Thread of Deceit (26 page)

“No,” she says.

She’s been saying no for many years now. No, she will not go to school. No, she will not go to church. No, she will not eat her food. No, she will not wear that dress. No, she will not walk on the beach or gather seashells or dance in the sunshine.

But Aurelia says yes, too. All her yeses are wrong. I try to tell her this. She must not say yes to bad things. But Aurelia no longer listens to me. I can’t comb her hair and braid it into a long plait down her back. I can’t sing to her and make her laugh. I can’t talk to her or touch her. I can’t even love her.

But I do. I’m desperate with love for Aurelia.

I’m so desperate that I have decided I will tell. I’ve asked Mama and Papa to sit with us now and listen, because I have something very important to say. They stare at me. They ask why Aurelia will not open her eyes. Why will she not look at them?

I don’t answer these questions, because I am going to say something more important. I am going to tell about the man.

First, I swallow. I can feel fear rising inside me like a volcano. I’m grown-up now, and I know in my heart that the man lied. But I still believe him. I’m sure I should not tell. I feel dirty. I’m ashamed.

But I’m also desperate. Desperate for Aurelia, who is dying from the filth and the shame and the pain.

I can’t swallow down the fear. It spews into my mouth, filled with bitterness and anger. I had planned everything so well, but now it boils out of me in words that rage and sting and blame.

“You must have known!” I hear myself shout.

“Why didn’t you protect us from him?” I cry. I remember the years of the goodbad man. They were the same years my parents almost lost their marriage. It was the time Papa found another woman. The time Mama drank too much. Which came first, and whose fault was it? They had blamed each other, fighting and shouting, until the night when Mama went after Papa with the broken bottle.

“You weren’t paying attention to us!” I scream at them, throwing the accusation the way Mama had thrown the bottle. “You were too busy to notice what was happening to your own daughters.”

“No, no,” they tell me as they sit together on the sofa, holding hands, secure in the marital unity they achieved by heaping great mounds of denial to cover all that had happened between them. “What you’re saying can’t be right.”

“Yes, it was him. He was the one. He did this thing to me. And then he did it to Aurelia.” I’m sobbing now, and my parents are still staring.

My sister is silent against my shoulder, her mind numbed and her body deadened by all it has been subjected to year after year. She is Sleeping Beauty, sleeping for a hundred years, and no prince will come for her. Or for me.

We know this. We do not expect him. We do not want him.

“No,” my father says finally. “I can’t believe you. You must have imagined this.”

My mother’s eyes are full of tears, but she agrees with him. “It can’t be true,” she says. “He was our friend. He took good care of you when we were away. He loved you.”

Yes. No. He was the lovehate man, I remember. He was the goodbad man. He confused me. He built a game in my mind, and he played with my thoughts until I was not sure what I could believe. Sometimes I think he is still inside my brain, mixing everything up, telling me lies, assuring me that what he says is true, and then lying again.

“How can you not believe me?” I ask my parents. “It is true.”

“No,” they say, shaking their heads. “He would never do such a thing. Why do you desecrate the memory of our dear friend?”

I stare back at them, and I understand now that he was right. He said they would not believe me, and he was right. They don’t believe it. They will never accept it. They can’t, even though they see their two daughters before them, ruined and broken and without hope.

“I told you,” Aurelia mumbles. “I told you not to tell.”

She hasn’t been sleeping on my shoulder as I thought. She heard. She knows I told, and she knows no one will believe us. Ever.

We are lost.

I look up and see the lightbulb. It cannot take me away now. I am too old, too full of sickness and scars and disease. My heart is already dead. My body is dying. I want to die.

Aurelia wants to die, too. She will.

A
na sat in the darkness and held the hand of the small child. She had come so far, all the way to this place, and now she saw only impenetrable night surrounding her.

