by Jayne, Chris
Louise, Roger, and Deacon all exchanged glances. Finally, Roger spoke. “I think we’re all in danger, but Willie doesn’t have unlimited power. We still don’t know,” he paused, obviously not knowing quite how to phrase what he wanted to say, “for sure what happened to Tom.”
Sandy’s chest heaved in a sob, but clearly, she was trying to control herself. Louise moved to her friend’s side and put her arms around her.
“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Roger continued. “After what I saw today, there have to be a lot of people in Bowenville who aren’t happy with what’s happening.”
Sandy nodded. “There are. It’s gotten so much worse, just since you left. When school started, all of a sudden there was this big fight over a dress code for all the little girls. And there was another conflict at the high school. About thirty kids are still going Lewiston every day to go to the public high school. One of the boys is the quarterback of the public high school’s football team.”
“Is that Mike and Kelly Howard’s boy?” Louise asked.
Sandy nodded. “Yes, and he’s going to get a college scholarship. The last thing his parents want to hear is they shouldn’t be sending him to public school.”
“I wonder if there’s a game this weekend,” Roger said thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll mosey on down to the high school and have a chat with Mike and Kelly. Anyway, that’s why no matter what’s going on, Willie can’t go crazy. There are enough people who’ve left, and enough people who are still in Bowenville that have questions. Whatever happened to Tom is one thing, but if you go back to Illinois, and then something happens to you, there are plenty of people who might start talking. No way he could sweep that under the rug.”
“And now we have him on video, pretty much threatening us,” Deacon added. “Or at least he thinks we do.”
Louise pulled back from Sandy and looked her in the eye. “What happened to Roshana? We saw the coffee shop was empty when we drove by.”
“I don’t know,” Sandy answered, shrugging. “There one day and the next it was closed up. I do know that Willie decreed that none of the businesses could be open on Sunday, except for the grocery and the pharmacy, and those were only open from one to five. A lot of people didn’t care for that. It was so everyone could attend the church of their choice, except it was obvious that there really wasn’t a choice.”
“Did she and Jacob leave town?”
“I don’t know, but I haven’t seen either one of them in weeks. And now that you mention it, there was another Jewish family whose little boy was in the grade behind Beth. He didn’t come back to school this year.”
“What that means to me,” Roger said, “is that enough people have left that Willie has to be careful.”
“I’m new to this,” Deacon added, “but if there are a dozen families around the country, all angry at Willie and asking questions, all it would take is one good magazine article to blow the top off this place.”
“I think I’m definitely going to check out the football schedule,” Roger nodded, “and see what Mike Howard has to say.” He looked at Sandy. “Call your mom now and then get your phone turned off.”
Sandy moved out to the porch to make the call. Deacon left then, to return the rental truck and, as soon as Sandy’s phone call was done, Louise and Sandy went upstairs to make beds and arrange sleeping quarters for everyone. It took a bit of work, people couldn’t have been wedged in any tighter if they’d had a shoehorn, but everyone fit. At least with the furniture they’d unloaded, there were nearly enough beds for everyone.
For now, Hannah and Tony were bunking in their parents’ bedroom. Sandy, with her three children, had been given Hannah’s room, which, even though Hannah was only three, was now equipped with a queen bed that they’d brought from Bowenville, since Louise had always intended Hannah’s room to serve as the guest room. The queen, supplemented with a double air mattress on the floor, accommodated Sandy’s family comfortably enough for sleeping, though there was almost no room to do anything else. Deacon was in Tony’s room, and as Louise put sheets on the single bed, she wondered briefly how he’d fit his six-foot plus frame into a plastic car bed, but then rejected the worry. It was still a full size single bed, and he’d probably slept on a lot worse.
And just as Louise finished with all the bedding and walked downstairs, realizing that somehow, she was going to have to feed nine people, Deacon called with the best surprise ever. He was bringing pizza.
Two hours later, Louise lumbered to her feet, collecting up empty paper plates and beer bottles from the kitchen table. The house she and Roger had bought outside of Lewiston was small, but it was only just tonight that she truly realized how small, as four adults and five children clustered around the kitchen table. The pizza place Deacon had found even had individual chocolate cakes for dessert, and he’d bought a dozen of those. The kids were in heaven.
Behind her, in the front room, the phone rang and Louise’s heart lurched, instantly back to her other worry. Maybe it was Lori - finally. Louise hadn’t even thought about her sister in hours but the ringing phone brought it all back. “I’ll get it,” she called out to the others at the table, and hurried to grab it before Roger could.
“Lou?”
Quickly Louise angled her body away from the kitchen door. With the children’s excited chatter about the desserts, she hoped no one in the kitchen could hear, but she didn’t want to take any chances. “I’ve been so worried,” she hissed. “Where are you?”
“Oklahoma City. We’re in a hotel. Grace is really sick, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to travel tomorrow.” Lori’s voice caught. “Have you seen the news?”
