the woods, after dark, she came across a band of backpackers, college-aged boys. Their noise and talk made her nervous. She was afraid if she asked them for help they’d call the police, if not do something worse. What happened at the crossroad never left her mind. So once they fell asleep, she snuck into camp and raided the food bag they’d hung between two trees.
If only one of them had left out a phone.
“How long have you been here?”
She shrugs and looks away.
“Since the crash?”
“I’ve kinda lost track of time.” She hesitates, then adds, “Are they looking for me?”
Pride was—though I don’t know why he kept it a secret. I don’t have the heart to tell her father is dead. I can see him in her now, that familiarity I’d half-recognized in the forest. She has the same green-flecked brown eyes. I can see the woman from the locket as well, her nose if not her smile. Shelby has little reason to smile—and may not for a long time.
I think of Duniway smacking the window frame of the white pickup. “I know it’s been a week,” he’d said. “I’m doing everything I can.” I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d sent Quince out to search for Shelby, his expeditions disguised as fishing trips. Meyer too, and maybe even Duniway himself when he wasn’t pretending to investigate me.
“I saw helicopters flying around while you were asleep,” she says.
“They’re for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I became a problem. Like you.”
She looks up. “What do you know about me?”
Not much, but I can guess a little. “You’ve been missing at least since March,” I theorize, because that’s when Pride left for his sabbatical. “Did you run away?”
She nods. “It was a lot longer ago than that, though.” Her face darkens with shame.
“It’s okay, Shelby. Really.” I try to speak with the conviction I feel, but I’m not sure she can hear it. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
She’s quiet for a long time. “What did you call that place?”
“The Hensley Asylum?”
“Yeah.” She examines her dirty fingernails. “You gotta understand, I wanted to be there.” The disbelief must show on my face, because she quickly adds, “No, really. They said they’d take care of me, even pay me.” A chuff pushes through her teeth. “Five thousand dollars if I agreed to give up the baby for adoption.”
“How did it happen?”
“Nathan and I hooked up at a party.” She thinks I’m asking about the pregnancy, but I don’t interrupt her. “I wasn’t in a very good place. My mother … she got breast cancer.” Her voice breaks and she wipes her eyes. “They caught it too late.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Fitz stirs but doesn’t speak. I watch her fingers twist in her lap, and then I manage a hollow “I’m sorry.”
She gives a little shrug, like she’s heard that a thousand times. “After she died, my dad just checked out. I mean, he was there, around the house and stuff. But he might as well have been gone. He stopped talking to me or even noticing me. He’d get up in the morning and take a shower, put on a suit. Go to work, I guess. I’d ask him questions, but he wouldn’t answer. At first I just tried to do my own thing, but the more time that passed, the harder it got to even be in the house when he was there, and even harder when he wasn’t. But it wasn’t until he forgot my birthday that I realized I couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s not like I wanted a party or anything. Mom had only been gone about
a month. But I guess I hoped he’d sit me down and give me a little pep talk or something. ‘Hard to celebrate, but you’re still my daughter,’ or some bullshit. But it was like I didn’t exist. The next morning, I left the house and didn’t go back.”
“That’s when you ran away?”
She nods. “Yep, on October twenty-second, the day after my Sweet Sixteen.” Another sad laugh. “I didn’t plan it, exactly. First I went and hung out with some friends, and then I ended up at that party with Nathan. We knew each other because our dads worked together, but we weren’t friends exactly. He was just someone my age to hang out with at the firm picnic. But at the party he started coming on to me, saying all this stuff about how he’d always liked me. I knew he was trying to get into my pants, but I figured why not? Since Nathan’s parents were away, we went to his house. He had a condom, but when it broke, I didn’t even care. It was just the one time.” She shakes her head. “He fell asleep like the second he finished, and I ended up staying over. But the next morning Nathan was being clingy, like we were suddenly a thing. He wanted to trade cell numbers, hang out. Have sex again. It was starting to feel like too much. I wasn’t sure I even wanted a boyfriend—him or anyone else. But I said I’d think about it. Before I left, he wrote his number on my arm with a Sharpie.”
“Where did you go?”
“I’d seen this crowd in downtown Portland, kids with no place to stay.”
I nod, remembering seeing kids like that with Uncle Rémy, my first morning off the train.
“I started hanging out with them. Probably sounds stupid, but I actually felt better with them, sleeping under bridges, than I did in my own home. At first it was just going to be a few days, long enough to freak my dad out. Or maybe he’d call the cops and I’d get dragged back. But a few days turned into a few weeks and then a few months. Long enough to figure my dad must really not have cared where I was. Then I found out I was pregnant. I didn’t actually believe it at first, but my period had stopped and my pants were getting tight. One of the other girls took me to this youth outreach place downtown. They have free pregnancy tests. I found out I was going to have a baby by peeing on a wand behind a bush.”
I have to suppress the urge to shake my head. I don’t want her to stop talking.
“My friends all said I should get an abortion, but by then I barely had money to eat. Just what I could panhandle. I even considered going home again, until someone hooked me up with a woman who said she could arrange a private adoption. I’d live in a facility with doctors and nurses and stuff. All hush-hush, because some parents would try to interfere, but she knew we young women were capable of making our own decisions.”
“What was the woman’s name?” I ask. I’m not surprised when Shelby says, “Lydia.”
But Lydia Koenig didn’t bring Shelby to the Hensley School with all the other teen moms. Make Motherhood a Mother Habit, my ass. Even as she mouthed platitudes about helping young woman make a future for themselves, Lydia was luring the most desperate, like Shelby, to the Asylum. The resort would provide the perfect cover for her clients. Fly in for a weekend of golf and pick up a baby, like Cricket and Stedman shopping for antiques.