What seemed like many years ago, she had walked away from Sam Hawke. A paramedic had unwrapped her hand and exclaimed in dismay. A policeman had insisted that she must do what they told her. She was a gunshot victim. A victim, they both called her.

You are a victim.

They needed reports and information. She needed X-rays and surgery. And so she found herself in the ambulance, and then in the emergency room at Barnes Hospital, and then at a police station, and then—many, many hours later—in a taxi on the way to her apartment.

It was three in the morning, and when she opened the door, she saw that someone had been there already. Her couch had been slit with a knife, and its downy filling covered the floor like snow. Her new dishes lay in pieces on the floor. Her sheets lay tangled at the foot of her bed, and a huge X had been slashed into her mattress.

This was not a robbery. She knew at once who had been there, coming in the darkness to violate her privacy. Not Don Bering. He would hardly take the time to wreak such havoc. Jack Slaughter, enraged by her discovery, had come after her.

She had found him out.

She had told.

And someone had believed her.

Fear rising inside her, Ana backed away from the apartment and staggered down the polished oak steps. She had hammered on the door of her elderly landlady, who stood on the other side and confessed that she had let the man in.

A friend, he had told her. Ana had been injured and was in the hospital. She needed clothes and a few personal items. The landlady had thought he looked so kind and sounded quite worried. She was concerned, too. Was Ana all right? Why was she out of the hospital already?

Ana had turned away, running down the hall and out into the night. And then she had heard the cry.

“Señorita!”
The voice came from behind the yew bushes that grew close to the foundation of the old house. “Señorita Ana…”

And the child arose, small and frightened, her face skeletal under the streetlight. “It is me. Flora.”

Ana walked between the yews, where there was no path, waded straight into the tangled limbs and shrubbery. She caught the child in her arms and began to weep. Both of them, sobbing now.

The two sat for a while together in the darkness, Ana aware of the heat of sunbaked bricks pressing into her back and the pain returning to her hand as the anesthetic wore off. Where could they go? Not the apartment. He had been there, torn into it, ripped away the protection it had offered. Haven? But perhaps he was there—Slaughter with his knife. Maybe Bering and his gun, too. The men would hide there and wait for Ana and Flora, the two they were sure would come.

Holding Flora close, Ana searched her mind for safety. There was nothing. No place in the world that could cradle them. The police had listened to her story and written it down. But she had seen the skepticism in their eyes. Jim Slater was an alias? He was selling children from his adoption agency? Jim Slater—so admired and respected? That Jim Slater?

Who are you to say such a thing?

He’s a good, kind man. A man of integrity. He would never do this.

The police would not protect her. Sam wanted to save her, but he could do nothing. Bering had gotten into the newspaper building. Slaughter had been inside Haven and her apartment. Every place she believed had been secure was open now, vulnerable.

She and Flora couldn’t hide behind the yews forever. They needed a place to go. A haven of their own. Ana thought of the city bus and the heartless bus driver. Then she recalled the old man who had guided her to safety. An angel? A guardian sent by God?

Feeling sick, exhausted and frightened half out of her mind, Ana stood on a corner with Flora until a bus rolled into view. They boarded, and it was empty except for the driver. No angels. No place to go.

As they rode, Flora rested her head on Ana’s shoulder and slept. That was when Ana remembered the other angel God had sent her. Perhaps not an angel. But a gift. A friend.

In silence, they left the bus and hurried through the darkness to her friend. Now the three of them sat together and listened to the sounds outside. Ana reflected on her articles about lead paint and had to laugh. How meaningless.

She lit a candle and took out the reporter’s notebook she always carried. Someone had taken the ink cartridge from a pen, using the plastic casing as a pipe for marijuana. She held the flexible tube in her broken hand and began to write her broken story about all the broken people.

She wrote about Sam. Terell. Raydell. She wrote about Tenisha, Gerald, Antwone and golden-haired Brandy. And she wrote about Flora. All of them. She wrote until she was empty. Finally, then, she put her head on Flora’s shoulder. And she slept.