“No. I mean I looked some stuff up about this senator thing Monday night, but I’ve been really busy with moving. We finally got a truck and moved all of our stuff from Bowenville.”
“I thought you moved this summer.”
“We left this summer, but most of our things were still there. It’s complicated, and it’s not important now, but what is important is you. So, you’re still coming?”
“Yes, I’m still coming. What made you think I wasn’t?”
“I don’t know, the whole thing seemed so… odd.”
Louise could hear the anger building in her sister’s voice. “Odd? Like you don’t believe me? I almost got killed, Louise, and saw a man being tortured to death and you consider that odd?”
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” Louise said defensively.
“Not many other ways to take it,” Lori snapped in reply. “But listen, I’ve got worse problems now than the fact that you apparently didn’t believe me. So, you haven’t seen anything on the news?”
“No, we don’t have cable, and with moving our stuff, I haven’t had a chance to get online today.”
“Well, you need to go online, because I’m on it.”
“On what?” Louise was aware she sounded stupid, but she just could not wrap her head around this.
“The news, Lou. The effin’ news. My face is everywhere.” And as Louise sank down onto the sofa in horror, Lori explained everything to her sister.
Chapter 25
Angela
Thursday
12:00 PM Eastern Time
Washington, D.C.
* * *
“Agent Jones, can I help you?” Angela Jones, answering the phone in Washington DC’s central FBI office, listened intently. At what she heard, her face became more still, more stark. She’d known this day would come since she was eighteen years old, and now it had. The voice on the other end spoke slowly and clearly, in perfect English. His instructions were precise.
The call lasted less than two minutes. After the caller had hung up, Angela stood, walked to the door of her office, and left the building. She and her partner often worked separately; it was already the middle of the afternoon, and her absence would not be noticed today.
Tomorrow morning she would call in sick. Since she’d taken fewer than five sick days in seven years, n
o one would think a thing of it.
By 7:00 that evening, Angela was on a flight from Washington DC, to Miami.
Angela had started life as Ajola Gashi in a village like so many others in Albania. Her peasant family had no jobs, no future, no hope. They only had a couple hectares of rocky soil and the backbreaking work of trying to carve a living out of it.
However, the government did manage to keep some minimal level of education open, and when Ajola was six, she started school like all the other village children.
Still, there was a difference. Ajola could read before she started school. Under the care of her grandmother, while her parents tried to scrape out an existence on their poor farm, the old woman, who had also done well in school so long ago under the communists, taught her granddaughter to read simply to stave off boredom. There were no lovely children’s books with bright colorful pictures and sweet-talking animals, but there were news sheets and agricultural publications and the occasional political flier, even an old family Bible that had been carefully hidden for decades, so the grandmother and the granddaughter read those and made the best of it.
Then when she went to school, to everyone’s astonishment, Ajola understood math. She just understood it. The numbers were real to her. They were her friends. And before the end of the first year, she was working sums and doing problems with the twelve-year-olds and asking for more.
There were rumors in the village that the chiefs paid well for the occasional genius child, paid well and took them away. No one was sure exactly why the children were wanted, or where they were taken, but the rumor was that it was America. It was also believed that the children who were taken were never harmed and benefits would flow to their families. Minimal to be sure, but even an extra pig in the fall or to be first on the list for gas for the communal tractor could mean the difference between a bad life and a slightly better life.
When Ajola was eight, the village schoolteacher had taken her to the chief. That man had quickly taken her on to his chief.
Ajola missed nothing. She knew that the trips with the schoolteacher to visit men she had only heard about in whispers were far outside the ordinary course of life. These men lived in houses that were fancy (at least by Albanian standards) and these visits, she knew, made her special. In each place she was treated with great kindness, given freshly baked treats and cold Coca-Cola. In the home of the second chief, there was even a woman who worked there who was not his wife: a servant.
While Ajola waited, she watched a color television. Then, when she was called in to meet the chief, she was asked to read a newspaper, material she’d never seen before. There were other men there, too, and one sharp-eyed grandfather gave her some mathematics problems to do. When she solved them correctly, all the men in the room looked at each other and nodded.
Within days two large cars pulled up at the Gashis’ small home, and Ajola was sent out to play while the adults talked. She knew that the large cars’ arrival also had something to do with her. And most of all, she knew that out there was a world very different than where she lived now.
Her parents sat her down when the first car left. The village chief was still there, standing in the corner, looking serious. She would have to leave them, leave the village, leave her grandparents and her two little sisters and little brother. She was to be sent to America, to go to a special school. Her grandmother, on her chair in the corner, wept in the old way, with her halel draped over her head, rocking back and forth, her grief silent and horrible. Ajola tried not to look.
Would she see them again? Ajola asked. Oh yes, the chief reassured everyone in the room. There were no computers in the village, of course, but at his house on the hill, there was a computer connected to a satellite dish (and this Ajola knew was true because she had seen the dish for herself) and through that dish, people could talk on the computer, not only hear the voices, but see the faces too. The chief promised that at least once a month, the big car would pick up her whole family, take them to the chief’s house, and they would talk.