The long drive from Portland in the back seat of a Cadillac left Shelby unsettled. The driver, a guy named Tucker, kept staring at her in the rearview mirror. “At least the place wasn’t too bad,” she said. “Old, but clean. I had my own room, the food was decent, and there really were a doctor and nurse.”
I actually smile a little. “But.”
“Yeah. But.” She raises her eyes to mine. “They had us locked on one of the upper floors with the windows boarded up. ‘For our safety,’ which I guess we half-believed.”
“We?”
“It was mainly me and this other girl, Alyssa. Two other girls were there when I arrived, but only for a few weeks. Alyssa called us Slut Team Six, which she thought was extra funny because there were only four of us.” She smiles.
I wonder what happened to those other girls. Were they really paid off, or were they turned over to Tucker Gill, the man with a history of pandering? Even more troubling is the question of how many might’ve ended up in the Bouton retort.
Fitz was right. I should have kicked Quince into the river.
“I mean, it could have been worse. We had books and movies to keep from getting bored, and crafts and shit. And the nurse, Fina, was really sweet. Her office had the only open window, and during my checkups, I’d watch birds circling over the forest. She’d let me stay as long as I wanted after she finished the exams.”
“What about the doctor?”
“Only saw him a couple times. He did a checkup when I first got there, said I was fine. Otherwise, he only came around for the births.” She trails off, thinking. “Never even knew his name.”
Must be Varney unless there’s somehow another doctor mixed up in all this. “How long were you there?”
“Like four months.”
Jesus. “And then you had your baby?”
“Yeah.” She presses her hand against her stomach again. “That’s when it all went wrong.”
Her eyes lose focus. When she finally goes on, it’s in a tone you might use to describe a trip to the store. Had lunch, ran some errands. Gave birth. Not so different from what I’ve been doing since I awoke in that empty hospital room when I was eight years old.
“It was down to me and Alyssa by then. We both started having contractions at the same time. At first, Fina said mine were Braxton Hicks, those fake kinds, but that idea didn’t last long.” Her voice trails off for a moment. “I knew something was wrong with Alyssa. We were in our own rooms, but I could hear her. I thought my labor was bad, but she sounded like … scary. Meanwhile, I was mostly on my own. Fina checked on me every so often, and the doctor showed for the actual birth. Like three minutes.” She shakes her head. “The whole time, Alyssa was up the hall screaming.”
Shelby lowers her head. “But it was worse when she stopped.”
Helene used to say the most dangerous thing a woman can do is give birth. While talking with Celeste, I’d worried the Hensley School was too far from Samuelton. But at least from there, an ambulance ride was an option.
“After a while, Fina came in to help me use the bathroom. She kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry.’ But I knew Alyssa was dead. On her way out, she didn’t close my door all the way—I think she was too upset. That’s when I heard the doctor in the hallway talking to Lydia. He thought they should have taken Alyssa to the hospital, but Lydia said, ‘You know what would come next if we’d done that. Losing your license would be the least of it.’ That shut him up. They were all quiet for a minute, then Fina asked what she should do about Alyssa. Lydia told her that was being handled. ‘Prepare the infant for travel. The clients are on their way.’ When she and the doctor left, Fina cried in the hallway.”
Shelby doesn’t remember getting dressed, but at some point she found herself in the empty hallway. Fina’s office door stood half open. The nurse, perhaps in her distress, had left her keys and phone. Shelby had seen Fina enter the PIN a couple of times when she didn’t realize Shelby was paying attention. “It was easy—the four corners: one-three-nine-seven.” Across from the office was the room Shelby knew to be the nursery, though she’d never been inside. One of the keys worked. There, lying in a clear plastic bassinet, she found a newborn girl.
Hers or Alyssa’s? She didn’t know. She hadn’t been allowed to see her baby. She and Alyssa looked pretty similar, just a couple of blonde girls; the wriggling infant could have belonged to either of them. As for the other newborn, Shelby figured Fina must be taking it to the mysterious clients. No matter. She wrapped the baby in a blanket, but when the baby started crying, she panicked. She fled downstairs and through the courtyard, then out the gate, dropping Fina’s heavy key ring after opening the big padlock. The river made her nervous, so she went through the cemetery and into the forest. The sun was setting, but it was still light enough to see.
They switched to texting then. The phone battery was low, and she needed the GPS. When the baby cried, she comforted her as best she could. It was dark by the time she reached the road. She hid in the trees when headlights approached.
“Nathan and Trae found me near some motel. The baby had messed herself, but we were afraid to stop for diapers. We cleaned her up with some paper towels, then Trae wrapped her in his sweatshirt. He was a new uncle, and his sister had taught him how to swaddle. He thought I should try to feed her too. My breasts were killing me by then, but I was so tired and hurt so bad I just made another mess.”
I guess the asylum doesn’t have a lactation clinic.
“I kept telling myself everything would be okay once we got back home. But when we got to that intersection—” She grows still. “—they were waiting for us.”
“Who was it? Did you know them?”
“Just the guy who drove me here, Tucker, and a security guard from the asylum.” A shadow passes over her face. “He used to watch us when Fina wasn’t around.”
“Was he the man—?”
“From last night, yeah.” She draws a shaky breath. “But the one who did all the talking was a cop. He said he was placing us under arrest. Kidnapping, child endangerment—you name it.”
According to Pride’s diagram, the Cadillac was angled across Route 55 westbound—the most direct route back to Portland. The white pickup—Meyer’s, I assume—was probably blocking the road up to Shatter Hill.