“He won,” Sam said the following evening. “He got her, and he got Flora. And then he escaped.”

Terell rubbed his face, trying to stay awake.

“Go on to bed,” Sam said. “I know you’re tired.”

“I’m tired, man, but I can’t let you keep talking this way. You’re going to have to get your head around it one way or another. Why don’t we go over to Drewes and get some frozen custard? They’ll still be open. C’mon. It’ll be good. The air-conditioning’s down, and I’m about to bake up here anyhow.”

Sam shrugged. “I can’t make myself care about the air-conditioning. You know we’re going to have to shut the place down anyway.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got a few days before that,” Terell said, tugging on a T-shirt. “We’ll get one of the volunteers to work on the AC tomorrow. Besides, I’m not giving up on Haven, Sam.”

“You heard the lady. We don’t have the money to fix our lead paint, so the health department is shutting us down. Nobody gave up, T-Rex. I fought hard to get that money. But Jim Slater—or whoever he really is—disappeared along with the promise of that five grand. The rest isn’t enough.”

“Okay, here’s what we’ll do.” Terell stood by the door. “I’ve been holding out on this, because I thought we could take care of it some other way. But there you go.”

He slipped the gold Rolex off his wrist and tossed it onto Sam’s mattress. “We can sell that. And I’ll call my mama tomorrow to see if she’ll take out a second mortgage on the house I bought her. How’s that?”

Sam sighed. “You can’t, Terell. Your mother isn’t making the payments on that house as it is.”

The big man turned away, pain obvious in the tilt of his shoulders. “I meant to pay it off for her. I did, Sam. I thought I could.”

“You know, that frozen custard is sounding pretty good after all.” Sam stood and handed his friend the watch. “Keep your Rolex, man. It’s a reminder of better times.”

“Worse times.” They walked down the stairs of the empty, darkened building. “Bad as things are right now, Sam, this is better than it was in the old days. I thought I was happy with all my ladies and my blow and my big NBA contract. Buying a house for my mama and daddy, buying a boat, buying a Mercedes and a big Harley…Man, I was crazy.”

Sam had to laugh. “I think I’m glad I was in Iraq.”

“Glad you didn’t see me messing up so bad? Me, too. But how about the war? You think you’re ever going to heal from what went down there?”

Stepping out into the night, they both instinctively looked up into the star-sprinkled sky. “No,” Sam said. “I’m pretty sure nobody gets complete healing until heaven. That’s just how it is.”

“You’re gonna carry that little dead girl with you everywhere?”

“Probably.” He struggled to swallow the knot in his throat. “And now Ana.”

“Sam, I don’t think Slaughter got her. I really don’t. He wasn’t the killer type. That’s why he hired Bering.”

“Slaughter shot Bering, Terell. You know that. He’s probably the one who trashed Ana’s apartment, too. Yesterday, when I saw what he’d done to the place, I couldn’t believe it. I have no doubt he’d do whatever it took to stop her.” Sam jammed his hands down into his pockets. “I keep expecting the police to call me. They’ll find her body in the river. Or lying in a parking lot somewhere.”

“Nah, she’s too mean.”

Sam tried to chuckle.

“She’s probably just hiding out,” Terell said.

“She would have called me by now. It sounds crazy, but we had something, Ana and me. There was something between us. I know she’d tell me if she was okay.”

They walked side by side in silence, Sam fighting the overwhelming sense of loss that dogged him. Ana, Flora, Haven—all gone. He had no idea what he would do with himself. They would put the building up for sale, of course. But the chances of a quick turnaround were slim. They would both be broke and jobless.

“Wasn’t this the place Raydell’s thugs attacked Ana?” Terell asked as they passed a boarded-up storefront.

Sam studied the graffiti. “Yeah. She lost her shoes in there. She’s always losing her shoes.”

“Wears them dumb little high-heel things.”