Ajola knew he was lying.
But Ajola, with instincts that somehow every child has, also knew that even if she cried and balked and ran away, she’d almost certainly be taken anyway. While they were lying about talking on computers, she thought that just maybe they were not lying about an extra pig in the fall or the chance for her little brother to go to the special school in the city many miles away.
And most of all, she knew they were not lying about the fact that she would be taken to America.
Her life would be better. In America there were big clean houses, plenty of food, and everyone had a car. Her grandmother had even told her that most families in America had two televisions. She thought about her friends, and the playhouse they had built in an abandoned barn, and she thought about the fact that she knew her parents wanted her to go. She said yes.
So, the almost nine-year-old girl from a tiny rural village in Albania somehow got a passport and was put on an airplane and was taken to a new family. Before she turned nine, she became Angela Jones and had a room of her own. Every day she went to a school where she wore a beautiful plaid skirt and clean white blouse, and the teachers were helpful and never hit a child, not once. She even had two new sisters. Her new parents were very kind, and there was a puppy of her own, and horses to ride, and a swimming pool in the back yard.
Her new life was wonderful and she loved it all. There was only one rule in the house and that was enforced savagely: Albanian was never to be spoken. The first time she made the mistake, she was warned. The second time, she was whipped until the blood ran down her legs. There was never a third time.
She had been right about one thing, however. The promised monthly phone call never occurred.
She didn’t see her family again for almost ten years.
It was the spring break of her senior year in high school. The Catholic elementary school had been replaced by a prestigious girls’ high school, where about half of the girls’ boarded and about half, including Angela, lived at home with their families.
Most of her classmates, already safely admitted to the exclusive college of their choice, were planning spring break trips to exotic locations, Aruba, Cancun, Cabo San Lucas. Their families worried about their daughters going off alone (“They are so young!”) but paid for the trips anyway. A group of twenty, including some of Angela’s best friends, were going to Mont Blanc in France, to ski. Angela had never been on a trip without her adoptive parents, and she had asked - once - if this spring she could go skiing with her classmates, but when she’d received a negative answer, she had not argued. She never did.
So, when her adoptive mother had walked into her bedroom on the Friday afternoon of the beginning of spring break, and told her to pack a bag because she was going on a trip, she’d been shocked. “Where?” Angela had asked.
“It’s a surprise,” her mother had answered.
Twenty-four hours later, Angela, accompanied by a woman she’d never seen before, got off the plane in Tirana, Albania.
The route they’d taken had been long and exhausting: first a plane to Charles De Galle in Paris. There they picked up their luggage, and it was then that the woman, whose name was Vanna, stopped Angela. She took Angela’s American passport and handed her another one. Angela flipped it open and was shocked to see her eighteen-year-old face staring back at her, with a name she did not dare remember: Ajola Gashi. The chaperone also handed Angela another ticket and they headed back towards security. They were going to Frankfurt.
At first she followed numbly, but when they repeated the exercise in Germany, picked up their luggage and then turned around and went back to the security checkpoint, Angela had had enough.
She didn’t have a lot of experience with international travel, but it didn’t take a genius to see what was happening here. Every possible effort was being made to conceal their destination. Angela was tired and hungry and eighteen years old. They’d already been traveling fifteen hours, and s
he’d had enough. “What is going on?” she cried, her face and voice showing the stress.
Throughout the trip the woman had been distant but kind, solicitous if Angela needed to use the restroom, asking if she wanted food, making sure she had enough money to buy a book or a magazine. Now, that demeanor melted away, and Vanna’s face darkened to cruelty. “Flisni shqip, Ajola.” Speak Albanian, Ajola.
It had been nearly ten years since she’d heard Albanian spoken, and coming with no warning, it hit Angela so hard she was nauseated. A night she had tried her best to forget, a night where a woman, who had been kind, held a nine-year-old child down, and a man, who had been gentle, whipped her with an electrical cord until her bladder let go and her legs were bleeding, came crashing back. So shocked was she that she could only gasp out the first thing that came to mind. In English, she whispered, “I don’t know if I remember.”
Fast as a striking snake, Vanna’s hand flashed out, caught Angela’s breast through her sweater, and wrenched it hard. Angela gasped and tried to twist away from the horrible, unexpected pain but the woman’s brutal grip did not lessen. “Shqip,” she hissed. “Ose do ta pres.” Albanian. Or I will cut it off.
That was all it took, and it was for the best. It one minute, Angela’s confident American demeanor was gone, replaced by a shy Albanian teen who blushed, kept her eyes down and mumbled.
Ajola was back.
On the plane between Frankfurt and Tirana, hearing Albanian spoken around her again, Angela relaxed. As soon as Vanna realized that Angela would not cause a problem, she became again the indifferent chaperone, so much so that by the end of the trip, Angela almost wondered if she had imagined the cruelty.