Sam smiled. “Hey, you want to meet somebody? Homeless geezer named Glen lives in there. Crazy coot. Let’s take him out for frozen custard.”

“You’re the crazy one,” Terell said. “This is a crack house.”

“Nah. It’s pretty much deserted. Except for Glen.”

“You first, dog. I ain’t going in there by myself.”

Sam pushed open the door and stepped into the darkness. “Glen?” he called out. “Are you in here?”

The silence stretched on for so long that Sam decided the building must be empty. Then a voice answered him.

“Sam?” A woman’s voice, soft and familiar. “Is that you?”

“Ana?” He hit Terell on the shoulder so hard the man nearly fell over. “It’s her! Ana! Ana, where are you?”

A match flickered to life in a far corner. Sam spotted the collection of cardboard boxes and paper bags that made up Glen’s home. Illuminated in the glow of a candle flame was Ana’s face.

“Sam!” she called. “It’s me. And Flora. We’re both here.”

“Look at her eating that frozen custard,” Terell said as the five sat around a table on the sidewalk outside Drewes. “You’d think she hadn’t eaten in a week.”

Ana looked up from her cup. “We haven’t had much. A can of beans last night.”

“Now then.” Glen pursed his lips. “You bein’ fussy about my cookin’?”

“Yes, I am,” Ana said.

She felt strange, almost otherworldly sitting out under the stars with Sam and Terell. For so many hours, she had hidden away with Flora—too frightened to come out. Too confused to think her way to a solution. Whose dead body was in the Ladue mansion? Where was Slaughter? What had become of Bering? Where could she turn?

And then the darkness inside the old building became a friend. She and Flora talked for hours. Glen joined in, his story even more confusing than theirs. He was a man, abused as a small child, molested by adult men, stripped of his innocence and dignity. He had taken a common path. Used drugs to escape the pain. Paid for his drugs by selling himself. And in the end, he had lost what shred might have been left of the person he should have become. He was a shell now, riddled with disease, his mind half-gone, but his soul still alive. He had wept when Flora wept. He patted her head and gave her his necklace of keys.

Ana had written out the articles due at the newspaper. Not the way Carl Webster wanted them—but the way they demanded to be written. And then, somehow, Sam and Terell had found her. Bering was dead. Slaughter was missing. Haven was lost. But in the group gathered around the wrought-iron table, she sensed a joy. A dawning hope.

“Beans,” Glen said. “Well, sugar, you do the best you can with what you got.”

Ana sucked down a mouthful of frozen custard, enjoying the feel of the cool treat sliding all the way to her stomach as she pulled a folded sheaf of tattered pages from her pocket. “I need to drop these off at the paper. And then…well, I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do about Flora.”

“Your apartment’s been cleaned already,” Sam told her. “The landlady has called me at least twice. She’s frantic. You should be safe there now.”

Ana considered it. She wasn’t sure she would ever feel safe anywhere. “And Flora? Are we supposed to turn her over to the Division of Family Services? Give her away to strangers?”

“Does she know where her family is?”

“In La Ceiba.” Ana took Flora’s hand when the child glanced up at the familiar name. “She told me that her father is poor. They live not far from the beach. Jack Slaughter has a large house in an exclusive waterfront area. The children all know the place. He has several TVs, a lot of toys, baskets of candy. Kids go there and hang out to watch TV and eat candy. Slaughter—the man she calls Primero—doesn’t touch them. Sometimes he asks if they will let his friend take their picture….”

She paused, trying to go on.

“Slaughter has a studio on the property,” she continued. “Several men work there, photographing children and sending the images to customers all over the world. He also runs a travel agency that brings wealthy men down to his property for a weekend vacation. Sometimes they stay for a week or more, Flora says. Slaughter and his employees pay the children to do whatever the men want. Flora had been to the house and eaten chocolate candy several times. But she knew nothing about the other things before the day her father took her and her sister to Slaughter and sold them.”